tagged w/ Civil War
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Colin Powell warned the Bush administration about their twin Wars of Error with the Pottery Barn Rule – “You break it, you buy it.” Unfortunately, the Bush and Obama administrations chose long term leases with options to wreck the US economy.Colin Powell warned the Bush administration about their twin Wars of Error with the... more
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The UN's failure to agree to a resolution on Syria is "disastrous" for the country's people, Ban Ki-moon has said today as President Assad's government launched its most intense bombardment of the city of Homs.
Speaking at the UN headquarters in New York, Ban said he had briefed the security council about a plan proposed by the head of the Arab League, Nabil al-Araby, for a possible joint UN-Arab League observer mission to Syria.
The statement issued by Ban's spokesman Martin Nesirky, is the latest and one of the strongest UN condemnations of Syrian government tactics, said Ban was "appalled" by the mounting death toll.
"Such violence is totally unacceptable before humanity," it said.
"No government can commit such acts against its people without its legitimacy being eroded."
The statement said Ban "strongly condemns" the onslaught. The failure of the U.N. Security Council on Saturday to pass a resolution on Syria because of vetoes by Russia and China, "gives no license to the Syrian authorities to step up attacks on the Syrian population," it added.
"All violence must end immediately," the statement said.
"The Secretary-General reminds the government of Syria that it is accountable under international human rights law for all acts of violence perpetrated by its security forces against the civilian population."
Ban called for "an inclusive Syrian-led political process, in accordance with international law, that respects the will and legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people to a democratic and pluralistic political system."
The UN's failure to agree to a resolution on Syria is "disastrous" for... more
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As the protests throughout the Arab world increase and Dictators try to hold on to power by any violent means possible it's amazing how people can still maintain hope. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad like many leaders before him may have not actually signed a deal with the Devil but with his actions against his own people resulting in over 6000 deaths he might just as well have. In the long run he will not prevail and history will add him to the long list of Tyrants that have tried to repress the human spirit. The challenge facing the rest of the world is how to intervene without ending up in a Third World War. With an Election Year taking top priority in the United States and a suspicion of U.S motives concerning any action in the Middle East, the actions or inaction of the Arab League and China and Russia strongly opposed to almost anything that they have no say in, the solution to the Syrian situation will most definitely be a messy one. I'm always cautiously optimistic about most things so I have to rely on what little faith I have that things will not continue to escalate until a Third World War breaks out. Even in our darkest hours we sometimes manage to prevent the worst from becoming the apocalyptic. History will tell if my optimism pays off. I HOPE....As the protests throughout the Arab world increase and Dictators try to hold on to... more
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CNN...
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THE CNN FREEDOM PROJECT ENDING MODERN-DAY SLAVERY
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January 19th, 2012
12:03 PM ET
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Child slavery and chocolate: All too easy to find
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In "Chocolate's Child Slaves," CNN's David McKenzie travels into the heart of the Ivory Coast to investigate children working in the cocoa fields.
(More information and air times on CNN International.)
By David McKenzie and Brent Swails, CNN
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CLICK ON CNN LINK (at top) TO VIEW THREE VIDEOS
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Daloa, Ivory Coast (CNN) - Chocolate’s billion-dollar industry starts with workers like Abdul. He squats with a gang of a dozen harvesters on an Ivory Coast farm.
Abdul holds the yellow cocoa pod lengthwise and gives it two quick cracks, snapping it open to reveal milky white cocoa beans. He dumps the beans on a growing pile.
Abdul is 10 years old, a three-year veteran of the job.
He has never tasted chocolate.
During the course of an investigation for CNN’s Freedom Project initiative - an investigation that went deep into the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast - a team of CNN journalists found that child labor, trafficking and slavery are rife in an industry that produces some of the world’s best-known brands.
It was not supposed to be this way.
After a series of news reports surfaced in 2001 about gross violations in the cocoa industry, lawmakers in the United States put immense pressure on the industry to change.
“We felt like the public ought to know about it, and we ought to take some action to try to stop it,” said Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, who, together with Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, spearheaded the response. “How many people in America know that all this chocolate they are eating - candies and all of those wonderful chocolates - is being produced by terrible child labor?”
But after intense lobbying by the cocoa industry, lawmakers weren’t able to push through a law. What they got was a voluntary protocol, signed by the heads of the chocolate industry, to stop the worst forms of child labor “as a matter of urgency.” One of the key goals was to certify the cocoa trade as child-labor free.
