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The Migrant Crisis: Arms That Welcome, Arms That Kill

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

The flood of people fleeing war and misery is swelling daily, reaching the shores and borders of Europe in a desperate bid for safety. They come from Syria, where a brutal civil war during the past half-decade has killed well over 200,000, and caused the displacement of 12 million people, both inside and outside the country��s borders��half of Syria��s population.

Other migrants come from sub-Saharan Africa, fleeing poverty and conflict. Like many Syrians, these people make their way to Libya, a country now in a state of near anarchy, to venture across the Mediterranean Sea in dangerous, overcrowded boats. Thousands have drowned. Ironically, many of these migrants are running toward the very countries that sold the weapons that are fueling the warfare they are fleeing.

Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, speaking of the migrant crisis, said this week at the State of the European Union speech in Strasbourg, France: ��I��m not talking about 40,000. I��m not talking about 120,000. It��s 160,000. That��s the number Europeans have to take in charge and have to take in their arms.�� Junker, of course, meant by ��arms�� a protective embrace. But another European with firsthand knowledge of the plight of the refugees takes the word in its other sense:

��It is our arms which are also killing and destroying these countries,�� Annette Groth told us on the ��Democracy Now!�� news hour. She is a member of the German Parliament and spokeswoman for human rights for Germany��s Left Party. She just returned from a trip to Hungary, where she witnessed thousands of migrants stranded at the Budapest train station. ��Germany is the third-biggest weapons exporter, and we have very good relations with, for instance, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, despite massive protest,�� she said. ��Our government is still delivering arms to Saudi Arabia, [which] is also supporting ISIS, the jihadists."

California Prisoners’ Strike a Win Against Solitary Confinement

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Thousands of prisoners will be moved out of solitary confinement in California, thanks to a landmark legal settlement announced this week. Grass-roots organizing can be tough, but when done by prisoners locked up in solitary confinement, some of them for decades, it is astounding. The settlement grew out of a federal class-action lawsuit alleging violations of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

They call themselves the Pelican Bay SHU Short Corridor Collective. This group of men has been subjected to long-term solitary confinement, some for more than 20 years, in California��s Pelican Bay State Prison, located in the far northern corner of the state. From within their small, windowless cells, they began talking, organizing. In July 2011, they launched a hunger strike in protest of conditions in the ��SHU�� (pronounced ��shoe��), the Security Housing Unit, Pelican Bay��s solitary-confinement facility. More than 1,000 SHU prisoners joined in. They issued five demands, and after three weeks, officials offered what the hunger strikers considered a good-faith pledge to review policies in the SHU. Months later, after no action was taken, they went on a hunger strike again. This time, more than 12,000 prisoners joined in, across California and even in other states.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, a public-interest law firm with a focus on human rights, filed suit on behalf of all prisoners in California��s prison system who had been accused of gang affiliation and, thus, sent to the SHU. As the lawsuit wended its way through the legal system, a third hunger strike was initiated, in July 2013. More than 60,000 prisoners took part. A movement was growing.

The Iran Nuclear Deal: Give Diplomacy A Chance

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

A war with Iran would be a catastrophe, yet by opposing diplomacy, hundreds of members of Congress may be blundering into just such a conflict. The Iran nuclear deal, as the complex diplomatic arrangement is popularly called, was agreed upon on July 14 by a consortium of key powerful countries, the European Union and Iran. The goal of the agreement is to limit Iran��s nuclear activities to peaceful purposes, and to block Iran��s ability to construct a nuclear bomb. Despite what its critics say, this agreement is not based on trust. It grants the International Atomic Energy Agency the power to conduct widespread, intrusive inspections to ensure that Iran keeps its many pledges. In return, many, but not all, of the sanctions on Iran, which have been crippling its economy, will be lifted.

The alternative to diplomacy is to pour gasoline on a region of the world already on fire with intense, complex military conflicts. Iran��s military has more than half a million soldiers, no doubt with many more who could be mobilized if threatened with invasion. Iran shares a vast border to its west with Iraq, and to its east with Afghanistan, two nations with ongoing military and humanitarian disasters that have consumed the U.S. military since 2001, costing trillions of dollars and untold lives.

