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beautiful-basque-country · 2 years ago

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Intervention of EH Bildu congressman Jon Iñarritu at the Spanish Congress, as an update of this affair:

Speaking of the situation in Ukraine, I can't leave without speaking to you about the case of Basque journalist Pablo González. As you know, he was arrested more than 15 months ago, while doing a journalist work for TV channel La Sexta, in Poland. He's imprisoned, accused of some very serious charges, but truth is he's in a Guantanamo-like situation; he's in a situation that's not desirable even for a person convicted of the worst of crimes. But what happens here? That this gentleman hasn't been even judged and he's still kept in custody, forced to spend more than 23 hours a day inside his cell, and during these 15 months he's benefited of a single visitiation - a few hours long - of a relative; [all this is happening] in a EU member state. You all get pride, and the minister of outer affairs stated that, before the detention of a person in very similar circumstances in Iran, he had called the Iranian authorities to claim the immediate liberation of said person. Just yesterday, you made public a communication condemning the imprisonment of Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich in Russia, and asking for his immediate liberation. Do you notice what happens? It's not that there are double standards. Because while you do give Pablo consular support - it's true - you're not giving him political support. Moreover, you won't stop insinuating [he's guilty] - blatantly violating his presumption of innocence. It's apparent you don't behave the same way in this case.

Enough is enough already. What's being done to this man shouldn't be tolerated anywhere, much less in the EU that likes to show itself like the human rights' defenders' paradise.

Meet Basque journalist Pablo González.

He was born in Moscow - grandson of one of the so-called “war children”, kids that were sent to the USSR to survive and escape the Spanish civil war - and came back when he was 9. He has a dual nationality, Russian and Spanish. He has a degree in Slavic languages and is an expert in Eastern Europe politics, and has informed about many conflicts there ie Nagorno-Karabaj, Donbass and now the war in Ukraine.

Polish authorities arrested him on Feb. 27th 2022 in Przemyśl, accused of being a Russian spy - a crime that can mean up to 10 years in prison according to Polish laws. Since he was charged with espionage and labeled as a “dangerous inmate”, he was placed in solitary confinement and denied to talk with his family and lawyer, and has been in that situation ever since.

He lives in a non-ventilated cell whose only window has been covered so light and view are limited. He’s under 24/7 video surveillance, is forced to wear handcuffs everytime he leaves his cell, and has to endure several friskings a day completely naked. He only leaves his cell 1h a day, and the only contact he has is an imposed public defender and the Spanish consul in Poland, who is the one that informs his family about Pablo. He hasn’t spoken to his children since he was arrested, because Polish authorities won’t allow any communication with minors.

After 7 months, the Polish public prosecutor has failed to show evidences against Pablo González yet, but still the court has extended his time in prison twice. On no proved grounds.

Seven of the biggest Basque newspapers have signed a letter adressed to Spanish and European institutions asking for help since «war cannot be an excuse to cut off freedom of speech and the citizens’ right to be informed». The Council of Europe and association Reporters sans frontières have condemned the situation of González.

Pablo González got to send a letter to the European Court of Human Rights and is waiting for their response.

Aski da!!

#euskadi #euskal herria #basque country #pais vasco #pays basque #pablo gonzalez #news #politics #torture #journalism #freedom of press #poland #jon iñarritu

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gatheringbones · 3 years ago

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[“Hundreds of Native American performers toured in Wild West shows at the turn of the century. Most considered it a respite from the oppressive reservation system, a lesser of two evils. Neither inexperienced nor naïve, some volunteered to join with P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill simply to escape the oppressive reservation system and attain an income on the side. It was reported that some split payments with Barnum and Cody to help recruit others. Those hired as interpreters secured favorable conditions and good pay. Harvard scholar Philip Deloria said that joining a Wild West show served “as a form of escape from agency surveillance.” Nearly one hundred Natives were recruited from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota every year. “Indeed, the most significant regular flow of money onto that reservation between 1883 and 1913 may have come from Lakota performers traveling nationally and internationally,” wrote Deloria. “The late 1880s and early 1890s in particular were starving times for many Indian communities, and performing represented, not simply escape, but also food and wages for Indian actors from a number of reservations.”

The Office of Indian Affairs, later the Bureau of Indian Affairs, objected to both the Standing Bear decision and Buffalo Bill’s recruitment process. They believed providing Natives with a taste of freedom would make their imprisonment unmanageable. Insisting that no Natives leave without the permission of the OIA, they fined Buffalo Bill several hundred dollars for doing something that the courts had already determined was perfectly legal.

Thomas J. Morgan, the new OIA commissioner, came up with a blackmail plan. He announced that anyone wishing to join a Wild West show was free to do so, but if they did, they would be stripped of their allotments and the annuities spelled out by treaty. He wrote in his annual report, “Indians must conform to white man’s ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must.” Suddenly it became much harder for Buffalo Bill to secure performers. Few were willing to risk losing their tribal status or the paltry annuities granted them in exchange for land. As a workaround, Buffalo Bill secured permission from federal authorities to offer potential Native American performers a plea deal: join the show or go to jail.

The famed Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull fled to Canada after the Battle of Little Big Horn and the death of General Custer in 1876. After months in hiding, he was extradited back to the United States, where he was given the option of prison time or performing with Buffalo Bill. Reduced to a mere sideshow attraction, comedian Rich Hall observed in his 2012 television special Inventing the Indian, “It was as if a Guantánamo detainee suddenly had to appear on X Factor.”]

Kliph Nesteroff, We Had A Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story Of Native Americans And Comedy

#kliph nesteroff #history stuff #currently reading

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blackkudos · 6 years ago

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Celia Cruz

Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso, also known by her stage name Celia Cruz (October 21, 1925 – July 16, 2003), was a Cuban singer of Latin music. The most popular Latin artist of the 20th century, she earned twenty-three gold albums and was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. She was renowned internationally as the "Queen of Salsa", "La Guarachera de Cuba", as well as The Queen of Latin Music.

She spent much of her career working in the United States and several Latin American countries. Leila Cobo of Billboard Magazine once said "Cruz is indisputably the best known and most influential female figure in the history of Cuban and Latin music".

Early life

Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso was born on October 21, 1925 in the diverse, working-class neighborhood of Santos Suárez in Havana, Cuba, the second of four children. Her father, Simon Cruz, was a railroad stoker and her mother, Catalina Alfonso was a homemaker who took care of an extended family of fourteen.

While growing up in Cuba's diverse 1930s musical climate, Cruz listened to many musicians who influenced her adult career, including Fernando Collazo, Abelardo Barroso, Pablo Quevedo and Arsenio Rodríguez. Despite her mother's opposition and the fact that she was Catholic, as a child Cruz learned santería songs from her neighbor who practiced santería. Cruz also later studied the words to Yoruba songs with colleague Mercedita Valdés (an Akpwon santería singer) from Cuba and made various recordings of this religious genre, even singing backup for other female akpwons like Candita Batista.

As a teenager, her aunt took her and her cousin to cabarets to sing, but her father encouraged her to attend school in the hope she would become a teacher. However, one of her teachers told her that as an entertainer she could earn in one day what most Cuban teachers earned in a month. Cruz began singing at Havana's radio station Radio García Serra as a contestant on this station's popular "Hora del Té" daily broadcast, where she sang the tango "Nostalgias" and won a cake as first-place finisher. She often won cakes and also opportunities to participate in more contests. Her first recordings were made in 1948 in Venezuela.

Career

With Sonora Matancera, she appeared in cameos in some Mexican films such as Rincón Criollo (1950), Una gallega en La Habana(1955) and Amorcito Corazón (1961).

