Amy Goodman's Blog, page 23

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Veterans of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are now challenging the occupation of Chicago.

This week, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is holding the largest meeting in its 63-year history there. Protests and rallies will confront the two-day summit, facing off against a massive armed police and military presence. The NATO gathering has been designated a “National Special Security Event” by the Department of Homeland Security, empowering the U.S. Secret Service to control much of central Chicago, and to employ unprecedented authority to suppress the public’s First Amendment right to dissent.

The focus of the summit will be Afghanistan. “Operation Enduring Freedom,” as the Afghanistan War was named by the Bush administration and continues to be called by the Obama administration, is officially a NATO operation. As the generals and government bureaucrats from around the world prepare to meet in Chicago, the number of NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2001 topped 3,000. First Lt. Alejo R. Thompson of Yuma, Ariz., was killed on May 11 this year, at the age of 30. He joined the military in 2000, and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Shortly after his death, The Associated Press reported that Thompson would be receiving the Purple Heart medal posthumously and is “in line for a Bronze Star.” On Wednesday, President Barack Obama awarded, also posthumously, the Medal of Honor to Leslie H. Sabo Jr., killed in action in Cambodia in 1970.

While the president and the Pentagon are handing out posthumous medals, a number of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will be marching, in military formation, to McCormick Place in Chicago to hand their service medals back. Aaron Hughes left the University of Illinois in 2003 to join the military, and was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait. He served in the Illinois National Guard from 2000 to 2006. Since leaving active duty, Hughes has become a field organizer with the group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). He explained why he is returning his medals: “Because every day in this country, 18 veterans are committing suicide. Seventeen percent of the individuals that are in combat in Afghanistan, my brothers and sisters, are on psychotropic medication. Twenty to 50 percent of the individuals that are getting deployed to Afghanistan are already diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, military sexual trauma or a traumatic brain injury. Currently one-third of the women in the military are sexually assaulted.”

IVAW’s Operation Recovery seeks increased support for veterans, and to stop the redeployment of traumatized troops. Hughes elaborated: “The only type of help that [veterans] can get is some type of medication like trazodone, Seroquel, Klonopin, medication that’s practically paralyzing, medication that doesn’t allow them to conduct themselves in any type of regular way. And that’s the standard operating procedures. Those are the same medications that service members are getting redeployed with and conducting military operations on.”

Another veteran—of the anti-war movement of the 1960s—and now a law professor at Northwestern University, longtime Chicago activist Bernardine Dohrn, also will be in the streets. She calls NATO the “militarized arm of the global 1 percent,” and criticizes Chicago Mayor and former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for misappropriating funds for the summit: “Suddenly we don’t have money here for community mental-health clinics. We don’t have money for public libraries or for schools. We don’t have money for public transportation. But somehow we have the millions of dollars necessary ... to hold this event right here in the city of Chicago.”

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By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Shareholder meetings can be routine, unless you are Bank of America, in which case it may be declared an "extraordinary event". That is what the city of Charlotte, North Carolina called the bank’s shareholder meeting this week. Bank of America is currently the second largest bank in the US (after JP Morgan Chase), claiming more than $2tn in assets. It is also the "too big to fail" poster child of Occupy Wall Street, a speculative banking monstrosity that profits from, among other things, the ongoing foreclosure crisis and the exploitation of dirty coal.

North Carolina, which went for Barack Obama in 2008, is a swing state in this year’s presidential election. Current polls indicate the Tar Heel State is a toss-up. To boost its chances there, the Democratic party has chosen Charlotte to host this summer’s Democratic National Convention. In preparation, the Charlotte city council passed an amendment to the city code allowing the city manager to declare so-called extraordinary events.

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

May Day, Murdoch and the murder of Milly Dowler. What do they have to do with the 2012 U.S. general election? This year’s election will undoubtedly be the most expensive in U.S. history, with some projections topping $5 billion. Not only has the amount of spending increased, but its nature has as well, following the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which allows unlimited spending by corporations, unions and so-called super PACs, all under the banner of “free speech.” This campaign season will unfold amidst a resurgent Occupy Wall Street movement launched globally on May 1, the same day the British Parliament released a report on Rupert Murdoch’s media empire charging that he is “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.” Now more than ever, people should heed the advice of the famous Watergate source, Deep Throat: “Follow the money.”