Gary Sick served on the National Security Council under Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis, when 52 Americans were held hostage in Iran for 444 days, between 1979 and 1981. ��Basically, we��ve had two years of negotiation, which have been remarkably successful and produced something that is complicated but nevertheless solves the problem,�� Sick said on the ��Democracy Now!�� news hour. ��If that is turned down by the U.S. Congress, the United States is on its own.��

Sick makes a key point: Even if the U.S. Congress rejects the deal, and, after President Barack Obama vetoes that rejection (which he has promised to do), even if the Senate can then muster the 67 votes needed to overturn his veto, that doesn��t mean that the other signatories to the deal will go along with the rejection. China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom, along with other European Union countries, can accept the terms and remove sanctions on Iran. This would leave the United States isolated and alone (with its Middle East ally, Israel), on a war footing against Iran. ��The chance of renegotiating it is very close to zero. As the situation evolves, there��s a very real chance of conflict,�� Gary Sick said.

Another supporter of the deal is an American activist who was a prisoner in Iran. Sarah Shourd was held for more than 400 days in Tehran��s notorious Evin Prison, much of that time in solitary confinement. She, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal were the three American hikers who were arrested by Iranian border guards while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan back in 2009. Much of the criticism of the current deal centers on its failure to secure the release of four other Americans, three of whom are known to be imprisoned in Iran, among them Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. The fourth, Robert Levinson, is believed to be alive, but his whereabouts are unknown.

��Not only does it weaken the hard-liner position in Iran and ease tension between our two countries, it could lead to cooperation to combat ISIS,�� Shourd said of the deal on ��Democracy Now!.�� I also think that it is good for the Americans that are currently detained there. I think it actually gives the Iranian government less incentive to use hostage taking as a tactic.�� When a deal was proposed in 2010, during her imprisonment, Shourd recalled: ��I was dancing and laughing in my cell, because I had no doubt in my mind that my release and Shane and Josh��s release would be carefully calibrated with the temperature of U.S.-Iranian relations. So, if the temperature is good, it looks better for the hostages.��

On Wednesday, U.S.-based groups organized more than 225 public demonstrations at the offices of members of Congress, in a ��No War With Iran�� National Day of Action. Shourd joined scores of other prominent women, among them Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, Jane Fonda and peace activist Medea Benjamin, under the banner of Codepink, declaring, ��Women support the Iran nuclear deal; we say no to war and YES to diplomacy.��

When sealing a nuclear-arms deal with the Soviet Union in 1987, President Reagan repeatedly said, ��Trust, but verify,�� playing on a Russian proverb. Reagan clearly did not trust the Soviets, so he insisted on a thorough verification process. This deal with Iran has exactly that. Give diplomacy a chance.

Browse the archive of Democracy Now! reports on Iran

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Published on August 27, 2015 07:34

Passing the Torch: From Julian Bond to Black Lives Matter

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Civil-rights pioneer Julian Bond died this week at the age of 75. In 1960, as a student at the historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, Bond led nonviolent protests against racially segregated facilities like restaurants, movie theaters and parks. He co-founded SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and spent years organizing and registering African-Americans to vote in the Deep South. In 1965, he was elected to the Georgia state Legislature, where legislators blocked him from being sworn in because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. It took a U.S. Supreme Court decision to get him seated.

Julian Bond was a lifelong activist. He spoke out early for marriage equality and got arrested in front of the White House while protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. He supported the Black Lives Matter movement as well.

Black Lives Matter was founded after a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin. The movement mushroomed in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown one year ago in Ferguson, Missouri, and has grown to more than 20 chapters nationally. Black Lives Matter is making waves on the presidential campaign trail, as activists disrupt events and demand that the candidates address the issues at the core of their movement. At one recent Hillary Clinton campaign event in Keene, New Hampshire, four Black Lives Matter activists were denied entry to the venue.

