Mass protests against US war
continue across the globe

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Mar. 4 (AGR)— As the United States government of George W. Bush continues to orchestrate it’s final moves towards a military invasion of Iraq, protests by hundreds of thousands of desperate people around the globe are becoming larger, more frequent and more widespread. Reports of anti-Bush/US war activities this past week only seemed to intensify.

On Wednesday in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, at least 100,000 people rallied against the war.

On Thursday, Feb. 27, in Naples, Italy, anti-war protesters chained themselves to a civilian ferry carrying US military vehicles to a US base in Sicily.

Thousands of people marched in Bahrain, Egypt and Yemen on Friday, burning US flags and effigies of Bush and demanding Washington scrap plans to invade Iraq.

About 5,000 Bahraini protesters marched nearly a mile to UN offices in the capital chanting “death to America, death to Israel.” Some demonstrators carried placards accusing Washington of wanting to invade Iraq to seize its oil reserves and support Israel, while others urged Bahrain’s government to close the US Navy base on this Persian Gulf island and expel the US ambassador if the United States attacks Iraq.

“Bush is the carbon copy of Hitler who is planning a genocide against the Iraqi people,” activist Fadheela al-Mahroos said as other marchers burned US and Israeli flags and carried a makeshift coffin with “Bush” scrawled on one end. Bahrain is home to the US 5th Fleet and hosts more than 4,000 American military personnel.

In Egypt, some 3,000 people staged a noisy protest outside downtown Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque against American war plans in Iraq. The protest came a day after Egypt’s largest anti-war demonstration yet, when some 100,000 people yelling “down with America” and kicking Bush effigies held a protest at Cairo’s main stadium.

That day in the Philippines, up to 50,000 people shouting anti-war slogans poured into a Manila park to show their anger at a looming US-led attack on Iraq.

“I want my voice to be heard. I am against war,” said Luz Landaos, a 51-year-old beautician, as she clutched the hand of her six-year-old granddaughter.

In the southern Arabian Peninsula nation of Yemen, about 7,000 people chanted anti-war slogans, burned an effigy of Bush and tried to march on the US Embassy in San’a. Chanting “Death to America! We are all human shields for Iraq,” the protesters were prevented by security forces from reaching the embassy.

The next day, more than 300,000 Yemenis took to the streets to denounce the United States and Israel as an “axis of evil” and urge Arab leaders meeting in Egypt to deny Washington any help in a war against Iraq.

On Saturday, police in Ireland arrested 10 activists as they tried to breach fences at Shannon airport where US military planes involved in preparation for a possible war on Iraq have been landing for months. Approximately 300 protesters from two groups marched and mounted a sit-down protest outside the airport’s entrance, where protesters last month attacked a US Navy cargo aircraft with hatchets.

“Judas Bertie [Ahern] sold our neutrality for US dollars,” read one protester’s placard, referring to the Taoiseach (prime minister).

Also on Saturday about 2,000 German and French protesters marched on the Rhine bridge near Kehl, western Germany.

In Bosnia, recalling the devastation of their own war of the last decade, up to 2,000 people carrying banners with slogans such as “Stop Bush and Save the World,” gathered in Tuzla, near the capital of Sarajevo to protest.

In Ankara, the capital of Turkey, between 50,000 and 100,000 chanting demonstrators waved banners in a square two miles from parliament.

“No to war, don’t let people die,’’ the crowd chanted in front of a stage where a large banner read, “The people will stop this war.”

“Deputies, do not give your support to the murderer Bush. Don’t play a part in killing innocent children,” read a sign carried by one woman.

In South Korea, anti-war protesters scuffled with police when about 2,000 demonstrators tried to march on the US embassy in Seoul.

The next day, more than 6,000 people in Japan rallied in Hiroshima. Strings of demonstrators spelled out “No War No DU” with their bodies in a city where more than 220,000 people were ultimately killed by a US atom bomb in the closing days of the Second World War.

DU is depleted uranium, the radioactive metal used in ammunition fired by US aircraft in the 1991 Gulf War.

That Sunday in Pakistan, up to 100,000 people, some chanting “America is the terrorist,” filled the streets of Karachi, while in India, nearly 10,000 anti-war protesters marched silently in the city of Hyderabad.

P.M. Bhargava, convener of the Forum Against War, said Sunday’s protest in Hyderabad would be followed by demonstrations in other cities.

“This march is a mass movement representing hundreds of thousands of people,” he said. “This is not a political movement, but a fight to protect human rights. If the United States attacks Iraq, it will create unprecedented chaos in the world.”

On Monday about 15,000 people held a silent rally in a city on Java Island in Indonesia. The protesters, carrying banners reading, “We want peace,” and “No war,” did not chant slogans or give speeches. Organizers said the silence symbolized their exasperation over the rhetoric of the world’s leaders.

