O'odham host Zapatistas North American Regional Conference near border in October

Marcos in Rancho el Penasco 2007/Photo Brenda Norrell




Tohono O'odham to host Zapatistas gathering in Rancho el Penasco, south of the Arizona border, Oct. 8 --9, 2007

The North American Regional Conference welcomes all people, with a special welcome to Indigenous Peoples from Alaska, Canada, northern Mexico and the United States

By Brenda Norrell
Narco News

MAGDALENA DE KINO, Sonora, Mexico – Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas will return to the U.S and Mexico border region to host a subsidiary conference prior to the Intercontinental Indigenous Summit in Pueblo Yaqui, to support Indigenous struggles for land and liberty.

The Magdalena gathering in the north, Oct. 8 – 9, will be one of four regional gatherings during the month of October, with three other regional conferences to be held in Oaxaca, Oct. 4 -- 5, Atlapulco, Oct. 6 –7 and Michaocan, Oct. 6 – 7, 2007. Those regional Indigenous gatherings precede the Intercontinental Indigenous Summit in Yaqui Pueblo near Obregon, to be held Oct. 11 -- 14.

O’odham in Mexico Lt. Gov. Jose Garcia welcomed all to the gathering at Rancho el Penasco, the eco-tourism site south of Magdalena, where Marcos and the Zapatistas met with Mexico’s northern Indigenous tribes during 2006 and 2007.

“This is an opportunity for Indigenous everywhere to come together and get to know one another better,” Garcia said, after the EZLN made the official announcement Aug. 15. “People can come together and learn more about the Zapatistas.”

Garcia said while the Zapatista struggle is well known in southern Mexico, tribes in the northern part of Mexico still want to learn more.

“The Zapatistas in the south are facing the same struggle as we are in the north, the same struggle that Indigenous are facing everywhere.’

Garcia encouraged those attending to bring camping gear and food. There is water on site.

During earlier meetings with the Indigenous in the north, Zapatistas established a fishing camp to protect the fishing rights of the Cucapa (Cocopah) in Baja and supported struggles of the Seri, Mayo, Yaqui, and Kickapoo. Tohono O’odham asked Zapatistas for their support in opposing a hazardous waste dump at the ceremonial area of Quitovac, Sonora, and with border rights of passage as the militarization of the border increases.

ENCUENTRO DE PUEBLOS INDÍGENAS DE AMERICA TEMARIO:
1.- La guerra de conquista capitalista en los pueblos indígenas de América.
2.- La resistencia de los pueblos indígenas de América y la defensa de la madre Tierra, nuestros territorios y nuestras culturas.
3.- Por qué luchamos los pueblos indígenas de América
SEDE:
11,12,13 Y 14 DE OCTUBRE 2007
PUEBLO YAQUI DE VÍCAM, SONORA, MÉXICO
SUBSEDES:
4 Y 5 DE OCTUBRE 2007
Región Sur-Sureste: VALLES CENTRALES DE OAXACA
Responsable: CONSEJO INDÍGENA POPULAR DE OAXACA “RICARDO FLORES MAGÓN”.
6 Y 7 DE OCTUBRE 2007
Región Centro y Sudamérica: ATLAPULCO, Territorio ÑAHÑU, Estado de México
Responsable: CONGRESO NACIONAL INDÍGENA en Atlapulco.
6 Y 7 DE OCTUBRE 2007
Región Centro Pacífico-Centro Atlántico de México: NURIO, Territorio PURÉPECHA, Michoacán, México
Responsable: Purépecha-Ireta, Congreso Nacional Indígena
8 Y 9 DE OCTUBRE 2007:
Región Norte del Continente Americano: Alaska, Canadá, Unión Americana y Norte de México: Rancho “EL PEÑASCO”, MAGDALENA, SONORA, MÉXICO
Responsable: Nación TOHONO O’ODHAM
Informes:
COMISION SEXTA DEL EZLN, encuentroindigena.org. Correo electrónico: informes@encuentroindigena.org
Guardia Tradicional de la Tribu Yaqui, Vícam, Guaymas, Sonora, México, Tel. (045 ó 001)64 49 98 94 08
Organización de Comunidades Indígenas y Campesinas de Tuxpan, Jalisco: (01 ó 001) 371 41 764 15 comunidad_tuxpan@hotmail.com

Photo 2: Zapatistas at Rancho el Penasco, Sonora, in 2007. Photo Brenda Norrell

ACLU: Abu-Ghraib was torture, new documents

ACLU: Abu-Ghraib abuse was torture

New documents identitfy role of Major General Barbara Fast in those tortures. Two priests in Arizona attempted to deliver a letter to Fast in opposition to torture in 2006 and were arrested. Jesuit Steve Kelly and Franciscan Louie Vitale, in federal court Monday, were arrested as they knelt in prayer outside of Fort Huachuca in Arizona and are now facing prison.

