rough edit of anti-NATO march
today at the rally there was a breakaway march, here are a few clips from the day!
some of todays footage quickly edited, gotta go, see ya in the streets! dont hate the media be the media!
get your sexy bootie out in the streets!
NATO summit weekend starts with a peaceful protest
“I’ve lived in Chicago all my life and haven’t seen anything like this,” said Gloria Prowell, 47, of Hyde Park, while making her way home from her restaurant job. “It looks peaceful, so I’m happy about that. (The protesters) have a right to be here, but they have to be calm. The police are being calm.”
One protester was arrested and charged with aggravated battery to a police officer during a scrum at the bridge, a Police Department spokeswoman said. Police also led away a protester dressed in black clothing from the rally. But the luckiest might have been a mohawked man whose fellow protesters helped him escape police clutches after he tore down a NATO banner hanging from the bridge house on the southeast side of the bridge.
The protesters are here to decry the NATO summit, which runs Sunday and Monday. The only other city-permitted protest is a Sunday anti-war march and rally from Grant Park to nearMcCormick Place where world leaders will gather.
Friday’s centerpiece was a noontime Daley Plaza rally against NATO organized by the National Nurses United. One of two protest events with a city permit, the rally drew about 3,200 people — short of the capacity 5,000 city officials had expected.
The kick-off rally was far from the angry, violent protests seen at other gatherings of world leaders. It featured people dressed like Buddy the Elf and dancing to Motown music and the Beatles “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Many wore Robin Hood-style hats made of green felt in support of a so-called Robin Hood tax on financial institutions’ transactions in order to offset cuts in health care and social services.
and more…
The rally unfolded after much hand-wringing by city officials. Last week, the Emanuel administration revoked permission for a march to Daley Plaza, claiming that the demonstration was expected to grow far beyond organizers’ original crowd estimate of 1,000 people. City officials relented after they were criticized for suppressing free speech, but only after the nursesagreed to drop their plans to march through downtown.
Most of the nurse demonstrators boarded buses and left after the rally. That didn’t stop a couple groups of protesters from marching through the Loop and up Michigan Avenue. Police officers accommodated the impromptu marches as they conducted rolling road closings for the hundreds of demonstrators who made their way east.
Chanting “these are our streets” and “(expletive) NATO,” roughly 100 demonstrators headed toward Michigan Avenue. Another group of roughly the same size marched toward Grant Park.
One group stopped briefly at Daley Bicentennial Park as members disagreed about where to go next. Police tried to direct them onto Columbus Drive, but some protesters defied them, yelling: “Whose parks? Our parks!”
After 10 minutes of trying to figure out where to go, the group made its way through the park to Randolph Street. Police tried to get them to use the sidewalks, but they pushed through the cops bike barricade and marched back west to Michigan Avenue. When they did, they let up a cheer proclaiming victory over the police.
The two groups of protesters converged at Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive shortly before 3 p.m. Police, who had allowed the groups to wander through Loop streets largely unrestricted, stopped them halfway across the Michigan Avenue bridge and not did allow them to go farther north.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel said protesters behaved responsibly Friday.
“I think the Chicago Police Department did a very good job. I think the protesters had a chance to have their voices heard and they also did it in a responsible way,” Emanuel said after delivering brief remarks at a photo exhibit exploring NATO’s history at the Pritzker Military Library.
Downtown streets were sprinkled with gawking tourists and the few curious office workers who didn’t work from home as the summit of world leaders loomed. Suburban Metra riders who rode into the city for work reported lighter-than-normal passenger loads. And far from the business as usual that city leaders touted, concerns about NATO took its toll on some retailers.
“The mayor promised an economic impact on the city (from hosting NATO), but I fear it’s going to be a negative one,” bemoaned owner Albert Karoll over the lack of customers at custom tailor and shirt-maker Richard Bennett.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Thursday that DEA agents were working with Honduran police aboard the helicopter.
“We did not use force, no U.S. personnel fired any weapons. We were involved purely supporting and advising,” said Nuland.
She said the State Department has two helicopters in Honduras involved in missions carrying members of Honduras’ National Police Tactical Response Team. And she said the aircraft were piloted by Guatemalan military officers and outside contractor pilots.
When asked about the shooting, U.S. Embassy official Matthias Mitman in Tegucigalpa provided a written statement saying that “the U.S. assisted Honduran forces with logistical support in this operation” as part of efforts to fight narcotics trafficking.
