Over and over, the U.S. government has rounded up groups of people for various terrorism charges — and it is clear that over and over it was informants and agent provocateurs who helped manipulated their targets “over the line” into serious illegality.
An NYU study claims that police infiltrators and informants played a role in 62% of U.S. “terror” cases.
The following article in the New York Times examines this issue of entrapment — focusing on the recent Portland case wherea small group were provided with a fake bomb by police forces and then charged with a plot.
It is extremely important for many different kinds of people to be alert to this widespread tactic of the government — which is determined to keep “uncovering sleeper cells” and so with provocateurish tactics helps invent them — creating massive publicity both for the existance of an “internal” danger and for their own police vigilance in tracking that danger down. Often they have prodded naive and impressionable young men into illegal actions that would probably not otherwise have happened.
* * * * * *
“Some defense lawyers and civil rights advocates said the government’s tactics, particularly since the Sept. 11 attacks, have raised questions about the possible entrapment of people who pose no real danger but are enticed into pretend plots at the government’s urging.”
“A study this year by the Center on Law and Security at New York University, which tracks terrorism cases, found that of 156 prosecutions in what it identified as the most significant 50 cases since 2001, informers were relied on in 97 of them, or 62 percent.
“The entrapment defense has often been raised, but as of September, it had never been successful in producing an acquittal in a post-Sept. 11 terrorism trial, the study found.”
Often in the long-standing debates of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), party conferences ended by announcing a merged or compromise position.
Some initial reports from the recent Central Committee meeting suggest that this time has been different.And, in particular in this article the argument is made that the ability of party chairman Prachanda to act as a unifying center within the party has been weakened by the sharpness of differences and the urgency of acting upon one or another strategic decision.
The long-standing and intensifying political line-struggle has centered over the timing of a possible seizure of power and more radical transformation of society — with some forces urging immediate preparations and others urging postponement. The issues include when to launch the next advance of revolution, whether a socialist Nepal can survive under current international conditions, and what would happen to the revolutionary movement if it were placed in semi-permanent holding pattern.
The following article comes from My Republica. We urge readers to remember that these reports on on the Maoist Central Committee Plenum are at this point still coming to us through the bourgeois press – who have their own motives and worldview. No one should assume that these are accurate, and we will post actual texts of the various positions and speeches as soon as they become available in English.
* * * * * *
Plenum weakens Dahal
KATHMANDU, Nov 30:
“This is the first time in the party´s history that your political document has failed. What do you have to say, comrade?”
When a journalist shot this question at Maoist Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal during the news conference held at the end of the weeklong party plenum in Gorkha last Saturday, the latter looked disappointed while the face of Vice-chairman Dr Baburam Bhattarai, who was sitting cross-legged nearby, lit up.
Right now
Somewhere
Someone is breaking the law:
Sneaking out into the desert
–trespassing private property
cutting through government wire
ingeniously avoiding ICE agents
and roving National Guard units
who stand armed with machine guns and
spitting the tobacco juice of disdain—
travelling unnoticed miles and miles
to leave giant blue water bottles
at discreet locations
where Northbound travelers,
“border crossers”–“ illegal aliens”–
may find them
and drink their fill
and thereby not become so parched
so dehydrated
so overheated
as to die in the dust
(nor so desperate
as to lose faith
in humanity
altogether).
If you would ask these water-bearers to stop
If you would make them stop
If you would give aid to those who would stop them
If you are the kind of person who would force these precious water-guardians
to disown their adopted cousins of the South,
and let them die,
grasping at cacti thorns in the skeleton desert
Then I say it’s you
Who must be stopped.
To everyone who cares about the revolution in Nepal: We may be about to get the break we have been waiting for. So far the U.S. intrigues have been hidden — barely seen. Now it may be exposed soon how the U.S. has been intriguing (with India and Nepal’s reactionary forces) to crush or co-opt the Nepal Maoist revolution. Who is involved? What are their speculations? What is the extent of their involvement? What are their intrigues with Nepal’s military feudalists?
We do not yet know what will emerge — but we should prepare now to go on the offensive, and make Nepal’s revolution an issue among all the diverse forces who hate and oppose U.S. interventions and counter-insurgency.
