Rouge Forum Dispatch: 9/11/2001 + 10/2008 = Fascism
Wednesday, September 9th, 2015We Say Fight Back!
Susan Ohanian’ EGGPLANT! Historical Signposts of Standards
The Meek
The Old Testament contains 163 references to the Common Core Curriculum Standards, the most cited being, “The meek shall inherit the Earth–after the Standardistos are through with it.”
Goat Blood
The Old Testament called for animal sacrifice, goats for instance. This ritual was based on the Standard that without blood there can be no forgiveness. The New York Times editorial board has learned from this that kids today have it too easy.
Not Certified
After bringing the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, Moses kept mum about the fact that they had not been certified “scientific” and “rigorous” by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Achieve, Inc., or the New York Times editorial board. susanohanian.org/show_nclb_news.php?id=923
“The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.”
SJ. In March of 2000 you released a book entitled Blowback that became a big seller after 9/11. What is blowback?
Blowback is a term the CIA invented. It’s a bit of jargon. Blowback means not just unintended consequences of foreign policy actions, but the unintended consequences of covert activities that have been kept secret from the American public. So blowback simply means retaliation. And when retaliation hits from the people who were on the receiving end of our covert actions, the American public has no way to put it in context.
SJ: How does 9-11 fit into this?
9/11 was almost the classic example of blowback. That is, it is almost surely the most important use of political terrorism in the history of international relations. But the terrorism here was carried out by people who were our former “assets,” as the CIA puts it-former agents of ours, people whom we lavishly supported in the ’80s in Afghanistan to serve our interests against the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union, in 1989, withdrew from Afghanistan, we abandoned them. The country fell into a disastrous civil war that was ultimately won by the fundamentalist-motivated Taliban, who instituted a repressive, religiously sanctioned regime in Afghanistan. The people who thought they were our allies, including most prominently Osama bin Laden, the son of a very wealthy Saudi Arabian family, a man who joined the CIA and the Pakistanis in recruiting militants from around the world to fight against the Russians.
Bin Laden was disgusted by the fact that the Americans simply walked away and abandoned the country that they had helped to devastate. I mean Kabul in the early ’90s looked like Hiroshima, it had been so badly decimated. He was also disgusted by the fact that after 1991 we based troops for the first time in Saudi Arabia, allegedly to defend the House of Saud, the royal house of Saudi Arabia. This was insulting and aggravating to many patriotic Saudis because these Americans were infidels being introduced into a country whose government is charged with defending the two most sacred sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina. For the United States it was a stupid thing to do. Even if military force could have influenced in any way the stability of the extremely authoritarian and dictatorial government of Saudi Arabia, such force should not have been based in Saudi Arabia. It should have been put aboard aircraft carriers or something like that, which would have been every bit as effective as putting 20,000 American troops at Prince Sultan airbase. This then led Osama bin Laden to become an enemy of the United States.
In fact, 9/11 was late in the day. He had already attacked our embassies in East Africa, American troops elsewhere, and the USS Cole. The World Trade Center had also already been attacked once. This was not, as the president put it, an attack on our values or an attack on America as Americans. It was an attack on our foreign policy by people who felt deeply aggrieved by it. They turned to an almost classic example of terrorism-what the Department of Defense calls asymmetric warfare-an attack on innocent bystanders in order to draw attention to the crimes of the invulnerable. This also made clear that “innocent bystanders” only refers to workers in the World Trade Center. They were not innocent bystanders in the Pentagon. That was the right target for these people, and they went to it in a ruthless manner. But it was blowback, pure and simple. www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Sept_11_2001/Chalmers_Johnson_HC.html
Compilation of Chalmers’ essays www.alternet.org/authors/chalmers-johnson
Later: The Great Financial Crisis The bursting of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial debacle have left most people, including many economists and financial experts asking: Why did this happen? If they had been reading Monthly Review, and were familiar with such articles as “The Household Debt Bubble,” “The Explosion of Debt and Speculation,” and “The Financialization of Capitalism,” they would not have needed to ask. In their new book, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences, Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster and long-time Monthly Review contributor, Fred Magdoff, update this analysis, exploring the whole course of what is now known as “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression”: from the debt explosion and housing bubble to the subprime debacle and federal bailout. They argue that this latest financial crash, although greater than any since 1929, is itself a symptom of deeper problems connected to the stagnation of the “real” or productive economy of mature capitalism. Financial bubbles have become the chief means of countering stagnation, but these inevitably burst, bringing the underlying economic problems back to the surface. The only recourse of the system: new and bigger bubbles, leading, as they too pop, to still greater financial crises and worsening conditions of production—in what has now become a vicious cycle.
