Elsewhere Today 444
Aljazeera:
Taliban readies Ramadan offensive
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2007
10:40 MECCA TIME, 7:40 GMT
The Taliban says it is launching a major Ramadan offensive amid claims by US and Pakistani forces that they have killed about 75 suspected fighters of the anti-government group.
And for the first time, the Taliban claims to control a large area north of Afghanistan's capital Kabul.
Pakistan's army said on Thursday up to 30 suspected Taliban members were killed and nine soldiers wounded after fighters attacked a military checkpoint in the tribal region bordering Afghanistan.
The fighting in North Waziristan came a day after the Pakistan military said it had killed 40 fighters in a nearby area.
Major-General Waheed Arshad, a military spokesman, said: "Militants attacked the post in Nawaz Kot district overnight but troops fought off their assault."
Air strikes called
Late on Wednesday, US-led forces in Afghanistan said air strikes were called in to help assist troops under attack in a battle that killed around 45 Taliban fighters in the central province of Uruzgan.
The fighting erupted when the Taliban attacked an Afghan and multinational-force patrol with rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire, it said in a statement.
The soldiers returned fire and called in air support after confirming that the attackers were "drawing large amounts of reinforcements".
The battle came on the eve of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The Taliban has said it would use the month to launch a new operation involving suicide bombings, ambushes and other attacks.
Taliban territory
The group also says that it now has a foothold in Kapisa province, about 50km north of Kabul, and claims most of the northeastern district of Tagab is under its control.
Al Jazeera filmed a group of about 50 Taliban fighters travelling unhindered in NowRoz-Abad, in Tagab.
And the unit's commander said there were 25 more groups just like it spread throughout the province.
Qais Azimy, an Al Jazeera producer, witnessed the fighters being greeted warmly by locals.
But the Taliban said they stop and search any unrecognised face owing to fear of spies.
Oji Mullah, a Taliban commander, said: "All of Tagab except the centre of the town is under control of the mujahidin. The government has no control at all, they are sitting in the centre and they run the market.
"Hundreds of mujahidin are in this area. If we want, in two hours, God willing, we could take all of Tagab."
The group was well armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. And they claimed to buy the weapons from the very people who are trying to stop them.
"We have old stores of ammunition and the national army are also selling us weapons because they have very poor discipline," Oji Mullah said.
"Even the national police are selling to us, maybe the Americans will start."
Government's stand
The Afghan government rejects the claim as little more than propaganda.
General Zahir Azimi, spokesman for the defence department, said: "The only organisation which is carrying out military operations in this area is the Afghan National Army and they have the trust of the people.
"The enemy is under their control, so they [the Taliban] want to build up distrust in the ANA."
However, Al Jazeera's producer travelled with the Taliban for five hours in Tabag district and saw no sign of Afghan or American forces.
While filming, a young boy appeared and told the Taliban he had seen some Americans - five Humvees nearby.
A ripple of excitement spread through the group and Oji Mullah ordered his men to move out to prepare and attack.
Fields of hashish
The fighters scanned the main road in the distance and then began to move through fields of hashish to take up their position.
At that point, the Al Jazeera camera pulled out.
Though the Taliban was removed from power in Afghanistan in 2001, it still has a strong presence in the country.
Nato forces have been battling fighters on several fronts, most notably in the south of the country, where the Taliban claim to control swathes of areas including Kandahar and Helmand provinces.
But as the Taliban advances closer to Kabul, the north may become a new battleground.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/71E72AE4-CB59-4725-8798-4D11A1C76573.htm
AllAfrica:
What Steve Biko Means for SA Today
By Nyameko Barney Pityana
13 September 2007
South Africa has been commemorating the 30th anniversary of the killing of black consciousness leader, Steve Biko, by apartheid security police.
Since his death Biko has become an international icon of black self-pride and of the African sense of humanity which the South Africans call, in their two main language groupings, "ubuntu" or "botho". In recent days, much has been written about Biko's intellectual heritage and what his life means to the liberated South Africa of today.
However, few South Africans can speak with the authority of the activist, lawyer, priest and academic, Nyameko Barney Pityana, now the principal and vice-chancellor of the University of South Africa. Pityana was one of the band of students who, with Biko, founded the principal institutions of the black consciousness movement in South Africa from the late 1960s. He delivered this address on September 12, the day on which, three decades earlier, Biko had died alone on the floor of a Pretoria prison cell.
Stephen Bantu Biko was an ordinary young man of his time. Nothing could have distinguished him, his family circumstances and environment from any other young man growing up in a small township in a small Eastern Cape town.
Not even his death, in some respects was extraordinary. After all, it was not unusual for political activists to die in detention. He was in fact the 42nd person to die while detained by the South African Security Police, the Special Branch. Almost all who died were young. Steve's comrades in the Black Consciousness Movement were also beginning to die either in detention as well, or in suspicious circumstances. Mapetla Mohapi, a young social worker and community activist, who died in detention, comes to mind, as does Mthuli ka Shezi, assassinated by being pushed in front of an oncoming train at Germiston Station. Onkgopotse Abraham Tiro died in exile, as a result of a parcel bomb. The manner of his death was not extraordinary either, shocking as it was. He would not have been surprised.
Steve Biko was an ordinary young man who lived in ordinary times but who made something extraordinary out of his life, not out of his own will, by but the machinations of an evil system. He touched the lives of young men and women of his generation and he was part of an abiding movement capable of changing the social and political face of our country. In other ways he gave birth to a society that could shape its own future.
I am one of those then young people of Biko's generation who was touched in extraordinary ways by his life and presence. For me it began when we shared a desk in class IVa at Lovedale in 1963; it continued when as university students we found ourselves at an ASF [Anglican Students' Federation] Conference at Michaelhouse, Natal, and later during a very long evening of conversations following a NUSAS [National Union of SA Students] Conference at Rhodes University Grahamstown.
It grew through an extraordinary three years when he invited me to live with him in Durban and I ended up sharing his room illegally at the Allan Taylor Residence of the University of Natal Medical School (UNB). Together with our two families we then shared a house in Umlazi, Durban. We travelled together distances across the length and breadth of this country, sharing long conversations, good times and bad, and a host of dear friends and comrades.
The last time I had any contact with him, though, was when, on 15 August 1977 we had a long telephone conversation on his domestic situation, in contravention of the banning orders to which we had been subjected. Later that afternoon the security police came and took me into detention at Baakens Street Police Station. On the Sunday, Major Fisher called in to tell me, with alacrity, that they had also detained Steve. I heard no more. I never saw the police again.
But a few days after Steve died, circumstances in my cell changed. The coloured policeman who was on duty at the police station disappeared. A young white police constable appeared. He was truly shocked to see me in prison. "Meneer prokureur", he said, "wat soek jy hierso? Hulle het mos my gesê daar is a baie gevaarlike terroris hierso." [Mr Attorney, what are you doing here? They told me there was a very dangerous terrorist here."] Upon seeing me he could not believe it. Unbeknown to me, he had been suddenly transferred from his duties as a court orderly in the Magistrate's Court in Port Elizabeth, the New Law Courts, where I used to appear as an articled clerk with a right of appearance.
He was a kind young man. He allowed me to have a shower, exercise out of the cell and, a privilege, let me read his morning newspaper - although by this time he was not keen to let me read. I managed to read a report on a statement by Jimmy Kruger on the death of Steve Biko, the infamous "Biko's death leaves me cold." Then I knew what my young policeman friend wanted to hide. That, it seemed, like it was the end.
But many South Africans of my generation could tell similar stories. My comrades in the Movement could tell their own stories. They could speak of a sense of loss and devastation, of anger, of the unleashing of resistance and the rededication that came with the murder of Steve. They could tell of the personal pain they felt at the loss of a dear friend, comrade and leader. They could also share a sense of fear, and for some of us guilt, that he died and we continued to live. For some there may have been some despair and hopelessness, that with Steve's death all was lost, and the exodus towards exile and the armed struggle turned into a flood. I remained in detention until August 1978 under section 6 of the Terrorism Act, and another spell in preventive detention.
I have said that Steve's life was ordinary and that in the circumstances of his day, not even his death could be said to have been extraordinary. But what was germane to Steve's story is that he touched the lives of many people of his generation, black and white. Among them, was the then editor of the East London Daily Dispatch, Donald Woods and at another end, Father Aelred Stubbs, CR. They were dear friends and they had the power of influence. They could not prevent his death but they could tell the world who he was. They wrote their stories about how Steve Biko changed their lives.
The world listened, and Steve became no longer the ordinary friend and comrade. He became a representative figure of the new generation of political activist and would-be revolutionaries that we fancied ourselves to be. But this is not a biography, not about Steve or about Barney Pityana. This address is a personal reflection on the 30 years that have passed since Steve was murdered. From a perspective of today's South Africa, I wish to make an analytical statement about the meaning and relevance of the life and times of Steve Biko, and its impact on contemporary South Africa.
The Black Consciousness Method
Recently I received by e-mail a copy of my paper Black Consciousness and Black Theology from Dr Ben Khumalo, a South African theologian now based in Germany. I gathered from the e-mail that Dr Khumalo had found it fit to distribute the paper to a number of people across the globe, in commemoration of Steve Biko. The paper was published in a book of essays on BLACK THEOLOGY edited by Prof Mokgethi Motlhabi now on the staff of our College of Human Sciences. Reading this paper again at the behest of Dr Khumalo I was reminded how ideas flowed and developed during the Black Consciousness era.
I wish to introduce this substantive part of this paper with a brief reflection on the Black Consciousness method. Steve Biko has come to be known as the "Father of Black Consciousness". While that is true, it needs however, to be put in context.
It is important to point out that Black Consciousness drew much from the method and pedagogy of the Latin American grassroots development movement. The Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire and his seminal work A Pedagogy of the Oppressed was an early influence. Social analysis leading to reflection and action were critical tools of engagement. I am reminded that the way black consciousness evolved was through many, and long hours of interaction and debate among friends at the Alan Taylor Residence.
