Amy Goodman's Blog, page 18
April 24, 2013
Terror in the West, Texas, Night
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
The Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath has dominated the nation’s headlines. Yet, another series of explosions that happened two days later and took four times the number of lives, has gotten a fraction of the coverage. It was the worst industrial accident in years. But to call it an accident ignores that it was preventable, and was quite possibly a crime, as is common with so many dangerous workplaces.
The first call came in to the 911 dispatcher at 7:29 p.m. on Wednesday, April 17. A woman at a playground noticed a fire across the railroad tracks, at the West Fertilizer Co. facility, in the small town of West, Texas, near Waco. The local volunteer fire department was mobilized. Less than 25 minutes later, a massive explosion leveled the plant, sending shock waves, debris and fire across West, ultimately killing 15 people, among them a local EMT, eight volunteer firefighters and a Dallas fire captain who was visiting his sons and joined the firefighting effort.
The call came over the emergency radio system: “We need every ambulance we can get at this point. A bomb just went off inside here. It’s pretty bad. We’ve got a lot of firemen down.”
Another call followed, with moaning in the background: “The rest home has been seriously damaged. We have many people down. Please respond.”
A mushroom cloud climbed high into the sky. The explosion registered 2.1 on the Richter scale, the same as a small earthquake. 911 calls flooded in, with people reporting a bomb, many injured and others engulfed in a toxic cloud. Sixty to 80 houses were leveled.
April 18, 2013
Peace Activists and Patriots at the Boston Marathon Bombing
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Monday was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts, celebrating the day the American Revolutionary War began in 1775, at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. It is also the day of the annual Boston Marathon, which will now, sadly, go down in history as yet another episode of senseless mass violence.
Martin Richard’s image has circled the globe since his murder that day. In it, the 8-year-old holds a sign he made that reads “No more hurting people. Peace.”
The Richard family was watching the marathon when the bomb went off. His mother, Denise, and his sister, Jane, were seriously injured. His father, Bill, suffered shrapnel wounds. Martin’s older brother, Henry, was not harmed—at least, not physically.
Across the street from the blast, Carlos Arredondo and his wife, Melida, were watching from the bleachers. They were waiting for a member of the National Guard who was running the race in memory of Carlos’ son, Alex Arredondo, a U.S. Marine who was killed in the battle of Najaf, Iraq, in August 2004. Back then, immediately after he learned of his son’s death, Carlos got into his van and set fire to it. He survived, with massive burns, then dedicated himself to peace activism, traveling the U.S. with a flag-draped coffin in memory of his son. Seven years after they lost Alex, in 2011, his younger son, Brian, who became depressed after Alex’s death, committed suicide.
At the marathon, Carlos, who is originally from Costa Rica, was wearing a big cowboy hat, and images of his fearless race to rescue people after the explosions also have gone global.
Within seconds, the lives of these two individuals, Martin Richard and Carlos Arredondo, from neighborhoods of Boston not far from each other, were thrust onto the world stage.
April 11, 2013
WikiLeaks’ New Release: The Kissinger Cables and Bradley Manning
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
WikiLeaks has released a new trove of documents, more than 1.7 million U.S. State Department cables dating from 1973-1976, which they have dubbed “The Kissinger Cables,” after Henry Kissinger, who in those years served as secretary of state and assistant to the president for national security affairs.
One cable includes a transcribed conversation where Kissinger displays remarkable candor: “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.”
While the illegal and the unconstitutional may be a laughing matter for Kissinger, who turns 90 next month, it is deadly serious for Pvt. Bradley Manning. After close to three years in prison, at least eight months of which in conditions described by U.N. special rapporteur on torture Juan Ernesto Mendez as “cruel, inhuman and degrading,” Manning recently addressed the court at Fort Meade: “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information ... this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general, as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.”
These words of Manning’s were released anonymously, in the form of an audio recording made clandestinely, that we broadcast on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. This was Bradley Manning, in his own voice, in his own words, explaining his actions.
