“The lawyers representing the families of four American Blackwater contractors killed in Fallujah make the case that the company’s executives are suing the families to keep them quiet and to avoid any accountability.”

… The surviving family members looked to Blackwater for answers as to how and why their loved ones died. Blackwater not only refused to give the grieving families any information, but also callously stated that they would need to sue Blackwater to get it. Left with no alternative, in January 2005, the families filed suit against Blackwater, which is owned by the wealthy and politically-connected Erik Prince.

Blackwater … initially hired Fred F. Fielding, who is currently counsel to the President of the United States. It then hired Joseph E. Schmitz as its in-house counsel, who was formerly the Inspector General at the Pentagon. More recently, Blackwater employed Kenneth Starr, famed prosecutor in the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, to oppose the families. To add additional muscle, Blackwater hired Cofer Black, who was the Director of the CIA Counter- Terrorist Center.

… The families claim that Blackwater is attempting to cover up its incompetence, its cutting of corners in favor of higher profits, and its over billing to the government.

… Blackwater also stonewalled the families concerning any information about how the men were killed.

… Blackwater [is] suing the families for $10 million …. Blackwater has also threatened to hold the administrator of the estates personally liable to scare him into abandoning his position, and has threatened the families’ attorneys as well.

… Blackwater’s lawsuit now seeks to gag the family members from even speaking about the incident or about Blackwater’s involvement in the deaths. This is a direct attack to their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

[Daniel J. Callahan and Marc P. Miles: AlterNet]

Via Giant Monster.

Stephan Orsak is a professional violinist, and has performed under Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Masur and Seiji Ozawa.

He is about to go to trial on six counts, including a Gross Misdemeanor of Obstructing Legal Process ‘with force or violence or threat thereof,’ after he was tased by a police officer who stopped him for riding a bike out of the airport.

What happened?
I was rudely accosted, assaulted with battery, and tased at Minneapolis St Paul USA international airport by Airport Police, simply for choosing to leave the airport by bicycle. I had broken no laws. I use a bicycle as a significant part of my daily mode of travel. I have legally cycled to and from airports internationally including 3 of the 4 major London airports, with no problems. I was using my bicycle completely in accord with MN Statutes and Metropolitan Airport Commission Ordinances.

When did this happen?
Sept 7 2006, approx 6:10pm

Where did this happen?
On the Outbound Roadway (also called Glumack Drive), just east of the post office and west of the highway.

Who would have witnessed it?
Many people. It was full daylight, and in view of the “A” concourse. Anyone leaving the airport would have passed the scene of the incident. The extensive 800+ CCTV video camera system at the airport, fully updated since 9-11, must have recorded everything, and with multiple viewpoints.

[greencycles]

Via Boing Boing.

“Massacres and paramilitary land seizures behind the biofuel revolution”

Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.

Surging demand for “green” fuel has prompted rightwing paramilitaries to seize swaths of territory, according to activists and farmers. Thousands of families are believed to have fled a campaign of killing and intimidation, swelling Colombia’s population of 3 million displaced people and adding to one of the world’s worst refugee crises after Darfur and Congo.

… A government investigation reportedly found irregularities in 80% of palm oil land titles in some areas.

… The paramilitary groups, first formed in the 80s by businessmen, landowners and drug lords to fend off guerrillas, became a powerful illegal army which stole land, sold drugs and massacred civilians. Under a peace deal with the government they have officially disbanded but many observers say remnants remain active.

… Coca production in Colombia has surged despite US-funded eradication efforts, according to an estimate that casts fresh doubt on Washington’s “war on drugs”. Satellite imagery collated by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy survey suggests that cultivation of coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine, jumped 8% last year to 156,000 hectares.

[Guardian]

David Sasaki on recent violence in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico:

This much we know for sure. On May third and fourth [2006], in the Mexican town of San Salvador Atenco, riots broke out which resulted in 200 arrests and 50 injured officers according to an official statement. We also know that a 14-year-old youth named Javier Cortés Santiago was killed in the violence. Those small details, however, are about the only facts that all sides agree on. Disagreed upon is 1.) whether Cortés was killed by a bullet of the police or protesters 2.) whether protesters were raped by police officers or if such claims are fabrications 3.) whether the government was justified in using force, and 4.) most importantly, just what actually set off the riots?
[Link]

John Ross @ Guerilla News Network: “The “Dirty War” Returns to Mexico”:

MEXICO CITY: Between 1970 and 1982, three Mexican presidents waged a “dirty war” against dissidents from one end of the country to the next. Recently compiled documentation lists 15,000 illegal detentions during that terrible period, thousands of instances of torture, and the forced disappearance of more than 700 Mexican citizens …

Nowhere was the dirty war more cruelly fought then along the Pacific coast of Guerrero state where farmers had risen in rebellion behind the rural school teacher-turned guerrillero Lucio Cabanas and his Party of the Poor. Carlos Montemayor, author of “War In Paradise”, perhaps the most vehement expose of that repression, is an assiduous scholar of how the dirty war in Guerrero was organized and carried out.

