Articles : Miscellaneous

If you knew...

Innocent al-Arian still imprisoned, Mint-i-juana, 'Douchebag' censors, Russia stops seal hunt, China targets Uighurs, 'Surge' myth, Eco's 'unbearable whiteness', Peace Corp spies

A list of this weeks guest on This is Hell follows the articles.

Appeals Court Weighs Teen’s Web Speech “A teen who used vulgar slang in an Internet blog to complain about school administrators shouldn’t have been punished by the school, her lawyer told a federal appeals court. But a lawyer for the Burlington, Conn., school told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday that administrators should be allowed to act if such comments are made on the Web. Avery Doninger, 17, claims officials at Lewis S. Mills High School violated her free speech rights when they barred her from serving on the student council because of what she wrote from her home computer. In her Internet journal, Doninger said officials were canceling the school’s annual Jamfest, which is similar to a battle of the bands contest. The event, which she helped coordinate, was rescheduled. According to the lawsuit, she wrote: ‘‘Jamfest’ is canceled due to douchebags in central office,’ and also referred to an administrator who was ‘pissed off.’ After discovering the blog entry, school officials refused to allow Doninger to run for re-election as class secretary. Doninger won anyway with write-in votes, but was not allowed to serve.” The Associated Press (3/5/08)

Is salvia the next marijuana? “On Web sites touting the mind-blowing powers of salvia divinorum, come-ons to buy the hallucinogenic herb are accompanied by warnings: Time is running out! ... stock up while you still can.” Within days of this article appearing, a bill making salvia illegal was introduced in the Michigan legislature. Sixteen other states are also considering making Magic Mint illegal. The Associated Press (3/11/08)

Red-Boating Obama “Sen. Barack Obama is many things to the right-wing noise machine: a crypto-Muslim, a drug-addled hoodlum, a snob who disdains flag lapel pins, and the husband of an avowed America-hater. Should Obama get the nomination, we can expect Republicans and their 527 Swift Boat surrogates ‘to move far beyond Sen. Hillary Clinton’s ‘kitchen-sink’ pot shots (as Obama calls them) and deploy Web-based slurs in their propaganda. In February, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times of London let loose with an article headlined ‘Right slams Obama as a shady Chicago socialist.’” In These Times (3/11/08)

The Torture of Sami Al Arian Authoe Peter Erlinder, this week’s guest on This is Hell and attorney for Sami al-Arian, writes, “On March 3, 2008 AUSA Kromberg turned the torture screw up another notch, when Dr. Al Arian was brought back to court and informed that he would be called before yet another grand jury on March 19, 2008, this time only 3 weeks before his latest release and deportation date. If he insists on the Bush administration respecting its ‘no-grand jury cooperation’ promise again, he is likely to be held in contempt again, which will effectively cancel the April release date and extend his time in prison again€¦ indefinitely. And, he has to insist on it because terms of the plea agreement ‘contract’ are still on appeal, a Catch-22, if there ever was one. But, there is a more sinister manipulation in the works. AUSA Kromberg has charged other acquitted Palestinian defendants with perjury, when they did testify before his grand jury. Other acquitted Palestinian defendants have been charged with ‘obstruction of justice,’ when they declined. Dr. Al Arian’s lawyer, George Washington University law professor Jon Turley has said that Kromberg is ‘setting up Al Arian for a perjury/obstruction trap.’ The other acquitted Palestinian defendants facing the same ‘Hobson’s choice’ have been given ‘terrorism-enhanced’ sentences of 5 to 10 years whether they answered grand jury questions or not after American juries already acquitted them of the underlying charges. Imprisoned for a decade after being acquitted certainly could be called ‘torture’, or at least ‘Kafka-esque.’” Jurist (3/11/08)

Overwhelmingly White, the Green Movement is Reaching for the Rainbow “‘The Prius people, the polar-bear crowd are great,’ [Van] Jones says. ‘We’re not mad at them. We like them! At the same time, if the only people who can participate are the kind who can afford to put solar panels on their second home, the green movement is going to be too small to fix the problem. If we want to beat global warming, there’s no way to do it without helping a lot of poor people. If you design a solution that does not do that, it’s a solution that’s too timid.’” The Seattle Times (3/10/08)

Top Iraq Contractor Skirts US Taxes Offshore “Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven. More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq – including about 10,500 Americans – are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands. The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars. But the use of the loophole results in a significantly greater loss of revenue to the government as a whole, particularly to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.” The Boston Globe (3/6/08)

The Myth of the Surge Guest on this week’s This is Hell Nir Rosen writes “Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq’s central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or ‘the Awakening.’” The Rolling Stone (3/6/08)

Recruiting Spies in the Peace Corps “In February, allegations surfaced that the U.S. embassy in La Paz, located in western Bolivia, has been asking Peace Corps volunteers and Fulbright scholars to provide intelligence information to the U.S. embassy about foreign nationals in Bolivia. ‘It flies in the face of what the Fulbright program is all about,’ says John Alexander van Schaick, 23, a Fulbright scholar from Rutgers University, who says that last year, an embassy official instructed him to report on Venezuelans and Cubans living and working in Bolivia. ‘We’re supposed to be here to help with mutual understanding, not intelligence operations.’” During the Cold War, the Soviets and others claimed the Peace Corps was used as a cover for the CIA. It seems the CIA may be up to their old tricks. In These Times (3/12/08)