He testified about the helicopter gunship video that he released to WikiLeaks, which was later made public under the title “Collateral Murder.” In stark, grainy black-and-white, it shows the gunship kill 12 men in Baghdad on July 12, 2007, with audio of the helicopter crew mocking the victims, celebrating the senseless murder of the people below, two of whom were employees of the Reuters news agency.
Manning said: “The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemingly delightful bloodlust the aerial weapons team. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards,’ and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers.”
April 4, 2013
Gun Control: It's Time for the Majority to Move
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
New federal gun-control legislation has been declared all but dead on arrival this week. Gridlock in the U.S. Senate, where a super-majority of 60 votes is needed to move most legislation these days, is proving to be an insuperable barrier to any meaningful change in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., massacre. Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association is pushing its controversial agenda to place armed guards in every school, increasing the number of guns in our society and further entrenching gun culture.
While the Senate is perhaps the worst bellwether for public sentiment, recent polls indicate majority support for stricter controls, with an overwhelming 85 to 90 percent of respondents from across the political spectrum supporting universal background checks. As the horror of the Newtown massacre recedes in time, polls show that support for a more aggressive ban on assault weapons is slipping slightly, as could be predicted.
Time is on the side of those opposing gun control, most notably the NRA. The longer this drags out, the less likely anything will get done. That is why President Barack Obama’s announcement of a commission, just four days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, was a harbinger of failure and inaction. Commissions take time. It didn’t help that the chairperson he appointed, Vice President Joe Biden, encouraged lawless, reckless gun use, saying: “If you want to protect yourself, get a double-barrel shotgun. Have the shells for a 12-gauge shotgun, and I promise you as I told my wife — we live in an area that’s wooded and somewhat secluded — I said, ‘Jill if there’s ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony here, walk out, put that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house. I promise you whoever’s coming in is not going.’ You don’t need an AR-15. It’s harder to aim; it’s harder to use. And in fact, you don’t need 30 rounds to protect yourself. Buy a shotgun. Buy a shotgun.”
Too much of what Biden says is written off as gaffes and bluster. But this is coming from the chair of the president’s own commission on gun control. In his State of the Union address, Obama got rousing applause when he insisted: “The families of Newtown deserve a vote. The families of Aurora deserve a vote. The families of Oak Creek and Tucson and Blacksburg and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence, they deserve a simple vote.”
Paul Barrett, assistant managing editor at Bloomberg Businessweek and author of “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun,” told me: “I think he sent a pretty clear, if coded, signal in his State of the Union address when his emotional refrain was the proponents of gun control deserve a vote. He kept saying that over and over again. He didn’t really demand that members of his own party in the Senate, which his party controls, pass the legislation in question.”
Even the proposed legislation is a shadow of what genuine gun control would look like. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Assault Weapons Ban of 2013, by her own admission, exempts 2,271 weapons. According to a 2007 survey conducted by GunPolicy.org, of the 645 million guns worldwide in civilian hands, more than 270 million of them are in the United States — almost half of all civilian guns on the planet. The same survey reports that U.S. military and police guns combined number just over four million. We are truly a nation of guns.
While the federal legislation appears hollowed out and stalled, more progress is being made at the state level. In Colorado, a Democratic-controlled legislature narrowly passed laws requiring stricter background checks and limiting clip sizes for semiautomatic weapons. Obama traveled there on Wednesday to highlight the progress. He said, “I don’t believe weapons of war have a place in movie theaters.” Next, he heads to Connecticut, home of Newtown as well as many gun manufacturers, which is in the midst of passing the strictest gun-control laws in the country.
The moment to pass gun control was when the national attention was riveted on the massacre at Sandy Hook, the brutal slaying of 20 children and six adults. Before the broken bodies of those victims fade from memory, our broken body politic must be mended. What is needed is a vigorous grass-roots movement, to provide the leadership so lacking in Washington, D.C.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,000 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
March 27, 2013
Edie Windsor's Day in Court
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about same-sex marriage this week. On Tuesday, it was about the controversial California ballot initiative known as Prop 8, which has banned same-sex marriages in that state. On Wednesday, the case challenging the constitutionality of DOMA, the federal Defense of Marriage Act, was heard. That case is called United States v. Windsor. Edie Windsor, now 83 years old, was married to a woman, Thea Spyer. They were a couple for 44 years.
