Stopping War With Iran Now!

take part in some serious grass-roots organizing, and take action to prevent a wider war

Iran ... a scapegoat for US reverses in Iraq,
including air strikes on its nuclear-related facilities.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was typically direct. I find his words a challenge to us today:

"There is such a thing as being too late.... Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity.... Over the bleached bones of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late.'"

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Do We Have the Courage to Stop War With Iran?
    By Ray McGovern
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective
    Friday 31 August 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083107R.shtml

    Why do I feel like the proverbial skunk at a Labor Day picnic? Sorry; but I thought you might want to know that this time next year there will probably be more skunks than we can handle. I fear our country is likely to be at war with Iran - and with the thousands of real terrorists Iran can field around the globe.

    It is going to happen, folks, unless we put our lawn chairs away on Tuesday, take part in some serious grass-roots organizing, and take action to prevent a wider war - while we still can.

    President George W. Bush's speech Tuesday lays out the Bush/Cheney plan to attack Iran and how the intelligence is being "fixed around the policy," as was the case before the attack on Iraq.

    It's not about putative Iranian "weapons of mass destruction" - not even ostensibly. It is about the requirement for a scapegoat for US reverses in Iraq, and the White House's felt need to create a casus belli by provoking Iran in such a way as to "justify" armed retaliation - eventually including air strikes on its nuclear-related facilities.

    Bush's August 28 speech to the American Legion comes five years after a very similar presentation by Vice President Dick Cheney. Addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, Cheney set the meretricious terms of reference for war on Iraq.

    Sitting on the same stage that evening was former CENTCOM commander Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was being honored at the VFW convention. Zinni later said he was shocked to hear a depiction of intelligence (Iraq has WMD and is amassing them to use against us) that did not square with what he knew. Although Zinni had retired two years before, his role as consultant had enabled him to stay up to date on key intelligence findings.

    "There was no solid proof that Saddam had WMD.... I heard a case being made to go to war," Zinni told "Meet the Press" three and a half years later.
    (Zinni is a straight shooter with considerable courage, and so the question lingers: why did he not go public? It is all too familiar a conundrum at senior levels; top officials can seldom find their voices. My hunch is that Zinni regrets letting himself be guided by a misplaced professional courtesy and/or slavish adherence to classification restrictions, when he might have prevented our country from starting the kind of war of aggression branded at Nuremberg the "supreme international crime.")

    Cheney: Dean of Preemption
    Zinni was not the only one taken aback by Cheney's words. Then-CIA Director George Tenet says Cheney's speech took him completely by surprise. In his memoir, Tenet wrote, "I had the impression that the president wasn't any more aware than we were of what his No. 2 was going to say to the VFW until he said it."
    Yet, it could have been anticipated. Just five weeks before, Tenet himself had told his British counterpart that the president had decided to make war on Iraq for regime change and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

    When Bush's senior advisers came back to town after Labor Day, 2002, the next five weeks (and by now, the next five years) were devoted to selling a new product - war on Iraq. The actual decision to attack Iraq, we now know, was made several months earlier, but, as then-White House Chief of Staff Andy Card explained, no sensible salesperson would launch a major new product during the month of August - Cheney's preemptive strike notwithstanding. Yes, that's what Card called the coming war: a "new product."

    After assuring themselves that Tenet was a reliable salesman, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dispatched him and the pliant Powell at State to play supporting roles in the advertising campaign: bogus yellowcake uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment, and mobile trailers for manufacturing biological warfare agents - the whole nine yards. The objective was to scare or intimidate Congress into voting for war, and, thanks largely to a robust cheering section in the corporate-controlled media, Congress did so on October 10 and 11, 2002.

    This past week saw the president himself, with that same kind of support, pushing a new product - war with Iran. And in the process, he made clear how intelligence is being fixed to "justify" war this time around. The case is too clever by half, but it will be hard for Americans to understand that. Indeed, the Bush/Cheney team expects that the product will sell easily - the more so, since the administration has been able once again to enlist the usual cheerleaders in the media to "catapult the propaganda," as Bush once put it.

    Iran's Nuclear Plans
    It has been like waiting for Godot ... the endless wait for the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear plans. That NIE turns out to be the quintessential dog that didn't bark. The most recent published NIE on the subject was issued two and a half years ago and concluded that Iran could not have a nuclear weapon until "early-to-mid-next decade." That estimate followed a string of NIEs dating back to 1995, which kept predicting, with embarrassing consistency, that Iran was "within five years" of having a nuclear weapon.

    The most recent NIE, published in early 2005, extended the timeline and provided still more margin for error. Basically, the timeline was moved 10 years out to 2015 but, in a fit of caution, the drafters settled on the words "early-to-mid next decade." On February 27, 2007, at his confirmation hearings to be director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell repeated that formula verbatim.

    A "final" draft of the follow-up NIE mentioned above had been completed in February 2007 and McConnell no doubt was briefed on its findings prior to his testimony. The fact that this draft has been sent back for revision every other month since February speaks volumes. Judging from McConnell's testimony, the conclusions of the NIE draft of February are probably not alarmist enough for Vice President Dick Cheney. (Shades of Iraq.)

    According to one recent report, the target date for publication has now slipped to late fall. How these endless delays can be tolerated is testimony to the fecklessness of the "watchdog" intelligence committees in House and Senate.

    As for Iran's motivation if it plans to go down the path of producing nuclear weapons, newly appointed Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked about that at his confirmation hearing in December. Just called from the wings to replace Donald Rumsfeld, Gates apparently had not yet read the relevant memo from Cheney's office. It is a safe bet that the avuncular Cheney took Gates to the woodshed after the nominee suggested that Iran's motivation could be deterrence:

"While they [the Iranians] are certainly pressing, in my opinion, for a nuclear capability, I think they would see it in the first instance as a deterrent. They are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons - Pakistan to the east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west, and us in the Persian Gulf."

    Unwelcome News (to the White House)
    There they go again - those bureaucrats at the International Atomic Energy Agency. On August 28, the very day Bush was playing up the dangers from Iran, the IAEA released a note of understanding between the IAEA and Iran on the key issue of inspection. The IAEA announced:

"The agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of the declared nuclear materials at the enrichment facilities in Iran and has therefore concluded that it remains in peaceful use."

    The IAEA deputy director said the plan just agreed to by the IAEA and Iran will enable the two to reach closure by December on the nuclear issues that the IAEA began investigating in 2003. Other IAEA officials now express confidence that they will be able to detect any military diversion or any uranium enrichment above a low grade, as long as the Iran-IAEA safeguard agreement remains intact.

    Shades of the preliminary findings of the UN inspections - unprecedented in their intrusiveness - that were conducted in Iraq in early 2003 before the US abruptly warned the UN in mid-March to pull out its inspectors, lest they find themselves among those to be shocked-and-awed.

