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As you’ll have seen above, the cover to the Honduran Coup: A Graphic History is now finished, and patiently awaiting a journey to the printers. There’s nothing quite like drawing a crowd of riot police to get you thinking about civil disobedience and the concomitant governmental responses, especially in conjunction with an unnerving yet fantastic piece in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine that I came across recently.
The article’s about the development and proliferation of non-lethal weapons for crowd control and ‘peaceful engagement’ of civilian protests, and cites numerous examples of these cuddly alternatives such as the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) and the neuro-chemical agent that reportedly played a pivotal role in ending the Chechen Hostage Crisis. Killing most, if not all, of the hostages in the process. Readers of this blog will also remember the LRAD’s role in the Honduran coup crisis, one which was actively denied by the de facto regime despite televised images such as this one (see left) being broadcast by Telesur. Its ear-shattering debut on US soil was at the Pittsburgh G20 protests, which you can witness below for yourself.
For the long wishlist of other techno-gadgets that every repressive government shouldn’t be without, click here. Granted, it’s from 2003 – from “Nonlethal Weapons: Terms and References,” a report published by the United States Air Force Institute for National Security Studies – and many on the list are still at the ‘proposal’ stage, but it’s good to see security officials really getting creative with their futuristic weaponised fantasies.
My personal favourite is under the ‘Holograms’ section entitled, Prophet: The projection of the image of an ancient god over an enemy capital whose public communications have been seized and used against it in a massive psychological operation. Doctor Manhattan eat your heart out.
Speaking of imaginative flights of fancy when it comes to security, Secretary of State Clinton is currently on a tour of central america and stopped off in Guatemala where she wished Honduran ‘President’ Pepe Lobo well and urged the rest of Latin America to take his government seriously. Or recognize them, for a start. She told those assembled (including Lobo himself) “We support the work that President Lobo is doing to promote national unity and strengthen democracy,” and went on to say that the US is restoring all aid to the country. No matter that the human rights situation in the country continues to worsen by the day, prompting first the Director of Human Rights Watch to write to the Honduran Attorney General and now nine members of congress to write directly to Clinton to investigate the abuses. Here’s their letter.
As mentioned yesterday, I’m looking for bilingual spanish/english readers to spot any translation problems in the page above. Leave a comment with your constructive criticisms, gente. Gracias! More news below, plus a poll for you to vote on.
…from my first graphic novel and current long-term project. More about this next week. In the meantime, scroll down for news.
Some amazing, bizarre and inspiring stories in the news this week. I came across the amazing one this afternoon, though it’s the form of the news that’s amazing as opposed to the content: the Winter Olympics’ use of a live twitter feed embedded in its online coverage so you can monitor trends in real-time as events unfold. See for yourself. Needless to say, the potential for this carried over into other news stories is massive.
The bizarre portion relates to the assassination guide mentioned in the title and is something straight out of the Bourne Identity franchise. If you hadn’t heard, Mossad, the Israel intelligence agency, is alleged to have carried out a covert operation to take out Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a leading Hamas official, in his hotel room in Dubai on Jan 20. Aside from the furore surrounding the identities of the team involved (who are also alleged to have cloned British and Irish passports) and the undeniable fact that al-Mabhouh wound up dead, what is most unbelievable is the security camera footage that chronicles the entire operation, broadcast recently on the US’s ABC network. Click here for the play-by-play guide, should you ever need to brush up your black ops skills. A surefire contender for the least covert operation ever carried out.
Lastly, on the inspiration front, is news from Iran that dissidents are publishing a comic that chronicles life in Iran. I know what you’re thinking – you’ve already read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. But whereas Satrapi’s incredible memoir relied on her childhood memories, this new project is being published in real time (there’s that buzzword again), and will be serialized three times a week. Click here for the full story or here for the start of the comic.
Panels 1-3: Despite a media blackout on these raids and an official denial by an army spokesman, several accounts corroborate the violent evictions: click here, here or here for spanish coverage.
