*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Tell Bush and Congress:
Don't Release Luis Posada Carriles!
Extradite Posada to Venezuela
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?JServSessionIdr006=238mdc75w3.app8a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=159

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

ARTICLES IN FULL:
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1) Reflections by the Commander in Chief
A BRUTAL REPLY
Fidel Castro Ruz
April 10, 2007
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2007/ing/f100407i.html

2) Now the South Erupts
Inter Press Service
Ali al-Fadhily*
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/iraq/000564.php#more

3) Cuban Youth Searching for Their Inner Selves
Juventud Rebelde reveals the finding of its Third National Survey of Youth
2007-04-10 | 13:31:23 EST
http://www.juventudrebelde.co.cu/cuba/2007-04-10/cuban-youth-searching-for-their-inner-selves-/

4) Paying the Price
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
April 12, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/opinion/12herbert.html?hp

5) Four Years Later in Iraq
Editorial
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/opinion/12thu1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

6) Civilian Claims on U.S. Suggest the Toll of War
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast/12abuse.html?hp

7) U.S. Suspects That Iran Aids Both Sunni and Shiite Militias
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html?ref=world

8) About Creation, Pope Melds Faith With Science
By IAN FISHER
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/europe/12pope.html

9) Life in Iraq Worsening, Red Cross Says
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast/12redcross.html

10) 4 Years On, the Gap Between Iraq Policy
and Practice Is Wide
By DAVID E. SANGER
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast/12policy.html

11) Panel on Walter Reed Woes Issues Strong Rebuke
By SCOTT SHANE
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12medical.html?ref=us

12) As His Time Grows Short, a Dog Seeks a Reprieve
By PAUL VITELLO
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/nyregion/12dog.html

13) The Blinded Leading the Blind
A Jones for Justice
Connecting the Dots: Law, Slavery, and Immigration
By Dr. John Calvin Jones, PhD, JD
BC Columnist
www.blackcommentator.com/225/225_jones_for_justice_law_slavery_immigration_pf.html

14) REFLECTIONS OF PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO
"More than three billion people in the world condemned
to premature death from hunger and thirst."
March 28, 2007
Fidel Castro.
Translated by Granma International
[This email was sent as a service by Roland Sheppard.
My website is http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret . Read
my book, The View From The Painter's Ladder available
at Amazon.com]

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1) Reflections by the Commander in Chief
A BRUTAL REPLY
Fidel Castro Ruz
April 10, 2007
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2007/ing/f100407i.html

George W. Bush is undoubtedly the most genuine representative of a system of
terror forced on the world by the technological, economic and political
superiority of the most powerful country known to this planet. For this
reason, we share the tragedy of the American people and their ethical
values. The instructions for the verdict issued by Judge Kathleen Cardone,
of the El Paso Federal Court last Friday, granting Luis Posada Carriles
freedom on bail, could only have come from the White House.

It was President Bush himself who ignored at all times the criminal and
terrorist nature of the defendant who was protected with a simple accusation
of immigration violation leveled at him. The reply is brutal. The government
of the United States and its most representative institutions had already
decided to release the monster.

The backgrounds are well-known and reach far back. The people who trained
him and ordered him to destroy a Cuban passenger plane in midair, with 73
athletes, students and other Cuban and foreign travelers on board, together
with its dedicated crew; those who bought his freedom while the terrorist
was held in prison in Venezuela, so that he could supply and practically
conduct a dirty war against the people of Nicaragua, resulting in the loss
of thousands of lives and the devastation of a country for decades to come;
those who empowered him to smuggle with drugs and weapons making a mockery
of the laws of Congress; those who collaborated with him to create the
terrible Operation Condor and to internationalize terror; the same who
brought torture, death and often the physical disappearance of hundreds of
thousands of Latin Americans, could not possibly act any different.

Even though Bush‚s decision was to be expected, it is certainly no less
humiliating for our people. Thanks to the revelations of „Por Esto!‰ a
Mexican publication from the state of Quintana Roo later complemented by our
own sources, Cuba knew with absolute precision how Posada Carriles entered
from Central America, via Cancun, to the Isla Mujeres departing from there
on board the Santrina, after the ship was inspected by the Mexican federal
authorities, heading with other terrorists straight to Miami.

Denounced and publicly challenged with exact information on the matter,
since April 15, 2005, it took the government of that country more than a
month to arrest the terrorist, and a year and two months to admit that Luis
Posada Carriles had entered through the Florida coast illegally on board the
Santrina, a presumed school-ship licensed in the United States.

Not a single word is said of his countless victims, of the bombs he set off
in tourist facilities in recent years, of his dozens of plans financed by
the government of the United States to physically eliminate me.

It was not enough for Bush to offend the name of Cuba by installing a
horrible torture center similar to Abu Ghraib on the territory illegally
occupied in Guantánamo, horrifying the world with this procedure. The cruel
actions of his predecessors seemed not enough for him. It was not enough to
force a poor and underdeveloped country like Cuba to spend 100 billion
dollars. To accuse Posada Carriles was tantamount to accusing himself.

Throughout almost half a century, everything was fair game against our small
island lying 90 miles away from its coast, wanting to be independent.
Florida saw the installation of the largest station for intelligence and
subversion that ever existed on this planet.

It was not enough to send a mercenary invasion on the Bay of Pigs, costing
us 176 dead and more than 300 wounded at a time when the few medical
specialists they left us had no experience treating war wounds.

Earlier still, the French ship La Coubre carrying Belgian weapons and
grenades for Cuba had exploded on the docks of Havana Harbor. The two well
synchronized explosions caused the deaths of more than 100 workers and
wounded others as many of them tool part in the rescue attempts.

It was not enough to have the Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the
world to the brink of an all-consuming thermonuclear war, at a time when
there were bombs 50 times more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.

It was not enough to introduce in our country viruses, bacteria and fungi to
attack plantations and flocks; and incredible as it may seem, to attack
human beings. Some of these pathogens came out of American laboratories and
were brought to Cuba by well-known terrorists in the service of the United
States government.

Add to all this the enormous injustice of keeping five heroic patriots
imprisoned for supplying information about terrorist activities; they were
condemned in a fraudulent manner to sentences that include two life
sentences and they stoically withstand cruel mistreatment, each of them in a
different prison.

Time and again the Cuban people have fearlessly faced the threat of death.
They have demonstrated that with intelligence, using appropriate tactics and
strategies, and especially preserving unity around their political and
social vanguard, there can be no force on this earth capable of defeating
them.

I think that the coming May Day celebration would be the ideal day for our
people, --using the minimum of fuel and transportation-- to show their
feelings to the workers and the poor of the world.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

2) Now the South Erupts
Inter Press Service
Ali al-Fadhily*
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/iraq/000564.php#more

BASRA, Apr 11 (IPS) - The eruption of demonstrations in the
south of Iraq this week could rob the occupation forces of
what was considered a critical bastion of support.

The southern areas of Iraq have long been said to be secure,
and people there peaceful towards the occupation forces. Iraqis
living in the south were also believed to be cooperative with
the occupation to the extent that they supported administrative
steps taken by successive Iraqi governments.

The majority of the population of the south are Shia Muslims,
and Iraq has had Shia- dominated governments under the occupation.

But demonstrations against the occupation and the United States
by hundreds of thousands of angry Shias in Najaf, Kut and other
cities across the south Apr. 9 mark a sharp break from a policy
of cooperation. Protesters demanded an end to the U.S.-led
occupation, burnt U.S. flags and chanted "Death to America!"

Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim al-Mayahi, a police commander in Najaf,
told reporters that at least half a million people joined the
demonstration there.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad,
told reporters, "We say that we're here to support democracy.
We say that free speech and freedom of assembly are part of that.
While we don't necessarily agree with the message, we agree with
their right to say it."

Clashes after the demonstration left at least one U.S. soldier
dead and another wounded in Diwaniyah, 180 km south of Baghdad.

"We have been patient and we have sacrificed a lot thinking the
situation would be better one day soon," Hussein Ali, a teacher
from Diwaniyah told IPS. "The result we see now is that we were
dragged into a swamp of hatred between brothers, and that all
the bloodshed was for the sake of war leaders to get more power
and fortune."

Fighting is continuing in Diwaniyah between the occupation
forces and the Mehdi Army led by Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Additional U.S. and Iraqi troops have been brought into the city
to make arrests and carry out door-to-door raids in search
of illegal weapons and wanted militiamen.

Muqtada al-Sadr, quiet for a considerable period after clashing
with U.S. troops early on in the occupation period, publicly
called on his militia to attack occupation troops.

So far this month, five occupation troops have been killed
every day on average, according to U.S. Department
of Defence figures.

The new Shia armed uprising, which appears to be in its early
days, is a further blow to occupation forces that are already
stretched thin.

"Four years of patience and what do we get?" Ali Hashim,
a merchant from the southern city Basra told IPS. "We got
nothing but the loss of our country to those who spoke a lot
but did nothing. The United States failed us and sold us cheap
to those who would have no mercy on us."

Mahmood al-Lamy, a historian from Basra told IPS the situation
there was critical.

