Category: Uncategorized

By Emily Spence, Countercurrents.org

Americans, particularly ones from the middle class, need to realize that there are no core entitlements imparted by their government representatives, nor any other sources. They have none and should adjust their expectations accordingly.

If the U.S. populace somehow imagines that its members are viewed any differently than any other populations across the world that are used to produce maximal profits for the top economic class, there’s a rude awakening in store ahead. Further, most legislators simply do not care whether middle and lower class interests are or aren’t well served as long as they, themselves, can somehow make out well in the times ahead.

Besides, why should any Americans feel that they deserve to be treated more favorably by the transnational moneyed elites and their government backers than their counterparts across the rest of the world? As A. H. Bill reminds: “The richest 225 people in the world today control more wealth than the poorest 2.5 billion people. And… the three richest people in the world control more wealth than the poorest 48 nations.”

Occasionally someone making a staggering amount of money in a crooked sort of way might raise a few officials’ eyebrows or induce a mild reprimand. In addition, he might, occasionally, be singled out as the token fall guy so as to be made into a warning example as was Bernie Madoff. Most of the time, though, no action is usually undertaken to correct the situation when directors of major companies carry out activities that are, obviously, right on or over the edge of fraudulent practices.

As Barak Obama, perhaps hypocritically, chastened, “Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productive and sound business practices. We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales.”

Yet, he, himself, showed no hesitation during his election campaign over collecting $40,925 from the bailout fund recipient and nearly bankrupt investment house Bear Stearns, $161,850 from the bailout fund recipient and mortgage underwriter Morgan Stanley, as well as benefits from countless other institutions that have received government favors at taxpayers’ expense. As such, it’s hard in actuality to deliver more than just a mild verbal rebuke about these organizations’ modus operandi if one picks up a personal windfall from not meddling. Thus, the financial corruption continues at all levels of government.

A case in point is the self-serving oil trader Andrew Hall. His relationship with Citigroup’s (C.N) Phibro energy-trading unit brought him approximately $100 million in 2008 despite that his parent company registered a net deficit of $18.7 billion for the same year and received $45 billion in TARP funds.

Counter Currents for more

by Mark Weisbrot, MrZine

Americans are famous for not paying much attention to the rest of the world, and it is often said that foreign wars are the way that we learn geography. But most often it is not the people who have little direct experience outside their own country that are the problem, but rather the experts.

The latest polling data is making this clear once again, as a majority of Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan, but the Obama Administration is escalating the war and his military commanders are asking for even more troops than the increase to 68,000 that the Administration is planning by the end of this year.

This gap between the average American and the foreign policy elite has been around since the Vietnam War and long before. The gap is also large between Democratic voters, three-quarters of whom oppose the war in Afghanistan, and the politicians and think tanks that represent them in the political arena. A few decades ago there was a real voting base of “Cold War” liberals — people who were progressive on social and economic issues but right wing on foreign policy. That base has largely disappeared. Yet amazingly, the foreign policy establishment — including most of the media — has managed to maintain this political tendency as a very influential force.

The gap between the public and the foreign policy elite is not due to the ignorance of the masses, as the elite would have it, but primarily to a different set of interests and values. Very few foreign policy decision-makers — just a handful of Members of Congress, for example — have sons or daughters who actually fight in the wars that they decide are “wars of necessity.” The tax burden for these wars is more affordable for most foreign policy experts than it is for an American with median earnings. And perhaps most importantly, the average American doesn’t have the same interest in trying to have the U.S. rule the world.

Mr Zine for more

By MARC W. HEROLD, Frontline

The Obama war machine has decided to accept more U.S. military casualties in order to keep NATO in America’s Afghan war.
ALEX BRANDON/AP

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA speaking at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 17.

BURIED in the public relations blather of United States Marine legions “liberating” Helmand and Afghan (sham) “elections” as democracy restored1 is an unspoken trade-off over who disproportionately dies in America’s modern wars in the Third World. Under President George W. Bush, U.S. politico-military elites chose to fight the Afghan war with minimal regard for so-called collateral casualties. But the soaring toll of killed Afghan civilians swayed world public opinion and stoked the Afghan resistance as grieved Afghan family members sought revenge.

