This week: • Gitmo • Korea • Philippines •
• Oil/Water • Chocolate • Butchers • Stuff •

 

Lancet pokes holes in Gitmo policy

Following his previous article on the role of US Army physicians in sanctioned torture at Guantanamo Bay, Dr Jim is pleased to report that the international community seems to be taking notice.

In February this year US Army General Bantz J. Craddock, military commander for US Southern Command which oversees the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, confirmed that military officials had been employing aggressive tactics to deter detainees from carrying out long-term hunger strikes to protest their detention. What this translates to in reality is the individual being immobilised in a restraining chair while a tube is passed through their nose and down into their stomach. This tube is then used to pass liquid foods and fluids to keep the detainee alive. Detainees being force-fed continue to be restrained to stop them vomiting after feeding, and are placed in solitary confinement for extended periods to stop them drawing encouragement from each other. The numbers of people involved in this scandalous breach of human rights are significant.

The hunger strikes began last summer as a protest against conditions at the prison, with 76 prisoners taking part. The number rose to 131 in September, then fell away, before rising again to 84 in December. Since December there has been a drop in the number of protesters from 84 to 4. The administration denies that this reduction is due to the use of force feeding. Lt. Col. Martin, who is the chief military spokesman at the US detention facility, tells us “We haven’t changed anything. Our processes and procedures are the same.”

John Edmondson (former commander of the hospital at Guantanamo) instigated this practice, and there is no evidence procedures have changed since then. Edmondson wrote in a signed affidavit that “the involuntary feeding was authorized through a lawful order of a higher military authority.” The “we were just following orders” get-out is know as the Nuremberg defence, after the Nazi war trials, and is unsurprisingly not considered a legal defence.

The insertion of the feeding tube is a medical procedure, and once again the physicians at the prison appear to be complicitous in these unlawful acts. Fortunately this has not passed unnoticed. A group of 250 prominent doctors from seven countries within Europe have written to The Lancet to protest. Their correspondence has just been published (full text here — registration required).

“We urge the US government to ensure that detainees are assessed by independent physicians and that techniques such as force-feeding and restraint chairs are abandoned,” the letter said.

The doctors said the World Medical Association — a global body representing physicians, including those in the US — specifically prohibited force-feeding. Dr David Nicholl, a UK neurologist who initiated the Lancet letter, told the Reuters news agency the allegations of force-feeding represented “a challenge” to the American Medical Association, which is a signatory to the World Medical Association’s code of conduct. “Are they going to obey those declarations [forbidding force-feeding], or are... [they] literally not worth the paper they are written on?” he asked.

The US government continues to argue that the Geneva Convention does not apply to prisoners at the camp, who, it says, are enemy combatants who continue to pose a threat to national security. This is no excuse, (If they’re not deemed Prisoners of War, then they should be covered by the Geneva Convention as Civilians, which is even more restrictive) and pressure seems to be growing internationally to make significant changes. The little red email could not agree more.

 

 

Uncle Sam stomps on Korean farmers

We are grateful for comrades in Korea sending us this dispatch. On March 6th, 2006, South Korean military riot police began an attack on the autonomous village of Daechuri. For over four years, villagers in Daechuri and the nearby community of Doduri have defiantly resisted the seizure of their homes and fields for the expansion of a United States Army base.

The expansion of US Army base Camp Humphreys (K-6) is part of the Global Repositioning Plan first outlined by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and later adopted as the Bush Administration’s strategy for consolidating its military hegemony over Northeast Asia.

Currently, Camp Humphreys occupies 3,734 acres. However, in December 2004 the Korean government pledged to give over an additional 2,851 acres for the base facilities. With this new expansion, some 1,372 residents, many elderly, will be driven off their land.

For the third time in fifty years, these people are being driven from their homes by foreign occupiers (first Japanese, then American), with the help of the ever loyal (to American interests) Korean government. The Korean Ministry of National Defense (MND) has declared publicly declared that it will make the houses unlivable and the land untillable, fining those who dare return and cutting water lines and erecting barbed wire to prevent agriculture.

