This Can't Be Happening!

Islamabad — This past June I posted an article by Anatol Lieven on Facebook. For those who are not familiar with his name, Anatol is from the UK and numbers among the few journalists whom I always enjoy reading. I have met Anatol a few times and he is the kind of person who likes to get acquainted with the psycho-social environment of the people he writes about. Written in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s execution, Anatol’s article was critical of the US approach to the region, particularly Pakistan.

Among those responding to this post was an American whom I would rather not embarrass by naming; so let’s just call him X. Admitting that he hadn’t read through Anatol’s article and was judging its contents by earlier articles of the author, he went on to add, “let me put this as simply as possible, for you to understand. The US has concluded that the Pakistan army is part of the problem, not the solution; and that the interests of the Pakistan army are not identical with those of Pakistan. Consequently, the US has decided that the Pakistan army has to be cut to size and, if in the process of doing so, the Pakistan army is destroyed, so be it. And, I agree”.

The first thing that hit me was the arrogance of his statement. The “US has decided (on behalf of, and for, the people of Pakistan) that its army’s interests and theirs are not identical”, and will, on behalf of, and for Pakistan, cut its army to size! Typical arrogance expected of the American establishment. The only issue was that this American had hitherto seemed pretty level-headed and very far from arrogant. Nor was he a Mansoor Ijaz or even an expatriate American. I commented on the arrogance of his words, to which he chose not to respond. However, I did not take the contents of his comment very seriously; not at that time.

The “Memo-gate” Scandal

Most readers will be familiar with this scandal, so I will cover just the bare outline of the incident from my perspective. On October 10th, Mansoor Ijaz, a multi millionaire American of Pakistani origin, wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times which, as it was expected to do, set Pakistan’s political landscape on fire.

His op-ed titled, “Time to take on Pakistan’s Jihadist spies”, as the title indicates, ostensibly seemed to target the ISI and the Pakistan military for maintaining ties with Jihadists. However, it mentioned the fact that in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s execution, he was contacted by a “senior diplomat”, who was known to be close to Pakistani President, Zardari. Apparently, Zardari feared the possibility of a military coup. Everybody knew that the senior Pakistani diplomat referred to Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US.

Smoldering ruin of a border outpost inside Pakistan attacked by US helicopter gunships. 24 Pakistani soldiers were slaughtered here and at a second mountaintop outpost in an unprovoked and clearly coordinated US massacre

 
(Photos: John Grant)

Ft. Meade — Saturday, December 17th was Bradley Manning’s 24th birthday, and at least 300 supporters gathered outside Fort Meade, Maryland, where the military was in its second day of a preliminary hearing process that’s expected to take about a week. Manning worked in military intelligence and is alleged to have released military secrets to WikiLeaks, which released the material publicly.

After collecting at the main gate, Manning supporters set off for a two-mile march to a gate nearer the military hearing site. The group was quite spirited and, despite Anne Arundel County Police efforts to keep marchers on the sidewalk, insisted on taking up a lane of the street. The police wisely did not attempt to stop them and there were no problems.

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Scroll to the bottom of the news articles on the home page, and you’ll find a Google site search window, where you can enter search words, separated by commas, to locate older articles on the site quickly. Enter a word from an article, from a headline, and/or a writer’s byline. As with Google searches, you can also include phrases, enclosed in quotation marks.

Even as President Obama and War Secretary Leon Panetta announce the supposed “end” of the Iraq War, a US “covert war” against Iran, as the National Journal put it in a December 4 article, has already begun.

This secret war–at least secret from the American people–is being conducted in part directly by the US, as evidenced by the advanced American RQ-170 Sentinel stealth surveillance drone just recently downed–apparently by sophisticated electronic countermeasures that allowed the taking control of, and landing of the vehicle–by Iran. Also being conducted in part of proxies, including the Iranian anti-government terrorist organization MEK (for Mujahideen-e Khalq), and of course Israel’s Mossad, this dirty covert war has led to an escalating string of acts of terror inside Iran, including a campaign of assassination against Iranian nuclear scientists, and bombings of Iranian military installations.

Not content to simply engage in such illegal hostilities against a sovereign nation that has not threatened the U.S., and that in fact has not invaded another country in some 200 years, President Obama had the effrontery to demand that the Iranians return the American spy drone that they had captured–a drone which CNN says US military officials confirm was “on a surveillance mission of suspected nuclear sites” — sites which of course could eventually be targeted for attack! (The US had earlier lied, claiming falsely that the drone had been surveilling the Iran-Afghan border and simply was lost by its controllers.)

Imagine for a moment, if you can, that an Iranian, or some other nation’s, robot spy plane had been captured or shot down over U.S. territory. Imagine further the official response if the nation that owned that plane were to demand its return! First of all, Congressmembers, probably almost unanimously, would be clamoring for the US to launch an attack on whatever country launched the spy plane. But the reaction to a demand to return such a device would be truly explosive! The audacity!

