Guadalajara Summit condemns Iraq abuse as protesters are tortured

Compiled by Skyler Simmons

Guadalajara, Mexico, May 28 (AGR)— Protesters clashed with police as the Third Summit of Governments and Heads of State of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the European Union (ALCUE) met to discuss trade liberalization, increasing international cooperation, and the recent events in Iraq, among other topics.

Some 3-5,000 people filled the streets of Guadalajara to protest the neoliberal trade plans being discussed at the ALCUE, accusing the world leaders of selling off their countries’ resources and labor to the European Union (EU).

“It is obvious that instead of contributing toward the much proclaimed social cohesion, the summit will increase the opening of the big Latin American market to transnational companies, deepening inequalities and social insecurity,” said Denise Mendez, a member of ATTAC, an organization seeking to tax international transactions to pay off developing countries foreign debt.

Many protesters likened the EU’s trade goals to the North American Free Trade Agreement which has caused poverty to skyrocket, increased environmental destruction and sparked a civil war in Mexico.

Skirmishes broke out when police blocked the march from getting to the ALCUE meeting site. As protesters began removing the crowd control barricades that were blocking their way, police attacked them with pepper spray, tear gas, and an unidentified foam irritant. This sparked off a two-hour-long battle as protesters threw rocks, defended themselves with sticks and chains, and used aerosol cans as makeshift blowtorches in an attempt to reach the summit site.

Protesters eventually began dispersing as police gained the upper hand. In their retreat a number of outraged demonstrators broke the windows of banks and shops. Close to 100 people were arrested and at least 30 have been reported injured, many were hospitalized. Most of the arrests occurred after demonstrators had dispersed out of the streets and back onto sidewalks and public parks.

“We saw piles of our friends in the streets, lying on top of each other and covered in blood; I watched as a riot cop picked up one girl and her head flopped to the side as though she were dead, her face red from blood. That same girl, Liliana Galavis Lopez, is known to be critically injured and she is still in jail right now, not receiving medical attention, food, or water,” one protester told AGR.

Police have been refusing to release the names of those arrested, and are demanding what many activists are calling a “ransom;” by which protesters pay for all property destruction in exchange for the prisoners.

Witnesses inside the jails have reported that the arrested protesters are being subjected to torture. Reports include women being stripped naked and forced into awkward positions, and men receiving severe beatings while handcuffed on the floor. At the time of press, there are 70 people still believed to be in jail, and the local authorities released a list of 44 people they say they have in detention.

These fresh reports of torture and “disappearances” of protesters at the hands of Mexican authorities were made public almost simultaneously with ALCUE declaration expressing “abhorrence at recent evidence of the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraqi prisons.” The 104 point document goes on to call for “the commitment by the relevant governments to bring to justice any individuals responsible” for inhumane treatment of prisoners of war.

In a report released by Amnesty International (AI) also on the same day, AI called on Latin American and European Union countries to do more to protect human rights, and especially human rights workers. “The defense of human rights is an essential part of public life, activists must be free to carry out their activities on human rights without fear of punishment or reprisals. The report went on to say “This [ALCUE] is an invaluable opportunity for countries from both continents to unite in efforts to put into practice those commitments and address the dangers facing human rights activists from all sectors of society.” Something that it appears the ALCUE summit failed to accomplish on the streets of Guadalajara as police arrested and tortured people advocating for basic human rights.

The ALCUE’s final document also made broad calls for multilateralism, strengthening the UN as an arbiter of world conflicts, and more specifically ratification of the Kyoto protocol and the International Criminal Court, all of which are not-so-subtle jabs at the US, though the US is never specifically mentioned. The ambiguous language of the document sparked conflict in the meeting, especially from Cuban foreign minister Felipe Perez-Roque, who wished to see the US specifically condemned in the document. Due to this disagreement, Cuba refused to sign the document, calling the EU a “flock of sheep, subordinate to Washington.” This drew a threatening response from European Commission President Romano Prodi who fired back, “I don’t think it’s in the best interest of Cuba to confront the European Union.”

Back on the streets of Guadalajara, many protesters regarded the seemingly progressive ALCUE statement as mere lip service, accusing the world leaders of pursuing a non-democratic agenda that only serves the interests of governments and their corporate counterparts. “Although the summit organizers invited civil society representatives to express their points of view, in fact we were excluded because the governments ended up, as always, imposing their model for integration,” said Alejandro Villamar of the Mexican Action Network Against Free Trade.

AGR Staff contributed to this report.

