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Here’s the opening to my latest 3-page piece on the pro-Israel lobby in Washington – all of it should be up at Religion Dispatches in the next few days.
Sources: Panel 2: Attendance info from AIPAC’s website here, Clinton’s quote from the State Dept. website.
News, as ever, is below.
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.
Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one to reflect what an ugly week it’s been in US-related politics. First up, here’s the latest part of the School of the Americas piece – skip back 3 steps to get to the beginning and find out more about SOA/WHINSEC and their illustrious graduates’ violent pasts.
As the estimated number of dead in Haiti rises past the 200,000 mark, several news reports (Democracy Now!, The Guardian and Al Jazeera for starters) are describing the US’s apparent takeover of the main airport at Port-au-Prince. Convoys carrying aid, medical supplies and water are being re-directed to make way for a worrying number of US troops, who are being deployed ‘to ensure security’. Yes Magazine had a great quote from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, after declaring her expectation that the Haitian government would pass an emergency decree – including things like the right to impose curfews – said, “The decree would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us”. Of course they would.
Naomi Klein leads the charge for transparency to prevent Haiti from succumbing to the free market agenda that New Orleans did in the aftermath of Katrina. Here’s a checklist of suggested actions sent by Rep. Paul Teller on September 13, 2005 – let’s hope they don’t start happening in Port-au-Prince. One other chilling similarity with Katrina is the already conspicuous presence of Blackwater-esque private mercenary forces, operating under the philanthropically-tinged moniker International Peace Operations Association. For an altogether more upfront description of their services in Haiti, checkout this webpage hosted by a similar private outfit called All Pro Legal Investigations – under the ‘Personal Protection’ header they’ll even deal with ‘worker unrest’ and ‘high-threat terminations’. What more could an International Peacekeeping force want? Jeremy Scahill has the whole scoop over at the Nation.
The bad news then came home, not only with the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat for the Democrats, but also yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that curbing corporate donations to electoral campaigns is unconstitutional. Why? Because it infringes on the said corporations’ first amendment rights to free speech. I’m sure that’s exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he said, “the end of democracy will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.” See corporate watch for more info.
Lastly, one piece of good news to try and even up the balance. The online human rights and social justice magazine Independent World Report will publish my 4-page piece on Diego Garcia in their next issue.