Hondurans Attack Government Buildings, Demand US Leave
People in Honduras have burned down government offices and demanded U.S. drug agents leave the area after news got out that American and Honduran forces shot and killed up to six innocent Hondurans.
The dead included two pregnant women and two children. The Drug Enforcement Administration agents, with their Honduran counterparts, fired from U.S. helicopter gunships at a boat carrying the civilians, mistaking it for their intended target – a boat carrying drug traffickers.
Anger is aimed at both Honduran authorities and U.S. authorities. ”These innocent residents were not involved in the drug problem, were in their boat going about their daily fishing activities … when they gunned them down from the air,” Lucio Vaquedano, mayor of the coastal town of Ahuas, said Wednesday.
“For centuries we have been a peaceful people who live in harmony with nature, but today we declared these Americans to be persona non grata in our territory,” the statement continued.
Honduran news media and human rights organizations began publicizing the incident, of which the American people were not informed, and claimed the DEA agents themselves did the shooting. But after news broke out, U.S. authorities started claiming the American agents merely assisted Honduran forces, without doing any of the shooting themselves and that didn’t shoot first.
Honduras has become a hub of drug-trafficking, particularly cocaine, which has earned it renewed focus from Washington.
The Obama administration chose to support the illegal military coup in Honduras in 2009, which ousted democratically elected Jose Manuel Zelaya. The coup leaders continued to receive U.S. aid as American military and DEA presence in the country began to expand. This began a descent into what Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, called “a human rights and security abyss.”
More than 600 U.S. troops are stationed in Honduras and the DEA has a Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team based there. By the end of 2011, 42 Honduran law enforcement agents were working with the DEA, despite widespread human rights abuses and forced disappearances of political opponents and journalists.
“We have seen over the years that whenever the military interfaces with the populace, incidents of human rights abuses go way up,” said George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. “We’re concerned that the U.S. is encouraging the use of the military for police work.”
In a written statement, the Committee of the Families of the Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), a human rights organization, said that “a foreign army [i.e., the U.S. army] protected under the new hegemonic concept of the ‘war on drugs,’ legalized with reforms to the 1953 Military Treaty, violates our territorial sovereignty and kills civilians as if it was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria.”
COFADEH called Honduras “a failed state” and said “the so called Honduran authorities have the ethical and political duty to demand from the U.S. Department of State an explanation and a public apology, and to punish those responsible.”
Congressman Howard Berman said Thursday that if the reports that innocent people were killed are true, the U.S. should review this part of its assistance to Honduras.
“I have consistently expressed deep concerns regarding the danger of pouring U.S. security assistance into a situation where Honduran security forces are involved in serious human rights violations,” said the California Democrat. “The problems are getting worse, not better, making such a review all the more urgent.”
There were many versions of what happened in the early morning May 11 and by the end of the day Thursday, the DEA wouldn’t confirm many details.
The DEA never fired during the operation, acting only in an advisory role, both the U.S. and Hondurans said. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said she didn’t know if the DEA told the Hondurans to fire back.
“As I understand it, the Honduran authorities are doing a broad investigation of this incident to evaluate what exactly happened and how it happened,” she said in a briefing Thursday. “I think we need to let that go forward.”
The U.S. has assisted with drug operations in Honduras since the 1970s, but activity has increased in the last few years, officials and statistics indicate. As the Mexican government has cracked down on drug cartels, transport of cocaine has shifted to areas like Honduras’ Miskito Coast, a remote jungle along the Caribbean that is isolated, hardly policed and populated with poor people willing to load and unload illicit cargo to make money.
The State Department says 79 percent of all cocaine smuggling flights leaving South America first land in Honduras.
Ramirez gave one version of the operation, saying U.S. and Honduran agents were monitoring the ground from four helicopters in a region known as Gracias a Dios, about 300 miles (500 kilometers) from the capital of Tegucigalpa along the coastal border with Nicaragua. It is known as the Mosquitia for the indigenous Miskito that have lived in the region for centuries.
Dana Frank, Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of many books, including “Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America,” which examines the banana workers’ unions of Honduras:
As a historian I would start by underscoring that we have to be very careful about believing what the State Department is saying at this point. They have admitted that there were four helicopters and that two of them were State Department helicopters and that there were Guatemalan military on board as well. So it is obviously getting even more complicated.