Sources: Associated Press, BBC News, Daily Mirror (UK), Reuters

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US dirty tricks to win Iraq war vote revealed

By Thalif Deen

United Nations, Mar. 3 (IPS)— The United States came under fire Monday over news reports that key UN diplomats in the Security Council were under high-intensity surveillance by US intelligence agencies.

According to a report in the UK Observer newspaper Sunday, the United States is conducting a secret “dirty tricks” campaign against diplomats from countries that have remained non-committal on how they would vote on a proposed US-British resolution legitimizing a war on Iraq.

The campaign has been directed mostly at delegates from six non-permanent members in the Security Council: Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea, and Pakistan.

“We knew all along that senior UN officials and diplomats were under constant surveillance,” said Jim Paul of the New York-based Global Policy Forum on Monday. “But the existing surveillance has raised bugging to new levels,” he added.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer refused to offer any comments on the breaking story at a news briefing in Washington.

The newspaper quoted a memo from the National Security Agency (NSA) in Washington advising senior US intelligence officials to ferret out information not only on how delegates would vote on a second resolution but to seek out “negotiating positions” and “alliances” among Security Council members.

Dated January 31, 2003, the memo was circulated four days after the UN’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix produced his interim report on Iraqi compliance with UN resolution 1441.

It was sent by Frank Koza, chief of staff in the ‘Regional Targets’ section of the NSA, which spies on countries that are viewed as strategically important for United States interests.

Koza specifies that the information will be used for the US’s “QRC” - Quick Response Capability – “against” the key delegations.

Suggesting the levels of surveillance of both the office and home phones of UN delegation members, Koza also asks regional managers to make sure that their staff also “pay attention to existing non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms [office and home telephones] for anything useful related to Security Council deliberations.”

The plan includes interception of email messages and bugging home and office telephones of diplomats whose countries are represented in the Security Council.

“The existence of the surveillance operation, understood to have been requested by President George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, is deeply embarrassing to the Americans in the middle of their efforts to win over the undecided delegations,” the Observer noted.

A Third World diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS that delegates have always remained vulnerable to secret US surveillance. “The United States is known for its dirty tricks not just in this country but the world over,” he said.

“But what’s happening now is a sign of desperation because the United States is in a relentless search for votes. I wouldn’t be surprised if most member states are turned off by the sneaky US attempts to invade the privacy of their homes.”

The United States, which needs nine votes — and no vetoes — in the Security Council for the adoption of the resolution, has only three certain votes of support so far, besides its own: Britain, Spain, and Bulgaria. That leaves Washington needing five more ‘yeas’ out of the six still-undecided countries.

Paul said the revelation is itself not astonishing to UN delegates, who have long believed that the United States has the United Nations “heavily bugged.” “But still, the revelation shows a new, heightened surveillance that is sure to stir further anger and resentment among member states,” he added.

The telephones of senior UN officials have been routinely bugged by US intelligence agencies, said Paul.

When the United Nations was building a cafeteria years ago, there was a joke that the United States had infiltrated the construction company in order to install bugging equipment in the premises, he said.

“The US Mission to the United Nations has over 100 staffers,” Paul said. “And a good number of them are intelligence agents,” he added. In comparison, he said, the next largest foreign mission accredited to the United Nations has only about 50 employees.

The NSA memo leaked to the Observer is a very good sign, Paul said, “The spies are coming in from the cold. What will we hear next?”

An Asian diplomat Monday recounted the Cold War days of the 1960s and 1970s when the United Nations was a veritable battleground between the United States and the now-defunct Soviet Union.

US and Soviet spies were everywhere in the UN building — committee rooms, the press gallery, the Secretariat, and even in the U.N. library, which was a drop-off point for sensitive political documents. The library, it later transpired, was headed by a master Soviet spy, said the diplomat.

The extent of Cold War UN espionage was laid bare before a US congressional committee investigating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1975.

Evidence revealed that the CIA had planted one of its Russian-speaking, lip-reading experts in a press booth overlooking the Security Council chamber so that he could monitor the lip movements of Russian delegates as they consulted each other in low whispers.

In his 1978 book A Dangerous Place, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former US envoy to the United Nations, describes the cat-and-mouse espionage game that went on in the bowels of the world body.

In December 1998, Washington was accused of using the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Baghdad to intercept Iraqi security intelligence in an attempt to undermine the government of President Saddam Hussein.

The charges, spread across the front pages of the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, only confirmed the longstanding Iraqi accusation that UNSCOM was “a den of spies.”