The bursting of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial debacle have left most people, including many economists and financial experts asking: Why did this happen? If they had been reading Monthly Review, and were familiar with such articles as “The Household Debt Bubble,” “The Explosion of Debt and Speculation,” and “The Financialization of Capitalism,” they would not have needed to ask. In their new book, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences, Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster and long-time Monthly Review contributor, Fred Magdoff, update this analysis, exploring the whole course of what is now known as “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression”: from the debt explosion and housing bubble to the subprime debacle and federal bailout. They argue that this latest financial crash, although greater than any since 1929, is itself a symptom of deeper problems connected to the stagnation of the “real” or productive economy of mature capitalism. Financial bubbles have become the chief means of countering stagnation, but these inevitably burst, bringing the underlying economic problems back to the surface. The only recourse of the system: new and bigger bubbles monthlyreview.org/product/great_financial_crisis/
Seattle on Strike: 
The Little Red Schoolhouse
Shocker Redux: School “reform” absent social/economic reform fails state educators have focused on helping black and Latino students perform as well in school as their white and Asian peers, calling the issue a social and economic imperative.
Data from a more difficult, new state testing system suggest that they still have a long way to go.
The new wave of tests, given in California and elsewhere, provide a more accurate gauge of academic skills, according to experts who support the system. If they are right, then the problem facing black and Latino students, which already was considered serious, is of greater magnitude.
“This is going to show the real achievement gap,” said Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “We are asking more out of our kids and I think that’s a good thing.”
At the same time, he added, “there’s no question that when we raised the bar for students that we’re going to have to support our lower-achieving students even more so than we are now.”
Although scores declined for all students, blacks and Latinos saw significantly greater drops than whites and Asians, widening the already large gap that was evident in results from earlier years, according to a Times analysis.
Under the previous test, last given to public school students two years ago, the gap separating Asian and black students was 35 percentage points in English. The gap increased to 44 percentage points under the new test. Asian students’ results dropped the least on the new tests, which widened the gap between them and those who are white, black or Latino, the analysis showed.
White students also maintained higher relative scores than their black and Latino peers.
A similar pattern occurred with students from low-income families www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-achievement-gaps-widen-20150911-story.html
J
Just remember sweetie–fight the biggest one first (New Yorker)
Byrd-Bennett–a piece of work In June, Barbara Byrd-Bennett stepped aside as chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools in the wake of a federal investigation involving a lucrative deal given to her former employers.
But it wasn’t the first time Byrd-Bennett had handed her former bosses Gary Solomon and Thomas Vranas a rich deal, records examined by the Chicago Sun-Times show.
In Detroit, where Byrd-Bennett was chief academic and accountability auditor before coming to Chicago, she gave them more than $3.4 million in contracts with that city’s school system, records show.
That included a $3.1 million deal the Detroit Public Schools gave Synesi Associates, a north suburban business owned by Solomon and Vranas, during the 2010-2011 school year to try to boost academic performance at five struggling schools and to seek federal “school improvement grants.”