Sources: IPS, Indymedia, Amnesty International, Associated Press

Medical experts doubt Berg behedding

By Ritt Goldstein

May 22— American businessman Nicholas Berg’s body was found on May 8 near a Baghdad overpass; a video of his supposed decapitation death by knife appeared on an alleged al-Qaida-linked website (www.al-ansar.biz ) on May 11. But according to what both a leading surgical authority and a noted forensic death expert separately told Asia Times Online, the video depicting the decapitation appears to have been staged.

“I certainly would need to be convinced it [the decapitation video] was authentic,” Dr. John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, said from New Zealand.

Echoing Simpson’s criticism, when this journalist asked forensic death expert Jon Nordby, PhD and fellow of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators, whether he believed the Berg decapitation video had been “staged,” Nordby replied: “Yes, I think that’s the best explanation of it.”

Questions of when the video’s footage was taken, and the time elapsed between the shooting of the video’s segments, were raised by both experts, reflecting a portion of the broader and ongoing video controversy. Nordby, speaking to Asia Times Online from Washington state, noted: “We don’t know how much time wasn’t filmed,” adding that “there’s no way of knowing whether ... footage is contemporaneous with the footage that follows.”

While the circumstances surrounding both the video and Nick Berg’s last days have been the source of substantive speculation, both Simpson and Nordby perceived it as highly probable that Berg had died some time prior to his decapitation. A factor in this was an apparent lack of the “massive” arterial bleeding such an act initiates.

“I would have thought that all the people in the vicinity would have been covered in blood, in a matter of seconds ... if it was genuine,” said Simpson. Notably, the act’s perpetrators appeared far from so. And separately Nordby observed: “I think that by the time they’re ... on his head, he’s already dead.”

Providing another basis for their findings, in the course of such an assault, an individual’s autonomic nervous system would react, typically doing so strongly, with the body shaking and jerking accordingly. And while Nordby noted that “they rotated and moved the head,” shifting vertebrae that should have initiated such actions, Simpson said he “certainly didn’t perceive any movements at all” in response to such efforts.

During the period when Berg’s captors filmed the decapitation sequence, circumstances indicate that he had already been dead “a quite uncertain length of time, but more than ... however long the beheading took,” Simpson stated. Both Simpson and Nordby also noted the difficulty in providing analysis based on the video, the inherent limitations presented by this. But both also felt that Berg had seemed drugged.

A particularly significant point in the video sequence occurred as Berg’s captors attacked him, bringing the supposedly fatal knife to bear. “The way that they pulled him over, they could have used a dummy at that point,” reflected Simpson regarding what the video portrayed. Separately, Nordby said Berg does not “appear to register any sort of surprise or any change in his facial expression when he’s grabbed and twisted over, and they start to bring this weapon into use.”

Subsequently, Nordby said it was likely that the filming sequence was manipulated at the point immediately preceding this, allowing Berg’s corpse to be used for the decapitation sequence. Nordby also emphasized that the video “raises more questions than it answers,” with the most fundamental questions of “who are you, and how did you die,” being impossible to answer from it. But broad speculation exists regarding a number of factors surrounding both Berg’s death and the video, and its timing in regard to revelations of US prison atrocities.

In a May 13 article, the Arabic newsgroup Al-Jazeera reported that a Dubai-based Reuters journalist first broke the story, “but while Fox News, CNN and the BBC” were able to secure the video from the “Arabic-only website” that hosted it, Aljazeera was unable to locate it.

And also on May 13, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US Central Intelligence Agency had determined that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the individual who beheaded Berg.

Since Secretary of State Colin Powell’s United Nations presentation of February 5, 2003, al-Zarqawi has been portrayed as the single most dangerous element facing the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” Powell’s UN presentation has since been widely accepted as empty; nevertheless, al-Zarqawi appears to have surpassed even Osama bin Laden as the administration’s No 1 terror target. And on May 15, Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s chief Iraq military spokesman, declared that al-Zarqawi will be eventually caught, though that may prove particularly difficult.

On March 4, Brigadier-General David Rodriguez of the Joint Chiefs of staff revealed that the Pentagon didn’t have “direct evidence of whether he’s [al-Zarqawi] alive or dead,” providing commentary on the nature of prior “evidence” linking al-Zarqawi to attacks and bombings. But that same day, AP reported that an Iraqi resistance group claimed al-Zarqawi had been killed the April prior in the US bombing of northern Iraq.

