When he came to power a couple of years ago, Hu Jintao, the president of China, was hoped to be a more lenient man than his predecessors — a Mikhail Gorbachev of China. This hope looks increasingly unrealistic. The screws are being tightened across the nation, security is being ramped up and more people are being executed.

Amnesty International has monitored a significant rise in executions as China celebrates the lunar New Year. Chinese authorities appear to have been wringing more than just rooster’s necks lately. According to incomplete statistics, there were 200 executions reported in the two weeks leading up to the start of the lunar New Year, 9 February. There were at least 650 executions reported in local media in the months of December and January alone. Both months are considered to be ‘ normal’, without the peaks seen around certain public holidays, although the true figure is certainly much higher, as China refuses to publish full details of all the people it executes. “There is a huge gap between policy and practice with regard to the death penalty in China,” said Catherine Baber, Deputy Asia Director at Amnesty International. “While the government claims that the death penalty is applied cautiously, the ritual peak in executions we’re witnessing at the moment completely undermines any pretence of ‘caution’.”

“Moreover, there is the very real concern that a number of those executed may have been innocent: China’s justice system is simply not sound enough to guarantee a fair trial.” Many reports of recent executions in China have justified the execution of ten or more people at a time as a way to ‘protect social stability, and ensure that people can have a safe, joyful and happy new year’. “No convincing evidence has ever been produced that the death penalty deters would-be criminals more effectively than any other punishment,” said Ms Baber. “To suggest executions ‘protect social stability’ is a dangerous misconception.” Recent intense debate within China on excessive use of the death penalty has focused on a proposed reform to allow the Supreme People’s Court to review all death sentences, rather than the current system where different courts apply different standards. However, this reform, and a suggestion that in some cases longer prison sentences should be passed instead of the death penalty, will still not address ‘confessions’ extorted through torture, limited access to lawyers, and political interference in the judicial process. This interference includes the so-called ‘strike hard’ anti-crime campaigns, when defendants are routinely given significantly heavier sentences than at other times. One recent ‘strike hard’ victim was Lu Shile, executed for murder in Qingdao, a city on China’s east coast. The legal process leading up to his execution was praised as ‘highly efficient’, and an example of ‘fast and heavy sentencing policy’. Lu was tried, lost an appeal, and executed, all within 24 days. Unusually, the Qingdao court where Lu was tried reported the total number of executions it had carried out in 2004. Fifty-seven people died at this single court, one of almost 400 empowered to pass and carry out the death penalty — implying an astronomical number of executions across the whole of China each year.

“We hope EU leaders will remember these people when deciding whether to lift the EU arms embargo on China which was imposed in response to human rights abuses committed in 1989,” said Ms Baber.

Hu Jintao has ordered a crackdown against any kind of dissent by public intellectuals, democracy, labour and rural rights activists, and ‘Net surfers and has promised to thwart any separatist movements as a priority. Crackdowns in Muslim Xinjiang and Tibet (where Hu was governor 16 years ago) have hardened. The mainland though, as it creaks under the tremendous economic growth seen in the last ten years, is an unhappy place. Workers are rioting more than ever, conditions remain pitiful and the gap in wealth between the coast and the inland western regions is enormous. The preservation of the Communist Party is paramount to Hu, and whatever draconian measures are needed to preserve this Byzantine organisation, he is not afraid to take them, even with the supposed symbol of peace and freedom, the Olympic torch just three years away from entering Beijing.

If there is a king of spin in this world, it has to be the secretive John Rendon — a stockily built fellow who has marketed all the US wars from the 1980s onwards.

Rendon and his eponymous company markets himself as an information warrior and a perception manager. His list of military spinning tales is impressive. You might recall 14 years ago when the US marched back into liberated Kuwait, which had endured seven and half months of tough occupation by Saddam’s forces, the streets were lined with thousands of locals waving small American flags. Where did they come from? One of John Rendon’s proudest moments.

