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AIDS demo in DC draws hundreds

Fate of anti-Castro Latin America aide uncertain

Nation Briefs

AIDS demo in DC draws hundreds

Washington, DC, Nov. 26— Over 500 people marched in DC today to demand funding for AIDS treatment instead of funding for war. Thirty-one activists were arrested for lying down in front of the White House.

Protesters rallied for funding AIDS treatment
in Washington, DC, on Nov. 26, 2002.

The demonstration, organized by Health GAP (Global Access Project) and ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), drew attention to the Bush administration’s lack of initiative to combat the AIDS epidemic. Currently, 40 million people have AIDS, with that number expected to grow to 100 million by the year 2010. Most people with AIDS are too poor to afford the prices charged by US pharmaceuticals for lifesaving medications.

Protesters started with a rally at McPhearson Square. There, Sheila Kabuka spoke about the devastation caused by AIDS in Africa and asked that Bush not visit Africa unless he comes with a plan to deal with the disease. She said that 27 million people in Africa are infected and another 70 million people have died of AIDS, while only 30,000 people are receiving treatment. Kabula also told the crowd of protesters and passersby that, added together, African countries pay more on their debt than they do on health and education combined.

"We know that America has the political and economic power to turn the tide…and we are pleading with Bush not to go to Africa if he has nothing to offer…[in Afrcia] you don’t go to mourning empty-handed," she said.

Protesters then marched to Lafayette Square while chanting "Global AIDS is the threat, prevention, treatment, drop the debt," "We need billions, 2.5, to save 40 million lives," and "Bush Jr. Bush Sr., which one dealt with AIDS, neither." They carried black "body bags" to symbolize those who have died from AIDS.

Sally Booker, with Action Africa, said, "We are here because we know what the real code red is — it’s the global AIDS pandemic….In twenty years people will ask — as they asked about the holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda — how could the US know and do nothing?" Booker’s answer was that the US doesn’t act because most people in the world who have AIDS are black, because the US government wants to protect the pharmaceutical companies, and because the world is divided along lines of a global apartheid — black from white, rich from poor, and powerful from powerless.

A diverse group of 31 protesters then crossed to the White House to "deliver a message to our President." The group sat down, covered themselves with a banner stating "AIDS: A Code Red Emergency. We Demand Billions to Save Lives Now," and locked together with a metal chain. Slowly, police handcuffed each demonstrator and brought them to the waiting vans. Many were dragged along the ground, and one woman was dragged into the van facedown.

Health GAP’s demands:

• Funding and personnel as needed to implement a plan to treat three million HIV worldwide by 2005, including comprehensive care services and significant increases in contributions to the Global Fund.
  
• Debt cancellation for the poorest countries, freeing up new funds for locally directed health and education spending.
  
• Passage of the Early Treatment for HIV Act (ETHA) which extends Medicaid coverage to perhaps hundreds of thousands of people with HIV in the US who are not yet poor and sick enough to qualify for medication.
  
• Increases in AIDS Drug Assistance Programs funding to get AIDS medicines to people with AIDS in the US currently on waiting lists because the Bush budget has not kept pace with the growing epidemic at home.
  
• Science-based HIV prevention at home and internationally, supporting the lives of vulnerable people, instead of budget cuts and audits targeting agencies serving that women, people of color, gays and lesbians, youth and drug users.

Source: DC Indymedia

Fate of anti-Castro Latin America aide uncertain

Analysis by Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Nov. 29 (IPS)— Otto Reich, the top State Department official for US policy toward Latin America, is no doubt on something of an emotional roller-coaster during this year’s long Thanksgiving Day weekend.

The champion of the hard-line, anti-Castro crowd in Miami had hoped that President George W. Bush would have announced his intention to re-nominate Reich to the position of assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, the post he held until a week ago when his unusual one-year appointment expired.

After all, with Republicans back in control of the Senate, Bush only had to give the word and the former Cuban exile would be well on his way to the full-blown Senate confirmation hearing that his Democratic foes denied him when they controlled the Senate.

And, despite a number of gaffes committed by Reich during his tenure, neither the president nor even Sec. of State Colin Powell, who opposed Reich’s initial appointment, has expressed a lack of confidence — at least, publicly — in his ability to get the job done.

But to the growing distress of his Cuban-American supporters, the White House has not indicated whether it intends to re-nominate Reich, and signs are growing that his prospects for returning to his seventh-floor office in the State Department are questionable.

On the day that his appointment expired last week, Powell named him to a new post as “special envoy” to Latin America. Pressed by reporters, Powell’s spokesman, Richard Boucher, said he could not describe precisely what the job’s responsibilities would include.

Reich was also nowhere in evidence during last week’s trip by Powell and several other cabinet secretaries to Mexico City to meet their counterparts in Vicente Fox’s administration.

Then came news Wednesday that the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, moderate Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, had privately asked the White House to submit someone other than Reich for confirmation as assistant secretary. Lugar, who replaces ultra-right-winger Jesse Helms as the senior Committee Republican, is close to Powell.

