States of siege wrack Guatemala

Critics say the government’s siege is about persecuting activists and appeasing the US, and not drug trafficking.

No one disputes the power, corrupting influence or horrific violence projected by the cartels. “You could see them walking in the mall [in Coban] before the siege,” says Cesar Bol, a leading activist with the National Indigenous and Campiseno Coordination Organisation (CONIC).

“They openly carried pistols on their belts, wore brand new clothes, drove brand new trucks and spoke with Mexican accents.”

But in farming villages, church halls and independent research offices, there is deep scepticism about the government’s actions.

“The state of siege is a strategy of the government to attack social movements,” says Carlos Morales, who works for farmers’ rights with the Union of Campiseno Organisations of Verapaz.

At least two activists, Chabil Utzaj and Pablo Sacrab, have been arrested in Alta Verapaz under the pre-text of the siege, another farmers’ rights groups says.

Sitting beside bags of fertiliser and posters of the revolutionary Che Guevara in a warehouse-turned-office, Morales says the Zetas don’t live in his municipality of Santa Cruz, a 15-minute drive from Coban.

He thinks the siege is staged and simply an excuse for repression, rather than a legitimate attempt to battle traffickers.

“There are agrarian conflicts in much of Alta Verapaz,” he says. “The government is trying to silence groups organising for land reform and against mega-projects like hydro-electric dams and palm oil plantations.”

While many urban Guatemalans do not share Morales’s analysis, there is scepticism about why a state of emergency would be declared in Alta Verapaz, as it is not the country’s most violent area.

Guatemala has one of the highest murder rates in the Americas, with 52 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with 14 in Mexico and 5.4 in the US.

Strange intentions

Haroldo Shetemul, a columnist with Prensa Libre newspaper, Guatemala’s largest daily, notes that 57.7 per cent of the country’s murders in 2010 happened in the region around Guatemala City, the capital.

If stopping violence and protecting average people is the goal of the siege, he writes, then Alta Verapaz “wasn’t necessarily a priority”.

The siege declaration didn’t “exactly have the aim of protecting the population as a whole, but instead was a response to particular interests.”

see the rest of the article, from al-jazeera

Punjab Governor Salman Taseer assassinated in Islamabad

‘Voice of courage’

Mr Taseer, 66, was shot repeatedly at close range by his Elite Force guard as he got into his car at the Kohsar Market, a shopping centre in Islamabad popular with Westerners and wealthy Pakistanis, Mr Malik said. Salman Taseer Salman Taseer was politically close to the president

“The governor fell down and the man who fired at him threw down his gun and raised both hands,” Ali Imran, a witness, told Reuters news agency.

One doctor told the Associated Press that Mr Taseer was shot 26 times. The suspect was carrying a sub-machine gun.

Unconfirmed reports say up to five other people were also wounded when Mr Taseer’s other bodyguards opened fire following the attack.

see the rest of the article, from the bbc

GurgaonWorkersNews – Newsletter 34 (January 2011)

Gurgaon in Haryana is presented as the shining India, a symbol of capitalist success promising a better life for everyone behind the gateway of development. At a first glance the office towers and shopping malls reflect this chimera and even the facades of the garment factories look like three star hotels. Behind the facade, behind the factory walls and in the side streets of the industrial areas thousands of workers keep the rat-race going, producing cars and scooters for the middle-classes which end up in the traffic jam on the new highway between Delhi and Gurgaon. Thousands of young proletarianised middle class people lose time, energy and academic aspirations on night-shifts in call centres, selling loan schemes to working-class people in the US or pre-paid electricity schemes to the poor in the UK. Next door, thousands of rural-migrant workers up-rooted by the rural crisis stitch and sew for export, competing with their angry brothers and sisters in Bangladesh or Vietnam. And the rat-race will not stop; on the outskirts of Gurgaon, new industrial zones turn soil into over-capacities. The following newsletter documents some of the developments in and around this miserable boom region. If you want to know more about working and struggling in Gurgaon, if you want more info about or even contribute to this project, please do so via:

http://www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com

Thurston County (WA) imposes 12-month moratorium on biomass permits

!On Tuesday, Thurston County Commissioners imposed an emergency 12-month moratorium on biomass permits. This could spell the death of the Evergreen State College’s forest-destroying gasification plant!

The County Commissioners will use this extra year to research the environmental consequences of using biomass (destroyed forests) for energy. Evergreen needs to enter a contract to build the facility by June 2011 to receive a $3.7 million grant from the state, but likely cannot do so if it has not received permits from the county.

