April 28, 2004 | The Daily Mislead President Bush yesterday tried to deflect questions about his environmental record by claiming that he supports efforts to reduce America's fossil fuel usage1. He said he had “introduced ideas like a hydrogen-powered automobile, put money behind it and research behind it” so that so that we will be “less dependent on foreign sources of energy” and we will “improve the environment.” But Bush's hydrogen-automobile proposal is purposely engineered to be fossil fuel dependent, and it is paid for by taking money out of programs that are actually reducing fossil fuel use. As Mother […]
Daily Archives: April 28, 2004
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April 28, 2004 | Associated Press by DAVID CRARY NEW YORK – U.S. military police stacked Iraqi prisoners in a human pyramid, and attached wires to one detainee to convince him he might be electrocuted, according to photographs obtained by CBS News which led to criminal charges against six American soldiers. CBS said the photos, to be shown Wednesday night on “60 Minutes II,” were taken late last year at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, where American soldiers were holding hundreds of prisoners captured during the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
[ The article below is about an 85 year-old socialist who, for the past 15 years, has been preparing for the adventure of a lifetime: He is building a boat and will sail to Cuba along with a crew of friends he’s met on the journey. –BL ] The Old Man, the Mountain and the Sea: Naturalist Has Big Plan for Sailboat April 28, 2004 | Washington Post by Blaine Harden ORCAS ISLAND, Wash. — At 85, App Applegate keeps pushing the limits of living off the grid. Out here in Puget Sound, on the upper west side of the American […]
The El Shifa Tragedy 1999 | media-criticism.com by Scott Loughrey On August 20, 1998 Bill Clinton launched 79 cruise missiles at seven defenseless targets in the Middle East. One was a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan called El Shifa. A pair of outstanding articles in Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ, Winter, 99) illustrates what a colossal crime was committed by this act of terrorism from our now-unimpeachable president. According to a well-researched article written by Richard Becker, Sara Flounders and John Parker in CAQ, the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant was responsible for over 50% of Sudan’s medicine. This included 90% of […]
[ The fundamentalist Islamic Sudanese government is committing or aiding in ethnic cleansing, and stalling the release of a UN human rights report in order to deter a UN envoy. As reported here over the course of the last month, Sudan may be the international community’s test of whether it has learned the lesson of Rwanda. I suspect the campaign of terror, murder, and relocation against black Sudanese is in part another resource war (that is, motivated by a plan to clear the way for oil exploration). Sudan, a British colony until less than 50 years ago, lost its main […]
October 21, 2003 | Washington Post by Dana Milbank Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets. To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings on all military bases. In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. “There will be no arrival […]
[ A statement from an NGO delivering aid to Iraqis in Fallujah, Merlin, says: “Humanitarian agencies trying to supply life-saving supplies such as food and medicine have been obstructed by coalition forces”; the agency is “extremely concerned by reports that the general hospital of Falluja is being used as a military base by coalition forces,” as well. –BL ] April 26, 2004 | The Guardian by Tash Shifrin Aid agencies have warned that the Geneva convention is being breached in Falluja, Iraq, amid serious concern about the safety of civilians in the city where at least 600 people have been killed […]
[ Dahr Jamail is Baghdad correspondent for The NewStandard. You can read his other daily dispatches online, or through ZNet. –BL ] 04/26/04 New Standard by Dahr Jamail The current “negotiations” in which the U.S. is engaged with the mujahedeen in Falluja boil down to this: the mujahedeen are to relinquish their “heavy weaponry” (ie, turn in their rocket propelled grenade launchers) to the U.S. military. This is an interesting proposition in light of how this all began. First the U.S. invaded Iraq. Just afterwards, in April 2003, American soldiers gunned down several people in Falluja during a demonstration against […]