Steve Biko was a central participant; he listened and challenged ideas as they emerged, concretised them, and brought them back for further development. This was a small group of men and women who were medical students, but joined regularly by some of us from other universities, especially at weekends. In such an environment it is hard to say who the originator of the ideas could be. All ultimately owned and identified with the expression of the collective idea. What I do know though, is that it was Steve who translated that common idea into essays that went into his columns as Frank Talk: I Write What I Like, and as memoranda to the SRCs and SASO [South African Students' Organisation] local branches. It was Steve ultimately who concretised and articulated the ideas. He captured the common mind.
In order to undertake such an experiment it is important to assert that this group of black consciousness activists were avid readers. I was introduced through their circle to the works of Paulo Freire, Amilcar Cabral, Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and indeed, African literary giants like Chinua Achebe, James N'gugi (as he was then known). There was in that group a culture of reading and of intellectual engagement. Debate was always rigorous, and maybe even opinionated. So there was never any question of uninformed debate or ideas that could not be justified.
With such critical insights therefore, it was possible to subject the social and political reality of South Africa at the time to critical scrutiny. The starting point and the perspective was on the oppressed, the marginalised; those who sought after and yearned for freedom. It was observed that at the time liberatory politics were in danger of suffocating from the vice-grip of two social forces. While black consciousness was conscious of and acknowledged the proud history and traditions of liberation struggles, they had to contend with the fact that visible and vocal activism had gone underground, with many in exile and more still in jails. The dominant condition was one of pathological fear because the security system was repressive and ruthless.
First, was the relentless attack from the system with its onslaught of Bantustanism. It was observed that in an environment where the authentic voice of the people was not heard many Bantustan quislings had appropriated the rhetoric of freedom. They presented the Bantustans as a step towards freedom and as a legitimate response to the cry of the people. What was alarming was not only that this nonsense was becoming accepted as some joined the system - ostensibly in order to subvert it, but also that the media of that day especially, was acquiescent and touted these Bantustan leaders as representative of the people. It was necessary to address that.
Second there was the "liberal" onslaught. Various bodies and institutions led by whites who were opposed to the policies of the apartheid regime, were assumed to be speaking for the black people. It was important to denounce any idea that they could be speaking for us. For one thing there was an effective accommodation of the prevailing white dominant ethos and hegemony, which needed to be exposed and set apart from the liberatory ethos we sought to affirm. The trouble with this was that there seemed to be the setting in of the idea that black people need not do anything by themselves, but that white people and institutions could be the defenders of black interests. There was a real concern that black people were abdicating responsibility for their own liberation and entrusting it to those who had no interest in the liberation of black people.
Social and political analysis was a necessary starting point to reflection and action. Much of Steve's writing therefore, addressed these three themes: fear, Bantustans and liberals. It was important to do so in order to create a conceptual space that would free black people for creativity, and to take responsibility for their own liberation.
Steve Biko's discourse on fear was in fact addressed to the black community. It was an internal conversation. It began with an analysis of the history of white people's dealings with black people, which was always based on instilling as much fear as possible in order to dominate, suppress and conquer. Fear had even more devastating consequences. It was demeaning of the dignity of black people and negated their humanity. Fear, therefore, had to be resisted because to do so was an assertion of one's humanity. Resistance therefore was the most humanising response to oppression.
The white liberal establishment, including white opposition parties in the apartheid parliament, the media, and institutions like the SAIRR [South African Institute of Race Relations], as well as NUSAS could not be entrusted with the task of liberation. They too were part of the movement that imprisoned the mind of the black people and created false hopes about what they might accomplish while at the same time participating in and enjoying the fruits of an evil system.
Their vision of South Africa was based on exploitative values, and the integration they espoused would entrench inequalities. There was also a connivance between all these forces: the apartheid regime and their Bantustan collaborators, and the liberal establishment, all had one thing in common: they applied and derived comfort and sustenance from a system of racial oppression, then they dared to believe that self-respecting black people would wish to be co-opted to their grand design, and finally to have their response to the condition of oppression programmed. That had to be rejected.
This analysis then set the scene for a presentation of black consciousness as a response to the social and political condition that was seen as a dead-end. The idea was to transform politics out of the danger of acquiescence, and position the voice of liberation as abiding – a voice that could not be silenced. That required courage, but also clear thought and ideas. Black consciousness therefore, as an ideology, was meant to lift black people out of despair and instil in them hope about a future that was in their own hands.
Millard Arnold [one of the first editors of Biko's writing, and formerly a lawyer of the The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in the U.S.] was right in observing that "Biko's lasting legacy was that he had an uncomplicated vision; an intrinsic appreciation of the essence of the struggle confronting black people."
There is a sense in which there is nothing original about black consciousness. There is in its articulation an amalgam of ideas from the black power and civil rights movements in the United States; there is a thread that runs from the early nationalist movements in Africa, the Ethiopian Movement to the early ANC; there is much that draws on the influence of negritude of Senghor and others, and the Pan African Movement. The essence of it though, is that it was not to become merely a set of ideas but "a way of life" as the SASO Manifesto so eloquently put it.
It was a call first and foremost to the black society to take responsibility for their liberation, to free the human spirit and claim back their nature as free humanity. Secondly, it was giving notice to all who undermined the humanity of black people that the condition of subjugation was not one which God had ever decreed, and that black people were ready to claim their freedom and their inherent humanity and that they would do so on their own terms.
I now wish to highlight three instruments that were intrinsic to this liberation ethic. One, a new and critical understanding of culture. Culture needed to be liberated from what Biko referred to as the "arrested" image of culture that lacked vibrancy and dynamism. His idea, however, was that culture was a necessary ingredient towards humanising black people, towards claiming back their instruments of humanity. Of course, it was recognised that the same culture had been used as an instrument of subjugation, set in a tight box as backward and uncivilised.
Inasmuch as the history of all subjugated peoples was a history of conquest, black people needed to be authors of their own histories, to make history while they lived it. Culture was an important determinant of consciousness, but African culture had to be subjected to critique which would include the discovery of authentic culture, draw from the elements of African culture of communalism and solidarity, and engender an understanding of human nature, of creativity and the arts, of wisdom and insight. All this suggests that there is nothing about African culture to be ashamed of, but that culture could be an instrument of liberation. There are echoes of Amilcar Cabral, of Franz Fanon in Biko's discourse on culture. In a profile on Cabral the point is made that
"Culture has to take its place at the heart of the struggle for liberation. It is not enough to talk about raising consciousness, what is important is the type of future we envisage, the kind of social relations we plan to set up and how we prepare for the future of humanity."
Fanon, for his part states it bluntly, "it is this that counts, everything else is mystification. It is around the people's struggles that culture takes on substance, not around songs, poems or folklore." I raise this point here because there has been criticism of black consciousness and Steve Biko as if there ever was an idea that black consciousness had no liberatory action or revolutionary force.
The second area of focus was religion. Although Biko himself was not consciously "religious" - especially he played no part in institutional religion and the church - he was deeply conscious of the role religion could play in social upliftment, in asserting a common humanity as well as human solidarity. He was equally conscious that the church through the missionary movement had brought mixed fortunes to Africa, a liberating gospel and an ideology and practice of acquiescence.
He therefore took his place among the radicals and the non-conformists who held that the gospel had to be liberated from the clutches of the politics of the missionary establishment. African traditional religions were therefore a significant pointer of a people's quest for authentic self expression, and the church had an abiding value to large numbers of black people who continued to find meaning and value in the church. His approach therefore was not to denounce the church or embrace atheism but to liberate religion and theology as well. That is how it came about that black consciousness found common cause with the UCM, and established the Black Theology Project, and worked very closely in advocacy work with the black churches and with theological colleges.
The third area was social development. Black consciousness as a strategy for liberation built its philosophy on the idea that the black oppressed shared common values and common aspirations. The ethic of black solidarity was critical for black consciousness. It was therefore important that students as the intelligentsia of their society, must remain connected to their social and cultural roots.
SASO pioneered the programme for engagement of students in the development of communities. By so doing they not only participated in community upliftment, but they also took time to understand the communities, listen to the people, hear their stories and their struggles for life, and work with them towards solutions. The community development projects began with literacy training using the Paulo Freirean psycho-social method of pedagogy. Students later ran clinics and were soon building schools and community centres. From the work of their hands, and the application of their knowledge and learning from the elders, students were not only able to fill up gaps in their knowledge and history but they were conscientised as well. His rallying cry to members of SASO was straightforward:
"We have a responsibility not only to ourselves but also to the society from which we spring. No one else will take up the challenge until we, of our own accord, accept the inevitable fact that ultimately the leadership of the non-white people in this country lies with us."
Of course, this idea was never original to Steve. It has been the means by which a liberatory ethic could afford to build its system on the basis of contending social forces. The idea was that through their common interest such forces could be fused, and the tendency towards elitism by the intellectual and bourgeois class neutralised by committing them to integrating their life and praxis to the communities they served. That was what Amilcar Cabral practiced in Guinea Bissau and Paulo Freire advanced in Brazil. Charles Peterson (2001:26) represents Cabral's thought in this way:
"The elite reunion with mass popular struggle and culture disproves the lie of colonial invincibility and superiority by showing how colonial subjects can move beyond foreign domination. For the elite class, the class most immersed in colonial ideology and culture, moving beyond the shadow of colonial influence demonstrates the possibility of a new nation rising out of the ashes of a dominated past. With an eye on the future the re-born elite, by becoming one with the mass population, suggests and actively works towards a new democratic nation that attempts to deliver on the party's national liberatory promises."
The reference to "non-white" was made in 1969. The formulations of blackness, non-white and solidarity had not become set. In later times he would never have referred to blacks as non-white, but only to those who betray the destiny of black people and their liberation.
Transcending Divisions
Black consciousness never attempted in any systematic sense to formulate a manifesto for a new South Africa: in part because black consciousness, certainly during the time of Steve Biko, never envisaged itself as an alternative liberation force, but also in part because it was justly preoccupied with the middle passage, the strategies necessary to bring about the revolution of the mind that leads to action.
I can assert that in its early formulations black consciousness had no desire to substitute the traditional liberation organisations, neither did it see itself as formulating an alternative ideology. Its primary thrust was that in the circumstances of its time, the disunity of the black people was a luxury that we could not afford. That explains why someone like me could be a loyal cadre of the movement even though I had a strong pedigree in the ANC Youth League. Indeed, at the time of BC I was regularly in touch with the underground at various levels. I made sure that what BC was about was well communicated and understood. It was therefore not about engaging loyalties from different movements, but about seeking ways of transcending such divisions by articulating a meta-narrative of liberation that was unifying rather than particularising.
