[Mb-civic] US human rights abuses, the empire reeks, & Mexico awakened

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

The three parts of this mailing are all from Ed Pearl (so if you're on his list 
you can delete this and if you're not you can read it)  Herein (all really 
important stuff!):  1) Ed's comments  2) Reuters article on new/ongoing 
human rights abuses by U.S.  3) Robert Scheer's biting commentary on 
wasting hundeds of billions on Iraq war while starving important domestic 
programs; and 4) what just happened in Mexico.  Read and be wise!

  It's almost inconcievable you won't hear that Fox just fired Mexico's
AG and dropped the suit against Obrador.  It's an historic victory for
Mexico and all of Latin America, and potentially the greatest defeat for
imperialism and US hegemony of our lifetimes.  The travesty aroused a
nation-wide massive engagement of Mexican workers and obreros, on a level
even Venezuela's Chaves would envy. I do believe it will impact the
hemisphere profoundly and in tandem with the other recent changes.

We should rejoice, but not on the sidelines.  This huge opportunity must
be used to build a mass progressive movement at home, while they reel.
Don't sit back.  Obviously, more on this in the days to come. Ed  (The NY
Times story is at the bottom)

----

Rights Group: Abu Ghraib Abuses 'Tip of Iceberg'
By Ian Simpson
Reuters
Wednesday 17 April 2005

Baghdad - A rights watchdog said on Wednesday the abuses at Iraq's
Abu Ghraib prison were just the "tip of the iceberg" of U.S. mistreatment
of Muslim prisoners.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib are part of a larger pattern of U.S. rights
violations of detainees in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, New
York-based Human Rights Watch said.

Its summary of accusations of abuses came on the eve of the anniversary of
publication of photos showing humiliation and mistreatment of prisoners at
the Iraqi jail.

"Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg," Reed Brody, special counsel
for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "It's now clear that abuse of
detainees has happened all over -- from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay to a
lot of third-country dungeons where the United States has sent prisoners.
And probably quite a few other places we don't even know about."

The group said it was concerned the United States had not stopped the use
of what it called illegal coercive interrogation.

It said nine detainees were known to have died in U.S. custody in
Afghanistan. At least 11 al Qaeda suspects have also "disappeared" in U.S.
custody, with no evidence of where they are being held.

It said there was growing evidence that prisoners being held at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, on suspicion of links to radical Islamic groups "have suffered
torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment."

Abuses there include chained detainees being forced to sit in their own
excrement, Human Rights Watch said.

The CIA has also transferred up to 150 prisoners to countries in the
Middle East known to practice torture routinely, the group added.

The U.S. military says its treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is
humane and justified and says it has changed some of its policies in Iraq
since the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included sexual humiliation of
detainees.

The photographs depicting U.S. forces mistreating Iraqi prisoners at Abu
Ghraib, once a notorious prison under Saddam Hussein, triggered
international criticism of U.S policies.

The former U.S. commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, 
was
cleared of wrongdoing by an army panel last week. The head of the military
police unit at Abu Ghraib received a letter of reprimand and was relieved
of her command.

***

Fiddling While Crucial Programs Starve

By Robert Scheer

Los Angeles Times April 26, 2005

Notice the price of gasoline lately? Isn't it great
that we have secured Iraq's oil? And as Congress signs
off on yet another huge supplementary grant to
supposedly protect U.S. interests in the Mideast, our
president pathetically begs his Saudi buddies for a
price break. As the fall of Rome showed, imperialism
never pays.

Of course, back in 2003, conquering Iraq looked like a
great package deal, what with all that oil -- second
only to Saudi Arabia -- and the manufactured photo ops
of cheering Iraqis. So what if those pesky weapons of
mass destruction weren't really there? So what if no
solid links to Al Qaeda are ever found? This was a win-
win, as the corporate guys like to say: Not only would
we be able to conduct this operation for next to
nothing, we would be welcomed with flowers.

"There is a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn't
have to be U.S. taxpayer money," then-Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress days before the
war, in testimony on the potential costs of invading
Iraq. "We are talking about a country that can finance
its own reconstruction and relatively soon." In the
real world, however, this turned out to be utter
nonsense.

With approval of the latest spending bill, taxpayers
will have been forced to cough up more than $300
billion for the war to date -- above and beyond the
annual $400-billion Pentagon budget -- and tens of
billions for a bungled reconstruction. Even if the
United States can lower its troop commitment to 40,000
troops in Iraq by 2010, as some Pentagon strategists
optimistically anticipate, the war could still end up
costing U.S. taxpayers up to $646 billion by 2015,
according to Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina, the
ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. If
insurgency, corruption and incompetence continue to
plague the U.S. occupation as they have steadily for
the last two years, however, the number could surge to
a trillion dollars or more.

We need to put such gargantuan numbers in some
perspective. The emergency funding that the Senate
passed 99 to 0 last week gives the military roughly $80
billion and pays for the occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan only through September. That is twice what
President Bush insists he needs to cut from the federal
support for Medicaid over the next decade.

Already the red state of Missouri is set to end its
Medicaid program entirely within the next three years
because of a lack of funds. As the Los Angeles Times
reported, that will save the state $5 billion, but at
the cost of ending healthcare for the more than 1
million Missourians enrolled in the program. That sum
is less than half of what Halliburton, Vice President
Dick Cheney's old company, alone has been paid for
reconstruction efforts in Iraq, without much to show
for it in terms of improving the Iraqis' quality of
life.

