People protest acquittal of Cincinnati police officer

By David Walsh

Sept. 28— City officials in Cincinnati imposed a state of emergency early Thursday in response to protests against the acquittal of a policeman who killed an unarmed black youth earlier this year. Mayor Charlie Luken also instituted an overnight curfew effective 12:30am Thursday; the mayor said he expected the curfew to begin again Thursday night at 10pm. Police called in backups and put all officers on 12-hour shifts. Protesters set fires and threw rocks and bottles Wednesday night as word of the verdict spread. One arrest was made.

Citizens were reacting to the decision by a municipal court judge Wednesday to clear Officer Stephen Roach of all charges in the shooting death of 19-year-old Timothy Thomas. The incident on April 7 set off four days of protest and rioting in which nearly 800 people were arrested in the largest civil disturbance in the US since the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Thomas was the fifteenth black man killed in encounters with Cincinnati police since 1995. Roach is believed to be the first Cincinnati policeman ever brought to trial for fatally shooting a suspect.

Hamilton County Municipal Judge Ralph E. Winkler, who heard the case without a jury at Roach’s request, summarily dismissed the charges of negligent homicide and obstructing official business — two misdemeanors that carried a combined maximum sentence of nine months in prison.

In reference to Officer Roach, Winkler declared: “The reasonableness of an officer’s action should be judged from the officers on the scene perspective of the facts.... If an officer mistakenly believed that a suspect was likely to fight back, the officer might be justified in using more force than was actually necessary. In such situations, an officer’s action should not be subjected to 20/20 hindsight or Monday morning quarterbacking.”

The judge also insinuated that Thomas was a menace to society: “Timothy Thomas was not unknown to the Cincinnati police. He had 14 open warrants.” In fact, these were misdemeanor warrants, including traffic violations and two for running from the police.

Following the verdict, Special Prosecutor Stephen McIntosh expressed concern about whether Thomas’s actions had figured too prominently in the judge’s decision. “The person who was on trial here is Officer Roach,” he observed, “not Mr. Thomas.”

The April 7 shooting took place in Cincinnati’s impoverished Over-the-Rhine district at 2am. Roach was one of several police officers who chased Thomas. The other officers testified at the trial that they did not draw their weapons, nor feel any need to do so. The prosecution argued that the killing took place because Roach was running with his finger on the trigger of his 9mm revolver, rather than waiting until a threat was perceived as police officers are supposed to do.

Roach was charged with obstructing official business for giving three contradictory accounts of the shooting. First, he told fellow officers that the gun “just went off.” Later, while being questioned by investigators, he gave a detailed story, saying he thought that Thomas was reaching for a gun. When investigators told him that his statement was contradicted by a police cruiser camera’s recording of his actions, he changed his story yet again. In his final version he claimed that Thomas had come around a corner, startling him and causing him to shoot.

During the trial police homicide investigator Charles Beaver testified that he didn’t believe Roach’s story. Beaver said he had concluded that the detailed description given by the accused cop was scripted: “In my training, it’s very unusual for not just police witnesses, but civilian witnesses, to have that kind of recall.”

Source: World Socialist Web Site: www.wsws.org

Hackers face life imprisonment under ‘Anti-Terrorism’ Act

By Kevin Poulsen

Sept. 23— Hackers, virus-writers and web site defacers would face life imprisonment without the possibility of parole under legislation proposed by the Bush Administration that would classify most computer crimes as acts of terrorism.

The Justice Department is urging Congress to quickly approve its Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), a twenty-five page proposal that would expand the government’s legal powers to conduct electronic surveillance, access business records, and detain suspected terrorists.

The proposal defines a list of “Federal terrorism offenses” that are subject to special treatment under law. The offenses include assassination of public officials, violence at international airports, some bombings and homicides, and politically-motivated manslaughter or torture.

Most of the terrorism offenses are violent crimes, or crimes involving chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. But the list also includes the provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that make it illegal to crack a computer for the purpose of obtaining anything of value, or to deliberately cause damage. Likewise, launching a malicious program that harms a system, like a virus, or making an extortionate threat to damage a computer are included in the definition of terrorism.

To date no terrorists are known to have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But several recent hacker cases would have qualified as “Federal terrorism offenses” under the Justice Department proposal, including the conviction of Patrick Gregory, a prolific web site defacer who called himself “MostHateD”; Kevin Mitnick, who plead guilty to penetrating corporate networks and downloading proprietary software; Jonathan “Gatsby” Bosanac, who received 18-months in custody for cracking telephone company computers; and Eric Burns, the Shoreline, Washington hacker who scrawled “Crystal, I love you” on a United States Information Agency web site in 1999. The 19-year-old was reportedly trying to impress a classmate with whom he was infatuated.

The Justice Department submitted the ATA to Congress late last week as a response to the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that killed some 7,000 people.

As a “Federal terrorism offense,” the five year statute of limitations for hacking would be abolished retroactively — allowing computer crimes committed decades ago to be prosecuted today — and the maximum prison term for a single conviction would be upped to life imprisonment. There is no parole in the federal justice system.

