December 6, 2007
By Jack or Felice Cohen-Joppa
TUCSON JUDGE DENIES BAIL; DECLARES TWO WHO PROTEST TORTURE "...A DANGER TO THE COMMUNITY"
TUCSON -- At a detention hearing today in federal court in Tucson, Betsy Lamb, a retired Catholic lay leader, and Franciscan Fr. Jerry Zawada were jailed without bail until their trial. Lamb, Zawada and Mary Burton Riseley were arrested on November 18 at Fort Huachuca, home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School, during a protest of military use of torture against war detainees. Magistrate Hector Estrada was concerned by evidence that both Lamb and Zawada had failed to heed an order of the court in cases pending in other jurisdictions. Betsy Lamb is awaiting trial for a September anti-war protest outside the office of Rep. Greg Walden, in Bend, Oregon. As a standard condition of release on her own recognizance, Lamb had promised not to commit any other crime while awaiting trial. Fr. Zawada has an outstanding bench warrant for failure to appear for a court date in Washington, D.C., where he has been arrested several times in recent years for anti-war protest. Army Prosecutor Capt. Evan Seamone came to court with three witnesses in dress uniform, several poster-sized photo enlargements and a videotape of the arrests. But the magistrate said he already knew the defendants' intent, and would only listen to Seamone's summation. Seamone described the defendants' peaceful passage through police barricades at the gate of Fort Huachuca as a violent act because it had to be met by police, who were forced to go face to face with the unarmed protesters and lift them from a kneeling position. In the eyes of the law and legal precedent, Seamone argued that such violent trespass warranted pretrial detention for the safety of the community. Were the court to release Zawada and Lamb, "their blatant defiance is likely to happen again" Seamone warned, gravely predicting that "all kinds of chaos" would ensue at the gate to Fort Huachuca. Attorney Rachel Wilson, representing the defendants, objected repeatedly without success to Seamone's arguments. Wilson told the court that Ms. Lamb had "learned her lesson" and was willing to post bond along with her promise to return to court for trial. Estrada was unmoved. He told the defendants he didn't trust them and that he believed they were right where they wanted to be - before him in chains. Protest is brinksmanship, and the point is to not be arrested; better to organize a conference or seminar, he chided. Estrada then ordered that Lamb and Zawada be kept in custody until their February 4 trial because they "remain a flight risk, and are a danger to the community." Not even Capt. Seamone had suggested that the defendants were a "flight risk". Responding to the court's conclusion, Felice Cohen-Joppa said of her friends, "Betsy Lamb and Jerry Zawada are not a danger to the community - they, along with Mary Burton Riseley, are the conscience of the community. They are shining a light on the involvement of military intelligence in torture around the world. Their nonviolent acts are no more a danger to the community than were the nonviolent acts of Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King, Jr." Lamb and Zawada are not the only people now in prison for peaceful protest of U.S. torture practices. On October 17, Magistrate Estrada sent Frs. Steve Kelly and Louie Vitale to prison for five months in prison for a similar protest at Fort Huachuca in November, 2006. They are scheduled to be released in mid-March.
For more information, visit tortureontrial.org
December 7, 2007
December 5, 2007
Katrina's Apartheid: Portraits and hand-penned stories
By Brenda Norrell
http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/
NEW ORLEANS -- Here is a book of the portraits and hand-written stories of those who survived Hurricane Katrina and the floodwaters of Apartheid, when America let democracy die.
Swept away in the floodwaters of Apartheid, were the babies, the old ones and sick ones.
There were other hurricanes, but none like this one. Now, a larger than life book, "The Post-Katrina Portraits, Written & Narrated by Hundreds," is a testament to genocide in America.
Portrait artist Francesco di Santis went to New Orleans and drew the faces of the people after Katrina. "For over a year, starting less than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, I drew roughly two thousand portraits ..."
The stories, published with those portraits, are now a poignant revelation for humanity and a portrait of a people, who against all odds, did not lose their hope or love of humanity and are rising again to rebuild the great city of New Orleans. Their stories are both medicine and censored truth, voices concealed by the nightly news.
They tell of rescuing babies floating in plastic cartons, men floating on tires to rescue others, of the stench of bodies and yes, they tell, of when the levees were blown up to save the French Quarter.
"I was trying to save my adopted four-year-old niece in our house ... the house was collapsing all around me," Catherine Otelle remembers. "I head my niece crying inside. We finally found her crouched inside.
"She had a piece of wood going straight through the top of her head. She also had two broken collar bones. The hospital said we were lucky to survive. Now my four-year old niece has lost half her memory."
