Watching the watch listers

It certainly is heartening to read that attorney Thomas Burke, who assisted the ACLU on our no fly list lawsuit, is still bedeviling government spooks and cataloguers of suspected "terrorists."

Acting along with the San Francisco Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, Burke pressed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case against the U.S. Treasury, seeking information about why various individuals couldn't get credit or open bank accounts and what the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was doing with complaints.

Turns out the Treasury list is a lot like the no fly list: if you find yourself on it, you can't find out why you were listed and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get off it. Moreover it is full of names of people who had done nothing to justify suspicion.

One man went into a Glen Burnie, Md., Toyota dealership to buy a car, only to be told that a name check revealed he was on a U.S. Treasury Department watchlist of suspected terrorists and drug dealers. He had to be "checked for tattoos," he said, to make sure he wasn't the suspect.

An 18-year-old found he could not open an account to accept credit card payments for his fledgling technology consulting business because his name was similar to that of a Libyan official on the watchlist.

A former U.S. Navy officer who served in the Persian Gulf and whose father was killed in the Korean War when he was a child, found himself locked out of his PayPal account because his name was similar to one on the watchlist. ...

Washington Post,
March 19, 2008

Worse than being impeded in the first place, many of these people can't get their names off the list.

The approximately 100 documents that the lawyers' committee received this week "suggest that little if anything is being done by the government to help individuals who are wrongly linked by the government with illegal activity," said Thomas Burke, a San Francisco lawyer who took part in the suit.

Even when the department confirms that a business has mistakenly identified a customer as a terrorist, he said, "they don't do anything."

San Francisco Chronicle,
March 20, 2008

As with so many developments of our encroaching surveillance society, we'll only rein in the list makers if we're willing to keep after them. Way to go Tom.

Shame on CNN for this...

Who's that they put on their website next to Obama? Some dangerous, disheveled sheik?

No, it is New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson who today endorsed Senator Obama. That just might be the worse bit of worse bit of racial photo-editing since Time Magazine doctored a photo of OJ Simpson.

Not surprisingly, Richardson's choice of candidate does have something to do with who is more able to address racism.

As a Hispanic, I was particularly touched by his words. I have been troubled by the demonization of immigrants--specifically Hispanics-- by too many in this country...

Senator Obama has started a discussion in this country long overdue and rejects the politics of pitting race against race. He understands clearly that only by bringing people together, only by bridging our differences can we all succeed together as Americans.

TPM

When it comes down to it, people in this country who suffer from racial marginalization recognize each other and hang together -- at least that is the California experience. We may not see the potential combining of this group with progressive whites come to power this year, but that coalition is our country's future. For the moment, that future belongs to Senator Obama.

Good Friday 2008: The cross the US has brought to Iraqis

After seeing Saddam statue collapsed at Firdoos square in central Baghdad on April9th, we forgot all that suffering with great expectations to witness a new era of freedom and prosperity having no Saddam and his followers.

Five years had passed since the multi national invasion head by the USA, but we had witnessed few positives factors including the space of freedom in society and raising the standard of livings for some governmental employees. [B]ut the negative factors are so many that made some Iraqis who welcomed the occupied forces wish to have Saddam’s regime back better than the recent days.

Nowadays, we lack of power supply, water, fuel, reconstruction and other services .We suffer from corruption in all fields. We suffer from the unemployment. We lack the ration food stuff and its bad quality. The major thing we suffer from is the powerful parties and their mismanagement, abuse of power, discredit, maltreatment and bad faith. ...

Shortly, in the last five years, Iraqi people get suffering more than the 24 years of those during Saddam’s regime.

In the past, we have the mass graves hidden while nowadays we can see them in open streets. In the past we had Saddam and his security forces who caused that catastrophe while now we have the Qaeda, the gunmen, the guards of the foreign security companies and Iraqi officials, criminals and the USA troops who can cause death to anyone and anywhere in Iraq with or without reasons...

Hussein,
Inside Iraq

I have added some punctuation and paragraph breaks to Hussein's essay.

And the religious context implied by the headline is mine, not his. Today we mourn and try to find hope.

Friday Cat Blogging

If I didn't know better, I'd think she was shy and retiring.

Holy Thursday

In Christian churches that use a liturgical calendar, today is Holy Thursday, the annual commemoration of Jesus' "Last Supper" (perhaps a Seder meal) with his followers.

The ritual meal aspect of this event is repeated in the Eucharist, the sharing of the blessed bread and wine. But the particular feature of the Holy (or Maundy) Thursday liturgy is the washing of each other's feet in reenactment of Jesus' washing the feet of the people coming along with him on his way. Think hardened, dusty, tired feet on people who knew no transportation but walking. There was nothing pretty about those followers' feet -- the ritual reminds us that it is the human condition to work and trudge on, sometimes painfully. And we are assured that apparently God cares for our walking along the path.