Speaking off the record, intelligence community sources have previously said they believe it “very likely” that al-Zarqawi is indeed long dead. Such a fact makes al-Zarqawi’s alleged killing of Berg difficult to reconcile, and there has been broad speculation that blaming al-Zarqawi is an administration ploy. Further anomalies surrounding Berg’s death have fueled added speculation.

According to e-mails sent from a US consular officer in Baghdad, Beth Payne, to the Berg family, Nick Berg was being held in Iraq “by the US military in Mosul.” A May 13 AP report notes that a US State Department spokesperson subsequently said this was untrue, an error, and that Berg was being held by Iraqi authorities. But another May 13 AP report quoted “police chief Major-General Mohammed Khair al-Barhawi” as claiming that reports of Iraqi police having held Berg were “baseless.”

And Berg is seen on the beheading videotape in what appears to be US military prison-issue clothing, sitting in what appears to be a US military-type white chair, virtually identical to those photographed as used at Abu Ghraib prison.

However, the taking of hostages has occurred in the region, and beheadings are not unheard of.

Because Iraq’s radical Islamists speak in a particular manner, and live by a closely proscribed code, apparent contradictions between these ways and the way Berg’s captors appeared has generated speculation. Some observers have speculated on the possibility that the individuals weren’t native Arabic speakers. Conversely, it is reported that in Saudi Arabia, where Sharia law allows for beheadings in cases of severe crimes, the condemned is heavily drugged with tranquilizers prior to the execution, reportedly leaving them in a state similar to that which Berg appeared in during parts of the video.

Again, Nordby emphasized that the video “raises more questions than it answers.”

Source: Asia Times

Community pressure saves UNCA forest

By Willy Rosencrans

June 1 (AGR)— An intensive, five-week-long community campaign to preserve a forest owned by UNCA paid off on May 26, when the university abandoned plans to develop a 300-car parking lot there. The group spearheading the preservation effort, Friends of the UNCA Urban Forest, is researching ways to preserve it for the long term.

The forest has been used for years by faculty, students, and community as an urban retreat and outdoor classroom, and is Asheville’s last significant public green space. UNCA officials began considering its potential as a site for a parking lot in response to its fall semester’s larger-than-usual incoming freshman class and other parking pressures.

Asheville residents working with university staff and students met with UNCA officials to stave off its development. Friends of the UNCA Urban Forest was formed when people suspected that dialogue with the university alone would not be enough. The group began a media outreach effort and petition drive; nearly 3,400 signatures were collected, and the fate of the forest became a community-wide concern.

Heather Rayburn, a member of the group, says public pressure was instrumental in saving the forest, but that it took a lot of work to build up that pressure.

“One day when I was asking people to sign the petition,” she recalls, “a woman said, ‘No, they’re just gonna put the parking lot in there anyway.’ That’s the kind of attitude that gets a Super Wal-Mart put in your backyard. People don’t feel like they’re empowered to do something about these issues. But this shows that people do have a say in how their community develops.

“It’s too bad we had to work so hard to be heard. But we appreciate that UNCA responded the way they did. They’ll be taking public input into a ‘master plan’ for the area this fall; we’ve been told there will be at least two meetings open to the public.”

UNCA’s new plan is to develop a parking area on the site of a former elementary school owned by the university, located on Nantahela Street. Work on the site is expected to begin in two to four weeks and will be completed by mid-August. 

On the central campus, UNCA will temporarily convert the use of three open areas to create 100 parking spaces. Construction which would have lost the university 145 parking spaces will be temporarily postponed. Offices of Admissions and Student Life will develop a plan to limit on-campus freshman parking. The university will also continue to work with the Asheville Transit System.

Organics program weakened under Bush administration

By Amanda Griscom

May 18— Over the course of 10 days in mid-April, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued three “guidances” and one directive — all legally binding interpretations of law — that threaten to seriously dilute the meaning of the word organic and discredit the department’s National Organic Program.

And the changes — which would allow the use of antibiotics on organic dairy cows, synthetic pesticides on organic farms, and more — were made with zero input from the public or the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), the advisory group that worked for more than a decade to help craft the first federal organic standards, put in place in October 2002.

The USDA insists that the changes are innocuous: “The directives have not changed anything. They are just clarifications of what is in the regulations that were written by the National Organic Standards Board,” USDA spokesperson Joan Shaffer said. “They just explain what’s enforceable. There is no difference [between the clarifications and the original regulations] — it’s just another way of explaining it.”