“I think we really need a very, very strong leader who has strong bipartisan confidence,” given political turmoil that is roiling the region, Lugar told the Associated Press.

It now appears that the administration, whose deep ideological divisions over Iraq colors its foreign policy virtually everywhere else, is having a difficult time deciding what face to present to Latin America over the next two years.

On the one hand, re-nominating Reich would not only reassure Bush’s right-wing base, especially in south Florida, where their turnout in 2000 made Bush’s election possible, but it would also signal a degree of continuity and steadiness of purpose on the part of a president who does not like to admit mistakes.

On the other hand, the stakes in Latin America are clearly growing, with the sweeping election victories of left-wing populist candidates and parties in Brazil and the Andes, the disenchantment with neo-liberal economic policies, the collapse of the Argentine and Paraguayan economies and the launch of serious negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement for the Americas (FTAA).

“The region is moving to the populist left, but he’s a die-hard right-winger,” noted Bill Goodfellow of the Washington-based Center for International Policy (CIP) who strongly opposes Reich.
“And his persistent obsession with Cuba and maintaining the [42-year-old US trade] embargo is not shared by any of the Latin American leaders, who fear that this obsession only makes it more difficult to tackle more-urgent issues.”

Like many of Reich’s foes, Goodfellow’s opposition arose during the 1980s, when Reich ran the Reagan administration’s Office of Public Diplomacy — which one government investigative agency found to be an illegal, covert operation — to rally domestic support for the Nicaraguan contras. That role led senior Democrats last year to deny him a confirmation hearing, thus forcing Bush to appoint him by executive order to a one-year term.

But opposition to Reich now is also rooted in his more recent performance.

Immediately after the attempted coup d’etat against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez last April, Reich made it appear that the administration welcomed the coup, a suggestion that he furthered by lecturing Latin American ambassadors invited to his office on the importance of supporting the new government (which quickly dissolved in the face of Chavez’ return).

While Reich insisted that he never intended to support the coup and had no role in fomenting it, the episode, “badly damage[d] US credibility on democracy questions and revealed that the US had completely isolated itself on this issue,” according to Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a multi-national think tank based in Washington, DC.

Stung by the reaction, Reich has endlessly repeated Washington’s rejection of any act in Venezuela that would violate constitutional processes, although he finds it difficult to hide his aversion to Chavez. On Thursday, for example, he told a Caracas television station that if Chavez did not resign after 90 percent of citizens rejected his leadership in a non-binding referendum, the Venezuelan leader “would be, at the very least, putting in doubt his commitment to democracy.”

Similarly, on economic issues and the growing rejection of neo-liberalism, Reich has been politically tone-deaf. He has harangued Argentines about their failure to further liberalize their economy, constantly cites El Salvador as a model — apparently oblivious to the huge role played by remittances from relatives in the United States in keeping the country’s economy afloat — and repeatedly decries efforts by farm-state lawmakers, in particular, to exempt food from the Cuba trade embargo.

Nation Briefs

Advocates sue to prevent deportations
to Somalia

A lawsuit filed by immigrant advocates asks a federal court to stop all US deportations of Somalis because the East African nation has no functioning government to accept deportees and the deportation violates international law and treaties including the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) contends the deportations are legal because the deportees are not rejected when they enter Somalia. An INS spokesperson said the US government has a responsibility to deport noncitizens who have committed certain crimes or been denied asylum. (AP)

Dark corner of Harvard’s past

About six months ago Amit R. Paley was doing research in the Harvard archives’ holdings when he came across an entry for “Secret Court Files, 1920.” This reference led Paley to 500 pages of documents describing the Harvard administrations methodical harassment of gays. A secret “Court” was authorized by Harvard’s then president, and zealously set out to protect the college from scandal. One teacher and eight students out of those victimized were ousted from the college and essentially run out of town. Most of those “tried” were found “guilty” and not only told to leave the college, but also the city of Cambridge. Letters were added to the student files of those ousted, which dissuaded the college’s Alumni Placement Service from “making any statement that would indicate confidence in these men.” Two of those men later committed suicide. (NYT)

Terror alert beepers for US citizens?