"Basra is the biggest southern city and the only Iraqi city
that has a port near the Gulf. It is now controlled by various
militias who fight each other from time to time over an oil
smuggling business that is flourishing under the occupation."

Lamy said residents fear that "the situation here will be
a lot worse in the coming months due to disputes that are
appearing between major parties."

Lamy was referring to the withdrawal last month of the al-Fadhila
Party from the Shia Islamic Coalition Parliament Group, and the
dismissal of two ministers from the al-Sadr movement as
a punishment for contacting U.S. officials in Nasiriyah
in southern Iraq.

The Shia political group is increasingly divided over many
issues, and it seems unlikely that it will hold together.
But many of the groups are increasingly opposed to the
occupation.

"We were late to realise that we were wrong about U.S.
intentions," Salman Yassen of the Basra city municipality
council told IPS. "We waited four years while U.S. and Iraqi
authorities kept us busy fighting each other while they were
setting the plan of stealing our oil and tearing our country
apart so that their allies would feel safe."

Four years of the occupation of Iraq have seen many changes
in U.S. strategies, ambassadors and tactics, but the changes
may be too little, too late.

"The delay in moving politically has cost Iraq, the U.S.
and many other countries a great deal," former Iraqi police
colonel Ahmed Jabbar told IPS in Baghdad. "The least to be
said is that the world would have been better off without
this occupation and the catastrophic security disturbance
it has caused."

*(Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration
with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who
travels extensively in the region)

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

3) Cuban Youth Searching for Their Inner Selves
Juventud Rebelde reveals the finding of its Third National Survey of Youth
2007-04-10 | 13:31:23 EST
http://www.juventudrebelde.co.cu/cuba/2007-04-10/cuban-youth-searching-for-their-inner-selves-/

The Cuban Center for Youth Studies (CESJ in Spanish) carried
out an important investigation – not only learn about young
people more deeply, but to encourage further studies.

The Third National Survey of Youth was given to more than
3,000 youngsters, ranging from 15 to 29 years of age, all
living in urban areas in all the provinces of the island.
The survey looked into conditions and influences, which
included their socio-demographic characteristics, housing
and economic conditions, education and employment situation,
and leisure opportunities.

Below, JR describes the youth interviewed and the
survey findings.

Looking Inside

For French writer Honore de Balzac, marriage was
“in the end, a passionate battle where spouses ask
for God’s blessing because loving ‘until death do
us part’ is the most frightful of tasks.” Maybe
this is why our youth suffer gamophobia (the fear
of marriage). Consequently, as the survey reveals,
most of them are still singles.

Another of the questions addressed is the sensitive
problem of housing, a major challenge facing Cuban
society as a whole, and which is also experienced
by youth. More than the 50 percent of them live
in houses with construction problems.

Interviewees complained about space and structural
conditions of their houses, considering them insufficient
for their development. Housing issues, family dependence
and a lack of privacy are their principal dilemmas.

Still, it’s revealing that 72.3 percent have their
own room or a minimally shared room. Overcrowding
tends to be more frequent in substandard housing.

The Pocket Economy

Although the Cuban economy moved forward and overcame
the harsh recession of the 1990s, people’s pockets
didn’t seem to catch up that fast. The household budget
of Cubans must still adjust to shortages.

Most interviewees are economically dependent on
other people. Most of them live in the eastern
region of the island, are women and range between
the ages of 15 and 29.

The survey demonstrated that youth spend their incomes
in the same way as the rest of the population: on food,
clothes, shoes, and household expenses. Women and young
adult share their income in accordance with other people’s
needs or with those of the home.

Seeking the Other Half

Some youngsters read through the horoscope to learn
of their fortune in affairs of the heart, or to look
for secret aphrodisiacs or some other sort of aid to
make them luckier in their pursuits. If you ask them
about one of their main goals, with no hesitation they
will answer: finding a partner. The same sentiments
were expressed by the investigators, especially the
women. They give top priority to this goal. Meanwhile
youth over 25 vehemently defended the right to be single.

Love and common likes are fundamental to a successful
relationship, asserted the youth, with all agreeing
that this was regardless of sex or age.

Regarding the prior study (the Second National Survey
of Youth), some of the youth’s priorities have shifted
in importance. Having children, in particular, has
dropped from the third to the seventh position —
an alarming sign given the unbalanced aging of
Cuban society.

Issues of greatest interest for this cohort were
those related to employment, leisure, personal
problems and future plans.

Employment on the Mind

The study demonstrated that over the 36 percent
of youth are students, while high school graduates
are 50 percent of this population and university
graduates 35.5 percent.

The largest part of the younger generation are
workers (37.7 percent). This group is made up mainly
of manual laborers, technicians, and service workers
— most of them working for the government.

When the study was carried out, most unemployed youth
spent their time doing house chores; the rest could
be divided into two groups: those who didn’t work
or study and those actively looking for employment.

Just as in the second national survey, the state
sector —along with the developing sector (tourism,
joint ventures, and publicly-run corporations) —
continue to be the most popular among youth.

Interviewees say their choice of field of employment
is closely related to the country’s economic situation,
the search for better working conditions as well
as the pay offered.

Prejudices and Stereotypes

Although hardly no teenagers and youth said they
had experienced rejection or mistreatment, they
highlighted certain prejudices and stereotypes that
go against the principles of Cuba’s socialist system.

A small number had experienced rejection within
society, owing to difference of opinion, their
economic situation, sex, or skin color.

Racial stereotypes have promoted discriminatory
behavior among adolescence and youth, especially
within the family and among couples.

The availability and use of free time was also
underlined as a problem. The majority said to have
little options for leisure. Likewise, there is a
tendency to fulfill those needs using personal
resources and not those provided by the government.

The primary aspirations of adolescence and youth
regarding family, studies, and employment go hand
in hand with the principles of Cuban society. Their
main aspirations are to find a partner, to strengthen
their present relationship, to go to college and work
in a field that allows them to satisfy their spiritual
and material needs.

Youth shift between reality and longings, between
dilemmas and the dreams of solving them. Cuban youth,
with its contradictions and challenges, is constructing
the destiny of our country — leading the way to humanism,
like the morning precedes the day.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

4) Paying the Price
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
April 12, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/opinion/12herbert.html?hp

You knew something was up early in the day. As soon
as I told executives at MSNBC that I was going to write
about the “60 Minutes” piece, which was already in pretty
wide circulation, they began acting very weird. We’ll
get back to you, they said.

In a “60 Minutes” interview with Don Imus broadcast
in July 1998, Mike Wallace said of the “Imus in the
Morning” program, “It’s dirty and sometimes racist.”

Mr. Imus then said: “Give me an example. Give me one
example of one racist incident.” To which Mr. Wallace
replied, “You told Tom Anderson, the producer,
in your car, coming home, that Bernard McGuirk
is there to do nigger jokes.”

Mr. Imus said, “Well, I’ve nev — I never
use that word.”

Mr. Wallace then turned to Mr. Anderson,
his producer. “Tom,” he said.

“I’m right here,” said Mr. Anderson.

Mr. Imus then said to Mr. Anderson, “Did I use
that word?”

Mr. Anderson said, “I recall you using
that word.”

“Oh, O.K.,” said Mr. Imus. “Well, then I used
that word. But I mean — of course, that was an
off-the-record conversation. But ——”

“The hell it was,” said Mr. Wallace.

The transcript was pure poison. A source very close
to Don Imus told me last night, “They did not want
to wait for your piece to come out.”

For MSNBC, Mr. Imus’s “nappy-headed ho’s” comment
about the Rutgers women’s basketball team was bad
enough. Putting the word “nigger” into the so-called
I-man’s mouth was beyond the pale.

The roof was caving in on Mr. Imus. More advertisers
were pulling the plug. And Bruce Gordon, a member
of the CBS Corp. board of directors and former head
of the N.A.A.C.P., said publicly that Mr. Imus
should be fired.

But some of the most telling and persuasive criticism
came from an unlikely source — internally at the
network that televised Mr. Imus’s program. Women,
especially, were angry and upset. Powerful statements
were made during in-house meetings by women at NBC
and MSNBC — about how black women are devalued in
this country, how they are demeaned by white men
and black men.

White and black women spoke emotionally about the
way black women are frequently trashed in the popular
culture, especially in music, and about the way
news outlets give far more attention to stories
about white women in trouble.

Phil Griffin, a senior vice president at NBC News
who oversaw the Imus show for MSNBC, told me yesterday,
“It touched a huge nerve.”

Whether or not Mr. McGuirk was hired for the specific
noxious purpose referred to in the “60 Minutes”
interview, he has pretty much lived up to that job
description. He’s a minstrel, a white man who has
gleefully led the Imus pack into some of the most
disgusting, degrading attempts at racial (not to
mention sexist) humor that it’s possible to imagine.

Blacks were jigaboos, Sambos and Brilloheads. Women
were bitches and, above all else, an endless variety
of ever-ready sexual vessels, born to be degraded.

The question now is how long the “Imus in the Morning”
radio show will last. Just last month, in a reference
to a speech by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Selma,
Ala., Mr. McGuirk called Mrs. Clinton a bitch and
predicted she would “have cornrows and gold teeth”
by the time her presidential primary campaign against
Senator Barack Obama is over.