While Thurston County is safe (for the next year) from dirty biomass energy, neighboring Mason County may not be so lucky. Engineers at the Olympia Regional Clean Air Agency (ORCAA) recently recommended approval of air pollution permits for the Adage biomass incinerator in Shelton, WA, despite health, safety, and ecological concerns and strong opposition from local and regional citizens. Since the engineers recommended approval, the public now has 40 days to comment on the recommendation (available at http://www.orcaa.org). There are also two public hearings on the Adage incinerator, scheduled for January 31st at 1 pm and 6 pm at the Shelton Civic Center (525 W. Cota St.).

from portland indymedia

Chalk this up as a win for our side!

What is Traitorware?

Commentary by Eva Galperin

December 23rd, 2010

Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera’s serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy patent it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone may record your voice, take a picture of your location, record your heartbeat, and send that information back to the mothership.

This is traitorware: devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.

Perhaps the most notable example of traitorware was the Sony rootkit. In 2005 Sony BMG produced CD’s which clandestinely installed a rootkit onto PC’s that provided administrative-level access to the users’ computer. The copy-protected music CD’s would surreptitiously install its DRM technology onto PC’s. Ostensibly, Sony was trying prevent consumers from making multiple copies of their CD’s, but the software also rendered the CD incompatible with many CD-ROM players in PC’s, CD players in cars, and DVD players. Additionally, the software left a back door open on all infected PC’s which would give Sony, or any hacker familiar with the rootkit, control over the PC. And if a consumer should have the temerity to find the rootkit and try to remove the offending drivers, the software would execute code designed to disable the CD drive and trash the PC.

Traitorware is sometimes included in products with less obviously malicious intent. Printer dots were added to certain color laser printers as a forensics tool for law enforcement, where it could help authenticate documents or identify forgeries. Apple’s scary-sounding patent for the iPhone is meant to help locate and disable the phone if it is lost of stolen. Don’t let these good intentions fool you—software that hides itself from you while it gives your personal data away to a third party is dangerous and dishonest. As the Sony BMG rootkit demonstrates, it may even leave your device wide open to attacks from third parties.

Traitorware is not some science-fiction vision of the future. It is the present. Indeed, the Sony rootkit dates back to 2005. Apple’s patent application indicates that we are likely to see more traitorware on the horizon. When that happens, EFF will be there to fight it. We believe that your software and devices should not be a tool for gathering your personal data without your explicit consent.

read the rest of the article at the electronic frontier foundation website…

Whaling stymied by Sea Shepherd: First clashes amoung the Antarctic ice

by Takver – Australia Indymedia
Saturday Jan 1st, 2011 9:12 PM

Image Courtesy Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR)
The first clashes have ocurred between Sea Shepherd activists and Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary bordering the Antarctic continent. Dodging and dancing perilously through the ice flows, Sea Shephard activists in small inflatable zodiacs and their larger three vessels harassed the three Japanese harpoon vessels, particularly the Yushin Maru 3.

Sea Shepherd found the whaling harpoon vessels on New Year’s Eve before any whaling could occurr. “We’ve got them before they were able to kill a single whale. They are not whaling today and our challenge now is to make sure they don’t kill any whales in the coming days,” said Sea Shepherd campaign leader Captain Paul Watson.

“What an awesome way to begin the New Year,” said captain of the Gojira Locky MacLean of Canada. “Our three vessels dancing dangerously through the ice packs locked in confrontation with the three harpoon ships of the Japanese whaling fleet. It was both deadly and beautiful. Deadly because of the ice and the hostility of the whalers and beautiful because of the ice, and the fact that these three killer ships are not killing whales while clashing with us.”

Sea Shepherd are still trying to locate the Nisshin Maru factory ship. In a dangerous ballet of ships and zodiacs amoung the ice flows the Japanese harpoon ships attempted to block Sea Shepherd’s vessels pursuit of the Nisshin Maru factory ship. Sea Shepherd activists were pelted with blasts of freezing water from water cannon as they attempted to throw fouling lines and bottles of very foul smelling rancid butter on board the harpoon ships.

article taken from indybay website

Psychologists protest ‘inhumane, harmful’ treatment of Bradley Manning

A psychologists’ group has sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking him to “rectify the inhumane, harmful, and counterproductive treatment” of the Army private accused of being WikiLeaks’ source for the US State Department cables.

In a letter dated Monday, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) argued that PFC Bradley Manning, who has been held in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico for the past five months, may be the victim of political retribution. The group also suggested that the psychological damage Manning may be suffering from spending 23 hours a day alone may ruin his bid for a fair trial.

“History suggests that solitary confinement, rather than being a rational response to a risk, is more often used as a punishment for someone who is considered to be a member of a despised or ‘dangerous’ group,” the letter stated. “In any case, PFC Manning has not been convicted of a crime and, under our system of justice, is at this point presumed to be innocent.”