Desperately fighting for their homes and lives, villagers first utilized tractors as road blocks then chained themselves to the school gates, resisting wave after wave of attacks by hundreds of military riot police. Barricaded inside the local elementary school, rice farmers, peace activists and elderly residents are still holding out against sporadic, sometimes intense attacks by Korea’s elite military police force.

Residents and peace activists have suffered beatings and arrests; inside the school, activists upload news updates, video of the attacks, and continue to make pleas for immediate aid. All are exhausted and dehydrated, and in need of reinforcements and supplies.

Opposition to the expansion of the base has come from many diverse currents within Korean society. Apart from community displacement, many have also highlighted issues including the devastating environmental impact of US bases, the violent crimes committed by US troops stationed on the peninsula, the issue of human trafficking and forced prostitution which surrounds the bases, and the potential for a new arms race that could destabilize all of Northeast Asia.

Residents and Korean peace organizations have been fighting the proposed expansion through legal means since 2001, all the while being deceived and ignored by officials. In November last year, two Korean farmers died at the hands of riot police in Seoul. In December, 2005, the Land Expropriation Committee approved the “imminent domain” seizure of Daechuri, Doduri and the surrounding fields. The farmers’ existence on their own land was now illegal. Outraged and disillusioned with the corrupt bureaucracy of an indifferent government, in February, farmers marched to Pyeongtaek city hall and burned their “residency cards”, renounced their Korean citizenship and declared Daechuri an autonomous region.

Within this rebel territory, a vibrant community has flourished. Artists, musicians, peace activists, and religious leaders have joined with the residents, repairing and occupying vacant houses, and creating a “Peace Village”. Murals of hope and resistance have appeared on blank walls, flags and banners opposing the American base expansion and US imperialism hang throughout the town. Traditional, shamanistic “totem poles” were carved in order to chase out the evil spirits plaguing the farmers. Every day for the past 550, residents and visitors have gathered in the Peace Village for a candlelight vigil. Famous Korean entertainers have made appearances and popular musicians held concerts to highlight the cause and encourage the farmers to continue fighting. Faced with the greatest tragedy of their lives, the villagers and their supporters have created a community of inspirational beauty and power.

Attacks against the village by Korean authorities will continue until the US withdraws its proposal for base expansion. Only massive international solidarity can save this land. International support is needed to pressure the Korean government to halt its brutal assault. International observers, journalists, or indeed anyone with a phone or a computer can take action now by logging into this site.

 

• For future updates see: here and here. Or email savePTfarmers@yahoo.com.

 

 

Keeping the Philippines American

In the past couple of weeks another 5,500 US troops have entered the Philippines ostensibly as “advisors” to help out with the global bullshit that is The War On Terror™ (TWOT™). The Philippine constitution prevents foreigners from armed combat on its soil, but this has not stopped heavily armed American soldiers heading down to the Muslim south of the archipelago and helping the decades old repression of this minority religion in Asia’s only Catholic country.

Under the guise of coming here for humanitarian issues, American troops are actually engaged in legitimate liberation organizations. Since 9/11 this former US colony has become a solid client state for the US with American troops stationed here all the time and helping the Pentagon’s aims of full spectral dominance. Under a 1991 constitution no US troops were to be based here. 9/11 changed that and now with troops in central Asia, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, the US has a noose around the growing perceived threat that is China.

First up, make no mistake about it — the Abu Sayyaf are no great shakes. These bunch of amateurs can barely scrape together a force of more than 100 and for all we know may well be the creation of the Philippine military to justify increased budgets both from Manila and Washington.

The Muslims in the Philippines have axes to grind, no question. In 1913, Muslims constituted 98% of the Sulu region’s population and “owned” all the lands prior to colonization. But so successful was the long-running resettlement program that by the time war broke out during the Moro uprising in the 1970s, Muslims accounted for a minority of the population but a majority of the landless. They accounted for only 40% of the population and owned less than 17% of the land, with more than 80% of them landless. Today, the Muslim-majority areas are the poorest provinces in the country.

But despite this the only violence that arises from this indignity is from the small Abu Sayyaf whose threat is neglible. In fact, a group of Filipino soldiers who staged a mutiny in July 2003 had accused the military top brass of setting off bombs in Mindanao to pin the blame on “terrorists” and thereby demand more military aid from the United States. Among all other countries in the region, the Philippine armed forces has received the most dramatic increase in foreign military funding from the US since 2001.