    Vice President Cheney can claim, as he did three days before the attack on Iraq, that the IAEA is simply "wrong." But Cheney's credibility has sunk to prehistoric levels; witness the fact that the president was told that this time he would have to take the lead in playing up various threats from Iran. And they gave him new words.

    The President's New Formulation
    As I watched the president speak on August 28, I was struck by the care he took in reading the exact words of a new, subjunctive-mood formulation regarding Iran's nuclear intentions. He never looked up; this is what he said:

"Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust."

    The cautious wording suggests to me that the White House finally has concluded that the "nuclear threat" from Iran is "a dog that won't hunt," as Lyndon Johnson would have put it. While initial press reporting focused on the "nuclear holocaust" rhetorical flourish, the earlier part of the sentence is more significant, in my view. It is quite different from earlier Bush rhetoric charging categorically that Iran is "pursuing nuclear weapons," including the following (erroneous) comment at a joint press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in early August:

"This [Iran] is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon."

    The latest news from the IAEA is, for the White House, an unwelcome extra hurdle. And the president's advisers presumably were aware of it well before Bush's speech was finalized; it will be hard to spin. Administration officials would also worry about the possibility that some patriotic truth teller might make the press aware of the key judgments of the languishing draft of the latest NIE on Iran's nuclear capability - or that a courageous officer or official of Gen. Anthony Zinni's stature might feel conscience bound to try to head off another unnecessary war, by providing a more accurate, less alarmist assessment of the nuclear threat from Iran.

    It is just too much of a stretch to suggest that Iran could be a nuclear threat to the United States within the next 17 months, and that's all the time Bush and Cheney have got to honor their open pledge to our "ally" Israel to eliminate Iran's nuclear potential. Besides, some American Jewish groups have become increasingly concerned over the likelihood of serious backlash if young Americans are seen to be fighting and dying to eliminate perceived threats to Israel (but not to the US). Some of these groups have been quietly urging the White House to back off the nuclear-threat rationale for war on Iran.

    The (Very) Bad News
    Bush and Cheney have clearly decided to use alleged Iranian interference in Iraq as the preferred casus belli. And the charges, whether they have merit or not, have become much more bellicose. Thus, Bush on August 28:

"Iran's leaders ... cannot escape responsibility for aiding attacks against coalition forces.... The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops. I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities."

    How convenient: two birds with one stone. Someone to blame for US reverses in Iraq, and "justification" to confront the ostensible source of the problem - "deadeners" having been changed to Iran. Vice President Cheney has reportedly been pushing for military retaliation against Iran if the US finds hard evidence of Iranian complicity in supporting the "insurgents" in Iraq.
    President Bush obliged on August 28:

"Recently, coalition forces seized 240-millimeter rockets that had been manufactured in Iran this year and that had been provided to Iraqi extremist groups by Iranian agents. The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased in the last few months ..."

    QED

    Recent US actions, such as arresting Iranian officials in Iraq - eight were abruptly kidnapped and held briefly in Baghdad on August 28, the day Bush addressed the American Legion - suggest an intention to provoke Iran into some kind of action that would justify US "retaliation." The evolving rhetoric suggests that the most likely immediate targets at this point would be training facilities inside Iran - some twenty targets that are within range of US cruise missiles already in place.
    Iranian retaliation would be inevitable, and escalation very likely. It strikes me as shamelessly ironic that the likes of our current ambassador at the UN, Zalmay Khalilizad, one of the architects of US policy toward the area, are now warning publicly that the current upheaval in the Middle East could bring another world war.

    The Public Buildup
    Col. Pat Lang (USA, retired), as usual, puts it succinctly:

"Careful attention to the content of the chatter on the 24/7 news channels reveals a willingness to accept the idea that it is not possible to resolve differences with Iran through diplomacy. Network anchors are increasingly accepting or voicing such views. Are we supposed to believe that this is serendipitous?"

    And not only that. It is as if Scooter Libby were back writing lead editorials for The Washington Post, the Pravda of this administration. The Post's lead editorial on August 21 regurgitated the allegations that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is "supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq;" that it is "waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible." Designating Iran a "specially designated global terrorist" organization, said the Post, "seems to be the least the United States should be doing, given the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq."

    As for the news side of the Post, which is widely perceived as a bit freer from White House influence, its writers are hardly immune. For example, they know how many times the draft National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program has been sent back for redrafting ... and they know why. Have they been told not to write the story?

    For good measure, the indomitable arch-neocon James Woolsey has again entered the fray. He was trotted out on August 14 to tell Lou Dobbs that the US may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons program. Woolsey, who has described himself as the "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs," knows what will scare. To Dobbs: "I'm afraid within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they [Iran] could have the bomb."

    As for what Bush is telling his counterparts among our allies, reports on his recent meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy are disquieting, to say the least. Those circulating in European foreign ministries indicate that Sarkozy came away convinced that Bush "is serious about bombing Iran's secret nuclear facilities," according to well-connected journalist Arnauld De Borchgrave.

    It Is Up to Us
    Air strikes on Iran seem inevitable, unless grass-roots America can arrange a backbone transplant for Congress. The House needs to begin impeachment proceedings without delay. Why? Well, there's the Constitution of the United States, for one thing. For another, the initiation of impeachment proceedings might well give our senior military leaders pause. Do they really want to precipitate a wider war and risk destroying much of what is left of our armed forces for the likes of Bush and Cheney? Is another star on the shoulder worth THAT?

    The deterioration of the US position in Iraq; the perceived need for a scapegoat; the knee-jerk deference given to Israel's myopic and ultimately self-defeating security policy; and the fact that time is running out for the Bush/Cheney administration to end Iran's nuclear program - together make for a very volatile mix.

    So, on Tuesday let's put away the lawn chairs and roll up our sleeves. Let's remember all that has already happened since Labor Day five years ago.

    There is very little time to exercise our rights as citizens and stop this madness. At a similarly critical juncture, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was typically direct. I find his words a challenge to us today:

"There is such a thing as being too late.... Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity.... Over the bleached bones of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late.'"

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    Ray McGovern, a member of the American Legion, was an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the sixties. He then served for 27 years as an analyst with the CIA and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He currently works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC.
    A shorter version of this article appeared originally on Consortiumnews.com.