Established by the Security Council after the 1991 Gulf War, the body was mandated to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and destroy that country’s ability to produce nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. It was the predecessor to the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), which is currently leading the effort to search for WMD in Iraq.

UNSCOM head Richard Butler denied reports that the UNSCOM office in Baghdad was wired with eavesdropping equipment to monitor secret communications among military units responsible for Saddam’s safety.

In an editorial in January 1999, the New York Times said that “using UN activities in Iraq as a cover for American spy operations would be a sure way to undermine the international organization, embarrass the United States, and strengthen Mr. Hussein.”

“Washington did cross a line it should not have if it placed American agents on the UN team with the intention of gathering information that could be used for military strikes against targets in Baghdad,” the editorial noted.

Additional information from Observer (UK)

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300,000 mentally ill in US prisons

By Duncan Campbell

Los Angeles, California, Mar. 3— Nearly 300,000 mentally ill people are held in US prisons, often because there is nowhere else for them to go. So serious is the problem that one jail in Los Angeles has become in effect the biggest mental institution in the country.

Senior police officers and mental health experts say that the situation is critical but there is a lack of political will to deal with it. Some of the mental patients spend many years in jail for minor offenses.

Twin Towers jail in central Los Angeles, which Los Angeles county sheriff’s department calls the biggest known jail in the world, has become a national symbol of the crisis. About 2,000 mentally ill prisoners, recognizable by yellow shirts and the letter M on their name tags, make up almost half its intended occupants.

“The more unstable they are, the higher up they are,” Deputy Sheriff Daniel Castro said, conducting a tour of the building where the men are housed. “Up on the seventh floor are the most unstable.”

All are on medication. It was noticeable that the higher the floor, the slower and more sluggish the movements of the inmates. “Some guys, all they do is sleep all day,” Castro said.

Many are both mentally ill and homeless, and have committed minor offences such as public drunkenness or vagrancy, or are awaiting trial. They spend most of the time lying on their bunks or watching television. A few read, but many are illiterate. They are allowed two 30-minute visits a week.

“We shouldn’t be running the largest de facto mental institution in the country,” the sheriff’s spokesman, Steve Whitmore, said yesterday. “We are doing it to the best of our ability but we just don’t have the resources. We have to have an alternative to what is going on now.”

The sheriff, Lee Baca, says it is not the job of the police and the county jails to incarcerate mentally disturbed people who have committed only misdemeanors. He would like to see a place established in central Los Angeles where they could be given treatment and help rather than locked up.

“Jails are not the appropriate place for the mentally ill,” he said yesterday, adding that the problem had been at “crisis emergency” level for some time.

Nationally the problem is growing. There were at least 283,000 inmates classified as mentally ill in 2000, according to the justice department.

It was exacerbated by the closure of many mental institutions under the “care in the community” policy introduced in the 80s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Between 1982 and 2001 the numbers of public hospital beds available for the mentally ill decreased by 69 percent.

Oscar Morgan, a senior consultant at the National Mental Health Association (NMHA) and a former mental commissioner for the state of Maryland, said it was a major issue for the prison service.

“It is acknowledged now that many people in the prison system could, with proper treatment, be elsewhere. The question is how to move them out and how to prevent them from going in the first place. One of the issues is who is responsible for their care and treatment.”

A few states are experimenting with mental health courts to deal with such cases. But the NMHA is skeptical about the idea, because it carries the risk of further criminalizing people with mental illness. And lobbyists for the rights of mental patients say they are worried that such courts could insist on coercive treatment.

In Memphis, Tennessee, the police have begun working with mental health professionals when someone clearly mentally ill is arrested.

Morgan said some mentally ill people spent years inside for minor offences because they did not know how to contact lawyers or explain their cases. There were various projects pioneered by states or individual communities to deal with the crisis but no coordinated national strategy.

Seriously ill patients complain that they are often unable to get the medication they need.

“I had a woman on the phone today whose fiancé is bipolar [manic-depressive] and who is in a facility in Florida where they won’t give him the medication he needs but have given him Prozac instead, which is completely inappropriate,” Kara Gotsch of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) national prison project said.

The woman had protested, but had then desisted because the prison authorities were retaliating against her fiancé.

“Now she is at a loss what to do.”

Gotsch said that high security prisons — supermaxes — were now being used as a dumping ground for people with serious mental problems.

“There are now large numbers of the mentally ill in solitary confinement,” she said. “They spend 23 hours out of 24 in their cell.”

The ACLU is taking legal action on behalf of mentally ill prisoners.

Last year it won a case in Little Rock, Arkansas, where a federal judge ruled that the state had violated the rights of mentally ill inmates by leaving them in jail and denying them court-ordered evaluation and treatment.

Source: Guardian (UK)

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