With the recent military offensives and with successive unexplained and unresolved killings gripping the island in the past few weeks, Sulu is again teetering on the precipice of full-scale war. With spy planes and helicopters hovering above and naval ships berthing and dislodging military equipment, residents of Sulu say it feels like the 1970s all over again — but this time, with American GIs around. One thing is for sure: if true, the involvement of US troops in attacks against the legal Moro National Liberation Front will not push the island away from the edge. Remember Vietnam started with Kennedy sending out “advisers”.

 

 

Who says oil and water don’t mix?

As the world gets ever nearer to going to war over such basic necessities as water, in Russia the greenlight has been given to construct a hugely controversial oil pipeline that will run alongside Lake Baikal, home to a fifth of the world’s fresh water. Transneft, the state pipeline monopoly, is proposing to build the $11 billion pipeline from Eastern Siberia to the Pacific Coast, via the Chinese border, to supply oil-thirsty Asian markets. The peipleine skirts within 800 metres of the huge lake. A panel of experts from Rostekhnadzor, the environmental watchdog, overwhelmingly rejected the plan last month on the ground that Baikal could be irreparably damaged if the pipeline ruptured.

Out of 52 experts on the commission, 46 ruled that there were insufficient safeguards to protect the pipeline from the region’s frequent and powerful earthquakes. But Konstantin Pulikovsky, the head of Rostekhnadzor, refused to endorse the decision and in true Vladimir Putin style appointed an extra 34 more amenable people to the commission, pressure was applied and approval gained on March 3, with construction likely to start this May.

Greenpeace is appealing to American, European and Japanese banks to refuse to finance the project. Roman Vazhenkov, Greenpeace campaign co-ordinator, said: “This decision once again demonstrates that private interests of a group of oil industry officials… have more weight than the law, opinions of scientists and Russian citizens, and than the future of the world’s most unique freshwater lake.”

Baikal is the world’s deepest (1,700 metres) and oldest (25 million years) freshwater lake and holds more endemic species of plants and animals than any other lake. The soil in the lake has increased by two and half times over the past century because of agricultural and industrial development.

The world’s current oil craze could make us all pretty thirsty soon.

 

 

Ads + school = diabetes + obesity

Imagine the scene. “Well, Johnny,” the teacher asks, “have you done your maths?”

“Sure,” he replies, his teeth stained from copious amounts of chocolate.

“Ok, so answer the following. Jane goes to school with seven bars of her favourite Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut Dairy Milk Chocolate™. On the way, she meets Sally and swaps two bars for a can of Dr Pepper™. As she gets to school, she runs into Mandy who she owes a bar of chocolate to. At lunch that day, after schnarfing down a Cadbury’s Twirl™ washed down with a Sunkist™, Jane, who just can’t get enough of that tasty Cadbury’s chocolate, wolfs down another bar. After throwing up, how many bars does Jane take home that night?”

A far fetched curriculum? Not really. Cadbury Schweppes was among a group of companies that held private talks with Ruth Kelly, the UK’s education secretary, this week about the possibility of ‘helping’ to run state schools.

Such benign charity should not be taken at face value. The captured attention of the schools market is a vital one for this confectionary and soft drinks giant. Ms Kelly had promised that by this September vending machines selling crisps, fizzy drinks and chocolate will be banned. Will she back track if the corporate promises beaucoup bucks?

Tony Blair dismissed the “worst-case hypothesis” made by some of his parliamentary critics that unsuitable companies would be allowed to take over schools, saying he had “yet to come across the Big Mac academy concept”. All he need do is glimpse across the Pond and see what impact the brands have had on US education. With obesity among Britain’s kids the worst in Europe the prospect of counting Mars bars for maths class and reading McDonald’s menus for literature cannot be allowed to happen.

 

 

‘Butchers’ joined at the hip

Saddam and Slobodan: the pair have so much in common., they could have been joined at the hip. Clearly both were nasty characters, that much is undeniable and justice was warranted on the pair of them, but this among other things has been something neither has received.

