Friday, October 31, 2008
COLOMBIA CIVILIAN KILLINGS CASTS DOUBT ON WAR AGIANST INSURGENTS
SOACHA, Colombia: Julian Oviedo, a 19-year-old construction worker in this gritty patchwork of slums, told his mother on March 2 that he was going to talk to a man about a job offer. A day later, Oviedo was shot and killed by army troops about 560 kilometers to the north. He was classified as a subversive and registered as a combat kill.
Colombia's government, the Bush administration's top ally in Latin America, has been buffeted by the disappearance of Oviedo and dozens of other young, impoverished men and women whose cases have come to light. Some were vagrants, some were street vendors or manual laborers. But their fates were often the same: They were catalogued as insurgents or criminal gang members and killed by the armed forces.
Prosecutors and human rights researchers are investigating hundreds of such deaths and disappearances, contending that the Colombian security forces are murdering civilians and making it look as if they were killed in combat, often by planting weapons on or near their bodies or dressing the corpses in guerrilla fatigues.
With soldiers under intense pressure in recent years to register combat kills to earn promotions and benefits like time off and extra pay, reports of civilian killings are climbing, prosecutors and researchers said, pointing to a grisly facet of this country's long internal war against leftist insurgencies.
The deaths have called into question the depth of Colombia's recent strides against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and have begun to haunt the military hierarchy.
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On Wednesday, President Álvaro Uribe's government announced that it had fired 25 officers and soldiers - including three generals and four colonels - in connection with the deaths of Oviedo and 10 other young men from Soacha, whose bodies were discovered in unmarked graves in a distant combat zone. The purge came after an initial shakeup last Friday, when the army command relieved three colonels.
At a news conference Wednesday, Uribe said that an internal military investigation appeared to have uncovered "crimes that in some regions had the goal of killing innocents, to make it seem as if criminals were being confronted."
The wave of killings has heightened focus on the U.S. Embassy here, which is responsible for vetting Colombian military units for human rights abuses before they can receive aid. A study of civilian killings by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Amnesty International, two rights groups, found that 47 percent of the cases reported in 2007 involved Colombian units financed by the United States.
"If the responsibility of the army is to protect us from harm, how could they have killed my son this way?" Blanca Monroy, 49, Oviedo's mother, asked in an interview in her cinderblock home here. "The official explanation is absurd, if he was here just a day earlier living a normal life," she said. "The irony of it all is that my son dreamed of being a soldier" for the government.
Even before the most recent disappearances and killings, prosecutors and human rights groups were examining a steady increase in the reports of civilian killings since 2002, when commanders intensified a counterinsurgency financed in no small part by more than $500 million a year in U.S. aid.
But more than 100 claims of civilian deaths at the hands of the security forces have emerged in recent weeks alone, from nine different parts of Colombia. Cases have included the killing of a homeless man, a young man who suffered epileptic seizures and a veteran who had left the army after his left arm was amputated.
In some cases, victims' families spoke of middlemen who recruited poor men and women with vague promises of jobs elsewhere, only to deliver them hours or days later to war zones where they were killed by soldiers.
"We are witnessing a method of social cleansing in which rogue military units operate beyond the law," said Monica Sánchez, a lawyer at the Judicial Freedom Corporation, a human rights group in Medellín. The group says it has documented more than 60 cases of "false positives" - a subset of the civilian killings in which individuals were killed and then presented as guerrillas in the province of Antioquia.
Researchers also have obtained thorough descriptions of some killings in the small number of cases - less than 50 - that have resulted in convictions this decade.
One April morning in 2004, for instance, soldiers approached the home of Juan de Jesús Rendón, a 33-year-old peasant farmer in Antioquia, and shot him in front of his son, Juan Estéban, who was 10 at the time. The soldiers placed a two-way radio and a gun near Rendón's body, court records show, and told his son that his siblings would suffer the same fate unless he said his father had fired at the soldiers.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
THE 2008 LAND GRAB FOR FOOD AND FINANCIAL SECURITY
The 2008 land grab for food and financial security
Grain
October 29, 2008
Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab. "Food insecure" governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snapping up farms all over the world to outsource their own food production and escape high market prices. Private investors, hungry for profits in the midst of the deepening financial crisis, are eyeing overseas farms as an important new source of revenue. As a result of both trends, fertile agricultural land is being swiftly privatised and consolidated by foreign companies in some of the world’s poorest and hungriest countries. A new report from GRAIN examines 100 cases of agricultural land grabbing — whether for food or simply for profit — that have exploded this year.
Saudi Arabia and China are just two nations out buying farms, from Sudan to Cambodia, to satisfy their own food needs. In these cases, governments, sometimes through sovereign wealth funds, are negotiating rights to foreign land — whether by purchase, concession or lease — so that their corporations can come in and produce food to export back home. In return, they are offering oil contracts, soft loans, infrastructure projects and development funds. The food-hungry land grabbers include China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Those giving up their land, in exchange for the oil deals or investments, include the Philippines, Mozambique, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sudan, Uganda, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe.