Way back in 1994, a friend of mine, the late Lars-Erik
Nelson, a terrific reporter and columnist at The Daily
News and Newsday, mentioned an Imus segment that offered
a “satirical” rap song that gave advice to President
Clinton on what to do about Paula Jones: “Pimp-slap the
ho.” Mr. Nelson also wrote that there was a song on the
program dealing with Hillary Clinton’s menstrual cycle.

So this hateful garbage has been going on for a long,
long time. There was nothing new about the tone or the
intent of Mr. Imus’s “nappy-headed ho’s” comment.
As Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association
of Black Journalists, told me the other night, “It’s
a long pattern of behavior, and at some point somebody
has to say enough is enough.”

The crucial issue goes well beyond Don Imus’s pathetically
infantile behavior. The real question is whether this
controversy is loud enough to shock Americans at long
last into the realization of just how profoundly racist
and sexist the culture is.

It appears that on this issue the general public, and
the women at Mr. Imus’s former network, are far ahead
of the establishment figures, the politicians and the
media biggies, who were always so anxious to appear
on the show and to defend Mr. Imus.

That is a very good sign.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

5) Four Years Later in Iraq
Editorial
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/opinion/12thu1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Four years ago this week, as American troops made their
first, triumphant entrance into Baghdad, joyous Iraqis
pulled down a giant statue of Saddam Hussein. It was
powerful symbolism — a murderous dictator toppled, Baghdad
is taking to the streets without fear, American soldiers
hailed as liberators.

After four years of occupation, untold numbers killed
by death squads and suicide bombers, and searing experiences
like Abu Ghraib, few Iraqis still look on American soldiers
as liberators. Instead, thousands marked this week’s
anniversary by burning American flags and marching
through the streets of Najaf chanting, “Death to America.”

Once again, tens of thousands of American troops are pouring
into Baghdad. Yesterday the Pentagon announced that battle-
weary Army units in Iraq would have to stay on for an
additional three months past their scheduled return dates.

Mr. Bush is desperately gambling that by stretching the
Army to the absolute limits of its deployable strength,
he may be able to impose some relative calm in the capital.
And he seems to imagine that should that gamble succeed,
the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri
Kamal al-Maliki will, without any serious pressure from
Washington, take the steps toward sharing political power
and economic resources it has tenaciously resisted since
the day it took office a year ago.

Unless Mr. Maliki takes those steps — eliminating militia
and death squad members from the Iraqi Army and police,
fairly sharing oil revenues, and rolling back laws that
deny political and economic opportunities to the Sunni
middle class — no lasting security gains are possible.
More Iraqi and American lives will be sacrificed.

Even among Shiites, who suffered so much at the hands
of Saddam Hussein and who are the supposed beneficiaries
of Mr. Maliki’s shortsighted policies, there is a deep
disillusionment and anger. This week, a Washington Post
reporter interviewed Khadim al-Jubouri, who four years
ago swung his sledgehammer to help knock down the
dictator’s statue. Mr. Jubouri said that ever since
he watched that statue being built he had nourished
a dream of bringing it down and ushering in much
better times.

Now, with friends and relatives killed, kidnapped
or driven from their homes, the prices of basic
necessities soaring and electricity rationed to
four hours a day, Mr. Jubouri says the change of
regimes “achieved nothing” and he has come to hate
the American military presence he once welcomed.

Mr. Maliki’s supporters can be even more frightening
to listen to. This week’s demonstration in Najaf
was organized by the fiercely anti-American Shiite
cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose political party and
militia helped put Mr. Maliki in power and are
still among his most important allies.

Two months into the Baghdad security drive, the gains
Mr. Bush is banking on have not materialized. More
American soldiers continue to arrive, and their
commanders are talking about extending the troop
buildup through the fall or into early next year.
After four years, the political trend is even more
discouraging.

There is no possible triumph in Iraq and very
little hope left.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

6) Civilian Claims on U.S. Suggest the Toll of War
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast/12abuse.html?hp

In February 2006, nervous American soldiers in Tikrit killed
an Iraqi fisherman on the Tigris River after he leaned over
to switch off his engine. A year earlier, a civilian filling
his car and an Iraqi Army officer directing traffic were shot
by American soldiers in a passing convoy in Balad, for no
apparent reason.

The incidents are among many thousands of claims submitted
to the Army by Iraqi and Afghan civilians seeking payment
for noncombat killings, injuries or property damage American
forces inflicted on them or their relatives.

The claims provide a rare window into the daily chaos and
violence faced by civilians and troops in the two war
zones. Recently, the Army disclosed roughly 500 claims
to the American Civil Liberties Union in response to
a Freedom of Information Act request. They are the
first to be made public.

They represent only a small fraction of the claims filed.
In all, the military has paid more than $32 million to
Iraqi and Afghan civilians for noncombat-related killings,
injuries and property damage, an Army spokeswoman said.
That figure does not include condolence payments made
at a unit commander’s discretion.

The paperwork, examined by The New York Times, provides
unusually detailed accounts of how bystanders to the
conflicts have become targets of American forces grappling
to identify who is friend, who is foe.

In the case of the fisherman in Tikrit, he and his
companion desperately tried to appear unthreatening
to an American helicopter overhead.

“They held up the fish in the air and shouted ‘Fish!
Fish!’ to show they meant no harm,” said the Army report
attached to the claim filed by the fisherman’s family.
The Army refused to compensate for the killing, ruling
that it was “combat activity,” but approved $3,500 for
his boat, net and cellphone, which drifted away and
were stolen.

In the killings at the gas station in Balad, documents
show that the Army determined that the neither of the
dead Iraqis had done anything hostile or criminal, and
approved $5,000 to the civilian’s brother but nothing
for the Iraqi officer.

In another incident, in 2005, an American soldier in
a dangerous Sunni Arab area south of Baghdad killed
a boy after mistaking his book bag for a bomb satchel.
The Army paid the boy’s uncle $500.

The Foreign Claims Act, which governs such compensation,
does not deal with combat-related cases. For those cases,
including the boy’s, the Army may offer a condolence
payment as a gesture of regret with no admission of fault,
of usually no higher than $2,500 per person killed.

The total number of claims filed, or paid, is unclear,
although extensive data has been provided in reports
to Congress. There is no way to know immediately whether
disciplinary action or prosecution has resulted from
the cases.

Soldiers hand out instruction cards after mistakes are
made, so Iraqis know where to file claims. “The Army
does not target civilians,” said Maj. Anne D. Edgecomb,
an Army spokeswoman. “Sadly, however, the enemy’s tactics
in Iraq and Afghanistan unnecessarily endanger innocent
civilians.”

There are no specific guidelines to tell Army field
officers judging the claims how to evaluate the cash
value of a life taken, Major Edgecomb said. She said
officers “consider the contributions the deceased made
to those left behind and offer an award based on the facts,
local tribal customs, and local law.”

In Haditha, one of the most notorious incidents involving
American troops in Iraq, the Marines paid residents
$38,000 after troops killed two dozen people
in November 2005.

The relatively small number of claims divulged by the
Army show patterns of misunderstanding at checkpoints
and around American military convoys that often result
in inadvertent killings. In one incident, in Feb. 18,
2006, a taxi approached a checkpoint east of Baquba
that was not properly marked with signs to slow down,
one Army claim evaluation said. Soldiers fired on the
taxi, killing a woman and severely wounding her daughter
and son. The Army approved an unusually large condolence
payment of $7,500.

In September 2005, soldiers killed a man and his sister
by firing 200 rounds into their car as it approached
a checkpoint, apparently too quickly, near Mussayib.
The Army lieutenant colonel who handled the claim
awarded relatives a $10,000 compensation payment,
finding that the soldiers had overstepped the rules
of engagement.

“There are some very tragic losses of civilian life,
including losses of whole families,” said Anthony D.
Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director, in an interview.
He said the claims showed “enormous confusion on all sides,
both from the civilian population on how to interact with
the armed services and also among the soldiers themselves.”

Of the 500 cases released, 204, or about 40 percent, were
apparently rejected because the injury, death or property
damage was deemed to have been “directly or indirectly”
related to combat. Of the claims approved for payment,
at least 87 were not combat-related, and 77 were condolence
payments for incidents the Army judged to be combat-related.

About 10 percent of the claims were rejected because the
Army could not find a “significant activity” report
confirming an incident.

A summary of the cases is online at
www.aclu.org/civiliancasualties.

In Iraq, rules for evaluating claims have changed.
Before President Bush declared major combat operations
over, in May 2003, commanders considered most checkpoint
shootings to be combat-related. Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli,
the former commander of day-to-day operations in Iraq,
stiffened rules at checkpoints. In late 2003, as more
Iraqis were accidentally injured or killed, the Army
began offering condolence payments. It has not always
worked as planned, said Sarah Holewinski, the executive
director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict,
a nonprofit group in Washington.

“Sometimes families would get paid and sometimes their
neighbors wouldn’t,” she said. “It caused a lot of
resentments among the Iraqis, which is ironic because
it was a program specifically meant to foster good will.”

