The Echo Park Lotus Festival takes place tomorrow and Sunday, at the N. end of the park, complete with gorgeous floral displays, presence of the growers, crafts tables, extensive children's section, fine food and entertainment and community booths. Just off the 101. Exit Echo Park (westbound) or Glendale/Union (eastbound.) FREE. See you there. -Ed
----- Original Message ----- From: Sid Shniad http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2123282,00.html The Guardian July 11, 2007 The rules change when dictators serve US interests The mosque siege reveals Musharraf's desperation to appear tough in the war on terror. But in truth he is a friend to terrorists By Imran Khan Over recent days, news from Pakistan has been dominated by the siege at the Red Mosque, which ended late yesterday. Scarcely a mile from the seat of power in Islamabad, the madrasa students and their two leading clerics inside the mosque first claimed attention with kidnappings, threats of suicide bombings and demands for the imposition of sharia law. The Musharraf regime mounted a military operation against the militants which led to the loss of numerous lives, among them one of the clerics, Abdul Rashid Ghaz. A number of questions arise. Why was action not taken immediately? How were militants and arms able to get in under the gaze of the police and intelligence services? And why were other measures, including shutting off electricity at the mosque, not exhausted earlier? The episode appears to have been drawn out deliberately by President Musharraf. Since he sacked the chief justice in March, a movement led by lawyers, journalists and opposition parties has been clamouring for democracy on Pakistan's streets. As Musharraf faces his biggest crisis, he is desperate to prove his indispensability to the west in the war on terror. But this use of force is likely to produce unintended and dangerous consequences, as it has in Baluchistan, Waziristan and Bajaur. It may be salutary to recall how Indira Gandhi's order for troops to attack the Golden Temple, where Sikh militants were holed up, not only failed to subdue the militants but triggered a wave of violence, including her assassination. While few Sikhs may have sympathised with the militants, many came to deeply resent the government's high-handedness. Suicide bombing and other noxious forms of terrorism were once alien to Pakistan. After eight years of military dictatorship, radicalism and fundamentalism are in the ascendant everywhere. Musharraf is perceived among radical elements as the west's instrument in a "war on Islam" - there could be no greater failure in the battle for hearts and minds. Terrorism requires a political solution. Extremists can be marginalised through debate and political dialogue in a democracy. Military dictatorship, as we are now seeing, only exacerbates the problem. It has become obvious to every Pakistani that, far from presiding over a transition to genuine democracy in the country, Musharraf is intent on dismantling every democratic institution in his way. Over recent months he has assaulted the judiciary, restricted freedom of the press, and put hundreds of members of the opposition behind bars. The roots of the most shocking incident so far, however, can be found in north London, where the chairman of the Musharraf-allied Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), Altaf Hussain, resides. When Pakistan's chief justice decided to address the bar in Karachi, a vast welcome was expected in the city. This worried Musharraf and his MQM allies, who control the Sindh government - and especially Karachi, the provincial capital. They decided to organise a rival rally the same day, despite protests by the opposition. What followed on the blood-soaked May 12 could be described in two words: state terrorism. While the police stood aside, the terrorist arm of the MQM sprayed bullets into a peaceful procession of the opposition parties. Some 48 people lost their lives and 200 sustained bullet wounds. Among them were 10 members of my party. Most callously, Musharraf later that evening triumphantly claimed that the people had shown their "force". None of the opposition parties believe MQM's denials that they were involved in turning this peaceful protest violent. It was then I decided to launch legal proceedings against Altaf Hussain, who has been living in exile in London since 1992 and became a British citizen in 1999. The MQM came into existence in the mid-1980s as a genuine people's movement in Karachi, representing the immigrant community that had arrived from India shortly after the creation of Pakistan. This community had serious grievances, the most significant being that educated young muhajirs could not get jobs because of imposed quotas. But within a few years it had degenerated into a thuggish mafia outfit, controlled by one man, Altaf Hussain. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and even the US state department and the European Union have issued reports about the MQM's terrorist activities. The only independent provincial assembly in Pakistan recently denounced the party as a "terrorist organisation", and last weekend the conference of opposition parties jointly resolved to support the legal proceedings against Hussain. While Musharraf maintains that he is at the frontline of the war on terror - in which thousands of Pakistani soldiers and citizens have lost their lives - he has allied himself with the country's number one terrorist. And Tony Blair's government, which was at the fore of this war, gave Pakistan's number one terrorist citizenship. It is impossible to embark on any quest for the hearts and minds of Pakistanis when these blatant double standards exist. Are dictators somehow fine when they exist to serve US interests, even if they destroy hopes of democracy in the process? And are terrorists only a problem when it is western blood that is shed? • Imran Khan is the leader of the Pakistan Movement for Justice and a member of parliament *** All Hail the Prophetic Gut! By Keith Olbermann MSNBC Countdown: Thursday 12 July 2007 Explaining Michael Chertoff's counterterrorism stomach. You have by now heard the remark - instantly added to our through-the-looking-glass lexicon of the 21st century, a time when we suddenly started referring to this country as "the homeland," as if anybody here has used that term since Charles Lindbergh or the German-American Bund in 1940. Michael Chertoff's "gut feeling." Which, he took pains to emphasize, was based on no specific nor even vague