“It was meant to achieve the end of child slave labor in cocoa fields,” Engel said.
It didn’t.
UNICEF estimates that nearly a half-million children work on farms across Ivory Coast, which produces nearly 40% of the world’s supply of cocoa. The agency says hundreds of thousands of children, many of them trafficked across borders, are engaged in the worst forms of child labor.
A recent study by Tulane University says the industry’s efforts to stop child labor are “uneven” and “incomplete” and that 97% of Ivory Coast’s farmers had not been reached. But the industry’s main representative in the country disagrees with the assessment.
“I think the situation has improved exponentially,” said Rabola Kagohi, country director for the International Cocoa Initiative, the chocolate industry’s answer to fighting child labor and trafficking. “Today, the message is physically getting through.”
Kagohi works out of a basement office with one other permanent employee.
“There are some results,” he said. “I wish that you had spoken to some planters.”
None of the farmers CNN spoke to in the heart of the cocoa production region said they had ever been reached by the International Cocoa Initiative, the government or chocolate companies about child trafficking.
Children such as Abdul don’t know anything about protocols or certification. All they know is work.
When Abdul’s mother died, a stranger brought him across the border to the farm. Abdul says all he’s given is a little food, the torn clothes on his back, and an occasional tip from the farmer. Abdul is a modern child slave.
And he is not the only youngster working in his group.
Yacou insisted he is 16, but his face looks far younger.
“My mother brought me from Burkina Faso when my father died,” he said.
Scars crisscross Yacou’s legs from a machete. He can’t clear grass in the cocoa fields without cutting himself. During harvest season, he works day after day hacking the cocoa pods.
The emotional scars run much deeper.
“I wish I could go to school. I want to read and write,” he said. But Yacou hasn’t spent a single day in school, and he has no idea how to leave the farm.
“It makes me angry,” Engel said. As far as he’s concerned, the chocolate companies haven't done enough.
“They are working with us, and we are glad that they are working with us. But they could do better.”
One of the major players in the Ivory Coast cocoa trade is, not surprisingly, the Ivorian government. Although the country has cornered a vast chunk of a lucrative market, it is considered one of the world’s poorest by any measure.
But the government leadership blames politics and war for the problems in the cocoa industry.
“Thirty years of political instability caused a lot of damage to our economy generally, and to the agricultural sector particularly, and more specifically to the cocoa industry,” said Ivory Coast’s minister of agriculture, Sangafowa Coulibaly. “Unfortunately, these years have been lost.”
After an attempted coup in 2002, the country was split in half and kept from all-out civil war by the United Nations. There was protracted violence after the last disputed presidential elections, when then-President Laurent Gbagbo refused to concede.
With the new government of Alassane Ouattara in charge, the government says it can now put much-needed reforms in place.
“Things can only get better,” Coulibaly said. “The main reason is that today, the political crisis is behind us, the armed conflict is behind us.”
But many observers believe that a new government won’t make it a priority to stop slavery in the cocoa fields.
And with peace, traffickers are free to do their work again. U.N. officials told CNN that the Ivory Coast conflict actually helped slow down trafficking because people were too afraid to move across borders.
Contrary to the promises of action, CNN’s investigation could only find promises. And those promises are empty to children like Abdul and Yacou.
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Post by: CNN's Brent Swails, CNN's David McKenzie
.CNN...
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THE CNN FREEDOM PROJECT ENDING MODERN-DAY SLAVERY
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January 19th,... more
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This two-minute mockumentary may have the answer. If was produced by BAMPA -- the Barely Any Motion Picture Association.
http://youtu.be/sdeKW76y_3UThis two-minute mockumentary may have the answer. If was produced by BAMPA -- the... more
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By RUSSELL GOLDMAN | ABC News
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad defiantly denied any suggestion that he has ordered a bloody crackdown against protesters who are demanding that he resign, and claims instead that most of the people who died in the unrest were his supporters and troops.
Assad, whose regime has been condemned by the West, the Arab League and former allies, dismissed suggestions that he step down and scoffed at sanctions being imposed on Syria.
His defiant stance was on display in an exclusive interview with ABC News' Barbara Walters who confronted the Syrian dictator in Damascus with stories and evidence of civilians being tortured and killed, some of them children.
"People went from house to house. Children were arrested. I saw those pictures," Walters said to Assad.