ACLU Obtains New Details of Possible "Cover-Up" of Iraqi Prisoner Abuse (8/15/2007)

Senior Defense Department Officials Failed to Act on Reports of Abuse, Documents Suggest
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: media@aclu.org

NEW YORK - Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union provide new evidence of a possible “cover-up” of Iraqi prisoner abuse by U.S. forces in 2003, and suggest that senior military officials failed to act promptly upon receiving reports of the abuse. The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, also reveal that an Army investigator found that the conditions of prisoners held in isolation at Abu Ghraib qualified as torture.

“These documents make clear that prisoners were abused in U.S. custody not only at Abu Ghraib, but also in other locations in Iraq,” said Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU. “Rather than putting a stop to these abuses, senior officials appear to have turned a blind eye to them.”

The documents detail Army Office of Inspector General investigations of alleged improprieties by Major General Barbara Fast, Major General Walter Wojdakowski and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. These investigations were initiated by the Department of Defense, after the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal, and absolved all three officers of blame.

The inquiry into Major General Barbara Fast, the top intelligence officer attached to U.S. command in Iraq at the time the Abu Ghraib abuses occurred, provides new details of her role in responding to reports of prisoner abuse in the vicinity of the Baghdad International Airport in the summer of 2003. The outcome of the investigation illustrates the Defense Department’s refusal to hold her, or any other senior military officials, responsible for failing to put a stop to the known abuses, said the ACLU.
The inquiry into Fast also includes the testimony of a colonel who compiled a report in November 2003 that documented potential abuse of Iraqi detainees by a joint Special Operations and CIA unit looking for weapons of mass destruction. Although the colonel’s name was blacked out throughout the records, the ACLU believes this testimony is from retired Colonel Stuart Herrington.
The colonel maintains that someone called him in late November with details of prisoner abuse that occurred in June or July of 2003 in the vicinity of Baghdad International Airport. The colonel’s source had previously complained about the abuse to Major General Dayton, Commander of the Iraq Survey Group in charge of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. The source had also reported the abuse to the Defense Intelligence Agency Chain of Command in Clarendon.
The colonel says that he met with Fast in late 2003 to brief her on his investigation and that he gave her a copy of his report. Subsequently, the Judge Advocate General’s office attached to U.S. Command in Iraq informed the colonel that it had found “no evidence to support the allegations that detainees were mistreated.” The colonel dismissed this conclusion as a “cover-up” and expressed “blunt dismay.” He could not fathom how his own report could be taken so lightly given that he had provided names of the witnesses and “already had two people who admitted it.”
The colonel testifies, moreover, that it was not until after the abuses of Abu Ghraib were made public, almost six months after he gave Fast the report, that she acknowledged finding his report in her e-mail account for the first time. Fast told him that she had not recognized his name and that she came across the e-mail while she was refreshing her memory on Abu Ghraib. The colonel testifies that he internally questioned the veracity of Fast’s claim of not having seen the report and whether “in light of the Abu Ghraib thing is this something here that’s convenient and comfortable?” However, based on his personal evaluation of her character, he decided that Fast must be telling the truth.
The Army Inspector General report clears Fast of all allegations of misconduct and concludes that Fast took prompt action to alert the proper authorities once she was informed of the alleged abuse.
Additional documents made public today by the ACLU reveal that Major General George Fay found that the conditions under which Abu Ghraib prisoners were isolated went far beyond the limits of abuse and were, in fact, torturous. Fay is quoted in the investigation as saying, “But what was actually being done at Abu Ghraib was they were placing people in their cells naked and they were - those cells they were placing them in, in many instances were unlit. No light whatsoever. And they were like a refrigerator in the wintertime and an oven in the summertime because they had no outside form of ventilation. And you actually had to go outside the building to get to this place they called the ‘hole,’ and were literally placing people into it. So, what they thought was just isolation was actually abuse because it’s - actually in some instances, it was torturous. Because they were putting a naked person into an oven or a naked person into a refrigerator. That qualifies in my opinion as torture. Not just abuse.”
Fay also says that a memo from then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorizing removal of clothing created a “mindset” in which that kind of humiliation was considered an “acceptable technique.” He notes that even though Rumsfeld later rescinded the memo, not everyone received notice that the interrogation of naked prisoners was no longer permissible.
In addition to the documents made public today, the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has resulted in the release of thousands of pages of government documents detailing the torture and abuse of detainees. The ACLU has created a search engine for the public to access the documents at www­.aclu.org/torturefoia/search/search.html
The ACLU brought the FOIA lawsuit in October 2003 with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.
In addition to Singh, attorneys in the FOIA case are Lawrence Lustberg and Melanca Clark of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, P.C.; Jameel Jaffer and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The documents released today are available online at: www­.aclu.org/safefree/torture/31303res20070815.html.