Another of his most famous messages, planted with the assistance of the Hill & Knowlton PR firm, was staged during the run up to the 1991 Gulf War. On October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill. California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter introduced a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah. Weeping and shaking, the girl described a horrifying scene in Kuwait City. “I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital,” she testified. “While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns and go into the room where babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

Seven pro-war senators brought up the baby-incubator allegations to argue for an invasion of Iraq, leading to a narrow five-vote win. Later it was discovered that the Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, daughter of the ambassador to the United States and that the incubator incident was fabricated.

In the last 20 years John Rendon has helped market US military interventions in Colombia, Argentina, Panama, Haiti, Iraq (twice), Zimbabwe and Kosovo.

Emblazoned on his website is the slogan “Information as an element of power”.

The alarming aspect of such a powerful person who spreads disinformation to aid death is that there are no checks on such people. He has the power to shape the way we perceive conflicts as just and legitimate when more often than not they are illegal or at best for ulterior, non-defined motives.

The shadowy Rendon started out as an election campaigner for the Democrats, beginning with Michael Dukakis’s campaign to become a senator in 1974 and moving onto Jimmy Carter’s failed re-election campaign of 1980.

A few years later he picked up his most lucrative client to date — the CIA, tasked with painting Saddam as evil as possible and building up a credible opposition to the tyrant. The Iraqi National Congress was his creation with the aid of $12m in CIA funds.

More recently, in the wake of 911, he was handed a contract to handle the PR regarding the US military strikes in Afghanistan.

He then moved onto Iraq for a second time, helping create such myths as the link between Saddam and 911 which two thirds of those polled in the US actually believed and the other classic being that Saddam had nuclear weapons, a lie eight out of ten Americans believed in the run up to war. An infamous Australian Broadcasting Corporation exclusive interview with an alleged scientist of Saddam’s who described all the alleged biological and chemical weapons installations — an exclusive that has now been proved to be wildly incorrect — had all the hallmarks of Mr Rendon’s ‘perception management’ about it.

When you have Rendon on your side, you have no need to lie as it is done automatically for you, seamlessly and effectively. The world deserves to know who he is and the lies he perpetrates to ensure the military industrial complex can keep firing.

The little red email’s medical correspondent, Dr Jim, takes a look a combat medicine, the Geneva Convention, Guantanamo and matters cognate.

In the last 2 months the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), has published 2 very different perspectives regarding modern medical care in the “combat zone”. Traditionally the Geneva Convention protects medical personnel, as long as they remain non-combatants. It also requires that care is provided for enemy prisoners and that any evidence of abuse of detainees is reported. It has become apparent that this is not always the case.

The casualty numbers involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom are continuing to rise at an alarming rate. As of November 16 th 2004, a total of 10,726 service members had suffered war injuries in these 2 conflicts. To put this into prospective, this represents more casualties than in the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the War of 1812 (1812-1815), or the first 5 years of the Vietnam War (1961-1965). However as you would expect with the advances in modern technology, many more soldiers are surviving their injuries. The lethality of war wounds has fallen from 42% in 1783, to 10% at the current time.

This is in no small part due to the efforts of the front line surgical teams who support troops in the field. We are told that a Forward Surgical Team (FST) can deploy a functioning hospital, complete with 2 operating rooms from 6 Humvees within an hour. These teams have the capacity to perform life saving operations just behind the front lines, and to provide an ITU service for up to 6 hours. They are equipped to care for up to 30 patients at a time. Their records show that 1 such unit cared for 132 U.S, and 74 Iraqi casualties over a 4 month period. Interestingly, of the Iraqi patients only 22 were combatants, the rest were civilians.

The goal of the FSTs is not curative treatment. Unless injuries are minor, military surgical strategy aims for damage control and stabilisation. Patients are then moved through the system depending on the scale of their injuries. Any service person requiring treatment that is expected to last over 30 days is immediately shipped home to the USA, via hospitals in Kuwait, Spain, or Germany. Iraqi casualties never leave the country, regardless of the seriousness of their injuries.

