VIDEO: Haiti Charges 10 white christian Americans With Child Abduction

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Ten Americans who tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country last week without the government’s consent have been charged with child abduction and criminal conspiracy, as Haitian officials sought to reassert judicial control after the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The Americans, most of them members of a Baptist congregation from Idaho, had said they intended to rescue Haitian children left parentless in the quake and take them to what they described as an orphanage across the border in the Dominican Republic. But they acknowledged failing to seek approval to remove the children from Haiti, and several of the children have at least one living parent.

The Americans will face a potentially extended legal proceeding in Haiti and could, if convicted, face prison terms of up to 15 years.

In a sign of the cloudy nature of the case, the prosecutor, Mazar Fortil, decided not to pursue what could have been the most serious charge against the group, that of trafficking. The charges will now be considered by an investigative judge, who has up to three months to decide whether to pursue the matter further.

The leader of the group, Laura Silsby, a businesswoman who describes herself as a missionary as well, has also come under scrutiny at home in Idaho, where employees complain of unpaid wages and the state has placed liens on her company bank account.

The lawyer for the group, Edwin Coq, said after a hearing on Thursday that 9 of his 10 clients were “completely innocent,” but that, apparently in a reference to Ms. Silsby, “If the judiciary were to keep one, it could be the leader of the group.”

The Haitian capital lost courthouses, judges, lawyers and its main prison in the earthquake, straining the judiciary along with everything else. Prosecutors said this was the first criminal case to receive a hearing in Port-au-Prince since the natural disaster.

The hearing took place in a hilltop courthouse that had minor cracks in the walls and scores of squatters living outside. A crush of journalists sought access to the defendants on their way into the courthouse, where police officers in riot gear prevented access.

The Americans were transported in two Haitian police vehicles — one labeled “Child Protection Brigade” — from the police station where they have been held since the weekend to Port-au-Prince’s main criminal courthouse. Mr. Coq said beforehand that their immediate release was possible, and the police who transported the detainees took their luggage to the hearing as well in case they were to be freed.

Ms. Silsby, who had helped organize the group’s mission, sounded a hopeful note as she waited to be taken into court, saying, “We’re just trusting God for a positive outcome.”

But during the hearing, Jean Ferge Joseph, a deputy prosecutor, told the Americans that their case was not being dropped and that it would be sent to a judge for further review.

“That judge can free you, but he can also continue to hold you for further proceedings,” the deputy prosecutor said, according to Reuters.

When they received the news, the Americans did not appear distraught, Mr. Coq, their lawyer, said. “They prayed,” he said. “They looked down and prayed.”

Reuters, which had a reporter in the session, said that all 10 of the detainees acknowledged to the prosecutor that they had apparently violated the law when they tried to take the children from Haiti, although they said they were unaware of that until after they were detained.

“We did not have any intention to violate the law, but now we understand it’s a crime,” said Paul Robert Thompson, a pastor who led the group in prayer during a break in the session.

Ms. Silsby asked the prosecutor not only to release the group, whose members range in age from 18 to 55, but also to allow them to continue their work in Haiti.

“We simply wanted to help the children,” she said. “We petition the court not only for our freedom, but also for our ability to continue to help.”

As they were led out of the courthouse one by one for their return to jail, some of the Americans smiled as reporters surrounded them. They left without comment.

The Americans were arrested last Friday as they tried to take the 33 children by bus to the Dominican Republic, where they said they were in the process of leasing or building an orphanage. It is unclear if the group had arranged for someplace to house the children in the Dominican Republic.

A Web site for the group, the New Life Children’s Refuge, said that the Haitian children there would stay in a “loving Christian homelike environment” and be eligible for adoption through agencies in the United States.

The children are being taken care of now at SS Children’s Villages, an Austrian-run orphanage in Port-au-Prince.

The Americans and members of their churches have said that they are innocent of any wrongdoing, and described the case as a misunderstanding. In an interview this week, Ms. Silsby said the group had come to Haiti to rescue children orphaned by the earthquake, and that “our hearts were in the right place.”

But some of the children had living parents, and some of those parents said that the Baptists had promised simply to educate the youngsters in the Dominican Republic and to allow them to return to Haiti to visit.

Ms. Silsby had made her intentions known to child protection officials, human rights experts and Dominican authorities in Haiti, all of whom warned her that she could be charged with trafficking if she tried to take children out of the country without proper documentation.

Some Haitian leaders have called the Americans kidnappers, but their case has created divisions. Outside the courthouse on Thursday, one onlooker backed the Americans. “The process they followed was wrong, but they were not stealing kids,” said Béatrice St.-Julien. “They came here to help us.”