And yet Steve Biko never hesitated in advancing his own vision of a new South Africa. That vision was never detailed. It was not a Freedom Charter, it was not a ten-point programme. These were ideas Steve formulated in response mainly, to interviews he was subjected to largely by outsiders curious about a future South Africa.
It therefore emerges that he espoused a vision of a common humanity and the affirmation of a society founded on justice, without any privileges or considerations for minorities. He recognised that South Africa ruled by majority would be black and nationalist in orientation and political practice. He had no language of socialism and as such never critiqued to any substantive extent the socialist ideology, save to say that he harboured intellectual suspicions about socialist ideologies and practice.
Steve Biko's essay Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity is by common consensus considered to be the best statement he could have made of a vision for a new society. This comes not just from discursive reasoning but draws from a critique of society as it was organised. He then elaborates a vision of the people of South Africa ultimately sitting down together around a tabula rasa to formulate a truly new society based on the common value we all share together as common humanity. Somehow through this essay we begin to get an insight into Steve Biko as a visionary and as someone with a truly humane heart. "We have set out", he says, "on a quest for true humanity, and somewhere on the distant horizon, we can see the glittering prize."
What Biko Means in the New South Africa
I must now come round to reflecting on what all this might mean for a new South Africa. What strikes me first and foremost is how much society needs both intellectuals and heroes. It is correct that this society should honour its heroes and heroines and celebrate its intellectuals. Heroes are never those who set themselves up as such, or who go about their business in the expectation of being hero-worshipped. Likewise intellectuals are not those who draw attention to themselves, but to ideas, their currency and to the critique of society. For both their currency is truth: to stand by the truth, to articulate reality as truthfully as they understand it without calculation of personal benefit.
Perhaps what we need even more in our current climate is a good dose of idealism. We need that capacity to think ahead and above the din of the madding crowd. Idealism comes from the knowledge that current circumstances need never be the final word and that we can visualise a better future. Without idealism, however, we can hardly find solutions to contemporary challenges, and shape our future. I believe that Steve Biko did all three things for our country. He was enormously prescient in his utterances, and he clearly envisioned the kind of future South Africa is struggling to establish today.
What is most refreshing about Steve's writings, looked at today, is their bluntness and matter-of-factness. He does not seem to calculate a particular way of courting acceptance. Reading Steve today one is amazed at how much of a truly "free" spirit he was. If one considers that he was writing at a time of repression, his courage shines through. No wonder the young people of his generation were rapt, in awe, and cultivated their own sense of imagination. Steve Biko in that sense has lessons for the young leaders of our day.
I believe that today, this should call us to a renewed connectedness to the values that sustained and entrenched the liberation struggles against all odds; in particular, to the abiding humanity, Ubuntu, that drove all aspects of the struggle.
Today, it would mean I believe, that we would address poverty with vigour, and that we would place human development at the centre of our national development strategy. We would by now, the second decade of our liberation, be advancing more strongly on all the development indices like housing, health care, primary education and basic literacy - much like what the Heads of State committed themselves to at the Millennium Summit in 2000: the Millennium Development Goals.
In truth crime and corruption devalue whatever values we stood for during the liberation struggle. They are founded on selfishness, jealousy and cold, inhuman violence. Crime and corruption inveigh against our common humanity and dignity. We are a society devoid of any regard for human life and cynical in our regard for the rights of others.
I believe that the same can be said about racism and ethnicity. A society which by common consent was founded on racism cannot but be riddled with the cancer of racism. Determined steps must continue to be taken to analyse all forms of racism, undertake corrective measures, set systems in place to entrench equality and punish all traces of racist conduct and behaviour. Social cohesion remains a major deficit of our society today. We are as divided as ever along the lines of race, gender and poverty/wealth divides. Social cohesion must remain an overriding goal of our society at all levels.
Finally, Steve Biko continues to point us towards a vision of leadership that is as visionary and sacrificial as it is transformational. His relationship with colleagues and comrades was truly collegial. A larger than life figure he was always at one with those from whom he sourced ideas and his thinking. Steve was always able to discern the strengths and weaknesses of his teams and often guided colleagues according to their gifts.
Because of his affirming nature Biko virtually lived with many of us like brothers and sisters. He was deeply concerned about our well-being and shared with those in need. We cannot tell what kind of leader Steve might have turned out to be in the new South Africa. What is undeniable is that he nurtured a band of comrades, confident and articulate, who lived in dangerous times without fear. Steve Biko is a true model of his generation.
The 2007 Steve Biko Lecture to mark 30 years of the death of Black Consciousness leader Stephen Bantu Biko, was delivered in the Senate Hall, Unisa, Pretoria, on Wednesday 12 September 2007.
Copyright © 2007 allAfrica.com.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709130385.html
AllAfrica: World Agriculture
Faces Serious Decline from Global Warming
Center for Global Development (Washington, DC)
PRESS RELEASE
13 September 2007
World agriculture faces a serious decline within this century due to global warming unless emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are substantially reduced from their rising path, and developing countries will suffer much steeper declines than high-income countries, according to a new study by a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute.
Developing countries, many of which have average temperatures that are already near or above crop tolerance levels, are predicted to suffer an average 10 to 25 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s, assuming a so-called "business as usual" scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, according to the study. Rich countries, which typically have lower average temperatures, will experience a much milder or even positive average effect, ranging from an 8 percent increase in productivity to a 6 percent decline.
Individual developing countries face even larger declines. India, for example, could see a drop of 30 to 40 percent. Some smaller countries suffer what could only be described as an agricultural productivity collapse. Sudan, already wracked by civil war fueled in part by failing rains, is projected to suffer as much as a 56 percent reduction in agricultural production potential; Senegal, a 52 percent fall.
China, further from the equator than most developing countries, could escape major damage on average, although its south central region would be in jeopardy. The picture is similar in the United States, with projected reductions of 25 to 35 percent in the southeast and the southwestern plains but significant increases in the northern states.
Overall, agricultural productivity for the entire world is projected to decline from levels otherwise reached by between 3 and 16 percent by 2080s as a consequence of global warming. The damages would continue to deepen in the following century in the face of still greater warming.
The projections are the work of William Cline, a joint senior fellow at CGD and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Cline is a pioneer in the study of the economic impact of global warming, having published an early comprehensive study of the issue in 1992.
"Some analysts have suggested that a small amount of global warming could actually increase global agricultural productivity. My work shows that while productivity may increase in a minority of mostly northern countries, the global impact of climate change on agriculture will be negative by the second half of this century," Cline said.
"There might be some initial overall benefit to warming for a decade or two but—because future warming depends on greenhouse gas emissions today—if we delay action it would put global agriculture on an inexorable trajectory to serious damage," he added.
Cline's new book, Global Warming and Agriculture: Impact Estimates by Country, builds on climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's leading scientific body on the issue.
He has combined six of these climate models with other modeling techniques and statistical tools relating agricultural productivity to climate to produce the most comprehensive estimates available, applying a consistent methodology to more than 100 countries, regions, and sub-regions within the larger countries. Previous studies have provided regional estimates or country estimates for just a handful of countries. The book is published jointly by CGD and the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
"Bill's projections are sobering and alone they understate the potential problem," said Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development. "Governments and millions of poor people in developing countries have limited ability to cope with such changes. At least a billion people live in the poorest countries that are likely to be worst hit by this slow-moving crisis. This will be a serious problem for us all."
Cline said that the productivity losses could be even greater than he has calculated because of more insect pests, severe drought, and scarcity of water for irrigation, changes that are likely to accompany climate change but are not explicitly included in the models he used in the study.
The book's projections are based on changes in temperature and rainfall predicted in six of the most widely accepted climate models under the leading international scenario for rising greenhouse gas emissions. Cline combines these climate projections with crop models and "Ricardian" models to obtain estimates of the likely impact of global warming on agriculture. (Ricardian models link land price data to temperature and precipitation, as well as soil types and other variables.)
Uncertainity about Carbon Fertilization
Cline presents a range of estimates to reflect uncertainty about plant-growth benefits from an atmosphere richer in carbon dioxide. Because plants absorb carbon dioxide (C02) from the air in their growth process, scientists have suggested that as CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere rise, plant growth will increase.
This carbon fertilization effect has been demonstrated in laboratories, but recent open-air field experiments indicate smaller gains. The alternative set of estimates of less serious impacts in developing countries and slightly positive impacts in some rich countries assumes that there will be a substantial carbon fertilization effect. Cline says that although a carbon fertilization effect of the magnitude he uses (+15 percent by the 2080s) is plausible, it remains uncertain.
"I think it would be extremely risky to assume that carbon fertilization is the solution to this problem," Cline said.
Will Better Agricultural Technology Offset Climate Losses?
Another area of uncertainty in the estimates involves technology. Analysts sometimes argue that technological change in agriculture will boost yields so much by late this century that any losses to global warming would be easily managed.
But Cline shows that the pace of the green revolution has slowed, with annual global yield gains falling from 2.8 percent per year in the 1960s and 1970s to 1.6 percent in the past quarter century.
After considering increases in world food demand from higher population and incomes, and the likelihood of sizable diversion of agricultural land to production of bio-fuels instead of food, he argues that there will be a relatively tight race between global agricultural supply and demand by late in this century, with little room for damages from global warming.
"With additional investments in technology and adaptation, the effect of climate change on actual agricultural production could be reduced, but because these inputs raise the cost of production, prices would also rise," he said. Similarly, increased irrigation could help farmers cope with droughts and excessive heat, but water shortages and the high cost of irrigation systems mean it will not solve the problem, Cline said.
Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute, said that Cline's study "shows that although the two largest polluting countries, China and the United States, will not yet suffer overall agricultural losses by late this century, both will experience substantial internal regional losses that should persuade them to participate in action to avoid severe domestic dislocations."
Birdsall said that the study's findings will have important implications for the global policy debate about how to address climate change:
"Policymakers in rich countries and developing countries are only now beginning to understand that the impact of climate change will be profoundly unequal," Birdsall said. "These alarming new projections are yet another indication that people who are concerned about global poverty also need to be deeply concerned about global warming."