When Fidel Castro assumed control of Cuba in 1959, Cruz and her husband, Pedro Knight, were prohibited from returning to their homeland and became citizens of the United States. In 1966, Cruz and Tito Puente began an association that would lead to eight albums for Tico Records. The albums were not as successful as expected. However, Puente and Cruz later joined the Vaya Records label. There, she joined accomplished pianist Larry Harlow and was soon headlining a concert at New York's Carnegie Hall.

Cruz's 1974 album with Johnny Pacheco, Celia y Johnny, was very successful, and Cruz soon found herself in a group named the Fania All-Stars, which was an ensemble of salsa musicians from every orchestra signed by the Fania label (owner of Vaya Records). With the Fania All-Stars, Cruz had the opportunity to visit England, France, Zaire (today's DR Congo), and to return to tour Latin America; her performance in Zaire is included in the film Soul Power. In the late 1970s, she participated in an Eastern Air Lines commercial in Puerto Rico, singing the catchy phrase ¡Esto sí es volar! (This is to truly fly!).

In 1976, she participated in a documentary film Salsa about the Latin culture, along with figures like Dolores del Río and Willie Colón.

Celia Cruz used to sing the identifying spot for WQBA radio station in Miami, formerly known as "La Cubanísima": "I am the voice of Cuba, from this land, far away...I am liberty, I am WQBA, the most Cuban! (Yo soy de Cuba, la voz, desde esta tierra lejana...soy libertad, soy WQBA, Cubanísima!) During the 1980s, Cruz made many tours in Latin America and Europe, doing multiple concerts and television shows wherever she went, and singing both with younger stars and stars of her own era. She began a crossover of sorts, when she participated in the 1988 feature film Salsa alongside Robby Draco Rosa.

In 1990, Cruz won a Grammy Award for Best Tropical Latin Performance – Ray Barretto & Celia Cruz – Ritmo en el Corazón. She later recorded an anniversary album with Sonora Matancera. In 1992, she starred with Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas in the filmThe Mambo Kings. In 1994, President Bill Clinton awarded Cruz the National Medal of Arts. In the same year, she was inducted intoBillboards Latin Music Hall of Fame along with fellow Cuban musician Cachao López. In 1999, Cruz was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 1999. In 2001, she recorded a new album, on which Johnny Pacheco was one of the producers.

On July 16, 2002, Cruz performed to a full house at the free outdoor performing arts festival Central Park SummerStage in New York City. During the performance she sang "Bemba Colora'." A live recording of this song was subsequently made available in 2005 on a commemorative CD honoring the festival's then 20-year history entitled, "Central Park SummerStage: Live from the Heart of the City". Cruz appeared on the Dionne Warwick albums 1998 Dionne Sings Dionne & 2006 My Friends & Me with their Latin Duet version of (Do You Know The Way To) San Jose.

In March 2003, the Spanish-language television network Telemundo produced and aired a tribute special honoring Cruz, ¡Celia Cruz: Azúcar!. It was hosted by American singer Marc Anthony and Cuban-American singer Gloria Estefan. It featured musical performances by various Latin music and Anglo performers including Victor Manuelle, Paulina Rubio, José Feliciano, Milly Quezada, Los Tri-O, Estefan, Patti Labelle, Arturo Sandoval, Ana Gabriel, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Tito Nieves, Albita, Johnny Pacheco, Alicia Villareal, Olga Tañón, Mikey Perfecto, José Alberto "El Canario", Rosario, Luis Enrique, Anthony and Gloria Gaynor.

Death

On July 16, 2003, Cruz died of brain cancer at her home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, at the age of 77. Her husband, Pedro Knight (died February 3, 2007), was there for her while she was going through cancer treatments. She had no children with him. After her death, her body was taken to lie in state in Miami's Freedom Tower, where more than 200,000 fans paid their final respects. Multiple vigils occurred worldwide in cities such as Havana, Miami, and Cali (the Cali vigil became notorious in Colombian history due to its three-day span) Knight had Cruz buried in a granite mausoleum that he had built in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City earlier in 2003, when she was dying. Knight chose the plot on which it stands, which is near the gravestones of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis because it was accessible to fans and had four windows built into it so that fans could see inside when paying their respects. Knight was known to share his time there with visiting fans. Knight himself was buried with Cruz in the same mausoleum following his death on February 3, 2007. An epilogue in her autobiography notes that, in accordance with her wishes, Cuban soil which she had saved from a visit to Guantánamo Bay was used in her entombment.

Legacy

In February 2004, her last album, Regalo del Alma, won a posthumous award at the Premios Lo Nuestro for best salsa release of the year. It was announced in December 2005 that a musical called Azucar! would open in Tenerife before touring the world. The name comes from Cruz's well-known catch phrase of "¡Azúcar!"

On June 4, 2004, the heavily Cuban-American community of Union City, New Jersey heralded its annual Cuban Day Parade by dedicating its new Celia Cruz Park (also known as Celia Cruz Plaza), which features a sidewalk star in her honor, at 31st Street and Bergenline Avenue, with Cruz's widower, Pedro Knight, present. There are four other similar dedications to Cruz around the world. Cruz's star has expanded into Union City's "Walk of Fame", as new marble stars are added each spring to honor Latin entertainment and media personalities, such as merengue singer Joseíto Mateo, salsa singer La India, Cuban musician Israel "Cachao" Lopez, Cuban tenor Beny Moré, Tito Puente, Spanish language television news anchor Rafael Pineda, salsa pioneer Johnny Pacheco, singer/bandleader Gilberto Santa Rosa and music promoter Ralph Mercado.

On May 18, 2005, the National Museum of American History, administered by the Smithsonian Institution and located in Washington, D.C., opened "¡Azúcar!", an exhibit celebrating the life and music of Celia Cruz. The exhibit highlights important moments in Cruz's life and career through photographs, personal documents, costumes, videos, and music.

On September 26, 2007, through May 25, 2008, Celia, a musical based on the life of Celia Cruz, played at the off-Broadway venue, New World Stages. Some performances were in Spanish and some in English. The show won four 2008 HOLA awards from the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors.

On March 16, 2011, Celia Cruz was honored by the United States Postal Service with a commemorative postage stamp. The Cruz stamp was one of a group of five stamps honoring Latin music greats, also including Selena, Tito Puente, Carmen Miranda, and Carlos Gardel.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History collaborated with photographer Robert Weingarten to create an object-based portrait of Celia Cruz featuring artifacts in the museum. The portrait was unveiled October 3, 2012.

On October 21, 2013, Google honored her with a Google Doodle. At 41st American Music Awards, American singer Jennifer Lopez performed a medley of Cruz's songs.

Discography

Filmography

Salón México (Mexico, 1950)

Una gallega en La Habana (Mexico, 1952)

¡Olé... Cuba! (Mexico/Cuba, 1957)

Affair in Havana (USA/Cuba, 1957)

Amorcito Corazon (Mexico, 1960)

Salsa (Documentary, 1976)

Salsa (USA, 1988)

"Fires Within" (USA, 1991)

The Mambo Kings (USA, 1992)

Valentina (TV) (Mexico, 1993)

The Perez Family (USA, 1995) Luz Pat

El alma no tiene color (TV) (Mexico, 1997)

¡Celia Cruz: Azúcar! (TV) (Tribute, USA, 2003)

Soul Power (Documentary of Kinshasa, Zaire Music Festival 1974) (USA, 2008)

CELIA, Celia Cruz Bio-Drama (2015 on Telemundo)

Wikipedia

#Celia Cruz

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ashxpad · 3 years ago

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Photographer Documents U.S. Military’s Fake Middle East Villages

One photographer had documented locations that many may not even know exist — fictitious Iraqi and Afghan villages on the training grounds of U.S. Army bases that are quietly tucked away in forests and deserts.