Until Thursday, Haitian judicial officials had left open the possibility that the group could be returned to the United States for trial, sparing Haiti’s crippled justice system a high-profile criminal prosecution fraught with diplomatic and political land mines.

American officials have talked with Haitian judicial authorities about the case, but it is unclear exactly how much lobbying Washington is doing behind the scenes to affect the outcome. The State Department has said that whether to pursue charges for any possible violations of Haitian law remains a Haitian decision.

One expert said that by pursuing the case Haitian authorities seemed to be trying to make a point.

“Haiti’s decision to prosecute the Baptist missionaries may be motivated, in part, by the need to show its own people and the world that it is a viable entity that is tackling the grave problem of international child abductions in Haiti,” Christopher J. Schmidt, a lawyer with Bryan Cave L.L.P. in St. Louis who has been involved in multiple cases of international kidnapping, said in a statement.

VIDEO: The Power of Nightmares A MUST SEE!!! (the truth about Al Qudia!)

The Rise of the Politics of Fear

This originally aired on the BBC in 2004.

US TODAY: White supremacy power on the march…

VIDEO: The Great White Father of America

VIDEO: Iran Israel and U.S.

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Trita Parsi,President of the National Iranian American Council, for a discussion of the struggle for power in the Middle East. Drawing on the perspective of the Realist School of International Relations Theory, he focuses on the region’s dominant powers–Israel and Iran–and examines the evolution of their relations with each other and with the United States, the world’s only superpower.

VIDEO: Media war (how US CAPTIAL master minded the invasion)

Disturbing new evidence suggests the CIA fed faulty intelligence to handpicked journalists to win support for the war against Iraq.

The defection of Iraqi engineer Adnan al Haideri in 2001 was a massive coup for the White House. “He was probably the single most significant defector who came out of Iraq,” states an INC spokesman. Al Haideri claimed to have been hired by Saddam Hussein to build facilities for testing WMD. His story was widely circulated and used to justify the war. Unfortunately, it now appears that his remarkable testimony was a lie. Not one of the hundreds of bunkers detailed by him has been found. “Al Haideri’s evidence is a perfect example of the kind of garbage that was disseminated by Ahmed Chalabi,” states former weapons inspector Scott Ritter. New information has also emerged about the way Al Haideri’s story was leaked to the media. “They misled us,” states Ritter “Thousands of innocent Iraqis perished in a war that didn’t need to be fought.”

VIDEO: The beacon of the world deconstructed (USA narcissism)

Fear, Agression, & Empire

What can psychoanalysis teach us about how we Americans understand our place in the world? Dr. Stephen Soldz talks with Pinky about narcissism, projection, and an enormous lost opportunity of our post-Cold War era.

PINKY SHOW

….
PINKY SHOW is a brilliant approach to deconstruct many things that is going on
from inside USA.

Thanx for doing this…

.))

a

Syria accuses US of deadly raid

Syria has accused the United States of killing at least eight people in a helicopter raid in the country’s east, close to the border with Iraq.

The government condemned the act as “serious aggression” and summoned the senior US and Iraqi envoys to Damascus to protest against the raid, the Syrian Arab news agency (Sana) reported on Sunday.

A US military official speaking on condition of anonymity told The Associated Press in Washington that the raid by US special forces were targeting al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq.

“We are taking matters into our own hands,” AP quoted him as saying.

Syrian state television said American helicopters raided the village of Sukariya, which lies 550km northeast of Damascus, before flying back towards Iraqi territory.

“Four American helicopters violated Syrian airspace around 4:45pm local time [13:45 GMT] on Sunday,” state television and Sana news agency reported.

During the raids, two of the helicopters landed and dropped off eight US soldiers, who then entered a house, Syrian media reported.

“American soldiers … attacked a civilian building under construction and fired at workmen inside, causing eight deaths,” the reports said.

Children killed

The government said civilians were among the dead, including four children.

“Syria condemns this aggression and holds the American forces responsible for this aggression and all its repercussions”

Syrian government statement
“Syria condemns this aggression and holds the American forces responsible for this aggression and all its repercussions. Syria also calls on the Iraqi government to shoulder its responsibilities and launch and immediate investigation into this serious violation and prevent the use of Iraqi territory for aggression against Syria,” a government statement said.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there have been some instances in which American troops crossed areas of the 600-km border in pursuit of fighters, or aircraft violating Syria’s airspace.

But Sunday’s raid, if confirmed, would be the first conducted by aircraft and on such a large scale.

Akram Hameed, one of the injured who said he was fishing in the Euphrates river, told Syrian television he saw four helicopters coming from the border area under a heavy blanket of fire.