Given the less than chirpy tone of the last rant, I’ll kick things off with an optimistic bang: news from Japan that the much-maligned military base planned for Okinawa has suffered a ‘setback’, to use US military parlance. In standard english, that means there are now too many people bitterly opposed to it to be conveniently ignored and forgotten about. Think peace in Iraq (we’ll get to that in a second) and you’ll see what I mean.
At last the groundswell of feeling against Uncle Sam’s maniacal militarism has finally found its spokesperson in the form of Susumu Inamine, the newly-elected mayor of Nago, Okinawa, who plans to revoke the 2006 US-Japan agreement that would move the majority of US troops (some 25,000+) currently based in Futenma, Okinawa to his hometown. Whose population is around 60,000. As if the prospective dash of cosmopolitanism wasn’t alluring enough, Nago is also turning down the opportunity to have a US helicopter crash land on its university campus, or servicemen rape its schoolgirls – once in 1995 and again in 2008. The move is a major spanner in the works for the US, who only want to leapfrog onto the undoubtedly far more pliant island of Guam by 2014 anyway. Oh wait, the locals are against a base there too. Don’t they know anything about national security?
The other glimmer of hope comes from the very man who once symbolized hope to millions, el presidente Obama. Speaking out against the indefensibly bad move from the Supreme Court last week to open the sluice gate on corporate contributions to the US electoral process, Barack raged: “[this] opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money in our democracy…This ruling strikes at our democracy itself”. Let’s hope no one reminds him that he has half of Wall Street kicking around in his cabinet. For an educational (and infuriating) way to waste away an afternoon, check out opensecrets.org and trace the flow of green to the white house. It’s not often that I (or anyone) looks to the UK as the paradigm of political process, but at least we have caps on campaign spending.
And now, the bad news. Apparently there aren’t enough accountants in Iraq, and the US-backed reconstruction effort, spearheaded by US firm Dyncorps, is hemorrhaging cash to the tune of $2.5bn lost expenses in training the iraqi police force. Once the moneymen get there, someone point them towards Afghanistan, where -yep, you guessed it- Dyncorps is also in charge of getting things up and running.
Coming soon: tomorrow’s inauguration in Honduras of conservative, coup-supporting President Porfirio Lobo, who takes office after the bloodiest months in his country’s recent history. Fear not, the last installment of the Honduran Coup: the graphic history is on my drawing board as I type. And for that Friday feeling, be sure to check out the sweat patches on Tony ‘Teflon’ Blair as the non-stick ex-PM tells us all how he and Dubya saved us from Saddam at the Iraq Inquiry this Friday.
PS Feel free to share/digg/tweet etc this and any comic from www.archcomix.com, there’s more than enough bile to go around.
Next three panels of my piece on the School of the Americas. To start at the beginning, just hit previous for an intro to the SOA and its heinous past.
Remember, this piece and the Honduran coup comics I put together with Nikil Saval are available in hard copy format via the chipin widget on the right hand side bar, shipped directly to your door for $5 plus $2 shipping. Or you could just click here.
Below is a film I highly recommend, viewable free online, about the SOA and the part Father Roy Bourgeois has had in fighting to get it shut down:
Above is the last tier of the Honduran comic. Now that the fake election was pushed through and trumpeted by the media, let’s not let the spotlight drift away from the area – check out the video below for some excellent reporting from behind the scenes of the voting process:
Also, here’s a comic from last year exposing the dangers, greed and environmental destruction inherent to Mountain Top Removal – and good luck to those who are protesting in Copenhagen this week.
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A request to new visitors to the site: (welcome!) on the right hand toolbar is a chipin widget that I’m using to get pre-orders for a hard copy, full-colour 32p comic about US intervention in central america – featuring both parts of the Honduran Coup: A Graphic History as published in Alternet and the Huffington Post. Read more about it on the chipin page I’ve created here.
For $5 (plus $2 shipping in the US and $4 overseas) you’ll get a copy of the comic as well as your name printed in the back, along with all the other donors to the project. We’re already well on the way (see the total) and payment is via paypal so totally safe. Be part of a group project to help raise awareness and produce an educational tool that will have a lasting impact. And please use the buttons below to share this link around – facebook, twitter, digg – any help is appreciated.