Christopher Sims has many professional titles under his belt: photographer, photo archivist, undergraduate Education Director, and Associate Professor.

Prior to learning about pretend villages, Sims was taking part in editorial coverage of Fort Bragg, a military facility in Fayetteville, North Carolina. During one such visit, a young U.S. Army private told Sims that there is a more compelling site to capture and took him to visit a fictitious village for the first time.

Situated in the deep forests of North Carolina and Louisiana as well as in the great expanse of desert near Death Valley in California, these villages — built as clusters — are spread out over thousands of acres. These villages are referred to by as existing in the pretend countries of Talatha, Braggistan, or “Iraq” — the latter likely accompanied by air quotes and a knowing look.

The purpose of these villages is to serve as a way station for soldiers and personnel who are heading off to war and for those who have fled it. The village consists of pretend villagers, who are often immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan themselves, and now are employed to play “a version of the lives they have left behind.”

The rest of the village population is created out of local communities near the Army bases, including spouses of active-duty soldiers and military veterans, some of who are amputees and play the part of wounded villagers. Others include actors who play police officers, gardeners, café owners, and more.

“The villages feel to me like they exist in a fantastical realm of sorts, but they are also worksites for employees,” Sims tells PetaPixel about his “Theater of War: The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan” project. “Overall, it’s a rather bizarre combination of elements.”

When the role-players are not actively engaged in training exercises, they spend time decorating and modifying their temporary surroundings, “creating architectural spaces that are layered visions of Western and Islamic world views” as Sims describes.

“The role-players are given wide latitude in inhabiting their characters and bring an impressive range of skills, activities, and traditions to their work. The overall effect of the villages is convincingly accurate and sometimes comically misdirected, mundane, or nightmarish,” he says.

So far, Sims has visited most of the pretend villages which are located on different bases throughout the country. For this project, he was granted access through the military’s public affairs offices and once even replied to a call for participants to be journalists for the International News Network — the military’s version of CNN.

Sims quickly got into the role of a pretend war correspondent and in exchange for performing it, he was given the opportunity to hitch rides around the training area and go photograph places that he hadn’t been able to access before.

The unique experience has left Sims asking questions.

“What did Americans think these distant lands and cultures where we were fighting were like? How are these wars present in our own day-to-day lives in the United States? Who do we believe to be our ‘enemy,’ and how do we imagine their lives? And how are these twenty-first-century wars, and our military’s preparation for them, hidden and not seen by US citizens, in a democracy?”

Sims has also captured Guantánamo Bay and both experiences bear similarities, he says. He felt that on both occasions he was documenting from the backstage, observing the global war on terror — or the “forever wars — whilst also trying to make sense of where his photographs fit in this narrative.

More of Sim’s work can be found on his website, including additional information about the “Theater of War: The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan” project.

Image credits: All photographs from “The Pretend Villages” by Christopher Sims and used with permission.

from PetaPixel https://ift.tt/3CKWjoR

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megalium · 4 years ago

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Covid-19: C.D.C. Order Requires Masks for Travel in U.S.

Countries are tightening borders to evade virus variants. A hospital refrigerator malfunction in Seattle led to a frenzied overnight inoculation drive.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued an order requiring travelers in the United States to wear masks as part of a new initiative aimed at stemming outbreaks of the coronavirus.

According to the 11-page order issued on Friday, travelers entering and transiting throughout the country will be required to wear face coverings in all transportation hubs, which the C.D.C. defines as including any “airport, bus terminal, marina, seaport or other port, subway station, terminal, train station, U.S. port of entry or any other location that provides transportation.”

The language of the order largely puts the onus on transit operators to enforce the rule.

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“Conveyance operators must use best efforts to ensure that any person on the conveyance wears a mask when boarding, disembarking and for the duration of travel,” the document said.

The new mandate, which comes as the country surpassed 26 million cases, is part of a string of executive orders and directives that President Biden signed on Thursday that aimed to ramp up the new administration’s ambitious goals of containing the latest surge and accelerating vaccine distribution.

A similar order was proposed during the Trump administration, but the White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Vice President Mike Pence, blocked the effort.

“Requiring masks on our transportation systems will protect Americans and provide confidence that we can once again travel safely even during this pandemic,” read the order, signed by Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the C.D.C.’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine. “Therefore, requiring masks will help us control this pandemic and aid in re-opening America’s economy.”

A footnote in the order states that the C.D.C. reserves the right to enforce the order “through criminal penalties.” But a spokesman for the agency said that the order relied heavily on voluntary action to enforce the mandate.

“C.D.C. strongly encourages and anticipates widespread voluntary compliance as well as support from other federal agencies in enforcing this order, to the extent permitted by law,” he said. “C.D.C. will be assisted with implementation by other federal partners, including D.H.S. and D.O.T.,” referring to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation.

The establishment of a national mask mandate for travelers was hailed by public health officials as a necessary step to fix the patchwork of local regulations that at times have let travelers move freely without facial coverings, in spite of ample data showing that mask wearing is key to preventing the spread of the virus.

“You needed this kind of coordinated response for quite some time,” said Dr. Melissa J. Perry, a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University. “So, uniform, across the board, everyone, everywhere, being required to wear masks will get us more soon to the end of the pandemic.”

The Pentagon on Saturday halted plans to offer coronavirus vaccines next week to the 40 wartime prisoners at Guantánamo Bay after an outcry over whether the Defense Department was putting terrorism suspects before the American people.

John Kirby, a department spokesman, announced the reversal on Twitter, noting that none of the detainees had been vaccinated. A delay, he said, would let officials “assess the impact on force protection to our troops, and that’s always going to be the first priority.”

The 40 prisoners include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as well as six men who have been cleared for release by an interagency government panel.

The disclosure by The New York Times on Thursday of the plan to administer vaccines to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay incited a sharp backlash, particularly given the slow start of the vaccine rollout in the United States.

Most states have started vaccinating older adults, but people across the country have expressed frustration over vaccine shortages, long lines and canceled appointments.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, chimed in on Twitter on Saturday to criticize the Pentagon’s initial proposal. “President Biden told us he would have a plan to defeat the virus on day 1,” he wrote. “He just never told us that it would be to give the vaccine to terrorists before most Americans.”

The Defense Department announced the suspension several hours later.

About 1,500 troops serve at the detention center in Cuba, most of whom are National Guard members who arrived during the pandemic and spent their first two weeks there in individual quarantine. But the Southern Command, which has oversight of the prison, has so far not disclosed how many of them were offered the vaccine and how many agreed to receive it.

Dr. Terry Adirim, the Pentagon’s principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, signed a memo on Wednesday that authorized the vaccination of the detainees. She is a Biden administration appointee who has been serving as a senior health official at the Defense Department since July 2016.

Motorists in line at one of the country’s largest vaccination sites were briefly halted on Saturday afternoon as demonstrators descended on Dodger Stadium, the authorities said.

At about 1:50 p.m. Pacific time, officials from the Los Angeles Fire Department closed the stadium’s entrance, said David Ortiz, a spokesman for the department. The closure lasted for about an hour before the entrance reopened, while vaccinations continued inside the stadium, Mr. Ortiz said. Cars were temporarily not let inside the entrance as protesters were trying to walk through the gates. About 50 protesters were present at the entrance.

