Saturday

Jeremy Hinzman: Military hero

Jeremy Hinzman: Military hero



Lou Plummer,
Fayetteville, North Carolina

In January, Jeremy Hinzman, a paratrooper from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division loaded his wife, son and a few possessions into their small car and drove from Fort Bragg to Toronto, Canada. In a journey reminiscent of one taken by another generation of soldiers, Hinzman committed a felony punishable by death, in order to avoid serving in a controversial war.

I’ve known Hinzman since he arrived from advanced infantry training, which he completed in the same place I had years ago: Fort Benning, in Georgia. We met in an unlikely place, Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I was there to attend a meeting of an anti-death penalty group and he was there to talk to the director, a man who counsels soldiers on discharge issues.

When I left the military after completing my enlistment, I went to work in a southern penitentiary. It took years for me to realise that the racism endemic to the prison was something I could not tolerate. I was able to quit and walk away from that job.

It didn’t take Jeremy Hinzman quite so long to realise that he was participating in something that was wrong. At Fort Benning, instructors led a chant during bayonet training “What makes the grass grow?” His fellow trainees exclaimed, “Blood, blood, blood” and Jeremy started to question his enlistment decision.

There aren’t many places in US society where it’s OK to scream one’s bloodlust. Some people willingly train to kill for their country. Others realise they can’t. That’s why the US military has a conscientious objector discharge program. The all-volunteer military stops being all volunteer the day that a person enlists. Even the Pentagon realises that people can change.

After spending a few months training with his unit at Fort Bragg, Hinzman filed a conscientious objector application. He hadn’t been a slacker while contemplating this decision. He’d been awarded the highly coveted expert infantry badge, worn only by those who master dozens of tasks involving deadly military skills. He’s aced parts of the army physical fitness test and was admired by his superiors for his work ethic.

After receiving his application, the army removed him from training and assigned him duty as a guard at the gates of Fort Bragg, checking IDs to keep terrorists from invading the home of the Airborne Infantry. Yet when his unit received orders to deploy to Afghanistan, Hinzman was ordered to go with them. His superiors claimed they had no record of his conscientious objector application.

Hinzman deployed and while on a clerical detail, discovered his application in, of all places, his personnel record. A hearing was convened and after Hinzman explained that, in the event of an attack he would defend his friends in the unit in which he’s served for two years, his application was denied. The Army wouldn’t discharge him.

When he returned from that deployment, I saw him often. We marched against the war in a demonstration at the state capitol. We attended meetings of a local grassroots peace group. Hinzman never used his unique position to generate attention. He participated as a believer in peace, not as a novelty act from the 82nd Airborne.

We talked about computers and cycling as well the war and the occupation. I watched his son grow. When his unit received orders for Iraq, only five months after returning from Afghanistan, I was saddened beyond words. While defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld held press conferences proclaiming that the soldiers he professes to support would receive real breaks between deployments, the people in military communities like the one I live in saw the real truth as we watched our friends prepare to depart to yet another combat zone.

By necessity, Hinzman planned his move to Canada secretly. Rather than laying low and avoiding the spotlight once he arrived, however, he decided to speak out for the first time, willingly drawing attention to his decision. To those who know him, he isn’t a novelty act or a weakling who couldn’t hack the rigours of the infantry. I know men who’ve served in Iraq and I admire them. I admire Jeremy Hinzman as well. He’s not a typical military hero, but he’s a hero nonetheless.

[Lou Plummer lives in Fayetteville, which is home to Fort Bragg, one of the biggest army bases in the US. An army veteran himself, he has a son currently on duty in Iraq and is active in Military Families Speak Out.]

From Green Left Weekly, June 23, 2004.

US war resister gets on bike to fight for freedom

US war resister gets on bike to fight for freedom

we support you, JeremyTORONTO: Hours after losing a bid to stay in Canada as a refugee, US Iraq war deserter Jeremy Hinzman vowed his battle to stay out of an American military jail would go on.

Hinzman, a trim 26, rode up to an anti-war protest in Toronto on a bicycle, and pledged to appeal in federal court, after his plea was turned down by the immigration authorities.

“Canada has a history of being a haven for people of conscience and hopefully when this is all said and done, I hope that legacy can continue,” said Hinzman.

“I know a lot of people have problems with desertion, believe me, I have problems with desertion,” said the man who walked out on the 82 Airborne Division last year to avoid a combat tour of Iraq. “However, when you are faced with commiting evil acts, you have no other choice but to act and that is what I did by coming here.”

Hinzman, in Canada with his Laotian born wife and young child, said he would huddle with his lawyer on Monday to start an appeal process in federal court.


for details about the case and the court's answer
see http://duckdaotsu.blogspot.com/2005/03/hinzman-canada.html

Web posted at: 3/26/2005 9:7:46

Source ::: AFP
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=
World_News&subsection=Americas&month=March2005&file=World_News200503269746.xml



DOWNLOAD A COPY OF THE PATCH FOR YOUR WEBSITE AT
--

I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more
if only they knew they were slaves. - Harriet Tubman

We Stand With You, Jeremy

Refusers Seeking Freedom
March 24, 2005

Jeremy Hinzman

More than a year ago Jeremy Hinzman left the Army base in Ft. Bragg, North Carolina and drove north with this family to Canada. Hinzman, who had applied for a conscientious objection discharge from the Army, was denied. After this denial, Hinzman decided that leaving for Canada was his only option to escape being re-deployed to Iraq. Hinzman applied with the Canadian government to gain refugee status. In December of 2004 he appeared before the Canadian Immigration Refugee Board (IRB) to plead his case. Hinzman argued that if he were returned to the U.S., the U.S. government would persecute him for his refusal to fight in an “illegal war” in Iraq.

After three months a decision was announced today by Canadian Immigration. Jeremy Hinzman and his family were found “not to be Convention refugees or persons in need of protection and rejected their claims of refugee protection.”[i] The refugee committee decided that the U.S. government or the Military would not persecute Hinzman if he were to return to face a military tribunal. In particular the committee felt the democratic nature of the U.S. government created a heavy burden of proof.

Hinzman will now appeal his claim in the Canadian federal court. When he was asked prior to the decision what will happen if it is denied, Hinzman replied, “I will appeal as many times as possible and, when those are exhausted, apply to be able to stay on compassionate and humanitarian grounds.”

Others

There are now over 50 other U.S. refusers seeking asylum from the U.S. Military in Canada. Brandon Hughey will be next refuser to appear before the Canadian Immigration board to claim a refugee status. Like Jeremy Hinzman, Hughey also claims the war in Iraq to be an illegal operation. Although there is a strong network of support in Canada for those resisting the war, it is expected that Hughey and many others who are in line will face the same fate as Hinzman before the refugee board.

Already the number of those contemplating fleeing to Canada is on the rise and with an increased threat of the military draft Canada will be facing a much larger problem than it is now. These cases of desertion from the U.S. military on the grounds of conscientious objection (CO) are a reflection of a larger problem. Many COs currently face hardships by the military here in the U.S. We must continue in our work to protect and extend the rights of COs. Sign-up now to participate in CCW’s National Lobby-day on May 16th for the rights of conscientious objectors.