Then, as she was set to leave Michigan to come to Chicago and work for two of Solomon and Vranas’ companies as a consultant, Byrd-Bennett again hired them, this time to find her replacement in Detroit.chicago.suntimes.com/news/7/71/935625/cps-byrd-bennett-gave-3-4-mil-deals-firm-probe
More vs Common Corpse more than 500 early childhood professionals — including educators, pediatricians, developmental psychologists, and researchers — signed the 2010 Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative. The statement says in part:
We have grave concerns about the core standards for young children…. The proposed standards conflict with compelling new research in cognitive science, neuroscience, child development, and early childhood education about how young children learn, what they need to learn, and how best to teach them in kindergarten and the early grades….it also said:
1. The K-3 standards will lead to long hours of direct instruction in literacy and math. This kind of “drill and grill” teaching has already pushed active, play-based learning out of many kindergartens.
2. The standards will intensify the push for more standardized testing, which is highly unreliable for children under age eight.
3. Didactic instruction and testing will crowd out other crucial areas of young children’s learning: active, hands-on exploration, and developing social, emotional, problem-solving, and self-regulation skills—all of which are difficult to standardize or measure but are the essential building blocks for academic and social accomplishment and responsible citizenship.
4. There is little evidence that standards for young children lead to later success. The research is inconclusive; many countries with top-performing high-school students provide rich play-based, nonacademic experiences—not standardized instruction—until age six or seven. www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/08/the-surprising-things-new-yorks-mayor-said-about-common-core-and-4-year-olds/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cFbn5rKWvs
Terry Grier: Tax Eater, Bonus Baby, Quitter Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier made a surprise announcement Thursday that he would step down March 1, leaving midway through his seventh school year as some trustees have been unwilling to extend his contract after an aggressive tenure marked by big-dollar reform efforts, staffing shake-ups and national accolades.
Grier, who came to Houston from San Diego in August 2009, expressed pride in his accomplishments in the state’s largest district but said it was “just time” to leave. His contract expires in June 2016, and the school board had not yet moved to extend it. The 65-year-old said he did not plan to retire, but noted that he underwent a knee replacement over the summer and has a second surgery in November.
“Time flies when you’re having fun. This is, like, year seven,” Grier told a crowd of administrators at the Houston Independent School District’s central office. “As I reflect back and look at where we were and where we are today, I couldn’t be more proud.”
Several board members said Thursday that they were surprised by the timing of Grier’s news. He told trustees about his resignation in private shortly before holding a news conference.
Grier has been a polarizing figure from the outset, partly because of his fast-paced rollout of initiatives designed to accelerate achievement among the district’s roughly 215,000 students. HISD won the coveted Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2013, though scores on state and national exams generally have stagnated in recent years.www.chron.com/news/education/article/Grier-out-as-Houston-ISD-superintendent-6496621.php
HISD school board gives superintendent $100K bonus on top of $300K salary
December, 2014 As school districts around the country are making major cuts, the Houston Independent School District is paying out.
The school board voted unanimously Thursday night to give Superintendent Dr. Terry Grier a $116,673.33 bonus on top of his $300,000 base salary.
School board members explained to Local 2 $45,000 comes from his evaluation, the other $71,673.33 is based on student performance and it’s all part of his contract. They said it’s like a grading scale: Grier is given either 1s, 2s or 3s on areas like test scores, for example, or whether or not the district’s population is growing. If board members give him all 2s or 3s he is given 100 percent of his bonus, which is what happened Thursday.
“It’s obscene, that’s really the word for it,” said Andrew Dewey, vice president of the Houston teacher’s union, who said the majority of the teachers who work in the HISD are not even eligible for bonuses. http://www.click2houston.com/news/hisd-school-board-gives-superintendent-100k-bonus-on-top-of-300k-salary/30191856
Under Half Of California Students Meet Targets On Common Core Test.
The Los Angeles Times (9/10, Blume) reports on Wednesday’s release of California’s Smarter Balanced test results for the Common Core, which showed that “most California students are falling short of state learning targets and are not on track to succeed in college,” while “the picture is even worse for L.A. Unified.” Statewide, 44 percent of those tested met English standards, and 34 percent met math standards, while in L.A. Unified, 33 percent met English standards, and 25 percent met math standards. California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson called the tests “our starting point,” saying the results are “a window into where California students are.” Former Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig said that “the results are not as discouraging as they seem,” because the goal is “so high: what students need to succeed at a four-year college.” There were also achievement gaps as 72 percent of Asian students met English standards, compared to 51 percent of white students, 28 percent of black students, and 32 percent of Latinos; while in math, 21 percent of low-income students met the goal, while 53 percent of students from “more affluent families” scored at grade level.