All scheduled vaccines would be delivered, the police said on Twitter on Saturday evening. A spokeswoman with the Los Angeles Police Department said no arrests were made.

“The protest did not shut down the vaccination site,” Chief Michel Moore said in a statement on Twitter. “All appointments are being met.”

The Police Department and Fire Department did not comment on whether the protesters were affiliated with any groups or what exactly they were demonstrating against.

Photos posted to social media, however, show people holding posters with the words, “99.96% survival rate” and “End the Lockdown” as well as other paraphernalia that appeared to denounce the pandemic’s existence and coronavirus vaccinations. One protester held a sign at the gates reading, “Vaccine Makers have no liability for injuries or deaths.”

The vaccination site at Dodger Stadium opened on Jan. 15. Since then, those eager to get vaccinated have been met with a wide range of wait times, with the site highlighting some of the logistical hurdles of vaccinating people in one of America’s largest cities. In the past week, an average of almost 7,000 daily cases were reported in Los Angeles County, according to a New York Times database. The city of Los Angeles has one of the highest vaccination rates in the country, as almost 83 percent of the doses the city has received have been administered.

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rmg171 · 4 years ago

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A federal judge sentenced a former commander of the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Thursday to two years in prison for trying to cover up a drunken fight with a commissary worker who was later found dead in the bay. Testimony at the trial showed that the fight inside the official residence of the now-retired Navy captain, John R. Nettleton, 54, followed a night of drinking during a celebration at the base's private officers' club. At the party, the man who died, Christopher Tur, 42, loudly accused Nettleton of having an affair with his wife.

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leviathangourmet · 5 years ago

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The word spiegel means “mirror” in German, and since its postwar founding, Der Spiegel has proudly held a mirror up to the world. When the magazine published top-secret information about the dire state of West Germany’s armed forces in 1962, the government accused it of treason, raided its offices, and arrested its editors. The resulting “Spiegel affair” led to mass demonstrations against police-state tactics and established an important precedent for press freedom in the young democracy. Throughout its history, the newsweekly has helped set the national agenda, like Time in its heyday.

Over the past weeks, however, the name of the magazine has assumed a new relevance. Der Spiegel has cracked, and revealed ugliness within the publication as well as German society more broadly.

On December 19, the magazine announced that the star reporter Claas Relotius had fabricated information “on a grand scale” in more than a dozen articles. Relotius has been portrayed as a sort of Teutonic Stephen Glass, the 1990s New Republic fabulist. “I’m sick and I need to get help,” Relotius told his editor. While that may very well be the case, his downfall is about more than just one writer with a mental-health problem.

A motif of Relotius’s work is America’s supposed brutality. In one story, he told the macabre tale of a woman who travels across the country volunteering to witness executions. In another, he related the tragic experience of a Yemeni man wrongly imprisoned by the United States military at Guantánamo Bay, where he was held in solitary confinement and tortured for 14 years. (The song that American soldiers turned on full blast and pumped into the poor soul’s cell? Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”) Both stories were complete fabrications.

And they should have been easily invalidated. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Der Spiegel’s fact-checking department is the largest in the world, besting that of the vaunted New Yorker. (In 2013, I spent several months on a fellowship working for a now-defunct English-language unit at Der Spiegel). A diligent checker would have at least contacted the purported death-row roadie to confirm her existence. And the U.S. government keeps scrupulous records about the inmates imprisoned at Guantánamo. Yet Relotius’s inventions escaped the scrutiny of his colleagues.

Der Spiegel is conducting an internal review to explain what went wrong. But it seems to me that the blame lies not only with Relotius or a few careless checkers or even the publication’s research methods, but with the mentality of its editors and readers. Relotius told them what they wanted—what they expected—to hear about America; this is a case of motivated reasoning if I’ve ever seen one.

Consider the story Relotius published in March 2017, “Where They Pray for Trump on Sundays.” In 7,300 words, the German correspondent described the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, in the manner of an explorer recounting his visit to a remote island tribe untouched by civilization. Some of the “facts” Relotius reported, like his claim that the city voted 70.4 percent for President Donald Trump when the actual figure was 62.6 percent, could have been exposed as false with a few minutes’ research. The same goes for other, too-good-to-be-true details, like the sign warning “Mexicans Keep Out” and a throwaway line about a resident who had “never seen the ocean.” Most of the story was, according to a devastating analysis written by the Fergus Falls residents Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, “uninhibited fiction.”

An open-minded editor would have doubted this astonishing tale about a town so jingoistic that its only cinema continues to sell out screenings of American Sniper years after the film’s release (another easily disproven lie). The fact that these blatant deceptions were not exposed until nearly two years after publication speaks to the ignorance about America that characterizes a wide swath of elite German society. Relotius, I submit, was able to get away with his con for so long because he confirmed the preconceived notions of people who fashion themselves worldly yet are as parochial as the red-state hicks of their imagination.

Though it is respected abroad as an authoritative news source, Der Spiegel has long peddled crude and sensational anti-Americanism, usually grounded in its brand of knee-jerk German pacifism. Covers over the years have impugned the United States as “The Conceited World Power” (with an image of the White House bestriding the globe), repeated the hoary “Blood for Oil” charge as the rationale for the Iraq War, and, in the run-up to George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, asked, “Will America Be Democratic Again?” When Edward Snowden leaked information detailing U.S. surveillance practices several years ago, Der Spiegel went on a crusade unlike anything in its recent history, railing about U.S. intelligence cooperation with Germany and demanding that Berlin grant Snowden asylum. (The magazine demonstrated none of the same outrage when, two years later, Russia hacked the German parliamentary computer network). Last year, Der Spiegel notoriously featured a cartoon of Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty on its cover. And this May, one of its columnists misappropriated the memory of those who struggled against Nazism by calling for “resistance against America,” quite a demand for a magazine from the country that started World War II.

The biases that Relotius stoked in his stories are ones that Europeans, and Germans in particular, have voiced about America since the first colonists set foot here hundreds of years ago. “European elites have consistently and passionately expressed the same negative sentiments about America for centuries,” the scholar Andrei Markovits observed in his 2007 book Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America. “In both substance and tone, what stands out is this continuity, rather than change.” Among the negative traits Europeans have long associated with America, Markovits writes, are “venality, vulgarity, mediocrity, inauthenticity,” along with the perception that the country is a “threatening parvenu.” America’s frontier spirit and radically democratic ethos frightened European elites, who distrusted their own masses with political power. “You dear German farmers!” the 19th-century poet Heinrich Heine, who never visited America, implored his countrymen. “Go to America! There, neither princes nor nobles exist; there, all people are equal; there, all are the same boors!”

This sort of reflexive anti-Americanism matters. Relations between the United States and Germany are at their lowest point since the early 1980s, when the deployment of American Pershing nuclear-tipped missiles on German soil sparked the largest protests in the history of the Federal Republic. While Trump’s singling out of Germany for rhetorical abuse is obviously a huge part of the lamentable decline in transatlantic relations, so are the latent anti-American prejudices routinely aroused by Der Spiegel’s brand of yellow journalism masquerading as high-minded critique.