Writing in the left daily La Jornada, Montemayor recently described the characteristics of that counter-insurgency campaign against farming villages along the Guerrero coast, and the striking similarities to the May 4th assault on San Salvador Atenco just outside of Mexico City by thousands of highly militarized police to quell a campesino rebellion.

According to Montemayor’s description, first an overwhelming force is assembled with the primary mission of totally subjugating a recalcitrant population. Then informers are introduced into the village to identify and eliminate rebel community leaders and those associated with them. If the leaders evade capture, their families are held hostage. Young men are rounded up and selectively tortured to extract information and to turn them into “soplones” (informers.)

Meanwhile, shock troops terrorize the civilian population into submission. Indiscriminate beatings, home invasions, the theft of personal items of value, and the systematic destruction of property are encouraged by police commanders. Women are raped and sexually abused to underscore the occupation force’s total domination over the rebellious villagers.

Virtually all of these dirty war characteristics were on display in San Salvador Atenco May 4th when 3000 armed state police and elements of the Federal Preventative Police (PFP), a force largely extracted from the Mexican military, slammed into that dirt-poor town of 30,000 out on the dried lake beds east of the capital, killing one 14-year-old, leaving a 20-year-old student hovering between life and death, and arresting 209, all of whom required hospitalization from the beatings they received under security force batons – although only some prisoners actually received it (and they were chained to their hospital beds.) Of 47 women arrested, 23 reported that they had been raped or were otherwise sexually abused.
[Link]

April 4, 1668: Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated.

“Martin Luther King, Jr., was “murdered by an intricate plot that included government agencies,” according to a December 1999 jury in Memphis Tennessee, ruling in a civil wrongful death suit. On March 15, 2000, The Christian Century Magazine (p. 308-313) published an article by James W. Douglass summarizing the evidence on which this startling verdict was made. The chronology which appears below is primarily based on the evidence presented in this article.” [Link]
(more…)

Here we go again …

Guatemala’s newly appointed defense minister, General Francisco Bermudez, is currently in Washington D.C., for a four day visit that began on March 13. On his agenda is an appointment with the Secretary of Defense. In that meeting, Rumsfeld is expected to address the matter of a renewal of U.S. military aid to Guatemala, and possibly the construction of a DEA base in the Guatemalan rainforest to help combat drug trafficking in Central America. The relatively high visibility of Bermudez’ visit is not adventitious, but represents a longstanding Rumsfeld policy of upgrading ties with some of Latin America’s most reprehensible and unsavory military establishments, who during the 1970s and 1980s savaged their nations’ constitutions and citizenry, including in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador and, perhaps most of all, Guatemala.

Link (via Boing Boing).

look around you, breeding your own collapse

before you know it you’ll be living like rats

more and more cannon fodder for the fanatics

depleted uranium leaching into the tigris

more blood to infuse the military industrial simplex virus

your self-induced fear and greedy fecundity

provide those soul less bastard with holy roller’s take of the taxes

they divide and conquer the populace

with splintering attacking on those more or less defenseless

railing and ranting against special interests

save their main, cancerous, to keep you all rabbitting along in ignorance

while they extract eden’s treasures, provided with government vouchers

leaving behind a scorched, sulfurous furnace

- Mark Jacobs, 10 March 2006 (”not the designer, not the St. Paul playwright; the hack cartoonist, bass player and instigator of punchline rock”)

1960: Sharpeville Massacre: South African police kill 89 protesters in Sharpeville and other towns during protests of apartheid pass laws. In Sharpeville itself, 69 were killed and 176 wounded when police opened fire on an unarmed crowd, 63 of them shot in the back. Overall, 13,000 were jailed.

1985: South Africa: During funeral march for three killed in a Sharpeville memorial demo, South African police kill 19 more.

1995: South Africa: On the anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre, newly elected democratic government establishes today as Human Rights Day. Link.