Last spring I had the privilege of attending a community forum at a church in San Mateo County at which religious leaders performed the foot washing ritual for low-wage, mostly immigrant, cafeteria workers. This seemed about right. It's the labor of people like these that keep our society going. How often do those of us who live more easily serve them?

A somber vigil

On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, protesters snaked through downtown San Francisco, rallied in Civic Center, and were arrested in some quantity while nonviolently blocking doors and intersections. Here's a pretty good SF Chronicle story, with lots of pictures.

A different, older perhaps, but no less determined, crowd of several hundred enacted their remembrance on the steps of Grace Cathedral at an evening interfaith vigil.


Hundreds of pairs of shoes served as reminders of the thousands killed in Iraq.


Bishop Marc Andrus set the tone backed by religious leaders from several faiths.




While the assembled mourners prayed and chanted, leaders read the names of some of the dead.




How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died?

Democrats are war weasels too

This singing and dancing trio greeted antiwar protestors in downtown San Francisco on the first day of the sixth year of the Iraq war.

Wouldn't it be great if we could be confident that our Democratic Presidential aspirants would end Cheney-McCain-Bush's occupation of Iraq? If we knew they would not bomb Iran? Too bad such any such confidence would be misplaced. Our Democrats are war weasels.

This may be a libel against an innocent animal, but somehow the little furry critter has become synonymous with "devious."

Item:

"Senator Clinton is very knowledgeable about national security and is probably going to be strong on defense," he said. "I have no doubts whatsoever that if she were president in January '09 she would not act irresponsibly and issue orders to conduct an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, regardless of the consequences, and squander the gains that have been made." [Retired General and Clinton advisor Jack] Keane added that he could not imagine any president in the White House making that kind of decision.

NY Sun

Item:

"He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator," [recently dismissed Obama foreign affairs advisor Samantha Power] said at one point in the [BBC] interview.

Politico

Clinton and Obama share the two premises of empire with the Republican administration:

• The United States is entitled to impose its conception of reality on the world. They may be smarter, more inclined to consult widely, but at root they agree that what Washington says goes.

• When the United States exercises its right to impose itself on the world, it will succeed.

Neither premise is true. If Iraq proves anything, it is that the era of unlimited U.S. freedom to dominate the world is over. After five years in Iraq, this country is economically and morally bankrupt, perhaps beyond recovery. Our historic institutions that promise civil liberties within the country are in tatters. It sure was a fast slide.

***Yesterday Barack Obama delivered what I agree with my friend Ronni Bennett was "one of the most sophisticated speeches politics has seen in years. Also one of the most personal and most decent - one that asks all of us to become our better selves. ..." But we'd be fooling ourselves if we didn't notice that he chose to embed in it one of the conventional falsehoods that underlie U.S. imperial pretensions. Speaking of Pastor Wright's views, Obama said they expressed

a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

Obama is rejecting Wright for the conventional wisdom of empire, valuing the European over the Arab, the Christian over the Muslim, occupiers over indigenous peoples, autocracies over popular aspirations -- the language of war and futility in the era of multi-polar globalization.

***Our Democratic war weasels will only be what we, the people, make them be -- just like our current rulers.

Mission District fire burns four buildings

This was something you hope you never see in your neighborhood. Alerted by the sound of choppers overhead, we ran out from dinner to check out what was happening.


The center of the fire seemed to be on Poplar Alley, close to the corner of Valencia and 26th Street. The core Mission area is crisscrossed by these small alleys, only one car wide. Blocks of three and four story flats line the narrow streets. Some of San Francisco's cheaper rentals hide within.


On the east, the Valencia, side of the fire, a tall cloud of black smoke rose from an invisible source.


I could barely catch sight of a firefighter on the roof.


When we got to the scene, gawkers (ourselves included) crowded the area. The fire chief conferred with a cop about setting up a perimeter.


Meanwhile reinforcements waited to go in.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, one firefighter was sent to the hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation. I would not be surprised if the fire made dozens homeless. The same article describes one 24-unit building as "ravaged."

A geographical expression, nothing more

John McCain and Dick Cheney "visited" this place yesterday. That is, they dropped in secretively, jumped around in helicopters under heavy guard meeting their dazed clients, and jumped out quick before catching a stray mortar. They say things are getting better.

An Iraqi employee of the New York Times, Khalid al-Ansary, thinks otherwise. He is stretched to his emotional limit, with no end in sight.