"To be frank with you, Barbara, I don't believe you," Assad said.
Walters asked Assad about the case of Hamza al-Khateeb, a 13-year-old boy detained by Syrian forces after a protest whose lifeless body was returned to his parents shot, burned and castrated. The boy's death galvanized protesters, and photos on the internet inflamed world opinion.
Assad Tells Barbara Walters Violence Is By Terrorists, Not His Troops
Assad denied the boy had been tortured. "No, no, no. It's not news," he insisted. "I met with his father, the father of that child and he said that he wasn't tortured as he appeared in the media."
The tide of pro-democracy protests sweeping the Arab world reached Syria in mid-March and news of violent clashes between protesters and government agents have leaked out of this tightly controlled dictatorship and on to the Internet. The bodies of the dead, some of them children, have been found bearing the marks of torture.
According to a United Nations report released last week, more than 4,000 people have been killed and the country is embroiled in an undeclared civil war, an assessment Assad dismissed with the question, "Who said that the United Nations is a credible institution?"
In an unprecedented condemnation of a fellow Muslim nation, the Arab League recently threatened sanctions, and last month one-time ally Turkey called on Assad to resign the presidency, an office he's held since 2000.
In his interview with Walters, his first sit down with an American journalist since the protests began, Assad denied he ordered a crackdown and blamed the violence on criminals, religious extremists and terrorists sympathetic to al Qaeda he claims are mixed in with peaceful demonstrators.
He said the victims of the street violence were not civilians protesters battling decades of one-party rule, he insisted.
"Most of the people that have been killed are supporters of the government, not the vice versa," he said. The dead have included 1,100 soldiers and police, he said.
Assad conceded only that some members of his armed forces went too far, but claims they were punished for their actions.
"Every 'brute reaction' was by an individual, not by an institution, that's what you have to know," he said. "There is a difference between having a policy to crackdown and between having some mistakes committed by some officials. There is a big difference," said Assad.
"But you have to give the order," countered Walters.
"We don't kill our people… no government in the world kills its people, unless it's led by a crazy person," Assad said.
At another point he said, "There was no command to kill or be brutal."
More at the link/full video.
By RUSSELL GOLDMAN | ABC News
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad defiantly denied... more
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In a bid to enable nationwide martial law, the Senate is scheduled to vote on S. 1867, referred to as the National Defense Authorization Act bill, an act drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-Michigan) and John McCain (R-Arizona).
The bill, if passed, would expand the military’s power to go after any terrorism suspect, including American citizens, anywhere in the world—including within the United States—and confine them indefinitely without being charged or tried.
Under the ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ provision of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which is set to be up for a vote on the Senate floor this week, the legislation will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who supports the bill.
http://www.allgov.com/Top_Stories/ViewNews/Senate_Bill_Allows_Indefinite_Imprisonment_of_Americans_without_Trial_111129In a bid to enable nationwide martial law, the Senate is scheduled to vote on S. 1867,... more
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After devastating Libya and partaking in the murder of an estimated 100,000 Libyan men, women and children, RAF pilots return home to their families in the UK. In a deeply obscene news update, the Daily Mail is literally using ‘puppy dog’ imagery to cynically whitewash the murderous war crimes that these British pilots have committed.
The article of November 1st, titled: ‘Overjoyed spaniel welcomes home her master as Libya Tornado crews return‘, contains heartwarming photos of an RAF pilot’s spaniel dog(1) being reunited with her master. The “touching scenes” include another RAF pilot’s three year-old son “looking on proudly“, dressed in his miniature RAF uniform.
In the report, RAF Wing Commander Andy Turk repeats the ‘no boots’ lie, “Because there were no British troops, it was very important that the RAF maintained our intelligence and surveillance“. This is one of the most notorious myths of the Libya war; not mentioned in the piece is the well-known fact that British SAS troops have been on the ground(2) in Libya, leading the ground war ever since February.(3)
What is perhaps even more sickening than this grotesque display of ‘puppy dog’ jingoism is the comments posted by Daily Mail readers. Comments included “Fantastic job done again guys and lovely pictures. Welcome home and well done,” and “My son worked round the clock at RAF Lossiemouth to keep those GR4 Tornadoes flying to Lybia, via Italy. Proud of you, son“. One reader even felt the need to voice how uplifting the story was: “Best story I’ve read all week. All the pics are great but the spaniel’s unbridled joy at seeing her loved one return is especially uplifting“.