“One of the helicopters landed in an agricultural area and eight members disembarked,” the man in his 40s said. “The firing lasted about 15 minutes and when I tried to leave the area on my motorcycle, I was hit by a bullet in the right arm about 20 metres away,” he said.

Syria TV showed what it said was the injured wife of the building’s guard, in bed in hospital with a tube in her nose, saying that two helicopters landed and two remained in the air during the attack.

US reaction

The alleged attack came just days after the commander of US forces in western Iraq said American troops were redoubling efforts to secure the Syrian border, which he called an “uncontrolled” gateway for fighters entering Iraq.

US Major-General John Kelly said on Thursday that Iraq’s western borders with Saudi Arabia and Jordan were fairly tight as a result of good policing by security forces in those countries but that Syria was a “different story”.

IN VIDEO

US raid on Syrian soil
“The Syrian side is, I guess, uncontrolled by their side,” Kelly said. “We still have a certain level of foreign fighter movement.”

However, Lieutenant-Colonel Chris Hughes, a spokesman for US forces in western Iraq, said the US division that operates on the Iraqi side of the border was not involved in Sunday’s incident.

A Pentagon spokesman in Washington said he had no immediate information on the reported strike but would check further while the White House and CIA declined to comment.

The US and the US-backed Iraqi government frequently say Damascus is not doing enough to stop anti-US fighters, including those from al-Qaeda, from crossing the border into Iraq.

The area targeted by Sunday’s raid lies close to the Iraqi border city of Qaim, which in the past has been a crossing point for fighters, weapons and money used to fuel the armed Sunni opposition against Iraq’s Shia-led government.

Thabet Salem, a political analyst, told Al Jazeera that the US had appeared to have taken the building workers for infiltrators.

“The Syrian government will be very worried because from the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003 until now, nothing has happened [in Syria]. There have maybe been a few cases, but nothing like eight people killed inside Syria,” he said.

“It will raise questions as to why this is happening at this moment – towards the end of the current US administration.

“Syria has deployed large numbers [of security staff] and they have checkpoints every four kilometres along the border. The Syrians have, according to my information, stopped five or six thousand people trying to cross the Syria-Iraq border throughout the last few years.”

Iraq security

The raid comes 10 days after Iraqi forces arrested seven Syrian “terrorist” suspects at a checkpoint near the city of Baquba, a base for al-Qaeda fighters, the Iraqi government said.

But last month, Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president, told his US counterpart George Bush that Iran and Syria no longer pose a problem to Iraqi security.

Syria’s first ambassador to Iraq in 26 years took up his post in Baghdad this month, bringing more than two decades of discord between the nations to an end.

In September, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, said she had met Walid Muallem, Syria’s foreign minister, to discuss Middle East peace efforts.

Syrian and American diplomats said the talks touched on Iraq, Lebanon and Middle East peace negotiations.

Ref: Al Jazeera

How the most powerful nation disabled itself – US: security’s bottom line

Just 15 numbers tell the history of the past seven years, in which a once wealthy and relatively secure nation near-bankrupted itself, pursued chimeras and funded chaos-causing wars that left it poorer and less safe then ever before.

Once upon a time, I studied the Chinese martial art of tai chi, until I realised I would never locate my “chi”. At that point I threw in the towel and took up western exercise. Still, the principle behind tai chi stayed with me, that you could multiply the force of an act by giving way before the force of others; that a smaller person could use the strength of a bigger one against him. Now, jump to 11 September 2001 and its aftermath, and you know the tai chi version of history from there. Think of it as a grim cosmic joke that the 9/11 attacks, as apocalyptic as they looked, were anything but. The true disasters followed and the wounds were largely self-inflicted, as the most militarily powerful nation on the planet used its own force to disable itself.

Before that fateful day, the Bush administration had considered terrorism, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida subjects for suckers. They were intent on pouring money into developing an elaborate boondoggle of a missile defence system against future nuclear attacks by rogue states. Those cold war high frontiersmen (and women) couldn’t get enough of the idea of missiling up. That was where the money and the fun seemed to be. Nuclear was where the big boys – the nation states – played. “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” the CIA told the president that August. Yawn.

After 9/11, George W Bush and his top advisers almost instantly launched their crusade against Islam and then their wars, all under the rubric of the “global war on terror”. (As Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld pungently put the matter that September, “We have a choice – either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live; and we chose the latter.”) By then, they were already heading out to “drain the swamp” of evildoers, 60 countries worth of them, if necessary. Meanwhile, they moved quickly to fight the last battle at home, the one just over, by squandering vast sums on an American Maginot Line of security. The porous new Department of Homeland Security, the NSA, the FBI, and other acronymic agencies were to lock down, surveil and listen in on America. All this to prevent “the next 9/11”.