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Rights of Natue Ordinance

http://www.celdf.org/Ordinances/RightsofNatureOrdinance/tabid/133/Default.aspx
				Rights of Nature
			An Ordinance by the Second Class Township of ________, _________ County, Pennsylvania, Acknowledging the Rights of Natural Communities and Ecosystems and Establishing a System of Enforcing and Protecting Those Rights Against Corporations and Other Business Entities   Section 1. Name. The name of this Ordinance shall be “The Rights of Nature Ordinance.”   Section 2. Authority. This Ordinance is adopted and enacted pursuant to the authority granted to _______ Township by all relevant state and federal Constitutions and laws, including, but not limited to, the following:   The founding documents of the United States, which recognize that governments are created to secure and protect inalienable and fundamental rights;   The Constitution of the United States, Article IV, §4, which requires the United States to guarantee a Republican Form of Government;   The Constitution of Pennsylvania, Art. 1, § 2, which provides that all power is inherent in the people, and that all free governments are founded on the peoples’ authority and instituted for their peace, safety, and happiness;   The Constitution of Pennsylvania, Art. 1, §27, which recognizes that Pennsylvanians are trustees of the natural world;   The general authority granted by the Constitution of Pennsylvania and the Second Class Township Code to make and adopt all such ordinances, bylaws, rules, and regulations as may be deemed expedient or necessary for the proper management, care, and control of _________ Township and its finances and the maintenance of the health, safety, peace, good government, and welfare of ________Township;   Pennsylvania Statutes, Tit. 53, Municipal and Quasi-Municipal Corporations, §66506, which authorizes _____________ Township to enact ordinances necessary for the proper management, care, and control of the Township and its finances and the maintenance of peace, good government, health, and welfare of the Township.     Section 3. Findings and General Purpose. The ________ Township Board of Supervisors recognizes that:   (1)   Governments are created to secure and protect inalienable and fundamental rights;   (2)   People and their communities are trustees of nature, and communities of nature and ecosystems form part of the natural trust;   (3)   It is well-settled law that trustees are required to protect and preserve the trust,   (4)   As trustees, people and communities are obligated to protect and preserve natural communities and ecosystems;   (5)   Natural communities and ecosystems are currently being destroyed, degraded, and weakened by corporations and other business entities;   (6)   Governments empower those corporations and other business entities through the bestowal of constitutional “rights” and powers upon them;   (7)   The environmental regulatory system merely regulates how quickly natural communities and ecosystems will be destroyed and degraded;   (8)   The environmental regulatory system has failed to protect and preserve natural communities and ecosystems because regulations focus solely on minimizing the adverse environmental impacts resulting from certain activities,   (9)   The environmental regulatory system fails to protect and preserve natural communities and ecosystems because it treats those communities and systems as property;   (10)  Creation and validation of the environmental regulatory system thus fails to satisfy the duties of humans and communities to be trustees of natural communities and ecosystems;   (11)   Recognition by humans and communities that natural communities and ecosystems have fundamental and inalienable rights is necessary to satisfy the obligation and duty of people and communities as trustees;   (12)  Creating a process for the legal enforcement of those fundamental and inalienable rights by people and communities is necessary to fulfill peoples’ role as trustees for natural communities and ecosystems.   Section 4. Specific Purpose. The specific purpose of this Ordinance is to acknowledge the inalienable, fundamental rights of nature, and establish an enforcement system whereby people and communities can protect and vindicate the rights of nature against actions taken by corporations and other business entities.   Section 5. Statement of Law. Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable and fundamental rights to exist and prosper, and no corporation or business entity – or persons acting in corporate or business capacities – shall deny those rights, or interfere with the vitality or functioning of those communities or ecosystems.   Section 6. Statement of Law. Every living creature within the Township of ____________possesses an inalienable and fundamental right to be an integral part of a community of nature and ecosystem, and no corporation or business entity shall deprive or deny living creatures that right. Section 7. Statement of Law. The Township Board of Supervisors shall not make or enforce any law which shall abridge the rights of natural communities and ecosystems.   Section 8. Statement of Law. The enumeration in this Ordinance, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by natural communities, living creatures, and ecosystems within the Township of ___________________.   Section 9. Enforcement. When this Ordinance or the underlying rights recognized by this Ordinance are violated, it shall be the duty of the Board of Supervisors of the Township of _____________to file an enforcement action against any corporation, business entity, or persons acting in corporate or business capacities. Such action shall seek to protect, preserve, and vindicate the rights of nature as recognized by this Ordinance. Any natural person shall also have the authority to file an action in the appropriate judicial forum against any corporation, business entity, or persons acting in corporate or business capacities, which has violated, is violating, or threatens to violate, the rights of animals or ecosystems within ___________ Township as outlined by this Ordinance. Protecting, preserving, and vindicating the rights acknowledged in this Ordinance shall include seeking both punitive and compensatory damages against a corporation, business entity, and/or managers of those entities, under the authority of state and federal civil rights statutes.   Section 10. Enforcement. For purposes of the enforcement of the rights acknowledged in this Ordinance, natural communities and ecosystems shall be considered “persons” within 42 U.S.C. §1983 and other federal and state laws adopted to vindicate and enforce rights.   Section 11. Severability. The provisions of this Ordinance are severable. If any section, clause, sentence, part, or provision of the Ordinance shall be held illegal, invalid, or unconstitutional by any court of competent jurisdiction, such decision of the court shall not affect, impair, or invalidate any of the remaining sections, clauses, sentences, parts, or provisions of this Ordinance. It is hereby declared to be the intent of the Board of Supervisors of __________ Township that this Ordinance would have been adopted if such illegal, invalid, or unconstitutional section, clause, sentence, part, or provision had not been included herein.   Section 12. Effective Date. This Ordinance shall take effect five days after enactment by the Board of Supervisors of _________ Township.

Labels: Nature, Rights, Rights of Nature
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Internation War-Crimes Trail For Bush Administration - Red Cross Report Sets It Up