Unfortunately and somewhat predictably, the alternative perspective of the provision of medical care in Iraq is far from flattering to the medical community. Recently there have been accounts of failure by US medical personnel to report evidence of detainee abuse, even murder, in Iraq and Afghanistan. There have also been claims (although less well supported) that staff have neglected the clinical needs of some detainees.

Medics stand accused of breaching their professional ethics and the laws of war by participating in abusive interrogation practices. The International Committee of the Red Cross has concluded that medical personnel at Guantanamo Bay shared health information including medical records with army units that planned interrogations. If this is true then it represents a flagrant violation of medical ethics, not to mention the basic human rights of the individuals concerned. The Pentagon has denied all these claims.

Legal scholars M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan Marks have conducted their own investigation into medical involvement in military intelligence gathering in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. They allege that recently released documents and interviews with military sources point to a pattern of involvement, including participation in interrogation procedures that violate the laws of war. Not only did caregivers pass health information to military intelligence personnel; physicians assisted in the design of interrogation strategies, including sleep deprivation, and other coercive methods tailored to detainees’ medical conditions.

The people who were involved in these areas report being told by military intelligence not to talk about their experiences and impressions. Fortunately the consistency of multiple confidential accounts, combined with available documents, and the confirmation of key facts by personnel who spoke on the record have made possible an understanding of the medical role in military intelligence.

In testimony taken in Feb 2004 as part of the inquiry into abuses at Abu Gharib, Col. T.M. Pappas, chief of military intelligence at the prison, described a physician’s systematic role in the development and execution of interrogation strategies. An example of such a strategy published in January 2004 makes for shocking reading. Among the approaches considered are “dietary manipulation-minimum bread and water, monitored by medics”; “environmental manipulation- i.e. reducing A.C. in summer, increasing in winter”; “sleep management- for 72 hour time periods, monitored by medics”; “isolation- for longer than 30 days”; “stress positions”; and “presence of working dogs”.

Pappas also tells us that typically military intelligence would give guards an interrogation plan and advise how best to execute it. The medical team involved would have the last say as to what was implemented. These practices, he conceded, were without precedent.

These events have sickened the medical community at large. Doctors, it is argued, act as combatants, not physicians, when they put their knowledge to use for military ends. Dr David Tornberg, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Health Affairs, believes that when a doctor participates in interrogation, “he’s not functioning as a physician” and therefore the Hippocratic ethic of commitment to patient welfare does not apply. This is self contradictory. The skills that make up being a doctor- technical skill, scientific understanding, a caring ethos, and cultural authority- are the reason they are called on by the military to assume these roles.

If the therapeutic mission that remains the physician’s primary role and the core of our identity is to be preserved, there are some things a doctor must not do. The little red email strongly believes that even in war, some rules must still apply. The Geneva Convention seems to us to be a good place to start.

So Procter & Gamble have moved for Gillette, in an audacious $57 billion merger, that would create the world’s largest consumer conglomerate with a market capitalisation of some $200 billion. This goliath, that produces everything from coffee to detergent to triple bladed razors, we would strongly urge that you boycott where possible. Here’s why:

Procter & Gamble (P&G) has repeatedly refused to cease animal testing despite enormous pressure. And don’t get the PETA people started on their Iams pet food range.

P&G has been represented by a powerful lobby led by the Chemical Specialties Manufacturers Association, which has attempted to discourage government agencies from disseminating information on cleaning alternatives.

In August 2001 the American Medical Association was criticized for a new million dollar campaign designed to educate doctors about its ethical guidelines against accepting gifts from drug companies — however, the majority of the funding for the campaign was provided by Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals and eight other drug companies. According to the Washington Post, “the ethics guidelines allow doctors to attend company-sponsored conferences and to receive textbooks or drug samples that will directly benefit their patients, but advise them against accepting individual gifts of more than minimal value.” However, a spokesperson for consumer organization Public Citizen said, “They’re certainly not exactly going to encourage doctors to adhere to [the guidelines] when they’re setting this kind of example.”