Those convicted of providing “advice or assistance” to cyber crooks, or harboring or concealing a computer intruder, would face the same legal repercussions as an intruder. Computer intrusion would also become a predicate offense for the RICO statutes.

DNA samples would be collected from hackers upon conviction, and retroactively from those currently in custody or under federal supervision. The samples would go into the federal database that currently catalogs murderers and kidnappers.

Civil liberties groups have criticized the ATA for its dramatic expansion of surveillance authority, and other law enforcement powers.

Attorney General John Ashcroft urged swift adoption of the measure Monday.

The Act is scheduled for mark-up by the committee Tuesday morning.

Source: Security Focus: www.securityfocus.com

International news coverage shrinks in era of globalization

By David Shaw

Sept. 27— Coverage of international news by the U.S. media has declined significantly in recent years in response to corporate demands for larger profits and an increasingly fragmented audience.

Having decided that readers and viewers in post-Cold War America cared more about celebrities, scandals and local news, newspaper editors and television news executives have reduced the space and time devoted to foreign coverage by 70% to 80% during the past 15 to 20 years.

Most media in the US -- like most Americans -- have historically shown less interest in foreign news than have the media and citizens of many other countries. But the amount of time and space devoted to international news here have declined still further in recent years.

Time magazine has reduced its foreign correspondent corps from 33 in 1989 to 24 this year. ABC News has decreased its foreign bureaus from 17 to seven in the last 15 years. The other networks also have cut back. Even CNN—the network created to cover all the news, all the time, with a foreign press corps that grew steadily from its founding in 1980—began to shift away from hard news, both at home and abroad, this year. In what Isaacson acknowledges was an effort to “chase ratings” against all-news rivals Fox and MSNBC, CNN was moving toward more entertaining, provocative talk about the news, as well as increased “soft news.”

Last year, an industry initiative called the Project on the State of the American Newspaper found that there were only 282 correspondents working abroad as full-time staffers or on exclusive contracts for all the nation’s daily newspapers.

More than one-third of those work for the Wall Street Journal, which focuses primarily on financial news. The nation’s three major metropolitan dailies -- the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post -- each have 20 or more foreign bureaus that provide substantial international coverage. Together, they account for almost another third of the 282 foreign correspondents. The remainder of the almost 1,500 daily U.S. papers have fewer than 100 foreign correspondents among them.

Some regional papers in areas with rapidly growing immigrant populations have increased coverage of the countries that provide those immigrants. The Dallas Morning News has done that in Mexico, for example, and the San Jose Mercury News has done it in Vietnam.

Many news executives say they don’t have to maintain large overseas contingents today because modern transportation and communications technology make it possible for them to cover stories and move staff quickly when a crisis erupts.

But as Peter Arnett, the longtime foreign correspondent for CNN and Associated Press, wrote in 1998, that approach means that for most Americans “there is no international news available anywhere unless there is a major crisis ... Individual papers that once rightly bragged on their own foreign affairs coverage -- Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, the Detroit News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to name a few -- virtually gave it up.”

A 1998 study by UC San Diego found that only 2% of total newspaper coverage focused on international news, a drop from 10% in 1983.

The amount of time that network television devotes to international news shrank from 45% of total coverage in the 1970s to 13.5% in 1995 -- a decline of more than 70% -- according to a 1997 study by Harvard University. The Tyndall Report, which monitors the content of network news shows, says ABC, CBS and NBC combined carried only 1,382 minutes of news from their foreign bureaus last year, a plunge of more than 65% from 1989.

This deterioration has taken place as the U.S. immigrant population is burgeoning -- 44% of the nation’s 30 million foreign-born residents arrived here in the 1990s -- and at a time when the globalization of commerce, communications and culture have made the people of once-diverse nations, including this one, increasingly interdependent.

“The sad irony is that we’ve identified globalism as one of the dominant issues in the world today, and yet one of the first things many editors cut back on is foreign news,” says Stuart Wilk, managing editor of the Dallas Morning News.

Maintaining a foreign staff is expensive. But reductions in foreign coverage cannot be attributed solely to high costs. The Associated Press -- with 95 foreign bureaus -- the New York Times News Service and the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, among others, have continued to provide reams of foreign copy daily, at no extra charge, in the package of news and features they provide their media clients.

But beginning in the late 1970s, after the Vietnam War ended, and increasingly in the late ’80s and into the ’90s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, most news executives decided that Americans weren’t interested in international news.

And yet, when the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press asked Americans in 1996 what kinds of stories they regularly followed, 15% named international news; that was 1% below Washington politics and just ahead of consumer news (14%) and celebrity news (13%).

If Americans really aren’t interested in foreign news, that may be because the news media “haven’t done a very good job of making foreign news seem relevant,” Wilk says. “We have to realize that maybe the problem isn’t foreign news so much as we how we cover foreign news.”

Source: Los Angeles Times

Colombia mobilization generates energy and focus

By Andrew Summers

Washington, DC, Sept. 28— Over 200 activists representing communities and religious groups from all over the United States and Colombia gathered in Washington, DC for the National Mobilization on Colombia on September 27 and 28. The National Mobilization is a coalition of organizations and individuals working to transform US policy in Colombia and the Andean region. Witness for Peace organized the event in order to lobby Congress and to generate strategies for local and national actions.

