Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalBeware NYT’s Michael R. Gordon
August 05, 2014
Stop Him Before He Kills Again!
Beware NYT’s Michael R. Gordon
by JOHN V. WALSH
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
– George W. Bush
Those in the U.S. who are enthralled by relentless reports of the most demonic acts attributed to President Vladimir Putin and the rebel Eastern Ukrainian federalists a in the NYT (New York Times), NPR, ETC. would do well to look at the track record of the “reporters” dishing out this stuff. What they will find is a trail of deception that is piled with corpses of hundreds of thousands of innocents.
Principle among the purveyors of these bloodletting falsehoods is Michael R. Gordon, chief military correspondent for the NYT, serving over the decades as a trusty pipeline from the Pentagon to you. Although his name should be in profound disrepute, many opposed to war are unaware of his ignoble career or may have forgotten it. Most notoriously he is the co-author with Judith Miller of the front page NYT article planted by Dick Cheney’s minions, which claimed that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), relying on the idea that aluminum tubing being purchased by Iraq was to be used for purifying uranium.
Here is a quick reminder of that sorry episode so typical for the NYT. That article, entitled “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest For A-Bomb Parts,” ran on page one of the NYT on Sunday, September 8, 2002. That same day, with the newsprint barely dry, Cheney popped up on Meet the Press citing the piece and claiming that Saddam Hussein was on his way to making nukes. Appearances on the other Sunday propaganda shows were made that same day by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Meyers (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Condoleeza Rice who employed the infamous phrase used by Miller and Gordon, declaring with a straight face, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” On October 11, 2002, with an election staring it in the face, the Congress voted authorization for Bush to go to war. (That Constitutional requirement was unceremoniously dropped when Obama decided to make war on Libya. At least Bush took the time to lie to Congress.) As we know all too well now, the entire aluminum tube story was a lie, as was obvious at the time to anyone who read the article with the slightest care and as the Department of Energy and Department of State knew well at the time, as was later disclosed.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/05/beware-nyts-michael-r-gordon/
How USAID’s Covert Ops In Cuba Endanger Health Workers Everywhere
How USAID’s Covert Ops In Cuba Endanger Health Workers Everywhere
by Andrew Breiner Posted on August 5, 2014 at 2:55 pm
The United States government secretly sent young people from across Latin America to Cuba to undermine the government, the Associated Press reported Monday. These operatives were given little training and paid badly, despite a real risk of arrest and prison, and attempted to recruit young Cubans through civic programs, including an HIV prevention workshop.
The choice of a U.S.-sponsored HIV workshop in Cuba is an interesting one, since Cuba’s HIV infection rate is one of the lowest in the world, and one-sixth that of the U.S. But it appears the disease was not necessarily the focus of the workshop, which was attended by 60 people. Fernando Murillo, after returning from Cuba, put together a report detailing his activities for Creative Associates, the USAID contractor hired to work against Cuba’s government. His only mention of HIV says it was “the perfect excuse for the treatment of the underlying theme,” meaning anti-government organizing.
In a press release, Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) blasted the program. “As co-chair of the Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, I am particularly concerned by the revelation that HIV-prevention programs were used as a cover,” she said. “This blatant deception undermines U.S. credibility abroad and endangers U.S. government supported public health programs which have saved millions of lives in recent years around the world.”
Creative Associates is the same contractor that developed the ‘Cuban Twitter’ site ZunZuneo for USAID and the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), also uncovered by the Associated Press earlier this year, and also intended to undermine the Cuban government. The intention was to build up a subscriber base while keeping the network’s U.S. government affiliation a secret, allowing the program to collect information that could aid in encouraging anti-government activity, and eventually using the network to call for mass protests. It never got beyond some data collection and light political content before its funding ran out and it shut down in mid-2012. So ZunZuneo’s only political accomplishment was exposing its 40,000 users to potential monitoring from the Cuban government.