History Will Not Absolve Us  Leaked Red Cross report sets up Bush team for  international war-crimes trial  by Nat Hentoff August 28th, 2007 http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0735,hentoff,77643,6.html  If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament--as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin's Press) and Charlie Savage's just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown).  While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world--or else governments wouldn't let them in.  But The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has sources who have seen accounts of the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held in CIA secret prisons. In "The Black Sites" (August 13, The New Yorker), Mayer also reveals the effect on our torturers of what they do--on the orders of the president--to "protect American values."  She quotes a former CIA officer: "When you cross over that line of darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but . . . you can't go back to that dark a place without it changing you."  Few average Americans have been changed, however, by what the CIA does in our name. Blame that on the tight official secrecy that continues over how the CIA extracts information. On July 20, the Bush administration issued a new executive order authorizing the CIA to continue using these techniques--without disclosing anything about them.  If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.  We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.  Only one congressman, Oregon's Democratic senator Ron Wyden, has insisted on probing the legality of the CIA's techniques--so much so that Wyden has blocked the appointment of Bush's nominee, John Rizzo, from becoming the CIA's top lawyer. Rizzo, a CIA official since 2002, has said publicly that he didn't object to the Justice Department's 2002 "torture" memos, which allowed the infliction of pain unless it caused such injuries as "organ failure . . . or even death." (Any infliction of pain up to that point was deemed not un-American.) Mr. Rizzo would make a key witness in any future Nuremberg trial.  As Jane Mayer told National Public Radio on August 6, what she found in the leaked Red Cross report, and through her own extensive research on our interrogators (who are cheered on by the commander in chief), is "a top-down-controlled, mechanistic, regimented program of abuse that was signed off on--at the White House, really--and then implemented at the CIA from the top levels all the way down. . . . They would put people naked for up to 40 days in cells where they were deprived of any kind of light. They would cut them off from any sense of what time it was or . . . anything that would give them a sense of where they were."  She also told of the CIA interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was not only waterboarded (a technique in which he was made to feel that he was about to be drowned) but also "kept in . . . a small cage, about one meter [39.7 inches] by one meter, in which he couldn't stand up for a long period of time. [The CIA] called it the dog box."  Whether or not there is another Nuremberg trial--and Congress continues to stay asleep--future historians of the Bush administration will surely also refer to Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, the July report by Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility.  The report emphasizes that the president's July executive order on CIA interrogations--which, though it is classified, was widely hailed as banning "torture and cruel and inhuman treatment"--"fails explicitly to rule out the use of the 'enhanced' techniques that the CIA authorized in March, 2002, "with the president's approval (emphasis added).  In 2002, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced the "torture" memos and other interrogation techniques in internal reports that reached the White House. It's a pity he didn't also tell us. But Powell's objections should keep him out of the defendants' dock in any future international trial.  >From the Leave No Marks report, here are some of the American statutes that the CIA, the Defense Department, and the Justice Department have utterly violated:  In the 1994 Torture Convention Implementation Act, we put into U.S. law what we had signed in Article 5 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which is defined as "an act 'committed by an [officially authorized] person' . . . specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering . . . upon another person within his custody or physical control."  The 1997 U.S. War Crimes Act "criminalizes . . . specifically enumerated war crimes that the legislation refers to as 'grave breaches' of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions], including the war crimes of torture and 'cruel or inhuman treatment.'"  The Leave No Marks report very valuably brings the Supreme Court-- before Chief Justice John Roberts took over--into the war-crimes record of this administration. I strongly suggest that Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility send their report--with the following section underlined--to every current member of the Supreme Court and Congress:  "The Supreme Court has long considered prisoner treatment to violate substantive due process if the treatment 'shocks the conscience,' is bound to offend even hardened sensibilities, or offends 'a principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental.'"  Among those fundamental rights cited by past Supreme Courts, the report continues, are "the rights to bodily integrity [and] the right to have [one's] basic needs met; and the right to basic human dignity" (emphasis added).  If the conscience of a majority on the Roberts Court isn't shocked by what we've done to our prisoners, then it will be up to the next president and the next Congress--and, therefore, up to us--to alter, in some respects, how history will judge us. But do you see any considerable signs, among average Americans, of the conscience being shocked? How about the presidential candidates of both parties? More Nat Hentoff Bush to CIA: 'Leave No Marks' With no sign of torture on a prisoner, then it didn't happen, right?

Labels: War Crimes, Bush Administration, Torture
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The Necessary Embrace Of Open Conspiracy is life. Secret Conspiracy is death.

a culture that values community cooperation and citizenship not competitive consumption and consumers

the only real security is in cooperation, conservation, and fairness, not imperialism.

The cooks & the crooks create a new status quo, legalize it, propagandize it, mythologize it, fundamentalize it, slather it with fear and patriotism, and force feed it to the complacent, sedated cow we call America.
How is that not conspiracy?

America has been a conspiracy against itself.

The reason we can’t talk about conspiracy is because it is the modus operandi. It isn’t the elephant in the room, it is the room itself. We all live there. ... the architecture is in place. And they control it.

Time to re-think conspiracy.

embrace conspiracy in two ways.
One, ... it’s the fabric of our lives, the mercury in the air, the dioxin in the water, it’s filling the airwaves and the marketplace and the courts and the halls of Congress before we even get out of bed every morning.

Two, counter it with a conspiracy of our own.

They can’t alter Reality. They can’t change the behavior of Nature.
They have conspired to change reality. We must conspire to live in harmony with Reality.

Con + spirare, from the Latin. To breathe together.

Con + spirare sounds like healthy men and women standing in the sun figuring out how in the hell they are going to take care of each other and their aging mother Earth and love life while doing it.

I want to be part of a conspiracy. Pervasive, populist, revolutionary, and totally transparent. Grassroots. Idealistic. Simplistic. Life-affirming. Community building

A conspiracy to make the common good and the love of nature the common denominator of every economic transaction.

start breathing together, conspiring big time, right out in the open, nakedly, unashamedly,

We have let them breathe for us, and they have stolen our breath, our air, our spirit.

Secret con + spirare is death.

Open con + spirare is life.
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The Necessary Embrace of Conspiracy

by Robert Shetterly
Published on Friday, August 31, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/31/3521/

Several years ago I gave a talk on Martha’s Vineyard about many of the people whose portraits I’ve painted in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series. I spent some time talking about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. When I talk about King, I like to focus on his last year — the period when, defying the advice of many of his advisors in the civil rights movement, he spoke against the Vietnam War, equating racism with imperialism. King felt bound to make the point that the forces of capitalism, materialism, and militarism that were driving segregation were also driving the war, and until we confronted the source of the problem, the abuses would continue. It was April 4, 1967, in Riverside Church in New York, that he made that declaration. A year to the day before his assassination.

It has always confounded me every year when we celebrate Dr. King’s life that no mention is made of that Riverside Church speech in the major media. We are always treated to sound bites of the 1963 I Have a Dream speech. That speech’s oratory is as powerful as it is non-confrontational. Which is why it is re-played for modern audiences. Dr. King was about confrontation. Non-violence and confrontation, each ennobling and making the other effective. In 1967 he said, “… my country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And he explained how our economic system thrived on exploitation and violence, or, as Emma Goldman put it, “The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.” This was probably the most important speech King ever gave and not playing it when we ostensibly honor him, is tantamount to castrating him morally and intellectually. Just as there is a long history of White America castrating black men, there is an equal legacy of Elite America cutting the most important truths of our social prophets out of the history books. We pay homage to King’s icon, the cardboard cutout, but not to his strongest beliefs and his most cogent analysis of our problems — to what vision called forth his courage. And, if we think that he spoke the truth, to censor that truth is to promote a curious kind of segregation. He is segregated, not for the color of his skin, but for the accuracy of his perception, how close to the bone his words cut. We can’t bear to hear the sound of truth’s knife scraping on hypocrisy’s bone. Only people who actually want to change the system dance to that music or want it to be heard.

Equally important, and part of the same neglect, is the intentional ignoring of the facts of his death. In my talk on Martha’s Vineyard I spoke about William Pepper’s book, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr. Pepper had been James Earl Ray’s lawyer. Ray was the man convicted of killing King. But both Pepper and the King family were convinced that Ray was innocent. The King family hired Pepper to represent them in a suit; they asked only $100.00 in damages to clear Ray’s name. Before the trial came to court in 1999, Ray had died in prison. The jury determined that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy involving the Memphis police, the Mafia, the FBI, and the Special Forces of the U.S. Army. Ray, the patsy, had left town before the shot was fired. Pepper had confessions from people involved from each of the organizations named. The verdict was barely mentioned in the U.S. media then and is not mentioned every year on the anniversary of his death. Why?

