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THE HANDSTAND |
AUGUST 2003 |
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stop press stop
press stop press Dear Friends,The Peace Centre and memorial to Rachel Corrie is to be demolished by the Israel Civil Administration in East Jerusalem The Labor Art and Mural Project's delegation to Palestine/Israel isfacing a grave challenge: This morning, four cars of Israeli authorities -the IDF, the Civil Administration, and the police department arrived at the work camp in East Jerusalem where LaMP activists are helping to onstruct a peace center in memory of Rachel Corrie. The authorities issued a 'stop work' order and confiscated building materials. They also announced that the building and mural - both scheduled for completion on Thursday - would shortly be demolished. Israeli and Palestinian activists are massing to spend the night in the building, or arranging to be at the site at 4:30 tomorrow morning in an attempt to stall or prevent the demolition. Some activists will carry outcivil disobedience. Your messages of protest are crucial as well. The building, called the Beit Arabia Peace Center, is the project of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions. As an act of resistance to the occupation, ICAHD is holding a work camp to rebuild on the site of the home of Arabia and Salim Shawamreh of Anata. The Israeli authorities have demolished the Shawamreh home four times. In addition to memorializing Rachel Corrie, the center will memorialize the death of Nuha Makadma Sweidan, a pregnant Palestinian woman killed in Gaza in March 2003 when an Israeli bulldozer demolished her home on top of her. The center will house a permanent exhibit of the ongoing tragedy of house demolitions, and will also serve as a center for educational activities, study tours, activist events and peace-building between Palestinians and Israelis. It is poignantly located across a valley from a new Israeli police and interrogation center. The mural being painted by U.S. labor muralist Mike Alewitz is anchored by an image of broken bulldozers and war equipment. In the sky float images of Corrie and Sweidan. A railroad track runs to the horizon, reminding viewers of the collective dreams of radical Jewish and Arab unionists in the mandate period who fought for joint organizing of the Haifa rail workshops. It is this kind of vision - of Jews and Arabs fighting for socialist future where the interests of working people will be central - that the Israeli authorities hope to bury in their escalating demolitions of rebuilt houses and structures. Please protest this outrage....... AMERICA’S GULAG FOR IRAQ’S VIP PRISONERS by Gordon Thomas Each prisoner receives six pints of dank, tepid water a day. He uses it to wash and drink in summer noonday temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius. He is not allowed to wash his clothes’. He is provided with a small cup of delousing powder to deal with the worst of his body infestation. For the slightest infringement of draconian rules he is forced to sit in painful positions. If he cries out in protest his head is covered with a sack for lengthy periods. This is daily life in America’s shameful Gulag – Camp Cropper on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport. Only the International Red Cross are allowed inside. They are forbidden to describe what they see. But some of its staff have broken ranks – to tell Amnesty International of the shocking conditions the 3000 Iraqi prisoners are held under. None had been charged with any offence. They are listed as suspected “looters” and “rioters”. Or listed as “loyal to Saddam Hussein”. Every day more prisoners are crowded into the broiling, dusty compound. Surrounded by ten-foot high razor wire, they live in tents that are little protection against the blistering sun. They sleep eighty to a tent on wafer thin mats. Each prisoner has a long-handled shovel to dig his own latrine. Some are too old or weak to dig the ordered depth of three feet. Others find they have excavated pits already used. The over-powering stench in this hell-hole is suffocating. “Add to sleep deprivation and physical abuse you have highly degrading conditions which are tantamount to torture and gross abuse of human rights” said Curt Goering, deputy director of Amnesty International, the London-based human rights watchdog. He confirmed that Amnesty had received “credible reports” of detainees which had died in custody, “mostly as a result of shooting by members of the coalition forces”. Camp Cropper also houses a growing number of what are listed as “special prisoners”. They include the former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, Saadiun Hammadi, the former speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, and Ezzar Ibrahim, the son of Saddam’s second in command on the Revolutionary Command Council. The one woman “special” is Huda Ammash – known as “Chemical Sally”, because a key member of Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons programme. The week before he committed suicide, Dr David Kelly, the English scientist, had prepared a list of questions he planned to put to her when he returned to Iraq to assist in the search for weapons of mass destruction. Chemical Sally sleeps in a tent with other women members of the Ba’ath party. Like the men they are not allowed to wash their underwear – and several have developed unsightly sores, according to a Red Cross visitor. After two months incarceration none of the “special prisoners” have been told what charges they will face – though several, like Tariq Aziz, then had surrendered voluntarily to the Americans. A glimpse of his life nowadays has come from one of the few prisoners to be released, Adnan Jassim. “Tariq Aziz has aged very much in the past months in the camp. He shuffles and has a stoop. This may because he has to dig his own toilet hole. It is forbidden for anyone to help him to do this. He is treated just like anyone else – an animal to be driven wherever the guards want him. “His hair has grown. It is very dirty. He gets no special treatment. The same terrible food. Mostly he eats very little of it. It is hard to believe he was, second to Saddam, the most powerful man in Iraq”. Jassim was arrested the day after the war officially ended. He insists, according to a Red Cross official, that he was stopped for speeding. “The Americans just fired at my car. Then they threw me into a truck and took me to the camp. At the gate I had a badge pinned to my shirt. It said’ presumed killer’. I have never even fired a gun, let alone kill anyone”, Jassim insisted. Amnesty’s human rights workers and Red Cross officials have gathered statements from the few prisoners who have been released. One is Qays al Salman, a 54-year-old guard at one of Saddam’s palaces. He claims: “One day we became so angry that all the man in my tent began shouting, ‘Freedom, freedom!’ The soldiers rushed in, tied us up and forced us to lie down in the middle of the day in the open. Some of us had bad sun stroke. Other detainees, like Suheil Laibbi Mohammed, who used to work as a mechanic, repairing Saddam’s fleet of cars, said he had seen prisoners repeatedly hit with riffle butts”. Detainees described being given food as inedible to Muslims. Most of the meat was pork. “But it was either eat it or starve”, said Rafed Adel Mehdi. Tariq Aziz’s wife, Zureida, and his two sons fled to Jordan when the war ended. In London their family lawyer, Dr Abdul Haq al-Ani, wants to serve a writ of habeas corpus on Britain’s embattled Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, arguing that his client is being held in contravention of the Geneva Convention and the Human Rights Act. “I spent a week in Baghdad but I was not allowed to see my client. I know the conditions he is being held under from those who have been released. It is outrageous what is happening”, he said. Chemical Sally’s family are also planning legal moves to have her freed. They have submitted evidence to the Americans that she has breast cancer and requires to continue with her medical treatment. Her mother, Kasmah Ammash, a frail 70-year-old said: “My daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late Eighties. She went to Pittsburgh for chemotherapy and underwent a mastectomy. Before she was arrested she was undergoing further follow up treatment. How can they be so cruel”. Amnesty International said it had urged the coalition forces to look into such allegations – and to bring to justice those found guilty of offences. “The Americans have acknowledged there are some serious problems. But there is a difference of opinion on what laws apply”, said Mr Goering. Nada Doumani, the International Red Cross spokesman in Baghdad said “we never comment on the conditions at the detention centers”. “The Geneva Convention is clear about the obligations that exist for legal advice and visits. If someone is being held as a POW then there is a legal obligation to allow them access to legal advice. But if they are held as a civilian detainee that does not apply. A tribunal has been set up to decide which category each person in the camp fits into. Until their work is complete we can say no more”. A spokesman for Lt-General Ricardo Sanchez, the coalition forces commander in Iraq, said he could not give a time frame when the tribunal’s work will be completed. