The third edition of ne(U)waves beta (that's what I'm going to call the show until fall) went OK. We had a wonderful interview with Susan C. Cerpa of the Northeast Impeachment Coalition. But there were some technical difficulties -- really frustrating! -- because of failed YouTube clips and something wrong with my Outkast CD. But I can't keep complaining about technology. I gotta find some way to secure sound bytes before I air them. So, aside from a few verbal slips, some sputtering and the technical glitch, the show went alright. We talked about Obamacide psy-ops, we talked about the government's exposed propaganda program, and we talked about higher education benefits for military members. I like being able to use the radio station like this, to develop my voice, to get used to the anxious nervousness I have when speaking on air. Stay tuned!
Songs played
- Obligatory "Guerilla Radio" by Rage Against the Machine (that's the show's intro, always, so won't be mentioned again).
- "Liar" by Henry Rollins
- "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)" by Outkast
- "Capital G" by Nine Inch Nails
- "Fruits of Babylon" by the Foundation Movement (check it out at http://www.myspace.com/thefoundationmovement)
Update: Here's the mp3
boomp3.com
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Second show, solo
Still working out the kinks. I started recording about five minutes into the show. My mistake. Won't happen again. I didn't prepare well enough for this one. So at points I was fumbling, again, and, instead of stumbling, I broadcasted a bunch of dead space (but no white noise this time). I'm thinking I need a co-host or a co-DJ or some correspondents if I could. An extra hand in the office would be awesome. Regardless, we keep marching on. Next week's show will be great, clean, no stops, smooth, ride smooth, and we'll be having on a guest, a leader from the impeachment movement. Stay tuned. By this fall, we'll be a well-oiled truth machine.
mp3 of the broadcast will be up by Sunday.
Update: Here's the recording.
boomp3.com
mp3 of the broadcast will be up by Sunday.
Update: Here's the recording.
boomp3.com
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The inaugural broadcast
Update: So I got the whole thing as an mp3 and I found a free host! This came after I downloaded Audacity and amplified the part of the broadcast that was mysteriously muted. To my frustration, I couldn't get rid of the white noise that came with this modifcation. But check it out, if ya want.
boomp3.com
If you just want the biolab interview, check it out here
boomp3.com
So the first edition of ne(U)waves went alright, except for the fact I got so nervous I had to start over, and then, when I did that, for some reason, listeners couldn't hear my voice during the headlines unless they had some powerful speakers and took the risk of turning them way up and were nimble enough to flick it down in time to not lose your hearing. I have a CD copy of the transmission. I'll copy and paste the transcript I typed up for headlines and attach it to this blog post. And I'm trying to carve an mp3 out of this to add to the post as well as post the whole thing for those risk takers.
But the Klare Allen interview went well, despite my mumbles and fumbles. She's the founder of Safety Net, a local activist organization, and makes it a top priority to fight Boston University's nascent Level-4 biolab, which some local residents refer to as the bioterror lab. I act kind of goofy and I didn't seem to straight-faced, objectivist, journalist-type that I'm training to become, (had to apologize on air for mentioning Tuskegee experiments, heh-heh), but I promise, it'll get better and better, more succinct and accurate, with no fluff and no needless guff. For a real good dissection of the biolab quandary, check out Adam Reilly's "Biolab Follies." The public meeting takes place at 9 a.m. on Friday at the State House in the Gardner Auditorium. Klare will be there early to protest how early it's taking place: it's inconvenient to the working people of the Roxbury and the South End.
Either way, the show still rocked -- playing System of a Down and the Bad Brains -- and we talked about this local revolt that Allen is a champion of.
But I didn't even get to go into the world news. I really flubbed for a while with the equipment, fiddling with an audio sample of a quote from Bush playing golf at the beggining of the war on terror. Whatevs, this is all a learning experience for me and tonight was my first time in the command center.
Here's the script -- replete with grammatical errors and mysterious quotation marks -- that I wrote for the intro and headlines:
"Welcome to ne(U)waves. I am your host, Marc Larocque. This is the inaugural edition of ne(U)waves, a newsmagazine program dedicated to issues of social justice, peace and prosperity. We will provide local, national and international news for you – along with a little bit of music about social change as intermission -- every week." We will go in depth regarding the biolab, later, after a feature story about security on the T. But, first, headlines.
President Bush has landed in Israel today to take part in celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of Israel’s founding in 1948.