For more information on the lobby day visit:

www.nisbco.org/LobbyDay05/lobbyday.html

[i] Hinzman Decision,
“http://www.irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/decisions/public/hinzman/hinz_e.htm”


Yours for Peace and Justice,

Center on Conscience & War
1830 Connecticut Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20009
Ph: 202-483-2220
Fax: 202-483-1246
www.nisbco.org


Join us on May 15 for our Annual Advisory Meeting and
on May 16 for our Anti-Draft/Pro-conscientious Objector Lobby Day




EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CLAIMS FOR REFUGEE PROTECTION OF
JEREMY HINZMAN, NGA THI NGUYEN, LIAM LIEM NGUYEN HINZMAN

Jeremy Hinzman, his wife, and their son, seek refugee protection in Canada. Mr. Hinzman enlisted in the US military and during his course of training and service gradually came to the conclusion that he could not participate in offensive operations. He sought conscientious objector non-combatant status from the US military while he was deployed in Afghanistan. His application was refused on the basis that he was willing to conduct defensive operations as a combatant, although not willing to conduct offensive operations as a combatant. Mr. Hinzman then resumed his regular military duties and training. When he received notice of his unit’s deployment to Iraq, he left the military without leave and came to Canada with his Family.

Mr. Hinzman claims that he is a conscientious objector. He fears that as a result of his desertion from the US military, he will be prosecuted and any punishment he faces as a result would be persecution for following his conscience. He also asserted that his likely sentence as a result of a court martial would amount to cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

Counsel to the Solicitor General of Canada (“S-G”) argued that Mr. Hinzman had a heavy legal burden to overcome in establishing his claim since the US is a democratic state. In addition, the S-G submitted that Mr. Hinzman does not meet the criteria of a conscientious objector. The S-G also asserted that Mr. Hinzman failed to demonstrate that the punishment he would likely receive for desertion from the US military would be excessive and amount to cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

The Refugee Protection Division (“RPD”) found Mr. Hinzman, his wife and son not to be Convention refugees or persons in need of protection and rejected their claims for refugee protection.

The RPD found that the claimants would be afforded the full protection of a fair and independent military and civilian judicial process in the U.S. As a result they had not rebutted the presumption of state protection and their claims for refugee protection must fail. The RPD also dealt with other matters in the public interest as they had been raised, including that Mr. Hinzman was not a conscientious objector and that the punishment Mr. Hinzman would likely receive as a result of his desertion was not excessive or disproportionately severe.

With respect to the claims of Mr. Hinzman’s wife and son, the RPD found that there was no evidence to support their claim that they would face a serious possibility of persecution in the US as a result of being part of Mr. Hinzman’s family, nor was there any evidence to support their claim that they would face serious harm as a result of any punishment Mr. Hinzman may receive as a result of his desertion from the US military.

--
I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more
if only they knew they were slaves. - Harriet Tubman

Hinzman-Canada

Refusers Seeking Freedom
March 24, 2005

Jeremy Hinzman

More than a year ago Jeremy Hinzman left the Army base in Ft. Bragg, North Carolina and drove north with this family to Canada. Hinzman, who had applied for a conscientious objection discharge from the Army, was denied. After this denial, Hinzman decided that leaving for Canada was his only option to escape being re-deployed to Iraq. Hinzman applied with the Canadian government to gain refugee status. In December of 2004 he appeared before the Canadian Immigration Refugee Board (IRB) to plead his case. Hinzman argued that if he were returned to the U.S., the U.S. government would persecute him for his refusal to fight in an “illegal war” in Iraq.

After three months a decision was announced today by Canadian Immigration. Jeremy Hinzman and his family were found “not to be Convention refugees or persons in need of protection and rejected their claims of refugee protection.”[i] The refugee committee decided that the U.S. government or the Military would not persecute Hinzman if he were to return to face a military tribunal. In particular the committee felt the democratic nature of the U.S. government created a heavy burden of proof.

Hinzman will now appeal his claim in the Canadian federal court. When he was asked prior to the decision what will happen if it is denied, Hinzman replied, “I will appeal as many times as possible and, when those are exhausted, apply to be able to stay on compassionate and humanitarian grounds.”

Others

There are now over 50 other U.S. refusers seeking asylum from the U.S. Military in Canada. Brandon Hughey will be next refuser to appear before the Canadian Immigration board to claim a refugee status. Like Jeremy Hinzman, Hughey also claims the war in Iraq to be an illegal operation. Although there is a strong network of support in Canada for those resisting the war, it is expected that Hughey and many others who are in line will face the same fate as Hinzman before the refugee board.

Already the number of those contemplating fleeing to Canada is on the rise and with an increased threat of the military draft Canada will be facing a much larger problem than it is now. These cases of desertion from the U.S. military on the grounds of conscientious objection (CO) are a reflection of a larger problem. Many COs currently face hardships by the military here in the U.S. We must continue in our work to protect and extend the rights of COs. Sign-up now to participate in CCW’s National Lobby-day on May 16th for the rights of conscientious objectors.

For more information on the lobby day visit:

www.nisbco.org/LobbyDay05/lobbyday.html

[i] Hinzman Decision,
“http://www.irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/decisions/public/hinzman/hinz_e.htm”


Yours for Peace and Justice,

Center on Conscience & War
1830 Connecticut Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20009
Ph: 202-483-2220
Fax: 202-483-1246
www.nisbco.org


Join us on May 15 for our Annual Advisory Meeting and
on May 16 for our Anti-Draft/Pro-conscientious Objector Lobby Day




EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CLAIMS FOR REFUGEE PROTECTION OF
JEREMY HINZMAN, NGA THI NGUYEN, LIAM LIEM NGUYEN HINZMAN

Jeremy Hinzman, his wife, and their son, seek refugee protection in Canada. Mr. Hinzman enlisted in the US military and during his course of training and service gradually came to the conclusion that he could not participate in offensive operations. He sought conscientious objector non-combatant status from the US military while he was deployed in Afghanistan. His application was refused on the basis that he was willing to conduct defensive operations as a combatant, although not willing to conduct offensive operations as a combatant. Mr. Hinzman then resumed his regular military duties and training. When he received notice of his unit’s deployment to Iraq, he left the military without leave and came to Canada with his Family.

Mr. Hinzman claims that he is a conscientious objector. He fears that as a result of his desertion from the US military, he will be prosecuted and any punishment he faces as a result would be persecution for following his conscience. He also asserted that his likely sentence as a result of a court martial would amount to cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

Counsel to the Solicitor General of Canada (“S-G”) argued that Mr. Hinzman had a heavy legal burden to overcome in establishing his claim since the US is a democratic state. In addition, the S-G submitted that Mr. Hinzman does not meet the criteria of a conscientious objector. The S-G also asserted that Mr. Hinzman failed to demonstrate that the punishment he would likely receive for desertion from the US military would be excessive and amount to cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

The Refugee Protection Division (“RPD”) found Mr. Hinzman, his wife and son not to be Convention refugees or persons in need of protection and rejected their claims for refugee protection.

The RPD found that the claimants would be afforded the full protection of a fair and independent military and civilian judicial process in the U.S. As a result they had not rebutted the presumption of state protection and their claims for refugee protection must fail. The RPD also dealt with other matters in the public interest as they had been raised, including that Mr. Hinzman was not a conscientious objector and that the punishment Mr. Hinzman would likely receive as a result of his desertion was not excessive or disproportionately severe.

With respect to the claims of Mr. Hinzman’s wife and son, the RPD found that there was no evidence to support their claim that they would face a serious possibility of persecution in the US as a result of being part of Mr. Hinzman’s family, nor was there any evidence to support their claim that they would face serious harm as a result of any punishment Mr. Hinzman may receive as a result of his desertion from the US military.

--
I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more
if only they knew they were slaves. - Harriet Tubman

dao retrospective


Chinese for "retrospective"

coils of color, facing each other we finally see it! peacocks! wonderful peacocks!!


You could labor ten years under a master
Trying to discern whether the teachings are true.
But all you might learn is this:
One must live one’s own life.



When one starts out learning a spiritual system, there are many absolute assertions that the masters make. These must be accepted with a provisional faith: Each must be tested and proved to yourself before you can believe in them. You will be exposed to all types of esoteric knowledge, but you need only be concerned with whether or not you can make them work for yourself.