“We went to New Hampshire with the intention of confronting Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, when we got there, we were told that we couldn’t come inside,” Daunasia Yancey, founder of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Boston, told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. CNN reporter Dan Merica had tweeted about their exclusion, which he was told was due to the room being at capacity. After that, Yancey explained: “Someone came out and invited us into an overflow room, where we could actually watch the forum. And then, one of her staffers came in and said, ‘We could offer you a couple of minutes with her.’ And we said, ‘Absolutely,’ so that we could ask her the questions that we had.”

Art, Politics and Social Change at the Venice Biennale

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

VENICE, Italy — This historic city, famous for its canals and its sonorous gondoliers, its stunning museums brimming with art, where tens of thousands stroll the wide Piazza San Marco and wander its maze of narrow alleys, hosts the world’s oldest and most prestigious art biennial, the Venice Biennale. Every two years, artists from around the world showcase their work in scores of venues — some national pavilions sponsored by countries from around the globe; others international or independent exhibits. High art may seem a rarified field when the world is consumed by war, climate catastrophe, mass migrations and growing economic inequality. Art may seem a luxury as people of color are gunned down by police in American streets. This year’s Biennale, though, explodes these myths.

Okwui Enwezor of Nigeria is the Venice Biennale’s first African-born curator. Enwezor has been widely credited for bringing political art back to the 120-year-old festival. He says he was partly inspired by the 1974 Biennale, when part of the exhibits were dedicated to Chile, to protest the U.S.-backed coup of Gen. Augusto Pinochet that overthrew Chile’s democratic government. Exhibits that Enwezor has brought to this Biennale include an epic live reading of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital,” the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s piece, a boat covered in the front page of a Venice newspaper published the day after nearly 400 migrants drowned off the Italian island of Lampedusa in October 2013, and Iceland’s controversial pavilion, where an actual mosque was created in a church that had been empty for more than 40 years. The city of Venice shut down the mosque, citing security concerns.

“Today’s artists are doing much more than providing a mirror,” Anne Pasternak of the organization Creative Time told us at one of the Biennale’s main venues, the Arsenale. “They’re getting into the gritty work of actual social change.” Creative Time, a New York-based nonprofit that commissions and supports public art and engagement, convened a three-day summit at this year’s Biennale. Hundreds of artists, activists, scholars and others gathered in the 16th-century Teatro alle Tese, part of Venice’s Arsenale. The Arsenale is a vast, ancient walled complex where Venetians built the warships that powered their military dominance in the Mediterranean Sea for centuries. As far back as the 1500s, they could build a warship in one day in what is said to have been the world’s first industrial assembly line.

Now, the complex is given over to art, theater, music and public discussion, turning swords into plowshares. Among those presenting at the summit was Mariam Ghani, an Afghan-American artist based in Brooklyn, N.Y., who conducted from the stage a video-streamed conversation with her father, Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan. Through her art, she delves into the dark corners of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Her collaboration “Index of the Disappeared” is a physical archive of post-9/11 disappearances, including detentions, deportations and renditions.

In building the archive, and a related project called “The Guantanamo Effect,” Ghani explained: “We noticed that ideas, policies and personnel circulated among all the different U.S.-run prisons in the world. So, first you have U.S. corrections officers and U.S. policemen who are deployed as military police to Afghanistan when they’re called up in the National Guard Reserves. They end up in Abu Ghraib, they end up in Bagram,” sites of horrible prisoner abuse and torture. “Ultimately, the policies, the techniques and now even the military equipment circulate back into the U.S., into our domestic sphere,” she continued. “It’s become extremely visible with the recirculation of military surplus equipment from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into domestic police departments and even into school police departments. We saw this extremely visibly in Ferguson, Missouri.”

The Creative Time Summit took place as mass protests marked the first anniversary of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The Black Lives Matter movement was central to the summit’s presentations, and was present in the broader Venice Biennale. “At the moment that we’re dealing with Black Lives Matter and the violence against black people and brown people in the United States, Europe is a experiencing incredible deaths of black people here, too,” said author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, referring to the drowning deaths of hundreds of African migrants seeking asylum in Europe. After Venice, Rhodes-Pitts will head to Lampedusa.