The trip has been criticized because Bush has no plans to mark what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, for the more than 700,000 Palestinians driven from their homes that same year.
As Mr. Bush arrived, at least five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli military operation on the Gaza Strip. The Israel attacks killed a teenage boy riding his bicycle and another civilian.
Mr Bush lauded the Jewish state of Israel as the top U.S. ally in the Middle East.
"One reason I bring so much optimism to the Middle East is because what happened here is possible everywhere," Bush told Israeli President Shimon Peres.
The trip is taking place While bloody fighting in Lebanon continues for which Bush has blamed Syria and Iran, While Hamas has been defiant over conditions for a truce for the beseiged Gaza Strip, and While Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is ensnared in a corruption scandal.
Before his departure, Mr. Bush singled out Iran, call it the "biggest threat to peace in the Middle East."
Bush said: "The message to Iran is that, you know, your desire to have a nuclear weapon, coupled with your statements about the destruction of our close ally, has made it abundantly clear to everybody that we have got to work together to stop you from having a nuclear weapon. I mean, to me it’s the single biggest threat to peace in the Middle East is the Iranian regime.
This, as Mr. Bush’s "War on Terror" plan has allowed the U.S. to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, resulting in thousands of deaths.
But Mr. Bush has shown some remorse for his war. Yesterday, he claimed that he has given up golfing as a gesture to the sacrifice of US troops and their families. In an interview with the Politico yesterday, Bush said, "I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families ... to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think paying golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."
As of Tuesday at least 4,077 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it started in March 2004, according to an Associated Press count. The Iraq Cody claims over 90,000 lives, as a result of the invasion, documented in English-language media. On the other hand, the Opinion Research Business, of London, an independent polling agency, estimates the total war casualties in Iraq at over 1,220,580.
But these deaths were an afterthought for Mr. Bush, who was on the links when he decried terrorist bombings in Israel while golfing in August of 2002. Here’s the clip:
[PRESIDENT BUSH, NOW WATCH THIS DRIVE, TERROR CLIP]
youtube.com/watch?v=Z3p9y_OEAdc
Scrutiny of the government’s war on terror was vindicated by the Pentagon today when charges were dropped against a Saudi, held at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, for his alleged role as the "20th hijacker" during the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In 2005, an official military investigation concluded that the interrogation regimen of Mohammed al-Qahtani, one of the most dangerous alleged terrorists in U.S. custody, amounted to abuse.
al-Qahtani was known at Gitmo as detainee Number 063. He was forced to wear a bra and had a thong placed on his head. They also put black hoods on his head that blinded him for prolonged periods of time. He was led on a leash and forced to perform dog tricks. He was barked at by teeth-baring military canines. He was told that his mother and sister were whores. A female interrogator straddled him like a lap dancer and he was forced to waltz with a male interrogator. He was told that other detainees knew he was gay. He was doused with water and strip searched in front of women. He was prevented from praying and he was forced to watch an interrogator squat over his Koran.
Yesterday, amid concerns about using information obtained during abusive military interrogations, a top Pentagon official removed al-Qahtani from the military commission meant to bring justice to those behind the vast Sept. 11 conspiracy. Susan Crawford, appointed to decide which cases will be heard in the largely untested commission, however, affirmed that five other alleged terrorists will still stand trial.
Officials close to the case told the Washington Post that Crawford’s office was reluctant to sanction the charges against al-Qahtani because prosecutors had little evidence against him outside his own coerced confessions, a point that most certainly would have become a central issue at trial.
Still, the miltary says it can hold him wihtout trail for the duration of the counterrorism wars. Prosecutors reserve the right to charge Qahtani again, but his defense lawyers and officials familiar with the case say it is unlikely that Qahtani will face new charges because he was subjected to the aggressive Defnese Department interrogation techniques.
In interviews with MSNBC.com – the first time they spoke publicly – former senior law enforcement agents described their attempts to stop the abusive interrogations. The agents of the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigation Task Foce, working to build legal cases against suspected terrorists, said they objected to coercive tactics used by a separate team of intelligence interrogators soon after Guantanamo prison camp opened in early 2002. They ultimatley carried their battle up to the office of Secretary of Defense Donal H. Rumsfeld, who approved the more aggressive techniques to be used on al-Qahtani and others.