Who will protect the kids from Rahm??? Chicago Expands Gang Protection Program For Schools. Reuters (9/8, Ortiz) reports that despite financial concerns, the Chicago Public Schools system has expanded the Safe Passage program to protect students from gang violence to seven more schools, bringing the total to 140 out of the city’s 660 public schools. Although Chicago Public Schools’ chief security officer Jadine Chou said the district lacks data on the effectiveness of the Safe Passage program, she said there have been no incidents of students at participating schools being hurt.??
Michigan Merit Exam – Students Not Proficient in Grade 11 Reading
Year(s): All | Data Type: All
Data Provided by:
| Location | Data Type | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Detroit | Number | 4,656 | 4,595 | 4,088 | 4,100 | 3,691 |
| Percent | 76.6% | 77.0% | 75.6% | 78.8% | 75.7% |
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIC8JTQMMQ
Girines: Still no girls allowed (Vietnamese, Chinese, and other wome seemed to do well) All-male ground combat teams outperformed their mixed-gender counterparts in nearly every capacity during a recent infantry integration test, Marine Corps officials revealed Thursday.
Data collected during a monthslong experiment showed Marine teams with female members performed at lower overall levels, completed tasks more slowly and fired weapons with less accuracy than their all-male counterparts. In addition, female Marines sustained significantly higher injury rates and demonstrated lower levels of physical performance capacity overall, officials said.
The troubling findings come as Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford prepares to make a crucial decision regarding the integration of female troops into closed combat roles. Faced with a Defense Department-wide mandate that will open all jobs to women by Jan. 1, he must decide whether to ask for specific exceptions to the mandate in order to preserve combat readiness. Officials said Dunford had met with Navy Secretary Ray Mabus about the decision but had yet to issue his recommendations. www.marinecorpstimes.com/story/military/2015/09/10/mixed-gender-teams-come-up-short-marines-infantry-experiment/71979146/
Oops, again, and sorry about that chaps An airstrike by international forces killed at least 11 members of Afghanistan’s counternarcotics police force and wounded four others in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, according to Afghan officials.
The attack unfolded in the Garmsir district of Helmand province during an anti-drug operation involving government forces, officials said, but details were not immediately available. Helmand is a hotbed of Afghanistan’s thriving poppy production. www.washingtonpost.com/world/at-least-11-afghan-police-officers-killed-in-friendly-fire-incident-officials-say/2015/09/07/40483f58-fdb5-4469-924d-991bc857a9fd_story.html
Crowhopping to WW3, Russia and Iran move to Syria When Zero Hedge first reported ten days ago that Russian troops, in their bid to support the Assad regime in its ongoing confrontation with various ISIS, Al Nusra, and other US-supported groups in what has become the proxy war of 2015 (one which even comes with thousands of refugees for dramatic media impact) had been quietly massing in Syria and have set up a forward operating base near Damascus, there were those who were openly skeptical.
Then, just a few hours ago, Bloomberg finally confirmed that “top officials were scheduled to meet at the National Security Council Deputies Committee level to discuss how to respond to the growing buildup of Russian military equipment and personnel in Latakia” and that Russia is “set to start flying combat missions from a new air base inside Syria.”
So yes, for whatever reason (and the reason as we explained is clear: natural gas pipelines) Russia is making not only its increasing support for Assad known, but also that it is in Syria and that any further US-funded and supported incursions by ISIS or whatever is the media scapegoat terrorist organization du jour, will not be tolerated.