Because media broadcasts may spread news too slowly in emergencies, a group of US security experts recommended that US citizens carry government-issued beepers for alerts of pending nuclear attack, biological threat, or tornado. Partnership for Public Warning, a 30-member panel including representatives of the FBI and American Red Cross, said a national system could send warnings to citizens via their pagers, mobile phones, or computer screens. The group called on the newly established Homeland Security Department to spearhead the technology, which would be produced by private industry and operated by governments and selected other organizations following strict protocols. The Partnership did not criticize the nation’s current color-coded alert system, but cited broad public apprehension over current US warning systems. (Reuters)

Delay of US audit probed in Florida

At the request of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s office, Janet Rehnquist, the inspector general of the Health and Human Services Department ordered delays in a federal audit of Florida’s pension fund that ensured the review wouldn’t be completed before Bush won re-election, officials say. The delays are now being investigated by Congress. A former Rehnquist deputy, recently retired, said he couldn’t recall another case during his quarter-century career with the watchdog agency in which an inspector general intervened personally to postpone an audit. The audit of Florida’s state employee pension fund was scheduled to have begun April 15, but didn’t start until five months later. (AP)

Supreme Court
to take affirmative action case

The Supreme Court will decide by June, 2003 if race can be a factor in college admissions. The justices will consider whether white applicants to the University of Michigan and its law school were unconstitutionally turned down because of their race. The cases give the court an opportunity to ban affirmative action in higher education or say how much weight universities may assign to an applicant’s race. Affirmative action supporters argue that without policies that encourage diverse student bodies, the top public colleges in the country would not be representative. Opponents contend that those policies discriminate against white students, giving slots to less qualified minorities. A divided appeals court upheld the law school’s practices in May, saying the Constitution allows colleges and graduate schools to seek “a meaningful number” of minority students, so long as the school avoids a fixed quota system. (AP)

US government asks court to seal vaccine records

Department of Justice lawyers asked the US Court of Federal Claims to seal documents on hundreds of cases of autism allegedly caused by childhood vaccines, arguing that allowing their automatic disclosure would take away the right of federal agencies to decide when and how the material should be released. The court is currently hearing approximately 1,000 claims brought by the families of autistic children. The suits charge that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine can cause neurological damage leading to autism. Federal law requires suits against vaccine makers to go before a special federal “vaccine court” before any civil lawsuit is allowed.

The request by the Bush administration would prevent plaintiffs who later go to civil court from using some relevant evidence generated during the required vaccine court proceedings. One lawyer representing the families accused the government of trying to lower “a shroud of secrecy over these documents” in order to protect vaccine manufacturers. (Reuters)

In an age of biowarfare, US sees new role for nukes

The US is rethinking the future of its weapons of mass destruction. Among the issues being discussed are these: the resumption of nuclear weapons testing; ambivalence over controlling chemical and biological weapons at a time when advancing technology offers new opportunities to control the battlefield; and the possible development of tactical nuclear bombs.

The Pentagon’s congressionally mandated Nuclear Posture Review calls for a “revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will ... be able, if directed, to design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements; and maintain readiness to resume underground nuclear testing if required.” One of the attractions of small nuclear weapons, in the eyes of some theorists, is that they can more effectively destroy biological or chemical stockpiles than can conventional explosives.

As is often the case, those in uniform tend to be more cautious than their civilian bosses. “In my experience, there is little to zero interest among military leaders in actually using nuclear weapons,” said Larry Seaquist, a retired Navy warship captain and Pentagon strategist.
(Christian Science Monitor)

At DOJ, freedom NOT to release
information

Last October, the Justice Department cited the Sept. 11 attacks in a memo to federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) officers that stated, “When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions.”

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) collects and analyzes government data, such as the number of cases referred by the FBI to US attorneys offices, and gauges the effectiveness of the front line of federal law enforcement in the US. Five years ago the Reno Justice Department stopped providing data to TRAC. The organization sued and the Justice Department settled out of court. Then the department reneged. TRAC sued again. The case is pending. Meanwhile, after the Sept. 11 attacks, TRAC data revealed that US attorneys around the country had declined to prosecute a large proportion of terrorism cases referred by the FBI and other agencies.

Such embarrassments have continued to upset Justice Department bureaucrats. In March, Teresa Davis of the Executive Office of US Attorneys wrote that monthly FOIA requests for data would be delayed to make sure releasing data did not “jeopardize the department’s counter-terrorism efforts or threaten national security.”
(Washington Post)

USA PATRIOT
Act earns council’s unanimous ‘no’ vote

On Nov. 23, through a vote of the city council, Eugene, Oregon became the 15th local government in the United States to formally seek reform or repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act. The council chamber was packed with over 200 people giving testimony during public comment of lost liberties, ideals in peril and heartfelt fear of unchecked government. Many told of feeling targeted by the Act – not only because of their politics, but also due to national heritage, religious beliefs or skin color. Muhammed Kahn, a doctor in Eugene said: “I just want to quote Benjamin Franklin, who said, ‘Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither.’”

Resolutions are varied among the governments that passed them, but most express a general concern about an erosion of fundamental rights and ask local police to report any federal request for enforcement under provisions of the Act. The other 14 local governments who oppose the Act are: Berkeley, CA; Santa Cruz, CA; Boulder, CO; Denver, CO; Alachua County, FL; Takoma Park, MD; Amherst, MA; Cambridge, MA; Leverett, MA; North Hampton, MA; Ann Arbor, MI; Santa Fe, NM; Carrboro, NC; and Madison, WI.
(Oregon Register-Guard)