Venice served for centuries as the crossroads of the world, a city where East met West and art flourished. This year’s Venice Biennale, called “All the World’s Futures,” showcases a growing community of politically engaged artists, who not only reflect the beauty and brutality of the world, but might actually change it.

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Published on August 13, 2015 07:37

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 70 Years After the Atomic Bombs Were Dropped

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

The world changed irrevocably 70 years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, when the United States dropped the first nuclear weapon in history on the civilian population of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the second and, to date, final atomic weapon used against human targets was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Many were horrifically burned, and thousands suffered the long-term impacts of radiation poisoning. Survivors of those two horrible blasts, called “hibakusha” in Japanese, still live, and still recount their experiences. While the world has avoided nuclear attacks since those two days in 1945, the potential for nuclear devastation is forever hanging over us. Born from the ashes of those two awful bomb blasts, however, was a nuclear abolition movement that still wages a peaceful campaign to eliminate these weapons.

“I was a child at the age of 10 ... when Japan experienced the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Kenzaburo Oe told me in Tokyo last year. Now 80 years old, Oe is the 1994 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and is one of Japan’s most highly respected intellectuals and humanitarians. “At the time, what was a great shock to me, but also my mother, our families, all the people at that time, was of course the atomic bomb. This was a greater catastrophe than anything we had ever known.”

For all of his great writings, known around the world, Oe said it is his greatest shame that he never wrote a novel about the atomic bombings. He gives great credit to the wounded survivors for keeping the stories alive: “Japan was under [U.S. military] occupation, and at that time it was not possible for the hibakusha, which is what we call the survivors of the atomic bombs, to create any kind of organization of their own. And five years following the bombings was when they were first able to create their own organization. At that time, their lone slogan was to never allow this to be repeated, never to allow any more hibakusha to be created.”

The hibakusha have served as the core of the Japanese peace movement ever since, taking as their symbol the origami peace crane. Sadako Sasaki was a 2-year-old girl when Hiroshima was leveled by the bomb. Sadako lived, but at the age of 12 was diagnosed with leukemia, one of the diseases caused by the bomb’s lingering radiation. A friend in the hospital told her that if she folded 1,000 origami cranes, she would be granted a wish. Hoping to defeat her disease, she began making the intricate paper cranes. She died on Oct. 25, 1955.

The peace movement in Japan still lives, though, as people there organize to abolish nuclear weapons, but also to eliminate nuclear power plants. Oe told the French newspaper Le Monde, ““Hiroshima must be engraved in our memories: It’s a catastrophe even more dramatic than natural disasters, because it’s man-made ... by showing the same disregard for human life in nuclear power stations, [it] is the worst betrayal of the memory of the victims of Hiroshima.” The movement to permanently shut down Japan’s fleet of nuclear power plants seemed on the verge of success after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. The conservative government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that came to power after the disaster, however, has vowed to revive nuclear power there, restarting dormant plants and even building new ones.

Across the world, at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, research is still conducted on making newer and “better” nuclear weapons. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, peace activists are holding a conference in nearby Santa Fe, as well as vigils at the gates of the top-secret national nuclear-weapons research laboratory in Los Alamos. As organizer and longtime peace activist Father John Dear says, “We said to God, what it took you 15 billion years to make, we can end in 15 minutes.”

Dear’s words echo those of one of the bomb’s architects, J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was a physicist and leader of the Manhattan Project, the massive U.S. project that built the bombs. The first atomic detonation happened on July 16, 1945 in the New Mexico desert, at a test site called Trinity. Watching the blast and the ensuing mushroom cloud, Oppenheimer recalled the words of Vishnu from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita:

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Hiroshima stands as a monument to the madness of nuclear weapons. Last year, walking the grounds of the Hiroshima Peace Museum, we saw the Children’s Peace Monument, in honor of Sadako Sasaki and the thousands of child victims of the blasts. The monument is adorned with thousands of paper cranes. Engraved at its base is a plea to us all:

“This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.”

Read this column at Truthdig.org.