Copyright © 2007 Center for Global Development. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709130522.html
AlterNet:
Are You on the Government's 'No Fly' List?
By Naomi Wolf, Chelsea Green Publishing
Posted on September 13, 2007
The following excerpt is from Naomi Wolf's latest book, End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007) and is used by permission of the publisher. In this timely call to arms, Wolf compels us to face the way our freedoms are under assault, and that each of the ten classic steps used by dictators to close down open societies are underway in the United States today.
ARBITRARILY DETAIN and RELEASE CITIZENS
The Press Department of the Foreign Ministry judged that ... I was urging the "spread of counterrevolutionary developments in the GDR." Because of the role I was clearly playing "in the ideological war of imperialist media against the GDR" I should be placed on the list ... - Timothy Garton Ash
Protest has been lively in our nation throughout most of our history because being free means that you can't be detained arbitrarily. We have also felt free in the security of our homes, believing that the state can't break in and go through our possessions. All that is changing.
The List
In 2002, I began to notice that almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I was called aside by the Transportation Security Administration and given a more thorough search. When this was happening on nine flights out of ten, I asked the officials about the special search. They told me that the search was due to the quadruple "S" that routinely came up on my boarding pass. There are several reasons why one might receive a quadruple "S" on one's boarding pass if one doesn't fit a terrorist profile: buying a ticket at the last minute, for instance, or paying in cash. But those circumstances didn't apply to me. I kept asking, but not getting real answers.
This stepped-up search became so routine as I traveled that companions who were flying with me began to simply say, "I'll meet you at the gate," even before we got through the security line.
On yet another preboarding search, I asked yet again. The TSA agent searching me, a young woman, said pleasantly, "You're on the list."
"The list?" I asked. "What list?" Her supervisor abruptly ended our exchange, took over from her, and then moved me on.
Indeed, the TSA Administration does keep a "list." The American citizens on the list who do not fit a terrorist profile range from journalists and academics who have criticized the White House to activists and even political leaders who have also spoken out.
These TSA searches and releases would be trivial in a working democracy. In the 1960s, peace activists found it merely irksome to be trailed by FBI agents, and in the 1980s those who organized The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) on college campuses were even amused sometimes to find, on submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, that there was a file open on them. But once the first steps in a fascist shift are in place, being on "the list" is not really funny any more.
When you are physically detained by armed agents because of something that you said or wrote, it has an impact. On the one hand, during these heightened searches of my luggage, I knew I was a very small fish in a very big pond. On the other hand, you get it right away that the state is tracking your journeys, can redirect you physically, and can have armed men and women, who may or may not answer your questions, search and release you.
Our faith in nonarbitrary "safe" detention helps to make us Americans. When I was twenty, I joined a group of graduate students who traveled from Oxford to London to get arrested. We all went over to the American embassy: There we sat, self-consciously, on the chilly concrete steps, with our "U.S. OUT OF EL SALVADOR" banner unfurled on our knees. A police van arrived. Bored British police officers took us away. We were locked up for a few hours and then, of course, released.
"Silly season," one of the bobbies commented civilly as he signed the paperwork that let us go. I wasn't scared to speak out because I was in a democracy and the rule of law protected me.
That kind of experience of accountable detention and release is eroding in America. Activists are not being beaten. But they are being watched, and sometimes intimidatingly detained and released.
In America, people are not supposed to be detained because of their political beliefs. But Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy, the liberal senator from Massachusetts who is a thorn in the side of the Bush administration, was detained five times in East Coast airports in March, 2004. Democratic Congressman John Lewis of Georgia has also been subjected to extra security measures.
On September 21, 2004, U.S. security officials diverted to Bangor, Maine, a United Airlines flight from London to Washington D.C. On board was Usef Islam, once known as the singer Cat Stevens. Customs and Border Protection agents questioned him on "national security grounds." Most Americans associate Cat Stevens not with bomb-building in al-Qaeda training camps, but with slowdancing to "Wild World" in suburban rec rooms. Islam's detention helps "blur the line"- he is "one of us."
Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, American peace activists, tried to check in at the San Francisco airport for a trip to Boston in August 2002. Airport personnel who said that these middle-aged women were on the "master list" called the police and notified the FBI. At least twenty other peace activists are confirmed to be on the list: A 74-year-old Catholic nun who works for peace was detained in Milwaukee; Nancy Oden, a leader of the Green Party, was prevented from flying from Maine to Chicago.
Free speech advocates are on the list: King Downing of the ACLU was detained in the Boston airport in 2003. David Fathi, also of the ACLU, was detained as well. Scholars who defend the Constitution are on the list: in 2007, Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton, one of the nation's foremost Constitutional scholars, who had recently spoken critically of Bush's assault on the Constitution, was detained for being on a "watch list." A TSA official confirmed informally that it was probably because Murphy had criticized the President, and warned him that his luggage would be ransacked.
In 2005, "Evo Morales"- which is the name of the President of Bolivia, who has criticized Bush-appeared on the list, beside President Morales' birthdate. After Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, gave a speech at the United Nations criticizing Bush, Chavez's foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro, was detained at Kennedy Airport. When Maduro explained that he was Venezuela's foreign minister, he said that officers "threatened and shoved" him. According to President Chavez, the officers accused Maduro of participating in terrorist acts. The chilling effect from this last example could be profound: Any staffer of any foreign government or international regulatory body can be detained.
Now, there are tens of thousands of people on the list.
Where did the list come from? In 2003, President Bush had the intelligence agencies and the FBI create a "watch list" of people thought to have terrorist intentions or contacts. These agencies gave the list to the TSA and the commercial airlines. 60 Minutes got one copy of the list: It was 540 pages long. That list of people to be taken aside for extra screening had 75,000 names on it.
The more stringent "no-fly list" had 45,000 names; before 9/11 there were just 16 names. The list is so secret that even Congresspeople have been prevented from looking at it. People on the list endure searches that can last for hours. One American citizen, Robert Johnson, described "the humiliation factor" of being strip-searched: "I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal." Donna Bucella, who was at that time head of the FBI program that oversaw the list, told 60 Minutes, "Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list."
On December 6, 2006, Democrats in Congress tried to find out more about recent reports that the Department of Homeland Security "was using a scoring system" that rated the dangers posed by people crossing American borders. The Democrats were worried that these lists did not simply keep people from flying-they could keep them from getting jobs as well.
According to the New York Times, Vermont Senator Patrick J. Leahy said that "the program and broader government data-mining efforts could make it more difficult for innocent Americans to travel or to get a job - without giving them the chance to know why they were labeled a security risk." So now there is not just the anxiety that you might be detained-you could also, if you are on certain secret lists, be turned down for a job and never know why.
Being on the list can get also get some people detained and tortured - although they are innocent.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen, a software consultant, husband, and father - a North American yuppie. The United States detained Arar when he was changing planes at Kennedy Airport in 2002. He was "rendered" to Syria. Security forces there kept him in prison for over a year, beating him repeatedly with a heavy metal cable. The Canadian government pursued a two-year investigation and concluded that it had all been a terrible mistake - Arar actually had no ties to terrorists whatsoever. Canadians were so appalled by this miscarriage of justice that the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police resigned. After he was released with his government's help, Arar, emboldened perhaps by living in a working North American democracy, sued the U.S. government.
The Bush administration refused to concede that it had been wrong; refused to provide documents or witnesses to the Canadian investigators; and finally announced in January 2007 that they had "secret information" that justified keeping Arar on the list.
So Arar, a North American citizen like you or me, has to live in fear, perhaps for the rest of his life (his CCR lawyer says he suffers from post-traumatic stress): Arar turns down offers to receive honors overseas, for whenever he travels - if he dares to - over borders, he fears being taken off the plane or train, shipped to another country and subjected to torture again.
Making it more difficult for people out of favor with the state to travel back and forth across borders is a classic part of the fascist playbook. As Nazi Germany closed down, borders tightened and families fleeing internment were traumatized by the uncertainties that they knew they faced at the borders. When reporter Timothy Garton Ash published essays that offended the Stasi, he was forbidden to re-enter the GDR. The United States has recently been refusing visas to various respected Muslim scholars from universities such as Oxford - scholars with no ties whatsoever to terrorists - because they have been critical of U.S. policy. This has happened before in America: in the 1950s the FBI confiscated the passports of intellectuals and journalists who had been critical of anticommunist witch hunts.
William Shirer described the tension of airport searches of suspect individuals - reporters - in Berlin in 1938:
Hans Kaltenborn, our star foreign news commentator, was turned back by the secret police when he arrived at Tempelhof [airport] from London this afternoon. ... I became suspicious when the passport officials continued to hold him after all the other passengers had been cleared. ... [Kaltenborn's] German relatives, who were exposing themselves to possible arrest by merely being there, remained bravely at the rail. I finally complained to a Gestapo man about keeping us standing so long. ... [A] Gestapo officer came up and announced that Hans would be taking the six o'clock plane back to London.
"Why, he's just come from there," I spoke up.
"And he's returning there now," the officer said.
"May I ask why?" Hans said, boiling inside but cool outside, though beads of sweat bubbled out on his forehead.
The officer had a ready answer: Looking in his notebook, he said with tremendous seriousness: "Herr Kaltenborn, on such and such a date in Oklahoma City, you made a speech insulting the Furhrer."
"Let me see the text of that, please," Hans spoke up. But you do not argue with the Gestapo. ... Hans was hustled out. ... Then he disappeared.
Are the cases we hear of Americans being caught up in detention, searches, and releases merely Homeland Security or TSA zealotry? Or are the stories effective PR about a new reality? Fascist propagandists target individuals, detain and release them, and then publicize the stories. Could all these - Bensman the fish defender and Cat Stevens the balladeer and the little elderly nun and the lady peace activists - be victims not of simple clumsiness but, rather, examples of the fact that perfectly ordinary Americans can now get entangled in the increasingly punitive apparatus of the state?
Could what happened to Maher Arar happen to a U.S. citizen? Chaplain James Yee was arrested and investigated on suspicion of "espionage and possibly treason" on September 10, 2003. It is not widely reported that he had also spoken up on behalf of better treatment for the detainees in Guantánamo. Military officials claimed that Yee had classified documents that included diagrams of cells at Guantánamo and lists of detainees. He was also said to have "ties to [radical Muslims in the U.S.]."