Some beat a hole in their roofs with their bare hands, and waited to be rescued on roofs. They waited and waited for the Red Cross, for the rescuers, that did not come.
One man remembers saving a woman hanging on to a gutter. "She told me to take the baby floating in a plastic container. I took the baby and she let go of the gutters and went underneath the water. We jumped in and got her out, altogether."
Altogether is the best word for how the people survived and the Common Ground Collective rose up to help the people.
That spirit is pervasive in the hand-written stories, as if drops of their souls had fallen into their pens' ink.
From the Ninth Ward, one woman says, "When I get settled into my new place, I'm going to find some way to help the New Orleans victims, to reach out and help other single parents get on their feet."
The stories are filled with neighbors cooking on the grill on their porches, piling the food on for the hungry in their neighborhoods. One person said when they saw snakes in the water, they knew they could have cooked them and people would have eaten them, because they had run out of food. Others could not believe that George Bush came here after Katrina.
For the local rescuers, relief came when people were found alive and at home. Julia describes seeing the words "We're home," written on one house. "It is the best feeling," she said.
For all of us who grew up in Louisiana and spent happy childhood days eating oyster poorboys and riding the ferries around New Orleans, this book is a tearful eulogy of a great people and a great city.
Randeep, breathing in mold and mopping up mud, remembers, "Yeah, sometimes I look at this ghost town and feel like I don't love anything. Sometimes I think it's so beautiful that my heart is gonna break forth like a New Orleans levee."
Krot says his heart has been broken before, but not like this, because the city looks like "the bottom of a pot of rice -- like a crayon that's been left in the sun."
Ultimately, they all ask who will rebuild the homes of the poor in New Orleans. Will the old jazz sounds be replaced with the voices of T-shirt vendors.
They all want to know: Will America hear their voices in the silence.
Still struggling to survive and rebuild, one survivor writes, "I weep because the toxic mold of corruption and injustice still remain and has begun to spread."
The Post-Katrina Portraits, Written & Narrated by Hundreds
Published by Francesco di Santis and Loulou Latta
e-mail: wanderer@riseup.net
www.postkatrinaportraits.org/
Portrait-Story Project video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://friendfeed.com/
Wanderings of Turtle Island exhibit
http://lb-fairgrounds.tumblr.
The Faces of Madtown - A Portrait-Story Project of The City of Four Lakes
http://facesofmadtown.org/
http://overturecenter.com/
http://plotweather.net/
Voices for Appalachia - A Portrait-Story Project Written and Narrated by
Hundreds
http://www.mountainjustice.
http://voicesforappalachia.org
The Post-Katrina Portraits - Written and Narrated by Hundreds
http://postkatrinaportraits.
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/
http://pacificastudent.info/?
early Portrait-Stories (which indicated a tactic rather than a community
thus never found a home) from Jan 2005
http://dc.indymedia.org/
Art unstreamlined at time of photo:
http://austincreator.blogspot.
Listen online to Indigenous Border Summit
Listen online to audio from the Indigenous Peoples' Border Summit of the Americas 2007:http://www.earthcycles.net/
Highlights include the Yaqui delegation from Sonora, Mexico, describing deaths of Yaqui from the pesticides banned in the US, being used by corporations in the agricultural fields of Sonora. Bill Means, Lakota cofounder of the International Indian Treaty Council, served as master of ceremonies.
Other highlights include Mohawk Kahentinetha Horn speaking on Indigenous Peoples' passports and sovereignty and the delegation of Indigenous Peoples responding to their first hand view of the border wall being built on Tohono O'odham land and the arrest of Indigenous Peoples by the US Border Patrol. Speakers included Mike Wilson, Tohono O'odham, Chris George, Oneida, Petuuche Gilbert, Acoma Pueblo, Lenny Foster, Navajo and Sebastian Quinac, Mayan from Guatemala, among those who searches for the bodies on Tohono O'odham land of Mayans walking to a better life.
http://www.earthcycles.net/
Photo Brenda Norrell
Western Shoshone: Halt nuclear waste genocide at Yucca Mountain
Alert from the Western Shoshone Defense Project:
Please do what you can to oppose this project – a major assault on the Western Shoshone Nation – we will be sending further details with ways you can voice your opinion. Public Hearing today in D.C. – written comment deadline January 10th. Please do what you can. Please let your voices be heard!