When Trump was elected president, it seemed to confirm every negative impression Europeans hold about Americans. Here, in the shape of our reality-TV leader, was the ur-American: vulgar, crass, ignorant, bellicose. Trump may be all those things, but to depict his supporters with such a broad brush is akin to writing off half of Germany as a bunch of goose-stepping, would-be fascists. The wildly popular work of Relotius reads exactly like what you would expect a snotty, effete, self-righteous, morally superior, latte-sipping European to say about America. Pardon the stereotype

#ideas #Der Spiegel #article #yellow journalism #anti american #antiamericanism #donald trump #fake news

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revolutionaryeye · 7 years ago

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The reasons one bigot pardoned another

Julian Guerrero and Nicole Colson explain the logic behind Donald Trump's pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

IT WASN'T a surprise when Donald Trump decided to pardon Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, on August 25. But it was a slap in the face--to Arpaio's victims and to millions of people across the U.S. sickened by the racism he promoted throughout his career.

And it was a gift to the racists and rabid reactionaries who have been let off the leash since Trump took office.

In granting his first (though probably not his last, given the crooks who populate his administration) presidential pardon, Trump said in a statement that, "Throughout his time as sheriff, Arpaio continued his life's work of protecting the public from the scourges of crime and illegal immigration. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is now 85 years old, and after more than 50 years of admirable service to our nation, he is [a] worthy candidate for a presidential pardon."

This "worthy candidate's" "admirable service" included years terrorizing the local Latino community in Maricopa County. A regular practitioner of sadistic techniques used to humiliate and divide Maricopa's residents, for years Arpaio proudly boasted to media outlets about his use of a tent city jail to house inmates in conditions that have been described as similar to those of a concentration camp or the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay; his use of a hired posse; and his willingness to flout the rule of law to enforce a racist, macho brand of "justice."

Describing Arpaio's career of "intimidation, cruelty and abuses of power," Nathan J. Robinson explained in Current Affairs:

The word "racist" isn't enough. The word "abusive" isn't enough. Joe Arpaio's actions over the course of his time in office were monstrous and sickening. As Arpaio's officers were harassing, detaining, and beating citizens and non-citizens alike, with jail employees routinely calling inmates "wetbacks" or leaving them to die on the floor..... Read on:- https://socialistworker.org/2017/08/31/the-reasons-one-bigot-pardoned

#police violence #extrajudicial murder #Donald Trump #US Politics #racism #joe arpaio

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newingtonnow · 5 years ago

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The Platt Amendment – Today in History: June 12

Orville Platt from An Old-Fashioned Senator: Orville H. Platt of Connecticut by Louis A Coolidge

On June 12, 1901, the Cuban Constitutional Convention agreed to the terms of the Platt Amendment. Drafted by United States Secretary of War, Elihu Root, the Platt Amendment was a rider appended to the Army Appropriations Bill of 1901 and laid out a series of stipulations by which the United States agreed to end its occupation of Cuba—an occupation that began three years earlier during the Spanish-American War.

The amendment got its name from Orville Platt, the Republican senator from Meriden, Connecticut, who presented it to Congress. Platt was a member of the “Senate Four,” a powerful group of senators known for their influence in Washington political circles.

The stipulations contained in the amendment prohibited Cuba from allowing foreign powers to use the island as a military base. They also forbade Cuba from negotiating treaties with countries that might compromise Cuba’s “independence,” and allowed the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs as it saw fit. Of the remaining conditions for American withdrawal, perhaps the one with the most lasting effect on Cuban-American relations was a provision allowing the United States to lease territory in Cuba for use as a naval station. This station ultimately became the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay.

Cuban officials bristled at signing the Platt Amendment due to the influence it gave the United States over the small island’s domestic and international affairs. After several failed attempts to modify the amendment, however, the Cuban Constitutional Convention eventually resigned itself to ratifying it in June of 1901.

American officials later incorporated the amendment into a permanent treaty with Cuba in 1903. In 1934, however, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America combined with new criticism of the Platt Amendment stemming from a growing tide of Cuban nationalism brought about a repeal of the Platt Amendment. One stipulation remained in effect, however, and that was the continued lease of the naval base at Guantánamo Bay—an issue still helping define Cuban-American relations today.

from Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project https://connecticuthistory.org/the-platt-amendment-today-in-history-june-12/

#History

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blackkudos · 7 years ago

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Celia Cruz

Early life

Career

With Sonora Matancera, she appeared in cameos in some Mexican films such as Rincón Criollo (1950), Una gallega en La Habana(1955) and Amorcito Corazón (1961).

In 1976, she participated in a documentary film Salsa about the Latin culture, along with figures like Dolores del Río and Willie Colón.

Death

Legacy

On October 21, 2013, Google honored her with a Google Doodle. At 41st American Music Awards, American singer Jennifer Lopez performed a medley of Cruz's songs.

Discography

Filmography

Salón México (Mexico, 1950)

Una gallega en La Habana (Mexico, 1952)

¡Olé... Cuba! (Mexico/Cuba, 1957)

Affair in Havana (USA/Cuba, 1957)

Amorcito Corazon (Mexico, 1960)

Salsa (Documentary, 1976)

Salsa (USA, 1988)

"Fires Within" (USA, 1991)

The Mambo Kings (USA, 1992)

Valentina (TV) (Mexico, 1993)

The Perez Family (USA, 1995) Luz Pat

El alma no tiene color (TV) (Mexico, 1997)

¡Celia Cruz: Azúcar! (TV) (Tribute, USA, 2003)

Soul Power (Documentary of Kinshasa, Zaire Music Festival 1974) (USA, 2008)

CELIA, Celia Cruz Bio-Drama (2015 on Telemundo)

Wikipedia

#Celia Cruz #10-21 #07-16

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socialjusticeartshare · 4 years ago

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Taking Children

An excerpt from Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs

Taking children has been a strategy for terrorizing people for centuries. There is a reason why “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” is part of international law’s definition of genocide. It participates in the same sadistic political grammar as the torture and murder that separated French Jewish children from their parents under the Nazis and sought to keep enslaved people from rebelling or to keep Native people from retaliating against the Anglos who violated treaties to encroach on their land. Stripping people of their children attempts to deny them the opportunity to participate in the progression of generations into the future — to interrupt the passing down of languages, ways of being, forms of knowledge, foods, cultures. Like enslavement and the Indian Wars, the current efforts by the Trump administration to terrorize asylum seekers is white nationalist in ideology. It is an attempt to secure a white or Anglo future for a nation, a community, a place.

The past stalks the present, the ghost in the machine of memory. This is why history writing matters; it gives us ways to understand the specters already among us and to assemble tools to transform our situation. Things change; the epidemic of child taking in the context of mass incarceration is quite different from separating refugees from their children at the border, but you cannot track the differences without a map of what happened. Writing histories is also a defense against the efforts to implant false memories, the insistence that things happened that did not. The Obama administration did not have a policy of separating children from their parents. Telling history’s story is a way to define it, to put limits on the infinite range of things that might have happened.