There will come an intermediate, joyous point where you find that certain techniques work even better than the scriptures claim. In the wake of these discoveries, you will also find that life continues to be just as thorny and problematic as ever. Does this mean that the study of Tao is useless? No. It only means that you have been laboring to equip yourself with skill. You must still go out and live your life to the end.

When you look back and realize that you have absorbed the teachings so thoroughly that they have become routine, it is not the time to reject the system you have learned. It is the time to utilize what you have learned. You must express yourself, take action in the world, create new circumstances for yourself and others.Only then does the long acquisition of skill become worthwhile.



retrospective
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

Proud of their traditional culture, these artists illustrate Maithil rituals or to make paintings of gods Ram and Sita who, according to legend, married in Janakpur. And in the "office" where they sang songs or told tales of the Hindu gods, they naturally painted scenes from the Ramayana or from Maithil songs and folktales. Many women have enjoyed painting the Maithil tale of Anjur, a tale in which a new bride is made to do impossible tasks by her jealous sisters-in-law, and each time is helped by sympathetic birds or snakes. They often mix images of other tales with Anjur's tale, and similarly Gods will appear in scenes of family planning. This mixing of themes is a reflection of the real world of the Janakpur artists today.

this painting is called
Bamboo Khobar

photo of artist Phuliya Karnathe artist: Phuliya Karna

How old am I? Just a minute, I have to ask my friend. She says in two years I'll be sixty. I was married at 2 1/2. My father sold me for 50 rupees.

Like other men of our caste, my father was a scribe. He would record loans for illiterate people. He told a man who worked with him that he had a daughter who was fifteen and ready to be married. This man paid him 50 rupees and after that my father went home and told my mother he'd sold me.

Because I was so young, he thought he might delay the marriage.But people were laughing at the man who had bought a baby, saying he really got cheated. So the man decided that the marriage must take place to prove he wasn't a fool.

The man was fifty years old. At that time, I wasn't even used to wearing clothes. During the marriage when I was told to cover my face with a sari, I didn't understand and I cried. The same year I was married my mother died of sadness. She was thinking of my marriage when she died.

I moved to my husband's house when I was ten. When I was fifteen or sixteen I had a boy, but he only lived three days. I was 18 when my daughter was born and after another one and a half years my husband died. So at 18 1 became a widow with a baby. I worked in other people's houses to support us — putting mud on house walls or pounding rice.

Around the same age I began to paint walls in the tradition of our caste. I looked around at the walls in our neighborhood during marriages and learned a lot about painting. Neighbors often asked me to paint and they'd give me an old sari or a little food as payment.

In my lifetime I've painted the wedding chambers (kobars) of 20-30 brides in my village. The designs I make at the center are often those I make in the kobar.

Sun and moon painting: We paint the gods of the sun and moon high on the walls of the wedding chamber. These gods preside over all of our lives and must bless the newly wedded couple. We worship these gods in other rituals and draw their images on both sides of our doors during Deepawali, the festival during which we worship the goddess of wealth.

text and images © JWDC



T A O t e C H I N G

hand drawn calligraphy of the word dao
f i f t y - f i v e
Chinese characters for "daodejing verse fifty-five"


Those who know do not talk.
Those who talk do not know.

Keep your mouth closed.
Guard your senses.
Temper your sharpness.
Simplify your problems.
Mask your brightness.
Be at one with the dust of the Earth.
This is primal union.

He who has achieved this state
Is unconcerned with friends and enemies,
With good and harm, with honor and disgrace.
This therefore is the highest state of man.

— translation by GIA-FU FENG

Those who know don't talk.
Those who talk don't know.

Close your mouth,
block off your senses,
blunt your sharpness,
untie your knots,
soften your glare,
settle your dust.
This is the primal identity.

Be like the Tao.
It can't be approached or withdrawn from,
benefited or harmed,
honored or brought into disgrace.
It gives itself up continually.
That is why it endures.

— translation by STEVEN MITCHELL
a reading list of books and interpretations of the Daodejing is available at http://wwww.duckdaotsu.org/dao_books.html
for a meditation sent to your email address each day, please write ’subscribe tao’ in the subject line and send to lisbeth at duckdaotsu


Friday

Death penalty for I.V. drug users

The Bush administration is considering imposing a gag rule on U.S.-funded groups that provide clean needles to addicts, despite their huge success in preventing the spread of HIV.

Sexual behavior is one of the most difficult human behaviors to alter, and the tragedy of the ongoing global HIV pandemic reflects the enormous complexity of that effort. But one cause of HIV transmission is far easier to remedy than unprotected sex: intravenous drug use with contaminated needles. Unfortunately, the United States is now trying to block the most effective method for fighting needle-transmitted AIDS -- distributing clean needles to addicts -- by pressuring the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to suppress data showing the success of needle-exchange programs and by considering an international "gag" rule on AIDS groups that work with needle users and receive American funding.

This would be tragic even if clean-needle programs saved only the lives of drug users, but they can have a far greater impact on the epidemic if instituted quickly enough. Contrary to popular stereotype, it's far easier to get an addict to use a clean needle than it is to get a man to use a condom, so containing HIV among addicts also massively reduces risk of later sexual and mother-to-child transmission. I should know, because as a woman and a former I.V. drug user, I first wrote about this issue 15 years ago for the Village Voice, in an effort to debunk myths that were being used way back then to block needle exchange. My argument at the time was based on some suggestive data, my own experience and common sense, but now there is overwhelming scientific evidence to favor these programs. It breaks my heart that more than ever before, politics is overshadowing science at the cost of so many lives.

While some countries with large HIV epidemics among heterosexuals (most notably Uganda) have reduced its prevalence to 5-10 percent, the numbers infected are stabilizing, not declining. In such heterosexual epidemics, for each person who dies, someone else is newly infected to take his or her place. And in many nations, heterosexual infection rates are still climbing. In the United States there is some evidence of an unfortunate resurgence in HIV infections among gay men. Both heterosexually and homosexually transmitted infections continue to plague minority communities, with HIV rates among African-Americans doubling between 1988-1994 and 1999-2002.

In those cases, the opportunity to fight HIV with clean needles either was lost or never existed. In 1989, Congress, led by Sen. Jesse Helms, banned federal funding for needle exchange in this country, which essentially allowed HIV to get a foothold in our minority communities. But in many other parts of the world, particularly in the former Soviet Union and Asia, HIV is still mainly transmitted by drug use. For example, 75 percent of new infections in Russia and more than half of those in China result directly from I.V. drug use. In these epidemics, in which heterosexual and pediatric cases overwhelmingly begin with transmission from addicts, even a moderately effective intervention with addicts done early can have major effects.

Providing sterile syringes to addicts to fight HIV is not just moderately effective, however. In fact, it may be the best-supported intervention in all of public health. In 2004, the World Health Organization conducted a review of more than 200 studies on the issue, and concluded that "there is compelling evidence that increasing the availability and utilization of sterile injecting equipment by [I.V. drug users] reduces HIV infection substantially ... There is no convincing evidence of any major, unintended negative consequences."

Alex Wodak, director of the Drug and Alcohol Service at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia, and the author of the WHO review, says, "I find it incredible that a major country was prepared to go to war on flimsy evidence that we now know was wrong but is not prepared to save the lives of its own citizens when the evidence is as strong as it gets in public health."

In New York state, for example, which spends $1 million annually on syringe exchange and has also decriminalized pharmacy sales of needles, infection rates among I.V. drug users dropped from 50 percent or higher in the early '90s to 10-20 percent in 2002. At the peak of the HIV epidemic in New York, at least two-thirds of heterosexual and pediatric infections resulted from sex with I.V. drug users.