Manning is alleged to have been the source of the 250,000 US State Department cables that WikiLeaks began publishing in late November. He is also alleged to have been the source of the “collateral murder” video that showed civilians and two Reuters reporters being killed in a 2007 US air raid in Baghdad.
As Manning’s public profile grows more prominent, activist groups have been organizing to oppose his treatment at Quantico. Anti-war group Code Pink has launched a petition asking for “humane” treatment for the private, while Courage to Resist has organized a defense fund for him.

A group calling itself the Bradley Manning Support Network has launched a blog to keep the public informed of developments in Manning’s case. Among the group’s advisory board members are filmmaker Michael Moore, activist and former CIA operative Ray McGovern, and Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower behind the Pentagon papers who has compared the plight of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to his own.

‘We can see everything’: USAF launches ‘airborne surveillance system’

By Agence France-Presse

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 — 2:22 pm

WASHINGTON — The US military plans to deploy a new intelligence drone in Afghanistan, which military experts say will allow US troops to monitor much larger operational theaters than before, The Washington Post reported Sunday. The newspaper said the airborne surveillance system is called Gorgon Stare and will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.

In 2010, a total of 711 international troops were killed in Afghanistan, according to independent website iCasualties — the highest annual death toll since the war began in 2001. The system consists of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, which can can transmit up to 65 live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements, the paper said. By contrast, current Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a narrow area the size of a building or two, The Post noted.

more from government computer news

Western Hemishpere Travel Initiative isn’t oppressive enough!

WASHINGTON — A federal audit now documents what at least a million border crossers already knew: U.S. border agents are failing to fully enforce laws requiring U.S., Mexican and Canadian citizens to present passports or other documents to enter the United States.

The audit by the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Inspector General prompted fresh criticism from Texas lawmakers and a border business coalition.

“The Department of Homeland Security’s strategy for defending America’s borders at the land ports of entry is a failure in progress that threatens America’s security,” said Monica Weisberg-Stewart, a McAllen businesswoman and member of the Texas Border Coalition.

Weisberg-Stewart commented on the matter in May, when the San Antonio Express-News first reported the requirement for certain documents may not be enforceable because border inspectors can’t deny entry to anyone able to prove U.S. citizenship. That means border crossers presenting, say, a Texas driver’s license are given a flier that says “Noncompliant” but otherwise are not delayed.

from the my san antonio website,

also see the whti website for more info.

Wikileaks Cables Reveal Two-Faced Politics by US

By Ángel Páez

LIMA, Dec 16, 2010 (IPS) – “It’s not surprising for the United States to cooperate with military or government officials in Peru about which it has information linking them to serious crimes,” said activist Ricardo Soberón, referring to contradictions revealed in cables released by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

Soberón, with the non-governmental Centre for Research on Drugs and Human Rights (CIDDH), says “since 1987, the U.S. Department of State has been concerned about the risk of corruption among the Peruvian military in drug trafficking zones, but that concern has not been shared by the Pentagon (Department of Defence), which was more interested in expanding its missions in the Andes region, without regard to the costs.”

“The leaked cables reflect a deep political contradiction between Washington’s institutional diplomacy, and the military diplomacy characterised by the promotion of strategies like (the U.S.-financed counterinsurgency and anti-drug strategy) Plan Colombia, the Merida Initiative (a multi-billion dollar U.S. counter-drug assistance programme for Mexico and Central America), hot pursuit across borders, or the ‘hammer and anvil’ tactic in the Colombian armed conflict,” he told IPS.

“The revelations by the cables represent a continuity of these dichotomies in the discourse and practices of U.S. agencies with different objectives and interests in the region,” he said.

A Mar. 12, 2009 cable sent by then-U.S. Ambassador in Lima Michael McKinley, which was released by WikiLeaks and published by the El Pais newspaper in Spain, says army commanders fighting remnants of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) Maoist rebels received “lucrative payoffs from drug traffickers.”

The sources cited by the document referred to drug traffickers operating in league with Sendero insurgents in the Apurimac and Ene River Valley (VRAE) region, and contended that “the army — for fear of disrupting these drug trafficking networks and losing access to payoffs — is unwilling to commit the large force needed to pacify the VRAE.”

But at the same time, the U.S. embassy has pressed for Washington to respond to requests by Peru’s army brass for increased military aid to squelch Sendero, according to seven confidential cables dated 2009, which were among the thousands of documents released by Wikileaks.

from the interpress news service

OAS Diplomat’s Words Rattle Haiti’s Occupation Regime

Written by Roger Annis
Tuesday, 28 December 2010 23:14
As the one-year anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake approaches, a brutally frank account of the plight of its people has been delivered by a highly placed diplomat. Ricardo Seitenfus, the representative to Haiti of the Organization of American States, delivered a hard-hitting assessment of the foreign role in that country in an interview published in the December 20 edition of the Swiss daily Le Temps. i

The interview also appeared in the right-wing, Haitian daily, Le Nouvelliste. For his words, he was immediately recalled from his posting.