Let’s take a quick look back at our since-resigned Secretary of Defense’s views on torture. In an October, 2002, memo from Guantanamo’s Lt. Col. Jerald Phifer entitled "Request Approval of Counter-Resistance Strategies," one technique of torture, known as stress positions, was put on the table for Rumsfeld to permit. The memo asked for the, quote, "[u]se of stress positions (like standing), for a maximum of four hours." In agreeing to this, Rumsfeld scrawled the following at the bottom of the memo: "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours."
In signing that memo Rumsfeld added 15 more aggressive interrogation procedures to the 17 methods that have been long time approved as part of stand US military practice. The additional methods, like interrogation sessions of up to 20 hours at a time and the enforced shaving of heads and beards, are otherwise prohibited under US military doctrine.
Yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon confirmed that the other five defendants in the 9/11 case will face the death penalty, and their arraignment will be within 30 days of the charges being served at Gitmo. The five defendants include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the terrorist attacks, the supposed intermediary between the hijackers and al-Qaeda leaders.
The arraignments, at the Guantanamo war crimes court, will be the first public appearance of the defendants since their captures after the attacks.
I don’t know, let’s go with this mini op-ed snippet before break. OPTIONAL
Some right-wingers would say, "Double Gitmo," as did Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and 2008 presidential nominee. But former Wall Street Journal editor and influential conservative Paul Craig Roberts writes:
"The six that the Untied States are bringing to, quote, trial, include two child soldiers for the Taliban and a car pool driver who allegedly drove Osama bin Laden.
"The Taliban did not attack the United States. The child soldiers were fighting in an Afghan civil war. The United States attacked the Taliban. How does that make Taliban soliders terrorists who should be lockied up and abused in Gitmo and brought before a kangaroo military tribunal?
If a terrorist hires a driver or a taxi, does that make the driver a terrorist? What about hte pilots of the airliners who brought hte alleged 9-11 terrirsts to the United States? Are they guilty, too?"
Mr. Roberts continues: "The Gitmo trials are show trails. Their only purpose is to create the precedent that the executive branch can ignore the U.S. court system and try people in the same manner that innocent people were tried in Stalinist Russia and Gestapo Germany. If the Bush regime had any real evidence against hte Gitmo detainees, it would have no need for its kangaroo military tribunal"
Wow that’s scathing.
[For our first break, enjoy the Bad Brains, and their crunchy punk and chill reggae.......That was "Banned in D.C." and "Leaving Babylon" by the Bad Brains ]
"In world news, a the Chinese authorities report that nearly 15,000 people have died from an earthquake flattened a swath of rural Sichuan Province on Monday. The authorities added that more than 18,0000 people were still unaccounted for in Mianyang, and 2,3000 were missing after the collapse of a school and two factories in the nearby town of Shifang.
A feature photo appears on the cover of the Boston Globe today, with a young nurse clad in army fatigues and wearing sandals, reached down through layers of rubble, with her hand clasped onto the fingers of a trapped youth whose eyes are black and blue and blood can be seen on his face.
This comes on the heels of a Burmese cyclone that, according to the Myanmar state television, caused 34,273 deaths and left 27,838 missing.
In Brussels on Tuesday, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, Javier Solana, said that if the Myanmar government continued to bar large scale aid to the country, that outsid edonors should find a way to deliver it anyway.
"We have to usee all the means to help those people," he said.
The government of Myanmar is notoriously militant and is seen as paranoid of Western intervention.
The Burmese cyclone also impacted the US presidential race, causing Doug Goodyear to resign as coordinator of the 2008 Republic National Convention after it came to light that his lobbying firm formerly represented the oppresive military regime in Burma. Newsweek reported on Saturday that Burma’s military state paid the lobbying firm DCI Group, of which Goodyear is the chief executive, $348,000 in 2002 and 2003. Other clients of the DCI Group include ExxonMobil and General Motors.
In other Iraq War news, according to The Associated Press, Blackwater Worldwide, the security contractor blamed by an angry Iraqi government for the 17 shooting deaths of innocent civilians, is not expected to face criminal charges. Instead, a seven-month-old Justice Deparmtent investigation is focused on as few as three or four Blackwater guards who could be indicted in the Sept. 16 massacre, according to half-dozen people close ot the investigation.
This all but ensures the company will keep it’s multi-million dollar contract to protect U.S. diplomats.
The private military contractor has also reportedly dropped C.S. gas on a busy intersection because guards were stuck in traffic in 2005.