More:
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/08/05/3467228/usaid-cuba-hiv/
The Fight to Abstain From Violence in Colombia
The Fight to Abstain From Violence in Colombia
Aug 4 2014
Nikki Drake
As he walked into the room, his face was tense and solemn. He had been here for over three months. His name is Jefferson Shayanne Acosta Ortiz, and we were at the army base in Saravena, Aruaca, one of the most dangerous departments in Colombia due to the ongoing conflict between the army and guerrilla groups.
Jefferson was recruited in April to fulfill his obligatory military service. During his recruitment, he expressed his objection to serve based on his religious and moral beliefs of non-violence. He officially declared himself a conscientious objector—meaning the refusal to perform military service—shortly thereafter, upon learning of the nationally and internationally recognized right. Two members of FOR Peace Presence made the 15-hour bus ride to visit Jefferson and meet with military officials as accompaniers of our partner organization Collective Action of Conscientious Objectors (ACOOC), which has been working on Jefferson’s case since his recruitment.
Although conscientious objection gained international attention during WWI as a fundamental right and political exercise to resist war, the practice was introduced in Colombia only as recently as 1989 as part of an effort by the Mennonite Church and the Collective for Conscientious Objection (COC). The biggest accomplishment by these two groups was their push to have the right to “Freedom of Conscience” included in the 1991 Colombian Constitution. The movement gradually secularized, and in 2000 individuals and entities such as COC, Just Peace, Colombian Working Youth, and the Foundation Growing Unity formed the Collective Action for Conscientious Objection in Colombia (ACOCC).
The present day ACOOC was created in 2009 as an organization focused on strategy and advocacy in its work toward the demilitarization of society and addressing the recruitment of youth by armed actors. In the same year, ACOOC, in coordination with the Swedish organization CIVIS and the Public Interest Group of the University of the Andes, played a large role in the decision by the Colombian Constitutional Court to ratify the fundamental right to object to military service for reasons of conscience. Despite the work of ACOOC and other organizations and networks throughout the country, the ideology and practice of conscientious objection are still largely unknown by the civilian population, and therefore widely unrecognized and often denied by the military.
More:
http://nacla.org/news/2014/8/4/fight-abstain-violence-colombia
Denmark's cage-free zoo will put humans in captivity
Denmark's cage-free zoo will put humans in captivity
Bjarke Ingels’s ‘zootopia’ reverses the role of captor and captive to let animals roam free, while humans are hidden from view. But will it become a feral version of the Hunger Games?
Oliver Wainwright
theguardian.com, Tuesday 5 August 2014 05.50 EDT
He’s designed apartment blocks in the shape of mountains and a power station with a ski-slope on the roof. He’s made museums that erupt from the ground with cartoonish glee, and proposed a viewing tower like a gigantic spiralling lollipop. Now the Danish architectural wunderkind, Bjarke Ingels, has reinvented the zoo – by making humans the ones that are captive.
His plan for the Givskud “Zootopia”, a 1960s zoological park in southern Denmark, is a world where animals roam free, liberated from cages and tanks, while visitors observe them hidden from view, buried beneath the ground or obscured inside piles of logs. It is like a live Truman Show for animals, a 300-acre stage set wilderness in which the roaming beasts should never even know you are there, carefully concealed behind the scenes.
“Architects’ greatest and most important task is to … make sure that our cities offer a generous framework for different people – from different backgrounds, economy, gender, culture, education and age – so they can live together in harmony,” says the Bjarke Ingels Group, aka BIG. “Nowhere is this challenge more acrimonious than in a zoo.”
The architects propose to reduce the acrimony by banishing the human captors beneath the carpet – in some cases quite literally. Visitors will be able to observe lions from a bunker buried beneath a hill and peep at pandas through a bamboo screen. They will look at bears from a little house hidden in a stack of tree-trunks, and gawp at giraffes through holes cut into a hillside.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2014/aug/05/denmark-cage-free-zoo-will-put-humans-in-captivity
DNA test reveals grandson of Argentina rights group founder taken during 'dirty war'
Source: Associated Press
DNA test reveals grandson of Argentina rights group founder taken during 'dirty war'
Article by: Associated Press
Updated: August 5, 2014 - 4:45 PM
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — An enduring mystery of Argentina's "dirty war" ended Tuesday with the announcement that a prominent human rights activist has located the son born to her daughter who was killed by the military dictatorship in August 1978.