In 2003, by contrast, there were just five HIV-infected babies born in New York, compared with 321 at the epidemic's peak. While some of this success is due to medications used to prevent transmission from mother to child, infection rates among mothers are also down, having decreased by almost half between 1990 and 1999. In fact, the much publicized "down low" transmission from African-American bisexual men to women has become a larger factor in the epidemic in New York only because drug-related infections (outside prisons) have declined.

Incredibly, conservatives in Congress, led by Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., are considering a needle-exchange version of the abortion gag rule, which prevents U.S.-funded international aid organizations from mentioning abortion to pregnant women. This new move could stop American-funded groups from even telling intravenous drug users that they should use clean needles, let alone where to get them -- at a stage in the epidemic when clean needles would be maximally effective in preventing indirect, as well as direct, transmission in many countries.

The United States is already alone among developed countries in refusing to fund syringe-swap programs here or abroad. And rather than recognize the success of states like New York that fund their own programs, the president wants to export its failed and disastrous policy overseas. In yet another example of its attempts to suppress science that does not support its ideology, the Bush administration recently threatened the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime with loss of funding if it did not remove from its literature and Web site supportive information about needle exchange and other "harm reduction" programs for addicts that do not demand complete, immediate abstinence from drugs. The United States is the major financial supporter of UNODC.

After a meeting with a U.S. State Department official last November, UNODC director Antonio Maria Costa promised to "review" its statements on the subject, saying the organization would now "neither endorse needle exchange as a solution for drug abuse nor support public statements advocating such practices."

Only months earlier, Costa had made the opposite pronouncement: "The HIV/AIDS epidemic among injecting drug users can be stopped -- and even reversed -- if drug users are provided, at an early stage and on a large scale, with comprehensive services such as outreach, provision of clean injecting equipment and a variety of treatment modalities, including substitution treatment [like methadone]."

He added that fewer than 5 percent of the world's I.V. drug users have access to such help, and he went on to criticize countries that incarcerate large numbers of addicts because this increases HIV rates. That last bit likely was a sensitive point, since America has the largest documented prison population in the world.

It's enough to make a former I.V. drug user like me think about shooting up again.

At a meeting of the 48th Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna, Austria, in early March, Costa did make at least a modest attempt to stand up to American pressure, saying that needle exchanges are "appropriate as long as they are part of a comprehensive strategy to battle the overall drug problem."

Nonetheless, American drug czar John Walters reiterated U.S. opposition to needle exchange in his speech to the group. Japan was our only public ally -- with all of Europe, Latin America (led by Brazil), and even Iran favoring needle exchange. While China did not explicitly speak up for needle exchange, with 70 percent of its HIV infections linked to I.V. drug use, it is experimenting with such programs and argued passionately for other harm-reduction measures like methadone maintenance.

Though support of needle exchange by human rights groups, who raised the issue before the meeting started, may have blunted the impact of the U.S. attack, the American grandstanding did manage to kill a resolution that would have stated UNODC's support for needle access and human rights for addicts.

Public health experts worry that the Bush administration's stance will undermine still shaky political support in countries that need to expand needle-exchange programs if they are to successfully ward off HIV. A gag rule on needle exchange would force AIDS groups to drop their programs or lose funds, seriously undermining access to clean needles for millions around the world.

Even if the administration supports a death penalty by AIDS for I.V. drug users, you'd think the innocent lives of their children or unwitting spouses might count for something. Or perhaps, being fiscal conservatives, opponents might worry about the thousandfold greater expense of HIV/AIDS treatment, compared with pennies for sterile needles.

Although the Clinton administration declined to overturn the 1989 Helms amendment banning federal funding for needle-exchange programs, at least it was honest that it was making a political, rather than a scientific or fiscal, decision, as science writer Chris Mooney noted in the American Prospect.

But the Bush administration is trying to deny the science, too, which means the harm of its stance won't be limited to the current debate. One administration official even suggested that the Washington Post contact several AIDS researchers who'd done studies on needle exchange, claiming that their work supported its contentions that such programs are ineffective and dangerous. When the Post called the researchers, however, they denied the administration's charge, stating that their data demonstrated the opposite.

It's worth looking more closely at one of these studies, which is in the small minority of the hundreds now published to even suggest any kind of negative result. In 1997 in the journal AIDS, Stephanie Strathdee and her colleagues reported that despite having North America's largest needle-exchange program, instituted in the late '80s, Vancouver's rate of HIV infections had increased dramatically during the early to mid-'90s. Worse, needle exchange users were more likely than other addicts to be HIV positive.

But as Strathdee and others have noted repeatedly, this does not mean that needle exchange caused participants to become infected. In fact, during the period of the study, Vancouver began to be flooded with cocaine. Injectors, who had previously used primarily heroin, started shooting coke as well. Since cocaine is injected far more frequently than heroin because of its shorter-lasting high, the number of daily injections is often greater by a factor of 10 or more, increasing the odds of being exposed to HIV.

Syringe exchanges tend to attract only the poorest, highest-risk users in Canada because needles can be legally purchased at pharmacies there, which might have confounded the data, but the program also had a variety of limitations that contributed to its initial failure. As Vancouver improved its program, however, and even opened safe-injection rooms, infection levels among I.V. drug users stabilized and then began to drop, according to Canadian government statistics. New HIV infections among I.V. drug users fell by more than 70 percent between 1995 and 2000, though part of this drop may represent saturation of the I.V. user population. (A study on the injection rooms published this week in the Lancet found that addicts who used the facility were 70 percent less likely to share needles than those who didn't visit it.)

A 1997 study that compared cities around the world with and without needle-exchange programs found that those with programs had an average annual decrease in the prevalence of HIV of 5.8 percent, while those without programs had an increase of 5.7 percent. No study has ever found that the existence of needle exchange motivates addicts to keep taking drugs -- in fact, most find that syringe-exchange users are more likely than other addicts to seek treatment. It's no surprise, therefore, that every major public health body that has looked at the issue -- from the World Health Organization to the American Medical Association to the Institute on Medicine to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies -- has strongly endorsed making sterile injection equipment available to addicts.

The policies that the Bush administration endorses as alternatives to needle exchange -- attempts to reduce the supply of illegal drugs, for example -- have not been shown to affect drug-use rates, let alone reduce HIV. Despite U.S. drug-control budgets that have increased almost exponentially since the 1980s, the purity of cocaine and heroin has at least quadrupled, the prices of both drugs have dropped by at least half, and neither addicts nor teenagers report difficulty purchasing most drugs.

It profoundly saddens me that I must still cite studies to defend needle exchange nearly 20 years after activists first began to fight for it. It also disturbs me that needle-exchange programs rarely get the credit they deserve. A Jan. 30 New York Times story on the virtual end of HIV infection in newborns in the United States didn't even mention the role of clean needle programs in this accomplishment.

And the articles about bisexual black men infecting heterosexual female sex partners have largely neglected the critical role that I.V. drug use in minority communities has played in the epidemic. One can make a good case, in fact, that there wouldn't even have been such an epidemic in black and Latino heterosexual populations if the United States had provided clean needles earlier and hadn't insisted on locking up (without access to condoms or needles) so many minority drug users.

The U.K. dodged this bullet: Under the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, it rapidly implemented clean-needle measures in response to the outbreak of AIDS, starting in 1986. HIV prevalence has rarely reached more than 1 percent among intravenous drug users there, compared with over 50 percent at the epidemic's peak in New York. Heterosexual AIDS in the U.K., consequently, is almost entirely limited to immigrants who were infected in Africa. Says Neil Hunt, a director of the U.K. Harm Reduction Alliance and an honorary research fellow at Imperial College London, "It's a largely unheralded, astonishing success."