After my talk on Martha’s Vineyard a man came up to me and said, “I enjoyed your speech and was with you until you started that conspiracy stuff about MLK, Jr.” I said, “That’s not conspiracy. What I told you are facts.” End of conversation.

I think we’re confronted with two conspiracies here: one to commit the crime, the other to ignore it even when the facts are known. ( Two sides of the same coin.) The man who accused me of slipping into the neurotic, aliens-are-among-us land of conspiracy nuts was unable to hear the evidence, perhaps because he was so utterly convinced by our government and media that conspiracies don’t exist, people who espouse them are dangerous fruitcakes, and if you begin to think like that, your whole house of cards wobbles then topples. Who wants that? Better a standing tower of marked cards, than having to admit the game is rigged and the ground is shaking.

America is steeped in conspiracy, and even more steeped in propaganda that discredits those who try to expose the conspiracies. Whether we’re talking about MLK, Jr., JFK, RFK, Iran-Contra, 9/11, or, most importantly, the status quo, anyone who works to uncover the truth is branded a “conspiracy nut” and discredited before any evidence has a fair hearing. The government/corporate/media version is THE VERSION. Anything else is illusory.

In fact, the cultural success of labeling investigative reporters and forensic historians, and, simply, anyone who tries to name reality, “conspiracy nuts” is perhaps the most successful conspiracy of our time. Well, not the most successful. That prize goes to the conspiracy to give corporations all the rights of individual persons under our Constitution. That conspiracy has codified and consolidated corporate power so that it controls our lives in almost every meaningful way. It controls the election funds of our candidates, and them once they are in office. It controls our major media including public broadcasting. It controls the content of our television programming. It controls how are tax dollars are spent making sure that the richest get the most welfare. It controls the laws, the courts, the prison system and the mind numbing propaganda that we are the greatest democracy on earth. It controls the values with which we raise our children. It controls our ability to dispense justice. It controls how we treat nature, how we deface our land with strip malls, and blow the tops off our mountains — a form of corporate free speech. It dictates our modes of transportation. It controls our inability to respond to true crises like climate change. It attempts to create a spiritual deficiency in every person that can be filled and healed only with stuff — and no stuff is ever enough.

As Richard Grossman puts it, “Isn’t it an old story? People create what looks to be a nifty machine, a robot, called the corporation. Over time, the robots get together and overpower the people. … For a century, the robots propagandize and indoctrinate each generation of people so they grow up believing that robots are people too, gifts from God and Mother Nature; that they are inevitable and the source of all that is good. How odd that we have been so gullible, so docile, obedient.”

It is obvious to say that we have been engineered into a culture that values competitive consumption and consumers instead of community cooperation and citizenship. Capitalism with its obsessive and necessary appetite for consumption, expanding markets, resource depletion, and increasing profits has consumed democracy. Have you ever watched a small snake swallow a large frog? The snake’s hinged jaw stretches wider and wider, squeezing the frog millimeter by millimeter into its gullet until finally the snake looks like the Holland Tunnel might if it had devoured the Titanic. Then the acids and enzymes do their corrosive work. The frog becomes the snake. And the snake claims it is the frog. Capitalism has gulped down democracy and claimed it is democracy. When, immediately after 9/11, President Bush advised Americans to demonstrate their love of freedom and their resistance to terrorism by courageously, selflessly, hurrying to the mall to buy something, he was speaking as the snake that identifies itself as a frog. He was asking us to play a little game with our brains’ synapses, replace the snake icon with the frog’s. Sadly, he may also have been speaking about democracy in the only way that he can understand or recognize it. And, for him, Christianity has been another tidy meal for the snake.

Perhaps this switcheroo is nowhere more obvious than in the military /industrial complex. We are told that the vulnerable frog needs protecting. The threats are grave. So we fork over our money and children’s lives for war and weapons. We are told that we are building security and peace. More lives. More weapons. What we aren’t told is that the largest US export to the world is weapons. What we aren’t told is that enormous fortunes are being made from the arms trade. What we aren’t told is that the more precarious and unstable the world is, the better the business for the arms dealers — that the real promotion is not for security and peace but insecurity and war, that the lives of our children are the necessary collateral damage for this monster. What we aren’t told is that the only real security is in cooperation, conservation, and fairness, not imperialism. The frog, who is a snake, wrapped in a flag, pleads for patriotism and counts the cash. The snake’s forked tongue is a barbeque fork on which we’ve all been roasted.

I’d call that conspiracy.

The neocons have claimed, with some accuracy, that they can create reality faster than we can react: the deed is done, now deal with it. The troops have invaded, Halliburton, Blackwater, and Lockheed signed their contracts, the prisoners are tortured, your email is bugged, the resources for social programs are gone, the laws are changed, the Wal-Mart is built, the sludge dump has already polluted the aquifer, truth is hollowed out —- catch me if you can!
How is that not conspiracy?

The cooks & the crooks create a new status quo, legalize it, propagandize it, mythologize it, fundamentalize it, slather it with fear and patriotism, and force feed it to the complacent, sedated cow we call America.
How is that not conspiracy?

Of course, ever since the Constitution was signed and didn’t free the slaves or give the vote to women, poor folks, Native Americans and freed blacks so that people with power and money could continue to profit, America has been a conspiracy against itself. It’s been cowboy grilling his own heart over a smoke & mirrors campfire, a CEO with inherited wealth and three hundred years of patrician, affirmative action crooning “Only in America.”

The reason we can’t talk about conspiracy is because it is the modus operandi. It isn’t the elephant in the room, it is the room itself. We all live there. We can impeach a few elephants, and we should, but the architecture is in place. And they control it.

When I was in school, I was reminded - repeatedly — to avoid using an indefinite pronoun without identifying whom it refers to, as in, “They are coming to get us,” … or, “They control everything.” Who are They? It’s bad practice to think and write like that. Without reference it just sounds like paranoia. But the hell of it is that it’s damned hard to say who the They are that are in conspiracy to destroy democracy and, by exploitation, nature. Did They do it on purpose or merely discover by serendipity, like cavemen seeing copper ooze out of a rock by a fire, the wondrous possibility and power of what they had found. For instance, the invention of the TV was not a conspiracy. But once the realization of how TV could be used to submerge the public in a lobotomizing swamp of advertising, sound bites, inactivity, community destruction, titillation, false history, empty myth, consumption, and complicity in making fortunes for the sponsors, the program was clear. Conspiracy was the silent partner in the euphemism good business practice. And, once they saw the implications of giving corporations First Amendment rights, they were home free.