The identity of the son born to slain student activist Laura Carlotto was confirmed by DNA after the now 36-year-old man came forward to voluntarily take the test, family members said.
Laura Carlotto's mother, Estela Barnes de Carlotto, is founder of the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. She is among leaders of the effort to seek justice for victims of the dictatorship that ruled the South American country in 1976-83 and to locate hundreds of children taken from their captured parents and illegally adopted by families who supported the dictatorship.
The Argentine military captured, tortured and killed thousands of people in a crackdown on guerrillas and their supporters during the dictatorship.
Read more: http://www.startribune.com/world/270040291.html
Kissinger approved Argentinian 'dirty war'
Declassified US files expose 1970s backing for junta
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
The Guardian, Friday 5 December 2003 21.20 EST
Henry Kissinger gave his approval to the "dirty war" in Argentina in the 1970s in which up to 30,000 people were killed, according to newly declassified US state department documents.
Mr Kissinger, who was America's secretary of state, is shown to have urged the Argentinian military regime to act before the US Congress resumed session, and told it that Washington would not cause it "unnecessary difficulties".
The revelations are likely to further damage Mr Kissinger's reputation. He has already been implicated in war crimes committed during his term in office, notably in connection with the 1973 Chilean coup.
The material, obtained by the Washington-based National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act, consists of two memorandums of conversations that took place in October 1976 with the visiting Argentinian foreign minister, Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti. At the time the US Congress, concerned about allegations of widespread human rights abuses, was poised to approve sanctions against the military regime.
According to a verbatim transcript of a meeting on October 7 1976, Mr Kissinger reassured the foreign minister that he had US backing in whatever he did.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/06/argentina.usa
Colombia’s former spy chief fled to Costa Rica, new extradition request in the making
Colombia’s former spy chief fled to Costa Rica, new extradition request in the making
Aug 5, 2014 posted by Adriaan Alsema
Judicial authorities in Bogota have asked Costa Rica to extradite Colombia’s former intelligence chief after learning she had fled Panama, where she was recently refused political asylum.
The former director of now-defunct intelligence agency DAS, Maria del Pilar Hurtado, reportedly left Panama in June, weeks before that country’s Supreme Court nullified the disgraced official’s political asylum.
Former Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli had granted the asylum after Colombian authorities filed a search warrant over the former official’s alleged involvement in the wiretapping of the Supreme Court, human rights workers, journalists and politicians deemed inconvenient for former President Alvaro Uribe, Del Pilar’s immediate superior at the time.
FACT SHEET: DAS Wiretapping Scandal
Martinelli is a personal friend of Uribe.
However, under Panama’s new president, the country’s authorities examined the validity of the asylum which was repealed in July.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/colombias-former-spy-chief-fled-costa-rica-new-extradition-request-making/#prettyPhoto
World's highest urban cable car proves 'a success'
5 August 2014 Last updated at 07:17 ET
World's highest urban cable car proves 'a success'
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The cabins can hold up to 10 people and reach a height of more than 4,000m above sea level [/font]
The state-run company operating the world's highest urban cable car in Bolivia says its first two months in operation have been a success.
Mi Teleferico's chief executive said it had exceeded its goal of making eight million bolivianos ($1.2m; £685,000) in the first 60 days.
The cable car connects the capital, La Paz, with the nearby city of El Alto, high in the Andes mountains.
More than two million people have used it since its inauguration on 30 May.
"We've already surpassed our most optimistic financial forecast," chief executive Cesar Dockweiler said.
The cable car was built by an Austrian company at a cost of $234m and financed by the government of President Evo Morales.