Seitenfus is Brazilian and a graduate of the Institute of Advanced International Studies in Geneva. The truths he pronounced in the now-famous interview are not unique; they have been voiced by many Haitians and their allies abroad. But to hear them uttered by someone of his standing is a sign of the unraveling of a miserably-failed foreign military and political occupation force in Haiti.
The Failings in Haiti

Seitenfus questions the legitimacy and utility of the UN Security Council occupation force known as MINUSTAH. It numbers 13,000 military and police (an increase of 50 per cent since the earthquake) along with several thousand political officers. “Haiti is not an international threat,” he says. “We are not experiencing a civil war.”

He is asked, is it a counter-productive presence?

The answer is, yes. The diplomat traces the 200-year history of foreign subjugation of Haiti. He draws a line of continuity to the present. “The world has never known how to treat Haiti, so it has ignored it.”
He says the country has lived a “low intensity war” since 1986, the year of the overthrow of the Duvalier tyranny. “We want to turn Haiti into a capitalist country, an export platform for the U.S. market, it’s absurd. Haiti must return to what it is, that is to say, a predominantly agricultural country still fundamentally imbued with customary law.”

see more from upside down world

Julian Assange on WikiLeaks, War and Resisting Government Crackdown

2010 can be defined as the year of WikiLeaks. The whisteblowing website first made headlines around the world in April when it released a video of a U.S. helicopter gunship indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians killing 12 people, including two Reuters news staff. In July, WikiLeaks created a bigger firestorm when it published more than 90,000 classified U.S. military war logs of the war in Afghanistan. Then in October, WikiLeaks published some 390,000 classified U.S. documents on the war in Iraq—the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history and the greatest internal account of any war on public record. And in November WikiLeaks began releasing a giant trove of confidential State Department cables that sent shockwaves through the global diplomatic establishment. Throughout it all, WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were targeted by the U.S. and other governments around the world. We play our interviews with Assange and with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. [includes rush transcript]

(ed – this is from democracy now, and includes an interview with julian assaunge conducted in october of 2010, as wikileaks released thousands of u.s. government documents.)

Wikileaks: Oil Motivates U.S. Policy More than Fighting Terrorists

By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Cables released by Wikileaks demonstrate that control of the world’s strategic energy reserves has always been a key factor in the direction of the “War on Terror”.

Among the batch of classified diplomatic cables recently released by the controversial whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, several have highlighted the vast extent of the financial infrastructure of Islamist terrorism sponsored by key U.S. allies in the ongoing “War on Terror.”

One cable by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in December 2009 notes that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Despite this, “Riyadh has taken only limited action to disrupt fundraising for the UN 1267-listed Taliban and LeT [Lashkar e-Tayyiba] groups that are also aligned with al-Qaeda.”

Clinton raises similar concerns about other states in the Gulf and Central Asia. Kuwait remains reluctant “to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait.” The United Arab Emirates is “vulnerable to abuse by terrorist financiers and facilitation networks” due to lack of regulatory oversight. Qatar’s cooperation with U.S. counter-terrorism is the “worst in the region,” and authorities are “hesitant to act against known terrorists.” Pakistani military intelligence officials “continue to maintain ties with a wide array of extremist organizations, in particular the Taliban [and the] LeT.”

more, from alternet

US refuses cooperation with Poland’s CIA ‘black site’ probe

The U.S. Department of Justice has rejected a request from prosecutors in Warsaw for assistance in the investigation into the alleged CIA prisons in Poland,where captives claim they were tortured. On 18 March, the Prosecutor’s Office of Appeal in Warsaw filed a motion for legal assistance from the US Department of Justice into the probe.

On 7 October, reports the PAP news agency, the US informed prosecutors that the motion had been rejected on the basis of the international Agreement on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters and that the U.S. authorities consider the matter “to be closed”. According to the agreement, a country has the right to refuse to provide legal assistance if the execution of the request would encroach on this country’s security or another interest of this country.

The revelation that the US will not be cooperating with the investigation into the alleged black site, thought to have been in northern Poland near the Szymany air base, comes after a second man followed al-Qaeda suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in asking prosecutors in Warsaw to look into his case. “According to the information we have, Abu Zubaydah was one of those people detained and interrogated by the CIA somewhere on the territory of Poland,” Polish lawyer Bartlomiej Jankowski told journalists in the Polish capital earlier this month. Zubaydah and Nashiri are both currently being held at the U.S. military jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Despite denials from former president Aleksander Kwasniewski and former prime minister Leszek Miller that they knew of the CIA activity in Poland, air traffic control in warsaw published a report stating that at least six CIA flights had landed at a disused military air base in northern Poland in 2003. Two aircraft, a Boeing 737 and a Gulfstream V, were US-registered and previously known to be part of CIA operations. (pg/mg)

from thenews.pl