Time to re-think conspiracy.

We need to embrace conspiracy in two ways. One, admit that it’s real, its quotidian, it’s the fabric of our lives, the mercury in the air, the dioxin in the water, it’s filling the airwaves and the marketplace and the courts and the halls of Congress before we even get out of bed every morning.

Two, counter it with a conspiracy of our own. On our side we have the fundamental fact that although the corporate They can alter many of our realities, they can’t alter Reality. They can’t change the behavior of Nature. They can sell off the rain forest, but they can’t leverage the effect of cutting it. They can keep the mileage of cars poor so we’ll buy more gas, but they can’t alter the amount of oil in the ground or the damage to the atmosphere. They can privatize every human interaction and every natural resource, but they can’t privatize the laws of nature. They have conspired to change reality. We must conspire to live in harmony with Reality.

In the same way, they can conspire to kill Martin Luther King, Jr., but they can’t totally eradicate the truth of who did it and why.

Con + spirare, from the Latin. To breathe together. Those are the roots of conspiracy. Breathing together doesn’t sound like an activity of the ideologically deracinated whispering seditiously in a dank cellar or a board room, foul breaths denting a weak flame flickering over a candle nub, gunpowder or greed blackened fingers setting a timer, the whites of creased eyes glinting like knives with treason, murder, power, and deceit.

Con + spirare sounds like healthy men and women standing in the sun figuring out how in the hell they are going to take care of each other and their aging mother Earth and love life while doing it. Breathing together, sharing the same air, plotting to make sure that what’s mine is yours, conspiring to save their self-respect, their ideals, the future for their children.

I want to be part of a conspiracy. Pervasive, populist, revolutionary, and totally transparent. Grassroots. Idealistic. Simplistic. Life-affirming. Community building

A conspiracy to make the common good and the love of nature the common denominator of every economic transaction.

And the simple truth is either we start breathing together, conspiring big time, right out in the open, nakedly, unashamedly, or we will have conspired in secret, by default, in our own demise.

We have let them breathe for us, and they have stolen our breath, our air, our spirit.

Secret con + spirare is death. Open con + spirare is life.

Conspiracy is dead. Long live conspiracy!

Robert Shetterly lives in Brooksville, Maine
www.americanswhotellthetruth.org

Labels: Conspiracy, Martin Luther King Jr., 9/11, Assinations, Open Conspiracy, Secret Conspiracy, Common Good, Transparent, Grassroots, Idealistic, Simplistic, Life Affirming, Community Building
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Kucinich Meets President Assad in Syria to Discuss Iraq Peace Plan

Kucinich Meets with Syrian President

Sunday, September 2, 2007 6:46 PM
http://www.newsmax.com/international/kucinich_syria/2007/09/02/29345.html


DAMASCUS, Syria -- U.S. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, a Democratic presidential candidate, met Sunday with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as part of a Middle East peace initiative and fact-finding tour to several countries over the next five days.

In the meeting with President Assad, Kucinich is expected to discuss approaches to dealing with the continued violence and instability in Iraq, as well as to discuss the Baker Hamilton report to the U.S. Congress which recommended direct engagement with Syria as part of a new Middle East foreign policy initiative.

Kucinich said, "President Assad will be pleased to know that there are many Americans who are committed to peaceful relations. I believe that Syria can play an important and constructive role in achieving peace in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Syria has cooperated with the United States on security matters in the recent past. Only through direct engagement can we hope to achieve the level of trust and dialogue which is necessary to achieve peace." Kucinich has been campaigning across the United States and in Congress to end the war in Iraq and has drafted and introduced a comprehensive legislative plan to end the war in Iraq (House Resolution 1234.)

Referring to his own foreign policy philosophy -- "Strength through Peace" -- the Ohio Congressman and winner of the 2003 Ghandi Peace Prize, Kucinich explained, "We must have direct engagement with other nations of the world, honest diplomacy, and strict adherence to international law and treaties." He noted further, "It is what U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt called 'the science of human relations'."

Kucinich said his approach is "vastly different from the dead-end, neo-conservative 'Peace through Strength' doctrine that attempts to legitimatize unilateralism, first-strike, and preemption. I want President Assad to know that there are many in our nation and in our Congress who believe in direct diplomatic engagement."

A top Syrian official, Munir Ali, today praised Kucinich's visit in light of the recent meeting between the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and President al-Assad. "Agreements and peaceful coexistence are much more effective than occupation," he said. "Nancy Pelosi talked to people in the marketplace. This is very important. It changes people to know that someone from the U.S. government would come to Syria and talk with normal people. It builds friendship and creates a new reputation for America," Ali said.

Kucinich and his wife Elizabeth today toured the border city of Quneitra in the Golan region and spoke with local officials regarding the effects of the Israeli occupation which began in 1967. The officials took the Congressman and his wife to view the widespread destruction of Quneitra by Israel which occurred in 1973 after then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had negotiated a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Syria.

The Kuciniches visited the site of the "Shouting Valley" where Syrians whose families were separated through the occupation of Majdal Chams, literally shout to each other across a distance of several hundred yards in order to maintain family contact.

"The Golan region is obviously one of the issues which will come up in the discussion with President al-Assad. I felt it was important to see for ourselves to better understand the contours of the issue. As a Congressman and as a Presidential candidate, I have an obligation to see for myself," Kucinich said.

Kucinich and his wife are also visiting Jaramanh where many of the 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria have settled. The Congressman, who has been very active in discussing the plight of the war-torn Iraqi people, expects to take up with President Assad matters relating to refugees from Iraq.

"We are working to build a new reputation for America in the region," said Kucinich. "We want people to love America again. We want people to know that many Americans want peace and justice. Many Americans are hoping for a new role for America in the world, strength through peace. It is in that spirit that I will meet with President Assad."
===


Kucinich Meets President Assad in Syria to Discuss Iraq Peace Plan
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,169780.shtml

Posted : Mon, 03 Sep 2007 03:28:33 GMT
Author : Kucinich for President 2008
Category : PressRelease


DAMASCUS, Syria, Sept. 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In a meeting today with Dennis Kucinich, US Democratic Presidential candidate, Syrian President Bashar Assad said that Syria would be willing to participate in a multinational conference and peacekeeping force to help Iraq to manage its transition from occupied country to sovereign nation.

Assad made these assurances and other observations in a two-hour meeting with Kucinich, who traveled to Syria to discuss a peace initiative which has arisen out of his anti-war work in the House of Representatives. President Assad agreed with Kucinich that various US demands for the privatization of Iraq's oil and partition of Iraq would mean a continuation of war.

"We must stand for strength through peace, for a sovereign and unified Iraq. President Assad is willing for Syria to play a significant role in assisting in the stabilization of Iraq," said Kucinich. "President Assad knows that an international peace keeping and security force must be organized and ready to deploy in order to facilitate the end of the occupation. He understands that the US cannot leave a vacuum in Iraq, but that at the present time the US occupation is fueling the insurgency. He is recommending a parallel political process involving an Iraqi national conference, the disarming of militias, and the building up of an Iraqi army which would eventually takeover from international peace keepers."