But Jim Riddle, vice chair of the NOSB and endowed chair in agricultural systems at the University of Minnesota, argues that what the USDA is trying to pass off as a clarification of regulations is actually a substantial change: “These are the sorts of changes for which the department is supposed to do a formal new rulemaking process, with posting in the federal register, feedback from our advisory board, and a public-comment period. And yet there is no such process denoted anywhere.”

Organic activists suspect that industry pressure drove the policy shifts. They point out that the USDA leadership has long-standing industry sympathies: Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman served on the board of directors of a biotech company, and both her chief of staff and her director of communications were plucked right out of National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

“Even though it evolved as a reaction against large-scale American agribusinesses, the organic food industry has seen tremendous growth, roughly 20 to 24 percent a year for the past 10 years,” said Ronnie Cummins, founder and national director of the Organic Consumers Association. “That, not surprisingly, has brought with it investments from big business and demands for conventional farming practices more favorable to mass production.”

One practice favored by large agribusiness is the use of antibiotics on cows, and a guidance [PDF] issued on April 14 will allow just that on organic dairy farms, a dramatic reversal of 2002 rules. Under the new guidelines, sickly dairy cows can be treated not just with antibiotics but with numerous others drugs and still have their milk qualify as organic, so long as 12 months pass between the time the treatments are administered and the time the milk is sold.

“This new directive makes a mockery of organic standards,” said Richard Wood, a recent member of the FDA’s Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee and executive director of Food Animal Concerns Trust. “Organic farmers that we have talked to are furious because they have been very careful to follow the antibiotics rule. [The rule change] undercuts their ability to make a living doing things right.”

“Furthermore,” said Wood, “the use of antibiotics will reduce the pressure on organic farmers to provide healthy accommodations for their livestock. If they know they can pump their animals up with drugs, they won’t have to worry so much about disease spreading when cows are penned up in close quarters, or about weaning calves from their mothers at an unnaturally early age.”

“It’s hard to deny that this looks awfully like a political move by USDA to do the bidding of larger dairy operations that want to produce organic milk by expanding their herds with cattle that were once on non-organic farms,” Wood said.

Another new guidance put out on the same day would allow cattle farmers to feed their heifers non-organic fishmeal that could be riddled with synthetic preservatives, mercury, and PCBs and still sell their beef as organic.

And the following week, on Apr. 23, the USDA took the particularly egregious step of issuing a legal directive that opens the door for use of some synthetic pesticides on organic farms.

Previously, organic farmers were only allowed to use natural, non-toxic pesticides on their crops, which effectively prohibited use of pesticides with hidden ingredients (pesticide manufacturers often don’t list certain ingredients, claiming the information is proprietary).

According to the new guidelines, however, organic farmers and certifiers are only required to make a “reasonable effort” to find out what is in the pesticides being applied to crops. “If they can’t come up with the info on toxic inert ingredients that may be in their pesticides, they’re off the hook,” said Liana Hoodes, organic policy coordinator for the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture (NCSA). “This takes all the pressure off of pesticide manufacturers to reveal their ingredients and develop non-toxic products. In fact, it creates a disincentive.”

Last but certainly not least, another guidance released on Apr. 14 narrows the scope of the federal organic certification program to crops and livestock and the products derived from them, meaning that national organic standards will not be developed for fish, nutritional supplements, pet food, fertilizers, cosmetics, and personal-care products.

“Consumers beware. This basically allows any opportunistic company to put fraudulent ‘organic’ labels on products outside of the regulated domain, without any liability concerns,” Hoodes said.

There have never been federal organic standards for these product categories — which is why you cannot now trust an “organic” label on a bottle of shampoo or a package of farm-raised salmon — but the USDA had previously said it would develop such standards. In anticipation of that eventuality, many companies have invested millions of dollars over the past decade to develop fish farms and factories for non-agricultural products that adhere to criteria consistent with those for organic crops and livestock.

“All that effort has just flown out the window,” Cummins said“It’s an outrage for the 30 million consumers who pay a premium for organic products and expect that they can trust the organic claim.”

The USDA rejects activists’ interpretation of this particular guidance: “There’s a process to go through [to develop organic guidelines for non-agricultural categories] and it hasn’t happened [yet],” said Shaffer. “It could still happen. I’m not clairvoyant.”

Despite the USDA’s demurrals, activists view the department’s changes as a serious threat to hard-won standards for organic products. The NCSA and other groups are investigating possible industry influence into the USDA’s process, and some environmental groups are preparing to take legal action.
“Secretary Veneman should withdraw these new directives and follow the appropriate rulemaking procedures,” said Riddle of the NOSB. “We want them withdrawn and to do it right.”

Source: Grist Magazine