Both were vassals turned opponents of the West. Both received catchy meat cleaving monikers once the West had decided to destroy them — the Butchers of Baghdad and Belgrade respectively. Both were smeared misleadingly as killing tons of babies when the West’s misguided missiles were slaughtering more innocents.

Both were captured and both stood on show trials. Slobodan is dead; how long before Saddam receives the same surreptitious syringe behind the knee to end his life and cut short any embarrassing tales of collusion with the Bush regime?

Due process was violated as well as fundamental fairness and elementary legal rules. Slobodan Milosevic was prevented time and time again from conducting a complete and thorough cross-examination of witnesses. His heart condition was well known yet never treated.

Let us not forget how Milosevic first came to trial. This was due to intense military, economic, and political pressure by the US and NATO amounting to “blackmail”, Milosevic was arrested and extradited to the Hague Tribunal in 2001. The US/NATO blackmail included arming and training the UCK/KLA/UCMPB Greater Albanian “terrorists”, “guerrillas”, “insurgents”, and planning military operations on their behalf in Southern Serbia. The US/NATO sent this KLA proxy army from US/NATO occupied Kosovo into Serbia where they murdered and mutilated the bodies of several Serbian policemen and soldiers and occupied Serbian towns and villages. Was this terror campaign by the US meant to achieve “greater rights” for the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia? That was the official propaganda or “party line” spewed forth by US propaganda outlets like National Public Radio (NPR), the “Radio Free America”, and RFE/RE. But the actual motive was to exert blackmail on the Serbian government. The US/NATO moreover withheld economic aid to Yugoslavia unless Milosevic was extradited. Using military, economic, and political blackmail is prohibited by the United Nations and international legal guidelines. But NPR and RFE/RL and the mainstream media of the US/NATO countries never seemed to notice or to care.

The Serbian and Yugoslav constitutions prohibited the extradition of Milosevic, but these laws like so many others were given short shrift.

NATO is immune from prosecution for war crimes. The 6th Convention of the Nuremberg prohibited targeting civilian targets not based on “military necessity”. NATO systematically targeted Serbian civilian targets.

NATO targeted Serbian television, power grids, oil refineries, bridges, passenger trains, busses, automobiles, nursing homes, Orthodox churches, and hospitals. Thus, the initial charges were lodged as a cover for NATO war crimes.

The ICTY, like all victorious sides post-war legal follow ups, allows for the winners to rewrite history and stamp it into people? conscience.

The show trials of Saddam and Slobodan are nothing short of travesties of justice. This pair deserved a long stretch inside no doubt, but more pertinently we owed them a fair crack in front of the judges, rather than the Stalin-esque Kangaroo court we have become accustomed to. 

 

• Showing the official cover up in all its barest forms, on the BBC’s obituary quotes page, Slobodan’s mate, Nico Varkevisser, is interestingly misquoted: “The real culprits, murderers and killers are in Brussels and in The Hague.” should read “The real culprits, murderers and killers are in Brussels, in NATO and in The Hague.” An omission that speaks volumes.

 

 

Stuff we like

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.

 

Video America: From Freedom to Fascism
A very interesting-looking documentary looks set to either take hollywood by storm or die in government-induced obscurity. Here’s the trailer - now where are your tax dollars going?

 

Video Live action Simpsons
The opening credits to The Simpsons, re-done in real life. Brilliant.

 

Israel’s Secret Weapon
Broadcast on BBC Two on Monday, 17 March, 2003, this film is the story of the Israeli bomb, Vanunu and Israel’s wall of silence.

 

New 9/11 Flight site takes off
Welcome to Flight 77.info— documenting the legal process to obtain government-held video recordings related to Flight 77 on 9/11.

 

Video Loose Change
The most provocative 9-11 documentary on the web today. This film shows direct connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the United States government. Evidence is derived from news footage, scientific fact, and most important, Americans who suffered through that tragic day. And the soundtrack is none too shabby either.

 

Wallabies of the UK
Forget the Loch Ness monster (which might have been an elephant), here are the Loch Lomond wallabies. They’re more common in England, with wild colonies in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Yorkshire.