This contemptuous piece of ‘journalism’ serves as a reminder of how emotion and opinion has been manipulated over the Libya war. Here, the utter criminality of NATO’s genocidal onslaught has been whitewashed by the heartwarming imagery of a pining puppy dog. These are heights of manipulation that this writer previously thought unreachable, even by the most cynically depraved minds.After devastating Libya and partaking in the murder of an estimated 100,000 Libyan... more
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;feature=youtube_gdata&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
As Parliament prepared for a crucial vote on additional austerity measures — including the most drastic cuts and reforms so far — renewed violence broke out on the streets of Athens. Without the vote, the Papandreou government would not have received the next installment of its EU/IMF bailout package and would have gone bankrupt next month.
In anticipation of the vote, a 48-hour strike brought the country to a complete standstill, while the single largest demonstration since the fall of the military junta sent hundreds of thousands of people into Syntagma Square and surrounding streets. For the first time, the communist party and union, KKE and PAME, joined the protests by blocking off Parliament so MPs would not be able to enter for the vote.
Carrying red flag sticks and wearing helmets, the unionists formed a human chain around Parliament. In the process, however, they ended up defending the state from the angry mob outside. Rather than turning their anger at the politicians, they protected them. Riot police were therefore happy to sit back and let the two sides fight each other. Dozens of people were injured in the clashes. One older man suffered a heart attack after being hit with a stone in the head. He died in hospital.
According to some rumors, police actually infiltrated the protests — either on the communist side or on the anarchist side, depending on whom you ask — to instigate the Leftist infighting. The truth, however, is that the Stalinist Left and the anti-authoritarian Left in Greece have a long history of antagonism. While this mutual distrust is understandable, the division itself remains a highly regrettable impediment to the creation of a united revolutionary front. Now, more than ever, we need to become and stay united.
Towards the end of the second video below, Stalinist union members can clearly be seen talking to police and telling them to attack anarchist protesters. There was a nauseating degree of collaboration between communists and police — a collaborative attempt to defend the last vestiges of the Greek state — that protesters were right to be angry about. But hurling stones and petrol bombs at fellow protesters? Following the death of three people in a bank arson last year and now the death of a communist union member, the time has come for the anarchists to revisit the use of escalating violence as a protest strategy.
http://roarmag.org/2011/10/anarchists-communists-strike-riots-violence-greece/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+roarmag+%28Reflections+on+a+Revolution%29;feature=youtube_gdata&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
As... more
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[A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that calling for someone to kill the President of the United States cannot be classified as a threat because standing law does not prohibit "predictions or exhortations" to violence."]
[In a 2-1 decision, judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California resident Walter E. Bagdasarian was engaging in free speech when he wrote that Obama "will have a 50 cal in the head soon," then called on someone to "shoot the nig."]
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/20/court-appeal-to-assassinate-obama-is-protected-speech/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/20/walter-bagdasarian-convic_n_904481.html
WHOA !!! Well, can this mean anything less than an appeals court is O.K.ing a Civil War, beginning with a call to assassinate the President of the United States?
Exhortation is defined online as: "An address or communication emphatically urging someone to do something." If someones asks their lover to murder their spouse, are they, or are they not culpable for some degree of murder or manslaughter? Does this mean it's o.k. to ask someone to murder another, as long as we don't provide a tangible incentive? Isn't hiring a murderer still illegal.
Per this appeals court decision, it is perfectly O.K. for us to plead with any patriotic person who cares about his country, his job, his children's future, the legitimacy of his vote, his healthcare, his social security, his medicare, and so much more, to shoot, stab, run over, poison, or whatever is required to kill dead all of the traitors who have committed, or continue to commit, treason against us all!
This means there could be an open call on all patriots to murder the following:
Both Bushes
All Republican legislators, eg. Boehner, Santorum, McConnell, ...
John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Scalia
All Republican Governors
The executives of every corporation, bank, and Wall Street firm
The board of directors of every corporation, bank, and Wall Street firm
Every lobbyist in Washington
Every executive member of the Federal Reserve
Every so called Democrat who steadily votes Republican
Oil company executives around the world
And numerous others!
Now that the courts have declared it to be legal to call for the deaths of those whom we disapprove of, all sides will be calling for the death of every opponent they have, on nearly every issue. It's a free for all blood feud! It's kill them, or they'll kill us