Most money in our elections goes to TV stations to run political advertisements. According to writers Robert McChesney and John Nichols in the Monthly Review, the amount of political ad spending is skyrocketing, such that “factoring for inflation, the 1972 election spent less than 3 percent of what will be spent on TV political ads in the 2012 election cycle.”

For just one relatively small race, a recent Pennsylvania congressional primary between Democrats, journalist Ken Knelly provided a comprehensive analysis of the local TV news coverage compared with the amount of political ads that ran on the same TV stations. Knelly’s headline says it all: “28 hours of political ads (and a few minutes of news).” More than 3,300 ad spots were run on the stations serving the predominantly Democratic district. Lost in the hours of ads, Knelly writes, was the “very occasional news report on the race,” and he said the reports contained very little substance.

How Knelly was able to probe these details is crucial. The Federal Communications Commission requires that TV stations maintain a public inspection file, and any member of the public can view it. Within the disclosures are the details of the political advertising purchases made, the amounts paid and what entity bought the airtime. Recent efforts have been made to compel these hugely profitable broadcast entities to publish these files online. The broadcasters have vigorously fought such efforts and, although they usually prevail in the industry-friendly halls of the FCC, have lost this battle. On Friday, April 27, the FCC voted 2-1 to require stations to transition from paper to online filing over a two-year period. ProPublica reporter Justin Elliot notes the files will not be provided in a standard format, and will likely not be searchable.

Most of the major U.S. broadcast networks lobbied against the new disclosure rules, including Fox Television, one of the crown jewels of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. media empire. Murdoch received a stinging rebuke this week with the release of a British Parliament report on the phone-hacking scandal that has racked his newspapers in Britain. The scandal exploded in 2011, when The Guardian reported that News of the World reporters had hacked into the voice mail of 13-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler in 2002. While Dowler was still missing, reporters deleted some of her voice mails, which gave false hope to her family that she still might be alive.

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Three targeted Americans: A career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these U.S. citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained—sometimes at gunpoint—and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer. Each remains resolute in standing up to the increasing government crackdown on dissent.

The intelligence official: William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the secretive National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. spy agency that dwarfs the CIA. As technical director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, Binney told me, he was tasked to “see how we could solve collection, analysis and reporting on military and geopolitical issues all around the world, every country in the world.” Throughout the 1990s, the NSA developed a massive eavesdropping system code-named ThinThread, which, Binney says, maintained crucial protections on the privacy of U.S. citizens demanded by the U.S. Constitution. He recalled, “After 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA,” as massive domestic spying became the norm. He resigned on Oct. 31, 2001.

Along with several other NSA officials, Binney reported his concerns to Congress and to the Department of Defense. Then, in 2007, as then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was being questioned on Capitol Hill about the very domestic spying to which Binney objected, a dozen FBI agents charged into his house, guns drawn. They forced aside his son and found Binney, a diabetic amputee, in the shower. They pointed their guns at his head, then led him to his back porch and interrogated him.

Three others were raided that morning. Binney called the FBI raid “retribution and intimidation so we didn’t go to the Judiciary Committee in the Senate and tell them, ‘Well, here’s what Gonzales didn’t tell you, OK.’ ” Binney was never charged with any crime.

The filmmaker: Laura Poitras is an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, whose recent films include “My Country, My Country,” about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and “The Oath,” which was filmed in Yemen. Since 2006, Poitras has been detained and questioned at airports at least 40 times. She has had her computer and reporter’s notebooks confiscated and presumably copied, without a warrant. The most recent time, April 5, she took notes during her detention. The agents told her to stop, as they considered her pen a weapon.

She told me: “I feel like I can’t talk about the work that I do in my home, in my place of work, on my telephone, and sometimes in my country. So the chilling effect is huge. It’s enormous.”

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign launched its first Spanish-language ads this week, just after returning from the Summit of the Americas. He spent three days in Colombia, longer than any president in U.S. history. The trip was marred, however, by a prostitution scandal involving the U.S. military and Secret Service. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We let the boss down, because nobody’s talking about what went on in Colombia other than this incident.” Dempsey is right. It also served as a metaphor for the U.S government’s ongoing treatment of Latin America.

The scandal reportedly involves 11 members of the U.S. Secret Service and five members of the U.S. Army Special Forces, who allegedly met prostitutes at one or more bars in Cartagena and took up to 20 of the women back to their hotel, some of whom may have been minors. This all deserves thorough investigation, but so do the policy positions that Obama promoted while in Cartagena.