P&G hired dozens of academic scientists in its campaign strategy to obtain FDA approval for the controversial fat substitute Olestra. These scientists are paid to testify at FDA hearings on Olestra, typically without noting any relationship to P&G.

P&G markets products such as various cereals containing genetically modified ingredients to children.

P&G continues to use genetically modified ingredients in its Pringles potato chips.

P&G is part of the National Foreign Trade Alliance, which brought suit against the state of Massachusetts for a “selective purchasing” law that prevented state agencies from doing business with companies involved in Burma.

P&G, the maker of Folger’s coffee and part of the coffee roaster oligopoly, was named one of the “10 Worst Corporations of 2002” by the Multinational Monitor for failing to take action to address plummeting coffee bean prices. Low prices have pushed tens of thousands of farmers in Central America, Ethiopia, Uganda and elsewhere to the edge of survival, or destroyed their means of livelihood altogether.

P&G was part of the Coalition Against the Costly Labelling Law, a group of companies that worked against Oregon’s Measure 27, which would have required the labelling of GMO products sold in that state. The company donated over $81,700 to defeat the Measure.

P&G like to hype their actions against pollution, but for all the rhetoric, they don’t score too highly on pollution issues either. There have been debacles in Wisconsin, Florida, and their suppliers have also been called into question.

Meanwhile, P&G’s takeover target is no corporate angel either:

According to “Lifting the Veil of Secrecy,” a July 2003 report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, as a sponsor of the International Society for Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, Gillette is one of 170 US corporations with “questionable corporate ties.”

Gillette and its Duracell subsidiary are part of the National Foreign Trade Alliance, a group of corporate concerns (including P&G) which brought a suit against the state of Massachusetts for a “selective purchasing” law that prevented state agencies from doing business in Burma.

According to a 2004 Environmental Working Group that details the EPA’s inefficient inspection practices, cited Gillette Paper Mate’s Santa Monica site in California as one of the top violators of the Clean Water Act (1999)

In 2002, Chairman and CEO James Kilts made $11,075,433 in total compensation including stock option grants from Gillette. And Kilts has another $1,267,500 in unexercised stock options from previous years.

The little red email recommends http://www.responsibleshopper.org for all your ethical purchasing decisions.

McDonald’s has agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a lawsuit over artery-clogging trans fats in its cooking oils, the company said on Friday.

McDonald’s said it would donate $7 million to the American Heart Association and spend another $1.5 million to inform the public of its trans fat plans

The settlement is the result of litigation from a San Francisco area activist who has been seeking to raise public awareness of the health dangers from the trans fatty acids (TFAs) in hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils.

Trans fats are used in thousands of processed food products, often giving the crunch to French fries, cookies, and cereals.

They are created in processing vegetable oils and have been found to be as unhealthy as pure cholesterol. The latest official US nutrition recommendations suggest limiting their intake.

Stephen Joseph, a lawyer who founded BanTransFats.com, sued McDonald’s over complaints the firm did not properly inform the public that it had encountered delays in plans to lessen the trans fats in its cooking oils.

Mr Joseph said his site would receive $7,500, as would another plaintiff in the case.

British-born Joseph first gained publicity for his cause by suing Kraft Foods two years ago to highlight the trans fat content of much-beloved Oreo cookies. The company has since moved to remove trans fats from its snack foods.

Dunkin’ Donuts, a unit of Britain’s Allied Domecq Plc, and other companies have in recent months introduced new products free of trans fats, chastened by the pioneering attacks from Mr Joseph.

Here’s more on trans fats. Partial hydrogenation is an industrial process that changes the molecular configuration and properties of oils used for baking and frying and other purposes. Partial hydrogenation creates trans fatty acids ( “ trans fats”) in the oil. This is by far the most dangerous type of fat.

Denmark has effectively imposed a ban. Oils and fats are forbidden on the Danish market if they contain more than 2% trans fat.