Part of the reason this theater of cruelty at the border worked was precisely because of its history. But that is also why it faltered, in the sense that it generated passionate and angry denunciations of, for example, immigrant child detention centers as “concentration camps.” We are primed by memory — by bits of stories handed down across generations, conversations, things read and half-remembered, formal histories, activists’ words and actions, and lies and distortions — to react in certain ways to events in the present. It is not that the histories of child taking repeat or that one set of events parallels another; it is that the past is brought to life in the present. William Faulkner famously evoked this sense of history when he wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Yet for all the anger the policy engendered, the demand for it to end also failed. The administration found a work-around that continued to separate children from their kin and caregivers. Instead of saying that children were being taken because parents were applying for asylum, the Trump administration began saying that it was because they were “neglectful” or dangerous to their children, often with the flimsiest of evidence — a diaper not changed quickly enough, a past criminalized disruption that caused $5 in damage. This, too, was about a failure of historical memory, as opponents failed to mobilize sufficient opposition to the ugly history of the use of “child neglect” to take the children of insurgent communities of color. The administration was reprising a tactic used against welfare mothers, who faced a definition of “child neglect” in the 1950s and ’60s that included having a common-law marriage, a boyfriend sleep over, or an “illegitimate” child. The Trump administration also used the Obama-era tactic of detaining immigrant children with their parents. It called parents criminal — either through a (failed) strategy of naming crossing outside regular border checkpoints to apply for asylum a crime, which courts repeatedly said it was not, or through the more successful efforts to call acts felonies that would be trivial administrative matters if people weren’t migrants, like giving a wrong name to the police. Other immigrants and asylum seekers in fact had criminal records. In the absence of a strong movement to protect the parental rights of those who are or were incarcerated in the United States — immigrants or not — the administration’s work-around, too, served to demobilize the movement to reunite refugee and immigrant children with those who cared for them. Opponents of the policy failed to understand the deep history of the criminalization of parents of color, the way foster care had become a state program of child-taking, and to realize how easily refugee parents could be transformed from harmed innocents to dangerous criminals.

While international and US law make much of the difference between immigrants and refugees, the Trump administration sought to collapse that distinction. Asylum for refugees was a product of the post-World War II response to German concentration camps, and states don’t like it much. Unlike regular immigration, which can to some degree be metered according to the labor needs of a nation or an economy — changing laws to allow more immigrants when more workers are needed, fewer when they aren’t — asylum is understood in international law as a right that follows from being persecuted for one’s ethnicity, race, or political view. The model is Jews under the Nazis, and it was extended to groups like the Hmong in Laos, who were forced to flee because of their aid to the Americans in the war in Southeast Asia. The international asylum system, however, has never worked well in the United States (or a great many other places), and Cold War refugees from politically unpopular left-wing governments, like those from Castro’s Cuba, have been massively favored over refugees from right-wing governments, like those who fled El Salvador in the 1980s. In the eighties and nineties, activists argued that race was a factor as well, with Reagan and the first Bush administration refusing Haitian refugees while accepting largely white Cubans. (Ironically, by 2019, many of the refugees sitting in Mexican shelters awaiting asylum hearings were Cuban. The favoritism did not last.) Bill Clinton campaigned against the distinction that allowed Cubans but not Haitians to petition for asylum in US courts, arguing that everyone had a right to go before a judge to make their case. As soon as he was elected, however, he too began to insist that Haitians couldn’t apply for asylum because they had not reached the land border of the United States, sending them instead to Guantánamo Bay, the US naval base in Cuba. Indeed, Clinton made a mockery of the entire notion of asylum, signing legislation that allowed “expedited” review of such claims, which ensured that people did not set foot in front of a judge but, rather, made their case to an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service, later ICE) official whose expertise was enforcement, not the finer points of the law.16 George W. Bush and Obama steadily expanded the use of expedited removal, to the point where, by 2013, it accounted for 44 percent of all deportations, compared with only 17 percent that went before a judge.

Taking Children is a book about how we got here. It tells the stories of the detention of children at the US-Mexico border since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and it also explores four other contexts in the past four centuries where the US state has either taken children as a tactic of terror or tacitly encouraged it. The first is the taking of Black children, beginning with the centuries of racial chattel slavery. Chapter 1 examines slavery and its aftermath through the decades after World War II, when white supremacists sought to dull the moral force of demands for the end of segregation by drawing attention to families and households they tried to paint as pathological: single mothers and their so-called illegitimate children relying on welfare. With the cooperation of the federal government, Southern cities and states put Black children in foster care as punishment for Black adults’ activism against segregation. Chapter 2 investigates the taking of Native children, beginning in the closing decade of the Indian Wars, designed to quiet further revolt. Child taking continued through the emergence of movements for sovereignty and against tribal termination in the middle of the twentieth century. Again, states responded with an aggressive discourse about welfare and illegitimacy, resulting in removal of one in three Native kids from their homes. In response, from 1969 to 1978, tribal councils, the Association on American Indian Affairs, and Native newspapers, newsletters, and radio shows began a campaign for an Indian Child Welfare Act, calling the taking of children the latest episode in centuries of settler colonialism — and they won.

The third episode of children being ripped from their parents and communities I examine in the pages ahead unfolded in the anti-Communist wars in Latin America and their aftershocks. After reprising the better-known cases of disappeared children in Argentina and the Southern Cone, chapter 3 tells the story of Central America: how governments in Guatemala and El Salvador took the children of suspected Communists and placed them for adoption or in institutions to an extent that is still being unearthed. In Honduras, the Reagan administration backed the Contras, a mercenary force seeking to overthrow the government of Nicaragua that happened also to be working with cocaine and marijuana traffickers from Colombia and Mexico, which set in motion much that followed. Within the United States, it sparked the “crack” epidemic, the subject of chapter 4. Crack cocaine justified the launching of a new campaign of harassment of drug users, not just dealers, including massive testing of Black pregnant women and taking their children into foster care in the name of protecting “crack babies.” Native women were caught in a parallel “crisis” that sent them to jail for drinking during pregnancy and sent their children to foster care.

The expansion of cocaine consumption also vastly empowered and armed drug cartels, launching the events that would end in the waves of refugees and asylum seekers that arrived at the borders of the United States in significant numbers beginning in 2013, as we will see in chapter 5. Central America’s Northern Triangle — Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador — had became increasingly unlivable for impoverished people, particularly youth, as the cartels and gangs claimed their neighbors in an ever-accelerating spiral of extortion, kidnapping, violence, and murder.

Taking Children is about a long history in the Americas of interrupting relations of care, kinship, and intimacy, and about how disrupted reproduction produces new regimes of racialized rightlessness. Child taking is, I am arguing, a counterinsurgency tactic has been used to respond to demands for rights, refuge, and respect by communities of color and impoverished communities, an effort to induce hopelessness, despair, grief, and shame.

This is not the whole story, however. There is also a fierce tradition of protesting this practice by the targeted communities and by those who acted in solidarity with them. Many people have found these policies repulsive and abhorrent, and activists, lawyers, and policy makers have sought to reform them. When we forget about the ways that governments have taken children, we also lose a powerful history of communities standing up against that practice, one that has often been quite successful, and provides resources for how to imagine doing it even now. Walter Benjamin wrote urgently about understanding the power of history in this way: “To articulate the past historically does not mean torecognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Benjamin’s point was that we will never see the past as those who lived it saw it, never grasp it whole, but we don’t have to be troubled by this partial vision. In his view, we need memory — history — for something else, for the way it is useful in the present, in a crisis (he was thinking of fascism).

This work is inspired by social movements’ responses to crisis, including one that Black feminists in the United States have started calling reproductive justice. In recent years, we have seen new protest movements coalesce around missing children — sparked by the mothers (especially, but also fathers and grandparents) of unarmed Black and Latinx youth shot by police or vigilantes — Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Jessie Hernández, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Antwon Rose, and so many others. In Mexico, a nationwide movement to end state- and police-sanctioned killing by criminal organizations coalesced around the demand by the parents of the young adults disappeared from the Ayotzinapa teacher-training school that they be returned alive. For forty years, some of the most effective opposition to the political right in Latin America has come from family members of the “disappeared,” those arrested or kidnapped by police and para military forces. While most opposition to right-wing governments was dismissed as the work of Communists and “terrorists,” groups like the Comité de Madres Monsignor Romero (Comadres; Committee of Mothers) in El Salvador claimed moral authority by speaking on behalf of disappeared sons and daughters literally in the name of Archbishop (now Saint) Óscar Romero, who was killed by the military while celebrating mass in 1980. In the 1990s, despite Central America’s truth commissions initially refusing to believe that disappeared children and infants were not dead, parents’ groups like Pro Búsqueda began searching for, and sometimes finding, children who had been taken to orphanages and boarding schools — and sometimes adopted abroad. These parents, kin, and caregivers cast the war and the taking of children in a new light, while continuing to fight for a full reckoning for the crimes committed in the name of anti-Communism.