* A d v e r t i s e m e n t
* Alex Jones TV live
Investing in farms abroad to produce food for a tight world market is also, apparently, a hot way to make money these days. Throughout this year, an army of investment houses, private equity managers and hedge funds have been out purchasing farmland throughout the world. The plan is to capitalise on low land costs and high food prices wherever fertile farmland is available, such as in Ukraine, China, Russia, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil and Kazakhstan. The money-hungry land grabbers include familiar names such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock and Louis Dreyfus, but there are plenty of others. And they are getting help from agencies like the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, who are pressing target countries to change their laws and make stronger land ownership by foreigners possible.
While political leaders and UN bodies are trying to "manage" the potential backlash, farmers’ organisations, opposition parties, human rights groups and others are challenging and resisting these deals. But much more needs to be done to stop this massive sell-out of the very basis of food sovereignty.
Labels:
CHINA,
FOREIGN FARMLAND,
LAND GRAB
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
MICROSOFT PATENTS "CENSORSHIP" BOT,ONLINE FREEDOM OF SPEECH THREATENED
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
October 28, 2008
As the Times Online reports, the corporate behemoth Microsoft is on the verge of unleashing a technology capable of eliminating “green inkers” and conspiracy theorists. “Microsoft has just been awarded a patent for technology designed to automatically detect and remove ‘undesired words or phrases’ from all manner of digital communications, ranging from YouTube broadcasts to internet chat and songs,” writes Mark Harris.
According to Mr. Harris, Microsoft will release this technology to protect children, which is the usual explanation. “The patent describes a system that listens out for phonemes (word fragments) likely to be part of a swearword. If it thinks it hears a forbidden phrase, the software either fades out the offending syllables or simply replaces the rude word with a similar-sounding but clean alternative lifted from earlier speech without a second’s delay.” Of course, defining “rude” will be left up to a corporate censor. It will not be limited to “explicit rap music.” It may very well include phrases such as “9/11 truth” and other political slogans at odds with the government.
For instance, Google’s behavior is not limited to DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) legal complaints, censoring search results on its Google China service, or training training police in India how to find “objectionable” material. Google also censors in the United States and Europe. In addition to blocking child pornography and certain Nazi websites, Google News routinely filters non-corporate media results. As the American Thinker reported in 2006, Google, “without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.” But it isn’t simply conservative websites: Google and Yahoo have repeatedly censored Uruknet, the Italian antiwar news portal. Liberals also complain of censorship and the removal of Google Adsense from their pages. (See Google’s Gag Order: An Internet Giant Threatens Free Speech.)
Google routinely “excludes” information from Infowars.com, Prisonplanet.com, and fudges rankings, or removes entirely Alex Jones’ films from Google Video and the popular YouTube service, owned by the corporation. In addition to Google, MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is in the business of censoring political speech on its hugely popular social network. In May of 2007, for instance, a MySpace moderator “admitted that it is MySpace.com policy to censor and filter out posts containing links to the Prison Planet.com website, adding that the MySpace server automatically blocks such information,” according to Paul Joseph Watson.
It is relatively easy to find and exclude text-based posts and websites on a network, however until the advent of this latest technology it was a tedious and time-consuming process to find and exclude audio and video files. As Mark Harris notes, governments and corporations may go beyond simply censoring obscene and pornographic material and use this technology to prevent “people from even discussing concepts such as ‘protest’ or ‘freedom,” especially under the rubric of anti-terrorism.
MICROSOFT PATENTS "CENSORSHIP" BOT,ONLINE FREEDOM OF SPEECH THREATENEDM
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
October 28, 2008
As the Times Online reports, the corporate behemoth Microsoft is on the verge of unleashing a technology capable of eliminating “green inkers” and conspiracy theorists. “Microsoft has just been awarded a patent for technology designed to automatically detect and remove ‘undesired words or phrases’ from all manner of digital communications, ranging from YouTube broadcasts to internet chat and songs,” writes Mark Harris.
According to Mr. Harris, Microsoft will release this technology to protect children, which is the usual explanation. “The patent describes a system that listens out for phonemes (word fragments) likely to be part of a swearword. If it thinks it hears a forbidden phrase, the software either fades out the offending syllables or simply replaces the rude word with a similar-sounding but clean alternative lifted from earlier speech without a second’s delay.” Of course, defining “rude” will be left up to a corporate censor. It will not be limited to “explicit rap music.” It may very well include phrases such as “9/11 truth” and other political slogans at odds with the government.
For instance, Google’s behavior is not limited to DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) legal complaints, censoring search results on its Google China service, or training training police in India how to find “objectionable” material. Google also censors in the United States and Europe. In addition to blocking child pornography and certain Nazi websites, Google News routinely filters non-corporate media results. As the American Thinker reported in 2006, Google, “without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.” But it isn’t simply conservative websites: Google and Yahoo have repeatedly censored Uruknet, the Italian antiwar news portal. Liberals also complain of censorship and the removal of Google Adsense from their pages. (See Google’s Gag Order: An Internet Giant Threatens Free Speech.)