Captured US Sentinel spy drone under guard in Iran — part of a covert US war against the country

At the beginning of the twentieth century the United States was engaged in a long and brutal war of aggression against the Philippines, which led to between 200,000 and 1.5 million civilian deaths. It was a colonial war against independence fought by the US with patriotic zeal and of course, the claim that God was on our side.  To be against the war in that jingoistic era was considered tantamount to treason.  Hence it was a brazen act of effrontery for author Mark Twain to have made a statement denouncing the acts of brutality that accompanied this war.  In his short story, The War Prayer, he portrayed a priest who, with  fervor, called upon God to bring victory to a supposedly just cause,  irrespective of the horror inflicted on the “enemy,” a poor and downtrodden people trying only to assert their freedom after centuries of colonial oppression.

David Lindorff, Sr. was a Marine staff sergeant in World War II

The mood was both celebratory and angry among a 1000-plus overflow audience packed into the balcony space of the Constitution Center in Philadelphia on the evening of Dec. 9.

The crowd of supporters of Philadelphia journalist and black political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal had come to denounce the over 29 years that he has spent locked in solitary confinement on Pennsylvania’s grim death row since his controversial conviction for the shooting of a white police officer, Daniel Faulkner. But they were also there to celebrate the surprise decision, announced two days earlier by Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, not to seek to reinstate Abu-Jamal’s death sentence, which had been permanently vacated by a recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Technically, the Supreme Court, last Oct. 11, had decided not to review a decision by a Third Circuit Court panel that had upheld a 2001 Federal Judge’s ruling declaring his 1982 death sentence to have been unconstitutional. The Federal Court and Appeals Court decisions had been had been the subject of costly and futile appeals by the Philadelphia district attorney’s office for years, all the way to the Supreme Court.

The event at the Constitution Center had initially been planned to mark the 30th anniversary of the shooting incident that had led to Abu-Jamal’s arrest and to his trial and conviction. But only two days before, Williams, who had 180 days from the Supreme Court’s ruling to decide whether to request a new jury trial to attempt to win a new death sentence, had held a press conference to announce that he would not take that step, and would instead allow Abu-Jamal’s penalty to revert automatically to life in prison without parole.

The crowd, surely the largest to attend an event in support of Abu-Jamal in years, had thus come both to celebrate the end to the death threat facing the veteran journalist and world-renowned symbol of America’s obsession with state murder, and also to demand that he not instead be “left to rot” in a regular prison for the rest of his life.
Mumia's supporters turned out in record numbers at the Constitution Center on the 30th Anniversary of the shooting that led to his arrest and his nearly 30 unconstitutional years on Pennsylvania’s death row (Lindorff photo)

This article originally appeared in The Pitch, a Kansas City alternative newspaper. ThisCantBeHappening! normally does not reprint other publications’ material, but this story about Kristi Neuhaus, a heroic doctor who has fought for women’s right to abortion in one of the most cynically benighted regions of the country for decades, together with her journalist/private investigator husband Mike Cadell, a lifelong prairie radical who puts the truth in front of Kansans in his newspaper, the Fightin’ Cock Flyer, and on his radio program Radio Free Kansas, has to be told to as wide an audience as possible. We’re proud to run it here:
 

There isn’t an address on the paint-chipped farmhouse in Nortonville, about 30 miles north of Lawrence. Across from it on this country road, the mailbox hangs limp. A muddy driveway leads past a beat-up pickup truck to a garage. An approaching car sends cats scattering.

It’s the only place that Ann Kristin Neuhaus and Mike Caddell have ever owned. She describes the place as something out of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road. Caddell calls it “a money pit.”

“Do we look rich?” Neuhaus asks. “We’re very broke all of the time. Our house is falling down.”

She turns on the water each time she wants to flush the toilet, but this is home for Neuhaus and Caddell. They’ve been married 26 years, and they have a 14-year-old son, Tristan. Six chickens, five cats, four dogs, three horses, two roosters and a goat roam the family’s 10 acres.

Neuhaus and Caddell bought the place 15 years ago, when she was making a little money. Now they’re struggling to survive. About a year ago, the house nearly faced foreclosure. During an interview with The Pitch in September, Neuhaus was on her way to apply for a payday loan. Then in October, the utilities were almost shut off.

“It’s just literally month by month that we’re holding onto the place,” says Caddell, host of the Radio Free Kansas online radio show. “We’ve been living on $30,000 a year for about two and a half years now.” That money came from a research stipend that has since expired. Neuhaus is now working as a research instructor at the University of Kansas Medical Center’s Department of Family Medicine.

Out here, they say, the neighbors are protective. One, fearing for Neuhaus’ safety, offered to loan her an AK-47. That’s life on the front line of Kansas’ abortion war.

Neuhaus is one of the last links to Wichita abortion provider George Tiller, who was murdered in May 2009 while attending a Sunday church service. From 1999 to 2006, Neuhaus provided second-opinion mental-health exams to determine whether the late-term abortions that some women sought at Tiller’s clinic were medically necessary. That step was required by Kansas law.