intelligence that we are entering a period of increased risk of terrorism here. He got as specific as saying that al-Qaida seems to like the summer, but as to the rest of it, he is perfectly content to let us sit and wait and worry - and to contemplate his gut. His gut! We used to have John Ashcroft's major announcements. We used to have David Paulison's breathless advisories about how to use duct tape against radiation attacks. We used to have Tom Ridge's color-coded threat levels. Now we have Michael Chertoff's gut! Once, we thought we were tiptoeing along a Grand Canyon of possible and actual freedoms and civil liberties destroyed, as part of some kind of nauseating but ultimately necessary and intricately designed plan to stop future 9/11s or even future Glasgow car bombers who wind up having to get out and push their failed weapons. Now it turns out we are risking all of our rights and protections - and risking the anger and hatred of the rest of the world - for the sake of Michael Chertoff's gut. I have pondered this supreme expression of diminished expectations for parts of three days now. I have concluded that there are only five possible explanations for Mr. Chertoff's remarkable revelations about his transcendently important counterterrorism stomach. Firstly, Mr. Chertoff, you are, as Richard Wolffe said here the other night, actually referencing not your gut but your backside - as in, "covering it." CYA. Not only has there not been a terrorist attack stopped in this country, but your good old Homeland Security hasn't even unraveled a plausible terrorist plan. And you and your folks there have a different kind of stomach pain, knowing that with a track record that consists largely of two accomplishments - inconveniencing people at airports and scaring them everywhere else - your department doesn't know what the hell it's doing, and even you, Mr. Chertoff, know it. Secondly, of course, there is the explanation of choice for those millions of us who have heard the shrill and curiously timed cries of "wolf" over the past six years - what we've called here "the Nexus of Politics and Terror" - that there isn't anything cooking, and your "gut feeling" was actually that you'd better throw up a diversion soon on Mr. Bush's behalf or something real - like the Republicans' revolt about Iraq, and the nauseating "gut feeling" that we have gotten 3,611 Americans killed there for no reason - was actually going to seep into the American headlines and consciousness. It's impossible to prove a negative, to guarantee that you and your predecessors deliberately scared the American public just for the political hell of it - even though your predecessor, Mr. Ridge, admitted he had his suspicions about exactly that. Suffice to say, Mr. Chertoff: If it ever can be proved, there will be a lot of people from Homeland Security and other outposts of this remarkably corrupt administration who will be going to prison. Thirdly - and most charitably, I guess, Mr. Chertoff - is the possibility that you have made some credible inference that we are really at greater risk right now but that any detail might blow some sort of attempt at interruption. There is some silver lining in this one. But the silver lining would have been a greater one if this National Counter Terrorism Center Report hadn't leaked out the day after you introduced us to your gut, a report suggesting al-Qaida had re-built its operational capacity to pre-9/11 levels. Not only did this latest hair-on-fire missive remind us that al-Qaida's re-growth has been along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border; not only did it remind us that your boss let this happen by shifting his resources out of Afghanistan to Iraq for his own vain and foolish purposes, to say nothing of ignoring Pakistan; not only did it underscore the ominous truth that if this country is victimized again by al-Qaida, the personal responsibility for the failure of our misplaced defenses would belong to President Bush and President Bush alone, but on top of all of it, Mr. Chertoff, it revealed you for the phony expert you are - the kid who hears in confidence something smart from somebody smart and then makes his prediction that what the smart kid said confidentially is about to happen. It reads just as you revised the "gut" remark this morning, sir - the "informed opinion." The kid telling stories out of school. The fourth possibility is a simple reversal of the third, Mr. Chertoff. You shot off your bazoo, and then this National Counter Terrorism Center report was rushed out - even created - to cover you, to give you credibility, to cloud the reality that you actually intoned to the Chicago Tribune, the 21st-century equivalent of "by the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes." But the fifth possible explanation of your gut, Mr. Chertoff, is the real nightmare scenario. And it is simple. That you, the man who famously told us "Louisiana is a city that is largely under water," meant this literally. That we really have been reduced to listening to see if your gut will growl. That your intestines are our best defense. That your bowels are our listening devices, your digestive tract is full of augurs, your colon produces the results that the torture at Gitmo does not. All hail the prophetic gut! So there are your choices: bureaucratic self-protection, political manipulation of the worst kind, the dropping of opaque hints, a gaffe backfilled by an "instant report," or the complete disintegration of our counterterror effort. Even if there really is never another terror attempt in this country, we have already lost too much in these last six years to now have to listen to Michael Chertoff's gut, no matter what its motivation. We cannot and will not turn this country into a police state. But even those of us who say that most loudly and insistently acknowledge that some stricter measures, under the still-stricter supervision of as many watchdogs as we can summon, are appropriate. But you're not even going to wring any of that from us, Mr. Chertoff, if we're going to hear remarks about your "gut feelings." You have reduced yourself to the status of a hunch-driven clown, and it's probably time you turned your task over to somebody who represents the brain and not the gut, certainly to somebody who does not, as you do now, represent that other part of the anatomy - the one through which the body disposes of what the stomach doesn't want. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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