Injustice

Source: The Peoples Voice

Iraq has between 25 and 50 percent unemployment, a dysfunctional parliament, rampant disease, an epidemic of mental illness, and sprawling slums. The killing of innocent people has become part of daily life. What a havoc the United States has wreaked in Iraq.

UN-HABITAT, an agency of the United Nations, recently published a 218-page report entitled State of the World’s Cities, 2010-2011. The report is full of statistics on the status of cities around the world and their demographics. It defines slum dwellers as those living in urban centers without one of the following: durable structures to protect them from climate, sufficient living area, sufficient access to water, access to sanitation facilities, and freedom from eviction.

Almost intentionally hidden in these statistics is one shocking fact about urban Iraqi populations. For the past few decades, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the percentage of the urban population living in slums in Iraq hovered just below 20 percent. Today, that percentage has risen to 53 percent: 11 million of the 19 million total urban dwellers. In the past decade, most countries have made progress toward reducing slum dwellers. But Iraq has gone rapidly and dangerously in the opposite direction.

According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 80 percent of the 285 million people living in the United States are urban dwellers. Those living in slums are well below 5 percent. If we translate the Iraqi statistic into the U.S. context, 121 million people in the United States would be living in slums.

If the United States had an unemployment rate of 25-50 percent and 121 million people living in slums, riots would ensue, the military would take over, and democracy would evaporate. So why are people in the United States not concerned and saddened by the conditions in Iraq? Because most people in the United States do not know what happened in Iraq and what is happening there now. Our government, including the current administration, looks the other way and perpetuates the myth that life has improved in post-invasion Iraq. Our major news media reinforces this message.

I had high hopes that the new administration would tell the truth to its citizens about why we invaded Iraq and what we are doing currently in the country. President Obama promised to move forward and not look to the past. However problematic this refusal to examine on the past — particularly for historians — the president should at least inform the U.S. public of the current conditions in Iraq. How else can we expect our government to formulate appropriate policy?

Inwardly compelled to bring justice to the world, seeking to make right wrongs that cry out for recognition, Assange is a man driven from an inward compulsion. His compass more than anything is moral, not so much philosophical in the sense of abstract thought, but purely and wholly in the reality of what is right and wrong. He has a clear sense that indiscriminate killing, deception by way of hazardous policy, and unspoken excess of military force are the key components of the machinery of death. Those who think that Assange is somehow trying to create the pretext for war, or to endanger one side to the other are clearly ignorant of the underlying reality at play. People expect grand things, in grand fashion, in a way that suits everyone simultaneously, and of course, it’s an impossible task.

Recently allegations have arisen claiming that Assange is in fact an intelligence asset of the CIA. The evidence given is that Assange himself asserted in a media interview that he was tipped off by Australian intelligence as to an impending attack upon his public person via a media-state-military co-ordinated effort. Now for some good reasons, there is a massive frenzy of intellectual excitement whenever the CIA and ‘intelligence’ becomes involved, it’s fascinating to observe; the aura of the CIA, both maligned and exalted for so long, survives as that of an agency of immense unseen power, dangerous and necessary, but which no one dare confront.

Intelligence as a Projection of Power

There is no doubt that intelligence is a form of power, since the degree of ones ‘knowing’ influences perception to a profound degree. However, intelligence and access to knowledge does not mean access to understanding, since knowledge born out of context only leads further into a self reinforcing state of confusion. There must be a compass through which one can navigate the fields of intelligence in order to bring about a context that reflects the movement towards greater human justice.

Rather than resisting the contextual truth of pure moral magnetism, and embracing the corporate fascist march to world destruction, Assange has aligned himself against the machine of death. That he has connections with ‘intelligence agencies’ only speaks to the nature of the man’s stature, the scope of his influence, and his ability to be heard. By default he has become a player of significance, one who has constructed a system of fall backs and redundancies such that his ‘physical termination’ may in fact lead to an actual escalation of the intelligence struggle currently taking place.

Harmonized?

The assumption is also generally made by alternative researchers that intelligence agencies are all aligned in harmonious synchrony, because they have given indication of unified databases running shared software applications. The reality is really one of ‘turf’, and a rule of power by power. There are many brokers and those hungry after power, who have the resources to do so, that will affect their own designs into the fabric of the world, seeking gain, favour and even a masterplan. The world of intelligence is compartmentalized and always at war, cross currents of competing and conflicted ideologies run headlong into increasingly resource based break away groups - those with the technology and money to ‘go it their own’.

It’s only in a simple minded world that the realm of state intelligence is an unconflicted whole, working in exactitude and total unity. This type of thinking is an exercise in futility, for since there are competing interests - some much stronger technologically, others economically - there is no unified agenda, but rather an interplay of competing interests that work together as they see fit, and as it suits their own agenda, but which are willing and indeed forced to fall into disagreement and even outright conflict.