According to the Mosquito people on the ground, and the local mayor, and the Congress person that the U.S. forces—they descended from the helicopters after they had allegedly been shot upon by alleged drug traffickers in a different boat. According to people on the ground, they mistook that boat for the boat with civilians and started shooting at the civilians, killing at least four people—by some accounts five—including at least one pregnant woman, and by some accounts, children. Another woman was also shot at and lost limbs as a result, and a boy was shot in the arm from behind. U.S. troops were clearly on the helicopters but local people say U.S. troops were doing part of the shooting.
Meanwhile, the Honduran government—I do want to underscore, a week before, the day after it happened, they reported that it was drug traffickers that had been killed, and only after the civilians came forward very bravely and said, wait a minute, we’re not drug traffickers, we are local people—in fact, terrified of drug traffickers. And only thanks to AP do we even have it crossing over into the U.S. press, that there was U.S. DEA agent involvement in helicopters and on the ground.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Dana Frank, Honduras is the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere after Haiti. Now suddenly we are being told that it has become the major transshipment point for drugs into Mexico and the United States? This is a recent phenomenon. Could you talk about this, what’s happening with the drug war in Honduras, the context of the political troubles, and the coup that occurred in Honduras a few years back?
DANA FRANK: There has been drug trafficking in Honduras for a long, long time but it was the 2009 coup—coming up on the third anniversary on June 28th—it was the 2009 coup that opened up the door for this kind of massive drug trafficking. It’s really important to know that the drug trafficking is interlaced with the post-coup government. Porfirio Pepe Lobo, from top to bottom—even the Minister of Defense has talked about the so-called Narco Congress people, the Narco judges. It is a totally corrupt regime from top to bottom.
The police regularly kill people, and they have admitted that themselves, at least 300, have been killed by state security forces since Lobo came into office a little over two years ago. None of these people have been prosecuted. There are at least ten thousand denunciations of human rights abuses by state security forces, and even the government itself admits that—no one has been prosecuted for that. So this incident is happening in the context of U.S. ongoing support and even celebration of that regime, and welcoming Lobo to the White House just two weeks ago. In October—he was certainly speaking to the government in D.C. two weeks ago. So what’s going on is we have this tremendously corrupt government that’s killing its own people, and the U.S. is pouring more and more money into it.
As we speak, the U.S. has just recently tried to double a key piece of funding for the U.S.-Honduran military and police. Biden was recently down there, promising a hundred and seven million dollars more. We’re increasing the funding for the U.S. Air Force base at Soto Cano, and making the barracks there permanent there for the first time.
Donna Summer, the “Queen of Disco” who died on Thursday from lung cancer at the age of 63, believed that she contracted the disease after inhaling toxic dust from the collapsed Twin Towers on 9/11.
Summer had talked at length about the traumatising effects of 9/11, revealing in a 2008 interview how she had suffered severe depression following the attacks. She also reportedly told friends that she believed the toxic dust, which contained 2,500 contaminants, including known carcinogens such as asbestos, lead, mercury and dioxin, caused her lung cancer.
The website TMZ cites sources close to the singer who confirm that Summer, a Manhattan resident, became extremely concerned about breathing the air in the months following 9/11, when she would
constantly spray some sort of disinfectant in the air. Deney Terrio, the host of ‘Dance Fever’, tells us … when he was around Donna post 9/11, she would hang silk sheets in her dressing room to prevent dust from coming in.
If exposure to toxic 9/11 dust did indeed kill Summer, she would not be the only victim.
Whilst offical figures suggest that 55 first responders have died of cancer, and 75 people diagnosed with the disease after exposure to Ground Zero toxins, such figures are likely to be massively underestimated. It is suspected that deaths and serious illnesses have been vastly underrated, due to the limited funding provided for health monitoring of responders.
If exposure to toxic 9/11 dust did indeed kill Summer, she would not be the only victim. Whilst offical figures suggest that 55 first responders have died of cancer, and 75 people diagnosed with the disease after exposure to Ground Zero toxins, such figures are likely to be massively underestimated. It is suspected that deaths and serious illnesses have been vastly underrated, due to the limited funding provided for health monitoring of responders, 911Research.comdetailing how the
federal government allocated only $125 million for the responders in its $21.4 billion federal aid package passed in 2002. Of the estimated 40,000 Ground Zero workers, only 16,000 had been screened by the Mount Sinai World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program by mid-2006.
Some 18,000 people claim to have fallen ill, with respiratory problems being the primary issue. Most shocking of all is the fact that those who are ill were led by authorities to believe, in the immediate aftermath of the collapses, that the Manhattan air was safe to breathe. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assured New Yorkers that the dust did not pose a health risk, even issuing five press releases within 10 days of the attack containing such assurances.