Three Kansas attorneys general tried to prosecute Tiller for his arrangement with Neuhaus. Tiller eventually was charged with having an improper financial relationship with Neuhaus. He was acquitted of the misdemeanor in March 2009. The doctor was assassinated two months later by Scott Roeder, who had attended Tiller’s trial and was seen sitting next to Operation Rescue president Troy Newman.
Ann Kristin Neuhaus, under attack for years by cynical right-wing politicians, and standing her ground in Kansas (photos by Angela C. Bond)

Wanted: Sculptor who works in bronze to construct life-sized group of statues of President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, all to be mounted at the high tide line below a high cliff in Maine’s Acadia National Park.

There what’s left of American posterity can watch as the seas rise inexorably over the coming years and decades, first lapping at the feet of the statues, then the knees, then the waists, then the chests and finally cover over the heads of these “leaders” in Washington who have cynically and foolishly squandered the last opportunity to take effective action to combat climate change.

Such a sculpture would give the lie to these climate deniers, as rise of the sea level due to warming of the ocean and to the melting of the polar caps and the mountain glaciers gradually swamps and submerges these images. It would also serve as a focal point for shaming those politicians who allowed short-term political and monetary gain to blind them to the need for true leadership and action in combatting the gravest threat to humanity and to life on the planet since a comet blasted the earth 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.

We need a monument to catastrophic leadership failure on climate change. It should be located at sea level.

I imagine other people could be added to this sinking monument: the Koch Brothers, those oil industry magnates who have been funding fake studies and fake political movements like the Tea Party aimed at further enriching themselves while attacking the science of climate change, or the chief executives of the major oil companies, especially at Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron Texaco and Shell, and of the big US auto companies, Ford and GM, who have worked assiduously to buy presidents and members of Congress over the years to assure that no serious action would be taken to reduce the use of oil and gas by Americans and by American industry. There should also be room left along the beach front for sculptures of whoever may be America’s next president and congressional leaders, though it is the current set who had a chance to take truly significant action and let it slip away.

What will we do when the gates go up?
 

Here is the dream: Consumers with money. A virtual middle class.
Cash and stuff. Jobs and cash. Benefits! Security.
 

Is there any way out?
 

Is it too late?
The lights go out. Nobody can find the switch.
Something as simple as a light switch and everything shifts.
Panic.
 

Dreams are amazing.
Everyone has the same dream. Think of that.
 

By linear time we have already reached the end.
 

What kind of history are we weaving?
 

If you ask the weather man,
After you have plied him with a few more drinks,
He will say,
We are making it easy for him. . .
 

Something about creation and prediction converging
In an open-ended season of 500-year storms.
 

The rivers, amnesiac,
Recovering from Irene,
Have conveniently forgotten
How they consumed their beds,
Swept gentle farms away,
Pushed huge trees to the brink
Of hydroelectric dams.
 

In the waterfalls I sometimes hear
The caterwauling and moaning and pining of the wild beasts.
 

When the gates went up
In malls across Turtle Island,
Consumers flooded through,
Tore into sales racks and displays. . .
But they weren’t buying.
They were just mad.
 

Were you mad, Grandpa?
(Muted gong, tinkling chimes. . .)
Ting, knnng, knnng, Ting. . .Mbronnggg!

Almost 30 years to the day of the fateful shooting incident that led to his incarderation, the decision has finally been announced: There will be no execution of African-American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who in 1982 was convicted and sentenced to death in a highly-controversial and seriously corrupted trial before “hanging” Judge Albert Sabo of killing white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981.

At a press conference this morning, current Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, with Faulkner’s widow Maureen Faulkner at his side, announced that in the wake of a US Supreme Court decision in October not to hear an appeal of a Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that had upheld the lifting of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence, he would not seek a new jury trial to try and win a new death sentence for Abu-Jamal.

Abu-Jamal’s death sentence was originally overturned in December 2001 by Federal District Judge William Yohn, who ruled that a poorly worded and constructed Jury polling form and confusing instructions from the trial judge were unconstitutional and could well have left jurors thinking, incorrectly, that none of them could consider a mitigating circumstance that argued against imposing a death penalty unless all 12 of the jurors agree to it. In fact, any one juror can find any mitigating circumstance and on that basis vote against death on their own, and since a death sentence must be unanimous, can block imposition of such a penalty.

A three-judge Third Circuit Court of Appeals panel twice upheld Yohn’s ruling, but their decision was appealed by DA Williams to the US Supreme Court, which finally decided on Oct. 11 to let the decision stand. Williams had 180 days from that date to decide whether to seek a new trial in state court on the penalty.

All of Abu-Jamal’s avenues for appealing his conviction have been rejected by the courts, meaning that absent new evidence of his innocence, he is doomed to spend the rest of his life in jail — though he must now be removed from the hellish death row in Greene, PA, where he has spent most of his last 29 years confined in solitary confinement in a windowless room the size of a small apartment bathroom. On death row, Abu-Jamal and other condemned prisoners are not allowed to physically touch visitors–even wives, siblings, children and grandchildren. They are shackled when they “meet” visitors through a plexiglass window, though escape is impossible under such circumstances.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: No longer facing execution