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President Evo Morales tried out the new cable car on the day it was inaugurated [/font]
More images at link:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-28658826
Colombia opposition senator receives death threat amid congressional Uribe probe
Colombia opposition senator receives death threat amid congressional Uribe probe
Aug 5, 2014 posted by Nicolas Bedoya
Colombian senator Ivan Cepeda received a funeral card allegedly signed by neo-narcoparamilitary groups Oficina de Envigado and the Urabeños.
The death threat came in the days the leftist Senator successfully achieved a senatorial debate over the alleged ties of former President Alvaro Uribe, who was elected to the senate earlier this year, and saw an initial attempt to debate his alleged criminal ties shot down.
MORE: Debate over Uribe’s alleged paramilitary past shot down in Senate
Cepeda published a photo of the eerie card on his twitter account which shows a picture of Jesus Christ with a text that invites the senator to mass for his funeral on November 28, 2014.
The card is signed by Darío Antonio Usuga and alias “Cesarin”; leaders of the Urabeños and Oficina de Envigado.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/colombias-senator-receives-death-threat/
Indigenous Seed Savers Gather in the Andes, Agree to Fight Climate Change with Biodiversity
Indigenous Seed Savers Gather in the Andes, Agree to Fight Climate Change with Biodiversity
Erin Sagen 04 Aug 2014
: Yes Magazine
As climate change makes it more difficult to practice agriculture in their ancestral homelands, indigenous communities are exchanging seeds in hopes of finding the hardiest varieties.
On top of a rugged Andean mountain situated high in Peru’s Cusco region, on 30,000 acres of conserved land known as Parque de la Papa (Spanish for “Potato Park”), indigenous farmers met in late April to discuss conditions they feared were threatening their ancestral lands.
They came from as far as Bhutan and China, and from as near as the mountain itself. They discovered that their cultures were more similar than they had expected, and that one concern had been troubling all of them: Climate change was making it harder to grow food on the mountains that had sustained them for centuries. They were meeting to do something about it.
During a series of talks held between April 26 and May 2, the farmers forged a unique partnership entailing the exchange of indigenous crop varieties and farming methods, which they hope will protect agricultural biodiversity in the face of climate change. The exchange will begin with potatoes—a sturdy crop that thrives in the mountains of China, Bhutan, and Peru—and will enable the farmers to experiment together from a distance, so they can find the hardiest, most resilient varieties.
More:
http://www.towardfreedom.com/32-archives/environment/3623-indigenous-seed-savers-gather-in-the-andes-agree-to-fight-climate-change-with-biodiversity
Francis reverses John Paul II, reinstates priest suspended in '80s for joining Sandinista govt
Francis reverses John Paul II, reinstates priest suspended in '80s for joining Sandinista govt
By Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press August 4, 2014 1:54 PM
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis has reinstated a Nicaraguan priest suspended by the Vatican in the 1980s for participating in Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
The 81-year-old Rev. Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, Nicaragua's foreign minister from 1979-1990, recently wrote to Francis asking to be allowed to celebrate Mass again before he died. The Vatican said Monday that Francis had agreed and asked D'Escoto's superior in the Maryknoll order to help reintroduce him into priestly ministry.
The Vatican suspended D'Escoto and three other dissident priests in 1985 for defying a church ban on clergy holding government jobs. The sanction was also a reflection of St. John Paul II's broader crackdown on liberation theology in Latin America.
The Sandinistas, who supported the "popular church" of liberation theology, overthrew the pro-American regime of Anastasio Somoza in 1979.
Francis, who was a young Jesuit provincial in Argentina at the time, shared John Paul's opposition to the perceived Marxist excesses of liberation theology. But as pope, he has also called for a more merciful church and has indicated that another symbol of liberation theology, slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, will soon be beatified.
More:
http://www.canada.com/life/Francis+reverses+John+Paul+reinstates+priest+suspended+joining/10088532/story.html
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