The Army usually assigns a captain, major or lieutenant
colonel to accept claims in Iraq and Afghanistan and
decide on payment.

But in and near combat zones in Iraq, a claim’s merit
is quickly judged by an officer juggling dozens of new
claims each week, said Jon E. Tracy, a former Army captain
and lawyer who adjudicated Iraqi civilian claims in the
Baghdad area from May 2003 through July 2004.

“I know plenty of lawyers who did not pay any condolences
payments at all,” said Mr. Tracy, who is now a legal
consultant for the Campaign for Innocent Victims in
Conflict. “There was no reason for it. It was clearly
not combat, and the victim was clearly innocent, all
the facts are there, witness statements, but they
wouldn’t pay them.”

Half of the claims he adjudicated were property damage
claims from collisions with military vehicles, he said.
Most fraudulent claims were property claims; few were
for wrongful killings. “You just had to read people,”
he said.

About a quarter of claims were for personal injury
or deaths. In his year judging claims, Mr. Tracy said
he paid 52 condolence payments, most for deaths. “I had
three to four times more,” Mr. Tracy said, “I just didn’t
have enough money.”

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York,
and Edward Wong from Baghdad.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

7) U.S. Suspects That Iran Aids Both Sunni and Shiite Militias
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html?ref=world

BAGHDAD, April 11 — Arms that American military officials
say appear to have been manufactured in Iran as recently
as last year have turned up in the past week in a Sunni-
majority area, the chief spokesman for the American
military command in Iraq said Wednesday in a news
conference.

The spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said
that detainees in American custody had indicated that
Iranian intelligence operatives had given support to
Sunni insurgents and that surrogates for the Iranian
intelligence service were training Shiite extremists
in Iran. He gave no further description of the detainees
and did not say why they would have that information.

“We have in fact found some cases recently where Iranian
intelligence sources have provided to Sunni insurgent
groups some support,” said General Caldwell, who sat
near a table crowded with weapons that he said the
military contended were largely of Iranian manufacture.

The weapons were found in a mostly Sunni neighborhood
in Baghdad, he said, a rare instance of the American
military suggesting any link between Iran and the Sunni
insurgency. It has recently suggested a link with
Shiite militants in Iraq.

The accusation of a link between the Iranian intelligence
service and Sunni Arab insurgents is new. The American
military has contended in the past that elements in Iran
have given Shiite militants powerful Iranian-made roadside
bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, and training
in their use.

Critics have cast doubt on the American military statements
about those bombs, saying the evidence linking them to
Iran was circumstantial and inferential.

The weapons displayed on Wednesday were more conventional,
and officials pointed to markings on them that they said
indicated Iranian manufacture.

The display came as the military released figures showing
that 26 percent fewer civilians were killed and wounded
in Baghdad from Jan. 1 through March 31 than during the
previous quarter, as the new American effort to secure
Baghdad got under way, but that nationwide civilian
casualties had risen.

From February to March the number of dead and wounded
nationwide, including civilians and members of Iraqi
and American security forces, rose 10 percent, according
to the military report.

“What does that mean?” General Caldwell said. “It means
we still have a lot of work to do.”

The military announced that one soldier died on the
eastern side of Baghdad from a roadside bomb early
Wednesday and that another soldier died in southern
Baghdad on Tuesday.

In his statement, General Caldwell renewed American
contentions that Iran was not doing enough to stop
weapons from being moved into Iraq from outside.

It is unclear from the military’s comments on Wednesday
whether it is possible to draw conclusions about how
the weapons that the military contends are of Iranian
origin might have made their way into a predominantly
Sunni area or why Shiite Iran would arm Sunni militants.

There are several possibilities, military officials
who were not authorized to speak publicly for attribution
said privately. One is that they came through Syria,
long a transit route for Iranian-made weapons being
funneled to the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah.
Another possibility is that arms dealers are selling
to every side in the conflict.

The weapons on the table next to General Caldwell were
found two days ago, the general said, after a resident
of the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood called
Jihad, in western Baghdad, informed the local Joint
Security Station run by Iraqi and American soldiers
that there were illegal arms in the area.

The soldiers found a black Mercedes sedan and on its
back seat, in plain view, a rocket of a type commonly
made in China but repainted and labeled and sold by
Iran, said Maj. Marty Weber, a master ordnance
technician who joined General Caldwell at the
briefing. In the trunk were mortar rounds marked
“made in 2006.”

In a nearby house and buried in the yard, the soldiers
found more mortar rounds, 1,000 to 2,000 rounds of
bullets, five hand grenades and a couple of Bulgarian-
made rocket-propelled grenades, Major Weber said.

The weapons that the military officials said were
of Iranian origin were labeled in English, which
Major Weber said was typical of arms manufactured
for international sale. He added that the military
knew that they were of Iranian origin by “the
structure of the rounds, the geometry of the
tailfins and, again, the stenciling on the warheads.”

He also said the mortar rounds marked 81 millimeters
on the table were made regionally only by Iran.

In the political arena, the members of Parliament
allied with the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr
announced that they would leave the government unless
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki set a fixed
timetable for the withdrawal of American troops
from Iraq. Mr. Maliki rejected the idea this week.

The capital was largely quiet on Wednesday, but 16
bodies were found around the city and a director
general of the city’s electricity ministry was
assassinated, an Interior Ministry official said.
The center of the city, where fighting raged on Tuesday,
remained extremely tense.

The United States military raised the death toll
from Tuesday’s estimate to 14 insurgents in Fadhil
killed, 8 detained and 12 wounded.

Sheik Jasim Yehiya Jasim, the imam of Al Joba mosque,
whose brother was killed by the Iraqi Army, said he
was devastated and confused about why his brother had
been singled out and killed. “He was born only in 1982,”
Sheik Jasim said. “He did the call to prayer. I thank
the Iraqi and American governments in the name of the
people of Fadhil for this bloody democracy.”

Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

8) About Creation, Pope Melds Faith With Science
By IAN FISHER
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/europe/12pope.html

ROME, April 11 — Science cannot fully explain the mystery
of creation, Pope Benedict XVI said in comments about
evolution that were published in a book on Wednesday.
At the same time, he did not reject evolutionary theory
or endorse any alternative for the origins of life.

“I would not depend on faith alone to explain the whole
picture,” Benedict, a former theology professor, told
his former students in September at a private seminar
outside Rome on evolution, according to an account
of the book from Reuters.

As pope, Benedict has not publicly defined his position,
amid angry debates in the United States over “intelligent
design” and questions raised two years ago by a leading
cardinal on whether evolution was compatible with
Catholicism.

But his comments at the seminar, published in German
by students who were present, seemed largely to avoid
any such debate: Rather, they seemed consistent with
his often-stated views on other subjects — that science
and reason, however valuable, should not rule out God.

The debate over evolution, he said, concerned “the great
fundamental questions of philosophy: where man and the
world came from and where they are going.”

The book, called “Creation and Evolution,” was not
publicly available on Wednesday, and Reuters did not
say how it had obtained a copy.

Apart from the pope’s comments, the book includes
essays from Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, a former
student of the pope who set off much debate in 2005
after seeming to raise doubts about evolution.

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he became pope
two years ago, Benedict had expressed concern that
on several fronts, including evolution, science was
overstepping its competence, denying the existence
of God and becoming its own system of belief. Though
he did not reject evolution, he noted in the remarks
quoted from the book that science could not completely
prove evolution because it could not be duplicated
in the laboratory.

But, Reuters reported, he also defended what is known
as theistic evolution, the idea that God could use
evolutionary processes to create life, if not through
the direct engineering suggested by “intelligent design,”
which posits that life is so complex that it requires
an active creator.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

9) Life in Iraq Worsening, Red Cross Says
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast/12redcross.html

GENEVA, April 11 — The situation for civilians in Iraq is
“ever worsening,” though security in some places has improved
because of stepped-up efforts by the American-led multinational
forces, the International Red Cross said Wednesday.

Thousands of bodies lie unclaimed in mortuaries, with
relatives either unaware that they are there or afraid
to recover them, said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director
of operations for the International Committee of the
Red Cross. Medical professionals have been fleeing the
country after the killings and abductions of colleagues,
the group said.

“Whatever operation that is today under way, and that
may be taken tomorrow and in the weeks after,
to improve the security of civilians on the ground
may have an effect in the medium term,”
Mr. Kraehenbuehl said.

“We’re certainly not seeing an immediate effect
in terms of stabilization for civilians currently.
That is not our reading.”

Referring to southern Iraq, he said, “It is clear that
the security situation has improved in certain instances.”
But the central region, including Baghdad, remains greatly
troubled, despite new security efforts, he added.

The Red Cross has reduced operations in Iraq since
attacks on its staff and Baghdad headquarters in 2003.
It relies on an affiliate for much of its information.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

10) 4 Years On, the Gap Between Iraq Policy
and Practice Is Wide
By DAVID E. SANGER
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast/12policy.html

WASHINGTON, April 11 — Four years after the fall of Baghdad,
the White House is once again struggling to solve an old
problem: Who is in charge of carrying out policy in Iraq?