So why is it so hard for U.S. policymakers to accept that needle provision works? A large part of it is surely prejudice related to drug-war propaganda -- for instance, the belief that addicts are out of control and thus unwilling to protect themselves even when protection is offered. And some of it may even reflect a desire to simply let addicts die. But I also think some people believe that addicts like to share needles, the same way many people prefer to have sex without condoms, and that changing such behavior would take too much effort.

And for those who suggest that needle exchange encourages drug use and keeps addicts using longer, I would argue that it is not the presence or absence of needles that determines one's desire to get high. For many, drug use stems from deep unhappiness and an inability to handle distress, not from an effort to obtain extra pleasure in their lives. Compassion is the appropriate response to such suffering, and for many addicts, the first place they ever experience such grace is at a needle-exchange program. It's the one place that accepts them just as they are.

Contrary to critics' claims, needle-exchange programs offer a message of hope, not a "counsel of despair," as U.S. officials recently claimed. They do not tell addicts that they are forever doomed to addiction and might as well kill themselves. Instead, they say, "We want you to live; we believe you are valuable." And that message is often the spark that starts recovery. It's far from all that is needed, but without it, many are too demoralized to try.

I can't abide the idea that my country is still fighting against HIV prevention. But what's most infuriating is that such action is not only unnecessary but also inhumane. It's throwing a symbolic sop to the religious right (which isn't even especially focused on the issue) at the demonstrable cost of human lives.


March 24, 2005 Maia Szalavitz is the author of the forthcoming book "Tough Love America: How the 'Troubled Teen' Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids" (Riverhead, 2005). She has also written for the New York Times, Elle, Redbook and other publications.

Related stories
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Vancouver hopes to save hundreds of lives by opening street clinics where heroin addicts can shoot up safely. But the White House is accusing Canada of going AWOL from its war on drugs.
By Mark Follman
09/09/03

A plague undetected
Did shady backroom hormone treatments and dirty needles cause a killer outbreak of HIV in the transgender community?
By Nina Siegal
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( '? a blog note

THIS BLOG is driving me nutz. I work throughout the day and continue to publish each page, but recently it has been eting my work, or sending it through three times, or just plain taking over 20 minutes to publish one page. I can't tell you how frustrating it has been, and how much work has been lost. I tried to send it to the email address of the blog (an alternative way of posting) and I just got 17 email back saying that they were unable to post, as the application had "timed out"

Sorry for all of this folks. It's not that I have been sitting here for my own benefit. You are the readers and I work for you. My deepest apologies for the sporadic posting.

best
lisbeth

New FBI fingerprint project nabbed killer-turned-poet

An FBI computer cleanup project launched in January led to the capture of the "poet killer" in Chicago, officials said Thursday.

The FBI realizes criminals' fingerprints are often entered into its national database under aliases. So this year, the FBI started comparing the millions of prints in the database to isolate those listed under fake names.

On Feb. 16, the fingerprints for Norman Porter Jr. -- a murderer who escaped from a Massachusetts prison 20 years ago -- matched the fingerprints of "Jacob Jameson," arrested in 1993 in Chicago for failing to pay a roofer.

Porter was known in Chicago under his alias of Jameson, as a fan of writer Nelson Algren and as a respected anti-war poet who recently was named ChicagoPoetry.com's poet of the month.

On Feb. 23, the FBI contacted Massachusetts police about the fingerprint match.

Investigators tracked Porter to the Far West Side, and he was arrested Tuesday as he walked into his church, Third Unitarian.

In 1993, the FBI's fingerprint identification system would have been unable to link Porter's fingerprints from his 1961 Massachusetts murder case to his arrest in Chicago, FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said.

After he was arrested here in 1993, the Chicago Police checked his ink-and-paper fingerprint card for matches and found none. Then, the card was sent to the Illinois State Police, which did a regional check but discovered no other crimes. Finally, the card was sent to the FBI where it was stored in a Clarksburg, W.Va., facility.

It would have been nearly impossible to compare the 1993 card manually with the millions of others at the facility, Bresson said.

Process took nine minutes

In 1999, the FBI launched its $640 million Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System after it reduced millions of paper fingerprint cards to digital images that were loaded into a database.

Now it takes minutes for a police department to transmit a digital fingerprint image to the FBI's West Virginia facility and get a match with a print in the AFIS database. Indeed, it took only nine minutes Tuesday for that to happen with Porter, Bresson said.

"If we had this technology in 1993, even with an alias, in all likelihood we could have detected this person," he said.

There are 45 million "individuals" in the fingerprint database.

Says he signed autographs

"We are consolidating our records to make sure one fingerprint is associated with one subject," Bresson said. "There could be 10 fingerprint cards with different aliases for the same person. We know that happens. We're cleaning out the database to make sure we have one person per image."

Bresson said he did not know whether other fugitives had been nabbed because of the cleanup project.

Porter, 65, pleaded not guilty Thursday in Norfolk, Mass., Superior Court to a charge of escape from a penal institution. He was ordered held without bail. Porter appeared subdued, said his attorney, Thomas Herman. "The reality is sinking in," he said.

Porter mentioned his Chicago friends. "He is concerned he let them down," said Herman, who plans to get a physical exam for Porter. Friends here said Porter had throat cancer, but he has denied it.

Porter also told his attorney that when police searched his apartment, they found copies of his poetry books and he agreed to autograph them.

March 25, 2005
BY FRANK MAIN DAVE NEWBART Staff Reporters
Copyright © The Sun-Times Company

A threat to Iraqi women

Almost two months have passed since Iraq's elections, and people there are understandably impatient to see a new government take office. But the real problem isn't the delay. Lengthy haggling over cabinet posts and other turf issues was inevitable among fledging politicians with no previous experience of democratic give-and-take. What is far more troubling are the significant sections of the Iraqi population whose rights could be sacrificed when the Shiite religious parties and autonomy-minded Kurdish leaders who were the election's biggest winners cut their final deal. Those who need to worry most at this point are women, Sunni Arabs and secular Iraqis of both sexes.

Saddam Hussein's sadistic, murderous dictatorship was no feminist paradise. But Iraqi women still managed to maintain access to educational, professional and personal opportunities denied to many of their sisters in neighboring Arab and Islamic countries. Now the future of these freedoms is in serious question. The dominant bloc of Shiite religious parties, along with their candidate for prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, want Iraq's new constitution to be directly inspired by conservative Islamic religious teachings derived from the Koran.

The secular Kurdish parties whose agreement is also needed to form a governing majority have the most leverage to resist these religious pressures. But the Kurds are focused mainly on maximizing their own region's independence. They seem far more interested in spending their political capital attaching the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the territory of a future Kurdistan than in protecting the rights of secular Iraqis. Already, the Shiites seem set to control the powerful Interior Ministry, which will run major police agencies. If the Kurds also concede to them ministries like education and women's affairs, they could be consigning Iraqi women to a life of subjugation and millions of secular Iraqis, male and female, to a bleak, Iran-like future.

The other unspoken issue haunting these negotiations is the violently estranged Sunni Arab minority. With very few representative Sunnis now at the table, finding a way to recognize a legitimate Sunni leadership in the government will require some creative ingenuity. Yet until Shiite and Kurdish leaders recognize their own vital interest in making this happen, no progress is likely. With a new, permanent constitution due to be drawn up later this year, time is rapidly running out.

It is now out of the question for Washington to try to micromanage Iraqi political development. That would mock the elections and the claims of Iraqi self-government. But with more than 1,500 American troops already dead in Iraq and the next Iraqi government clearly dependent on the protection of more than 100,000 U.S. troops, Washington is not just entitled, but obliged to make clear America's interest in a free, democratic and unified Iraq. The United States cannot be complicit in allowing haggling politicians to subordinate those goals to their own narrow religious, separatist or divisive agendas.