To be sure, none of this is in any way a surprise to the US – just as the US is using ISIS as a pretext to invade or pressure any mid-east nation it desires “in order to hold the jihadist terrorist scourge”, so Russia is now using ISIS as a comparable excuse to intervene. After all, if ISIS is the friend of humanity, then surely Russian aid will be welcome. That it is not, had made it abundantly clear that not only is ISIS just a convenient diversion, but the reasons for a Syrian invasion and deposition of Assad, are purely political and entirely in the realm of real-politik. Also, Russia’s return to Syria in greater numbers is no surprise to anyone in the Pentagon – this was merely the long-awaited escalation of the foreplay that started when ISIS mysteriously emerged on the scene just over a year ago.
But in the latest twist in what we have been warning for months has the makings of the biggest proxy shooting war in years, one that will come as a major humiliation to the Obama administration, today we find out that none other than America’s most recent diplomatic sweetheart in the Gulf region, Iran, has deployed ground soldiers into Syria in the past few days in cooperation with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-10/major-humiliation-obama-iran-has-sent-soldiers-support-russian-troops-syria
www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3HWiydFlJc
DIA chief: Iraq and Syria may not survive as states Iraq and Syria may have been permanently torn asunder by war and sectarian tensions, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency said Thursday in a frank assessment that is at odds with Obama administration policy.
“I’m having a tough time seeing it come back together,” Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart told an industry conference, speaking of Iraq and Syria, both of which have seen large chunks territory seized by the Islamic State.
On Iraq, Stewart said he is “wrestling with the idea that the Kurds will come back to a central government of Iraq,” suggesting he believed it was unlikely. On Syria, he added: “I can see a time in the future where Syria is fractured into two or three parts.”
That is not the U.S. goal, he said, but it’s looking increasingly likely.
CIA Director John Brennan, speaking on the same panel at an industry conference, noted that the countries’ borders remain in place, but the governments have lost control of them. A self-declared caliphate by the Islamic State straddles the border between both countries. www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/09/10/dia-chief-iraq-and-syria-may-not-survive–states/72027834/
Afghans See American General as Crucial to Country’s Defense
Gen. John F. Campbell holds several titles: top NATO commander in Afghanistan, commander of the Resolute Support Mission coalition, commander of United States Forces-Afghanistan.
Lately, Afghans are inclined to describe the American commander by yet another: minister of defense of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
It is a recognition not only that there is no confirmed nominee for the post, but also of what Afghan officials say is General Campbell’s strong influence within the highest levels of the Afghan government.
No other American commander in recent years has had as much power within the Afghan military establishment and top government echelons, according to interviews with senior Afghan and Western officials, and it is a role that President Ashraf Ghani has welcomed and encouraged.
But at a time when Afghan forces and officials are supposed to be running the war, and eight months after the official end of the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan, General Campbell’s prominent role is also being widely taken as a sign that the fight against the Taliban is not going well.
“Everyone knows who the minister of defense is in Afghanistan now, and it is not Masoom Stanekzai,” said one Western diplomat, naming the Afghan official whose nomination as defense minister was rejected by the Parliament but who was kept on as the acting minister. “The American combat role may be over, but you still have an American general running the war.”
Afghan officials who have worked closely with General Campbell, and who generally approve of his authority, say it has resulted from a mixture of the general’s take-charge personality and the dire situation that Afghanistan’s military leaders have found themselves in. www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/world/asia/afghans-see-american-general-as-crucial-to-countrys-defense.html?_r=0
1 Marine killed, 18 injured in vehicle rollover at Pendleton
A California-based Marine was killed and 18 others injured in a vehicle rollover accident at Camp Pendleton Thursday afternoon, according to a Marine Corps news release.
The Marine killed in the accident was assigned to 1st Marine Division, based out of Pendleton. The Marine’s identity is behind held for 24 hours after next of kin have been notified www.marinecorpstimes.com/story/military/2015/09/10/1-marine-killed-18-injured-vehicle-rollover-pendleton/72036846/
Pentagon’s Mine Hunting System Doesn’t work! Over the past 16 years the U.S. Navy has spent $706 million developing a futuristic-looking device that could remotely detect mines underwater.
The only problem? The device, known as the Remote Minehunting System, doesn’t work.