Once again President Bush and his top aides are searching
for a high-level coordinator capable of cutting through
military, political and reconstruction strategies that
have never operated in sync, in Washington or in Baghdad.

Once again Mr. Bush is publicly declaring that his
administration has settled on a strategy for victory —
this time, a troop increase that is supposed to open
political space for Sunnis and Shiites to live and
govern together — even while his top aides acknowledge
that the White House has never gotten the execution right.

“We’re trying to learn from our experience,” Stephen
J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in an
interview on Wednesday. Confirming a report that first
appeared in The Washington Post, Mr. Hadley said he
had been sounding out retired military commanders
to assess their interest in a job where they would
report directly to President Bush.

“One of the things that we’ve heard from Republicans
and Democrats is that we need to go a step further
in Washington and have a single point of focus,
someone who can work 24/7 on the Washington end
of executing the strategy we’ve put in place for
the next 22 months,” to the end of Mr. Bush’s term.

Mr. Hadley came to his job in the beginning of 2005,
after four years as deputy national security adviser,
and said from the outset that the Achilles’ heel
of the administration had been its failure to execute
its policies.

Now, Mr. Hadley said, he had decided that “while we’ve
had plans and due dates and stoplight charts, what we
need is someone with a lot of stature within the
government who can make things happen.” That official,
Mr. Hadley said, would deal daily with the new American
ambassador in Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, and the new commander,
Gen. David H. Petraeus, and then “call any cabinet
secretary and get problems resolved, fast.”

Mr. Hadley says he has not yet brought top candidates
into the White House for formal interviews. But what
he is seeking is someone willing to take on, at the
end of a war-weary administration, one of the most
thankless jobs in Washington: overseeing policy in
Iraq and Afghanistan, where the administration has
discovered that changing regimes was a lot easier
than changing habits.

It is telling that Mr. Hadley and Mr. Bush are still
wrestling with this problem. Four years ago, both had
hoped and expected that by 2007, Iraq would essentially
be a cleanup operation, involving a comparatively small
American force. Instead, the current force of 145,000
is building to 160,000.

For both men, deciding who in Washington should take
the reins on Iraq strategy is hardly a new task.

It was in August 2003, five months after the American
invasion, that Mr. Bush ordered the formation of an
Iraq Stabilization Group to run things from the White
House. That action reflected the first recognition
by the White House that Donald H. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon
was more interested in deposing dictators than
nation-building.

When that group was formed, Mr. Rumsfeld snapped that
it was about time that the National Security Council
performed its traditional job — unifying the actions
of a government whose agencies often spent much
of their day battling one another. That approach
worked, for a while.

But then the insurgency in Iraq grew formidable,
reconstruction efforts were slowed, the State and
Defense Departments reverted to bureaucratic spats,
and the White House never managed to get its arms
around the scope of the problem, in Baghdad or in
Washington.

That was evident earlier this year when Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and the new defense
secretary, Robert M. Gates, openly clashed on the
question of who would provide the personnel for
new Provincial Reconstruction Teams that were
charged with trying, once again, to rebuild Iraq.

But that was only a small part of the problem: When
the Iraq Study Group turned out its recommendations
in December for revamping strategy, it cited “a lack
of coordination by senior management in Washington,”
declaring that “focus, priority setting, and skillful
implementation are in short supply.”

Mr. Hadley’s initiative won support on Wednesday from
Mr. Gates, who has spent much of the past four months
demonstrating that he is the anti-Rumsfeld.

At a news conference, Mr. Gates offered a public
endorsement for the idea of empowering someone at
the White House to better carry out the president’s
priorities. “This person is not ‘running the war,’ ”
Mr. Gates said. “This ‘czar’ term is, I think,
kind of silly.”

Instead, he said, “this is what Steve Hadley would
do if Steve Hadley had the time, but he doesn’t have
the time to do it full time.”

Part of the new job is to make sure, in Mr. Gates’s
words, that when Ambassador Crocker or General Petraeus
“have requested something from the government and not
gotten it, or it’s moving too slowly through the
bureaucracy, that there is somebody empowered by the
president to call a cabinet secretary and say, ‘The
president would like to know why you haven’t delivered
what’s been asked for yet.’ ”

As David J. Rothkopf, who wrote a history of the
National Security Council titled “Running the World”
(Public Affairs, 2005), noted Wednesday, “It’s been
a difficult thing for the N.S.C. to do because it is
an almost impossible task.”

“This is a problem of Sunnis and Shiites, and it is
not about Republicans and Democrats or the rank of
officials or bureaucratic rivalry,” he said. “The
Sunnis started fighting the Shiites a thousand years
before we got to Plymouth Rock, and it’s hard to create
a new special implementer to deal with that.”

But by this point in the Bush administration, officials
say, their only hope is to take the surge and run with
it. So when Meghan L. O’Sullivan, a deputy national
security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, told Mr.
Hadley a few months ago that she was ready to leave,
the White House seized the moment to open a post nearly
equivalent in power to Mr. Hadley’s own job.

For a White House that invaded Iraq with hopes that
it would become a model for the Middle East, this seems
to be another step away from ideological missions and
toward the nuts and bolts of rescuing its troubled
nation-building experiment.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

11) Panel on Walter Reed Woes Issues Strong Rebuke
By SCOTT SHANE
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12medical.html?ref=us

WASHINGTON, April 11 — An independent panel assessing
dilapidated facilities and red tape for wounded Iraq
war veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on
Wednesday issued a sweeping indictment of leadership
failures, inadequate training and staffing shortages.

The panel, headed by two former secretaries of the Army,
Togo D. West Jr. and John O. Marsh Jr., found that a high
standard of care for troops when they were first evacuated
from war zones and hospitalized fell apart when they became
outpatients, with a “breakdown in health services” and
“compassion fatigue” on the part of overworked staff
members.

“Leadership at Walter Reed should have been aware
of poor living conditions and administrative hurdles
and failed to place proper priority on solutions,”
the panel said in a summary of its draft report
released at a meeting at Walter Reed.

The report called the current system for assessing
soldiers’ disabilities “extremely cumbersome,
inconsistent, and confusing,” saying it must be
“completely overhauled.” It called for the creation
of a “center of excellence” on treatment, training
and research on two conditions suffered by thousands
of troops in Iraq: traumatic brain injury and post-
traumatic stress disorder.

The panel, called the Independent Review Group,
was appointed by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates
in February after The Washington Post reported on
the problems at Walter Reed, the Army’s century-old
medical center in Washington. A presidential commission
and a Department of Veterans Affairs task force are
also assessing the troubles.

The conditions at Walter Reed, including moldy, rat-
infested quarters and a bureaucratic maze that left
severely injured soldiers in limbo for months, have
become a symbol of the government’s broader failure
to help troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. President
Bush visited patients at the facility March 30 and said,
“I apologize for what they went through, and we’re going
to fix the problem.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates, Cynthia O. Smith, said
Wednesday that he “welcomes the findings and believes
our wounded warriors deserve the best treatment possible
both as inpatients and outpatients.”

The initial reports in February led to a shake-up of Army
leadership. Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey fired Walter
Reed’s commander, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, and replaced
him with Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army surgeon general.

But critics said General Kiley had been told about the
problems and failed to act. Mr. Gates then publicly
criticized the Army’s response as inadequate, and both
Mr. Harvey and General Kiley stepped down.

Since then, the Army has moved aggressively to make
improvements at Walter Reed. Patients have been moved
out of the most squalid building. Some 28 new case
managers have been added to help wounded soldiers
navigate the medical system. A telephone hot line
has been opened and information handbooks have been
distributed to families of wounded service members.

In remarks at Wednesday’s meeting, Mr. West, a former
military lawyer who served as both secretary of the
Army and secretary of veterans affairs under President
Bill Clinton, strongly criticized the tortuous bureaucracy
that assesses soldiers’ disabilities.

“The horrors inflicted on our wounded service members
and their families in the name of the physical disability
review process simply must be stopped,” Mr. West said.

He said the Army’s system currently requires four
proceedings before an official board, causing delays
and excessive paperwork and producing “inexplicable
differences in standards and results.”

“We can and must do better,” he said.

Mr. West also said the panel concluded there was
inadequate understanding of how to diagnose and treat
the brain injuries that have become a signature
of the Iraq war, where thousands of troops have
been wounded by improvised explosive devices,
and the mental effects of long exposure to the
constant threat of attack.

“We believe there is a need for greater and better
coordinated research in this area,” he said.

Under legislation introduced Wednesday by Senators
Evan Bayh of Indiana and Hillary Rodham Clinton
of New York, both Democrats, troops suffering from
traumatic brain injuries would be kept on active
duty, rather than being retired, so they would
receive more medical attention.

Steve Robinson, a longtime veterans’ advocate with
Veterans for America, said he welcomed the findings
of the review panel. But he said the panel should
address the problems of discharged soldiers who
were not getting V.A. benefits they needed.

“What are we going to do about the thousands of
people who have unjustifiably lost their V.A. benefits
forever?” Mr. Robinson said. “It’s not enough just
to fix the problems starting from the point that
President Bush went to Walter Reed.”