© NYTimes

dao intellect


Chinese for "intellect"

coils of color, facing each other we finally see it! peacocks! wonderful peacocks!!



Scholars, drunk on words and obscure meanings,

Weave a tangled web of concordances.
Simple practice never occurs to them.
Give up education, and the world will be better.



There are many who seek Tao through the intellect. They revel in thousands of concordances, seek similarities in all the world’s religions, conduct learned discourses for enthralled audiences. But they would reach the truth faster if they tied their thoughts to experience.

The intellect is inherently dualistic. It makes distinctions and relates new connections between concepts and calls that “meaning.” This type of analytical thinking is extremely limited in the face of Tao, which is not fully rational, not fully quantitative, not fully describable. Though most followers of Tao are learned, they also realize that the intellect is but one aspect in what must be a multifaceted approach to Tao.

It is said one must give up education, not because we should be dumb, but because we must seek a level of consciousness beyond the intellect. We must study, but not to the point that emphasis on experience and meditation is lost. If we can combine the intellect and direct experience with our meditative mind, then there will be no barrier to the wordless perception of reality.



intellect
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

The artists now work daily at the Janakpur Women's Development Center. It is a beautiful complex which the members decorated with traditional mud relief designs. The artists share ideas and images with women working in other sections of the Center who produce ceramics, textile, and papier mache. Over the years they have also received training in literacy, management, planning, gender awareness, health and child care. For them, painting is synonymous with a new social life with women friends from different villages and castes, and some of the stories they typically share are recounted in the next pages. My hope is that this exhibit will help to create a greater understanding of the Janakpur artists, as well as a new interest in how their art evolves.

this painting is called "two coiled peacocks"
Chinese for "coiled peacocks" anyone know a Napali or India translator?

the artist: Pulaba Mandalphoto of artist Pulaba Mandal
How old am I? Whatever you think: I was married when I was around sixteen and my eldest son is six. My parents never sent me to school because they were poor. After they had six girls they had two boys who were sent to school till class 3. So I worked for neighbors, putting mud on houses during Deepawali, or cutting grass. When I was thirteen or fourteen neighbors were going from place to place cutting rice, corn and grass. I packed rice, lentils, salt and took enough money for a bus fare to work in other places for one or two weeks.

I learned to make designs on houses from my mother. People would say, look at how her daughters can make designs. I saw my mother and sister do it, then I did it. We used lime and colors bought from the market which we mixed with milk. Now I paint just like I did on the walls of my house when I was first asked to join the center. I make elephants, horses, people, and wedding palanquins.

When I was married I went in a palanquin to my husband's house. I cried and couldn't eat. In my village I'd never had to cover my head but I always had to keep covered in front of my in-laws. Then for two years I wasn't given enough food because my father-in-law said my husband didn't work. So I'd meet my mother in the bazaar and she'd hand me salt, a kilo of rice which lasted two nights, and some kerosene. Then I grew angry with my husband and told him if my mother died we could never survive. So he began to work a little in the fields. Then I started work at the center and now he stays home and watches our three children.

In my designs I often make small triangles and two short double lines which make the image look nicer. My paintings often show rural people, vegetables and animals. Lately I like making up designs of peacocks and other birds—these designs come out of my head.

text and images © JWDC


T A O t e C H I N G

hand drawn calligraphy of the word dao
f i f t y - f o u r
Chinese characters for "daodejing verse fifty-four"


What is firmly established cannot be uprooted.
What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.
It will be honored from generation to generation.

Cultivate Virtue in your self,
And Virtue will be real.
Cultivate it in the family,
And Virtue will abound.
Cultivate it in the village,
And Virtue will grow.
Cultivate it in the nation,
And Virtue will be abundant.
Cultivate it in the universe,
And Virtue will be everywhere.

Therefore look at the body as body;
Look at the family as family;
Look at the village as village;
Look at the nation as nation;
Look at the universe as universe.

How do I know the universe is like this?
By looking!
— translation by GIA-FU FENG

Whoever is planted in the Tao
will not be rooted up.
Whoever embraces the Tao
will not slip away.
Her name will be held in honor
from generation to generation.

Let the Tao be present in your life
and you will become genuine.
Let it be present in your family
and your family will flourish.
Let it be present in your country
and your country will be an example
to all countries in the world.
Let it be present in the universe
and the universe will sing.

How do I know this is true?
By looking inside myself.
— translation by STEVEN MITCHELL

Cultivate harmony within yourself, and harmony becomes real;
Cultivate harmony within your family, and harmony becomes fertile;
Cultivate harmony within your community,
and harmony becomes abundant;
Cultivate harmony within your culture, and harmony becomes enduring;
Cultivate harmony within the world, and harmony becomes ubiquitous.
Live with a person to understand that person;
Live with a family to understand that family;
Live with a community to understand that community;
Live with a culture to understand that culture;
Live with the world to understand the world.
How can I live with the world?
By accepting.
— translation by P. MEREL
a reading list of books and interpretations of the Daodejing is available at http://wwww.duckdaotsu.org/dao_books.html
for a meditation sent to your email address each day, write ’subscribe tao’ in the subject line and send to lisbeth at duckdaotsu

Thursday

Noam Chomsky ... still furious at 76

Noam Chomsky ... still furious at 76

ON my way to meet Noam Chomsky in Boston, I pick up a copy of The American Prospect, whose cover features snarling caricatures of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, and of Chomsky: the man dubbed by Bono “the Elvis of academia”. Cheney is presented as the proverbial bull in an international china shop, Chomsky is portrayed by this “magazine of liberal intelligence” as the epitome of high- minded dove-ish, misguided idealism. Chomsky, of course, is well used to such attacks. For every cloying article by a disciple, there is a rocket from the enemy camp revelling in his perceived failings and undermining his reputation, denigrating his scholarship as a linguist and joyfully repeating statements which, when taken out of context, seem tinged with fanaticism.Norm Chomsky

To his credit, Chomsky puts them all on his website, whether it’s The New Yorker describing him as “the devil’s accountant” and “one of the greatest minds of the 20th century”, or The Nation, which lampooned him as “a very familiar kind of academic hack” whose career has been “the product of a combination of self-promotion, abuse of detractors, and the fudging of his findings”. He stands accused of asserting that every US President since Franklin D Roosevelt should have been impeached as war criminals; of supporting the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia; and of comparing Israel to the Third Reich.

Leaving behind red-brick Harvard, where the winter snow is at last beginning to melt, one enters a vast industrial estate. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Chomsky has been professor of modern languages and linguistics since 1976, is home to more than 10,000 students, each of whom pays around $50,000 a year for the privilege of studying at America’s self-styled “ideas factory”.

Chomsky, who at 76 is technically retired, inhabits a suite of offices overflowing with foreign translations of his books and dusty academic journals. A photograph of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell hangs above a door, as a picture of the Pope might decorate a priest’s study. The professor, his gatekeeper says, has gone for a walk, but he should return soon, if he can find his way back. Apparently, he is exploring a hitherto uncharted underground route on the campus.

I am shown into his office, which looks as if it has been burgled. Papers are piled high and strewn on every available surface. On a desk are photographs of his grandchildren. Chomsky, who has been married to the same woman for more than half a century, has three children, two daughters – one of whom works for Oxfam, the other is a teacher – and a son, who is a software engineer. When finally he does appear, I am informed that my allotted hour has shrunk magically to 45 minutes. Interviewers, it’s intimated, are lining up like planes on a runway waiting for take-off. “Don’t take it personally,” I’m told.

I remind Chomsky of his 1990 visit to Scotland, when he spoke on “self-determination and power” at the Pearce Institute in Govan, Glasgow. “You’ve got to remind me what this is about,” says Chomsky. This does not seem a promising start. I remind him that he is coming to Edinburgh to deliver a Gifford Lecture. “I know that,” he says, rather testily. “But who are you?”