The failed program, detailed in a new report released by the Senate Armed Service Committee Thursday, started in the late 1990s and has yielded only half the number of planned systems with the cost per unit doubling since the program began.
On paper, the mine hunting system is meant to be deployed from destroyers and littoral combat ships as sort of a bomb-sniffing dog for the ocean. The system would scan an area, possibly even out of the surface ship’s line-of-sight, and would communicate back the location of detected minefields.
In 2007, after one failed test aboard a destroyer, the Navy went back to the drawing board and in 2008 the system was still testing poorly. Despite the results, the Navy purchased another mine hunting system at around $13 million.
According to the recent SASC report, however, the device still doesn’t function as it should. In 2013 the Government Accountability Office noted that “in spite of starting development the towed sonar couldn’t not detect certain mines, and falsely identified other objects as mines.”http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/sep/05/tp-pentagons-mine-hunting-system-still-not-working/
New ISIS threat prompts U.S. to send 75 more troops to Egypt’s Sinai The Pentagon announced Thursday that it will send 75 more troops to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula amid a rising threat from insurgents linked to the so-called Islamic State.
The additional troops will boost force protection for the roughly 650 service members deployed there now as part of the Multinational Force of Observers, a little-known peacekeeping force that helps maintain a 1979 treaty between Egypt and Israel.
The new deployments come after four U.S. troops in the Sinai were injured by an improvised explosive device Sept. 3. www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/09/10/new-troops–sinai/72018008/
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
Detroit Aflame A first-of-its-kind survey reveals the devastating impact of fires on Detroit’s neighborhoods at a time when the city is struggling to stabilize residential areas.
From Jan. 1 to July 31, fires damaged or destroyed more than 1,650 houses, apartments, commercial buildings, schools, hospitals and churches, according to Loveland Technologies, a Detroit-based research and mapping group that provides detailed information about every parcel in the city.
A vast majority of those fires – 1,495 – were in houses and apartments. More than half were occupied.
“Occupied residential fires are especially devastating, forcing people out of their homes and eating away at the stability of the city’s neighborhoods,” the report states.motorcitymuckraker.com/2015/09/02/in-depth-survey-reveals-devastating-impact-of-fires-on-detroits-neighborhoods/
One of Twenty Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know
Bad Jobs
“Bad jobs” are typically considered those that pay low wages and do not include access to health insurance and pension benefits. As shown here, about 10% of full-time workers are in low-wage jobs, about 30% don’t have health insurance, and about 40% don’t have pensions. The graph also shows that the likelihood of being in a bad job is much worse for part-time workers, for on-call and day laborers, and for those working for temporary help agencies.
Employment relations and job characteristics
Source: Arne L. Kalleberg, Barbara F. Reskin, Ken Hudson. 2000. “Bad Jobs in America: Standard and Nonstandard Employment Relations and Job Quality in the United States.” American Sociological Review 65(2): 256-278
Source: Arne L. Kalleberg, Barbara F. Reskin, Ken Hudson. 2000. “Bad Jobs in America: Standard and Nonstandard Employment Relations and Job Quality in the United States.” American Sociological Review 65(2): 256-278
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zDGLeLj_Ko
U.S. government blocks release of new CIA torture details
U.S. government officials have blocked the release of 116 pages of defense lawyers’ notes detailing the torture that Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah says he experienced in CIA custody, defense lawyers said on Thursday.
The treatment of Zubaydah, who lost one eye and was waterboarded 83 times in a single month while held by the CIA, according to government documents, has been the focus of speculation for years.
“We submitted 116 pages in 10 separate submissions,” Joe Margulies, Zubaydah’s lead defense lawyer, told Reuters. “The government declared all of it classified.”
Margulies and lawyers for other detainees said that the decision showed that the Obama administration plans to continue declaring detainees’ accounts of their own torture classified. A Central Intelligence Agency spokesperson declined to comment.
After the release of a U.S. Senate report on CIA torture in December, the government loosened its classification rules and released 27 pages of interview notes compiled by lawyers for detainee Majid Khan in which he described his torture.