First, the war on drugs. Obama stated at the summit, “I, personally, and my administration’s position is that legalization is not the answer.” Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, told me that, despite Obama’s predictable line, this summit showed “the transformation of the regional and global dialogue around drug policy. ... This is the first you’ve had a president saying that we’re willing to look at the possibility that U.S. drug policies are doing more harm than good in some parts of the world.” He credits the growing consensus across the political spectrum in Latin America, from key former presidents like Vicente Fox of Mexico, who supports legalization of drugs, to current leaders like Mexico’s Felipe Calderon, who cited the rapacious demand for drugs in the U.S. as the core of the problem.

Nadelmann went on: “You have the funny situation of Evo Morales, the leftist leader of Bolivia, former head of the coca growers’ union, lecturing the United States about—essentially, sounding like Milton Friedman—that ‘How can you expect us to reduce the supply when there is a demand?’ So there’s the beginning of a change here. I don’t think it’s going to be possible to put this genie back in the bottle.”

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

The Pentagon knows it. The world’s largest insurers know it. Now, governments may be overthrown because of it. It is climate change, and it is real. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last month was the hottest March on record for the United States since 1895, when records were first kept, with average temperatures of 8.6 degrees F above average. More than 15,000 March high-temperature records were broken nationally. Drought, wildfires, tornadoes and other extreme weather events are already plaguing the country.

Across the world in the Maldives, rising sea levels continue to threaten this Indian Ocean archipelago. It is the world’s lowest-lying nation, on average only 1.3 meters above sea level. The plight of the Maldives gained global prominence when its young president, the first-ever democratically elected there, Mohamed Nasheed, became one of the world’s leading voices against climate change, especially in the lead-up to the 2009 U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen. Nasheed held a ministerial meeting underwater, with his cabinet in scuba gear, to illustrate the potential disaster.

In February, Nasheed was ousted from his presidency at gunpoint. The Obama administration, through State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, said of the coup d’etat, “This was handled constitutionally.” When I spoke to Nasheed last month, he told me: “It was really shocking and deeply disturbing that the United States government so instantly recognized the former dictatorship coming back again. ... The European governments have not recognized the new regime in the Maldives.” There is a parallel between national positions on climate change and support or opposition to the Maldives coup.

Nasheed is the subject of a new documentary, “The Island President,” in which his remarkable trajectory is traced. He was a student activist under the dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and was arrested and tortured, along with many others. By 2008, when elections were finally held, Gayoom lost, and Nasheed was elected. As he told me, though: “It’s easy to beat a dictator, but it’s not so easy to get rid of a dictatorship. The networks, the intricacies, the institutions and everything that the dictatorship has established remains, even after the elections.” On the morning of Feb. 7, 2012, under threat of death to him and his supporters from rebelling army generals, Nasheed resigned.

While no direct link has been found yet between Nasheed’s climate activism and the coup, it was clear in Copenhagen in 2009 that he was a thorn in the Obama administration’s side. Nasheed and other representatives from AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States, were taking a stand to defend their nations’ very existence, and building alliances with grass-roots groups like 350.org, that challenge corporate-dominated climate policy.

Back in the U.S., March delivered this year’s first weather disaster that caused more than $1 billion in damage, with tornadoes ravaging four central states and killing 41. Dr. Jeff Masters of the weather website Weather Underground blogged about March that “records not merely smashed, but obliterated.” On March 23, conservative Texas Gov. Rick Perry renewed the state of emergency declared there last year as a result of massive droughts.

Texas lists 1,000 of the state’s 4,710 community water systems under restrictions. Spicewood, Texas, population 1,100, has run dry, and is now getting water trucked in. Residents have severe restrictions on water use. But for Perry, restricting corporations whose greenhouse-gas emissions lead to climate change is heresy.

Mitt Romney is on track to be the Republican candidate for president, with the support of former challengers like Perry. They are already attacking President Obama on climate change. The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has been promoting legislation in statehouses to oppose any climate legislation, and rallying members of Congress to block federal action, especially by hampering the work of the Environmental Protection Agency. As the Center for Media and Democracy has detailed in its “ALEC Exposed” reporting, ALEC is funded by the country’s major polluters, including ExxonMobil, BP America, Chevron, Peabody Energy, and Koch Industries. The Koch brothers have also funded tea-party groups like FreedomWorks, to create the appearance of grass-roots activism.