Google routinely “excludes” information from Infowars.com, Prisonplanet.com, and fudges rankings, or removes entirely Alex Jones’ films from Google Video and the popular YouTube service, owned by the corporation. In addition to Google, MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is in the business of censoring political speech on its hugely popular social network. In May of 2007, for instance, a MySpace moderator “admitted that it is MySpace.com policy to censor and filter out posts containing links to the Prison Planet.com website, adding that the MySpace server automatically blocks such information,” according to Paul Joseph Watson.
It is relatively easy to find and exclude text-based posts and websites on a network, however until the advent of this latest technology it was a tedious and time-consuming process to find and exclude audio and video files. As Mark Harris notes, governments and corporations may go beyond simply censoring obscene and pornographic material and use this technology to prevent “people from even discussing concepts such as ‘protest’ or ‘freedom,” especially under the rubric of anti-terrorism.
THE NEW NEO-CON REALITY
The New Neo-Con Reality
Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch
October 28, 2008
"We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
–Bush White House aide explaining the New Reality
The New American Century lasted a decade. Financial crisis and defeated objectives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Georgia brought the neoconservative project for American world hegemony crashing to a close in the autumn of 2008.
The neocons used September 11, 2001, as a “new Pearl Harbor” to give power precedence over law domestically and internationally. The executive branch no longer had to obey federal statutes, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or honor international treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions. An asserted “terrorist threat” to national security became the cloak which hid US imperial interests as the Bush Regime set about dismantling US civil liberties and the existing order of international law constructed by previous governments during the post-war era.
Perhaps the neoconservative project for world hegemony would have lasted a bit longer had the neocons possessed intellectual competence.
* A d v e r t i s e m e n t
* Obama - The Postmodern Coup
On the war front, the incompetent neocons predicted that the Iraq war would be a six-week cakewalk, whose $70 billion cost would be paid out of Iraqi oil revenues. President Bush fired White House economist Larry Lindsey for estimating that the war would cost $200 billion. The current estimate by experts is that the Iraq war has cost American taxpayers between two and three trillion dollars. And the six-week war is now the six-year war.
On the economic front, the incompetent neocons overlooked the fact that a country that relocates its industry and best jobs abroad in order to maximize short-run profits becomes progressively economically weaker. Propagandistic talk about a “New Economy” built around financial dominance covered up the fact that the US was the world’s greatest debtor country, dependent on foreigners to finance the daily operation of its government, the home mortgages of its citizens, and its military operations abroad.
In Iraq the neocons gave up their hegemonic military pretensions when they put 80,000 Sunni insurgents on the US Army’s payroll in order to scale down the fighting and reduce US casualties.
In Afghanistan the neocons gave up more military pretensions when they had to rely on NATO troops to fight the Taliban.
US military pretensions came to an end in Georgia when the Bush Regime sent Georgian troops to ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of Russian residents in order to end the secessionist movement in the province, thereby clearing the path for Georgia’s NATO membership. It took Russian soldiers only a few hours to destroy the US and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian Army.
The ongoing financial crisis has put an end to the pretensions of American financial hegemony and free-market illusions that deregulation and offshoring had brought prosperity to America.
In a long article, “The End of Arrogance,” on September 30, the German news magazine Der Spiegel observed:
This is no longer the muscular and arrogant United States the world knows, the superpower that sets the rules for everyone else and that considers its way of thinking and doing business to be the only road to success.
Also on display is the end of arrogance. The Americans are now paying the price for their pride.
Gone are the days when the US could go into debt with abandon, without considering who would end up footing the bill. And gone are the days when it could impose its economic rules of engagement on the rest of the world, rules that emphasized profit above all else — without ever considering that such returns cannot be achieved by doing business in a respectable way.
A new chapter in economic history has begun, one in which the United States will no longer play its former dominant role. A process of redistributing money and power around the world — away from America and toward the resource-rich countries and rising industrialized nations in Asia — has been underway for years. The financial crisis will only accelerate the process.
Looking at his defeated adversary, George W. Bush, brought down by military and economic failure, Iranian President Ahmadinejad observed: “The American empire in the world is reaching the end of its road, and its next rulers must limit their interference to their own borders.”
Truer words were never spoken
Labels:
BUSH.IRAQ,
FALL OF USA,
NEO CONS
Sunday, October 26, 2008
VIDEO"COLIN POWELL" THERES GONNA BE A CRISIS ON JAN 21ST,22ND
Powell - 'There's Going To Be
A Crisis...On The 21st, 22nd Of Jan'
10-22-8
"Theres going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January which we don't even know about right now!" -Colin Powell
Colin Powell, former secretary of state and retired general during his TPMtv Sunday Show Roundup interview, during which he endorsed Barack Obama mentioned a crisis on January 21st, 22nd:
"Theres going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January which we don't even know about right now!"
Watch at 2 mins 40 secs the video below:
A Crisis...On The 21st, 22nd Of Jan'
10-22-8
"Theres going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January which we don't even know about right now!" -Colin Powell
Colin Powell, former secretary of state and retired general during his TPMtv Sunday Show Roundup interview, during which he endorsed Barack Obama mentioned a crisis on January 21st, 22nd:
"Theres going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January which we don't even know about right now!"
Watch at 2 mins 40 secs the video below:
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