Khan, a Guantanamo detainee turned government cooperating witness, said interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, twice videotaped him naked and repeatedly touched his “private parts” – none of which was described in the Senate report.
Khan said that guards, some of whom smelled of alcohol, also threatened to beat him with a hammer, baseball bats, sticks and leather belts.
“The CIA has apparently changed its mind about allowing detainees to talk about their torture,” said Wells Dixon, Khan’s lawyer. www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/11/us-usa-cia-torture-idUSKCN0RA2RM20150911
43 Nearly a year after 43 Mexican teachers college students disappeared, an examination of the case by outside experts has rejected the government’s official narrative of events and claims that investigators tortured witnesses and mishandled evidence.
The report, more than 400 pages long, does not shed any light on the ultimate fate of the students, but it calls into question nearly all the claims by Mexican authorities about how the crime unfolded in the troubled hills of Guerrero state, particularly the assertion that the students were burned to death at the base of a rural trash dump.
The review, conducted over six months with the Mexican government’s cooperation by a group of experts convened by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, also proposed a possible new motive: that the students may have inadvertently stolen a bus full of drugs and that corrupt police wanted it back. “This report provides an utterly damning indictment of Mexico’s handling of the worst human rights atrocity in recent memory,” José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “Even with the world watching and with substantial resources at hand, the authorities proved unable or unwilling to conduct a serious investigation.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/mexicos-account-of-how-43-students-disappeared-is-wrong-new-report-says/2015/09/06/26a4a7be-5443-11e5-b225-90edbd49f362_story.html
For Elizabeth
Solidarity for Never
UAW leaders want to shrink the gap between the pay and benefits of workers hired before and after 2007, but they are open to establishing another level of pay and benefits for supplier employees who work on site at various assembly plants, according to people familiar with the discussions.
This idea for a third tier may or may not be incorporated in a new labor agreement, but there are reasons management and union leaders are willing to explore the potentially controversial structure.
Management values the flexibility of paying less for people who provide logistics and janitorial services, stamp metal parts or package small kits that are attached to vehicles along the assembly line. And the union, for its part, sees an opportunity to gain new dues paying members, some of whom might see their wages and benefits improve.
The idea of a third tier is just one facet of what could become a watershed contract negotiation this month with the current contract expiring Monday at midnight. The UAW is floating an innovative idea for a health care benefits pool for all Detroit Three employees, union and salaried, to drive down health care costs. www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2015/09/11/uaw-leaders-open-3rd-tier-wages-supplier-workers/72013690/
Dues Eaters’ Lobbying Effort (for dues) flops A labor union-inspired push to deal with the potential financial fallout of an unfavorable U.S. Supreme Court decision is not expected to occur in the final two days of the Legislative session.
Labor groups had approached Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration for sign-off on a late-session measure that would set aside some required time to meet with employees to discuss the benefits of union participation.
The idea behind the meetings, or conferences, is to discourage employees from withdrawing from unions if the U.S. Supreme Court rules next year that nonunion members cannot be compelled to pay “fair share” fees in lieu of full union dues. Labor officials fear that if the right-leaning court rules that way unions would experience a drop-off in membership and a significant loss of funds.
Brown’s office, which is not commenting, told multiple opponents of the effort that the governor’s staff wants more time than the expiring session allows to discuss the issue with the stakeholders before deciding on a possible remedy. Read more here: www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article34688232.html#storylink=cpy
Statement from NEA President on Washington Educators’ Strike
NEA Boss Eskelsen García easily co-opts Seattle Strike: “proud that Seattle educators are standing up for the schools students deserve”
WASHINGTON – September 09, 2015 –NEA President Lily Eskelsen García provided the following statement regarding the more than 5,000 Seattle educators striking on the first day of school:
“There is no stronger voice or advocate for Seattle students than Seattle educators. Since May, educators and their representatives have worked diligently for an agreement with the Seattle School Board that centers on student success. Unfortunately, the School Board has failed to address issues raised by educators, such as ensuring opportunity for every student, regardless of zip code; neatoday.org/
‘This is the end’: leftwing Pacifica Radio affiliates enter protracted death spiral
Veteran broadcasters accuse the board of promoting bizarre conspiracy theories as network puts pressure on staff to reduce their hours and pay.