Enter Barack Obama. Faced with the prospect of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces being withdrawn as restless NATO-country citizens mobilised against the war, the Obama war machine took the decision to trade off (mostly) lower-class U.S. “volunteer” soldiers from rural America2 for fewer rural Afghan civilians killed. The decision had nothing to do with valuing Afghan lives and everything to do with a careful political calculation. In outlying areas such as in the Pakistan borderlands or in isolated rural areas of Afghanistan, Obama’s war machine cavalierly slaughters innocent civilians with the same impunity and at the same rate as his maligned predecessor did, as drone strikes in Pakistan and U.S. air strikes in Farah and Logar have demonstrated.

What has also changed is the public face of the war as one might expect from a President skilled in diction and possessing the persuasive skills of a well-trained lawyer. On the other hand, behind the soothing words, the rationales are identical: in Phoenix recently, Obama reiterated the Bush of September 2001:

“This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. This is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defence of our people.”3

So much for the current U.S. rationale for war. So much for “Change We Can Believe In”.

AFP

U.S. MARINES CROSS a makeshift bridge in the Garmsir district of Helmand Province on July 12.

The Obama approach finds strong support amongst U.S. liberals, the U.S. corporate media and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). As I have documented elsewhere, the UNAMA coughs up statistics on Afghan civilian deaths which cannot be fact-checked and which conveniently grossly underestimates the carnage caused by U.S./NATO actions. Sadly, the superficial impartiality of the U.N. gives such “faith-based” data credibility in the international media, which widely cite them. Former President Bush must look on with envy at how the U.S. media, including such “liberal” pillars as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (for example, the McNeill Lehrer News Hour) or MoveOn.org, now toe the Pentagon line on Obama’s Afghan war.

Almost eight years ago, I pointed out a trade-off taken by the U.S. military in its original bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001:
“From the point of view of U.S. policymakers and their mainstream media-boosters, the ‘cost’ of a dead Afghan civilian is zero as long as these civilian deaths can be hidden from the general U.S. public’s view. The ‘benefits’ of saving future lives of U.S. military personnel are enormous, given the U.S. public’s post-Vietnam aversion to returning body bags…. But, I believe the argument goes deeper and that race enters the calculation. The sacrificed Afghan civilians are not ‘white’, whereas the overwhelming number of U.S. pilots and elite ground troops are white. This ‘reality’ serves to amplify the positive benefit-cost ratio of certainly sacrificing darker Afghans today [and Indochinese, Iraqis yesterday] for the benefit of probably saving American soldier-citizens tomorrow. What I am saying is that when the ‘other’ is non-white, the scale of violence used by the U.S. government to achieve its stated objectives at minimum cost knows no limits.”4

Frontline for more

By GABRIEL KOLKO, Counterpunch

Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another Century of War? and The Age of War: the US Confronts the World and After Socialism. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is World in Crisis, from which this essay has been excerpted.

In late 1949 I worked on a boat taking Jews from Marseilles to Haifa, Israel. Jews from Arab nations were in the front of the boat, Europeans in the rear. I was regarded by many of the Europeans as some sort of freak because I had a United States passport and so could stay in the land of milk and honey. One man wanted me to marry his daughter – which meant he too could live in the land of milk and honey. My Hebrew became quite respectable but the experience was radicalizing or, I should say, kept me radical, and I have stayed that way.

Later I learned from someone who ran a displaced persons camp in Germany that the large majority of Jews wanted to go anywhere but Palestine. They were compelled to state Palestine or else risk receiving no aid. I understood very early that there was much amiss in the countless Arab villages and homes I saw destroyed, and that the entire Zionist project – regardless of the often venal nature of the Arab opposition to it – was a dangerous sham.