On Friday, May 9, State Department officials said they did not believe there are alternative sto Blackwater, which supplies about 800 guards to the department to provide security for diplomats traveling through Baghdad.
This was to the chagrine of Iraqi leadership, including President Nuri al-Malaki.
- Feature story (min): Civil liberties are being sacrificed on the subway in Boston as random searches were vamped up recently. Black-clad, machine gun-toting transit police now are riding along with passengers.
Taking place late last month, this was all part of an ongoing drill to test the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, with assistance from the federal Transportation Security Administration, for their reaction to terrorist attack threat elevation. It’s not because of an actual security threat, but rather pre-emptive practice, to show how well the transit agency would respond if the government reported increased possibility of terror.
In the summer of 2004, the MBTA became the first transit agency in the nation to institute a permanent policy of randomly inspecting passenger bags and packages on subway and commuter trains. The policy was made public weeks after the MBTA announced a controversial policy decision to have transit police officers request identification from T passengers perceived as acting, quote, "suspiciously."
While some riders have expressed appreciation for the security measures in local news media and in Boston blogs, others have spoken out against what they think is an attack against a fundamental civil liberty. Strident opponents have declared the drills to be incremental conditioning, constructing a fearful mind-set among the American people, ultimately to implement an overbearing police state.
The security paradigm stems from the precedent set by the Office of Homeland Security, which was signed into existence, by President George W. Bush, after the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, when three of New York’s World Trade Center towers were demolished after two planes hit them, while two other planes went missing with impacts at the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and in an open field in Shankville, PA. The operation was allegedly orchestrated by Al Qaeda terrorists.
Much of the impetus behind the MBTA’s move to rachet up security measures was found in the Madrid, Spain, bombings, which were allegedly orchestrated by Al Qaeda terrorists, whose agents concealed explosives in their backpacks to coordinate a series commuter train bombings on March 11, 2004, killing 191 civilians. Then came the bombings of the London public transport system, killing 52 civilians, in a coordinated attack on three subway trains and a bus, on July 7, 2005, in an operation allegedly orchestrated by Al Qaeda terrorists.
A color system was designed by the Office of Homeland Security which is intended to convey to Americans the risk of terror they face. From a spectrum chart spanning from green, denoting "low" risk, to red, denoting "severe" risk, comes different measures and precautions. For example, at the current threat level for all domestic and international flights, orange, there is a "high" risk, so only small amounts of liquids, aerosols and gels are allowed in planes as carry-on baggage.
With the MBTA, and the rest of the U.S.A., the current threat level is yellow, meaning there is an "elevated" threat level. The recent drills on the Boston subway system were in preparation for when -- or if, rather -- the national security level becomes orange.
On Friday the Department of Homeland Security published a message to explain the current threat level: "We are mindful of the recent tapes and propaganda messages allegedly from Al
Qaeda regarding increased attacks," it read. "At this time there is no credible information warning of an imminent, specific threat to the homeland."
At this moment, I’d like to recite the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution in its entirety. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," it promises, "shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable causes, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
For those inclined to retain their Fourth Amendment right and resist the warrant-less searches, according to the MBTA transit police website, subway "[p]assengers who refuse the search won’t be allowed into the transit system, and any person refusing to leave could be arrested."
I may be making posts throughout the week for the show.
boomp3.com
If you just want the biolab interview, check it out here
boomp3.com
So the first edition of ne(U)waves went alright, except for the fact I got so nervous I had to start over, and then, when I did that, for some reason, listeners couldn't hear my voice during the headlines unless they had some powerful speakers and took the risk of turning them way up and were nimble enough to flick it down in time to not lose your hearing. I have a CD copy of the transmission. I'll copy and paste the transcript I typed up for headlines and attach it to this blog post. And I'm trying to carve an mp3 out of this to add to the post as well as post the whole thing for those risk takers.
But the Klare Allen interview went well, despite my mumbles and fumbles. She's the founder of Safety Net, a local activist organization, and makes it a top priority to fight Boston University's nascent Level-4 biolab, which some local residents refer to as the bioterror lab. I act kind of goofy and I didn't seem to straight-faced, objectivist, journalist-type that I'm training to become, (had to apologize on air for mentioning Tuskegee experiments, heh-heh), but I promise, it'll get better and better, more succinct and accurate, with no fluff and no needless guff. For a real good dissection of the biolab quandary, check out Adam Reilly's "Biolab Follies." The public meeting takes place at 9 a.m. on Friday at the State House in the Gardner Auditorium. Klare will be there early to protest how early it's taking place: it's inconvenient to the working people of the Roxbury and the South End.