Kucinich said the fact that Syria, a nation of just 20 million people, has both welcomed and is providing free health care and education to the million and a half Iraqi refugees is evidence of Syria's vital role in the region. "The international community must recognize and appreciate that Syria has at its own great cost provided a lifeboat to millions who suffer from the humanitarian crisis which the war in Iraq has created."

Late last night Kucinich and his wife Elizabeth visited a neighborhood of Damascus which was teeming with Iraqi refugees. "People are desperate. They have lost loved ones in the war. They have nothing but the clothes on their back, but they have their lives, thanks to President Assad's willingness to open Syria to the Iraqi refugees. This is a profound humanitarian gesture, since it has significantly increased the population of Syria. Now we must help Syria provide for these refugees," Kucinich said.

Kucinich told President Assad that he will take up the refugee matter with the UN Secretary General and the US Congress.

Kucinich and Assad discussed a wide range of other matters including building relations between Syria and the United States, the role of the European community in negotiations between Syria and Israel, hopes for a national unity government in Lebanon, conditions affecting Pakistan and Assad's desire for a peace agreement with Israel hinging on resolution of matters relating to Golan.

After the meeting Mrs. Kucinich met with British born Mrs. Assad to discuss their mutual interests and work in community economic development, education and the welfare of refugees.

Kucinich and his wife Elizabeth visited the ancient holy site of Notre Dame de Saydanaya, where today fully veiled Muslim women worship together with Christians. "This is the one of the few places in the world that I have witnessed such profound coexistence, and harmony," Mrs. Kucinich said. "In this time of religious strife it is important to bear witness to places which show the way of peace."

This evening Kucinich spoke to over 150 academicians, journalists and politicians in Damascus where he presented his new security doctrine. "Strength through Peace turns the neoconservative doctrine of Peace through Strength on its head. The neo-cons' Peace through Strength, has led to unilateralism, military build up and illegal war." Kucinich told the packed audience, "Strength through Peace favors the upholding of international law, treaties and direct engagement, which is why I am here" Kucinich added.

"I believe that through direct communication there is new hope for peace," he said.

"The world is ready to fall in love with America again. It is important that America reaches out to show our true values, our compassion and our willingness to work for peace."

The trip is continuing with a visit to Lebanon.

Kucinich for President 2008

===

President Al-Assad Reviews Regional Developments with US Senator Kucinich

Sunday, September 02, 2007 - 02:55 PM
http://www.sana.org/eng/142/2007/09/02/137124.htm
    
Damascus, (SANA) – President Bashar al-Assad met on Sunday Democratic Senator Dennis Kucinich and reviewed with him the current situation in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and the latest regional and international developments.

Opinions were exchanged regarding American-Syrian relations, the possibility of pushing the peace process forward and maintaining security and stability in these sensitive circumstances.

Senator Kucinich pointed out to Syria's pivotal role in bolstering security and stability in the region.

President al-Assad affirmed Syria's stances in support of the political process in Iraq as the only way to resolve the crisis. He also affirmed Syria's support for whatever the Lebanese parties agree upon and its support for a just, comprehensive and permanent solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict, which would end all the region's problems.

The meeting was attended by Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem and the delegation accompanying Senator Kucinich.

H. Sabbagh, Ghossoun


Labels: Peace, Strength Through Peace, Syria, Iraq, Peaceful Coexistence, Peaceful Relations, Honest Relations
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Pope Urges Save The Planet Before It's Too Late

Pope Benedict says to react urgently to create a strong bond between man and the land

Loreto, Sep 2, 2007 / 02:07 pm (CNA).- 
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=10281



Monks take part in a meeting between Pope Benedict XVI and youths in Loreto, central Italy

Two nuns eat ice cream on a field where Pope Benedict XVI is expected to meet youth during his pilgrimage to Loreto, central Italy, Saturday, Sept. 1, 2007. The pontiff is taking a new step in the Vatican's environmental campaign, leading a Catholic youth festival this weekend where participants will use recycled prayer books, biodegradable plates and recycling bags for their trash.
http://sognodargento.blogspot.com/2007/09/pope-benedict-visits-loreto.html

On Saturday, the Italian Church sponsored its annual “Saving Creation Day” in Loreto, Italy. Pope Benedict helped mark the day by telling the 300,000 young people gathered at the popular Marian shrine, that they must be responsible with the gift of God’s creation. 

Marking “Save Creation Day”, an initiative of the Italian bishops, the Pope also called on the young people present to protect the environment, asking them to “react urgently .... to recreate a strong bond between Man and Earth and to reverse trends which risk causing irreparable damage." 

Before it is too late, the Pope said, “it is necessary to have the courage to choose, to recreate a strong alliance between man and the land.  A decisive ‘yes’ is needed to protect creation and to provide a strong commitment to reverse those tendencies that risk making certain situations irreversible.” 

Benedict XVI also made a particular appeal to safeguard the precious resource of water, and warned that “if it is not shared in a fair and peaceful manner, severe tensions will unfortunately turn into harsh conflicts”.
===

Pope attends environmentally friendly youth festival in run-up to Sydney World Youth Day
AP

2007-08-31 19:12:57
http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=209776

Link to original

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI is taking a new step in the Vatican's environmental campaign, leading a Catholic youth festival this weekend where participants will use recycled prayer books, biodegradable plates and recycling bags for their trash.

About 300,000 young Catholics are expected to attend the festival in Loreto, home of Italy's most famous Marian shrine, in a run-up to next year's World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia.

The festival coincides with the Catholic Church's «Save Creation Day,» and has a decidedly eco-friendly theme. Each participant will be given a knapsack _ made of recycled nylon _ containing a hand-cranked battery recharger, three sets of biodegradable plates and three bags for recycling trash.

The prayer books for Benedict's Sunday Mass will be made out of recycled paper, hydrogen cars will be on display and trees will be planted in areas of southern Italy recently devastated by forest fires to make up for the CO2 emissions the festival generates, organizers said.

The message about caring for the environment will be entrusted not just with words, but with the young people's gestures and the things they use,» said one of the event's organizers, the Rev. Paolo Giulietti.

The Italian company Novamont said the use of 400,000 of its biodegradable plates would amount to a reduction of C02 emissions of 8 tons. As a result, it said, Loreto will be an «environmentally low-impact» event.

The Vatican has been going greener under Benedict, installing photovoltaic cells on the roof of its main auditorium to convert sunlight into electricity and joining a reforestation project aimed at offsetting its CO2 emissions.
Just this week, the pope bemoaned the destruction wrought by the recent forest fires in Greece and Italy, saying the blazes destroyed «humanity's precious environmental patrimony.