The result of the creation of a state called Israel was abysmal. Jews from Poland have nothing in common with Germans and neither has anything to do with those from the Arab world. It is nationality, not religion, that counts most. Jews in Israel, especially the Germans, largely ghettoized themselves by their place of origin during the first generation, when a militarized culture produced the mixed new breed called sabras – an essentially anti-intellectual personality far different from the one the early Zionists, who were mostly socialists who preached the nobility of labor, expected to emerge. The large majority of Israelis are not in the least Jewish in the cultural sense, are scarcely socialist in any sense, and daily life and the way people live is no different in Israel than it is in Chicago or Amsterdam. There is simply no rational reason that justifies the state’s creation.

The outcome is a small state with a military ethos that pervades all aspects of Israel’s culture, its politics and, above all, its response to the existence of Arabs in its midst and at its borders. From its inception, the ideology of the early Zionists – of Labor Zionism as well as the rightist Revisionism that Vladimir Jabotinsky produced – embodied a commitment to violence, erroneously called self-defense, and a virtual hysteria. As a transcendent idea, Zionism has no validity because the national differences between Jews are overwhelming.

What Zionism confirmed, if any confirmation were needed, is that accidents are more important in shaping history than is all too often allowed. Here was the intellectual café, which existed in key cities – Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century or the Lower East Side of New York before World War I – filled with immensely creative people full of ideas and longing for a golden era to come. Ideas – good, bad, and indifferent – flourished. In this heady atmosphere, Zionism was born.

But Zionism has produced a Sparta that traumatized an already artificially divided region partitioned after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I led to the Versailles Treaty and the creation of the modern Middle East. The state of Israel has always relied on military solutions to political and sociological problems with the Arabs. The result is constant mobilization.

Even more troublesome for peace and stability in the vast Middle East, Zionism has always been symbiotic on some great power for the security of its national project, realized in a state called Israel. Before 1939 it was the British; during the 1950s it was France. Israel has survived since the late 1960s on the influx of US arms and money, and this has allowed it to encourage its fears of annihilation – a fate its possession of nuclear weapons makes most unlikely. But Israel also has an importance far beyond the fantasies of a few confused literati.

Today its significance for American foreign policy is far greater because the Soviet Union no longer exists and the Middle East provokes the fear so essential to mobilizing Congress and the US public. “The best hopes and the worst fears of the planet are invested in that relatively small patch of earth” – as George Tenet, the former head of the CIA, put it in his memoir – and so understanding how and why that patch came into being, and the grave limits of the martial course it is following, has a very great, even transcendent value.

Counter punch for more

By Martin Vogl BBC News, Bamako

Tens of thousands of people have protested against the new law.
The president of Mali has announced that he is not going to sign the country’s new family law, instead returning it to parliament for review.

Muslim groups have been protesting against the law, which gives greater rights to women, ever since parliament adopted it at the start of the month.

President Amadou Toumani Toure said he was sending the law back for the sake of national unity.

Muslim leaders have called the law the work of the devil and against Islam.

More than 90% of Mali’s population is Muslim.

Some of the provisions that have proved controversial give more rights to women.

For example, under the new law women are no longer required to obey their husbands, instead husbands and wives owe each other loyalty and protection.

“I have taken this decision… to ensure calm and a peaceful society, and to obtain the support and understanding of our fellow citizens,” President Amadou Toumani Toure

Women get greater inheritance rights, and the minimum age for girls to marry in most circumstances is raised to 18.

One of the other key points Muslims have objected to is the fact that marriage is defined as a secular institution.

Tens of thousands have turned out at protests in Bamako in recent weeks and there have been other demonstrations against the law across the country.

It is a political defeat for President Toure, who was a strong backer of the new law.

BBC for more

By ALEX BERENSON, NYT

At least four million Americans under age 65 are exposed to high doses of radiation each year from medical imaging tests, according to a new study in The New England Journal of Medicine.

About 400,000 of those patients receive very high doses, more than the maximum annual exposure allowed for nuclear power plant employees or anyone else who works with radioactive material.

It did not estimate the number of cancer cases that the radiation might cause over the next several decades. But Dr. Rita Redberg, a cardiologist and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who has extensively studied the use of medical imaging, said it would probably result in tens of thousands of additional cancers.