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Published on August 06, 2015 09:19

Cincinnati and the Murder of Samuel DuBose

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

A stunning indictment has been handed down in Cincinnati, focusing attention again on police killings of people of color. Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph T. Deters announced that University of Cincinnati Police Officer Ray Tensing has been charged with murder, for the July 19 shooting death of Samuel DuBose, a 43-year-old African-American man. Tensing pulled over DuBose because he was driving a car without a front license plate. As Deter said in his news conference: “He was dealing with someone without a front license plate. This is, in the vernacular, a very chicken-crap stop.” Tensing wanted to see DuBose’s driver’s license. When DuBose said he didn’t have it, Tensing made a motion to open DuBose’s car door. Within seconds of this interaction, Tensing’s right hand swung into the video frame with a pistol. He fired a single shot into DuBose’s head, which sent the car, with DuBose dead behind the wheel, rolling down the street, where it crashed to a halt. Before Tensing’s body-camera video was released, the officer claimed that his arm had been caught in the car, and he was dragged down the street. Another officer, Phillip Kidd, reported he saw the same thing. The video clearly debunked their version. Kidd should be arrested, too. Prosecutor Deters released Officer Tensing’s body-camera video, stating, “This is without question a murder.”

DuBose was killed about one week after another deadly traffic stop. In that case, in Waller County, Texas, 28-year-old Sandra Bland, also African-American, was pulled over by Brian Encinia, a white Texas State Trooper. Encinia claimed she had not signaled a lane change. The trooper’s dashboard camera recorded the stop. He demanded that Bland put out her cigarette, then told her to get out of the car, saying: “I’m giving you a lawful order. I am going to drag you out of there.” Bland can be heard saying: “You opened my car door. So you’re threatening to drag me out of my own car?” Encinia then shouted, “Get out of the car!” When Bland replied: “And then you’re going to assault me? Wow,” Encinia, brandishing a Taser, shouted: “I will light you up! Get out! Now!”

The next video captured Bland on the ground. She is heard saying, “You slammed me into the ground!” When she told Encinia she suffered from epilepsy, he can be heard replying “Good.” Three days after her arrest, Sandra Bland was found dead in her jail cell. The official cause of death reported was suicide, but family and friends dispute this.

DuBose’s murder also occurred almost a year to the day after Eric Garner was killed, when New York City Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo put Garner in a choke hold. A video captured his death, with Garner gasping “I can’t breathe” 11 times. His death was declared a homicide, but Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan failed to charge Pantaleo or any other officer with his death. D.A. Donovan subsequently ran for Congress in a special election and won.

Three weeks after Garner’s death in Staten Island, police killed African-American teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. There was no video of his death on that Saturday afternoon, Aug. 9, 2014. There is video, taken by a bystander, of Brown’s bleeding corpse, left for hours, uncovered, on the hot pavement. No charges were filed against Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, sparking massive protests and launching the Black Lives Matter movement.

This past weekend, more than 1,000 people gathered in Cleveland for a national organizing meeting for Black Lives Matter. Cleveland was the home of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy playing with a toy pistol in a public park on Nov. 21, 2014. A caller to 911 alerted the police about a “guy with a pistol,” but added “it’s probably fake.” Cleveland Police Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback careened into the park in a police cruiser. Within seconds, Loehmann fired at least twice, killing the boy. Surveillance footage, grainy and silent, captures the crime.

Reports have emerged that Loehmann was deemed unfit for police service over two years ago when he worked in the Cleveland suburb of Independence. A letter from a superior there specifically criticizes Loehmann’s performance in firearms training, saying, “He could not follow simple directions ... his handgun performance was dismal.” In 2014, the City of Cleveland paid $100,000 to settle an excessive-force case against Officer Garmback. In June, Cleveland Municipal Judge Ronald Adrine said there are grounds to prosecute the officers. So why haven’t Loehmann and Garmback been charged?

Cincinnati is a start for accountability and justice. Cleveland should pay attention. As the thousand people gathered there last weekend said clearly, “Black Lives Matter.”

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Published on July 30, 2015 07:57

Cincinnati and the murder of Samuel DuBose