U.S. approves spy satellites for border

The U.S. moves one step closer to being a large concentration camp

The Wall Street Journal reports the U.S. has approved the use of spy satellites to spy on people at the border. Then local law enforcement is going to use it everywhere in the U.S.:
"Access to the satellite surveillance will be controlled by a new Homeland Security branch -- the National Applications Office -- which will be up and running in October.
"In recent years, some military experts have questioned whether domestic use of such satellites would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. The act bars the military from engaging in law-enforcement activity inside the U.S., and the satellites were predominantly built for and owned by the Defense Department." http://http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118714764716998275.html?mod=googlenews_wsj/

Lakota woman receives Nuclear Free award 2007

From the Nuclear-Free Future Award, a project of the Foundation for the Coming Generations, Munich, Germany
Email: info@nuclear-free.com
Tel.: +49 89 28 65 97 14


CHARMAINE WHITE FACE TO RECEIVE NUCLEAR-FREE FUTURE RESISTANCE AWARD


MUNICH -- The Nuclear-Free Future Awards honors individuals, organizations and communities for their outstanding commitment towards creating a world freed from the threat of nuclear weapons and atomic energy. This year, the Award jury members – who include Johan Galtung (Norway), Val Kilmer (New Mexico), Chris Peters (California), Kirkpatrick Sale (Massachusetts), Galsan Tschinag (Ulan Bator), and Christine von Weizsäcker (Germany) – have selected Charmaine White Face to receive, endowed with a money purse of $10,000, the Nuclear-Free Future Award in the category of Resistance.

Educated as a biologist, Charmaine White Face is the moving spirit behind the Defenders of the Black Hills, an organization that monitors abandoned uranium mines on sacred Lakota Lands and seeks the remediation of hazardous waste ponds that contaminate the region with high levels of radium 226, arsenic, lead and iron. A central part of Ms White Face’s message is that not just the Lakota, but all of us are threatened: aquifers cover massive areas of the continent, rivers empty into one another, radioactive dust is carried by the wind, and toxic poisons in the soil nourish grass and feed crops that eventually work their way into the mainstream food chain.

Hosted by the Salzburg, Austria, state government, the 10th annual Awards ceremony will take place in the storied Salzburg Residenz on 18 October 2007. Based in Munich, the Nuclear-Free Future Award is a project of the Franz Moll Foundation for the Coming Generations. For more information, please visit www.nuclear-free.com

Unified force to expose and halt U.S. torture

Government hysteria and fairy dancing, the United States' scary court arguments

By Brenda Norrell
http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/

TUCSON -- To hear military prosecutor Capt. Evan Seamone tell it, the Fort Huachuca Army Intelligence Training Center is much like a Bible School Class for eight-year-olds.

Capt. Seamone, with an inordinate amount of squeaky cleanness, told the U.S. District court that the Army interrogation trainers at Fort Huachuca abide by every aspect of international law and the Geneva Conventions.

U.S. interrogators would, never, never, engage in sexual assaults, forcing detainees to remain naked for long periods of time and would never use dogs to terrorize inmates, he said.

But, they did.

It was Monday, August 13, and the preliminary motions of the trespass case against two priests, Franciscan Louie Vitale and Jesuit Steve Kelly, were being heard.

In response, defense attorney Bill Quigley quickly listed the U.S. interrogators abuse in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. There were lap dances by female interrogators who smeared what appeared to be menstrual blood on the face of the Muslim detainee. There were extremes of heat and cold and sleep deprivation.

U.S. interrogators squatted on the Koran.

Detainees heads were duck-taped. There was rape, sodomy and sexual assault. Hoods were placed on their head and electric wires ran from their bodies, including their penises, to simulate torture. They were forced to masturbate and were filmed doing it. They were strip searched in front of female interrogators. Detainees were placed on leashes and forced to perform dog tricks. They were piled on top of one another naked.

Female interrogators fondled the genitals of male detainees.

Those were the lucky ones. Others were beaten and an unknown number, at least six, died during those tortures by U.S. military personnel.

Among those carrying out these abuses was the 800th Military Police Brigade. They punched and slapped inmates, forced them to remain naked for long periods of time, simulated torture with wires and placed dog chains around inmates' necks. Inmates were short-shackled to the floor.