Each individual patient is at relatively minor additional risk from the tests, Dr. Redberg said, but because they are given to so many people, the cumulative risk is significant.

“It’s certain that there are increased rates of cancer at low levels of radiation, and as you increase the levels of radiation, you increase cancer,” said Dr. Redberg, who was not connected with the new study.

The radioactive tests are given for hundreds of purposes. In the last two decades, they have become especially common in cardiology, where physicians use them to check for the buildup of plaque in the arteries and the heart’s ability to pump blood.

Some cardiologists now encourage their patients to have routine heart scans even if they do not have clinical symptoms of heart disease, like chest pain or shortness of breath. The study did not examine what percentage of the tests were medically necessary.

The use of the tests has risen sharply in the last two decades, as more and more physicians have bought CT and PET scanners and installed them in or near their offices. In 2007, the Department of Health and Human Services estimated that the number of CT scans given to Medicare patients had almost quadrupled from 1995 to 2005, while the number of PET scans had risen even faster.

The new study’s lead author, Dr. Reza Fazel, a cardiologist at Emory University, said the use of scans appeared to have increased even from 2005 to 2007, the period covered by the paper.

“These procedures have a cost, not just in terms of dollars, but in terms of radiation risk,” Dr. Fazel said.

NY Times for more

by DAVID SMITH, M&G

Poor aliens. They trek halfway across the galaxy, run out of petrol and end up living off cat food in, of all places, 1980s Johannesburg. Then they get the kind of reception that asylum seekers who don’t speak the language have come to expect.

This is the improbable premise of the surprise sci-fi hit of the year. District 9 shot to the top of the United States box office in its opening weekend and earned the kind of reviews that eluded George Lucas — even the first time around. Its modest credentials include a 29-year-old debutant director, a budget of just $30-million and a cast of unknowns.

But District 9 also boasts two points of instant recognition. Its producer is Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings films and King Kong. Its setting is apartheid-style South Africa, a time and place that seems both close and yet distant, a paradox that filmmakers are now finding irresistible. Improbably, the traumas suffered as a result of South Africa’s white-minority rule have now become one of cinema’s most fertile territories.

The warped society apartheid created will be examined in a rugby film about Nelson Mandela, the story of photographers capturing township violence and the startling real-life account of a black girl born to white parents. As a result, Hollywood stars — including Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Clint Eastwood, Ryan Phillippe, John Malkovich and Sophie Okonedo — have been crowding the arrivals halls at South Africa’s airports. The gold rush comes 15 years after Africa’s most powerful nation held its first democratic election and on the eve of the biggest sporting event in its history.

Of all the new releases, District 9 wears its politics most lightly, making no mention of apartheid or its legacy in today’s impoverished black townships. But the allegorical overtones are inescapable in the plot about aliens who, their spaceship stranded above Johannesburg, have to endure a daily routine of unemployment, gangsterism and xenophobia in a squalid shantytown. The Prawns — as they are known in derogatory slang because of their vaguely crustacean appearance — spend their hopeless days brawling and getting high on pet food.

Mail & Guardian for more

PBS
Last month, testimony in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation by a former health insurance insider named Wendell Potter made news even before it occurred: CBS NEWS headlined: “Cigna Whistleblower to Testify.” After Potter’s testimony the industry scrambled to do damage control: “Insurers defend rescissions, take heat for lack of transparency.”

In his first extended television interview since leaving the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter tells Bill Moyers why he left his successful career as the head of Public Relations for CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest insurers, and decided to speak out against the industry. “I didn’t intend to [speak out], until it became really clear to me that the industry is resorting to the same tactics they’ve used over the years, and particularly back in the early ’90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan.”

Potter began his trip from health care spokesperson to reform advocate while back home in Tennessee. Potter attended a “health care expedition,” a makeshift health clinic set up at a fairgrounds, and he tells Bill Moyers, “It was absolutely stunning. When I walked through the fairground gates, I saw hundreds of people lined up, in the rain. It was raining that day. Lined up, waiting to get care, in animal stalls. Animal stalls.”