Iraqi security forces all over the country and specifically in Baghdad have done their best to crack down on violence. However, what they are doing is like a tug of war. They tighten their grip some of the time against the militias and Qaeda, but let it go or unleash it most of the time. ...

...The battle is much harder than Mr. Bush expected. His own army, the strongest in the world, could not cope with the situation. The Iraqi government doesn’t tell the real numbers of the dead.

In Baghdad, no one knows when he will die. It is like a line we are standing in. One day a friend dies, another day a relative, and so on.

I have started to ask myself, is this country cursed? ... God, are we all bad people here? If so, why do you not use your superior power to terminate this country. Or if not, why don’t you help people to stay alive, next to their beloved.

A veteran United Kingdom journalist sums up five years of invasion and occupation.

Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shia ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party, and the Shia wave a newer version, adopted by the Shia-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag. ...

The Sunni defeat in the battle for Baghdad in 2006 and early 2007 was the motive for many guerrillas, previously anti-American, suddenly allying themselves with American forces. They concluded they could not fight the US, al-Qa'ida, the Iraqi army and police and the Mehdi Army at the same time.

There is now an 80,000 strong Sunni militia, paid for and allied to the US but hostile to the Iraqi government. Five years after the American and British armies crossed into Iraq, the country has become a geographical expression.

Patrick Cockburn,
The Independent

"We care, so that you don't have to ..."

Marine Sergeant Adam Kokesh was a civil affairs officer in Falluja, Iraq from February to December 2004. He testified at the Winter Soldier hearings held in Washington, DC March 13-16.

What the preacher said ...

If you've been following the latest Democratic tempest in a tea pot, you know that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said some things that Barack Obama felt he must "condemn." Wright has been Obama's pastor and friend for many years. The Chicago UCC minister has now resigned from Obama's African American Religious Leadership Committee.

But do you know what Wright said that has the right so upset? Here are some of his unacceptable opinions.

• "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

• "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

• "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation. ...

I'd call these statements many adjectives: perhaps "gutsy," perhaps slightly "ill-considered" -- but most importantly, self-evidently true.

After 9/11, angry, frightened vengeful citizens, much abetted by right wing politicians and the Bush administration, demanded censorship and self-censorship from us all. Mostly we complied, stunned by the vehemence of the grief and anger we felt ourselves and in most around us. My friend Bob Wing wrote a prescient letter on September 14, 2001 that warned explicitly against one of Pastor Wright's phrases (those roosting-returning chickens...).

But shutting up about home truths didn't do anyone any good after 9/11. The Bush administration played on our emotions to justify their imperial wet dreams. And now the country is tied in for the long term to a war that is bankrupting us.

Shutting up about how the racially-defined underclass of African Americans and new immigrants are forced to live doesn't make injustice go away either.

And a lot of people know this. In breaking the story of Wright's words, ABC concluded with this comment which seems about right.

"I wouldn't call it radical. I call it being black in America," said one congregation member outside the church last Sunday.

***
One more thought about the Rev. Wright: I think what upsets white folks most about his sermons is perhaps even more the style of his delivery than the words. We aren't accustomed to seeing speakers vigorously declaiming, raising their voices, pounding the air for emphasis. He must be an angry black guy -- now there's a category we know and fear. And I guess that Obama guy must also be an angry black guy, even though he hides it so well ... Yes, the attempt of our white supremacist cultural arbiters to racialize Obama's image is working.

People on the move -- a constant of history

Our picture of the meaning of "immigration" is simply too small. We are choosing to lock ourselves in a tiny box bounded by anxieties about who is taking whose job, who has legal documents, who presents a security threat. Meanwhile, there's a lot we overlook from relatively small shifts with local effects to vast global migrations,

Two examples:

The number of people crossing into the United States at San Ysidro has fallen 21.4 percent from a peak three years ago, a precipitous drop that economists and others attribute to frustrating border waits, dwindling tourism and a struggling U.S. economy. ...

"There is nobody spending any money," said Tom Shultz, the owner of a Subway franchise near the San Ysidro port of entry. Shultz said the overwhelming majority of his customers are from Tijuana, and most are daily commuters. "I see a drop in traffic, and I see more cautiousness in spending."

Neighboring businesses, a mix of mom-and-pop retail and quick-service shops, are having similar problems: reduced traffic, lower sales, reductions in employee hours.

"Between the border wait time and security issues, it is killing us," said Jason Wells, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in San Ysidro...

San Diego Union-Tribune,
March 11, 2008

Yes, the national obsession with guarding the U.S. border is killing small business and pissing off the Chamber of Commerce in this Republican bastion. A more open border made a healthy economy; cutting off movement is choking the border communities, on both sides.