This election season will likely be marked by more extreme weather events, more massive loss of life, and billions of dollars in damages.

President Nasheed is working to run again for his lost presidency, as President Obama tries to hold on to his. The climate may hang in the balance.

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 author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2012 Amy Goodman

The former Marine shot by cops in his apartment died from a single bullet that entered his right arm and ripped through both lungs, according to an autopsy report obtained by the Daily News. The lawyer for Kenneth Chamberlain's family said the autopsy contradicts the police account of his death. Cops say Chamberlain, 68, was advancing toward police with a butcher knife on Nov. 19 when White Plains Police Officer Anthony Carelli fired two shots to stop him. Randolph McLaughlin, attorney for Chamberlain's family, said the trajectory of the fatal bullet suggests Chamberlain was neither facing the police nor holding up a weapon.

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

"My name is Kenneth Chamberlain. This is my sworn testimony. White Plains police are going to come in here and kill me."

And that's just what they did.

In the early hours of Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011, U.S. Marine veteran Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. accidentally hit his LifeAid medical-alert pendant, presumably while sleeping. The 68-year-old retired corrections officer had a heart condition, but wasn't in need of help that dawn. Within two hours, the White Plains, N.Y., police department broke down his apartment door and shot him dead. Chamberlain was African-American. As with Trayvon Martin, the black teen recently killed in Florida, there are recordings of the events, recordings that include a racial slur directed at the victim.

The opening quote, above, was related to us by Kenneth Chamberlain Jr., when he appeared on the "Democracy Now!" news hour talking about the police killing of his father. Ken Jr. was holding on to the LifeAid pendant that his father wore around his neck in case of a medical emergency. Perhaps unbeknownst to the White Plains police who arrived at Ken Sr.'s door that morning, the LifeAid system includes a box in the home that, when activated, transmits audio to the LifeAid company, where it is recorded. Ken Jr. and his lawyers heard the recording in a meeting at the office of the Westchester County district attorney, Janet DiFiore.

Ken Jr. repeated what he heard his father say on the tape: "He says, 'I'm a 68-year-old man with a heart condition. Why are you doing this to me?' ... You also hear him pleading with the officers again, over and over. And at one point, that's when the expletive is used by one of the police officers."

One of Chamberlain's attorneys, Mayo Bartlett, told me about the racial slur. Bartlett is a former Westchester County prosecutor, so he knows the ropes. He was very explicit in recounting what he heard on the recording.

"Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. said to the police, 'I'm a sick old man.' One of the police officers replied, 'We don't give a f—k, n——-!'" (that last word rhymes with 'trigger,' which they would soon pull). The recording also includes a taunt from the police, as related by Bartlett, "Open the door, Kenny, you're a grown-ass man!" It was when Ken Jr. related how the police mocked his father's military service that he broke down. "He said, 'Semper fi." So they said, "Oh, you're a Marine. Hoo-rah. Hoo-rah." And this is somebody that served this country. Why would you even say that to him?" Ken Jr. wept as he held his father's Marine ring and Veterans Administration card.

The LifeAid operator that November morning, hearing the exchange live, called the White Plains police in a desperate attempt to cancel the call for emergency medical aid. Chamberlain's niece, who lives in the building, ran down, trying to intervene. Chamberlain's sister was on her cellphone, offering to talk to her brother. The police denied any attempt at help. One was heard on the recording saying, "We don't need any mediator."

The heavily armed police used a special device to take Chamberlain's door completely off the hinges and, as chillingly captured in the Taser-mounted camera, burst into the apartment. Mayo Bartlett recounted seeing Chamberlain shirtless in the video, hands at his side, without the knife or hatchet that police claim he wielded, standing in his boxer shorts. "The minute they got into the house, they didn't even give him one command. They never mentioned, 'Put your hands up.' They never told him to lay down on the bed. They never did any of that. The first thing they did, as soon as that door was finally broken off the hinges, you could see the Taser light up, and it was charged, and you could see it going directly toward him."

The last thing Bartlett hears on the Taser tape is "shut it off," meaning, turn off the video recording, which the police did. Within minutes, they would shoot Chamberlain twice. Four months later, no one has been charged with the killing. Democracy Now! cohost Juan Gonzalez revealed the name of the shooter through his reporting in the New York Daily News, as White Plains Officer Anthony Carelli. Carelli is to be tried in coming months for alleged police brutality against two brothers, the sons of Jordanian immigrants, who say Carelli beat one of them, Jereis Hatter, while handcuffed, and called him a 'raghead'.