(And, as a secondary thing, we should also prepare ourselves to look at all of this critically as chicanofuturet suggested, in case, COINTELPRO-like disinformation is planted, somehow, in the flood of leaks.)
“A Wikileaks report says the documents date to 1995, with almost 1,200 tagged with PTER (Prevention of Terrorism). There are 339 with the specific tag “Maoist” or “Maoist Insurgency.””
Nepal Desperately Waiting For Wikileaks Documents
by Anil Giri – AHN News Correspondent (November 29, 2010)
Kathmandu, Nepal (AHN) – Anxiety, search and curiosity are rampant in Nepal among the political, diplomatic and media circles about the release by Wikileaks of a cache of more than 2,600 classified and non-confidential documents related to Nepal.
According to the website, the dossier has 2,278 memos sent by the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu to the U.S. State Department. Eighty-four of those memos were labeled secret and 1,399 confidential while the remaining 795 are unclassified.
Although none of the memos on Nepal were released Sunday, the whistle-blower website said it would be releasing the embassy cables “in stages over the next few months.”
This was taken from a factsheet found on endthekoreanwar.org. The factsheet can be downloaded as a PDF here.
KOREA CRISIS: Basic Facts and Historical Context
Facts on the Recent Artillery Duel:
• On Tuesday, November 23rd, 70,000 South Korean and American military troops engaged in an annual military drill, called “Hoguk [Defend the State],” involving 50 warships, 90 helicopters, 500 warplanes, and 600 tanks mobilized for war simulation exercises scheduled for a period of 9 days, until Nov. 30th.
• The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) criticized the mobilization, stating that they were provocative, and demanded that South Korea halt the drill.
• South Korean artillery units fired toward DPRK from a battery close to the DPRK coast, within a disputed maritime region called the Northern Limit Line (NLL). The disputed border on the west coast between North and South Korea was drawn unilaterally by the U.S. Navy in 1953; it was never recognized by the North.
• After four hours, the DPRK replied with 100 artillery shells from a position north of Yeonpyeong Island; South Korea then fired back 80 artillery shells.
• Two South Korean marines and two civilians were killed and at least 16 others injured on Yeonpyeong Island, a site with military bases as well as a fishing community of 1,300 residents. DPRK casualty and damages are unknown.
U.S. Involvement and Escalation of Tensions
• Obama has responded by sending the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington (carrying 75 warplanes and a crew of over 6000) and other warships to conduct additional joint war-games with the South Korean military in the vicinity of the NLL, to begin Sunday, November 28.
There is also a browsable database at the guardian.co.uk.
Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information — data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built. Never before has the trust America’s partners have in the country been as badly shaken. Now, their own personal views and policy recommendations have been made public — as have America’s true views of them.
A Superpower’s View of the World
By SPIEGEL Staff
251,000 State Department documents, many of them secret embassy reports from around the world, show how the US seeks to safeguard its influence around the world. It is nothing short of a political meltdown for US foreign policy.
What does the United States really think of German Chancellor Angela Merkel? Is she a reliable ally? Did she really make an effort to patch up relations with Washington that had been so damaged by her predecessor? At most, it was a half-hearted one.
The tone of trans-Atlantic relations may have improved, former US Ambassador to Germany William Timken wrote in a cable to the State Department at the end of 2006, but the chancellor “has not taken bold steps yet to improve the substantive content of the relationship.” That is not exactly high praise.
And the verdict on German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle? His thoughts “were short on substance,” wrote the current US ambassador in Berlin, Philip Murphy, in a cable. The reason, Murphy suggested, was that “Westerwelle’s command of complex foreign and security policy issues still requires deepening.”
Such comments are hardly friendly. But in the eyes of the American diplomatic corps, every actor is quickly categorized as a friend or foe. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? A friend: Abdullah can’t stand his neighbors in Iran and, expressing his disdain for the mullah regime, said, “there is no doubt something unstable about them.” And his ally, Sheikh bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi? Also a friend. He believes “a near term conventional war with Iran is clearly preferable to the long term consequences of a nuclear armed Iran.”
The following document originally appeared on KOE (International). It represents a history of the splits, ideological struggles, and regroupment of the Maoist movement in Greece into the new Communist Organization of Greece (KOE).