Similarly, with roughly 10% of what we've spent in
Iraq, we could make up the $27-billion federal funding
shortfall in paying for Bush's controversial No Child
Left Behind Act, which tells public schools that they
will be all but scrapped if they don't improve -- yet
it doesn't provide the means to do so. This number
comes from a lawsuit filed by school districts in
Texas, Michigan and Vermont and the National Education
Assn., the nation's largest teachers organization.

Sadly, these domestic failures provide a far greater
long-term threat to our nation's security than the
hyped-up claims surrounding our foreign adventures.
Abroad, we must "support our troops" at all costs --
even if the cost is their lives -- while at home, the
nation's leaders are all about tough love.

"Government is not here to do everything for
everybody," admonished Missouri state Rep. Jodi
Stefanick, a Republican representing suburban St.
Louis. "We have to draw the line somewhere." Just not
in Iraq, apparently.

Welcome to late-era Rome, where mindless militaristic
expansion is considered patriotic and where demagogues
who recklessly waste taxes and young lives in empire-
building are deemed valorous. Wolfowitz, for example,
has been rewarded for his ignorance and arrogance with
the top job at the World Bank.

It is not too late, however, for us to wake up and
recall that, in the end, once militarism trumped
republicanism, the glory that was Rome proved to be a
hollow boast.

Copyright(c) 2005 Robert Scheer

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-
scheer26apr26,0,20526
89.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions


***

By GINGER THOMPSON

NY Times, April 28, 2005

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico, April 27 - The legal proceedings that threatened 
to
knock Mexico's most popular politician off next year's presidential ballot
and to plunge this country into turmoil seemed to come to a sudden end on
Wednesday night, when a beleaguered President Vicente Fox announced the
resignation of his attorney general and a review of the government's case
against the politician

In a nationally televised address, Mr. Fox said he had accepted the
resignation of Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, who oversaw
the prosecution of the politician, Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador of
Mexico City, and thus became one of the most polarizing figures in the
government.

Mr. Macedo de la Concha, a conservative brigadier general who previously
served as chief of the military prosecutor's office, had been credited
with dismantling some of the most powerful drug cartels but also
criticized for using his office to intimidate President Fox's political
adversaries.

His resignation was widely considered a kind of peace offering to Mayor
López Obrador, whose political career was threatened three weeks ago when
Congress voted to lift his official immunity and remove him from office so
that he could stand trial in a land dispute.

Striking an uncharacteristically stiff posture and formal tone of voice,
President Fox said he considered defending democracy his government's most
important responsibility, and wanted to guarantee that next year's
presidential elections would be fair, transparent and open to all
qualified figures.

"It will always be better for our Mexico to stay open to dialogue, and not
duels," Mr. Fox said. "Our goal is to conciliate, not divide. Our future
as a country will be promising if we are capable of reaching agreement on
that which is fundamental, instead of futile confrontations."

To most Mexicans, the case against Mayor López Obrador had little to do
with law and order. They called it a conspiracy led by President Fox's
conservative National Action Party in alliance with the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, which ruled this country for more than seven decades.
Analysts from here to Washington and Wall Street denounced the case
against the mayor as a threat to Mexico's fragile democracy.

The announcement comes only a few days after nearly one million people
thronged the streets of the capital to protest the Fox government's
campaign to prosecute Mr. López Obrador. The case against the mayor was
based on a minor contempt of court charge for disobeying an order against
the construction of a hospital access road. Still, it threatened the
mayor's political career, and could have landed him, the leading contender
to succeed Mr. Fox, in jail.

Mr. Fox, Mexico's first peacefully elected opposition president, had
contended that the proceedings against Mayor López Obrador, a leftist
street fighter of a politician who rose to power as a champion of the
poor, was proof of the progress his government had made in establishing
rule of law. No one, no matter how powerful, he said, stood above the law.

A majority of Mexicans, however, did not believe him. Since Mr. Fox came
to power five years ago, his government has failed to live up to its
promises to prosecute the multi-million-dollar scandals and violent
massacres that were signatures of the old authoritarian rule.

"All transitions have a watershed, and this could be Mexico's," said
Sergio Aguayo, who stood on the front lines of Mexico's struggle to reform
its political system. "For me and many other people, this case was never
about López Obrador. It was about the right to compete. It was about
ideology, and the left standing up for change, because the right has
failed to deliver what it promised. It was about power.

"What we learned was that President Fox's credentials as a democrat are
not as strong as we believed and that the Mexican right is more
reactionary than we ever imagined."

Manuel Camacho Solis, a federal legislator and political adviser to Mayor
López Obrador, called the announcement by President Fox an "important
victory."

"This is the fist step toward ending the assault against democracy," he
said. "It is a decision that shows respect for the conscience of the
people and puts us back on course for fair elections next year."

George Grayson, a political analyst who teaches government at the College
of William and Mary and is writing a book on Mayor López Obrador, said the
Fox government had virtually delivered the presidency to his party's
leftist adversary. Polls published this week indicated that Mr. López
Obrador had double-digit leads over all other leading contenders. Indeed
while the proceedings against the mayor, known as a desafuero, caused his
popularity to soar, it plunged Mr. Fox's lackluster government into open
conflict. In interviews earlier this week, aides to the president
described the case against the mayor as an enormous mistake and said the
president was looking for a way out.

The toll became clear Tuesday during a trip by Mr. Fox to Oaxaca State, in
the south. After a lunch with business leaders and the governor, the
president stopped to confront a young protester carrying a sign that
described him as a "traitor to democracy."

Clearly agitated, the president asked over and over again for the
protester to explain. The protester did not answer. "I am not some traitor
to democracy," Mr. Fox said. "On the contrary, I have worked for democracy
for all."

--


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