Benedict's predecessor, Pope John Paul II, frequently spoke out about the need to care for God's creation. And the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, is known as the «green patriarch» for his environmental initiatives.

The head of the Italian bishops' conference, Monsignor Angelo Bagnasco, told Vatican Radio it was the responsibility of the Church to teach its young about caring for the planet.

The youth rally has a poignant aspect: Loreto was dear to John Paul, and was the site of his final pilgrimage, in September 2004.

The city is famous for the Holy House, a simple stone cottage that the faithful believe was the house in Nazareth where the Virgin Mary was raised and received the annunciation. Legend has it that angels transported it from the Holy Land to the Loreto area, in central Italy near the Adriatic coast, in 1294.

Benedict is due to visit the cottage for a moment of prayer Saturday night after taking questions from the youths. On Sunday, he will celebrate a morning Mass and return to the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo south of Rome for the rest of his summer holiday.

The Loreto meeting, organized by the Italian bishops' conference, is in many ways an Italian warm-up for World Youth Day, to be held in Sydney July 15-20. The 80-year-old Benedict is expected to journey to Australia for that event.
===


Save The Planet Before It's Too Late, Pope Urges

ITALY: September 3, 2007
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/44080/story.htm


LORETO, Italy - Pope Benedict, leading the Catholic Church's first 'eco-friendly' youth rally, on Sunday told up to half a million people that world leaders must make courageous decisions to save the planet "before it is too late".

"A decisive 'yes' is needed in decisions to safeguard creation as well as a strong commitment to reverse tendencies that risk leading to irreversible situations of degradation," the 80-year-old Pope said.

Wearing green vestments, he spoke to a crowd of mostly young people sprawled over a hillside near the Adriatic city of Loreto on the day Italy's Catholic Church marks it annual Save Creation Day.

More than 300,000 people had slept on blankets and in tents or prayed during the night. Organisers said they were joined by some 200,000 more who arrived from throughout Italy on Sunday.

"New generations will be entrusted with the future of the planet, which bears clear signs of a type of development that has not always protected nature's delicate equilibriums," the Pope said, speaking from a white stage.

In one of his strongest environmental appeals, Benedict said: "Courageous choices that can re-create a strong alliance between man and earth must be made before it is too late."

The Pope closed the rally with a Sunday morning mass.

It was the first environmentally friendly youth rally, a break from gatherings that have left tonnes of garbage.

Participants had backpacks made of recyclable material, flashlights operated by a crank instead of batteries, and colour-coded trash bags so personal garbage could be easily recycled. Meals were served on biodegradable plates.

Tens of thousands of prayer books for Sunday's mass were printed on recycled paper and an adequate number of trees will be planted to compensate for the carbon produced at the event, many in areas of southern Italy devastated by recent brushfires.

Under Benedict and his predecessor John Paul, the Vatican has become progressively "green", installing photovoltaic cells on buildings to produce electricity and hosting a scientific conference to discuss global warming and climate change.

Benedict voiced concern about a breakdown of the traditional family and in his Sunday homily told young people to "go against the current" and challenge "seductive" media messages promoting materialism, consumerism and fleeting pleasures.

Loreto is famous in the Catholic world for the "holy house of the Madonna", a small stone structure purported to be where Mary grew up in the Holy Land and where she was told by an angel she would give birth to Jesus although a virgin.


Story by Philip Pullella

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Save the Homeowners - Rent To Former Owners - A Fair Deal In The Mortgage Market Meltdown

Save the Homeowners, Not the Hedge Funds

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_baker31_08-31-07_8G6SA6I.1c1d9dc.html
Providence Journal
August 31, 2007

By Dean Baker and Andrew Samwick


HANOVER, N.H.

THE MORTGAGE-MARKET meltdown has gotten big enough that even Congress is taking notice. Members of Congress, especially those running for president, are now racing to propose bills that promise relief to the millions of homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages.

They are right to act. In the run-up to this crisis, there was precious little counsel to families at the margin of homeownership that it could be better economically to not take on the commitment of ownership. There was aggressive marketing of deceptively worded mortgages that were virtually certain to reset to payments that these families could not afford. And the government has for years been abetting this process, pointing to ever-increasing rates of homeownership as a policy success and pushing for the low short-term interest rates that fostered the bubble in prices and the increase in leverage that precipitated the crisis.

In light of this history, it is important that policy be focused on assisting financially strapped homeowners, not lenders that issued deceptive mortgages or investors who foolishly speculated in mortgage-backed debt.

Some of the proposals currently on the table, for example, getting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac more involved in the subprime- and jumbo-mortgage market, will do more to help the speculators than the homeowners. After all, if private investors are not prepared to hold this debt, why should these government-backed agencies jump in and buy risky mortgages at above-market prices?

There is a simple way to allow troubled homeowners to stay in their homes without also bailing out the mortgage issuers and speculators.

Congress can pass legislation granting current homeowners the right to stay in their homes as long as they like, simply by paying the fair-market rent. In other words, no one gets tossed out on the street, as long as they can pay the rental value of their house. The fair rent would be determined by an independent appraiser — exactly the same way that a lender is supposed to determine the size of a mortgage that can be issued on a home.

Under this plan, homeowners would turn over their property to the mortgage holder. This would generally not be a loss since borrowers currently face crises precisely because they owe more than the value of their house. If the value of the home exceeded their debt, then they wouldn’t have to sign up for the program.

As a renter with secure tenure, the former homeowner would have incentive to do necessary maintenance and keep the home from falling into disrepair. This would prevent the blight that is already hitting neighborhoods where foreclosures have become commonplace.

The mortgage holder would get possession of the house, but they would be stuck having the former homeowner as a tenant. Otherwise the mortgage holder is free to hold or sell the property as they choose. Being stuck with a renter may reduce the resale value of the house, but intelligent investors knew there was risk when they got into the business.

To limit the size of the program and to ensure that it only benefits those who are really in need, there can be a cap placed on the value of homes that qualify. For example, Congress could stipulate that only homes with a market value below the median price for an area are eligible for this plan.

This security-of-housing proposal meets the needs of the homeowners who were victimized by deceptive lending practices and pro-homeownership ideologues. It gives them the right to stay in their home as long as they want. It accomplishes this task in a way that provides minimal opportunities for fraud and should require very little by way of new government bureaucracy.

It also manages to benefit homeowners in crisis without also rescuing the financial institutions that were speculating in mortgages gone bad. This will give the presidential candidates, and other members of Congress, a clear choice between helping distressed homeowners or bailing out financial institutions that should have known better.
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Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Andrew Samwick is a professor of economics and director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College and former chief economist on the staff of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.

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Center for Economic and Policy Research, 1611 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 293-5380, Fax: (202) 588-1356, Home: www.cepr.net



Labels: Mortgage Crisis, Home Owners, Renters, Speculation
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