Edie and Thea met in the early 1960s, in New York’s Greenwich Village. They hit it off. In 1967, Thea proposed marriage to Edie, even though they knew it wasn’t a possibility. The couple lived together as though they were married, buying a house together, sharing their earnings and living life. In 1975, Spyer was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Edie cared for Thea as her MS progressed, causing paralysis and forcing her into a wheelchair. When, in 2007, doctors told Thea that she had only one year to live, she reiterated her proposal to Edie. The couple flew to Toronto, and on May 22, 2007, they were wed in a ceremony officiated by Canada’s first openly gay judge, Justice Harvey Brownstone.
Within a year, New York state, where the couple lived, officially recognized out-of-state same-sex marriages, although it took the state several more years to legalize such marriages performed in-state. With their Canadian marriage license and acceptance by New York state, one major institution remained that refused to recognize their formal declaration of lifelong love and commitment: The United States government. DOMA was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, on Sept. 21, 1996. The law states, “In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”
DOMA passed Congress months before a national election, with solid bipartisan support. As Clinton wrote this month in The Washington Post, however, he now opposes the law. He wrote that DOMA is “incompatible with our Constitution. Because Section 3 of the act defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, same-sex couples who are legally married in nine states and the District of Columbia are denied the benefits of more than a thousand federal statutes and programs available to other married couples.”
Thea died Feb. 5, 2009, at the age of 77. After losing her wife, Edie suffered a heart attack. As she recovered, she learned that federal estate taxes on the value of what Thea left her would cost her $363,000, an amount that would be zero if the government recognized their marriage as legal. Edie, who has been a lesbian-rights activist for decades, decided to fight back. She sued the U.S. government.
March 21, 2013
Tomas Young and the End of the Body of War
Tomas Young was in the fifth day of his first deployment to Iraq when he was struck by a sniper’s bullet in Baghdad’s Sadr City. The single bullet paralyzed him from the chest down, and changed his life forever. Now, nine years later, at the age of 33, Tomas has decided to end his life. He announced recently that he will soon stop his nourishment, which comes in the form of liquid through a feeding tube.
Tomas was the subject of the award-winning documentary “Body of War,” made by legendary TV talk-show host Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro. The 2007 film follows Tomas’ rehabilitation, struggles with his injuries and his political awakening to become one of the most prominent anti-war U.S. veterans of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He was first moved to action by the efforts of Cindy Sheehan to speak with President George W. Bush while he was on vacation at his so-called ranch in Crawford, Texas. Sheehan’s son, Casey, was killed in Baghdad, on the same day that Tomas was shot. She wanted to ask Pres. Bush, “For what noble cause did my son die?”
I asked Tomas if anything would change his mind about his decision to end his life. “No,” he said, adding that if he were not in such intense, constant pain, then he would not be taking this course. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said.
This week, Tomas released a letter titled “The Last Letter: A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran.”
In it, Tomas wrote, “You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.”
Phil Donahue has stayed in touch with Tomas for years since making “Body of War.” Donahue told me the making of the film was a “spiritual experience ... a chapter of our lives.” He says he understands Tomas’ decision: “Four years after being shot in Sadr City, he sustained a pulmonary embolism. So he struggles now to speak, although you can understand him. He has difficulty grasping silverware, his opposable thumbs are at a serious deficit ... so he has to be fed. When he and his wife, Claudia, have gone out to dinner, she would look for a corner of the restaurant, so when she fed him, they wouldn’t be stared at. He now has pressure sores, with exposed bone. He recently had a colostomy, so he has a bag on the side of his body. He is fed through a tube, and every other commercial he sees on television is about food. It is beyond awful what Tomas has sustained. He now lies immobile, in a dark bedroom in Kansas City, dutifully cared for by his wife, Claudia, who has been with him for five years.”