Chomsky is quietly impatient, his voice subdued and crackly. He has retained his wavy hair, which flops over his ears, and he dresses like a style-unconscious academic – black trainers, white socks, denims, charity-shop jumper. To some interviewers he comes across as bitter and despairing but others, including me, find a seam of laconic humour beneath the serious, restrained manner. When he starts to talk he often forgets to stop and in the course of our foreshortened hour he proves as difficult to interrupt as the Queen’s Christmas message. Wind him up and away he goes.

But with Chomsky it’s hard to know where to begin. Having spent more than 50 years at the MIT, he is the author of dozens of books and countless articles. A decade ago, Nature mentioned him in the same breath as Darwin and Descartes. Among his modern peers are Einstein, Picasso and Freud. Apparently, only Shakespeare and the Bible have been cited in scholarly publications more often than Chomsky has been. His influence is equally formidable, including generations of media students and the likes of John Pilger, Harold Pinter, Naomi Klein and James Kelman.

“If Chomsky has a specialist subject,” wrote Kelman, “then some would argue it is not linguistics, nor the philosophy of language, rather it is US global policy, with particular reference to the dissemination of all related knowledge.”

Not all of Chomsky’s devotees would agree with Kelman. Some, such as author and columnist Paul Johnson, wish he’d stuck with linguistics and kept his nose out of politics. Through his study of language and, in particular, syntax, Chomsky is credited with transforming the way foreign languages are taught through his theory of a “universal grammar”, and of “revolutionising our view of the mind”. Several of his books, including Syntactic Structures and Theory Of Syntax, published in 1957 and 1965 respectively, are invariably referred to as essential documents, though they’re hardly accessible to the layman.

Meanwhile Manufacturing Consent, which he co-wrote with Edward Herman in 1988, is on every rookie journalist’s reading list. Chomsky is the sceptics’ sceptic, believing that the true nature of the US’s role in the world is distorted and hidden from the American people by the corporate-owned media elite and federal government representatives who protect business interests in order to get re-elected or keep their jobs in the administration. Though he reluctantly supported Democrat John Kerry’s failed pitch for the presidency last November, Chomsky is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. From his perspective, there’s not a lot to choose between them ; they’re both “business parties”.

We begin by talking about the piece in The American Prospect. “It’s the journal of what they modestly call ‘the decent left’,” he says, oozing contempt. “It’s kind of moderate social democrat and they see themselves as embattled. You know, caught between two powerful forces which are crushing them. One is Dick Cheney, representing the White House, the Pentagon, one of the most powerful forces in history, and the other one – an equal and opposite force – is me. Do you think any intellectual or academic in history has ever received such praise? I mean, it’s way beyond the Nobel Prize. I already got someone to put it on the website. It tells you something about their attitudes. They’re pathetic, frightened, cowardly little people.”

Interesting, I note, that though his face is on the magazine’s cover, his name is nowhere to be seen in the piece. “Oh, no, no, no,” Chomsky says, grinning at my naivety, “you can’t mention it. You can’t mention anything. You can’t read anything. All you can do is report gossip . So you heard some gossip saying that I was in favour of Pol Pot or I support Osama bin Laden. That I’m in favour of [Slobodan] Milosevic. And then you heard it at a dinner party so it must be true. My previous interviewer is doing a documentary mainly on Palestine. She just got a PhD at New York University. She was telling me that if she ever so much as mentioned my name her faculty members practically collapsed in terror. The idea that you could look at anything of mine was so frightening it couldn’t happen. Which is standard. You can’t think because that’s too dangerous. Or you can’t look at public opinion. You should see public opinion. It’s amazing.”

In what way? Just before last November’s presidential election, he says, two of America’s most prestigious public attitude monitoring institutions – the Program on International Policy Attitudes and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations – published studies which showed that both political parties, the media and what he calls “the decent left” are far to the right of the American public on most major issues. “I’m right in the mainstream,” says Chomsky. “And, of course, it wasn’t reported.”

“ The major facts were just suppressed,” he says. “Actually, these two reports were reported in two local papers in the country and a couple of op eds. That’s it. In the entire country. The most important information possible right before an election.”

What the reports showed, he explains, was that the American public are strongly opposed to the use of force, except in terms of the UN charter, and in the face of imminent attack. “The public wants the UN, not the US, to take the lead in an international crisis,” says Chomsky. “That includes reconstruction, security and so on in Iraq. A majority of the public is actually in favour of giving up the veto at the UN so the US would go along with the majority. An overwhelming majority supports the Kyoto protocol. In fact, so enthusiastically that Bush voters assumed that he was in favour of it, because it was so obviously the right thing to do.

“The same huge majority is in favour of joining the International Criminal Court. A large majority of the population takes it to be a moral issue for the government to provide health care for everybody. It goes on and on like this. The public is far to the left of anything in the establishment.”

Come the elections, he says, the public suffered from mass delusion. They didn’t understand what the candidates stood for. What they were voting for was imagery. “Elections are run by the public relations industry; the same guys who sell toothpaste.” Issues don’t register on the radar. “You don’t talk about what the candidates stand for, what you have is John Kerry goose-hunting and riding his motorcycle and George Bush pretending to be a simple kind of guy, who chops wood and takes care of his cattle …”

And plays golf?

“No, no. You don’t push that too much, that’s elitist. He is supposed to be an ordinary guy. Take a look at him! His sleeves are rolled up; he’s just getting ready to go back to the ranch. You don’t present him as what he is: a spoiled frat boy from Yale who only got somewhere because of his parents.”

Chomsky, one suspects, could continue in this vein ad nauseam. Even now, at an age when most people would rather be in a gated Florida compound than constantly locking horns with the establishment, he persists in banging his head against closed doors. In the US, he is either a pariah or a prophet, “a kind of modern-day soothsayer”, according to his biographer Robert Barsky.

“Unlike many leftists of his generation,” says Barsky, “Chomsky never flirted with movements or organisations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, anti-revolutionary, and elitist … He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century.”

Nobody can deny Chomsky’s commitment to the cause of truth. His father was a renowned Hebrew scholar who emigrated from the Ukraine to the United States in 1913 to avoid being drafted into the army. His mother was also a Hebrew scholar and wrote children’s books. Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928, and his precocity was nurtured at an experimental elementary school. By 10, he was reading the proofs of his father’s edition of a 13th-century Hebrew grammar, and writing about the rise of fascism in Spain for his school newspaper. As a teenager he would often take a train from Philadelphia to New York to visit his uncle, who had a newspaper stand and a changeable political viewpoint. “First he was a follower of Trotsky,” Chomsky says, “then he was an anti-Trotskyite. He also taught himself so much Freud he wound up as a lay psychoanalyst with a penthouse apartment.”

At the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Chomsky met his mentor, Zellig Harris, a politically active professor of linguistics. It was Harris who dissuaded him from abandoning his studies and going to Israel where the new state was in formation. In 1956, at an MIT symposium on information theory, Chomsky presented a paper which overturned conventional linguistic wisdom. “Other linguists had said language had all the formal precision of mathematics,” said George Miller, a psychologist who was in the audience, “but Chomsky was the first linguist to make good the claim.”

Throughout his life, Chomsky has maintained his twin interests in politics and linguistics but it is the former which has consumed his energies in recent years and given him such a public profile. When he speaks, he says, crowds turn up in their thousands. In Sweden, the venue changed from a small hall to a football stadium. He turns down many more requests than he accepts. Rarely does he agree to appear on American television, because – as I can testify – he will not compromise by talking in sound bites. Proper discourse requires time to allow arguments to develop.

