[LAAMN] NATL INDIGNATION RALLY: Justice for Filipina Raped by US Marines; US Hands Off Philippine Affairs; Uphold Philippine Sovereignty
MEDIA ADVISORY 12 November 2005 Reference: Dorotea Mendoza Secretary General, GABRIELA Network [EMAIL PROTECTED], (212) 592-3507 WOMENS GROUP GABRIELA NETWORK RALLY TO CONDEMN CUSTODY TRANSFER OF U.S. MARINE RAPE SUSPECTS; DEMAND U.S. GOVT. TO BACK OFF PHILIPPINE AFFAIRS, FULL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. MILITARY FROM THE PHILIPPINES WHAT: Indignation Rally condemning custody transfer of US marine rape suspects, demanding US government to back off Philippine affairs and full withdrawal of US military from the Philippines. WHEN: Monday, 14 November 2005, 5PM WHERE: In front of the Philippine Consulate- 3600 Wilshire Blvd. (corner of Wilshire Kingsley), Los Angeles, CA 90010 Simultaneous actions in Chicago, Irvine, Los Angeles, New York/New Jersey, Portland, Pullman/Washington State Univ., San Diego, San Francisco/Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, DC. WHO: Organized by GABRIELA Network USA, a Philippine-US womens solidarity organization, established 1989. PHOTO AND INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITIES. STATEMENT: The transfer of the six US marines suspected of raping a 22-year old Filipina from the Philippines to Okinawa is a glaring example of the more than century-long inequitable, colonial relationship between the US and the Philippines. It is a glaring example of the constant violence and violation of a nations sovereignty perpetrated by the US military and US intervention in the Philippines. It is a glaring example of the US government pulling the strings on Philippine affairs and Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. It is a glaring example of Macapagal Arroyo kowtowing to US interests, mocking the Filipino peoples fight to bring to justice all those who have wronged them. As US and Philippine government officials continuously invoke the provisions under the US-Philippine Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) to justify this custody transfer and the interference of the US on the issue of jurisdiction, they themselves are proving VFAs inadequacies, one-sidedness, outright violation of the Philippine constitution, and the subjugation of countries like the Philippines through US military, political and economic might. They themselves are putting into action the very reasons why the VFA must be scrapped, GABNet Secretary General Dorotea Mendoza said. They themselves are proving Bush and Macapagal Arroyos inadequacies as presidents, their disingenuous oath to serve the people of their respective nations. ### === GABRIELA Network - Los Angeles Chapter A US-Philippine Women's Solidarity Mass Organization PO Box 3032 Cerritos, CA 90703-3032 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web: www.gabnet.org === *** GABRIELA Network is a Philippine-US women's solidarity organization since 1989. GABNet provides the means by which Filipinas in the US can empower themselves, functions as training ground for women's leadership, and articulates the women's point of view. GABNet effects change through organizing, educating, fundraising, networking, and advocacy. GABRIELA stands for... General Assembly Binding women for Reform, Integrity, Equality, Leadership and Action It also commemorates Gabriela Silang, known as one of the first and fiercest women generals in the Philippines who led the longest series of successful revolts against 18th Century Spanish colonizers. GABNet-US is an all-volunteer organization of women with chapters in Chicago, Irvine, Los Angeles, New Jersey/New York, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco/Bay Area, Seattle and Washington D.C. *** Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ~-- Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/7gSolB/TM ~- --- 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! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to:
[LAAMN] NY Times: 'We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories, Robert Fisk at USC, UCLA, Pomona
'We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories By FRANK RICH NY Times Op-Ed: November 13, 2005 IF it weren't tragic it would be a New Yorker cartoon. The president of the United States, in the final stop of his forlorn Latin America tour last week, told the world, We do not torture. Even as he spoke, the administration's flagrant embrace of torture was as hard to escape as publicity for Anderson Cooper. The vice president, not satisfied that the C.I.A. had already been implicated in four detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to give the agency a green light to commit torture in the future. Dana Priest of The Washington Post, having first uncovered secret C.I.A. prisons two years ago, was uncovering new black sites in Eastern Europe, where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown interrogation methods redolent of the region's Stalinist past. Before heading south, Mr. Bush had been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to cast the first veto of his presidency if Congress didn't scrap a spending bill amendment, written by John McCain and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate, banning the cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners. So when you watch the president stand there with a straight face and say, We do not torture - a full year and a half after the first photos from Abu Ghraib - you have to wonder how we arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore. The fallout from the Scooter Libby indictment reveals that the administration's credibility, having passed the tipping point with Katrina, is flat-lining. For two weeks, the White House's talking-point monkeys in the press and Congress had been dismissing Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation as much ado about nothing except politics and as an exoneration of everyone