Meanwhile, across the globe, the European Union is trying to look ahead and perceives a profound new challenge:

In its half-century history, the EU has absorbed wave upon wave of immigrants. There were the millions of political migrants fleeing Russian-imposed communism to western Europe throughout the cold war, the post-colonial and "guest worker" migrants who poured into western Europe in the boom years of the 1950s and 60s, the hundreds of thousands who escaped the Balkan wars of the 90s and the millions of economic migrants of the past decade seeking a better life.

Now, according to the EU's two senior foreign policy officials, Europe needs to brace itself for a new wave of migration with a very different cause - global warming. The ravages already being inflicted on parts of the developing world by climate change are engendering a new type of refugee, the "environmental migrant".

...the immediate and devastating effects of global warming will be felt far away from Europe, with the poor suffering disproportionately in south Asia, the Middle East, central Asia, Africa and Latin America, but that Europe will ultimately bear the consequences.

... "The core challenge is that climate change threatens to overburden states and regions which are already fragile and conflict-prone. The risks include political and security risks that directly affect European interests."

The Guardian,
March 10, 2008

Actually, the U.S. faces the same environmental migration pressures-- and has the historical experience to weather it. Our history includes an analogous episode, the massive wave of immigration pushed by the 19th century Irish potato famine that filled our cities with hungry laborers, much to the consternation of the good Anglo-Saxon Americans who had got here previously.

No force is going to stop human migrations -- the task is to manage their consequences as fairly to both long time residents and newcomers as can be achieved. Pretending we can lock these human tides into our little boxes is literally crazy.

Friday Cat Blogging

Somtimes I think I know how she feels.

Pelosi skewers Bush

I've said some pretty nasty things about Nancy Pelosi on occasion. (For example, here.) But today she was right on point


Way to go Congresswoman!

No happy ending

The other day, I caught a snatch of this on my car radio in that disjointed way one does while doing errands.

But I think there's really no happy ending here. If the Americans stay, then they're only postponing the inevitable, which is fulfillment of the civil war.

But the Mahdi army is growing impatient with the cease-fire. Mahdi army men are losing control, losing their power and influence. They're still being arrested by the Americans, so they're growing resentful.

The Sunni militiamen feel like they're not getting anything from the Iraqi government, so why are they in this bargain? The Americans forced the Iraqi government to promise to integrate 20 percent of the Sunni militiamen into the Iraqi security forces. That's not really happening.

There's no reconciliation. In fact, the Iraqi government just acquitted two famous death squad leaders from the Ministry of Health. I mean, they're basically an insult to the entire Sunni community.

Unthinkable -- realism on NPR about conditions under U.S. occupation in Iraq? Well if you follow the link, not really, as a Neocon policy hack was "debating" the undebatable, that this U.S. war is completely hopeless, in fact a stinking quagmire.

The speaker of realism was the reporter Nir Rosen. He was recently on the ground -- unembeded, speaking Arabic -- in Baghdad. Read his account of real life in Iraq here. There's no peace ahead for suffering Iraqis and this remains the invaders' (our) fault.

A contest for who includes the most people?

Fascinating -- we're seeing a development just like what happened with the Democratic Presidential hopefuls and the Iraq war. Certainly Hillary Clinton and most likely the rest of the early field didn't voluntarily leap out to run on an "end the war" promise. But Bush made the Iraq war the center of his Presidency. The people have wanted the U.S. out for a couple of years now. In order to be heard, to draw a contrast, all the Dems began to compete on promise to get out of Iraq, someday. Barack Obama used his early opposition to the war as his own point of contrast to the rest of the lot.

Now John McCain has chosen to tie himself to "winning the war". We can expect whoever emerges from the Democratic wrestling match to continue to campaign on some kind of promise of withdrawal, not that we can trust either of them to follow through without an energetic peace movement. But we know what they'll promote in response to McCain and that will give peace people leverage if they don't deliver.

McCain also seems to be running on his close connection to a series of Christian-rightwing nuts. First there was Pastor John Hagee, a classic ignorant Protestant hater of Roman Catholics who thinks the U.S. was assigned by God to fight the Palestinians so as to prop up Israel and bring on end times. McCain begged for his endorsement, got it, and won't repudiate the ugly bigotry he gets with it.

Apparently McCain has also picked up a genuine Crusader, the Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio. Mother Jones reports:

Senator John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser an Ohio megachurch pastor who has called upon Christians to wage a "war" against the "false religion" of Islam with the aim of destroying it.