Chaplain Yee was taken to a navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and interrogated. He was blindfolded; his ears were blocked; he was manacled and then put into solitary confinement for seventy-six days; forbidden mail, television, or anything to read except the Koran. His family was not allowed to visit him. He was demonized on TV, radio, and the Internet and accused of being an operative in "a supposed spy ring that aimed to pass secrets to al- Qaeda from suspected terrorists held at Guantánamo. ... Court papers said he would be charged with espionage, spying, aiding the enemy, mutiny or sedition, and disobeying an order." Chaplain Yee, born in New Jersey and raised a Lutheran before he converted to Islam, was baffled at the accusations. His lawyers were told he could face execution.Within six months, the U.S. government had dropped all criminal charges against Yee. But the government said it did so to avoid making its sensitive evidence public, not because Yee is innocent.
Yee was released - but charged with what looked like punitive "Mickey Mouse" charges: "adultery, lying to investigators and two counts of downloading porn." In the presence of his humiliated wife and his four-year-old daughter, military prosecutors compelled Navy Lt . Karyn Wallace to testify about their extramarital affair. The military rarely prosecutes adultery. The government never presented the evidence on which it based its first accusations against Yee. But after Yee was set free, he was placed "under a new Army order not to talk about his ordeal in any way that might be seen as critical to the military." If he says anything negative about what happened to him, he faces further prosecution.
(In 2007, Lieutenant Colonel William H. Steele, who like Chaplain Yee has spoken up for a more humane situation for the detainees, would also find himself accused of "aiding the enemy," for various charges, and facing possible execution.)
So in Yee's case a United States citizen innocent of the initial charges was kept in solitary confinement, this time for 76 days. His name was destroyed, his family humiliated-and he can't talk about it or he will be arrested again.
On July 24, 2006, Chaplain Yee said he had been detained once again, this time at the Canadian border as he was trying to come home after a trip to Vancouver to see a performance. Yee was questioned for two hours. You can imagine how that "Come with us" might have felt.
In Germany, by 1933, arbitrary arrest and release was common. On November, 27, 1938, two police officers came to Victor Klemperer's house to search for weapons. As they ransacked the possessions of the two middle-aged German Jews, Mrs. Klemperer made the mistake of asking them not to go through the linen cupboard with unwashed hands. Professor Klemperer was taken into custody and released: "[A]t four o'clock I was on the street with the curious feeling, free-but for how long?" (In 1941, Klemperer would spend eight days in prison for forgetting to close the curtains on his windows for the blackout.)
The charges against those taken into custody and then released were often vague and uncontestable. In a survey of German citizens who had lived through that era, 36 percent reported having been arrested, questioned, and released. A well-known Cologne priest who was outspoken about the Nazis was arrested and released repeatedly. As the 1930s progressed hundreds of thousands of German citizens were arbitrarily detained and released. General Pinochet used this tactic too: Every so often the military would enter a slum, arrest people in random sweeps, keep them behind bars briefly, and then let them go. The only real reason was to intimidate the population.
Naomi Wolf is the author of 'The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot' (Chelsea Green, 2007).
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/62407/
Arab News:
Controversial Subjects and Censorship
Abeer Mishkhas, abeermishkhas@arabnews.com
Thursday, 13, September, 2007 (01, Ramadhan, 1428)
IT IS the season again and our TV channels have filled their schedules with various series and programs made especially for Ramadan. The month of fasting has, in the last few years, become known for its TV shows as well. It has also been the occasion for trouble in some cases, especially for those films which deal with political and social problems. Such controversial programs invariably excite some viewers and almost always the censors, both self-appointed and official.
We all remember the case of the popular but unfinished series, “The Road to Kabul.” It dealt with terrorism and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan but was prematurely stopped because of alleged threats to the actors and producers. Sadly, whatever the viewers thought, the series was terminated and that was simply that. It was instructive to hear the kinds of arguments that erupted at the time, between those who approved and those who condemned anything that tried to explore the roots of terrorism and our role in the phenomenon.
There were other series which faced a similar uproar — one Egyptian series dealt with relations between Christians and Muslims and it was taken off the air after it started even though it was based on a popular novel which was readily available in the market. Last year another series — “Al Hoor Al Ein” — which concerned the mujahedeen was condemned but not banned, and the severe criticism that it faced was relentless in attacking both the work and those who worked in and on it.
That campaign was unfortunately not the first nor will it be the last. We have one example very close to home of how ugly one-sided arguments can get. “Tash ma Tash,” the Saudi sitcom which has become a much-anticipated part of Ramadan, draws severe criticism every year. The criticism does not limit itself to newspapers, websites and social gatherings: It has been exported to mosques and, as many of us remember, one of the sitcom’s actors actually heard himself severely insults when he was in a mosque with his father. Not only that, the actors last year actually received death threats because they “mock Saudi society and scholars.” Such a charge is unfounded as the work has proved over the years that it is the most popular program on Saudi TV. In addition, its relentless and brave portrayal of social problems made it a must-see for most people.
In order to enjoy more freedom, the show has now moved to a satellite channel from Saudi Television’s Channel 1. People who watched it last year could not stop exclaiming over some of the episodes such as the one about segregation in which a city for women only was created in order to prevent the mixing of men and women.
The channel that hosted the show last year, the Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), has been somewhat of a disappointment this year. It will carry “Tash ma Tash” this Ramadan but it announced a few days ago that it was suspending a Saudi-Kuwaiti series that dealt with temporary marriages, including Shiite ones. The suspension followed some very heated criticism from a few Shiite Kuwaitis and then an actual physical attack on the channel’s offices in the country. The channel said that it was not continuing with the show because it did not wish to cause problems between religious sects.
One step back! But not the only one for the season; another channel, the Lebanese LBC, announced the suspension of another Saudi series dealing with women. The series, called “Mousa’s Sisters,” drew its inspiration from 100 actual stories about rape, kidnapping, family disputes and homosexuality. A source at the channel told the Al-Arabiya website that some of those subjects were considered “unspeakable” in Saudi Arabia and therefore any public discussion or dramatic rendition of them was bound to meet fierce opposition. That much we know, but we have to wonder — at a time when our newspapers are covering such stories extensively and when a government body has been formed to deal with crimes of incest and other family problems — if it is acceptable for a TV show dealing with these problems to be stopped before even one episode had been seen by the public.
If intimidation is that strong and TV stations cannot face it or find enough support to keep exposing the ills we suffer from, we have to hope that those who support these works have louder voices. But as it happens, the voices of censorship and the advocates of banning are always louder and stronger. Which leads us to wonder if moderates have a chance or rather if they have a voice that could win, even once?
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=101141&d=13&m=9&y=2007
Guardian:
Iraq bomb attack kills key US ally
Mark Tran and agencies
Thursday September 13, 2007
A key figure in the US-backed revolt of Iraqi Sunni leaders against al-Qaida was killed by a bomb today, hours before George Bush was due to defend his war strategy.
The White House suffered the setback when a roadside bomb killed Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha and two of his bodyguards near the tribal leader's home in Ramadi, Anbar's provincial capital.
Abu Risha was killed 10 days after meeting Mr Bush during his surprise visit to Iraq. He led the Anbar Salvation Council, an alliance of clans that turned against al-Qaida and went over to the Iraqi government and the US military.
US officials have described the rift between Sunni tribes and al-Qaida in Anbar province, in western Iraq, as one of the most significant developments of the war.
From 2003 until last year, Anbar was the heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the most dangerous part of Iraq.
Al-Qaida once controlled large swathes of the province, but angered local tribal leaders with its indiscriminate killing of civilians and harsh interpretation of Islam.
Pentagon officials said the assassination would be a huge blow to US efforts in Iraq because it would send a message to others cooperating with US-led forces or thinking about cooperating against al-Qaida.
During a visit to the al-Asad air base this month, Mr Bush hailed Abu Risha and others "who have made a decision to reject violence and murder in return for moderation and peace".
The latest setback to the US military effort came just hours before Mr Bush was due to make hs latest appeal for patience to the US public.
In a 15-minute speech, he is expected to ask the American public for more time for his strategy to work and cite the threat from Iran as a reason for a heavy US troop presence in Iraq.
While pointing to what he sees as progress on security, he will insist that any troop reductions will depend on continued improvement. Underscoring the importance of Mr Bush's televised address, the White House said it had gone through more than 20 drafts.
Without the votes to push for a timetable for withdrawal, congressional Democrats are expected to focus on efforts to change the emphasis of the US military in Iraq from combat to training.
However, they appear resigned to the fact that Mr Bush will keep a large number of troops in Iraq for the rest of his presidency.
Mr Bush's speech comes after two days of congressional testimony from Genreal David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, and the ambassador, Ryan Crocker.
Gen Petraeus recommended a withdrawal of 30,000 troops by next summer, bringing troop numbers back to 130,000 - the same level as before the "surge" began in February.
Mr Bush is expected to accept that recommendation while maintaining a hard line on Iran. Gen Petraeus said a further decision on troop levels would have to wait until next March.
A US general today accused Shia militants backed by Iran of executing a deadly rocket attack on a US military headquarters in Iraq.
One person was killed and a dozen injured in the incident, which happened when a 240mm rocket hit Camp Victory, a sprawling base near Baghdad international airport, two days ago.
The US claims such rockets are supplied to Shia extremists by Tehran.
Major General Kevin Bergner said the rocket was launched from the Rasheed district of west Baghdad, which he said had been infiltrated by the Mahdi army militia of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
"The attack used a 240mm rocket, which is a weapon that these groups have received from Iranian sources in the past and recently used in other attacks against coalition forces," Gen Bergner told a news conference in Baghdad.
As part of its campaign against Iran, the US is starting a drive for a third round of sanctions against the country.
Iran has emerged as an increasingly important rationale for the US to maintain a significant presence in Iraq. Mr Crocker told the Washington Post that Iran now had a "fairly aggressive strategy" on the ground in the country.
He said Tehran's increased support of extremist militias contributed to the near unravelling of Iraq last year, adding that it was now trying to create a force like Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed Shia force in Lebanon, to advance its long-term interests in Iraq.
In a briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, Gen Petraeus said arms supplies from Iran, including 240mm rockets and explosive devices, "contributed to a sophistication of attacks that would by no means be possible without Iranian support ... the evidence is very, very clear".