except Mr. Libby. Now the American people have rendered their verdict: they're not buying it. Last week two major polls came up with the identical finding, that roughly 8 in 10 Americans regard the leak case as a serious matter. One of the polls (The Wall Street Journal/NBC News) also found that 57 percent of Americans believe that Mr. Bush deliberately misled the country into war in Iraq and that only 33 percent now find him honest and straightforward, down from 50 percent in January. The Bush loyalists' push to discredit the Libby indictment failed because Americans don't see it as a stand-alone scandal but as the petri dish for a wider culture of lying that becomes more visible every day. The last-ditch argument rolled out by Mr. Bush on Veterans Day in his latest stay-the-course speech - that Democrats, too, endorsed dead-wrong W.M.D. intelligence - is more of the same. Sure, many Democrats (and others) did believe that Saddam had an arsenal before the war, but only the White House hyped selective evidence for nuclear weapons, the most ominous of all of Iraq's supposed W.M.D.'s, to whip up public fears of an imminent doomsday. There was also an entire other set of lies in the administration's prewar propaganda blitzkrieg that had nothing to do with W.M.D.'s, African uranium or the Wilsons. To get the country to redirect its finite resources to wage war against Saddam Hussein rather than keep its focus on the war against radical Islamic terrorists, the White House had to cook up not only the fiction that Iraq was about to attack us, but also the fiction that Iraq had already attacked us, on 9/11. Thanks to the Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who last weekend released a previously classified intelligence document, we now have conclusive evidence that the administration's disinformation campaign implying a link connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda and 9/11 was even more duplicitous and manipulative than its relentless flogging of nuclear Armageddon. Senator Levin's smoking gun is a widely circulated Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002 that was probably seen by the National Security Council. It warned that a captured Qaeda terrorist in American custody was in all likelihood intentionally misleading interrogators when he claimed that Iraq had trained Qaeda members to use illicit weapons. The report also made the point that an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration was absurd on its face: Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. But just like any other evidence that disputed the administration's fictional story lines, this intelligence was promptly disregarded. So much so that eight months later - in October 2002, as the White House was officially rolling out its new war and Congress was on the eve of authorizing it - Mr. Bush gave a major address in Cincinnati intermingling the usual mushroom clouds with information from that discredited, intentionally misleading Qaeda informant. We've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members
[LAAMN] Fwd: Bob Scheer to continue column despite LA Times axe
November 11, 2005 Dear Subscribers to www.RobertScheer.com, Some of you may have read in the Los Angeles Times this morning that Robert Scheer's home paper for nearly 30 years has axed his very popular weekly column from that paper's op-ed pages without providing a single reason. However, the column will continue to be written and published here and elsewhere every week. It will keep showing up in your mailbox! Here is Robert Scheer's own statement this morning on the situation: On Friday, I was fired as a columnist by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, where I have worked for thirty years. The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher. The good news is that, thanks to the San Franciso Chronicle, The Nation and numerous web sites including HuffingtonPost.com, AlterNet.org, robertscheer.com and the forthcoming TruthDig.com, Scheer's weekly column on national and international issues will still be widely available, and will also be syndicated to other media outlets by Creators Syndicate. The column will run in the Times for a few more weeks on Tuesdays, after which it will become a Wednesday column. Here is the Times own article on the changes: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lat11nov11,0,808176.story?coll=la-tot-promotrack=morenews Perhaps most disturbing is that the cancellation of Scheer's column in the Times after more than 12 years was clearly a political decision taken by paper's new publishers, who recently took control of the paper's opinion page from its editors. While the Times took the opportunity to push out controversial conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez (and will not replace him with another cartoonist), the new cast of columnists they are bringing in is strongly tilted to the far right, led by Max Boot and Jonah Goldberg. None of the other new or retain columnists on the page can be said to hold down Scheer's spot as a passionate and contrarian progressive voice. As always, we are grateful to you independent thinkers who have subscribed to receive the column in your inbox. And thank goodness for the Internet! Sincerely, Christopher Scheer [webmaster and son] p.s. If you know folks who read Scheer in the LA Times, please forward them this note so they can find out how to continue to find and read the column after December. ___ Isn't it time for a boycott of the LA Times? Back in the day of the Crack the CIA Coalition, we had 4000 people march around the LA Times condemning their white- wash of the CIA and white-out of the truth behind the drug war and the contra war. --Michael Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ~-- Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/7gSolB/TM ~- --- 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! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