In the process, they would treat bin Laden’s scattered al-Qaida network as if it were the Nazi or Soviet war machine (even comically dubbing his followers “Islamofascists”). In the blinking of an eye, and in the rubble of two enormous buildings in downtown Manhattan, bin Laden and his cronies had morphed from nobodies into supermen, a Legion of Doom. (There was a curious parallel to this transformation in the second world war. As historian John Dower documented in his book War Without Mercy, before Pearl Harbour American experts had considered the Japanese bucktoothed, near-sighted military incompetents whose warplanes were barely capable of flight. On 8 December 1941 they suddenly became a race of invincible supermen without, in the American imagination, ever passing through a human incarnation.)

Homeland insecurity
When, in October 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act, and an Office of Homeland Security (which in 2002 became a “department”) was established, we were welcomed to the era of homeland insecurity. From then on, every major building, landmark, amusement park, petting zoo, flea market, popcorn stand and tollbooth anywhere in the country would be touted as a potential target for terrorists and in need of protection. Every police department would be in desperate need of anti-terror funding. And why not, when the terrorists loomed so monstrously large, were so apocalyptically capable, and wanted so very badly to destroy our way of life? No wonder that, in the 2006 National Asset Database, compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, the state of Indiana, “with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50% more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation”.

In the administration’s imagination (and the American one), they were now capable of anything. From their camps in the backlands of Afghanistan (or was it the suburbs of Hamburg?), as well as in the murky global underworld of the arms black market, al-Qaida’s minions were toiling to lay their hands on the most fiendish of plagues and pestilences – smallpox, botulism, anthrax. They were preparing to fill suitcases with nuclear weapons for deposit in downtown Manhattan. They were gathering nuclear refuse for dirty bombs. Nothing was too mad or destructive for them. Every faint but strange odour – the sweet smell of maple syrup floating across a city – was a potential bio-attack. And everywhere, even in rural areas, politicians were preparing to run imminent-danger, anti-terror campaigns, while urging their constituents to run for cover.

So, thank you, Osama bin Laden for expediting the Department of Homeland Security, glutting an already-bloated Pentagon with even more money, ensuring that all those “expeditionary forces” would sally forth to cause havoc and not find victory in two hopeless wars, enabling the establishment of a vast offshore prison network (and the torture techniques to go with it), and creating a whole new global “security” industry to “thwart terrorists” that was, by 2006, generating $60bn a year in business, its domestic wing devoted to locking down America.

When the history of this era is finally written, Osama bin Laden and his scattering of followers may be credited for goading the fundamentalist leaders of the United States into using the power in their grasp so stupidly and profligately as to send the planet’s sole superpower into decline. Above all, bin Laden and his crew of fanatics will have ensured that the real security problems of our age were ignored in Washington until far too late in favour of mad dreams and dark phantoms. In this lies a bleak but epic tale of folly worthy of a great American novelist. In the meantime, consider the following list – 15 numbers that offer an indication of just what the tai chi principle meant in action these last years; just where American energies did and did not flow; and, in the end, just how much less safe we are now than we were in January 2001, when George Bush entered the Oval Office:

536,000,000,000: the number of dollars the Pentagon is requesting for the 2009 military budget. This represents an increase of almost 70% over the Pentagon’s 2001 budget of $316bn, and that’s without factoring in “supplementary” requests to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the president’s global war on terror. Add in those soaring sums and military spending has more than doubled in the Bush era. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, since 2001, funding for “defence and related programmes… has jumped at an annual average rate of 8%… four times faster than the average rate of growth for social security, Medicare, and Medicaid (2%), and 27 times faster than the average rate for growth for domestic discretionary programmes (0.3%).”

1,390,000: the number of subprime foreclosures over the next two years, as estimated by Credit Suisse analysts. They also predict that, by the end of 2012, 12.7% of all residential borrowers may be out of their homes as part of a housing crisis that caught the Bush administration totally off-guard.

1,000,000: the number of “missions” or “sorties” the US air force proudly claims to have flown in the Global War on Terror since 9/11, about 353,000 of them in what it still likes to call Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is a good measure of where American energies (and oil purchases) have gone these last years.

509,000: the number of names found in 2007 on a “terrorist watch list” compiled by the FBI. No longer is a Ten Most Wanted list adequate. According to ABC News, “US lawmakers and their spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list” and Saddam Hussein was on the list even when in US custody. By February 2008, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, the names on the list had ballooned to 900,000.