This is the legacy that we carried into the twenty-first century. In the United States, both Democratic and Republican administrations have sought to deter those who lawfully sought asylum by punishing parents as parents and their children. The US government sought to terrify people into not asking for a review of their asylum cases by putting their children in camps, even as it enacted policies that ensured they would come in ever greater numbers. In the pages that follow, this book builds out these stories about how taking children came to seem reasonable, a kind of pain that kept the peace or maintained the status quo, and how people again and again stood up to that violence. Taking children may be as American as a Constitution founded in slavery and the denial of basic citizenship rights to Native people, African Americans, and all women, but activists in every generation have also stood up and said it did not have to be.

Laura Briggs is professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption, and Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico.

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#taking children #taking kids #history of terror

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onlinevideoproduction · 5 years ago

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Talk: Jérôme Tubiana, Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani

Jérôme Tubiana will be with us to talk about the book Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani

Become a member and be the first informed of our events. If you are not yet a member of the Institut français d'Ecosse, we invite you to join. Already a member? Book your place early! About the authors: Jérôme Tubiana is a journalist and independent researcher. He has contributed to National Geographic, Foreign Affairs, The London Review of Books, Foreign Policy and many other publications. An expert on conflicts and armed groups in the Sahara, the Horn of Africa and Latin America, he has worked for various NGOs, think tanks and humanitarian organizations, including the International Crisis Group, Action Against Hunger and the United States Institute of Peace. He lives in Paris.

Alexandre Franc is a comic book artist and writer. He is the creator of over a dozen graphic novels, including Agatha: The Real Life of Agatha Christie. He is also an illustrator for youth periodicals, educational books and the communications industry. He lives in Paris. _ About the book: Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani Saudi Arabia offers few prospects for the bright young Mohammed El-Gharani. With roots in Chad, Mohammed is treated like a second-class citizen. His access to healthcare and education are restricted; nor can he make the most of his entrepreneurial spirit. At the age of 14, having scraped together some money as a street trader, Mohammed seizes an opportunity to study in Pakistan. One Friday in Karachi, Mohammed is detained during a raid on his local mosque. After being beaten and interrogated, he is sold to the American government by the Pakistani forces as a member of Al-Qaida with links to Osama Bin Laden, but Mohammed has heard of neither. The Americans fly him first to Kandahar and then to Guantánamo Bay. In Guantánamo Kid, Jérôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc tell the eye-opening, heart-wrenching story of one of Guantánamo's youngest detainees.

Event details Talk: Jérôme Tubiana, Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani Monday 18 May 2020 | 6pm Bilingual event FRENCH/ENGLISH FREE & OPEN TO ALL

Institut français d'Ecosse Salle Emilienne Moreau-Evrard (1st floor) West Parliament Square Edinburgh EH1 1RF

Access Details The Institut français d'Ecosse is accessible with step-free access available at West Parliament Square and George IV Bridge.

Booking Book directly online via our ticketing system Feel free to contact us at 0131 285 6030 or ifecosse.edimbourg-cslt diplomatie.gouv.fr

IFE Membership and discount rates To benefit from the discounted member rates and to have access to members-only events throughout the year, we invite you to become a member of the Institut français d'Ecosse.

from Institut Français Écosse http://www.ifecosse.org.uk/Talk-Jerome-Tubiana-Guantanamo-Kid.html via IFTTT

#showreel media #media production company #business media specialists #media specialists company

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okgooglenews · 5 years ago

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Ex-Guantanamo chief convicted of covering up fight over alleged affair days before man’s death - The Washington Post

* Ex-Guantanamo chief convicted of covering up fight over alleged affair days before man’s death The Washington Post * Ex-Guantanamo commander convicted of lying about man's death POLITICO * Former Gitmo commander found guilty of obstructing justice in civilian's 2015 death Fox News * Ex-Guantanamo Bay commander convicted of hindering inquiry into man's death NBC News * Sex, Power and Fury: The Mystery of a Death at Guantánamo Bay The New York Times * View full coverage on Google News http://dlvr.it/RNH89f

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we-arnold-lockshin-blog · 6 years ago

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Dictatorship USA – Run By A Plundering and Murderous Ruling Class — 2019 (014)

Факты, которые подконтрольные ЦРУ СМ»И» в России скрывают...

American imperialism (4)

Foreign interventions by the United States (incomplete list)

Wikipedia

The First and Second Barbary Wars of the early 19th century were the first wars waged by the United States outside its boundaries after the War of Independence. Directed against the Barbary States of North Africa, it was fought to end piracy against American-flagged ships in the Mediterranean.

The founding of Liberia was sponsored by American such as the American Colonization Society with the support and unofficial cooperation of the United States government.

The U.S. advanced the Open Door Policy to guarantee imperialist economic access to China. The USA has also acquired small islands in the Pacific.

From 1846 to 1848, the United States initiated a war with Mexico to conquer Texas, California and what today is the American Southwest but was then part of Mexico. During this war, US. troops invaded and occupied parts of Mexico, including Veracruz and Mexico City.

The early decades of the 20th century saw a number of interventions in Latin America by the U.S. government often justified under the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. President William Howard Taft viewed "Dollar Diplomacy" as a way for American corporations to benefit.

1901: The Platt Amendment amended a treaty between the US and Cuba after the Spanish–American War virtually made Cuba a U.S. protectorate. The amendment outlined conditions for the U.S. to intervene in Cuban affairs and permitted the United States to lease or buy lands for the purpose of the establishing naval bases, including Guantánamo Bay.

1903: U.S. backed independence of Panama from Colombia in order to build the Panama Canal.

1904: Theodore Roosevelt announced his "Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, stating that the United States would intervene in the Western Hemisphere should Latin American governments prove incapable or unstable.

1906 to 1909: U.S. governed Cuba under Governor Charles Magoon.

1909: U.S.-backed rebels in Nicaragua deposed President José Santos Zelaya.

1912 to 1933 United States occupation of Nicaragua: Marines occupied main cities.

1914 to 1917: Mexico conflict and Pancho Villa Expedition, U.S. troops entering northern portion of Mexico.

1915 to 1934: United States occupation of Haiti.

1916 to 1924: U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic.

Repeated US interventions in Chile, starting in 1811, the year after its independence from Spain.

During World War I, US troops intervened in the Russian Civil War against the Red Army with the Polar Bear Expedition.

During the Cold War, the US frequently used the CIA for covert operations against governments considered unfriendly to US interests. In 1949 under US President Harry Truman, a coup overthrew an elected parliamentary government in Syria, which had delayed approving an oil pipeline requested by US international business interests in that region.

In 1953, under US President Dwight Eisenhower, the CIA helped Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran remove the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh.

In 1954, the CIA launched Operation PBSUCCESS, which deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and ended the Guatemalan Revolution. The coup installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, the first in a series of U.S.-backed dictators who ruled Guatemala. Guatemala subsequently plunged into a civil war that cost scores of thousands of lives and ended all democratic expression for decades.

The CIA armed an indigenous insurgency in order to oppose the invasion of Tibet by Chinese forces and the subsequent control of Tibet by China and sponsored a failed revolt against Indonesian President Sukarno in 1958.