March 13, 2013
Starving for Justice at Guantanamo
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Reports are emerging from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay that a majority of the prisoners are on a hunger strike. One hundred sixty-six remain locked up, although more than half of them have been cleared by the Obama administration for release. Yet there they languish (in some cases now in their second decade) in a hellish legal limbo, uncharged yet imprisoned. President Barack Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo, as he boldly promised to do with an executive order signed on Jan. 22, 2009, and the deterioration of conditions at the prison under his watch will remain a lasting stain on his legacy.
From Guantanamo, Yemeni prisoner Bashir al-Marwalah wrote to his lawyer: “We are in danger. One of the soldiers fired on one of the brothers a month ago. Before that, they send the emergency forces with M-16 weapons into one of the brothers’ cell blocks. ... Now they want to return us to the darkest days under Bush. They said this to us. Please do something.”
Al-Marwalah was referring to the first recorded use of rubber bullets being fired at a Guantanamo prisoner by the U.S. military guards there.
According to Pardiss Kebriaei, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, her client Ghaleb al-Bihani is one of the Guantanamo prisoners currently on a hunger strike. She told me Al-Bihani told her that “there is a large-scale hunger strike in Camp 6, which is the largest of the facilities at Guantanamo. That prison holds about 130 men. He said that almost everyone, except for a few who are sick and elderly, is on strike. He had lost over 20 pounds. He is a diabetic. His blood-glucose levels are fluctuating wildly. He told me that medical staff at Guantanamo has told him his life is in danger. And he and others want us to get the word out about this.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., this week, the Obama administration has to defend its Guantanamo policy before a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a part of the Organization of American States. Kebriaei’s colleague at the Center for Constitutional Rights, attorney Omar Farah, addressed the hearing, saying: “I represent Tariq Ba Odah, a young Yemeni man who’s been on an uninterrupted hunger strike since February 2007. He is force-fed daily by Guantanamo guard staff. As we speak, it’s likely that he’s being removed from his cell, strapped to a restraint chair, and a rubber tube is being inserted into his nose to pump a liquid dietary supplement into his stomach. Tariq says this is the only way that he has to communicate to those of us who have our freedom what it means to be unjustly detained, to be put in a cell for a decade without charge. It’s his only way to communicate the barbarism of such conduct.”
March 7, 2013
Rand Paul’s Filibuster of John Brennan
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
You could say that a filibuster occurs when a senator drones on and on. The problem with the U.S. Senate was that there were too few senators speaking about drones this week.
President Barack Obama’s controversial nomination of John Brennan as director of the Central Intelligence Agency was held up Wednesday afternoon by a Senate filibuster. The reason: Brennan’s role in targeted killings by drones, and President Obama’s presumed authority to kill U.S. citizens, without any due process, if they pose an “imminent threat.” The effort was led by tea-party Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, joined by several of his Republican colleagues. Among the Democrats, at the time of this writing, only Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon had joined in the genuine, old-fashioned “talking filibuster,” wherein the activities of the Senate floor are held up by a senator’s speech.
Members of Congress, tasked with oversight of intelligence and military matters, have repeatedly demanded the memoranda from the White House detailing the legal basis for the drone program, only to be repeatedly denied. The nomination of Brennan has opened up the debate, forcing the Obama administration to make nominal gestures of compliance. The answers so far have not satisfied Sen. Paul.
Nearing hour six of his filibuster, Sen. Paul admitted: “I can’t ultimately stop the nomination, but what I can do is try to draw attention to this and try to get an answer ... that would be something if we could get an answer from the president ... if he would say explicitly that noncombatants in America won’t be killed by drones. The reason it has to be answered is because our foreign drone strike program does kill noncombatants. They may argue that they are conspiring or they may someday be combatants, but if that is the same standard that we are going to use in the United States, it is a far different country than I know about.”
The issue of extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens, whether on U.S. soil or elsewhere, is clearly vital. But also important is the U.S. government’s now-seemingly routine killing of civilians around the world, whether by drone strikes, night raids conducted by special operations forces or other lethal means.