“We support the view that Anagennisi formulated important programmatic elements, confirmed by the developments. Such elements were:
The position of Greece and the special role of the anti-imperialist struggle in our country,
the assessment for the role of revisionism and the need of re-groupment of the left movement,
the support of the international communist movement and
a rather clear position on the confrontation that was taking place at that time,
the formulation of criteria on critical subjects (such as obtaining roots in the masses, cultivating an “independent” spirit instead of depending on international centers),
the assessment of critical questions of the past Greek communist movement, and
simultaneously the confrontation with other currents and ‘fashions’ of that time, and
the insistence in the choice of mass people’s struggle…
“On the contrary, what prevailed was the logic of ‘heavy activism’ and ‘making noise’ without taking care about the political and ideological lines of the movement, that is to say the programmatic elements that needed to be redefined in a period of big changes and realignments in the whole world.
“Instead of a heavy and cumbersome organizational form with very insufficient content of internal discussion, what was necessary was a political operation that would arm the whole organization for the particular needs of an ideological, political and organizational strengthening.
“At the same time, measures should be taken
against the creation of ‘independent kingdoms’ inside the organization in several Greek cities,
against the strangling of the desire for study and research,
against dogmatism and blind self-confidence,
against the cultivation of several ‘mythologies’.”
The influence of the Chinese Revolution
on the Communist Movement of Greece
May 2006
Our contribution can reach the point of formulating an opinion (open for debate) and sharing the experience of a small section of the world’s proletariat, that of the Greek communist movement. Read the rest of this entry »
“I celebrate Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invite everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we have an enormous feast, and then I kill them and take their land.” Jon Stewart
Kasama received these thoughts, penned on Thursday, 25 November 2010.
Cut To the Political Heart of a U.S. Holiday on the Brink
by Roxanne Amico
“… I thought of the blinded, armless, legless soldier in Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun, who, lying on his hospital cot, unable to speak or hear, remembers when his hometown gave him a send-off, with speeches about fighting for liberty and democracy. He finally learns how to communicate, by tapping Morse code letters with his head, and asks the authorities to take him to schoolrooms everywhere, to show the children what war is like. But they do not respond. ‘In one terrible moment he saw the whole thing,’ Trumbo writes. ‘They wanted only to forget him.'”
Pasted to my desk for the past twenty some years is a cool photo, which a friend took of my mouth wide open, when she told me that I do my job of “making trouble for the status quo” really well. Pouring out of the image are these words I found in an article interviewing Paul Simon, when asked about the tension between silence and speaking in his creative process,
“And you say, ‘I have nothing to say’… But the truth is, you always do, and often don’t want to say it. And that’s how you begin. You begin by talking about the subject that you didn’t want to talk about.”
I was going to remain silent about “Thanksgiving Day.”
Solidarity Statement from Father Roy Bourgeois, School of the Americas Watch
My name is Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of the Americas Watch, a Catholic Priest for 38 years, and I want to join my voice to the many, many who are supporting the Committee to Stop FBI Repression.
It is our understanding that what we have here is a grave injustice. Sisters and brothers, U.S. citizens who are peace activists, who are critics of U.S. foreign policy as our organization is, the School of the Americas Watch, what we feel we have here, really, if the FBI is interested in investigating terrorism, they should come here to Columbus, Georgia, home of Ft. Benning, in Georgia, where there is the School of the Americas. It is a combat school, that every year trains hundreds of soldiers from El Salvador, Honduras, most of them coming in from Colombia, and this really is a well known terrorist training camp, and if we want to get serious about talking about terrorism and closing down terrorist training camps, I would highly recommend that the FBI come right in their backyard to Ft. Benning, Georgia and investigate the School of the Americas.
This background piece first appeared in Monthly Review (2007). Kasama has posted a number of pieces about the little-known miners rebellion in the 1970s, including Mike Ely’s recollections of communist work within the wildcat strikes.
by Paul J. Nyden
“There is never peace in West Virginia because there is never justice.
“Injunctions and guns, like morphia, produce a temporary quiet. Then the pain, agonizing and more severe, comes again. So it is with West Virginia. The strike was broken. But the next year the miners gathered their breath for another struggle. Medieval West Virginia! With its tent colonies on the bleak hills! With its grim men and women! When I get to the other side, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia.”