In August 2003 a US government coverup was exposed, when EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley issued a report admitting that the reassurances had been unfounded, and that the agency’s statements had been influenced by the National Security Council, under the direction of the White House. The EPA had been told to “add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.” A futher report by the Sierra Club in 2004 provided more damning details about the official coverup and alleged gross malfeasance on the part of not only the EPA, but also FEMA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
The 2004 report detailed how the EPA failed to investigate and disclose toxic hazards properly, how the federal government failed to change its safety assurances even after it became clear that people were getting ill, and how EPA, FEMA and New York City’s own health department told families that they could clean up the contaminated dust themselves with wet rags.
As the years pass, such official malfeasance and outright criminality will no doubt result in many more suffering Donna Summer’s tragic fate.
1. H.Res.568 significantly lowers the threshold for going to war. This resolution effectively calls for a military attack on Iran when Iran when it obtains a “nuclear weapons capability” – an undefined term that, by some interpretations, could already apply to Iran, not to mention Brazil, Japan, the Netherlands, and any country with a civilian nuclear program. We should not stake questions of war and peace on such shaky foundations.
2. H.Res.568 sets conditions for going to war without stating that it is not an authorization for using military force. Given the resolution’s unambiguous statement ruling out containing a nuclear-capable Iran, this resolution could be construed by this President or a future President as an authorization of force for launching military action against Iran that would have devastating consequences. At the absolute minimum, the resolution should clarify that it is not an authorization of force, and does not provide a legal authority for the President to initiate war against Iran.
3. H.Res.568 dangerously confuses U.S. policy. While supporters of the resolution have repeatedly claimed, “President Obama has stated that it’s unacceptable for Iran to obtain a nuclear capability,” this is not true. President Obama has never used the “nuclear capability” phrasing, speaking instead of Iran “getting,” “obtaining” or “acquiring” a nuclear weapon as the U.S. red line. The presence of international nuclear inspectors in Iran and U.S. intelligence gathering operations make it nearly impossible for Iran to build a nuclear weapon undetected. U.S. and Israeli intelligence has been clear: Iran has yet to decide whether to actually build a bomb—our aim must be to use diplomacy to implement the verification measures to guarantee Iran cannot take this step.
4. H.Res.568 undermines diplomacy and takes peaceful options off the table. The U.S. and Iran are scheduled to hold negotiations on May 23, along with the rest of the P5+1 (Permanent 5 Security Council members plus Germany). These talks hold the potential to achieve real progress in curbing Iran’s nuclear program—with Iran’s Supreme Leader for the first time publicly endorsing negotiations and signaling that Iran is prepared to make key concessions to cap its enrichment in accordance with U.S. national security interests. This hawkish bill could undermine those talks by signaling to Iran that the U.S. is committed to war. Diplomacy is the only way to prevent war, prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon, and put mechanisms in place to effectively address human rights abuses in Iran and create space. Congress should support diplomacy, not undermine it.
Officials warn against H.Res.568
Senator Dianne Feinstein warned this resolution would interfere with current diplomatic efforts with Iran: “I really believe that these negotiations should proceed without any resolutions from us right now….This is a very sensitive time. Candidly, I think diplomacy should have an opportunity to work without getting involved in political discussions about a resolution.”
Colin Kahl, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East cautioned: “I think that all of us in this town need to be very careful of taking positions, whether its up on the Hill or out there, that box in our negotiators from being able to find a diplomatic solution….That’s what concerns me about the resolution.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, warns: “This resolution reads like the same sheet of music that got us into the Iraq war, and could be the precursor for a war with Iran….it’s effectively a thinly-disguised effort to bless war.”
for anyone who likes to hassle elected officials, there is also this, from the same source:
Congress is planning to vote today to make war with Iran more likely.
This afternoon, the House of Representatives is going to consider H.Res.568 – a resolution that significantly lowers the threshold for war with Iran.
It is no coincidence that this vote is taking place just a week before the U.S. and Iran resume negotiations that many in the pro-war camp want to sabotage.
We need your help today to stop this push for war.
Police also led away a protester dressed in black clothing from the rally. But the luckiest might have been a mohawked man whose fellow protesters helped him escape police clutches after he tore down a NATO banner hanging from the bridge house on the southeast side of the bridge.