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CASPIAN LAUNCHES WORLDWIDE GILLETTE BOYCOTT Gillette faces consequences for spying on consumers August 11, 2003 CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) is calling for a worldwide boycott of Gillette products since the company failed to renounce a Gillette Mach3 "smart shelf" spy system. "We have corroborated evidence that a Gillette 'smart shelf' fitted with radio frequency identification (RFID) devices can sense when packages are removed from a store shelf and, in response, take pictures of consumers handling them," says CASPIAN founder and director Katherine Albrecht. "Tracking and photographing consumers without their knowledge and consent is unacceptable." CASPIAN sent an open letter to Gillette VP Dick Cantwell July 21 requesting information about the smart shelf and Gillette's item- level RFID tagging of consumer products. The group also sought assurances that the company would not condone the photographing and tracking of consumers anywhere in the world. "Since Gillette failed to renounce the photographing and tracking of innocent shoppers, we can only conclude that they plan to continue down this ill-advised path," says Albrecht. "We want to send a clear message to Gillette and other companies that consumers will not tolerate being spied on through the products they buy." Albrecht theorizes that Gillette could face other consequences besides loss of revenue from their actions. "Photographing adult consumers has already cost Gillette a loss of consumer goodwill. But just imagine if a picture of a minor is snapped without permission. Gillette will have a firestorm on its hands if its shelf photographs a teenage girl as she bends down to examine Venus shaving products. Her father, his attorney and the whole world would be knocking on CEO James Kilt's door." A copy of the open letter, evidence of Gillette smart shelf trials and pictures of tagged products are available at the group's new boycott Gillette web site: http://www.boycottgillette.com. Gillette is currently the leader in nearly a dozen consumer product categories. Their products include well-known brands like Gillette razors and shaving products, Oral-B toothbrushes, Braun appliances and Duracell batteries. A more complete list of their products is posted at http://www.boycottgillette.com to help consumers avoid purchasing Gillette products. Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) is a grass-roots consumer group fighting retail surveillance schemes since 1999. With members in all 50 U.S. states and more than 15 nations across the globe, CASPIAN seeks to educate consumers about marketing strategies that invade their privacy and to encourage privacy-conscious shopping habits across the retail spectrum. For more information about CASPIAN visit http://www.nocards.org. Germany supports NATO troops in Iraq - 11.08.2003 - 09:21 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- German defence minister Peter Struck has said that he supports the idea of a NATO operation in Iraq - a statement interpreted as being the start of reconciliation between the US and Germany after the Iraq war. Link to article >> http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?aid=12337 Prominent American Painter Alowayts in Solidarity with Palestinian People 09/08/2003 Palestine Media Center- (PMC) Will the American empire make Iridium glow in the dark? or, why that next call you make from a booth in downtown Baghdad could be your last... Gary Zatzman comments on the news that a group of Israeli businessmen, using a derelict global communnications satellite relay system, plan to run public telephones in post-Saddam Iraq On August 3, 2003 the Israeli commercial news provider Globes Online published a tale to the effect that a group of Israeli businessmen propose to restore "public phone" service (pay phones etc) for something like US$4-5 million. The sensational portion was a mention that the group will use the global satellite telephone system that was set up by the US electronics giant Motorola under the name of Iridium back in the 1990s but which declared bankruptcy in 1998. Although the technology --- a linkable system of geostationary communications satellites positioned in enough different orbits so that their footprints cover the entire surface of the Earth --- was completed and launched, the bankruptcy left the system as a whole un-linked and un-networked. (1) The Iridium system represented a failed attempt to establish the world's first privately-controlled global telephone network. At the time of the bankruptcy, the impression was left that the project collapsed because the world market demand for commercial use of such a network "wasn't there yet". One important thing about communications satellites is their bandwidth. Most are capable of accommodating an enormous number and range of switching operations, generally more than would be used up by ordinary commercial demand for its services. So if you have some spies around the globe who have implanted transmitters in their territories, tuned to and beaming into space on a frequency receivable by one of these satellites, you can piggyback an entire espionage-gathering network onto a network of such satellites.