Feuding and ideological extremism have driven some of the US’s flagship leftwing radio stations to the brink of collapse, according to two veteran broadcasters.
Ian Masters and Sonali Kolhatkar, hosts of the Los Angeles-based KPFK, said its parent network Pacifica Radio, the country’s oldest public radio network, was putting pressure on staff to reduce their hours and pay, leave or work for free, alienating listeners and approaching a point of no return.
“This is the end. They’re running out of road,” Masters told the Guardian. He accused managers and board members of promoting conspiracy theories – including those related to the “truth” about 9/11 and claims about cancer and HIV. “They’ve run this place into the ground.”
Kolhatkar, who hosts a daily show called Uprising, accused KPFK of betraying its progressive heritage and violating a union agreement by replacing paid employees with volunteers. “It’s Walmart-isation. It’s up to listeners to save this network from ruin.” www.theguardian.com/media/2015/sep/10/pacifica-leftwing-radio-kpfk-wbai-financial-collapse?CMP=share_btn_link
Spy versus Spy
NSA and CIA Agents Infiltrated World of Warcraft, Other Online Games
Ostensibly concerned that terrorists would disguise themselves as gamers in order to secretly communicate, agents from the NSA, CIA, Pentagon and Britain’s GCHQ have posed undercover in online realms like World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Xbox Live. In fact, the practice grew so popular with the spy agencies that a special “deconfliction” group was established to prevent the agents from inadvertently spying on or trying to recruit each other.
Our country’s best and brightest began disguising themselves as digital trolls, elves, and supermodels in 2008, after a top-secret NSA documents—provided by Edward Snowden and published by the New York Times and ProPublica—described the games as a “target-rich communication network” that lets terrorists and other criminals “hide in plain sight.”
U.S. Drops Charges That Professor Shared Technology With China When the Justice Department arrested the chairman of Temple University’s physics department this spring and accused him of sharing sensitive American-made technology with China, prosecutors had what seemed like a damning piece of evidence: schematics of sophisticated laboratory equipment sent by the professor, Xi Xiaoxing, to scientists in China.
The schematics, prosecutors said, revealed the design of a device known as a pocket heater. The equipment is used in semiconductor research, and Dr. Xi had signed an agreement promising to keep its design a secret.
But months later, long after federal agents had led Dr. Xi away in handcuffs, independent experts discovered something wrong with the evidence at the heart of the Justice Department’s case: The blueprints were not for a pocket heater.
Faced with sworn statements from leading scientists, including an inventor of the pocket heater, the Justice Department on Friday afternoon dropped all charges against Dr. Xi, an American citizen.
It was an embarrassing acknowledgment that prosecutors and F.B.I. agents did not understand — and did not do enough to learn — the science at the heart of the case before bringing charges that jeopardized Dr. Xi’s career and left the impression that he was spying for China. www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/us/politics/us-drops-charges-that-professor-shared-technology-with-china.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
The Magical Mystery Tour
Caudillo Jr to Suck up to Poverty Pimp Pope Francis has added a stop in Cuba to his planned trip to the United States this September, a visit that will highlight his role as a peace-broker between the two countries and offer a boost to their efforts to mend relations after 50 years of rancor.
Francis will make a Cuba landing in late September before his previously scheduled stops in Philadelphia, New York and Washington, where he is expected to meet with President Obama and address Congress. www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-francis-to-stop-off-in-cuba-on-way-to-united-states-in-september/2015/04/22/7625c4a4-e8f4-11e4-8581-633c536add4b_story.html
The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World
A university press release stated that some 2,400 female students signed up to get into one of Alabama’s sororities. And they said it was their most diverse group
yet.www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/sorority-bid-video-alabama/?fb=dd&type=cpc
So Long