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

12) As His Time Grows Short, a Dog Seeks a Reprieve
By PAUL VITELLO
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/nyregion/12dog.html

BAY SHORE, N.Y., April 11 — In legal papers filed on
Wednesday in the Appellate Division of State Supreme
Court, the conflicting portraits of the prisoner seem
to describe two different individuals.

He is a vicious predator with a history of assault.
Or, he is the kind who would not even show his teeth
if you pulled his ears.

After three and a half years on doggie death row,
Duke, a 5-year-old American pit bull terrier, is the
subject of an unusual, last-ditch appeal of a judge’s
“order of destruction” over his attacks on a neighbor
dog twice in two months in 2003. His lawyer contends
that Duke was wrongly convicted and harshly sentenced,
based on a law that took effect on Jan. 1, 2004, two
weeks after the attack, making dog-on-dog attacks
subject to serious punishment. Before that, only
dogs attacking humans were punished severely.

“We are running out of options,” said the lawyer,
Amy Chaitoff. “And it would be a terrible injustice.”

Duke’s case has drawn considerable attention on Long
Island. Dog rescue organizations staged a demonstration
at Islip Town Hall in 2005, demanding that he be freed.
And during a 2006 hearing, a crowd of about 60 gathered
outside the courthouse to show solidarity with Duke’s
owners, Denise and Chanse Menendez of Hauppauge.

But if the judges of the state Appellate Division in
Brooklyn rule against him this time, Duke, who has
been confined to the last cage on the east tier of Kennel
No. 1 at the Town of Islip Animal Shelter here since
Dec. 26, 2003, will probably soon eat his last biscuit.
(His cage is adjacent to the small room where workers
administer lethal injections to a dozen or so animals
each week.)

In some ways, legal experts say, Duke represents a new
class of death-row dog. New York is among a dozen states
that have changed laws over the past 10 years to make
it possible to seize dogs from their owners and order
them euthanized for biting other dogs.

Ledy VanKavage, director of legislation for the American
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said
the stricter provisions reflected several factors: the
rising numbers of pet dogs in American households,
a growing concern about highly publicized vicious
dog cases, and what she called the “evolving human-
animal bond.”

“The thinking goes: ‘My dog is a member of my family.
If you attack my dog, you are attacking my family,’ ”
she said.

But Ms. VanKavage said this was flawed logic, noting,
“Dogs are predators, after all.”

The opposing view is in the papers filed on behalf
of Duke’s former neighbor, Dominick Motta, who
testified that on Oct. 23, 2003, Duke and his pit
bull sister, Shelby, chased Mr. Motta’s bulldog,
Daisy, and that Duke bit her.

After a hearing, Duke was designated a “dangerous
dog” by District Court Judge Madeleine A. Fitzgibbon
of Suffolk County. His owners were ordered to keep
him indoors or in a specially built kennel outdoors.

When Duke got loose on Dec. 13, 2003, and again
chased and bit Daisy, Mr. Motta, who then had three
children ages 2 to 7, filed a follow-up complaint,
which resulted in Judge Fitzgibbon’s order of
destruction.

“My client did not order the dog euthanized,
a judge did,” Mr. Motta’s lawyer, John L. Belford Jr.
of St. James, said in an interview. “And the judge’s
decision was not designed to protect my client alone.”

If Duke shares with some human death row residents
the kind of mysterious personality that can look
darkly dangerous to some and intriguing to others,
he also shares what seems like the equanimity of
one who is at peace with himself.

“Watch this, I’m going to do some things that no
aggressive dog would tolerate,” said Jeff Kolbjornsen,
an animal behaviorist who attended the rallies on Duke’s
behalf, on a visit to the shelter the other day.

He clamped a hand over the dog’s mouth. He pushed him.
He stepped on his paw, lightly. He gently slapped
the dog’s head.

Duke — whose skull is about the size of a baby watermelon,
whose neck is roughly as thick as a man’s thigh, and whose
mouth is ear to ear — sat on his hind legs, panting,
his tongue extended just past the widest part of his
wide chest. He nudged and then licked Mr. Kolbjornsen’s
hand.

“This is the nicest, calmest dog I have ever worked with,
and I’ve been here seven years,” said Joanne Daly,
an attendant at the shelter.

In the brief filed with the court on Wednesday by
Ms. Chaitoff, the lawyer for Duke’s owners, affidavits
from Ms. Daly and from Matt Caracciolo, the shelter
supervisor, were included praising the dog’s unflappable
and friendly nature.

But the main thrust of her argument is that the law under
which he was prosecuted, Section 108 of the state’s
Agriculture and Markets Law, which defines “a dangerous
dog,” changed from the time of the attacks to the time
of his trial.

In 2003, the law defined a dangerous dog as one who
attacks a person or attacks certain types of service
animals, like Seeing Eye dogs. It was in 2004 that
the law was expanded to include “companion animals,”
pets like Mr. Motta’s Daisy.

Therefore, Ms. Chaitoff said, in the eyes of the law,
as well as his friends, “Duke is an innocent dog.”

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

13) The Blinded Leading the Blind
A Jones for Justice
Connecting the Dots: Law, Slavery, and Immigration
By Dr. John Calvin Jones, PhD, JD
BC Columnist
www.blackcommentator.com/225/225_jones_for_justice_law_slavery_immigration_pf.html

I used to teach courses in government and politics
at a small college at South College in South Texas
(and I mean south – 260 miles south of San Antonio).
Though there was to be some sort of check on the
competence and baseline knowledge of the faculty,
i.e. that they knew something about the subject matter
in the courses that they taught, I quickly learned that
my colleagues in the department of government were,
to put it nicely, limited. While two others even knew
of Michael Parenti's Democracy for the Few, most had
never heard of an organization called the Project for
a New American Century (whose members include Dick
Cheney, Jeb Bush, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz, Philip Zelikow, and Zalmay Khalilzad),
no one else recognized the ubiquity and debilitating
effects of depleted uranium, and all but one other
thought that the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery
in the United States. The last point was particularly
troubling because my colleagues told all their students
that the 13 Amendment outlawed slavery in the United
States and demanded that the students repeat the lie.

Trained Ignorance

The collective wisdom of the school's administration
and my colleagues had determined that the best way
to determine if we instructors were dispensing relevant
information (much less teaching) anything apropos,
was to employ a uniform set of test questions that
we would give to the students taking intro classes
in government. Such was to work as a type of validity
test whereby each instructor would collect data and
report how many students got the "right" answer to
various trivia questions in the subject of American
and Texas government and politics.

Though I protested the entire project in theory, the
use of a uniform or department-wide test via a set
of multiple choice test questions is the logical
extension of the silly, if not criminal, project of
standardized testing demanded through programs like
No Child Left Behind. Included in this list of
about 50 questions was "which amendment banned slavery
in the United States?" While the non-reading, so-called
instructors claimed that the "correct answer" to the
question was the 13th Amendment. (Note, I refer to
my former colleagues as "instructors." They were not
professors in that only one of them had earned a PhD
and apparently he did not like to read anymore than
the rest of them). As I had known for about 20 years,
after reading the Constitution without a filter
(i.e. ignorant, yet licensed teacher), that the 13th
Amendment did not outlaw slavery in the United States,
I told my esteemed colleagues that that they were
mistaken. I explained, by citing the text (a rare
practice I have learned), that the Amendment did not
outlaw slavery at all, instead, the addition codifies
when slavery is legal.

For those of you who care to read and (re)learn,
please note that the 13th Amendment reads as follows:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within
the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction. (Italics added).

To put it more simply, in the United States, slavery
and or involuntary servitude is legal, when compelled
as punishment for a crime.

Though I demonstrated this plain language to my fellow
legal scholars, and added the need to demonstrate to
our students both the political and legal ramifications
of the 13th Amendment and how such is relevant today,
I was met with criticism about my being too hard, and
trying to push esoteric knowledge or being too ideological.
While I did not and do not mind others being in disagreement
with me, the fact that these people are paid by the state
to preach a lie is criminal. More importantly, because
these elders are "teaching" youth, there are particular
negative social ramifications for such pedagogy. What
shall the victims of ignorance and mendacity, and nearly
all these young people are Mexican-American, do or think
when faced with a newspaper story of so-called immigrant
labor shortages and the use of prison labor (including
imprisoned immigrants) to harvest crops in Colorado?
Without a recognition that slavery is legal, has been
and is maintained throughout American history, how can
our children make sense of a small news story and see
that the larger picture that touches on immigration law,
labor rights, outsourcing, and racism?

Colorado Works Its Slaves

According to Nicholas Riccardi, because of state laws
and crack downs on Mexican and Latino migrant laborers
in Colorado, various farms there are facing a labor
shortage – crops will be lost unless harvested.[1] And
while economic theorists might see the resulting shortage
of exploitable labor as a good thing for youth and
underemployed Americans who might fill the void,
Agribusiness and prison officials in Colorado have
a better idea – prison labor.

Riccardi finds that the Colorado Department of Corrections
is launching a pilot program, contracting with more than
a dozen farms to provide inmates to pick melons, onions
and peppers. (Note the program is only new to Colorado,
chain gangs and forced slave labor in agriculture
is nothing new in America).

