Canada almost won

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now asked Michael Moore what gave him the idea to produce Sicko, his disturbing new documentary on the USA health care system:

Well, I actually -- I had a TV show on back in the '90s called TV Nation, and one day I just -- I thought it would be interesting to have like a race. So we sent a camera crew to an emergency room in Fort Lauderdale, a camera crew to an emergency room in Toronto, and then one to Havana. And they would each wait until someone came in with a broken arm or a broken leg. And then they were going to follow that person through and see falthcare Olympics. And so, it was a race between the US, Canada and Cuba. And to make a long story short, Cuba won. They had the fastest care, the best care, and it cost nothing.

We turn the show in to NBC that week, and we get a call from the censor. They're not called "the censor," they're called Standards & Practices. And so, this woman calls. She's the head of Standards & Practices -- Dr. Somebody. I don't know they -- she actually had a "Dr." before her name, but I forget her last name now. But she calls, and she says, "Mike, Cuba can't win." I said, "What?" "Cuba can't win." "Well, they won. What do you mean they can't win? They won." "No, we can't say that on NBC. We can't say that Cuba won." "Well, yeah, but they won! They provided the fastest care. They were the cheapest. And the patient was happy, and the bone got fixed." "No, it's against regulations here." I said, "Oh, well, I'm not changing it."

Well, they changed it. They changed it. Two days later, when it aired, they changed it so that Canada won. And Canada didn't win. Canada almost won, but they charged the guy $15 for some crutches on the way out. So it's bugged me to this day that anybody who saw that episode, you know, where it said, you know, "and Canada won the Healthcare Olympics," and in fact it was Cuba, but that couldn't be said on NBC, because God knows what would happen ...
AlterNet

Sicko trailer at YouTube

Sicko released on BitTorrent

Categories: health, usa, corporations

Abu Ghraib investigator points to Pentagon

From the Washington Post, June 17:

The Army two-star general who led the first investigation into detainee abuse
at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq believes that senior defense officials were involved in directing abusive interrogation policies and said that he was forced to retire early because of his pursuit of the issue, says an article to be published tomorrow in the New Yorker magazine. [see below - N]

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba said that he felt mocked and shunned by top Pentagon officials, including then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, after filing an exhaustive report on the now-notorious Abu Ghraib abuse that sparked international outrage and led to an overhaul of the U.S. interrogation and detention policies. Taguba's report examining the 800th Military Police Brigade put in plain terms what had been documented in shocking photographs.

In interviews with New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh, Taguba said that he was ordered to limit his investigation to low-ranking soldiers who were photographed with the detainees and the soldiers' unit, but that it was always his sense that the abuse was ordered at higher levels. Taguba was quoted as saying that he thinks top commanders in Iraq had extensive knowledge of the aggressive interrogation techniques that mirrored those used on high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that the military police "were literally being exploited by the military interrogators."

Taguba also said that Rumsfeld misled Congress when he testified in May 2004 about the abuse investigation, minimizing how much he knew about the incidents. Taguba said that he met with Rumsfeld and top aides the day before the testimony.

"I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib," Taguba said, according to the article. "We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."

* Ø * Ø * Ø *

The General’s Report

"How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties"

by Seymour M. Hersh at the New Yorker.

Lid dip to Extra! Extra!

Categories: iraq, war+on+terror, disinfo, disinformation, torture, human+rights, civil+rights, military, army, abu+ghraib, usa, bush, rumsfeld

Cindy Sheehan's farewell

The antiwar movement took Cindy Sheehan for granted. It was only when she resigned from a role that she never sought that anyone bothered to think of what an essential player she had become.

"Cindy Sheehan never set out to be the face of the antiwar movement. She was a mom thrust by an ugly circumstance and a lovely faith to the forefront of a movement that was struggling to find its voice. She gave it that voice as an honest player who spoke her mind -- sometimes intemperately, often imperfectly, always sincerely -- and backed up her words with actions. Her unscripted activism allowed her to succeed where others had failed in touching hearts and calling the disengaged, the disenchanted and the downright angry to believe once more in the prospect that citizens can make real the promise of the American experiment.

"So it was that when Sheehan announced that she was 'resigning' from a role she never sought, the loss was palpable. Yes, the antiwar movement took her for granted. She was expected to show up, draw a crowd, willingly accept the outrageous attacks of critics, risk arrest -- and get up the next morning and do it again. It was only when she explained in a poignant letter that she would no longer be the Sisyphus of a troubled movement that anyone bothered to think of what an essential player she had become.

"'Nobody has given more to the peace movement in recent years -- emotionally, physically, spiritually,' explained Tim Carpenter, national director of Progressive Democrats of America. With Code Pink and her own Gold Star Families for Peace, PDA was the group with which Sheehan most closely aligned herself during a period of nonstop antiwar activism that began after the death of her son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, in a Baghdad ambush. She became a national phenomenon when, in August 2005, she set up camp outside George W. Bush's ranchette in Crawford, Texas, and demanded to talk with the President about her loss and about his responsibility to end the war before any more mothers suffered her fate.

"On a Memorial Day weekend that fell just hours after Congress met Bush's demand for more war funding, Sheehan reached what she described as 'heartbreaking' conclusions. 'The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our "two-party" system?' she wrote. 'However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left," but "right and wrong."'

"Sheehan was not whining in her resignation letter. She was despairing for a Republic to which she had shown a patriot's allegiance ..."
AlterNet

"But while some believe that Sheehan may return to the peace movement after a spell out of the limelight, she seems unlikely to kiss and make up with the Democrats - or one of their most famous support groups, MoveOn.org - which has become the other high-profile face of the US anti-war movement.