(2) Certainly the espionage-gathering capabilities were part of the ambition of the U.S. military. It financed a great deal of the research that Motorola used to perfect the Iridium system. But the Pentagon wanted its own network of satellites dedicated exclusively to military use. That would mean relying on the NASA shuttle program to launch such satellites. The cost and unrealiabilities built into the shuttle program were deemed unacceptable at a time ---the early to mid 1990s --- when such projects seemed unnecessary for current or projected US military or espionage requirements. Motorola thereafter attempted to complete Iridium as a private purely commercial project --- managing to launch all the satellites in place. Indeed, in the attempt to accommodate the potential consequences for how it would be doing business into such a future, Motorola turned its entire system of internal management, accounting, etc. upside-down and became case-study material at all the top business schools. But the project failed to generate the required volume of business and Iridium was placed in bankruptcy. The Israeli Zionists' interest to start picking up pieces of this system looks like a way the U.S., in "partnership" with a Zionist machine that cannot breathe for a nanosecond or do anything without U.S. financial guarantees, economic subsidies and ongoing military support, can now convert this network to the purposes it originally had in mind. For the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld, this approach has the advantage of shifting financial and political responsibility for maintaining the network onto the "partner", while harvesting some considerable share of the intelligence booty collected. The fact the Israelis will also have access is no cause for immediate or particular alarm at the Pentagon, since / so long as there is no cause or interest independent of the imperial interests of the U.S. for the Zionists to serve. Almost two-thirds of the Israeli GDP --- 64 % as of the year 2000 --- originates outside Israel, from foreign sources mainly U.S.-based. Based on information supplied in the latest OECD study,(3) at this time the direct capital investments and government subsidies from the U.S. (for purchasing US military equipment and civilian goods & services, not to mention financing the Occupation and the expansion of the settlements) account immediately for 20 per cent of the Israeli GDP. This is far and away the single biggest chunk of the entity's GDP. Israel's economy is foreign-dependent and its society and polity are a satellite of and hostage to U.S. imperial policy. So, yes indeed: Iraq's prostration has become another opportunity for the Zionists to "coin it". But this latest scheme is also about a great deal more than a $4 or $5-million public-phone contract. It has to do with some critically important aims and objectives of the American empire in this period. Three years ago, the member-states of the EU (excepting Britain) raised warnings against the so-called ECHELON system of electronic spying which had been set up by the U.S. using its infrastructure of control within other English-speaking countries, especially Britain, Canada and Australia, and which was caught gathering information about French corporate deal-making at the expense of various American companies in various sectors of the global economy.(4) The response was widespread and immediate in quite a number of countries, where Linux and open-source computer network management software were widely substituted for Microsoft. Microsoft had become one of the most way-beyond-the-call-of-duty faithful and fervent agencies of the State Department and Pentagon --- even moreso as various antitrust suits were mounted against it by numerous state governments in America and Europe. The inter-imperialist edge underpinning this rivalry is seen in the fact that most of the U.S.-based suits were settled between 2001 and early 2003, whereas the EU as recently as August 2003 was intensifying its efforts to compel Microsoft to conform to its existing standards of data privacy and data protection. To supplement ECHELON with electronic intelligence-gathering by means of a globe-girdling system of communications satellites for which the US government could not be held responsible or fingered for using against other countries may seem like science fiction to some. Maybe. But it sure sounds like Donald Rumsfeld to the rest of us. End Notes 1. That, for example, is why foreign correspondents cannot just dial a central network switch from their videophone. Instead, they must first coordinate with their network ahead of time as to when they will be in contact, then wait for one of these satellites to pass within range of the transmitting equipment and manually establish the uplink at the prearranged time. 2. This is known as ELINT or "electronic intelligence-gathering". Up to now, ELINT has been confined to passive collection, collation and-or distribution of electronically-intercepted information. Certain technical aspects of satellite transmission also have major implications for the real-time conduct of actual military operations. Iridium Satellite Israel is a subsidiary of the privately held corporation Iridium Satellite, owned by Iridium Satellite Solutions' regional operators in Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Eastern Europe, and East Africa, and a group of investors headed by Ami Schneider. The company acquired the assets of the Iridium company in December of 2000. It is a provider of global satellite voice and data through a constellation of 66 low-earth orbiting (LEO) satellites operated by Boeing, one of the top 5 military contrractors weith the Pentagon. Iridium currently provides service to the US Department of Defense under a multi-year contract. Benjamin Netanyahu, wearing his "Minister of Fianance" hat, was reportedly instrumental in arranging the deal. This rings lots of alarm bells as to the likelihood that far deeper and broader U.S.