 

Video Dude, where’s my ice
There’s new evidence of global warming affecting Earth’s southernmost continent. A recent report shows that Antarctica has been losing ice rapidly — the equivalent of about 40 trillion gallons (151 trillion litres) of water a year from 2002 to 2005. Click here for National Geographic’s video on the southern continent’s decline.

 

Fun with the State Department I: Beggars can be heckled
Whilst surfing the State Dept we came across this article “Testimony on Iraq”, which turned out to be the Bush administration begging for more money (the FY 2006 Supplemental Budget Request). The testimony amused us more than usual because of the heckling after her preamble:
SECRETARY RICE: Mr. Chairman, and members of the Committee, natural disasters and the course of war do not take into account our budget timelines and practices and it is therefore necessary —
AUDIENCE OBSERVER: How many of you have children in the illegal and immoral war? How many of you have children in this illegal and —
CHAIRMAN COCHRAN: Sergeant-at-Arms, please restore order.
AUDIENCE OBSERVER: How many children in this illegal and immoral war —
CHAIRMAN COCHRAN: The Committee will come to order.
AUDIENCE OBSERVER: The blood is on your hands and you cannot wash it away. The blood is on your hands and you can not wash it away.
(The audience observer is escorted from the hearing room.)
CHAIRMAN COCHRAN: Madame Secretary, you may proceed.
We at the little red email also have to wonder exactly how popular the good ship Condi is at State, if this tale of begging for more money to pay for the war is placed, with unexpurgated heckling, as their top Iraq story.

 

More fun with the State Department:
Our reason for trawling the state department was for some reference for TWOT research. We were also looking for the ill-fated "Country Reports on Terrorism" for 2004 which fudged the figures to make TWOT™ look like less of a fiasco, before they abandoned the whole Country Reports on Terrorism scheme as being too damn embarrassing. Enquiring minds were subsequently diverted to the NCTC, who provide a new and much less clear account, where you have no messy overview or disturbing running total. As if this wasn’t amusing enough, they felt they had to add to the cheese factor, by providing the 2006 Counterterroism Calendar, a Week-by-week desk diary for the paranoid in PDF format, with all your favourite classic terrorist and counterterrorist events marked in*. Yes really. We did that double-take too. Talk about shock and awe… and, err too much time and money on your hands.
(*Aside from those nice terrorists with US-backing, natch)

 

Top 10 worst dictators
Which brings us on to a niggle or two with Parade’s up the ten worst dictators of 2006. None of the US-backed lovelies appear (Saudi Arabia? Kuwait? Yemen? Pakistan makes it to page two). One final minor nitpick: Hu Jintao doesn’t qualify as a dictator according to their criteria: ‘A “dictator” is a head of state who exercises arbitrary authority over the lives of his citizens and who cannot be removed from power through legal means’. Hu Jintao can indeed be removed from power by legal means (the National People’s Congress), and cannot serve longer than two terms of the NPC (about 10 years). Such has been the way of it since 1982. Which begs the question if Hu can be in there, why can’t Bush? Ahem *cough* Diebold *cough* Florida. And don’t get us started on Queen Elizabeth II…

 

The Madrid bombings receive the full Kurt Nimmo treatment
So then, it’s official, if on the down low, those train bombings in Madrid had absolutely nothing to do with al-Qaeda. If it wasn’t Osama’s crew, then who was it? Allow Kurt Nimmo to elaborate.

 

Flash Nuclear Success
The new animation from Mark Fiore looks at the curious double standards on nukes displayed by the Bush administration.

 

Be corrupted absolutely
by Absolute Power. Enjoy episodes one, two, three and four of series four here.

 

Flash adbusting
Weird advertising catch lines subverted, smooth Jazz, flashing LCDs, pornography most perverted and mother-in-law jokes: this week’s adbust really has it all, in a flash format. It’s an oldie but a goodie. Click on the big blue pic to begin a tale of weird sordidness. If the one below grabs you, you’re probably ready for the whole set of Samsung tales and other Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries madness like Kim Jong-il’s Cunnilingus in North Korea speech, or Dakota, or the really way too fast Orient. Yup, either your ready for that or electroshock therapy.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then how come the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia is so much warmer?