Either way, the show still rocked -- playing System of a Down and the Bad Brains -- and we talked about this local revolt that Allen is a champion of.
But I didn't even get to go into the world news. I really flubbed for a while with the equipment, fiddling with an audio sample of a quote from Bush playing golf at the beggining of the war on terror. Whatevs, this is all a learning experience for me and tonight was my first time in the command center.
Here's the script -- replete with grammatical errors and mysterious quotation marks -- that I wrote for the intro and headlines:
"Welcome to ne(U)waves. I am your host, Marc Larocque. This is the inaugural edition of ne(U)waves, a newsmagazine program dedicated to issues of social justice, peace and prosperity. We will provide local, national and international news for you – along with a little bit of music about social change as intermission -- every week." We will go in depth regarding the biolab, later, after a feature story about security on the T. But, first, headlines.
President Bush has landed in Israel today to take part in celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of Israel’s founding in 1948.
The trip has been criticized because Bush has no plans to mark what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, for the more than 700,000 Palestinians driven from their homes that same year.
As Mr. Bush arrived, at least five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli military operation on the Gaza Strip. The Israel attacks killed a teenage boy riding his bicycle and another civilian.
Mr Bush lauded the Jewish state of Israel as the top U.S. ally in the Middle East.
"One reason I bring so much optimism to the Middle East is because what happened here is possible everywhere," Bush told Israeli President Shimon Peres.
The trip is taking place While bloody fighting in Lebanon continues for which Bush has blamed Syria and Iran, While Hamas has been defiant over conditions for a truce for the beseiged Gaza Strip, and While Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is ensnared in a corruption scandal.
Before his departure, Mr. Bush singled out Iran, call it the "biggest threat to peace in the Middle East."
Bush said: "The message to Iran is that, you know, your desire to have a nuclear weapon, coupled with your statements about the destruction of our close ally, has made it abundantly clear to everybody that we have got to work together to stop you from having a nuclear weapon. I mean, to me it’s the single biggest threat to peace in the Middle East is the Iranian regime.
This, as Mr. Bush’s "War on Terror" plan has allowed the U.S. to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, resulting in thousands of deaths.
But Mr. Bush has shown some remorse for his war. Yesterday, he claimed that he has given up golfing as a gesture to the sacrifice of US troops and their families. In an interview with the Politico yesterday, Bush said, "I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families ... to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think paying golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."
As of Tuesday at least 4,077 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it started in March 2004, according to an Associated Press count. The Iraq Cody claims over 90,000 lives, as a result of the invasion, documented in English-language media. On the other hand, the Opinion Research Business, of London, an independent polling agency, estimates the total war casualties in Iraq at over 1,220,580.
But these deaths were an afterthought for Mr. Bush, who was on the links when he decried terrorist bombings in Israel while golfing in August of 2002. Here’s the clip:
[PRESIDENT BUSH, NOW WATCH THIS DRIVE, TERROR CLIP]
youtube.com/watch?v=Z3p9y_OEAdc
Scrutiny of the government’s war on terror was vindicated by the Pentagon today when charges were dropped against a Saudi, held at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, for his alleged role as the "20th hijacker" during the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In 2005, an official military investigation concluded that the interrogation regimen of Mohammed al-Qahtani, one of the most dangerous alleged terrorists in U.S. custody, amounted to abuse.
al-Qahtani was known at Gitmo as detainee Number 063. He was forced to wear a bra and had a thong placed on his head. They also put black hoods on his head that blinded him for prolonged periods of time. He was led on a leash and forced to perform dog tricks. He was barked at by teeth-baring military canines. He was told that his mother and sister were whores. A female interrogator straddled him like a lap dancer and he was forced to waltz with a male interrogator. He was told that other detainees knew he was gay. He was doused with water and strip searched in front of women. He was prevented from praying and he was forced to watch an interrogator squat over his Koran.
Yesterday, amid concerns about using information obtained during abusive military interrogations, a top Pentagon official removed al-Qahtani from the military commission meant to bring justice to those behind the vast Sept. 11 conspiracy. Susan Crawford, appointed to decide which cases will be heard in the largely untested commission, however, affirmed that five other alleged terrorists will still stand trial.