The Department of Energy’s website, as well as the color glossy environmental impact reports on the Nuclear Waste Repository and Transportation plan, sugar-coats this deadly proposed operation. Health and environmental impacts of this massive transportation and dumping plan will be felt across the nation and especially in the tribal and poor communities. Many concerns are not addressed, beginning with the fact that this is not U.S. land. It is Western Shoshone land, recognized by the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, which the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has recently mandated that the US must freeze, desist and stop any further destructive activities on Shoshone lands. Until the past is corrected and the present stage of land rights is settled, no licenses should be issued for future operations. Furthermore, there is no procedure nor funding specified for the inevitable "accidents" inherent in transporting this deadly material across the nation and storing it in a mountain moving on active fault lines over a major aquifer. Talking points and further information is available at: www.h-o-m-e.org/Yucca/index.htm.
To review Yucca Mountain history, read Cheney's "Nuclear Fuel management and Disposal Act" submitted to Bush on April 5, 2006. The legislation to construct this travesty has already been passed. We each need to contact our Congress people to insist that this be repealed. The action in question today is to stop the issuing of the license to proceed with the construction and implementation of this madness!
For more information select here. For new information on the entire nuclear chain and your health, go to www.h-o-m-e.org/Index. Also, check out http://www.inyoyucca.org/ for their excellent recent impacts assessment report and Matt Gaffney's article in E Magazine.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
1.TODAY – Wednesday DECEMBER 5th, 2007:
The Dept. of Energy is concluding its round of hearings for public comment on both the Yucca Mountain repository and the rail/trucking transportation system for highly dangerous radioactive waste.
The hearing is today from 2:00 - 5:00 pm (EST) at:
The Marriott at MetroCenter
775 12th St.
NW Washington, DC
Fax questions &/or comments to: (800) 967-0739
Call in to: (800) 967-3477
Questions and comments may also be posted on the Radioactive Waste Management website: http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/
Submit written comments on or before Jan. 10, 2008. Talking points, Yucca Mtn. for Dummies and contact info are available at: www.h-o-m-e.org/Yucca/index.htm.
Request extensions of time to study and submit reports – see attached extension request from the State of Nevada.
Pass Tribal Council, City Council or State legislative actions reflecting your opinion – send them to the DOE.
Please do what you can to oppose this project – a major assault on the Western Shoshone Nation – we will be sending further details with ways you can voice your opinion. Public Hearing today in D.C. – written comment deadline January 10th. Please do what you can. Please let your voices be heard!
The Department of Energy’s website, as well as the color glossy environmental impact reports on the Nuclear Waste Repository and Transportation plan, sugar-coats this deadly proposed operation. Health and environmental impacts of this massive transportation and dumping plan will be felt across the nation and especially in the tribal and poor communities. Many concerns are not addressed, beginning with the fact that this is not U.S. land. It is Western Shoshone land, recognized by the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, which the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has recently mandated that the US must freeze, desist and stop any further destructive activities on Shoshone lands. Until the past is corrected and the present stage of land rights is settled, no licenses should be issued for future operations. Furthermore, there is no procedure nor funding specified for the inevitable "accidents" inherent in transporting this deadly material across the nation and storing it in a mountain moving on active fault lines over a major aquifer. Talking points and further information is available at: www.h-o-m-e.org/Yucca/index.htm.
To review Yucca Mountain history, read Cheney's "Nuclear Fuel management and Disposal Act" submitted to Bush on April 5, 2006. The legislation to construct this travesty has already been passed. We each need to contact our Congress people to insist that this be repealed. The action in question today is to stop the issuing of the license to proceed with the construction and implementation of this madness!
For more information select here. For new information on the entire nuclear chain and your health, go to www.h-o-m-e.org/Index. Also, check out http://www.inyoyucca.org/ for their excellent recent impacts assessment report and Matt Gaffney's article in E Magazine.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
1.TODAY – Wednesday DECEMBER 5th, 2007:
The Dept. of Energy is concluding its round of hearings for public comment on both the Yucca Mountain repository and the rail/trucking transportation system for highly dangerous radioactive waste.
The hearing is today from 2:00 - 5:00 pm (EST) at:
The Marriott at MetroCenter
775 12th St.
NW Washington, DC
Fax questions &/or comments to: (800) 967-0739
Call in to: (800) 967-3477
Questions and comments may also be posted on the Radioactive Waste Management website: http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/
Submit written comments on or before Jan. 10, 2008. Talking points, Yucca Mtn. for Dummies and contact info are available at: www.h-o-m-e.org/Yucca/index.htm.
Request extensions of time to study and submit reports – see attached extension request from the State of Nevada.
Pass Tribal Council, City Council or State legislative actions reflecting your opinion – send them to the DOE.
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