February 27, 2013
Albert Woodfox’s 40 Years of Solitary Confinement
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Albert Woodfox has been in solitary confinement for 40 years, most of that time locked up in the notorious maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary known as “Angola.” This week, after his lawyers spent six years arguing that racial bias tainted the grand-jury selection in Woodfox’s prosecution, federal Judge James Brady, presiding in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, agreed. “Accordingly, Woodfox’s habeas relief is GRANTED,” ordered Brady, compelling the state of Louisiana to release Woodfox. This is the third time his conviction has been overturned. Nevertheless, Woodfox remains imprisoned. Those close to the case expect the state of Louisiana, under the direction of Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell, to appeal again, as the state has successfully done in the past, seeking to keep Woodfox in solitary confinement, in conditions that Amnesty International says “can only be described as cruel, inhuman and degrading.”
Woodfox is one of the “Angola 3.” Angola, the sprawling prison complex with 5,000 inmates and 1,800 employees, is in rural Louisiana on the site of a former slave plantation. It gets its name from the country of origin of many of those slaves. It still exists as a forced-labor camp, with prisoners toiling in fields of cotton and sugar cane, watched over by shotgun-wielding guards on horseback. Woodfox and fellow inmate Herman Wallace were in Angola for lesser crimes when implicated in the prison murder of a guard in 1972. Woodfox and Wallace founded the Angola chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1971, and were engaged in organizing against segregation, inhumane working conditions and the systemic rape and sexual slavery inflicted on many imprisoned in Louisiana’s Angola.
“Herman and Albert and other folks recognized the violation of human rights in prison, and they were trying to achieve a better prison and living conditions,” Robert King told me last year. “And as a result of that, they were targeted.” King is the third member of the Angola 3, and the only one among them to have finally won his freedom, in 2001.
King went on: “There is no rationale why they should be held in solitary confinement—or, for that matter, in prison. This is a double whammy. We are dealing with a double whammy here. We are not just focusing on Herman’s and Albert’s civil- or human-rights violation, but there is question also as to whether or not they committed this crime. All the evidence has been undermined in this case.” Since his release, King has been fighting for justice for Wallace and Woodfox, traveling around the U.S. and to 20 countries, as well as addressing the European Parliament.
The devastating psychological impacts of long-term solitary confinement are well-documented. Solitary also limits access to exercise, creating a cascade of health complications. The Center for Constitutional Rights is challenging the use of solitary confinement in California prisons, writing: “Ever since solitary confinement came into existence, it has been used as a tool of repression. While it is justified by corrections officials as necessary to protect prisoners and guards from violent superpredators, all too often it is imposed on individuals, particularly prisoners of color, who threaten prison administrations in an altogether different way.”
February 21, 2013
Israel, Palestine and the Oscars
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
The Academy Awards ceremony will make history this year with the first-ever nomination of a feature documentary made by a Palestinian. “5 Broken Cameras” was filmed and directed by Emad Burnat, a resident of the occupied Palestinian West Bank town of Bil’in, along with his Israeli filmmaking partner Guy Davidi. What does a Palestinian farmer wear on the red carpet in Hollywood? We were almost prevented from knowing, as Burnat, his wife and 8-year-old son were detained at Los Angeles International Airport and threatened with deportation. Despite his formal invitation from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, it took the intervention of Oscar-winning documentarian Michael Moore, who now sits on the Academy Board of Governors, followed by Academy attorneys, for Burnat and his family to gain entry into the country.
“5 Broken Cameras” is in competition at the Oscars with an Israeli documentary, “The Gatekeepers,” a film that features interviews with the six surviving former directors of Israel’s Shin Bet, the country’s secret internal security service, which functions as sort of hybrid of the U.S. FBI and CIA. In the film, all six condemn the current practices of Israeli occupation and settlement expansion.
In a remarkable case of life imitating art, as celebrities gather for the entertainment industry’s biggest gala of the year, the Israel/Palestine conflict is being played out on the streets of Tinseltown.
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