Officials close to the case told the Washington Post that Crawford’s office was reluctant to sanction the charges against al-Qahtani because prosecutors had little evidence against him outside his own coerced confessions, a point that most certainly would have become a central issue at trial.
Still, the miltary says it can hold him wihtout trail for the duration of the counterrorism wars. Prosecutors reserve the right to charge Qahtani again, but his defense lawyers and officials familiar with the case say it is unlikely that Qahtani will face new charges because he was subjected to the aggressive Defnese Department interrogation techniques.
In interviews with MSNBC.com – the first time they spoke publicly – former senior law enforcement agents described their attempts to stop the abusive interrogations. The agents of the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigation Task Foce, working to build legal cases against suspected terrorists, said they objected to coercive tactics used by a separate team of intelligence interrogators soon after Guantanamo prison camp opened in early 2002. They ultimatley carried their battle up to the office of Secretary of Defense Donal H. Rumsfeld, who approved the more aggressive techniques to be used on al-Qahtani and others.
Let’s take a quick look back at our since-resigned Secretary of Defense’s views on torture. In an October, 2002, memo from Guantanamo’s Lt. Col. Jerald Phifer entitled "Request Approval of Counter-Resistance Strategies," one technique of torture, known as stress positions, was put on the table for Rumsfeld to permit. The memo asked for the, quote, "[u]se of stress positions (like standing), for a maximum of four hours." In agreeing to this, Rumsfeld scrawled the following at the bottom of the memo: "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours."
In signing that memo Rumsfeld added 15 more aggressive interrogation procedures to the 17 methods that have been long time approved as part of stand US military practice. The additional methods, like interrogation sessions of up to 20 hours at a time and the enforced shaving of heads and beards, are otherwise prohibited under US military doctrine.
Yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon confirmed that the other five defendants in the 9/11 case will face the death penalty, and their arraignment will be within 30 days of the charges being served at Gitmo. The five defendants include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the terrorist attacks, the supposed intermediary between the hijackers and al-Qaeda leaders.
The arraignments, at the Guantanamo war crimes court, will be the first public appearance of the defendants since their captures after the attacks.
I don’t know, let’s go with this mini op-ed snippet before break. OPTIONAL
Some right-wingers would say, "Double Gitmo," as did Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and 2008 presidential nominee. But former Wall Street Journal editor and influential conservative Paul Craig Roberts writes:
"The six that the Untied States are bringing to, quote, trial, include two child soldiers for the Taliban and a car pool driver who allegedly drove Osama bin Laden.
"The Taliban did not attack the United States. The child soldiers were fighting in an Afghan civil war. The United States attacked the Taliban. How does that make Taliban soliders terrorists who should be lockied up and abused in Gitmo and brought before a kangaroo military tribunal?
If a terrorist hires a driver or a taxi, does that make the driver a terrorist? What about hte pilots of the airliners who brought hte alleged 9-11 terrirsts to the United States? Are they guilty, too?"
Mr. Roberts continues: "The Gitmo trials are show trails. Their only purpose is to create the precedent that the executive branch can ignore the U.S. court system and try people in the same manner that innocent people were tried in Stalinist Russia and Gestapo Germany. If the Bush regime had any real evidence against hte Gitmo detainees, it would have no need for its kangaroo military tribunal"
Wow that’s scathing.
[For our first break, enjoy the Bad Brains, and their crunchy punk and chill reggae.......That was "Banned in D.C." and "Leaving Babylon" by the Bad Brains ]
"In world news, a the Chinese authorities report that nearly 15,000 people have died from an earthquake flattened a swath of rural Sichuan Province on Monday. The authorities added that more than 18,0000 people were still unaccounted for in Mianyang, and 2,3000 were missing after the collapse of a school and two factories in the nearby town of Shifang.
A feature photo appears on the cover of the Boston Globe today, with a young nurse clad in army fatigues and wearing sandals, reached down through layers of rubble, with her hand clasped onto the fingers of a trapped youth whose eyes are black and blue and blood can be seen on his face.
This comes on the heels of a Burmese cyclone that, according to the Myanmar state television, caused 34,273 deaths and left 27,838 missing.
In Brussels on Tuesday, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, Javier Solana, said that if the Myanmar government continued to bar large scale aid to the country, that outsid edonors should find a way to deliver it anyway.
"We have to usee all the means to help those people," he said.
