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News Not Found In the Mainstream Press
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compiled by Polly Mann, W A M M
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SNOW JOBS
The World Bank spends $21 million a year on public relations. (50 Years is Enough, April 2005) The Israeli government and military receive $15,139,178* from the U.S. every day.
(http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/usaid.html)
SECOND CLASS CITIZENS
It is patently untrue that Israeli Arabs have “the same civil rights as Israeli Jews.” They are second-class citizens. They are not accepted for service in the Israeli Defense Force; their property ownership in Israeli is severely restricted; they cannot marry a partner of their own choice and continue to live in Israel. (Washington Report on the Middle East, May/June 2005).
ARMED GIRLS
Save the Children reports that a hidden army of more than 120,000 girls is working or fighting with armed groups around the world, and international programs to help them often fail or make things worse, Out of roughly 300,000 children living with armed groups, about 40% are girls. (Guardian Weekly. Apr.29-May 5, 2005).
JROTC INVASION
This fall the U.S. Air Force plans to increase its present 746 high school Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) units by adding 48 more units. The cost to school districts of each unit averages $76,000. 30 schools rejected units because 1) of JROTC non-compliance with the non-discrimination policies of schools, 2) the school district has no control over JROTC curriculum set by the national JROTC; 3) ROTC curricula are biased; 4) lack of evidence that JROTC prevents school drop-outs; 5) the essence of JROTC’s leadership training is the necessity to follow orders; and 6) JROTC is more a recruiting program than a leadership program. It is reported that the U.S. Navy has selected 207 schools for JROTC units. (Peacework, AFSC, June-July 2005).
SUBVERTING DEMOCRACY
In a newly-published book, El Codigo Chavez the author, Venezuelan-American attorney Eva Golinger writes that “since 2001 the American Institute for Democracy (AID) and the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have invested more than $20 million to foment conflict and instability in the name of “promotion of democracy” in Venezuela.
MEDICS ASSIST TORTURE AT GUANTANAMO
In the July 7th issue of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. M. Gregg Bioche, a professor of both law and public health and a London barrister and bioethicist, charge that at Guantanamo Bay “Since late 2002 psychiatrists and psychologists have been part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with behavior-shaping rewards to extract actionable intelligence from resistant captives.” In addition, reads the report, the “U.S. Southern Command policy statement, in effect since August 6, 2002 . . . not only requires caregivers to provide clinical information to military and CIA interrogation teams on request; it calls on them to volunteer information that they believe might be of value. It thereby makes them part of Guantanamo’s surveillance network, dissolving the Pentagon’s purported separation between intelligence gathering and patient care.” For further information on this subversion of international law, see jheffernan@phrusa.org.
G-8 SUMMIT TO AFRICA: OUR WAY OR THE HIGHWAY
At the G-8 summit leaders initiated a “Make Poverty History” program insisting that multinational corporations are not the cause of Africa’s problems but the solution. To become eligible for U.S. help African countries must bring about “a market-based economy that protects private property rights,” “the elimination of barriers to U.S. trade and investment,” and a conducive environment for U.S. foreign policy interests. In return they will be allowed “preferential treatment” for some of their products in U.S. markets. All this is classified as foreign aid with the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) the overseer, outsourcing the responsibility to the Corporate Council on Africa, the lobby group representing Halliburton, Exxon, Mobil, Coca Cola, and General Motors. Et al. (Guardian Weekly, July 15-21).
THANK YOU, FIDEL, BUT NO THANKS
On September 1st the government of Cuba (overlooking the antipathy the U.S. holds for its socialist economy) volunteered to send 1,500 medical doctors, medicine and medical equipment to Louisiana to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. True to form there has been no response from the government of the U. S.
BELGIAN DOCTORS BILL U.S. GOVT. FOR TREATING IRAQI GIRL
The Belgian organization, Medical Aid for the Third World MATW approved a treatment which consisted of weeks of physiotherapy and five operations for, Hiba Kassim, a girl seriously injured by a cluster bomb in 2003. Bert De Belder, coordinator of MATW said he sent the bill for services incurred, $66,650, to the U.S. embassy because international law dictated that an occupying force was responsible for the well-being of the country’s people. (michel.colon@skynet.be)
JOHN BOLTON’S CHILLING UNITED NATIONS DEBUT
Bolton’s proposals are: 1) to delete every one of the 35 specific references to programs seeking to eliminate world poverty and, 2) to put at risk treaties to which the U.S. is already a party, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Phyllis Bennis, author of the forthcoming book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy U.S. Power charges that, “This time, as before, the United States has threatened and declared war on the United Nations and the world.”
THIRD WORLD POVERTY IN OUR OWN BACKYARD
“Parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World,” according the United Nations Human Development Report released in September. The study “reveals that the infant mortality rate has been rising in the US for the past five years — and is now the same as Malaysia,”
the UK Independent reports. “America’s black children are twice as likely as whites to die before their first birthday.” In “unusually outspoken language,” the United Nations accuses the Bush administration of having “an overdeveloped military strategy and an under-developed strategy for human security,” creating an “urgent need to develop a collective security framework that goes beyond military responses to terrorism.” (See http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10186.htm) |
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Word Up
The most violent people on earth are not the demonstrators, not even the anarchists. The most violent criminals in the world today are in the Gleneagles hotel and they’re called the G-8. They’re responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the world by the system of globalized capitalism, by their war, by their exploitation.
—George Galloway,
a politician recently re-elected to the House of Commons, despite being thrown out of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labor Party
W A M M Action
The No Fly Zone
As a sign of solidarity with the striking workers of Northwest Airlines, please consider choosing an airline other than Northwest when making your travel plans.
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© 2005 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete October 2005 Index - click here
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