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2168318,00.html
Jeune Afrique: Le gouvernement
se mobilise pour combattre l'épidémie d'Ebola
RD CONGO - 12 septembre 2007 - par AFP
Le gouvernement de la République démocratique du Congo (RDC) et ses partenaires se mobilisent pour combattre la fièvre virale hémorragique Ebola qui a déjà fait plus de 160 morts au Kasaï occidental (centre) en plus de quatre mois.
Le foyer de cette maladie - qui n'a ni traitement spécifique ni vaccin - a été localisé à Kampungu, à près de 300 km à l'ouest de Kananga, chef-lieu du Kasaï occidental.
Le virus, identifié par plusieurs laboratoires internationaux, a fait en quatre mois dans la région 166 morts parmi les 372 personnes contaminées, selon le ministre congolais de la Santé.
Une délégation des autorités congolaises dirigée par le ministre de la Santé, Victor Makwenge Kaput, s'est rendue mercredi à Kananga. Elle était composée notamment d'une importante équipe médicale de l'Organisation mondiale de la Santé (OMS) ainsi que d'épidémiologistes congolais.
Des médicaments et du matériel de protection donnés par l'OMS ont été remis aux autorités sanitaires de la région pour être acheminés dans les zones contaminées. D'autres ONG, comme Médecins sans frontières, sont sur place pour tenter de contenir l'épidémie.
"Nous avons fait avec les autorités une évaluation globale de la situation en vue d'établir les besoins", a déclaré à l'AFP le ministre provincial de la Santé du Kasaï occidental, Fortunat Ntumba Tshitoka.
La mise en quarantaine de la région est exclue et "seuls les malades sont isolés et le personnel soignant soumis à des règles strictes d'hygiène", a expliqué M. Ntumba, ajoutant que "seules des écoles des zones affectées par le virus ont été fermées".
La maladie a frappé le pays pour la première fois en 1976, dans une localité de la province de l'Equateur (nord-ouest). Sur les 318 personnes infectées, 200 sont mortes, selon les chiffres de l'OMS. Une deuxième épidémie, qui s'était déclarée en 1995 dans le Bandundu (sud-ouest), avait touché 315 personnes dont 250 sont décédées.
Le virus tient son nom d'une rivière du nord-ouest de la RDC où il a été repéré pour la première fois en 1976. Il avait tué près de 500 personnes de part et d'autre de la frontière entre le Soudan et l'ex-Zaïre (devenu depuis la RDC). Il a réémergé en 1979 au Soudan, puis à nouveau au Zaïre en 1995, où il avait fait 245 morts.
Dans l'ensemble de l'Afrique, la maladie a touché 1.850 personnes et fait 1.200 morts depuis 1976. Très virulent, le virus entre 60% à 90% des malades.
Le réservoir du virus serait constitué par des chauves-souris mangeuses de fruits, au contact desquelles se contamineraient les grands singes frugivores, selon une étude de l'Institut de recherche pour le Développement (IRD, France) publiée en 2005 dans la revue scientifique britannique Nature.
A Genève, l'OMS a confirmé mercredi la présence de la dysenterie infectieuse de Shigella dans le centre de la RDC, où sévit déjà une épidémie Ebola.
Des analyses en laboratoire ont confirmé la présence de la maladie de Shigella dysenteriae type 1 parmi les 372 cas suspects découverts dans la région du Kasaï occidental depuis quatre mois, a déclaré à l'AFP la porte-parole de l'OMS à Genève, Fadéla Chaïb.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP31827legoualobed0
Mail & Guardian:
Ethiopia's Ogaden rebels warn of 'African genocide'
Bogonko Bosire | Nairobi, Kenya
13 September 2007
Ethiopian rebels on Thursday urged the world to bring an end to an army crackdown in the restive Ogaden region, warning that another "African genocide" was unfolding.
The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) said thousands of displaced civilians had fled to neighbouring Somalia without food and medicine over the past four months.
"We call on donor nations to bear pressure on the Ethiopian regime to end its brutal campaign against our civilian population and allow international journalists and humanitarian organisations to travel and operate freely in Ogaden," the ONLF said in a statement.
"The United Nations bears a particular responsibility to thoroughly investigate war crimes in Ogaden and halt the unfolding of yet another preventable African genocide."
The Ethiopian government rejected the allegations, saying it had "never launched any campaign against civilians in Ogaden".
"These allegations are a calculated diversion tactic by the terrorists," said Bereket Simon, an adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. "[The] ONLF is a terrorist organisation. The fight against terrorism will continue, but [it] has never undermined the rights of the people."
The Ethiopian military launched a crackdown on the region, which is about the same size as Britain and has a population of about four million, following an attack by the ONLF rebel group against a Chinese oil venture in April that left 77 people dead.
"It is clear that the Ethiopian regime's policy in Ogaden continues to be a campaign of state-sponsored terror that largely avoids engagements with ONLF forces and instead focuses on collectively punishing our civilian population," the rebel statement added.
UN humanitarian chief John Holmes last week denounced Addis Ababa's decision to expel two global charities - Médecins sans Frontières and the International Committee for the Red Cross - from the area for allegedly meddling in politics.
The United States top diplomat to Africa, Jendayi Frazer, also told Addis Ababa to minimise civilian casualties during the crackdown.
Human rights groups have accused the government of imposing an economic blockage on the region, which has suffered from recurrent bouts of flooding and drought.
The ONLF also called on the UN to deliver humanitarian supplies to fleeing civilians, some from razed villages and a number of whom are victims of rape, torture and gunshot wounds.
Many have arrived in the northern Somali town of Bosaso in a bid to take perilous boat rides to Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the group said.
"To do this, the United Nations must have access to all parts of Ogaden and not be limited to routes approved by the regime as was the case with the recent UN fact-finding mission. These fleeing civilians provide the best testimony of the policy of collective punishment being pursued by the Ethiopian regime in Ogaden.
"The plight of these families shows the world that despite the regime's denials, war crimes continue in Ogaden," the rebels said.
Predominantly barren, the Ogaden has long been extremely poor, but in recent years the discovery of gas and oil has brought both hopes of wealth and new causes of conflict. Insurgent activities have scuppered efforts to carry out conclusive explorations.
Ethiopian authorities have accused arch-rival Eritrea of supporting the Ogaden separatists. The Eritreans have denied the accusation.
Formed in 1984, the ONLF is fighting for the independence of ethnic Somalis in Ogaden, who they say have been marginalised by Addis Ababa.
Sapa-AFP
http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/
breaking_news__africa/&articleid=319133
Mother Jones:
Meet Viktor Bout, the Real-Life 'Lord of War'
Journalist Douglas Farah, co-author of a new book on Viktor Bout, tells how the Tajik-born arms dealer forged a lucrative career skirting U.N. embargoes to sell weapons and air transport services to warlords and despots—not to mention the U.S. military and its contractors in Iraq.
Laura Rozen
September 13 , 2007
Former Soviet military officer Viktor Bout, the inspiration for Nicholas Cage's character in the Lord of War, remade himself as an international arms dealer and blood diamonds trafficker following the break-up of the USSR. Using his air charter business to smuggle weapons into the world's conflict zones (circumventing U.N. embargoes), Bout traveled the world with a precious gems expert and accountant in tow, supplying arms to a notorious clientele: Liberia's Charles Taylor, a cast of Congolese warlords, and the Taliban, among others. More surprising, journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun report in their new book on Bout, Merchant of Death, is that the shadowy Tajik-born arms dealer has also provided his services to the U.S. military and several U.S. contractors in Iraq, including Halliburton parent company Kellogg, Brown & Root. Laura Rozen interviewed Farah via email.
Mother Jones: How did Viktor Bout get his start as an international supplier of arms, ammunition, and transport services?
Douglas Farah: Viktor Bout was a unique creature born of the end of Communism and the rise of unbridled capitalism when the Wall came down in the early 1990s. He was a Soviet officer, most likely a lieutenant, who simply saw the opportunities presented by three factors that came with the collapse of the USSR and the state sponsorship that entailed: abandoned aircraft on the runways from Moscow to Kiev, no longer able to fly because of lack of money for fuel or maintenance; huge stores of surplus weapons that were guarded by guards suddenly receiving little or no salary; and the booming demand for those weapons from traditional Soviet clients and newly emerging armed groups from Africa to the Philippines. He simply wedded the three things, taking aircraft for almost nothing, filling them with cheaply purchased weapons from the arsenals, and flying them to clients who could pay. His background is difficult to ascertain. He is said by U.S. intelligence officials to be the product of an "immaculate conception." He was not, and then he was. He has provided no stories of his youth, very few personal details. He was, according to his multiple passports, born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the son of a bookkeeper and an auto mechanic. He graduated from the Military Institute on Foreign Languages, a well-known feeder school for Russian military intelligence, and is known to have a true gift for languages.
MJ: What is the evidence of a relationship between Bout and Russian military intelligence, the GRU?
DF: It is highly unlikely he could have flown aircraft out of Russia and acquired huge amounts of weapons from Soviet arsenals without the direct protection of Russian intelligence, and, given his background, the GRU seems the most likely candidate. He was providing not solely AK-47s and massive amounts of ammunition, as his competitors were, but attack helicopters, anti-aircraft systems, anti-tank mine systems, sniper rifles, and items that are much harder to acquire. The clearest, most recent direct tie came through an obscure investigation in the United States carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Last year the ATF was investigating sales of $240,000 worth of night vision scopes and paramilitary gear from a small sporting goods store in Pennsylvania, and discovered that the items had been illegally shipped to a company that is controlled by an elite Russian intelligence counterterrorism group. The money was paid through a Bulgarian holding company controlled by Bout.
MJ: Your reporting indicates that Bout has supplied not only the Taliban, Liberia's Charles Taylor, and Congolese warlords, but the U.S. Army and its contractors as well. Can you describe how the U.S. government and U.S. contractors have responded to revelations about who they are doing business with?