Looking back over his long career, Potter sees an industry corrupted by Wall Street expectations and greed. According to Potter, insurers have every incentive to deny coverage — every dollar they don’t pay out to a claim is a dollar they can add to their profits, and Wall Street investors demand they pay out less every year. Under these conditions, Potter says, “You don’t think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you’re going to meet Wall Street’s expectations.”

You can view Wendel Potter’s congressional testimony online or read the text.

You can learn more about Remote Area Medical, the organization that put on the “health care expedition” here.

Strategy Memos

During the interview, Bill Moyers read from confidential documents drafted by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) in May and June of 2007. The documents outline a unified strategy for AHIP members to prepare for the release of Michael Moore’s documentary, SICKO on June 29, 2007.

You can download and read the full AHIP documents by clicking here and here (PDFs).

The Language of Health Care 2009 (PDF)
The Frank Luntz memo strategizing opposition to health care reform Bill Moyers mentions in the interview.

GOP Health Care Strategy (PDF)
Strategy memo by Alex Castellanos dated July 7, 2009.

[partial transcript of video]
July 10, 2009

BILL MOYERS: Wendell Potter joins us now. Welcome to the Journal.

WENDELL POTTER: Thank you very much for having me here.

BILL MOYERS: You worked for CIGNA 15 years and left last year.

WENDELL POTTER: I did.

BILL MOYERS: Were you pushed out?

WENDELL POTTER: I was not. I left– it was my decision to leave, and my decision to leave when I did.

BILL MOYERS: Were you passed over for a promotion?

WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely not. No.

BILL MOYERS: Had you been well-paid and rewarded by the company?

WENDELL POTTER: Very well-paid. And I, over the years, had many job opportunities, many bonuses, salary increases. So no, I was not. And in fact, there was no further place for me to go in the company. I was head of corporate communications and that was the ultimate PR job.

BILL MOYERS: Did you like your boss and the people you work with?

WENDELL POTTER: I did, and still do. I still respect them.

BILL MOYERS: And they gave you a terrific party when you left?

WENDELL POTTER: They sure did, yeah.

BILL MOYERS: So why are you speaking out now?

WENDELL POTTER: I didn’t intend to, until it became really clear to me that the industry is resorting to the same tactics they’ve used over the years, and particularly back in the early ’90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan.

BILL MOYERS: But during this 15 years you were there, did you go to them and say, “You know, I think we’re on the wrong side. I think we’re fighting the wrong people here.”

WENDELL POTTER: You know, I didn’t, because for most of the time I was there, I felt that what we were doing was the right thing. And that I was playing on a team that was honorable. I just didn’t really get it all that much until toward the end of my tenure at Cigna.

BILL MOYERS: What did you see?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, I was beginning to question what I was doing as the industry shifted from selling primarily managed care plans, to what they refer to as consumer-driven plans. And they’re really plans that have very high deductibles, meaning that they’re shifting a lot of the cost off health care from employers and insurers, insurance companies, to individuals. And a lot of people can’t even afford to make their co-payments when they go get care, as a result of this. But it really took a trip back home to Tennessee for me to see exactly what is happening to so many Americans. I–

BILL MOYERS: When was this?

WENDELL POTTER: This was in July of 2007.

BILL MOYERS: You were still working for Cigna?

WENDELL POTTER: I was. I went home, to visit relatives. And I picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a health care expedition was being held a few miles up the road, in Wise, Virginia. And I was intrigued.

BILL MOYERS: So you drove there?

WENDELL POTTER: I did. I borrowed my dad’s car and drove up 50 miles up the road to Wise, Virginia. It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn’t know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health– booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.

But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they’d erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases– and I’ve got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.

And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee– all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.

There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think?

WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost– what country am I in? I just it just didn’t seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me.

Read more of transcript here.

Red-Flagging and Rescission

Among the other testimony heard by the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation was that of Robin Beaton. It reflected some of the insurance company tactics condemned by Potter.