The government of Myanmar is notoriously militant and is seen as paranoid of Western intervention.
The Burmese cyclone also impacted the US presidential race, causing Doug Goodyear to resign as coordinator of the 2008 Republic National Convention after it came to light that his lobbying firm formerly represented the oppresive military regime in Burma. Newsweek reported on Saturday that Burma’s military state paid the lobbying firm DCI Group, of which Goodyear is the chief executive, $348,000 in 2002 and 2003. Other clients of the DCI Group include ExxonMobil and General Motors.
In other Iraq War news, according to The Associated Press, Blackwater Worldwide, the security contractor blamed by an angry Iraqi government for the 17 shooting deaths of innocent civilians, is not expected to face criminal charges. Instead, a seven-month-old Justice Deparmtent investigation is focused on as few as three or four Blackwater guards who could be indicted in the Sept. 16 massacre, according to half-dozen people close ot the investigation.
This all but ensures the company will keep it’s multi-million dollar contract to protect U.S. diplomats.
The private military contractor has also reportedly dropped C.S. gas on a busy intersection because guards were stuck in traffic in 2005.
On Friday, May 9, State Department officials said they did not believe there are alternative sto Blackwater, which supplies about 800 guards to the department to provide security for diplomats traveling through Baghdad.
This was to the chagrine of Iraqi leadership, including President Nuri al-Malaki.
- Feature story (min): Civil liberties are being sacrificed on the subway in Boston as random searches were vamped up recently. Black-clad, machine gun-toting transit police now are riding along with passengers.
Taking place late last month, this was all part of an ongoing drill to test the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, with assistance from the federal Transportation Security Administration, for their reaction to terrorist attack threat elevation. It’s not because of an actual security threat, but rather pre-emptive practice, to show how well the transit agency would respond if the government reported increased possibility of terror.
In the summer of 2004, the MBTA became the first transit agency in the nation to institute a permanent policy of randomly inspecting passenger bags and packages on subway and commuter trains. The policy was made public weeks after the MBTA announced a controversial policy decision to have transit police officers request identification from T passengers perceived as acting, quote, "suspiciously."
While some riders have expressed appreciation for the security measures in local news media and in Boston blogs, others have spoken out against what they think is an attack against a fundamental civil liberty. Strident opponents have declared the drills to be incremental conditioning, constructing a fearful mind-set among the American people, ultimately to implement an overbearing police state.
The security paradigm stems from the precedent set by the Office of Homeland Security, which was signed into existence, by President George W. Bush, after the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, when three of New York’s World Trade Center towers were demolished after two planes hit them, while two other planes went missing with impacts at the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and in an open field in Shankville, PA. The operation was allegedly orchestrated by Al Qaeda terrorists.
Much of the impetus behind the MBTA’s move to rachet up security measures was found in the Madrid, Spain, bombings, which were allegedly orchestrated by Al Qaeda terrorists, whose agents concealed explosives in their backpacks to coordinate a series commuter train bombings on March 11, 2004, killing 191 civilians. Then came the bombings of the London public transport system, killing 52 civilians, in a coordinated attack on three subway trains and a bus, on July 7, 2005, in an operation allegedly orchestrated by Al Qaeda terrorists.
A color system was designed by the Office of Homeland Security which is intended to convey to Americans the risk of terror they face. From a spectrum chart spanning from green, denoting "low" risk, to red, denoting "severe" risk, comes different measures and precautions. For example, at the current threat level for all domestic and international flights, orange, there is a "high" risk, so only small amounts of liquids, aerosols and gels are allowed in planes as carry-on baggage.
With the MBTA, and the rest of the U.S.A., the current threat level is yellow, meaning there is an "elevated" threat level. The recent drills on the Boston subway system were in preparation for when -- or if, rather -- the national security level becomes orange.
On Friday the Department of Homeland Security published a message to explain the current threat level: "We are mindful of the recent tapes and propaganda messages allegedly from Al
Qaeda regarding increased attacks," it read. "At this time there is no credible information warning of an imminent, specific threat to the homeland."
At this moment, I’d like to recite the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution in its entirety. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," it promises, "shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable causes, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
For those inclined to retain their Fourth Amendment right and resist the warrant-less searches, according to the MBTA transit police website, subway "[p]assengers who refuse the search won’t be allowed into the transit system, and any person refusing to leave could be arrested."
I may be making posts throughout the week for the show.
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