As part of the Eisenhower Doctrine, the US also sent troops to Lebanon in Operation Blue Bat.

Covert operations continued under President John F. Kennedy and his successors. In 1961, the CIA attempted to depose Cuban president Fidel Castro through the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

The CIA (with Cuban exiles and South African mercenaries) fought Maoist "Simbas" and Afro-Cuban rebels during the Congo Crisis. The CIA was involved in the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.

In 1961, the CIA supported the overthrow of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. After a period of instability, US troops invaded the Dominican Republic in Operation Power Pack.

At the end of the Eisenhower administration, a campaign was initiated to deny Cheddi Jagan power in an independent Guyana. This campaign was intensified by John F. Kennedy. The CIA cooperated with the AFL-CIO, most notably in organizing an 80-day general strike in Guyana in 1963, backing it up with a strike fund estimated to be over $1 million.

From 1965 to 1973, US troops fought in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the Vietnam War against the military of North Vietnam and against Viet Cong, Pathet Lao, and Khmer Rouge insurgents. President Lyndon Johnson escalated US involvement following the Gulf of Tonkin provocation. The CIA organized Hmong tribes to fight against the Pathet Lao. The CIA developed and ran the Phoenix Program that totured and killed thousands of Vietnamese.

The United States covertly intervened in Chile from as early as 1962, and from 1963 to 1973, covert involvement was "extensive and continuous". In 1970, the CIA planned a "constitutional coup" to prevent the election of Marxist leader Salvador Allende in Chile, while secretly encouraging Chilean generals to act against him. The CIA destabilized Chile and helped create the conditions for the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, which led to years of dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.

In 1973, Nixon authorized Operation Nickel Grass, an overt strategic airlift to deliver weapons and supplies to Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

From 1972–5, the CIA armed Kurdish rebels fighting the Ba'athist government of Iraq.

In Afghanistan, the US began gave financial and military aid to Afghan dissidents through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. President Jimmy Carter began covertly arming Afghan mujahideen in a program called Operation Cyclone. This program was greatly expanded under President Ronald Reagan as part of the Reagan Doctrine.

The CIA also supported the UNITA movement in Angola, the Solidarity movement in Poland, the Contra revolt in Nicaragua, and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front in Cambodia.

Under Reagan, the US sent troops to Lebanon. The US withdrew after 241 servicemen were killed in the Beirut barracks bombing.

Under Carter and Reagan, the CIA repeatedly intervened in El Salvador.

In 1983, the US invaded Grenada in Operation Urgent Fur.

In 1986, the US bombed Libya.

President George H. W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama (Operation Just Cause) in 1989 and deposed President Manuel Noriega.

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Перед нами - коварный и опасный мошенник, расист, лжец и фашист Дональд Трамп, порочный Конгресс, нацистские ФБР - ЦРУ, кровавые милитаристы США и НАТО >>> а также и лживые, вредоносные американские СМ»И».

Киевские власти — фашистские агенты американского империализма...

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Правительство США жестоко нарушало мои права человека при проведении кампании террора, которая заставила меня покинуть свою родину и получить политическое убежище в СССР. См. книгу «Безмол��ный террор — История политических гонений на семью в США» - "Silent Terror: One family's history of political persecution in the United States» - http://arnoldlockshin.wordpress.com

Правительство США еще нарушает мои права, в течении 14 лет отказывается от выплаты причитающейся мне пенсии по старости. Властители США воруют пенсию!!

ФСБ - Федеральная служба «безопасности» России - вслед за позорным, предавшим страну предшественником КГБ, мерзко выполняет приказы секретного, кровавого хозяина (boss) - американского ЦРУ (CIA). Среди таких «задач» - мне запретить выступать в СМИ и не пропускать большинства отправленных мне комментариев. А это далеко не всё...

Арнольд Локшин, политэмигрант из США

BANNED – ЗАПРЕЩЕНО!!

ЦРУ - ФСБ забанили все мои посты, комментарии в Вконтакте, в Макспарке, в Medium.com... и удаляют ещё много других моих постов!

… а также блокируют мой доступ к таким сайтам, как «Портал Госуслуги Москва»!

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asylum-ireland-blog · 6 years ago

Text

European parliament 'won't pay for offshore migrant camps'

New Post has been published on http://asylumireland.ml/european-parliament-wont-pay-for-offshore-migrant-camps/

European parliament 'won't pay for offshore migrant camps'

A senior European politician has warned that MEPs would seek to block any use of EU funds for offshore migrant camps in north Africa.

The opposition to offshore centres for processing asylum claims raises tensions before an EU summit that will be dominated by a political crisis over migration that threatens Angela Merkel’s future as German chancellor.

As Mediterranean countries spar over who is responsible for people rescued at sea, the EU is reviving the idea of processing asylum claims in countries outside Europe.

Claude Moraes, a British Labour MEP who chairs the European parliament’s influential justice and home affairs committee, said the parliament “wouldn’t cooperate on the budget” for such centres, because “we think these ideas are extreme and we are not going to touch them”.

The parliament must give its consent to the EU’s next seven-year budget, which foresees spending €35bn (£31bn) on border management from 2021-27, compared with €13bn in the current budget.

Moraes chairs the committee that co-legislates EU migration law and said that many of its MEPs shared his legal and ethical qualms about offshore processing.

However, the centre-right EPP bloc is understood to be more supportive of offshore centres, as long as they are not set up in Libya, where the UN human rights chief has reported “unimaginable horrors” in migrant detention camps.

Even if the European parliament were able to block EU money for offshore migrant camps, member states could still fund them. But opposition from the European parliament would be a setback for credibility.

“Offshoring has been tried before,” Moraes told the Guardian. “[It] is not an asylum system in our view, because you wouldn’t guarantee human rights, you wouldn’t guarantee proper processing and you wouldn’t have any guarantee that someone who had any asylum claim would end up in the European Union.”

The MEP said the United Nations refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration were wrong to encourage offshore centres, in a rare criticism of the two UN-linked agencies. The UNHCR wrote to the European commission last week, proposing discussion of “disembarkation centres”, while EU officials are seeking involvement of the IOM, which has concerns, but is yet to state its official position.

At an EU summit on Thursday, leaders are expected to give their blessing to “regional disembarkation platforms”, according to a draft communique, but many questions remain unanswered. It is not clear whether the camps would only be for people rescued at sea or for any migrants, or where they would be. No country has agreed to host the centres, while Tunisia has flatly refused.

At an emergency meeting of EU leaders on Sunday, some – such as Belgium’s prime minister, Charles Michel – asked for details of the scheme’s legality.

The European commissioner for migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, insists the EU will be guided by international law. “I am against Guantánamo Bay for migrants,” he told journalists. “This is not what we are discussing or what we have proposed.”

Brussels officials see the plan as an acceptable alternative to one recently floated proposal of expelling migrants from the EU to camps in neighbouring countries.

Austria, which takes over the EU rotating presidency on 1 July, is seeking an overhaul of European asylum laws, which would mean Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis would no longer be able to make an asylum claim on European soil.

The Austrian government, a centre-right and far-right coalition, wants “a new, better protection system under which no applications for asylum are filed on EU territory”, with limited exceptions, according to a leaked discussion paper.

The paper highlights “weaknesses in the fields of external border protection” and provides a window into official fears about migrants. It states that large numbers of lone, poorly educated young men are travelling to Europe, many of whom are “particularly susceptible to ideologies that are hostile to freedom and/or are prone to turning to crime”.

#Asylum Europe

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