Will the Democrats respond to these slurs as they did to the Republicans' embrace of the war? Will we start hearing endorsements of religious pluralism, of the separation of church and state?

Will Dems speak out against Islamophobia? Obama clearly has, and probably has to, since he is getting the he-is-Black-so-he-must-be-Muslim treatment. But perhaps respect for Muslim Americans might become a theme of the Democratic campaign?

This is probably too much to hope for, but the logic of events is showing the Dems the way. Let them compete for which party is most inclusive of the great variety of religious and non-religious people who make up this country. That could be good politics. Most voters like to feel spoken to, included.

Going... going... "blinking out"

This little critter, a pika, watched us warily through a thick fog. We were stumbling along a high ridge on a Colorado mountain aptly named Quandary. Quandary is a 14er -- over 14,000 feet high -- cold, wet, inhospitable to hikers, but home to its proper inhabitants.

Pikas are about 6 to 8 inches long, rodents, grass eaters, who scarf up in the summer and hibernate under snow in the winter.

They are also proving to be "canaries in the coal mine," animals dying off because global warming is inexorably destroying the conditions on which they depend. They have lived in the U.S. west at elevations between 8,000 and 13,000 feet, but their numbers are shrinking.

Pushed by warmer weather to ever-higher elevations, the tiny pika is losing real estate at an alarming rate, according to scientists, and is disappearing rapidly from much of its historic territory in the West....

"Pikas in general are now found at such high elevations that there's not a lot of places left for them," [Donald] Grayson, [a University of Washington paleontologist] said.

Denver Post

Pikas are not going to go extinct in truly high places, like Quandary. But where mountain peaks top out at lower elevations, local populations of pikas are experiencing what the scientists call "blinking out." They are just gone.

Spitzer: The guy had potential; blew it for what?

Just want to say, as I often have about Bill Clinton, if these dick heads can't manage to keep it in their pants, they shouldn't be in public office. Those of us who depend on these men deserve better than some pathetic overage adolescent who is made a fool by his gonads.

And that holds true, even if Republican federal prosecutors were setting up some kind of trap for this up and coming Democrat. Dude walked into it. I am not sympathetic -- I am pissed off.

U.S. shows no respect for the opinions of [hu]mankind

Most days, one of the news sources I read is a "terrorism" email from openDemocracy, a U.K.-based, internationalist web forum that conveys a moderate European perspective on the world's doings. This is today's lead story.

Bush condones torture

A torture technique once used in the Spanish Inquisition has been condoned by the US president. George Bush vetoed a Congressional bill outlawing water boarding and other forms of torture. Bush's latest exercise of executive power will allow the CIA to continue practicing waterboarding. Bush claims the bill would have made it more difficult for CIA operatives to obtain key information from terrorists, despite compelling evidence and advice that suggests otherwise. US General David H. Petraeus says the use of waterboarding will increase the risks of torture for future American prisoners of war. Democrats may attempt to override the veto but require a two-third majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives to do so.

The toD [terrorism.openDemocracy] verdict: Waterboarding simulates drowning and is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, even under US law the technique is considered a war crime. ...

Nikolaj Nielsen

Not a verdict I could argue against. My headline -- the appeal to the"decent respect to the opinions of [hu]mankind" -- was the standard the U.S. signers of the Declaration of Independence proposed to hold the English monarchy to in their famous insurgency.

It was ever thus ...

An unschooled 19-year-old hoping for an education was scolded for dreaming and sent to work in a factory.

... An ailing, jobless father of three, facing immigration laws that called for deportation of those who sought public aid, told his caseworker, as her notes put it, that "he was more concerned and more disturbed now than he had ever been..."

In another case, a young family was cut off from agency assistance two months after their arrival, for failing to disclose a "secret bank account" containing $138 in loans from friends. ...

The father ... was later chided for not reporting the few dollars that his young son earned fixing bicycles after school. And when his daughter graduated from high school with honors, she had to give up on college to help support the family.

Were these people some of nearly 38 million foreign born people currently in the United States? Were they undocumented migrants, the fellow digging that trench at the construction site, the maid cleaning your hotel room?

No. These were "DPs," -- displaced persons -- Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution, of Auschwitz, of the Warsaw Ghetto, seeking a new life away from the death and destruction of post-World War II Europe. Five hundred thousand were belatedly allowed to enter the United States in 1951. In the McCarthyite atmosphere of the time, they were looked upon as potential freeloaders and security risks. The record of that migration from the resettlement agency, the New York Association for New Americans, has just been opened and written up in the New York Times by Nina Bernstein. Go read it all.

One more echo of today's migrants:

"We were all smuggled across borders. ...We had to go someplace. America seemed good. ...