"She called MoveOn's reputation as a big player in the anti-war left 'hilarious', accusing it of being so tied in to the Democrats and their electoral cause that they clammed up when the party failed to protest about the war."
Guardian

Cindy Sheehan steps away
DUVALL: Sheehan got a raw deal
Exit, Cindy Sheehan
US antiwar protest groups silent on Cindy Sheehan’s resignation ...
In-Forum (subscription) - San Jose Mercury News
all 242 news articles »

Categories: sheehan, war, peace, peace+movement, iraq, usa, action, activism

China and USA in new Cold War over Africa’s oil riches

Darfur? It’s the Oil, Stupid ...

by F. William Engdahl

To paraphrase the famous quip during the 1992 US Presidential debates, when an unknown William Jefferson Clinton told then-President George Herbert Walker Bush, “It’s the economy, stupid,” the present concern of the current Washington Administration over Darfur in southern Sudan is not, if we were to look closely, genuine concern over genocide against the peoples in that poorest of poor part of a forsaken section of Africa.

No. “It’s the oil, stupid.”

Hereby hangs a tale of cynical dimension appropriate to a Washington Administration that has shown no regard for its own genocide in Iraq, when its control over major oil reserves is involved. What’s at stake in the battle for Darfur? Control over oil, lots and lots of oil.

The case of Darfur, a forbidding piece of sun-parched real estate in the southern part of Sudan, illustrates the new Cold War over oil, where the dramatic rise in China’s oil demand to fuel its booming growth has led Beijing to embark on an aggressive policy of—ironically-- dollar diplomacy. With its more than $1.3 trillion in mainly US dollar reserves at the Peoples’ National Bank of China, Beijing is engaging in active petroleum geopolitics. Africa is a major focus, and in Africa, the central region between Sudan and Chad is priority. This is defining a major new front in what, since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, is a new Cold War between Washington and Beijing over control of major oil sources. So far Beijing has played its cards a bit more cleverly than Washington. Darfur is a major battleground in this high-stakes contest for oil control.

China Oil diplomacy

In recent months, Beijing has embarked on a series of initiatives designed to secure long-term raw materials sources from one of the planet’s most endowed regions—the African subcontinent. No raw material has higher priority in Beijing at present than the securing of long term oil sources.

Today China draws an estimated 30% of its crude oil from Africa. That explains an extraordinary series of diplomatic initiatives which have left Washington furious. China is using no-strings-attached dollar credits to gain access to Africa’s vast raw material wealth, leaving Washington’s typical control game via the World Bank and IMF out in the cold. Who needs the painful medicine of the IMF when China gives easy terms and builds roads and schools to boot?

In November last year Beijing hosted an extraordinary summit of 40 African heads of state. They literally rolled out the red carpet for the heads of among others Algeria, Nigeria, Mali, Angola, Central African Republic, Zambia, South Africa.

China has just done an oil deal, linking the Peoples Republic of China with the continent's two largest nations - Nigeria and South Africa. China's CNOC will lift the oil in Nigeria, via a consortium that also includes South African Petroleum Co. giving China access to what could be 175,000 barrels a day by 2008. It’s a $2.27 billion deal that gives state-controlled CNOC a 45% stake in a large off-shore Nigeria oil field. Previously, Nigeria had been considered in Washington to be an asset of the Anglo-American oil majors, ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron.

China has been generous in dispensing its soft loans, with no interest or outright grants to some of the poorest debtor states of Africa. The loans have gone to infrastructure including highways, hospitals, and schools, a stark contrast to the brutal austerity demands of the IMF and World Bank. In 2006 China committed more than $8 billion to Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique, versus $2.3 billion to all sub-Saharan Africa from the World Bank. Ghana is negotiating a $1.2 billion Chinese electrification loan. Unlike the World Bank, a de facto arm of US foreign economic policy, China shrewdly attaches no strings to its loans.

This oil-related Chinese diplomacy has led to the bizarre accusation from Washington that Beijing is trying to “secure oil at the sources,” something Washington foreign policy has itself been preoccupied with for at least a Century.

No source of oil has been more the focus of China-US oil conflict of late than Sudan, home of Darfur ...
Global Research

Categories: darfur, oil, usa, war, humanitarian+crisis, refugees, corporations

Your journey has ended, but the nightmare at Guantánamo continues

Dear travellers,

The good news is you’ve made it, you’ve reached Guantánamo; you are at the end of your virtual journey.

Thank you for travelling to Guantánamo with Amnesty International and thousands of others. Thanks also for inviting your friends, linking to the site from your websites and blogs, and speaking out about human rights violations at the US detention centre.

The bad news is that hundreds of people remain at Guantánamo, and the US authorities will not allow independent access to the detainees. Most have been there for over five years without charge or trial; many have languished in harsh conditions, confined to mesh cages or held in isolation in maximum security cells.

Despite repeated requests, the US government is not allowing independent human rights organizations or UN representatives to have access to the detainees at Guantánamo. Detainees continue to be denied access to their families and access to lawyers is highly restricted.

So your journey may be over, but the struggle to close Guantánamo is not, and we rely on your help and support as much as ever. I am passing on to you a video message from Amnesty International’s Secretary General Irene Khan.

We will e-mail you with more ways for you to make a difference.

Thank you again for your support

Sarah Burton
Campaigns Programme Director

Keep checking www.amnesty.org/closeguantanamo and www.amnesty.org/guantanamoflotilla for updates on Guantánamo and the progress of our flotilla.

Categories: amnesty, guantanamo, action, activism