The shadow of the September 11 terrorist attacks deeply influenced the context of the gathering. An interfaith service provided an opportunity for reflection and mourning for the victims of violence in the United States and Colombia. But participants were forceful in asserting that while impunity for terrorists is never justified, the cries of grief produced by September 11 are not a cry for war. The service called to mind a statement attributed to Albert Camus, “I would like to be able to love my country and justice at the same time.”

Many Colombians testified to the reality of the cycle of violence. The opening session was a time to hear voices from Colombia address the reality of the crisis facing their country. They called for development assistance so small farmers can support their families by growing legal crops, for strong support of the peace process, and for strengthening the legal system. At the present time, almost 80 percent of $l.3 billion aid package from the United States known as Plan Colombia brings military helicopters and fumigation planes. The current aid package in Congress, the Andean Regional Initiative, will spread the main elements of Plan Colombia over the entire region. Participants in the conference maintained that the US program is a formula for failure.

Discussions included the drug war and US policy, displacement and refugees, the plight of Afro-Colombians, how globalization impacts Colombia, the human and environmental costs of aerial fumigation, labor and indigenous issues, the current status of the peace process, and strategies for change.

An especially high energy event was the gathering of over 40 people who had been to Colombia in a Witness for Peace delegation this year. (Since January 200 US citizens have been on delegations to Colombia.) This group came to the meeting with reflections on their actions in their local communities and appointments to visit the office of their senators to discuss Colombian policy. Ten of the delegates also met at the State Department with Jonathan Farrar, the Deputy Director of Andean Affairs, for dialogue and current information on US policy to Colombia.

The Andean Regional Initiative is expected to come before the Senate for a vote soon, perhaps as early as this week. Activists urged concerned citizens to contact their senators immediately and urge them to reduce military aid and replace it with development aid.

The final afternoon focused on ways to build a national movement for changing US policy from one that perpetuates violence, environmental devastation, and injustice to one that strengthens the peace process, the judicial system, and development projects for small farmers.

No speaker was more powerful and gripping than Marino Cordoba, the President of the Association of Afro-Colombian Displaced Persons. Cordoba spoke of the plight of his people, who have been driven from their lands by paramilitary groups which spread terror and seize land. In the past five years over 5 million Colombians have become internal refugees. Although about 25 percent of Colombians are of African decent, they account for 70 percent of those forcibly displaced by violence.

This Thursday, October 4, Marino Cordoba will be speaking at 7:30 in Asheville at Issues International Newstand located at 32 Biltmore Avenue (near the Fine Arts Theater). This is open to the public. To gain a clear grip of the crisis in Colombia, come hear Marino Cordoba.

Bush Sr. in business with bin Laden family

Washington, DC, Sept. 28— Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, reacted with disbelief to the recent Wall Street Journal report that George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm. The senior Bush has met with the bin Laden familyat least twice. (Other top Republicans are also associated with the Carlyle group, such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker.)

The terrorist leader Osama bin Laden had supposedly been “disowned” by his family, which runs a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and is a major investor in the senior Bush’s firm. Other reports have questioned, though, whether members of his Saudi family have truly cut off Osama bin Laden. Indeed, the Journal also reported that the FBI has subpoenaed the bin Laden family business’s bank records.

Judicial Watch earlier this year had strongly criticized President Bush’s father’s association with the Carlyle Group, pointing out in a Mar. 5 statement that it was a “conflict of interest (which) could cause problems for America’s foreign policy in Middle East and Asia.” Judicial Watch called for the senior Bush to resign from the firm then.

“This conflict of interest has now turned into a scandal. The idea of the President’s father, an ex-president himself, doing business with a company under investigation by the FBI in the terror attacks of September 11 is horrible. President Bush should not ask, but demand, that his father pull out of the Carlyle Group,” stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman.

“This has the potential of making ‘Billygate’ (Jimmy Carter’s brother’s dealings with Libya) look like small potatoes,” added Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Source: Judicial Watch: www.judicialwatch.org

Environmental activist accused of ‘supporting terrorists’

Sept. 28— Activist Connor Cash, who was charged with Earth Liberation Front (ELF) actions just a few months ago, was officially charged with “providing material support to terrorists” yesterday.

Cash was previously charged with arson and vandalism for a series of actions claimed by the ELF last year in Long Island. Cash is accused of aiding ELF activists when he drove them to unspecified Suffolk County sites where acts of vandalism and arson were committed and by buying the gasoline used to set fire to five homes under construction in Mount Sinai in December.

He already could be sentenced to up to 40 years in prison if convicted of the arson charges. The additional count could add another 10 years in prison. Such a lengthy sentence would be unlikely under federal sentencing guidelines, however.

The government claims it is coincidental that an anti-terrorism statute was used against Cash so soon after the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and Pentagon. This seems to be the first example of the government using the WTC attacks to further increase repression on the Earth liberation movement.

Source: A-Infos News Service: www.ainfos.ca

For more information: www.longislandrevolt.org