DF: The U.S. government response to revelations of the use of Viktor Bout to fly for government contractors in Iraq (not just a few flights, but hundreds, and perhaps a thousand) has been mixed. Bear in mind most of these flights occurred after President Bush had signed an executive order making it illegal to do business with Bout, because he represented a security threat to the United States. The State Department, under a congressional inquiry initiated by Senator Russell Feingold, found it had used Bout companies, acknowledged it, and stopped. Paul Wolfowitz, while at DOD, did not respond to queries for nine months, then acknowledged that DOD contractors had subcontracted to Bout companies. Despite the public revelation, the congressional inquiry, the executive order, and a subsequent Treasury Department order freezing the assets of Bout and his closest associates, the flights continued for many months, at least until the end of 2005. The Air Force cut him off immediately, but other branches of the military continued to use him.
MJ: Any evidence that Bout is authorized by governments to play this murky role because he is as useful as he is dangerous?
DF: Bout, through an intermediary, approached the CIA and FBI immediately after 9/11, and offered his services in helping to oust the Taliban if he were paid tens of millions of dollars for his efforts. Negotiations were serious and lasted several months, but we do not know what, if any, parts of the deal he offered were accepted. There is no doubt he has benefited from the schizophrenic policies of the U.S. government (the Treasury and State departments going after him, while DOD pays him money to fly), but it is difficult to say whether that is the result of calculation or just sloppiness.
MJ: Is he actually under indictment anywhere?
DF: There is an Interpol Red Notice on Bout issued in 2002 requiring his arrest, requested by the Belgians for money laundering. The Russians have not honored it.
MJ: Where does he reside and how easily does he move around? What countries' passports does he travel on?
DF: He resides in Moscow and travels abroad with some frequency, despite being on a U.N.-sanctioned travel-ban list. He has had five different passports we know of, all from the USSR or Russia, but there could be more.
MJ: What does it mean that he can operate through a string of front companies so successfully?
DF: Bout's ability to continue to function shows primarily that the post-Cold War, state-centric view of the world and transnational threats has been rapidly and totally outstripped by the rapidly changing world. Intelligence services and law enforcement agencies are operating in the 20th century, while Bout and those like him are operating in the 21st. With the ability to register aircraft on line, move money electronically in the blink of an eye, and set up proxy shell companies around the world, he will remain far ahead of efforts to stop him unless he gets sloppy.
MJ: What does it say about the larger system, which does not rein him in?
DF: Bout's operations tell us that demand for important commodities, particularly weapons, is at a premium. He could arm different sides of the same conflicts because he was efficient and reliable. That is why they called him "the mailman," because he always delivered. With the rapid proliferation of failed and failing states across the globe and the rise of religious and economic militias, guns have become a vital commodity. One of the biggest dangers is that, given Bout's network, access, and capabilities, is that he would be ideally situated to move nuclear material or other highly dangerous weapons or components that could inflict huge damage.
MJ: You mentioned that Bout was supplying Hezbollah, presumably with authorization from the Russian government. Do you believe this indicates a kind of proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in Lebanon via Israel and Hezbollah, or that it is just a reflection of Russian defense manufacturers seeking a profit outlet for their supplies?
DF: I think it is both. Russia has long had an interest in Hezbollah and has given the group support, which it continues to do. It is clear from the large stockpiles of new armor-piercing Russian missiles that Hezbollah used last year. But such activities both project Russian power, at a time when the Putin government is desperate to project Russian power across the world, as well as provide outlets for the sale of Russian weapons.
MJ: What is the difference between the gray arms market and the black market?
DF: It is important to note, as we do in the book, that much of what Viktor Bout does is, while reprehensible, not illegal. For example, it violates international norms to break U.N. weapons sanctions on a given country, but there is no penalty attached to those violating the sanctions regime. What specific crime was committed in what country? If a weapons merchant uses a forged End User Certificate to purchase weapons, should the country selling the weapons be penalized, should the merchant be punished, or should the country of the forgery be pursued? The answer, of course, is none of the above. No one is penalized, although the law was broken numerous places. This is the grey market, where one may know the weapons are destined for Liberia, but the EUC says it is for Rwanda, and the Bulgarian company selling the weapons, while knowing the EUC is likely a forgery, proceeds with the sale anyway. The black market is selling weapons in a clearly illegal and punishable way.
MJ: What's been the reaction in U.S. government circles to your book? Is there more U.S. and international resolve to constrain Bout, or the same half measures?
DF: There has been no official reaction. Treasury and those who went after Bout are happy; there are some in the Pentagon who are chagrined. The embarrassment factor for dealing with Bout is pretty high now, at least in the U.S., and there are greater efforts to make sure he is not paid with U.S. taxpayer dollars. But no pressure has been brought to bear on Russia to turn him over or rein him in, and, like the United States, much of the rest of the world wants to pretend he doesn't exist.
Laura Rozen is the National Security Correspondent for Mother Jones.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2007/09/viktor-bout.html
Página/12:
Un hombre solo
Por Rodrigo Fresán
desde Barcelona
Jueves, 13 de Septiembre de 2007
UNO Un hombre solo es, a veces, un solo hombre. Un hombre único. Alguien que se ha ganado con esfuerzo la admirada o temida soledad de empezar y terminar en sí mismo. No es fácil, tiene sus riesgos, a mucha gente le molesta mucho, pero muy de tanto en tanto la cosa sale bien.
Escribo esto –y lo escribo rápido, casi en piloto automático, en trance; en realidad lo escribí hace unos meses, en enero creo– recién llegado de ver Inland Empire, la nueva ¿película? de David Lynch.
Tres horas que se pasan como cinco minutos o se arrastran como una eternidad según el humor en que uno de encuentre. Y el humor de uno cambia varias, demasiadas, veces mientras se contempla Inland Empire. Y, después, Inland Empire deja un regusto de temor irracional y así uno vuelve casi corriendo a casa con los ojos casi cerrados y un poco rotos por la sobreexposición a tanto video digital de bajísima resolución cortesía de una manuable cámara Sony PD-150 igual a la que cualquiera utiliza para registrar esos bautismos y bodas y funerales y postales turísticas de Maradona en Colombia, donde todos cantan aullando como si se hubieran perdido o encontrado en una escena de Inland Empire.
Y uno escribe rápido ideas lentas porque teme, con razón, que el efecto de Inland Empire sea similar al de un sueño que se vaya disolviendo en la memoria como un Alka-Seltzer y que al final deje un murmullo de burbujas que no se entiende del todo cómo es que llegaron allí.
Decir que Inland Empire no se parece a nada sería fácil porque Inland Empire se parece mucho a uno de esos films de David Lynch que no se parecen a ningún film que no sea de David Lynch. Pero también puede afirmarse sin dudarlo –y no es una redundancia– que Inland Empire es el film más David Lynch de David Lynch. Es decir: han sido advertidos y abandonad toda esperanza quienes entren en él. Inland Empire es, también, la hermana siamesa y deforme de la –ahora lo/la comprendemos– mucho más normalita Mulholland Drive pero, como ésta, una nueva pero mucho más bizarra aproximación al concepto de cine-dentro-de-cine. Y si Mulholland Drive podía ser decodificada como las alucinaciones paradisíacas y el infierno terreno de una rubia llegada a Hollywood en busca del estrellato (Naomi Watts) para acabar estrellándose, entonces Inland Empire tal vez, quizá, quién sabe, puede entenderse como su contracara y negativo: otra rubia, Laura Dern (actuación que quita el aliento o devuelve alaridos, según lo que prefieran, y en la que, por supuesto, llora como sólo ella sabe llorar: Laura Dern es al llanto lo que David Lynch es al cine) es aquí una actriz reconocida que se arriesga a filmar una nueva versión de un viejo film maldito e inconcluso que, en esta nueva encarnación, parece algo así como una pesadilla de Douglas Sirk. Y, por supuesto, algo pasa. Y, ah, en la televisión pasan un programa con unos conejos parlantes con cuerpo de hombre y risas grabadas al fondo. Y de golpe estamos en algún sitio de Europa Central y sin aviso unas prostitutas comienzan a danzar. Y una mendiga oriental no para de hablar de un mono en Pomona y...
DOS ...hasta ahora había muchos libros sobre David Lynch y ensayos antológicos sobre David Lynch (firmados por gente como David Foster Wallace y Slavoj Zizek) y recopilaciones de entrevistas a David Lynch (Lynch on Lynch) y la muy útil guía The Complete David Lynch, de David Hughes. Pero faltaba un libro sobre David Lynch por David Lynch y aquí llega el indispensable Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (que publicará Mondadori en el 2008) donde El Mismísimo revela (a su manera, claro) las claves de su creatividad y el modo en que funciona su muy particular mente. En lo que hace a Inland Empire, Lynch explica que todo surgió de un monólogo de catorce páginas a pedido de Laura Dern para ver qué pasaba. Y algo pasó. Y esta especie de manual de autoayuda que sólo le funciona a él pero que fascinará tanto a sus seguidores –dedicado a “Su Santidad Maharishi Mahesh Yoghi”– arranca con un “Las ideas son como peces” y sale de pesca confesando, otra vez, a su manera, cómo y por qué y dónde pescó David Lynch y cuál fue la caña y carnada utilizadas para hacerles morder el anzuelo a las ideas que originaron cada uno de sus proyectos. La palabra con la que Lynch cierra su libro es “Paz” y, claro, uno se pregunta qué será la paz para este solitario rey pescador.
TRES Y cabe la posibilidad –al menos así era hasta hace poco– de preguntárselo en su site. Preguntarle lo que uno quiera y tal vez responde y yo el otro día estuve tentado de preguntarle si no le parecía que Wes Anderson –otro solitario, acaso la contraparte angelical de Lynch– era el candidato ideal para filmar el On the Road de Jack Kerouac con Ben Stiller como Paradise/Kerouac y Owen Wilson como Cassady/Moriarty Y hay tantas cosas ahí... Episodios de proyectos televisivos de Mr. Lynch, series como Rabbits (los conejitos de Inland Empire) creadas para ver on-line, galería de arte, y acaso lo más interesante de todo: el apartado Interesting Questions donde es nuestro maestro de ceremonias quien deja de tanto en tanto caer preguntas para ser respondidas por la concurrencia. Ejemplo: “¿Si dos casitas para perros se incendian y sus respectivos perros se mueren, ¿debería uno prenderle fuego a una tercera casita?” Mientras se lo piensan –más información en http://www.davidlynch.com– tómense un café. Un café marca David Lynch. Orgánico, por supuesto. Y después métanse en el cine más cercano para que así Inland Empire se meta dentro de ustedes. Y ya no salga.