Why Does Assange Get Heard At All?

Assange is an internet emergence, the entire alternative media is an internet emergence, and as more ‘paying consumers’ move to the internet for their media consumption, the financier owned media evolves a strategy of survival. With Assange, his rising notoriety happened over time, in what was a trickle of media coverage widely dispersed, and which culminated in Wikileaks hitting the mainstream, due in large part to Wikileaks strategic position, and the pressure it was beginning to exert upon the entire complex.

The Fall

The corporate media loves to ‘fall’ people, they love the drama of personal destruction, fabricated or not - stories of impropriety, double dealing, sexual relations, etc...Conspiratorially aware people often act as though receiving coverage in the corporate media is somehow an endorsement from the establishment, or that the coverage is the result of connections within the corporatocracy. But how many people suspect a set-up, a media embrace of death, and a push from above? The corporate media is a carnivorous animal, jealous, greedy and wrathful, and it will work at fever pitch to destroy that which opposes its masters.

I don’t think Assange’s position is easy, or sanctioned, or manufactured. He is Julian Assange, the moral crusader, whose cornerstone is the belief that human beings should co-exist under a rule of transparent justice, no more, and no less.

Would other crime labs around the country also be prone to falsifying evidence for the purpose of gaining convictions?


Source: ABC News

Greg Taylor was wrongfully convicted of killing a prostitute in 1991 in North Carolina. Taylor proclaimed his innocence, but the evidence against him seemed insurmountable: blood from the victim found on his SUV.

The catch is that there was never any blood in the car. Taylor was convicted after crime lab technicians reported traces of blood on his SUV near the crime scene. Those same technicians buried the results of additional testing that showed there was never any blood.

Taylor wrongly served 17 years in prison until being released in February.

Blood Evidence Buried in Hundreds of Cases

Taylor might not be alone. A new report released by the FBI showed that North Carolina crime lab workers omitted, overstated or falsely reported blood evidence over a 16-year period.

"The practice is unacceptable," said Chris Wrecker, one of the report's investigators. "We were encouraged to turn over every rock and look at everything."

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered the review in March after a hearing about Taylor's case. During the hearing, a North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation agent testified that the crime lab once had a policy of excluding complete blood test results from reports sent to defense attorneys.

Cooper said that the investigators pored through 15,000 lab files from the period between 1986 and 2003. Of those, they identified 230 instances where a lab report did not clearly reflect the totality of information in the lab notes.

"I firmly believe in the interest of justice that the full case files in each of these cases should be reviewed by both prosecutors and appropriate defense counsel to determine if any of thse cases should be re-opened," Cooper said.

Death of Michael Jordan's Father Among Cases

The investigation does not conclude that people were wrongly convicted of crimes, but it does call for a re-examination of 190 of the 230 criminal cases where blood evidence was misrepresented.

The independent report confirmed long-held suspicions about the people at the North Carolina crime lab. It said that "information that was material or even favorable to the defense was withheld and misrepresented."

Of the 190 cases that will now be reviewed, four people are sitting on death row, three have already been executed and five died in prison.

One of the highest-profile cases involved in the investigation is the conviction of two men for the murder of the father of basketball superstar Michael Jordan. Lab technicians reported that there was blood at the crime scene but they didn't reveal that four additional tests were inconclusive.

Source: Global Research

BILOXI, Mississippi, Aug 20, 2010 (IPS) - The U.S. state of Mississippi recently reopened all of its fishing areas. The problem is that commercial shrimpers refuse to trawl because they fear the toxicity of the waters and marine life due to the BP oil disaster.

"We come out and catch all our Mississippi oysters right here," James "Catfish" Miller, a commercial shrimper in Mississippi, told IPS. Pointing to the area in the Mississippi Sound from his shrimp boat, he added, "It's the only place in Mississippi to catch oysters, and there is oil and dispersants all over the top of it."

On Aug. 6, Mississippi's Department of Marine Resources (DMR) and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, in coordination with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ordered the reopening of all Mississippi territorial waters to all commercial and recreational finfish and shrimp fishing activities that were part of the precautionary closures following the BP oil rig disaster in April. At least five million barrels flowed into the Gulf before the well was shut earlier this month.

But Miller, along with many other commercial shrimpers, refuses to trawl.

Miller took IPS out on his shrimp boat, along with commercial shrimper Mark Stewart, and Jonathan Henderson of the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental group working to document and alleviate the effects of BP's oil disaster.