Canada is now moving towards a ban. In November 2004, the Canadian House of Commons, in a bipartisan vote, passed a motion calling on the Government of Canada “to enact regulation, or if necessary present legislation that effectively eliminates processed trans fats, by limiting the processed trans fat content of any food product sold in Canada to the lowest level possible.”

In January 2005, the US Department of Agriculture and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005. The Dietary Guidelines include the following recommendation:

Consume 10 percent of calories from saturated fatty acids and less than 300 mg/day of cholesterol, and keep trans fatty acid consumption as low as possible.

“Restaurants and other food service establishments account for about 38% of the fats in our food supply,” Mr Joseph noted in a press release. “All restaurants using partially hydrogenated cooking oil should switch to non-partially hydrogenated oil at the earliest possible time,” he urged.

BanTransFats.com made Tiburon in California America’s “First Trans Fat-Free City.” All of the restaurants in Tiburon now use trans fat-free cooking oils. There are green heart stickers on the windows of the restaurants telling customers that the cooking oil is trans fat-free. None of the restaurants experienced any problems making the change.

Mr Joseph has this final word to consumers: “When eating out, always ask whether the cooking oil that is used in the restaurant is ‘partially hydrogenated.’”

Wanna learn more about what you should and shouldn’t eat, click here.

And for a pretty alarming look at how America has become obese in the last 20 years, click here and scroll down through the maps.

And finally for more on the little red email’s diatribes against the Golden Arches click here, here and here.

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

If you fancy your luck, on the other hand...
You could try our latest competition! Yes, that’s right: another chance to be cool for free. Head on over to here to try your luck in our latest revolutionary contest.

 

Coming soon: the Revolution launches its new bulletproof vest
On March 18th, the Revolution will be celebrating two glorious years of Iraqi occupation, and offering help to North Americans as they face the highest levels of anti-US sentiment seen throughout the world. Come along and get bombed on b-52s at Canned Revolution’s expense and witness the unveiling of the latest bulletproof technology. The venue will be the wonderful 5 o.p.t. Studio Gallery. More details will be forthcoming soon.

 

Wal-Mart folds store before it unionizes
According to this Washington Post article, Wal-Mart has dodged the unions once again. As the little red email brought to your attention last year, this would have been the first store with a union in the whole of North America.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. says it will close one of its Canadian stores, just as some 200 workers at the location are near winning the first-ever union contract from the world’s largest retailer.

Wal-Mart said it was shuttering the store in Jonquiere, Quebec, in response to unreasonable demands from union negotiators that would make it impossible for the store to sustain itself.

“We were hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” Andrew Pelletier, a spokesman for Wal-Mart Canada, said Wednesday. “Despite nine days of meetings over three months, we’ve been unable to reach an agreement with the union that in our view will allow the store to operate efficiently and profitably.”

Pelletier said the store will close in May. The retailer had first discussed closing the Jonquiere store last October, saying the store was losing money.

The United Food & Commercial Workers Canada asked Quebec labour officials to appoint a mediator last week, saying negotiations with Wal-Mart had reached an impasse.

Union leaders dismissed Wal-Mart’s reasons for closing the store and promised to fight the move.

“Wal-Mart has fired these workers not because the store was losing money but because the workers exercised their right to join a union,” Michael J. Fraser, national director of UFCW Canada, said in a written statement. “Once again, Wal-Mart has decided it is above the law and that the only rules that count are their rules.”

Wal-Mart’s decision to close the store reflects the retailer’s deeply rooted aversion to unions, and its worries that organized labour had nearly established a beachhead, said Burt Flickinger III of Strategic Resource Group, a consulting firm specializing in retailing and consumer goods.

But he said the move could backfire for Wal-Mart, which has worked hard to counter a wave of bad publicity and portray itself as a generous employer.

“The store closing may potentially catalyze the combination of the government (officials in Canada), organized labour and consumers working together against Wal-Mart,” Flickinger said.

 

Getting the monkey off our backs
Thanks to wonderous Harry Harrison for sending us this savagely cynical look at the Chinese New Year.