—Mother Jones
Rank-and-file rebellions began rumbling in the coalfields from Pittsburgh and down the Ohio River after 1964, when dissident miners first challenged incumbents in international and district United Mine Workers (UMW) elections. Concern and anger also seethed through the coalfields of southern West Virginia during those years, particularly over black lung, a painful and often-fatal occupational disease. Doctors Isadore E. Buff and Donald Rasmussen helped spark those rumblings with speeches in union halls, schools, and churches.
A tragic spark ignited the growing resistance. Before dawn, at 5 a.m. on November 20, 1968, a methane and coal dust explosion ripped through Consol No. 9, located between Mannington and Farmington in West Virginia’s northern coalfields. The blast killed seventy-eight miners. People living in Fairmont, ten miles away, felt the tremors. The tragedy captured national attention.
Russia Today is reporting that the South Koreans have admitted they fired artillery rounds into North Korean territory which has in fact started this entire conflict.
The weakening of the Kim dynasty may represent an opening to Korea's people.
note by Mike Ely:
Kim Jong Il is gone. This is breaking news, and the implications of this event will not be immediately known.
Kim Jong Il has long been head of state in this oppressive and isolated state in northern Korea. The regime there may well be weakened by his death, and by resulting power struggles within the North Korean ruling circles.
There is both danger and opportunity in the possibilities of instability.
Certainly the people of northern Korea and their compatriots in the southern Korea’s peninsula have every interest in having radical changes sweep their peninsula. They deserve the freedom to make their difficult future choices freed from the interference and domination of great powers.
At the same time, any turmoil or instability in North Korea will signal intense and self-interested interference by the United States, and by those great powers (China, Russia and Japan) that border Korea.
Over and over Korea has been invaded, occupied, colonized, brutalized, exploited and threatened by outside powers — specifically Japan and the United States during the 20th century.
Sitting here in the U.S., we shouldcertainly extend our hope that the Korean people find their way through the complex and explosive contradictions that have for so long dominated their region. But we also need many more people to appreciate our own responsibility to demand that the U.S. stay out.
In the last decade, the U.S. superpower has shattered and tortured Iraq, aggressively helped NATO exploit the uprising in Libya, and has participated in the murder of Palestinians . It has tried to dominate Afghanistan, imposed hideously corrupt puppet forces, intruded into Pakistan. It has created secret prisons of torture, sent killers into countless countries, unleashed high tech drones in the skies and left a trail of bodies wherever it touches.They have declare their own right to intervene everywhere — launched unprovoked aggression and systematically lied about their motives. While they denounced adversaries for seeking nuclear weapons while they have (of course) threatened with their own massive nuclear arsenal (“nothing is off the table”).
In short: the U.S. has has zero right or justification to intrigue in Korean events. However difficult it will be for Korea’s people to unravel the divisions and oppressors they have inherited from the past, we know one thing that we should find ways to share: U.S. intervention, bribery and deceit cannot help the people of Korea or the rest of the world in any way.
U.S. bullying and intrigue simply form one of the major obstacles to justice and progressive change in Korea.
The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS), a think tank with offices in London, New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro and Sharjah (UAE) has just released the results of a survey involving 1500 Afghan men interviewed in October. Conducted in the northern provinces of Parwan and Panjshir, and the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, it contains a major surprise.
92% of respondents in the Pashtun-dominated south are unaware of 9/11 events, or their relationship to the presence of foreign troops.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the 92% figure. After all, Afghanistan is one of the least literate societies on earth, and a 2005 report indicated that any “press is scarce in rural areas.” The radio is the most widely used method of communication in Afghanistan, but there are fewer radios per capita than in any other country on earth.
There are only 5.6 radios per 1000 people in the country. (Bhutan, ranks immediately ahead of Afghanistan on a list of 212 nations. There there are three times as many radios—16.5—per 1000 people. In Haiti and Somalia there are more than 50 radios per 1000 people.) The Afghans are not just benighted in their illiteracy, but terribly lacking in access to basic communications technology.
As we will see the illiteracy problem, and general lack of education, has become a major headache for the invaders who arrogantly toppled the old regime and imposed an occupation seeking to remake Afghan society.
by Mike Ely 
My name is Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of the Americas Watch, a Catholic Priest for 38 years, and I want to join my voice to the many, many who are supporting the Committee to Stop FBI Repression.
Kasama 