The goal was to prove to the public that their fishing grounds are contaminated with both oil and dispersants. Their method was simple – they tied an absorbent rag to a weighted hook, dropped it overboard for a short duration of time, then pulled it up to find the results. The rags were covered in a brown oily substance that the fishermen identified as a mix of BP's crude oil and toxic dispersants.

Miller and Stewart, who were both in BP's Vessels of Opportunity programme and were trained in identifying oil and dispersants, have been accused by some members of Mississippi's state government of lying about their findings.

"Why would we lie about oil and dispersant in our waters, when our livelihoods depend on our being able to fish here?" Miller asked IPS. "I want this to be cleaned up so we can get back to how we used to live. But it doesn't make sense for us or anyone else to fish if our waters are toxified. I don't know why people are angry at us for speaking the truth. We're not the ones who put the oil in the water."

IPS watched Miller and Stewart conduct eight tests in various places around Mississippi Sound. One of them was less than a quarter mile from the mouth of Pass Christian Harbor, and another was less than one mile from a public beach. Every single test found the absorbent rags stained with brown oil.

During an earlier test round, the two fishermen brought out scientist Dr. Ed Cake of Gulf Environmental Associates.

Dr. Cake wrote of the experience: "When the vessel was stopped for sampling, small, 0.5- to 1.0-inch-diameter bubbles would periodically rise to the surface and shortly thereafter they would pop leaving a small oil sheen. According to the fishermen, several of BP's Vessels-of- Opportunity (Carolina Skiffs with tanks of dispersants [Corexit?]) were hand spraying in Mississippi Sound off the Pass Christian Harbor in prior days/nights. It appears to this observer that the dispersants are still in the area and are continuing to react with oil in the waters off Pass Christian Harbor."

Shortly thereafter, Miller took the samples to a community meeting in nearby D'Iberville to show fishermen and families. At the meeting, fishermen unanimously supported a petition calling for the firing of Dr. Bill Walker, the head of Mississippi's DMR, who is responsible for opening the fishing grounds.

On Monday, Aug. 9, Walker, despite ongoing reports of tar balls, oil, and dispersants being found in Mississippi waters, declared "there should be no new threats" and issued an order for all local coast governments to halt ongoing oil disaster work being funded by BP money that was granted to the state.

Recent days in Mississippi waters have found fishermen and scientists finding oil in Garden Pond on Horn Island, massive fish kills near Cat Island and Biloxi, "black water" in Mississippi Sound, oil inside Pass Christian Harbor, and submerged oil in Pass Christian, in addition to what Miller and Stewart showed IPS and others with their testing.

"We've sent samples to all the news media we know, here in Mississippi and in [Washington] D.C.," Stewart, a third generation fisherman from Ocean Springs, told IPS. "We had Ray Mabus's people on this boat, and we sent them away with contaminated samples they watched us take, and we haven't heard back from them."

Raymond Mabus is the United States secretary of the Navy and a former governor of Mississippi. President Barack Obama tasked him with developing "a long-term Gulf Coast Restoration Plan as soon as possible."

Mabus has been accused by many Gulf Coast fishermen of not living up to his task.

Stewart told IPS, "Normally we have a lot of white shrimp in the Sound right now. You can catch 500 to 800 pounds a night, but right now, there are very few people shrimping, and those that are, are catching nothing or maybe 200 pounds per night. You can't even pay your expenses on 200 pounds per night."

"We think they opened shrimp season prematurely," Miller told IPS, "How can we put our product back on the market when everybody in America knows what happened down here? I have seen so many dead animals in the last few months I can't even keep count."

On Thursday, several commercial shrimpers, including Miller and Stewart, held a press conference at the Biloxi Marina. Other fishermen there were not fishing because they feared making people sick with seafood they might catch.

"I don't want people to get sick," Danny Ross, a commercial fisherman from Biloxi told IPS, "We want the government and BP to have transparency with the Corexit dispersants."

Ross said he has watched horseshoe crabs trying to crawl out of the water, and other marine life like stingrays and flounder trying to escape the water as well. He believes this is because the water is hypoxic due to the toxicity of the toxic dispersants, of which BP admits to using at least 1.9 million gallons.

"I will not wet a net and catch shrimp until I know it's safe to do so," Ross added. "I have no way of life now. I can't shrimp and others are calling the shots. For the next 20 years, what am I supposed to do? Because that's how long it's going to take for our waters to be safe again."

David Wallis, another fisherman from Biloxi, attended the press conference.

"We don't feel our seafood is safe, and we demand more testing be done," Wallis told IPS. "I've seen crabs crawling out of the water in the middle of the day. This is going to be affecting us far into the future."

"A lot of fishermen feel as we do. Most of them I talk to don't want the season opened, for our safety as well as others," Wallis added, "Right now there's barely any shrimp out there to catch. We should be overloaded with shrimp right now. That's not normal. I won't eat any seafood that comes out of these waters, because it's not safe."