300,000: the number of American troops who now suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress, according to a recent RAND study. This represents almost one out of every five soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Approximately 320,000 “report possible brain injuries from explosions or other head wounds”. This, RAND reports, represents a barely dealt with major health crisis. The depression and PTSD will, the study reported, “cost the nation as much as $6.2bn in the two years following deployment”.

51,000: the number of post-surge Iraqi prisoners held in American and Iraqi jails at the end of 2007. The US now runs “perhaps the world’s largest extra-judicial internment camp” (1), Camp Bucca, in Iraq, whose holding capacity is being expanded from 20,000 to 30,000 prisoners. Then there’s Camp Cropper, with at least 4,000 prisoners, including “hundreds of juveniles” (2). Many of these prisoners were simply swept up in surge raids and have been held without charges or access to lawyers or courts ever since. Add in prisoners (in unknown numbers) in our sizeable network of prisons in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, and in offshore and borrowed prisons; add in the widespread mistreatment of prisoners at American hands; and you have the machinery for the manufacture of vast numbers of angry potential enemies, some willing to commit almost any act of revenge.

Though there is no way to tabulate the numbers, many tens of thousands of prisoners, at least, have cycled through the Bush administration’s various prisons in these last seven years, many emerging embittered. (And don’t forget their embittered families.) Think of all this as an enormous dystopian experiment in “social networking”, a Facebook from Hell.

5,700: the number of trailers in New Orleans, issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as temporary housing after Hurricane Katrina, still occupied by people who lost their homes in the storm almost three years ago. They have been found to contain toxic levels of formaldehyde fumes. Katrina was but one of many security disasters for the Bush administration.

658: the number of suicide bombings worldwide last year, including 542 in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than double the number in any of the past 25 years (3). Of all the suicide bombings in the past 25 years, more than 86% have occurred since 2001, according to US government experts. At least one bomber, who died in a recent coordinated wave of suicide bombings in the Iraqi city of Mosul, was a Kuwaiti, Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, who had spent years locked up in Guantanamo.

511: the number of applicants convicted of felony crimes, including burglary, grand larceny, and aggravated assault, who were accepted into the US army in 2007, more than double the 249 accepted in 2006. According to the New York Times, between 2006 and 2007, those enrolled with convictions for wrongful possession of drugs (not including marijuana) almost doubled. For burglaries, the number almost tripled, for grand larceny/larceny it more than doubled, for robbery it more than tripled, for aggravated assault it went up by 30%, and for “terroristic threats including bomb threats” it doubled (from one to two). Feel more secure?

132: the number of dollars it took to buy a barrel of crude oil on the international market towards the end of May (4). Meanwhile the average price of a gallon of regular gas at the pump in the US hit $3.88, while the price of gas jumped almost 20 cents in Michigan in a week and 36 cents in Utah in a month. As Memorial Day weekend arrived, a time when Americans traditionally hit the road, the average price for a gallon of gas in the state of California crossed the $4 barrier. Just after the 9/11 attacks, a barrel of crude oil was in the $20 range; at the time of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it was at about $30. In other words, since 9/11, a barrel of crude has risen more than $100 without the Bush administration taking any serious steps to promote energy conservation, cut down on the US oil addiction, or develop alternative energy strategies (beyond a dubious programme to produce more ethanol).

82: the percentage of Americans who think “things in this country have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track”, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. This is the gloomiest Americans have been about the “direction” of the country in the last 15 years.

40: the percentage loss “on a trade-weighted basis” in the value of the dollar since 2001. The dollar’s share of total world foreign exchange reserves has also dropped from 73% to 64% in that same period. According to the Center for American Progress, “By early May 2008, a dollar bought 42.9% fewer euros, 35.7% fewer Canadian dollars, 37.7% fewer British pounds, and 17.3% fewer Japanese yen than in March 2001.”

37: the number of countries that have experienced protests or riots in recent months due to soaring food prices, a global crisis of insecurity that caught the Bush administration completely unprepared. In the last year, the price of wheat has risen by 130%, of rice by 74%, of soya by 87%, and of corn by 31%.

0: the number of terrorist attacks by al-Qaida or similar groups inside the United States since 11 September 2001.

So consider the homeland secure. Mission accomplished.

One last figure, representative of the ultimate insecurity that, by conscious omission as well as commission, the Bush administration has left a harried future to deal with. That number is 387. Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii have just released new information on carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere, and it’s at a record high of 387 parts per million, “up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years”. Its rate of increase is on the rise as well. Behind all these figures lurks a potential world of insecurity with which this country has not yet come to grips.

Ref: Le Mond By Tom Engelhardt,e

Inside USA – Lobbying for Israel – 05 April 08 – Part 1

Ref: Al Jazeera

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