Trayvon Martin was killed Feb. 26. A Florida grand jury is expected to begin the investigation into his killing on April 10. The next day, April 11, a New York grand jury is scheduled to begin hearing evidence in the case of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. He was killed last November. In both cases, an African-American male was gunned down. In both cases, the shooter is known, but neither yet has been arrested.

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

There was terror in the skies this week over Texas, caused not by a terrorist but by a pilot—a Flight Standards captain, no less. JetBlue Airways Capt. Clay Osbon, flying Flight 191 from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Las Vegas, began moving up and down the aisle after the jet was airborne, ranting, according to several passengers, about Iraq, Israel, al-Qaida and bombs, calling on passengers to recite the Lord's Prayer, saying that they were "all going down." An off-duty pilot in the cabin went to the cockpit to help the co-pilot with the emergency landing, while passengers and crew subdued Osbon. Osbon, who'd been with JetBlue almost since its founding, was taken to the hospital, suspended with pay, then criminally charged with interfering with a flight crew.

That's enough to inspire a fear of flying in anyone. But just getting to your airplane these days may present a greater risk to your health than the actual flight.

New airport security screening technology, primarily backscatter X-ray devices, have come under increased scrutiny, as their effectiveness is questioned amid concerns that the radiation exposure may cause cancer. Adding to health concerns are both the graphic nature of the images captured, essentially nude photos of every person passing through the machine, and the aggressive—and for some, humiliating—nature of the alternative to the scans, the "enhanced pat-down" by a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins introduced a bill that would require independent laboratory testing of the X-ray backscatter machines, exactly what a group of University of California, San Francisco scientists called on the Obama administration to do in April 2010. Responding to the TSA claim (provided by the manufacturer, Rapiscan) that the radiation dose is less than "the dose one receives from eating one banana," professor John Sedat and others wrote: "While the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high. ... There is good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations [including pregnant women]." When this risk is multiplied over 700 million annual travelers, Michael Love, Ph.D., the manager of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine X-ray facility, told Discover magazine, "someone is going to get skin cancer." The European Union has banned the machines.

While flying the past few weekends, I refused to go through the scanners, which is every passenger's right, although the option is almost never indicated anywhere (the Collins bill also requires clear signage). I was made to wait while TSA employees were clearly available to conduct what is euphemistically called an "enhanced pat-down." The agent's aggressive questioning of my decision to "opt out" was matched only by her aggressive pat-down when I would not give in. Arriving back in New York, a friend who had just flown in from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport recounted how the TSA agent had her hands down the front of my friend's pants and said, "Feels like you've lost some weight"!

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

On the rainy night of Sunday, Feb. 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked to a convenience store in Sanford, Fla. On his way home, with his Skittles and iced tea, the African-American teenager was shot and killed. The gunman, George Zimmerman, didn't run. He claimed that he killed the young man in self-defense. The Sanford Police agreed and let him go. Since then, witnesses have come forward, 911 emergency calls have been released, and outrage over the killing has gone global.

Trayvon Martin lived in Miami. He was visiting his father in Sanford, near Orlando, staying in the gated community known as The Retreat at Twin Lakes, where Zimmerman volunteered with the Neighborhood Watch program. The Miami Herald reported that Zimmerman was a "habitual caller" to the police, making 46 calls since January 2011. He was out on his rounds as a self-appointed watchman, packing his concealed 9 mm pistol, when he called 911: "We've had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there's a real suspicious guy ... this guy looks like he's up to no good, or he's on drugs or something."

Later in the call, Zimmerman exclaims, "OK. These a—holes always get away. ... [Expletive], he's running."

Sounds of Zimmerman moving follow, along with a controversial utterance from Zimmerman, under his breath, considered by many to be "[Expletive] coons." The sound of his running prompted the 911 operator to ask, "Are you following him?" Zimmerman replied, "Yeah," to which the dispatcher said, "OK, we don't need you to do that."

One of the attorneys representing the Martin family, Jasmine Rand, told me: "The term 'coon' on the audiotape ... is a very obvious racial slur against African-Americans. We also heard the neighbors come forward and say, 'Yeah, in this particular neighborhood, we look for young black males to be committing criminal activity.' And that's exactly what George Zimmerman did that night. He found a young black male that he did not recognize, assumed that he did not belong there, and he targeted him."

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