The timing for Simmons death has the fingerprints of devilish deeds. His outspokeness regarding BP's cover-up of an ocean floor gusher, and his ability to get that message heard, was undermining BP's armor of denial. Maybe Matt did simply die in his hot tub of natural causes, though something within me knows better. I hope the autopsy is conducted in an aboveboard way, and maybe it will provide some answers.

I'm very sad to hear this news, I felt as though Simmons always did his best to speak what he knew, even in the face of ridicule and condemnation. He has been proven correct time and again, and I don't think he's wrong about the Gulf - something very sinister is happening there - and the cloak of security around the issue is very intense, and the deception fiercely enforced.

Matthew Simmons, farewell, and may we find you on the other side.


The Matthew Simmons archive at Harvest Dream



Source: Bangor Daily News

NORTH HAVEN, Maine — Matthew Simmons, the founder of an international energy investment bank, who once advised President George W. Bush on energy issues and also founded the Ocean Energy Institute in Rockland, drowned Sunday at his home on the island. He was 67.

Gov. John Baldacci praised Simmons on Monday as “an innovative thinker who pushed ideas that have the potential to yield a more environmentally and economically sustainable future for Maine and the world.”

The founder and chairman of Simmons & Co. International, one of the largest energy investment banking firms in the world, was a seasonal resident of Maine, with homes in North Haven and Rockport.

His body was found Sunday night in a hot tub at his home on the island. An autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office concluded Monday that he died from accidental drowning with heart disease as a contributing factor.

The Rockland-based Ocean Energy Institute that he founded in 2007 is “a think-tank and venture capital fund addressing the challenges of U.S. offshore renewable energy,” according to its website.

The institute is a part of a consortium led by the University of Maine, which aims to design and test floating deep-water wind turbine platforms.

He also wrote the 2005 book, “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy,” raising concerns about Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves and laying out his theory that the world was approaching peak oil production.

Source: Planet Ark

Brazilian native Indians on Sunday took 100 workers hostage at the construction site of a hydroelectric plant in the southern Amazon region, local media reported.

As many as 400 Indians from several different tribes occupied a power plant they say was built on an ancient burial site.

"They didn't take into account the situation of the Indians," Antonio Carlos Ferreira de Aquino, a local administrator with the government's agency of indigenous affairs, Funai, told Folha.com.

Armed with bows and arrows, the Indians occupied the site at dawn on Sunday and confined the construction company's employees to their barracks.

There were no reports of injuries.

The Indians are demanding that government officials help negotiate a settlement with the construction company.

"We want to be compensated for the construction of the plant. The site is 30 kilometers (19 miles) from our reserve and has caused great cultural and social impact in our community, not to mention environmental damage," Aldeci Arara, a tribal leader, told the G1 news portal.

The Dardanelos dam on the Aripuana river, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of the Mato Grosso state capital Cuiaba, was due to come online in January 2011, the media reports said.

The construction company told G1.com that it has been in touch with Funai to define a community development program for the local native Indians.

The company was not immediately available for comment.

It is one of nearly a dozen hydroelectric power plants the administration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been promoting in the Amazon region.

Earlier this year the government took bids for the construction of the $17 billion Belo Monte dam on the Xingu river. The project triggered an international outcry over potential environmental damage and impact on native Indian tribes.

Source: Survival International

There was outrage today as Botswana’s High Court denied the Kalahari Bushmen access to water.

The Judge ruled that the Bushmen were not entitled to access an existing water borehole on their lands or to drill a new one inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of the driest regions in the world. The hearing of the case was held on June 9, but the judge reserved his ruling until today.

The ruling is a blow to the Bushmen who have struggled without water since 2002 when the Botswana government sealed and capped a borehole to drive them out of the reserve. In 2006, the forced evictions of the Bushmen were declared illegal and unconstitutional by the High Court, and hundreds have since returned to their lands.

Despite the ruling, the government banned the Bushmen from re-commissioning the borehole, leaving them to face what the UN’s top official on indigenous peoples, James Anaya, described as, ‘harsh and dangerous conditions due to a lack of access to water’. At the same time, Wilderness Safaris opened a luxury tourist lodge, complete with bar and swimming pool, on Bushman land; the government drilled new boreholes in the reserve to provide water for wildlife with funding from the Tiffany & Co Foundation; and Gem Diamonds was given environmental clearance to mine in the reserve on condition the Bushmen could not use any of its water.

Bushmen are also being prevented from bringing water to their relatives inside the reserve.

Bushman spokesman, Jumanda Gakelebone, said, ‘This is very bad. If we don’t have water, how are we expected to live? The court gave us our land, but without the borehole, without water, our lives are difficult.’