Though she and colleagues in the Colorado legislature
empowered local police to engage in Nazi-style stop and
"check for papers" harassment leading to the arrest
of thousands of migrants, now Colorado Legislator
Dorothy Butcher wants to force prisoners to pick peppers
for pennies "to make sure the agricultural industry
wouldn't go out of business."

Ironically, under the Colorado prison-crop picker plan,
farms will pay more for inmate labor than they pay for
undocumented migrants. According to Riccardi, the
prisoners will be paid [sic] (i.e. credited, apparently
Mr. Riccardi has never been in prison) with 60 cents
a day. And it is unlikely that individual prisoners
will refuse. Firstly, while the program will employ
perhaps as many as 700 prisoners, Colorado has over
22,000 prisoners with "agricultural experience".
Secondly and more importantly, prison overseers can
use a combination of punishments and inducements to
encourage their participation.

Where to begin? The federal government sells fewer
than 200 visas for farm laborers every year. Colorado
arrests undocumented immigrant laborers – who cannot
obtain necessary documents. Prisoners forced to work.
"Prisoners" are paid more than migrant farm workers.
Migrant field workers in Colorado earn less than
60 cents a day. The cost to hold someone in jail
or prison costs the taxpayers anywhere from $30-75
per day! The prospect of prison wardens harvesting
the labor of their inmates is akin to Wal-Mart managers
forcing "associates" to work off the clock or walk home.

All Politics are Local, National and International

Without any plan for his presidency, other than
enrichment of his friends, murder of millions, and
praying for Armageddon prior to November 2008, Bush
is now turning attention from Iraq and Iran to the
US-Mexican border. Once again, speaking with Bushisms
and contradictions, W. announced a need for guest-
worker programs all the while calling for security
to "fight terrorism".[2]

To quote Keith Olbermann, Bush's words are lies.
Rather than provide for the orderly and legal entry
of thousands who come here to work, Bush orders or
allows his deputies in the Nazi-like Department
of Homeland Security (Hitler called it the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt) to round up thousands
(including women and children).

These people who are denied legal admission to the
U.S., are arrested at work and their children nabbed
at school in the name of "a war on terror" or a policy
of "law and order" that is simply insane (part of
a White Supremacist megalomania), economically inefficient,
and horribly cruel. How long will it be until thousands
of detained immigrants are farmed out in slave-labor camps?
That is how the Nazis took care of their inferior
populations, isn't it?

This week, as he has done for the past months, a Texan-
Activist, Jay Johnson-Castro, will be walking to Austin
to protest the imprisonment of hundreds of immigrants
in a system of private prisons across the state. Bush
could order the release of these people … but instead,
corporate interests in the private prison industry and
the Christo-fascist wing of the Republic party demand
militarization of the border and mass incarceration.
The entire system is immoral, but legal – as international
treaties and international laws to the contrary have
no force inside the United States.
Millions of us are beginning to learn the truth about
this system of slave labor and the immigration traps.
How many of us need to act out to stop it?

Sources:
[1] Riccardi, Nicholas 2007. "Colorado to Use Inmates
to Fill Migrant Shortage", Los Angeles Times, 1 March.
Posted at Truth Out
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030107F.shtml

[2] Daily News & Analysis. "Bush renews call for
comprehensive immigration reforms", Wednesday, April 11, 2007.
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1090197

BC Columnist Dr John Calvin Jones, PhD, JD has
a law degree and a PhD in Political Science. His
Website is virtualcitizens.com. Click here to
contact Dr. Jones. jcjones@virtualcitizens.com

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

14) REFLECTIONS OF PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO
"More than three billion people in the world condemned
to premature death from hunger and thirst."
March 28, 2007
Fidel Castro.
Translated by Granma International
[This email was sent as a service by Roland Sheppard.
My website is http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret . Read
my book, The View From The Painter's Ladder available
at Amazon.com]

"More than three billion people in the world condemned
to premature death from hunger and thirst."

THAT is not an exaggerated figure, but rather a cautious
one. I have meditated a lot on that in the wake of President
Bush’s meeting with U.S. automobile manufacturers.

The sinister idea of converting food into fuel was
definitively established as an economic line in U.S.
foreign policy last Monday, March 26.

A cable from the AP, the U.S. news agency that reaches
all corners of the world, states verbatim:

"WASHINGTON, March 26 (AP). President Bush touted the
benefits of ‘flexible fuel’ vehicles running on ethanol
and biodiesel on Monday, meeting with automakers
to boost support for his energy plans.

"Bush said a commitment by the leaders of the domestic
auto industry to double their production of flex-fuel
vehicles could help motorists shift away from gasoline
and reduce the nation's reliance on imported oil.

'"That's a major technological breakthrough for the
country,' Bush said after inspecting three alternative
vehicles. If the nation wants to reduce gasoline use,
he said “the consumer has got to be in a position to
make a rational choice.”

"The president urged Congress to 'move expeditiously'
on legislation the administration recently proposed
to require the use of 35 billion gallons of alternative
fuels by 2017 and seek higher fuel economy standards
for automobiles.

"Bush met with General Motors Corp. chairman and chief
executive Rick Wagoner, Ford Motor Co. chief executive
Alan Mulally and DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group
chief executive Tom LaSorda.

"They discussed support for flex-fuel vehicles, attempts
to develop ethanol from alternative sources like
switchgrass and wood chips and the administration's
proposal to reduce gas consumption by 20 percent
in 10 years.

"The discussions came amid rising gasoline prices.
The latest Lundberg Survey found the nationwide
average for gasoline has risen 6 cents per gallon
in the past two weeks to $2.61."

I believe that reducing and moreover recycling all
motors that run on electricity and fuel is an
elemental and urgent need for all humanity. The
tragedy does not lie in reducing those energy costs
but in the idea of converting food into fuel.

It is known very precisely today that one ton of
corn can only produce 413 liters of ethanol on
average, according to densities. That is equivalent
to 109 gallons.

The average price of corn in U.S. ports has risen
to $167 per ton. Thus, 320 million tons of corn
would be required to produce 35 billion gallons
of ethanol.

According to FAO figures, the U.S. corn harvest
rose to 280.2 million tons in the year 2005.

Although the president is talking of producing fuel
derived from grass or wood shavings, anyone can
understand that these are phrases totally lacking
in realism. Let’s be clear: 35 billion gallons
translates into 35 followed by nine zeros!

Afterwards will come beautiful examples of what
experienced and well-organized U.S. farmers can
achieve in terms of human productivity by hectare:
corn converted into ethanol; the chaff from that
corn converted into animal feed containing 26% protein;
cattle dung used as raw material for gas production.
Of course, this is after voluminous investments only
within the reach of the most powerful enterprises,
in which everything has to be moved on the basis
of electricity and fuel consumption. Apply that recipe
to the countries of the Third World and you will see
that people among the hungry masses of the Earth will
no longer eat corn. Or something worse: lend funding
to poor countries to produce corn ethanol based on
corn or any other food and not a single tree will
be left to defend humanity from climate change.

Other countries in the rich world are planning to
use not only corn but also wheat, sunflower seeds,
Rapeseed and other foods for fuel production. For the
Europeans, for example, it would become a business
to import all of the world’s soybeans with the aim
of reducing the fuel costs for their automobiles and
feeding their animals with the chaff from that legume,
particularly rich in all types of essential amino acids.

In Cuba, alcohol used to be produced as a byproduct
of the sugar industry after having made three extractions
of sugar from cane juice. Climate change is already
affecting our sugar production. Lengthy periods of drought
alternating with record rainfall, that barely make it
possible to produce sugar with an adequate yield during
the 100 days of our very moderate winter; hence, there
Is less sugar per ton of cane or less cane per hectare
due to prolonged drought in the months of planting and
cultivation.

I understand that in Venezuela they would be using
alcohol not for export but to improve the environmental
quality of their own fuel. For that reason, apart from
the excellent Brazilian technology for producing alcohol,
in Cuba the use of such a technology for the direct
production of alcohol from sugar cane juice is no more
than a dream or the whim of those carried away by that
idea. In our country, land handed over to the direct
production of alcohol could be much useful for food
production for the people and for environmental
protection.

All the countries of the world, rich and poor, without
any exception, could save millions and millions of
dollars in investment and fuel simply by changing
all the incandescent light bulbs for fluorescent
ones, an exercise that Cuba has carried out in all
homes throughout the country. That would provide
a breathing space to resist climate change without
killing the poor masses through hunger.

As can be observed, I am not using adjectives to
qualify the system and the lords of the earth.
That task can be excellently undertaken by news
experts and honest social, economic and political
scientists abounding in the world who are constantly
delving into to the present and future of our species.
A computer and the growing number of Internet networks
are sufficient for that.

Today, we are seeing for the first time a really
globalized economy and a dominant power in the
economic, political and military terrain that in no
way resembles that of Imperial Rome.

Some people will be asking themselves why I am talking
of hunger and thirst. My response to that: it is not
about the other side of the coin, but about several
sides of something else, like a die with six sides,
or a polyhedron with many more sides.