It was a nightmare scenario. The day before she was scheduled to undergo a double mastectomy for invasive breast cancer, Robin Beaton’s health insurance company informed her that she was “red flagged” and they wouldn’t pay for her surgery. The hospital wanted a $30,000 deposit before they would move forward. Beaton had no choice but to forgo the life-saving surgery.

Beaton had dutifully signed up for individual insurance when she retired from nursing to start a small business. She had never missed a payment, but that didn’t matter. Blue Cross cited two earlier, unrelated conditions that she hadn’t reported to them when signing up — acne and a fast beating heart — and rescinded her policy.

Beaton pleaded with the company and had her doctors write letters on her behalf to no avail. It was not until Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) personally called Blue Cross that her policy was reinstated and she could undergo surgery. In that year, Beaton’s tumor doubled in size, leading to further complications necessitating the removal of her lymph glands as well.

>>Watch Robin Beaton’s testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

The practice is called “rescission” and Beaton’s is not an isolated case. The House Energy and Commerce Committee found that the major private health insurers had rescinded the policies of approximately 20,000 people in a five year period, to avoid paying out approximately $300 million in benefit claims.

Appearing before the same committee, CEOs of the major health insurance companies stated that they would continue to use rescission, arguing that it is a necessary protection against fraud and abuse.

PBS for more

Written by Various Authors, UDW

Open Letter to Kenneth Roth

Kenneth Roth
Executive Director
Human Rights Watch
Dear Mr. Roth,

We are deeply concerned by the absence of statements and reports from your organization over the serious and systematic human rights abuses that have been committed under the Honduran coup regime over the past six weeks. It is disappointing to see that in the weeks since July 8, when Human Rights Watch issued its most recent press release on Honduras, that it has not raised the alarm over the extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detentions, physical assaults, and attacks on the press – many of which have been thoroughly documented – that have occurred in Honduras, in most cases by the coup regime against the supporters of the democratic and constitutional government of Manuel Zelaya. We call on your organization to fulfill your important role as a guardian of universal human rights and condemn, strongly and forcefully, the ongoing abuses being committed by the illegal regime in Honduras. We also ask that you conduct your own investigation of these crimes.

While Human Rights Watch was quick to condemn the illegal coup d’etat of June 28 and the human rights violations that occurred over the following week, which helped shine the spotlight of international media on these abuses, the absence of statements from your organization since the week following the coup has contributed to the failure of international media to report on subsequent abuses.

The coup regime’s violent repression in Honduras has not stopped.

Well-respected human rights organizations in Honduras, such as the Committee for the Relatives of the Disappeared Detainees (COFADEH), and international human rights monitors have documented a series of politically-motivated killings, hundreds of arbitrary detentions, the violent repression of unarmed demonstrators, mass arrests of political opposition, and other violations of basic human rights under the coup regime. The killing of anti-coup activists has been documented in press reports, bringing to a total of ten people known or suspected to have been killed in connection to their political activities. Press freedom watchdogs such as Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have issued releases decrying the regime’s attacks and threats against various journalists and the temporary closure and military occupation of news outlets. Various NGO’s have issued alerts regarding the politically motivated threats to individuals, and concern for people detained by the regime, but no such statements have come from Human Rights Watch.

This situation is all the more tragic in that the coup could easily be overturned, if the Obama administration sought to do so, by taking more decisive measures, such as canceling all U.S. visas and freezing U.S. bank accounts of leaders of the coup regime. Yet not only does the administration continue to prop up the regime with aid money through the Millennium Challenge Account and other sources, but the U.S. continues to train Honduran military students at the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) – the notorious institution formerly known as the School of the Americas. If the coup were overturned, and the democratically elected government restored, it is clear that the many rampant human rights abuses would immediately cease. If Human Rights Watch would raise its voice, it would be much more difficult for the Obama administration to ignore Honduras’ human rights situation and maintain financial and other support for its illegal regime.

We know that there are, sadly, innumerable urgent human rights crises around the world, all of which require your attention.