 

Iraq from the other side of the gun barrel
The wonderful information Clearing House has an interesting new video of Iraq from a wildly different viewpoint than that presented on Fox.

 

Oil for Food corruption OK, Occupation corruption good
George Monbiot in the Guardian wonders why few are outraged by the US allowing the Oil-for-food scams to continue and even fewer about the way the US absconded with $8.8bn in just 14 months of occupation.

Book review: The Men Who Stare at Goats
Well with a title like that, the little red email had to pick up the book. And we weren’t disappointed on the bizarre front. It is a tale of weirdness of the highest order within the US Army, and touches on one of our favourite episodes of oddness, the wonderfully venal MK-ULTRA.

Ronson takes the reader on an engaging romp through some of the US military’s more unlikely black programmes. Starting with a general who attempts to walk through walls, and on via Uro Geller hinting that he has been enlisted as part of the Homeland Security threat warning system, Ronson looks at all manner of covert oddness: The eponymous man who stares at goats and stops their hearts, the use of sound in torture and riot-suppression and non-lethal weapons, and the MK-ULTRA project’s investigations into mind control using psychedelic drugs.

Ronson views the heart of the matter is a mission statement from the 70’s describing the hypothetical “First Earth Battalion”, although to the little red email’s mind the fact that MK-ULTRA and some of the remote viewing projects predate this mission statement somewhat invalidates this view.

The book is entertaining and fascinating, nonetheless, and perhaps its greatest interest is the way it ties in with some of the reports coming out of Iraq of new, more psychological methods of torture.

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson
published by Picador
ISBN 0-330-43526-4

 

Pilger’s Breaking the Silence
Just in case you missed it at all, here’s another chance to see John Pilger’s Breaking the Silence, a look at The War On Terror™ and the terrorism that doesn’t get talked about about: our own.

 

Reaganite calls Bush administration out on lies
Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, ex-Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review takes a look at the Iraq fiasco and the lies the current administration are using to cover up in his Counterpunch article.

 

Shooting the messenger, literally
In the little red email’s opinion this piece in the New York Sun should have been titled “CNN Executive Tells the Truth for Once”:

CNN Executive Says G.I.s in Iraq Target Journalists
By Roderick Boyd of the New York Sun

The head of CNN’s news division, Eason Jordan, ignited an Internet firestorm last week when he told a panel at a World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland, that the American military had targeted journalists during operations in Iraq.

Mr. Jordan, speaking in a panel discussion titled “Will Democracy Survive the Media?” said “he knew of about 12 journalists who had not only been killed by American troops, but had been targeted as a matter of policy,” said Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat of Massachusetts who was on the panel with Mr. Jordan.

In an interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Frank said Mr. Jordan discussed in detail the plight of an Al-Jazeera reporter who had been detained by American forces, was made to eat his shoes while incarcerated in the Abu Ghraib prison, and was repeatedly mocked by his interrogators as “Al-Jazeera boy.”

A man who said he was a producer with Al-Jazeera at the network’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, said he was unaware of any such incident, “although we have had problems with American troops in and out of Iraq.” The Al-Jazeera producer refused to give his name.

As an interesting epilogue to the above: Jordan resigned from CNN in the ensuing aftermath.

 

The Little Red Email Osama bin Laden Sweepstakes Shirt Contest!
Well we had been for sometime advocating that Osama bin Laden would be paraded in front of the US public for a little publicity boost. Time ran out for the little red email, but not for you. We guessed October 23rd for a pre-election Osama... and we feel a mite foolish, although Osama did show up on video. If you fancy a free Canned Revolution t-shirt, why not sign up. There is of course much speculation that Osama was caught ages ago and now is stewing in jail awaiting his upcoming moment in front of the cameras. Now, by simply guessing the date of Osama’s media debut as a US prisoner you can win a t-shirt. Send your expected date of bin Laden’s first television appearance as an American prisoner to osamasweepstakes@cannedrevolution.com. May you be luckier than us.