As Quigley spoke, he delivered to the court, report after report, from the U.S. Army, Navy, FBI and Red Cross, detailing the torture. There were hundreds of cases of torture and few U.S. interrogators were ever prosecuted.

Why were there no whistleblowers, Quigley asked. If this is military intelligence, didn't they know what was going on?

Quigley then explained Project X. Between 1966 and 1991, torture manuals were produced at Fort Huachuca. Those torture manuals were used by the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., to train Latin military and leaders. The manuals became public in 1996. Those torture manuals resulted in mass tortures, murders, rapes and disappearances in Central and South America. An unknown number of Indigenous Peoples were tortured and murdered.

In the current court case in federal court in Tucson, Priests Vitale and Kelly are facing 10 months in prison, charged with federal trespass and the Arizona state charge of failing to yield to an officer at Fort Huachuca.

On Monday, U.S. District Court Magistrate Hector Estrada spent a great deal of time scolding the priests. Apparently, Judge Estrada didn't like the fact that the priests have been going to prison in their efforts to oppose war and the nuclear industry.

However, Capt. Seamone's arguments were very revealing about what goes on at Fort Huachuca. If the judge agrees, there will be more of this when the trial gets underway.

"No actual detainees are actually used," Capt. Seamone explained of the training of interrogators at Fort Huachuca. "Of course, this is role playing."

Besides, he described Fort Huachuca as "very picturesque."

On top of all that, Capt. Seamone just couldn't understand what the priests definition of torture was. To hear him tell it, Fort Huachuca, near Sierra Vista in southern Arizona, is no more than a sweet walk in the park.

Besides, he said, whatever occurred before new military regulations regarding torture were put in place in 2005 "are irrelevant."

Capt. Seamone added that whatever is going on in another country, or "what the CIA may be doing," doesn't address what is going on at Fort Huachuca.

The government's delivery was as rigid as a Ku Klux Klan mantra.

Meanwhile, there was a row of military commanders and police seated in the audience in court, prepared as witnesses for the government. They all sat extremely upright during the prosecutor's delivery, but their shoulders began to sag as Quigley described the sexual and physical assaults on prisoners.

No, they don't torture inmates at Fort Huachuca, they do it at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan, Quigley told the court. Further, Quigley asked if Fort Huachuca has addressed the torture. Quigley said it is believed that U.S. torture continues.

After listening to the preliminary arguments, one can only wonder why a federal court would even proceed with this case: Two priests kneeling in prayer outside a guard station. They weren't even inside the gates of Fort Huachuca. With a backlog of federal cases, why chose this one to proceed to trial?

Quigley explained that the priests had not even reached the guard station when they were arrested outside.

If they had been pizza delivery men, they would have been allowed in. "They could have driven farther in a car," Quigley told the court.

Capt. Seamone wanted these two priests to sound pretty scary. Capt. Seamone used the "A" word: "Anthrax" in court. No kidding. He said Army personnel had to take a great deal of precaution when they saw two Catholic priests approaching with a letter. He said this was because Anthrax was sent earlier to post office employees and Congressmen.

Whoa, now there's a stretch. At this point, I scribble in my notebook: "Fairy dancing." The government's mangling of truth with deception had created a sort of fairlyland.

What the priests really planned to do was to deliver a letter to Major Gen. Barbara Fast, then at Fort Huachuca. Major Gen. Fast was the commanding intelligence officer in Iraq at the time of the most grotesque tortures of detainees and went unpunished for her involvement.

While chastising the priests, the judge said that Martin Luther King, Jr., always obtained formal permits before he marched in protest. Members in the audience, apparently older than the judge, groaned at the misinformation.

The motions to the court were taken under advisement.

PHOTOS OF U.S. TORTURE AT Abu Ghraib in Iraq:
http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&q=Abu+Ghraib

PHOTO at top: Buddhist monk Arjahn Sarayut Arnanta catches up with Fr. Louie Vitale as Vitale enters U.S. District Court in Tucson Monday. Vitale, with a tiny pink rose between his lips, and Jesuit priest Steve Kelly were arrested as they knelt in prayer outside the gates of Fort Huachuca in 2006. The priests now want to expose to the world the role of Fort Huachuca's Army Intelligence Training Center in torture by interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Afghanistan. Arnanta said he had planned to spend the day searching for the dying along the U.S./Mexico border, but chose instead to spend the day supporting the priests' effort to expose torture. Photo Brenda Norrell


Read more: "Priests expose secret cycle of U.S. torture"
Counterpunch
by Brenda Norrell
http://www.counterpunch.org/

US Army torture manuals: (copy and past link if not functioning)
http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/manuals.htm

"Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our
children." Sitting Bull