I refer in this case to an official news agency,
founded in 1945 and generally well-informed about
economic and social questions in the world: TELAM.
It said, and I quote:

" In just 18 years, close to 2 billion people will
be living in countries and regions where water will
be a distant memory. Two-thirds of the world’s
population could be living in places where that
scarcity produces social and economic tensions
of such a magnitude that it could lead nations
to wars for the precious 'blue gold.'

"Over the last 100 years, the use of water has
increased at a rate twice as fast as that of
population growth.

"According to statistics from the World Water
Council, it is estimated that by 2015, the number
of inhabitants affected by this grave situation
will rise by 3.5 billion people.

" The United Nations celebrated World Water Day
on March 23, and called to begin confronting, that
very day, the international scarcity of water,
under the coordination of the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), with the goal of highlighting
the increasing importance of water scarcity on
a global scale, and the need for greater integration
and cooperation that would make it possible to
guarantee sustained and efficient management
of water resources.

"Many regions on the planet are suffering from
severe water shortages, living with less than
500 cubic meters per person per year. The number
of regions suffering from chronic scarcity of
this vital element is increasingly growing.

"The principal consequences of water scarcity
are an insufficient amount of the precious liquid
for producing food, the impossibility of industrial,
urban and tourism development and health problems."

That was the TELEAM cable.

In this case I will refrain from mentioning other
important facts, like the melting ice in Greenland
and the Antarctic, damage to the ozone layer and
the growing volume of mercury in many species of
fish for common consumption.

There are other issues that could be addressed,
but with these lines I am just trying to comment
on President Bush's meeting with the principal
executives of U.S. automakers.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

The New Suburban Poverty
by EYAL PRESS
[from the April 23, 2007 issue]
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070423&s=press

Canadian Auto Workers occupy parts
plant in Scarborough, Ontario
By Julian Benson from Toronto
Thursday, 12 April 2007
http://www.marxist.com/canadian-auto-workers-occupation110407.htm

U.S. Is Extending Tours of Army
By DAVID S. CLOUD
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast/12military.html

Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies
By DINITIA SMITH
April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books/12vonnegut.html?hp

Robert Fisk: Divide and rule - America's plan for Baghdad
"Revealed: a new counter-insurgency strategy to carve up
the city into sealed areas. The tactic failed in Vietnam.
So what chance does it have in Iraq?"
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2439530.ece

Published: 11 April 2007

Refugees Speak of Escape from Hell
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail
"DAMASCUS, Apr 11 (IPS) - Refugees from Iraq scattered
around Damascus describe hellish conditions in the country
they managed to leave behind."
April 11, 2007
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/syria/000565.php#more

Manhattan: Leash-Free Dogs at Night in City Parks
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
The Parks and Recreation Department announced yesterday
that a policy of allowing dogs off leashes during overnight
hours will become effective next month. Beginning May 10,
owners with a license and proof of a current rabies
vaccination will be permitted to let their dogs roam
in designated areas of city parks from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m.
Under an unofficial policy, the department has for years
not given tickets to dog owners who let their pets run
free at night in parks.
April 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/nyregion/11mbrfs-dogs.html

How Trees Might Not Be Green in Carbon Offsetting Debate
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/10/443/

There is climate change censorship - and it's the
deniers who dish it out
"Global warming scientists are under intense pressure
to water down findings, and are then accused
of silencing their critics."
George Monbiot
Tuesday April 10, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2053521,00.html

American Tortured in Iraq Sues Rumsfeld
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040907J.shtml

And These Refugees Are Lucky
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/syria/000561.php#more

Bush Renews Effort on Immigration Plan
By DAVID STOUT
April 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/washington/09cnd-prexy.html?hp

Ranchers and Army Are at Odds in Old West
By DAN FROSCH
"DENVER, April 6 — Mack Louden worries that his 30,000-acre
ranch sits in the cross hairs of the Army’s plans to expand
its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site at Fort Carson, and he, along
with other Colorado ranchers, are increasingly upset
about the idea.
'Where we live, how we live, it’s all going to die a slow death
if the Army gets our land,' said Mr. Louden, a fourth-
generation rancher from Las Animas County, along the
southern edge of the state."
April 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/us/09hearing.html?ref=washington

Big Coal Invokes Reverse Nuremberg Defense
Massey Energy's CEO: Just Giving Orders, Not Carrying Them Out
By CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
April 9, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/ccr04092007.html

The political situation in Venezuela – interview
with Yonie Moreno, member of the CMR in Venezuela
By Yonnie Moreno
Monday, 09 April 2007
www.handsoffvenezuela.org/political_situation_venezuela_moreno.htm

FOCUS | US Warplanes Attack Shiites as Civil War Rages in Iraq
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040807Z.shtml

FOCUS | Thousands in LA Demand Immigrant Rights
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040807Y.shtml

Pesticides Linked to Honeybee Population Decline
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_4279.cfm

Executive Pay: A Special Report
More Pieces. Still a Puzzle.
By ERIC DASH
April 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/business/yourmoney/08pay.html?ref=business

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

DEMAND THE RELEASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN

The National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) demands the immediate
release of political prisoner, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Although
Dr. Al-Arian is no longer on a hunger strike we must still demand
he be released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). After an earlier
plea agreement that absolved Dr. Al-Arian from any further questioning,
he was sentenced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify before
a grand jury in Virginia. He has long sense served his time yet
Dr. Al-Arian is still being held. Release him now!

See:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/16/1410255

ACTION:

We ask all people of conscience to demand the immediate
release and end to Dr. Al- Arian's suffering.

Call, Email and Write:

1- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Fax Number: (202) 307-6777
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov

2- The Honorable John Conyers, Jr
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax
John.Conyers@mail.house.gov

3- Senator Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
(202)224-4242
senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov

4- Honorable Judge Gerald Lee
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA 22314
March 22, 2007
[No email given...bw]

National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
http://www.arab-american.net/

Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of
Terror
By Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6767.shtml

Related:

Robert Fisk: The true story of free speech in America
This systematic censorship of Middle East reality
continues even in schools
Published: 07 April 2007
http://news. independent. co.uk/world/ fisk/article2430 125.ece

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]

Excerpt of interview between Barbara Walters and Hugo Chavez
http://www.borev.net/2007/03/what_you_had_something_better.html

Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY

My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic

Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE

Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o

Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

THIS IS AN EXCELLENT VIDEO DESTRIBUTED BY U.S. LABOR AGAINST
THE WAR (USLAW) FEATURING SPEAKERS AT THE JANUARY 27TH
MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOCUSING ON THE DEMAND - BRING
THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6935451906479097836&hl=en

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Defend the Los Angeles Eight!
http://www.committee4justice.com/

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

George Takai responds to Tim Hardaway's homophobic remarks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJoJZIcQW4&eurl_

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Iran
http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Another view of the war. A link from Amer Jubran
http://d3130.servadmin.com/~leeflash/

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Petition: Halt the Blue Angels
http://action.globalexchange.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=458
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/289327

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

A Girl Like Me
7:08 min
Youth Documentary
Kiri Davis, Director, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer
Winner of the Diversity Award
Sponsored by Third Millennium Foundation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1091431409617440489

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Film/Song about Angola
http://www.prisonactivist.org/angola/

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

"Cheyenne and Arapaho oral histories hammer history's account of the
Sand Creek Massacre"

CENTENNIAL, CO -- A new documentary film based on an award-winning
documentary short film, "The Sand Creek Massacre", and driven by
Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people who tell their version about
what happened during the Sand Creek Massacre via their oral
histories, has been released by Olympus Films+, LLC, a Centennial,
Colorado film company.

"You have done an extraordinary job" said Margie Small, Tobient
Entertainment, " on the Colorado PBS episode, the library videos for
public schools and libraries, the trailer, etc...and getting the
story told and giving honor to those ancestors who had to witness
this tragic and brutal attack...film is one of the best ways."

"The images shown in the film were selected for native awareness
value" said Donald L. Vasicek, award-winning writer/filmmaker, "we
also focused on preserving American history on film because tribal
elders are dying and taking their oral histories with them. The film
shows a non-violent solution to problem-solving and 19th century
Colorado history, so it's multi-dimensional in that sense. "

Chief Eugene Blackbear, Sr., Cheyenne, who starred as Chief Black
Kettle in "The Last of the Dogmen" also starring Tom Berenger and
Barbara Hershey and "Dr. Colorado", Tom Noel, University of Colorado
history professor, are featured.

The trailer can be viewed and the film can be ordered for $24.95 plus
$4.95 for shipping and handling at http://www.fullduck.com/node/53.

Vasicek's web site, http://www.donvasicek.com, provides detailed
information about the Sand Creek Massacre including various still
images particularly on the Sand Creek Massacre home page and on the
proposal page.

Olympus Films+, LLC is dedicated to writing and producing quality
products that serve to educate others about the human condition.

Contact:

Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
7078 South Fairfax Street
Centennial, CO 80122
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

A NEW LOOK AT U.S. RADIOACTIVE WEAPONS
Join us in a campaign to expose and stop the use
of these illegal weapons
http://poisondust.org/

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

You may enjoy watching these.
In struggle
Che:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqcezl9dD2c
Leon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkFVV5X0p4

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

[The Scab
"After God h