“You can only be on television if you have concision,” he says. “That means you can say something between two commercials. That’s a terrific technique of propaganda. On the rare occasions when I’ m asked to be on television, I usually refuse for this reason. If you’re gonna be asked a question, say, about terrorism and you’re given three sentences between commercials, you’ve got two choices. You can repeat conventional ideology – you say, yeah, Iran supports terrorism. Or you can sound like you’re from Neptune. You can say, yeah, the US is one of the leading terrorist states. The people have a right to ask what you mean. And so if it was a sane news channel – al-Jazeera, say – you could talk about it and explain what you mean. You’re not allowed to do that in the United States.”

On occasion, one suspects, Chomsky doth protest too much. Like fellow American “dissidents”, such as Michael Moore and Gore Vidal, he may complain about the manipulative power of the media and government but he can hardly complain that he has been rendered voiceless. Indeed, these days the internet is a potent weapon in his armoury. He can’t be both the most cited living person and marginalised.

There is little doubt, however, that his relentless monitoring of the American media and his fundamental distrust of the denizens of Washington DC make him a formidable and eloquent adversary and, consequently, persona non grata in certain quarters. In general, he believes that the US should stay out of other countries’ affairs. Bush’s White House, he says, only believes in democracy when it serves American interests. The same guys who backed Saddam Hussein’s brutal suppression of the Shi’ites are the ones who ordered the invasion of Iraq.

He is in full flow, bashing Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the war in Iraq and US nominee for the presidency of the World Bank, rubbishing Tony Blair – “I suppose Hitler believed what he was saying too” – and recalling how, in 1985, Ronald Reagan declared a national emergency because he thought Nicaragua was about to march into Texas, when his assistant pokes her head round his door and says my 45-minute hour is up. On the way out, Chomsky draws my attention to a ghoulish painting hidden behind a filing cabinet.

“It’s a terrific Rorschach test,” he says menacingly. “When I ask people from North America what it is, nobody knows. When I ask people from South America, everybody knows. If you ask people from Europe, maybe 10% know. What it is, is Archbishop Romero on the 25th anniversary of his assassination [in El Salvador], six Latin American intellectuals – Jesuits – who were also murdered, all by elite forces armed and trained by the United States who also killed another 70,000 people. Nobody knows a thing about it.

“Suppose it had been in Czechoslovakia. Suppose the Russians had murdered an archbishop and killed [Vaclav] Havel and half-a-dozen of his associates. Would we know about it? Yeah. We probably would have nuked them. But when we do it, it doesn’t exist. It reminds me of the world.”

Copyright © 2005 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088

Pentagon Kills Investigation Into Case of Abused Reuters Workers

Mar 23 - In a letter to Reuters, the Pentagon says it will not reopen an investigation into the case of three unembedded Iraqi journalists who say US soldiers tortured and sexually abused them while they were working for the London-based news service last year.

"I'm very disappointed that the Department of Defense has chosen not to reopen a clearly flawed investigation into a very troubling incident," Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger said Tuesday in response to the letter.

The Pentagon told Reuters it was satisfied with the results of its initial investigation, which did not include interviews with the three Iraqis. It concluded its letter to Reuters by recommending that media organizations embed their reporters with US military units.

Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division detained the three Reuters employees in January 2004 while covering the downing of an American helicopter by rebels near Fallujah. The journalists say soldiers beat them and subjected them to sexual humiliation similar to that practiced by US jailers at Abu Ghraib prison around the same time. They were released without charges three days after being detained.


© 2005 The NewStandard.

Pentagon Kills Investigation Into Case of Abused Reuters Workers

Mar 23 - In a letter to Reuters, the Pentagon says it will not reopen an investigation into the case of three unembedded Iraqi journalists who say US soldiers tortured and sexually abused them while they were working for the London-based news service last year.

"I'm very disappointed that the Department of Defense has chosen not to reopen a clearly flawed investigation into a very troubling incident," Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger said Tuesday in response to the letter.

The Pentagon told Reuters it was satisfied with the results of its initial investigation, which did not include interviews with the three Iraqis. It concluded its letter to Reuters by recommending that media organizations embed their reporters with US military units.

Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division detained the three Reuters employees in January 2004 while covering the downing of an American helicopter by rebels near Fallujah. The journalists say soldiers beat them and subjected them to sexual humiliation similar to that practiced by US jailers at Abu Ghraib prison around the same time. They were released without charges three days after being detained.


© 2005 The NewStandard.

N.C. cities want to sue over public records requests

RALEIGH, N.C. - North Carolina cities and other government agencies are pursuing the authority to sue citizens who ask to see public records.

Lawyers for local governments and the University of North Carolina are talking about pushing for a new state law allowing pre-emptive lawsuits against citizens, news organizations and private companies to clarify the law when there is a dispute about providing records or opening meetings.

On another front, the city of Burlington is appealing a ruling last year by the state Court of Appeals that said the government can't take people to court to try to block their access to records or meetings.

Citizens can sue the government over records, the court said, but not the reverse. The state Supreme Court takes up that case next month and is expected to settle the issue.

North Carolinas League of Municipalities supports Burlington.

"It makes sense to ask a court what the law is when there's a dispute about the Open Meetings Law, just like when there's a dispute about anything else," said Ellis Hankins, the league's executive director.

"We need to have open government," he said. "But governments need to operate. And there are unanswered legal questions."

The cities say they want to use an ordinary tool often deployed in other kinds of legal disputes, called a "declaratory judgment," to let judges settle disagreements about public access to records or meetings.

Urging the Supreme Court to forbid pre-emptive government lawsuits are news organizations and civil rights advocates on the political left, right and center.

They include the state's newspapers and broadcasters, the conservative John Locke Foundation, and the liberal American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina.

Many say they will also oppose any legislation that would give the government that power, saying it would intimidate and punish inquisitive citizens. They say pre-emptive access lawsuits are undemocratic and contrary to the state's policy of open government.

They also argue that such lawsuits penalize citizens for exercising their First Amendment constitutional rights to criticize the government and to ask it to address their concerns.

"Imagine that your daughter is part of a new busing plan, and you go and ask for a copy of the plan," said Raleigh media lawyer Amanda Martin. "They say, You can't have it and we're going to sue you for asking.'"

In the Burlington case, Alamance News publisher Tom Boney had challenged the closing of a city council meeting to the public in 2002. Boney asked the city to disavow the secrecy and release minutes of the meeting. And he said he might sue.

Burlington beat Boney to it.

At the time, no state statute or court ruling prevented the city from doing that.

The city's lawsuit against the newspaper required Boney to spend money defending it. The lawsuit also asked the judge to make Boney pay the city's lawyer.

"A government body should not be permitted to bully citizens who object to its actions or who argue for an interpretation of the law that differs from the position taken by the public body," the newspaper's attorney, Raleigh media lawyer Hugh Stevens, said in a recent court filing. "It is simply wrong for a public body to use the blunt club of the judicial system to silence and intimidate those who disagree."

Part of the problem is that state law provides no mechanism for cities to get a court ruling in a dispute over access to records or meetings other than to sue the people or companies seeking the information _ unless the requesters sue first. In some other states, cities can sue the state attorney general to get a ruling.

In filings with the N.C. Supreme Court, Burlington and North Carolinas other cities say they must be free to sue requesters for declaratory judgment to resolve disputes.

In its ruling against Burlington last year, a Court of Appeals panel of three judges concluded that allowing the government to file pre-emptive access lawsuits would create "a chilling effect on the public."

The court also ruled that requiring members of the public to defend the lawsuits in lengthy court actions would undermine the fundamental right of every person to have prompt access to information in the possession of public agencies.

And such lawsuits, the appeals court suggested, would violate the aim of state sunshine laws "of promoting openness in the daily workings of public bodies."

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case April 19.

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Information from: The News & Observer, http://www.newsobserver.com