Addressing the deteriorating situation in Honduras, however, is of paramount importance given its potential to serve as a precedent for other coups and the rise of other dictatorships, not just in Honduras, but throughout the region. History has shown that such coups leave deep scars on societies, and that far too often they have led to the rise of some of history’s most notorious rights abusers, such as in Pinochet’s Chile, Videla’s Argentina, and Cedras’ Haiti, to name but two. As human rights defenders with extensive experience in dealing with the appalling human consequences of these regimes, Human Rights Watch is clearly well placed to understand the urgency of condemning the Honduran regime’s abuses and to helping ensure the coup is overturned, that democracy is restored, and that political repression and other human rights abuses are stopped. Your colleagues in the Honduran human rights community are counting on you, as are the Honduran people. We hope you will raise your voice on Honduras.

Sincerely,

Leisy Abrego
University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow
UC Irvine

Paul Almeida
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
Texas A&M University

Alejandro Alvarez Béjar
Professor, Economic Faculty
UNAM-Mexico

Tim Anderson
Senior Lecturer in Political Economy
University of Sydney
Australia

Anthony Arnove
Author and Editor
Brooklyn, NY

Marc Becker
Truman State University
Kirksville, MO

Marjorie Becker
Associate professor, Department of History
University of Southern California

John Beverley
Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies
University of Pittsburgh

Larry Birns
Director, Council on Hemispheric Affairs
Washington, DC

Jefferson Boyer
Professor of Anthropology (ethnography of Honduras)
Appalachian State University

Jules Boykoff
Associate Professor of Political Science
Pacific University

Edward T. Brett
Professor of History
La Roche College, Pittsburgh, PA

Renate Bridenthal
Professor of History, Emerita
Brooklyn College, CUNY

Bob Buzzanco
Professor of History
University of Houston

Aviva Chomsky
Professor of History and Coordinator, Latin American Studies
Salem State College

Noam Chomsky
Professor of Linguistics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
…

Upside Down World for more

IWPR
A deferred referendum and a timely payment may deflect unease over security deal.

One night in April, American troops stormed into Ahmed al-Baderi’s house, shot dead his wife and brother and ignited outrage over a sensitive deal defining their remit in Iraq.

“They tore down the door with a military truck,” said Baderi. “My brother Khalid went to investigate but they shot him dead. Then they killed my wife.”

The next day, hundreds of demonstrators marched on a government office in the city of Kut, where the raid took place, calling for an end to American “occupation”.

On state television, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki demanded the United States hand over to Iraqi courts the troops who had carried out the raid. He accused American forces of violating the Status of Forces Agreement, SOFA – a pact overseeing the remainder of their deployment in Iraq that Maliki had helped broker.

The US said its troops had behaved properly and within the provisions of the agreement. A military statement released after the raid said the troops had shot dead a man who approached them carrying a weapon. A woman who “moved into the line of fire” also died despite receiving emergency treatment from a military doctor.

Four months after the incident, few questions have been answered but much of the outrage has ebbed.

Baderi says he has received an apology from the US military and a payment totalling 100 million dinars (about 90,000 US dollars) from Iraqi and US officials.

Meanwhile, a referendum on the SOFA that was due to have been held this summer has been postponed until January. It will now coincide with Iraqi parliamentary elections.

The government announced the plebiscite had been delayed to save money. Its critics said Maliki did not want to risk his re-election prospects with the public defeat of an accord he had claimed credit for.

SHOCK AND SCEPTICISM

The SOFA describes the terms under which US troops can operate in Iraq as they slowly reduce their deployment. The deal was worked out over 2008 between Baghdad and the government of former US president George W Bush.

It envisages a phased withdrawal for US combat troops, starting with an exit from most of Iraq’s towns and cities by June 30, 2009. By August 2010, the deal says most US forces would leave the country. Of those that remain, all would be gone by the end of 2011.

The agreement was ratified by the Iraqi parliament in December last year. Critics who said the deal was a smokescreen for prolonging the US military occupation were promised it would be put to a referendum this summer.

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