CUATRO Porque, sí, desde su site David Lynch te vende su propia marca de café (la droga del pescador, en su libro el director dice que no se droga porque “las drogas dañan el sistema nervioso” y porque “existen experiencias más profundas y naturales disponibles”) con el slogan “Todo está en los granos, y yo estoy lleno de granos”. Y, para ir cerrando todo esto, una advertencia que, seguro, ya conocen. David Lynch es cafeína pura. David Lynch excita. David Lynch crea adicción. Pero también es cierto que David Lynch hay uno solo y que su influencia –como ocurre con el influjo de muchos de los muy pocos verdaderamente grandes– suele resultar incómoda cuando no funesta y generar productos más bien descafeinados. Por ejemplo: Alias ha sabido ser davidlynchiana sin caer en el absurdo. Millennium supo sacar provecho a sus enseñanzas mientras que X-Files reprobó el último examen. Carnivale (que le robó hasta a su enano) resultó una tontería y Donnie Darko una sorpresa. Lost, mientras tanto, ya no sabe cómo salir de ese ridículo laberinto para poder encontrarse a sí misma.
Y es que resulta arriesgado intentar caminar junto a su fuego. Así que, mejor, ya saben, recuerden Twin Peaks: café y donuts y dejar que David Lynch –definido justicieramente por Mel Brooks como “un James Stewart venido de Marte”– siga haciendo de las suyas.
Esas cosas únicas que él hace.
Solo y a solas.
Pescando.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar| Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-91298-2007-09-13.html
The Independent:
Al-Jazeera man 'close to death' at Guantanamo Bay
By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Published: 13 September 2007
An al-Jazeera journalist captured in Afghanistan six years ago and sent to Guantanamo Bay is close to becoming the fifth detainee at the US naval base to take his own life, according to a medical report written by a team of British and American psychiatrists
Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese national, is 250 days into a hunger strike which he began in protest over his detention without charge or trial in January 2002. But British and American doctors, who have been given exclusive access to his interview notes, say there is very strong evidence that he has given up his fight for life, experiencing what doctors recognise as "passive suicide", a condition suffered by female victims of Darfur.
Dr Dan Creson, a US psychiatrist who has worked with the United Nations in Darfur, said Mr Haj was suffering from severe depression and may be deteriorating to the point of imminent death.
He said the detainee's condition was similar to that of Darfuri women in Sudan whose mind suddenly experiences an irreversible decline after enduring months of starvation and abuse. He said: "In the midst of rape, slow starvation, and abject humiliation, they did whatever they could to survive and save their children; then, suddenly, something happened in their psyche, and, without warning, they would just sit down with their small children beneath the first small area of available shade and with no apparent emotion wait for death."
In June this year a Saudi man became the fourth prisoner to take his own life at Guantanamo Bay. Guards found him dead in his cell. Two Saudis and a Yemeni prisoner were found hanged in an apparent suicide at Guantanamo in June last year. A senior US officer caused outrage at the time by describing the suicides of three men as an act of asymmetric warfare and a good PR move on the part of terrorist suspects.
Mr Haj, 38, was sent on assignment by al-Jazeera television station to cover the war in Afghanistan in October 2001. The following month, after the fall of Kabul, Mr Haj left Afghanistan for Pakistan with the rest of his crew.
In early December, the crew were given visas to return to Afghanistan. But when Mr Haj tried to re-enter Afghanistan with his colleagues, he was arrested by the Pakistani authorities – apparently at the request of the US military.
He was imprisoned, handed over to the US authorities in January 2002, taken to the US military compound in Bagram, Afghanisatan, then Kandahar, and finally to Guantanamo in June 2002.
His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, of the human rights charity Reprieve, said his client had endured months of brutal force-feeding and lost nearly a fifth of his body weight during the hunger strike.
Mr Stafford Smith said: "The US military is rightly afraid of a fifth prisoner dying in their custody. But they wrongly respond by treating prisoners worse. Blankets and clothes are removed in case they are used to commit suicide. The harshest methods of forced feeding are deployed – Sami has suffered the feeding tube being forced down into his lungs by mistake several times."
The warning about the condition of Mr Haj coincided with the release of Guantanamo transcripts which describe the hostility between guards and their prisoners. The transcripts includes details of guards interrupting detainees at prayer, detainees flinging body waste at guards and interrogators withholding medicine.
Dr Hugh Rickards, a British psychiatrist, warned in his report that the level of Mr Haj's mental suffering "appears so acute that it is my duty as a medical practitioner to put this in writing to ensure appropriate assessment and treatment".
Dr Mamoun Mobayed, a British psychiatrist based in Northern Ireland, and a third member of the team who has also been given access to written notes of recent interviews with the prisoner, said there was also concern about the mental health of Mr Haj's wife and seven-year-old son, who was just one when his father went on assignment to Afghanistan.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2956428.ece
ZNet | Race:
Harry Potter and immigration
by Aviva Chomsky
Providence Journal; September 13, 2007
HARRY POTTER as a parable of immigrants’ rights? Both my kids thought I was crazy when I first suggested this notion, half-way through the book on a recent Saturday afternoon. The more I read, though, the more sense the idea made.
Among the crucial issues separating the bad guys from the good guys in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is their position on the rights of Muggles, half-bloods and Muggle-borns. For the non-initiated, let me clarify: Muggles are ordinary humans without wizarding powers. A half-blood is the offspring of a Muggle and a pure-blood wizard. Muggle-borns are people with wizard powers born into Muggle families, like the heroine Hermione.
The evil Malfoy family sniffs about its ancient lineage and its pure blood; young Draco torments Hermione at school about being a “Mud-blood,” contaminated by her Muggle background. When Voldemort’s followers take over the Ministry of Magic they establish a “Muggle-Born Registration Commission” and distribute a pamphlet entitled “Mudbloods and the Dangers they Pose to a Peaceful Pure-Blood Society.”
Wizards fake their family trees to claim pure-blood status. A wizard accused of having Muggle parentage begs to be spared prison because he’s a half-blood—his father was a wizard, and he has written documentation of his legal status. The Registration Commission interrogates prisoners to determine their correct status, and punishes a woman of non-wizard parents for using a wand, a privilege reserved for wizards.
Some have suggested that Voldemort’s obsession with purity of blood and ancient wizarding families is meant to suggest a reference to Nazi Germany. But the Nazis were not the only historical example of a group claiming the right to dominate others based on ancestry, birth or blood. Spanish Christians relied on the concept to justify the expulsion of Muslims and Jews in 1492, and the domination and enslavement of Africans and indigenous Americans thereafter. U.S. law uses the concept today to justify the exclusion of millions of people in the United States: non-citizens, or even worse, those it defines as “illegal immigrants.”
“But U.S. nationality isn’t based on ideas about blood!” my readers will protest. “We are all immigrants here! Our laws explicitly prohibit discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or national origin!”
And there’s the rub. While our laws do prohibit this kind of discrimination, they also prescribe it. Our immigration, citizenship and naturalization laws are based explicitly on discrimination on the basis of national origin. Where you were born, and what passport you carry, determine whether you have the right to come here, to visit, to work, or to live here.
It wasn’t always that way. Until the Civil War, U.S. citizenship was based on race rather than birthplace, and there were no restrictions on immigration. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that the concept of citizenship-by-birth was inscribed into U.S. law. Before that, whites could be citizens, no matter where they were born, while non-whites, which at the time meant primarily Native Americans and African Americans, could not be citizens, even if their ancestors were here long before any Englishmen arrived. People considered racially unfit for citizenship were welcomed, or even forced to immigrate, in the case of Africans, on condition that they and their descendants would remain a permanent underclass of non-citizens—physically present, but with few legal rights.
But citizenship-by-birth didn’t mean the end of racial discrimination. It meant that lawmakers scrambled to make sure that those they considered racially unfit couldn’t take advantage of the new citizenship law. Almost immediately after the new law was enacted, in 1866, Congress began restricting immigration. Chinese, Japanese and then all Asians were only the first to be told that they couldn’t come any more, because the government didn’t want their children to be able to obtain citizenship by birth.
I’m not claiming to be able to read J. K. Rowling’s mind. But for her readers in the United States, the desperate struggle of Muggle-borns and half-bloods to document their status, the punishments meted out by the Ministry of Magic to those who try to work or attend school without documents proving their lineage, and Voldemort’s obsession with determining just who has true wizard ancestry, and restricting and punishing those who don’t, have some pretty powerful resonances with the last massive legalized form of discrimination in our own society: discrimination against non-citizens.
I suppose it’s possible to make a general statement about tolerance and discrimination in a society characterized by serious legalized inequality, and yet discuss the issue entirely in the abstract, with no reference at all to the discrimination going on around you. But a tome about tolerance written in Nazi Germany, for example, would inevitably be read as a commentary on Nazi policies — either that, or as evidence of just how brainwashed the public was, that it could advocate tolerance while remaining oblivious to the intolerance of its own society.
The main audiences for Rowling’s book are in Britain and the United States. In both countries, tolerance is officially promoted at the same time that one group of people is conspicuously excluded: immigrants. Citizenship-by-birth may be racially blind if a country has open borders, but with walls, border patrols, and a long history of racially restrictive immigration laws, “citizenship” becomes just another means to enforce discrimination and exclusion.
Legalized discrimination in the United States goes way beyond the immigration-quota system that still prescribes different treatment for people from different countries.
What else can it be called, when millions of people are not allowed to work, not allowed to go to school, not allowed to live in certain places, not allowed access to all of the benefits that society offers to the rest of its members? When the police raid workplaces to round them up and deport them? When they live in fear that their very existence will be discovered, and they will be punished?
Perhaps we can all learn something from Rowling’s characters: from the Weasley family, ardent defenders of the rights of the non-wizard-born, on to Hermione, the “mud-blood” who out-wizards them all, and finally Harry, whose quest to defeat the evil Voldemort is inextricably bound up with the defense of the rights of those whom Voldemort seeks to expel, exploit and destroy. If we cannot see reflections of our own national discourse on immigrants in their struggle, perhaps we are closing our eyes to Rowling’s most important lesson.
Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history at Salem State College. Her new book, They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths About Immigration, was just published by Beacon Press.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=13761
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