-Israeli strategic objectives are to be served by this project. Radio signals that are not loaded by electronic noise or degraded by the amount of switching that would take place over a conventional analog or digital telephone network would at least theoretically make excellent triggers for detonating explosives. State terrorism buffs take note: it is speculative but not beyond reason that devices hooked to Iridium's network could be used to detonate explosives anywhere on the planet. 3. OECD. Reviews of foreign direct investment: Israel (June 2002. Data current to March 2002) 4. The exposure began late in 1999. As of August 2003, googling "Echelon" and "BBC" still brought up a series of stories covering these developments. Early morning yesterday(7thAugust 2003), the Israeli Military invaded the Askar Refugee Camp in Nablus in a so-called "arrest" operation. During the invasion, four Palestinians were killed and two more are critically wounded. "We didn't mean to shoot him, we just wanted to arrest him." Yes, we clearly understand that it takes seven tanks, three jeeps, a helicopter and dozens of soldiers to arrest one man. The attack is yet another of Sharon's attempts to destroy the hudna and goad the Palestinians into another battle. According to "Haaretz" even senior military officers admit that Hamas is not, right now, busy with preparing suicide attacks, but is complying with seize fire plans.The Sharon government is not interested in de-escalation or any sort of cease fire. He is interested in agitating for violence, so he can use it as a much-needed excuse to continue Israeli's illegal occupation and complete construction of the Apartheid Wall Here's a description of what happened by an eyewitness who lives in Askar. At 2:30 in the morning I heard a lot of people moving in the streets of the camp. Then I discovered that these people are soldiers or special forces after I heard some Hebrew words. 20 minutes later strong gunfire started, suddenly a lot of tanks, jeeps and one helicopter started to arrive to the area followed by a bulldozer. The gunfire continued. I started to hear the bombs from time to time, during all this time I didn't leave my bed. After 4:30, the jeeps started to impose the curfew. After that, I received a call from my father asking me to leave my place and to join the family. His fears were: in case the army started to search from house to house, having me by myself in the house would give them the chance to do what ever they want to me, as we do have long list of people who been beaten by the occupation forces taking the chances that no witnesses around. I joined my family went up to the roof to have a clear vision about what's going on, the gunfire, bombs continued, then I heard strong bombing followed with a lot of smoke. After calling the neighbors to figure out what's happening, I had been told that the house of the Dwaikat family was shelled by tanks, and they destroyed the fourth and the third floor. The jeeps kept driving the streets imposing the curfew. By six in the morning, the people started to break the curfew going out to the streets. Then confrontations started between the kids, youth, men,  women, and the
Army, and the army opened fire using live ammunition
for the purpose of killing us. Around 10:00 am I
heard huge bombing. Then it was clear that they
bombed the entire building. The confrontations kept
going on, and the bulldozer started to work to be
sure that no one was still alive after bombing the
building.Around 11:30 am, the army left the camp. It was very clear there was no need for releasing the curfew as everybody was outside. I went out to see the area where the operation happened. We been told that the army took the body of the martyr Khamis abu Salim, 22 years old, whilst the people were trying to get some stuff out from under the destroyed house, they found the body of the martyr Fayez Al Sadar 28 years old. All the people carried him on their shoulders toward the ambulance, everybody went home preparing himself for next day demonstration for the two martyrs. 3 hours later, 2 of the 9 who were injured in the confrontations died; Fawzi Al Alami 45 years old, and Mohammad al Tek 17 years old. |
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