Bush Spending U.S. Tax Dollars to Foment Unrest in Bolivia “Declassified documents and interviews on the ground in Bolivia prove that the Bush Administration is using U.S. taxpayers’ money to undermine the Morales government and co-opt the country’s dynamic social movements—just as it has tried to do recently in Venezuela and traditionally throughout Latin America. Much of that money is going through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).” The Progressive (3/10/08)

Construction projects take advantage of imported workers in China: Beijing’s Migrant Construction Workers Abused “Migrant construction workers building the ‘new Beijing’ are routinely exploited by being denied proper wages, under dangerous conditions with neither accident insurance nor access to medical and other social services, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. The 61-page report, ‘One Year of My Blood,’ documents the Chinese government’s failure to fulfill long-repeated promises to protect the rights of migrant construction workers, as well as to end deprivations caused by the discriminatory nature of China’s household registration (hukou) system. An estimated 1 million migrant construction workers, hailing from other parts of China, make up nearly 90 percent of Beijing’s construction workforce.” Human Rights Watch (3/12/08) And in the U.S.; Shipyard workers organize to stop 21st century slavery “More than 100 workers, carrying signs reading ‘I Am A Man,’ walked off the job at a Mississippi shipyard last week to protest conditions of slavery. Their struggle for justice comes 40 years after the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., marched with striking Memphis sanitation workers carrying the same signs. The shipyard workers – who are from India – have filed a class action suit against Signal International, a marine fabrication company; recruiters in India and the United States; and a New Orleans immigration lawyer, Malvern Burnett; accusing them of forced labor, human trafficking, fraud and civil rights violations.” Workday Minnesota (3/11/08)

China fabricated terror plots: Uighur leader “Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer Monday accused China of fabricating alleged plots against the Olympics, and even of scheming to carry out its own terror attacks, to blacken her community’s name. ‘It’s completely untrue. All these allegations are falsified’, the separatist figurehead, who joined her US-based husband in 2005 after six years in a Chinese jail, told AFP through an interpreter. ‘The real goal of the Chinese government is to organize a terrorist attack so that it can increase its crackdown on the Uighur people.’” Agence France Presse (3/10/08)

Extraordinary victory for harp seals: Russia moves towards banning the whitecoat hunt “Today, Oleg Trutnev, Russia’s Minister of Natural Resources drafted a letter requesting the government to bring a full stop to Russia’s hunt for newborn whitecoat harp seals less than three weeks old. This first step in halting Russia’s harp seal hunt was applauded by IFAW (The International Fund for Animal Welfare), which has been working in Canada and throughout the world to put an end to commercial seal hunts. ‘We are very pleased that the Russian government is taking steps towards ending the whitecoat hunt.’” International Fund for Animal Welfare (3/6/08)

Notes

The news is full of China’s repression of Tibet, but let us not forget the Uighurs. Or might the U.S. media have a different view of the abuse of Buddhist Tibetans than the abuse of Muslim Uighurs.

There will be no If you knew… for the next two weeks. But you can check out Headline from Hell for some fresh articles.

This week’s This is Hell with host Chuck Mertz, will be broadcast live Saturday, March 15th, with a four show at 9 AM (CMT) on WNUR 89.3 FM.

This week’s guests are:

• Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher and author of “So Wrong For So Long: How the Press, the Pundits – and the President – Failed on Iraq” (Sterling)
• Maude Barlow, heads the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization. She is a past winner of the Right Livelihood Award (the “alternative Nobel”) for her work on water justice. Her new book, “Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water (The New Press) will be discussed
• Peter Erlinder, law professor at William Mitchell College of Law. He is an attorney for past This is Hell guest Dr. Sami Al Arian in appeals to the US 4th Circuit, the 11th Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States. All have declined to intervene in Dr. al Arian’s case, who, despite having been acquitted, he is still being detained in a federal prison. Now, Sami is in the midst of a hunger strike in protest for his continued incarceration and is in danger of irreversible renal failure. Erlinger wrote this week’s Jurist article, The Torture of Sami Al Arian
• Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq” (Simon & Schuster). He’ll be discussing his Rolling Stone article, The Myth of the Surge

This week’s irregular correspondents are:

• Nicholas Hale will report from the UK with his “Fool Britannia” segment
• Jeff Dorchen delivers a Moment of Truth, now in its 11th year on This is Hell
• Dave Buchen, ‘Our Man in San Juan,’ phones it in from Puerto Rico

Last week’s show is now available in archives. Guests were David Rose, Vanity Fair editor and author of Gaza Bombshell at The Observer, Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, who wrote the Scientific American story, Space Wars – Coming to the Sky Near You?, Ken Silverstein, Harper’s Magazine editor, author of “Beltway Bacchanal: Congress Lives High on the Contributor’s Dime” and James Suggett who writes at Venezuelanalysis.com.

Check out these excellent roundups; for the recent news from all points east, check out Isaac Oommens East is East, Nathan Coes brand new Labor News Roundup and for the latest in rebel uprisings, read Alfonzo Torrezs The Rebel Communiqu.

If you knew is posted as an article on Fridays. There is an archive of over 400 blogs that were posted over the last two years. Any comments, suggestions, critiques or leads to articles, are welcomed. If You Knew will soon be announcing some changes, in coordination with the This is Hell website. It does look like this is actually going to happen. Along with articles, Headlines from Hell now includes commentary from contributors to This is Hell, including yours truly.

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Posted by mwm
The goal of If you knew… is to accumulate news items from various sources, that deserve attention and have been mostly ignored by the mainstream media. If you knew... will discontinue and contribute exclusively to This is Hell's Headlines from Hell...

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