Duty to Warn

Click on the link to go to the WCRS site and listen to the latest "Unconscious Voices" radio program featuring Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman. Produced by Tom Over, Robb Ebright, Josh Paulson and Joey Pigg.
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During the second week of March more than 200 people from 27 states gathered in Washington, D.C. to lobby federal legislators to support the Clean Water Protection Act, HB 1310, as a way to stop or seriously curtail mountain top removal mining.

“It (the House bill ) would effectively end the valley fill process that's used in mountain top removal, and it would end the greatest majority of mountain top removal mining thereby,” said Bob Kincaid, whose reporting appears on the Horn

Lenny Kohm, Campaign Director for Appalachian Voices, said on Tuesday the bill has 164 co-sponsors.

“These are people who have actually signed on to the bill, and are registered in the Congressional Record as co-sponsors,” Kohm said.

The Robert Jackson Steering Committee, a group of lawyers and journalists founded to uphold the principles of the Nuremberg Trials, is urging the Department of Justice to proceed with trying Khalil Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and other suspected 9/11 terrorists in federal criminal court, and not in military commissions.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, the Committee enumerates several substantial problems with military commissions:

(1) Admissibility of statements following torture in certain circumstances,
(2) Evidence derived from impermissible interrogation methods is not barred,
(3) Evidence seized outside the US without search warrants is not excluded,
(4) The accused is entitled to one "reasonably available" defense counsel,
(5) No mention of the attorney-client privilege,
(6) In a capital case, the accused is entitled to additional counsel "to the greatest extent practicable",
(7) Ex post facto law may be applied,
(8) No right to speedy trial,
(9) Trials may be closed to public,
(10) Conviction by two thirds of jurors rather than unanimity,

The event on the House floor Wednesday (March 10) was monumental -- the first major congressional debate about U.S. military operations in Afghanistan since lawmakers authorized the invasion of that country in autumn 2001. But, as Rep. Patrick Kennedy noted with disgust on Wednesday, the House press gallery was nearly empty. He concluded: “It’s despicable, the national press corps right now.”

Sure enough, the Thursday edition of the New York Times had no room for the historic debate on its front page, which did have room for a large Starbucks ad across the bottom.

Despite the news media and the lopsided pro-war tilt on Capitol Hill (reflected in the 356-65 vote Wednesday against invoking the War Powers Act), antiwar organizing has a lot of hospitable terrain at the grassroots. National polling shows widespread opposition to the Afghanistan war effort -- a far cry from the dominant lockstep conformity in Congress.

To the Editor:

Your Feb. 26 editorial “The Voters Will Pay” opposes a merger between manufacturers of electronic voting machines, but avoids the question of why we use them at all. As you say, “numerous studies have shown that electronic voting machines are particularly vulnerable to software glitches, intentional vote theft or sabotage.”

In a real democracy, there is no room for such shortcomings, especially when there is no reason to tolerate them. Having observed the fiasco in Ohio in 2004 firsthand, I believe that the conclusion is unavoidable that we need universal hand-counted paper ballots.

They are not perfect. But they are cheaper, trackable and subject to far fewer abuses than the electronic systems that have failed us so badly in recent years.

Harvey Wasserman
Bexley, Ohio, Feb. 26, 2010

The writer has co-authored four books about election protection.

Susan Harman, who by now deserves some kind of medal and who will be joining in a protest of John Yoo on March 19th, questioned Jay Bybee yesterday about his crimes. Here's her report:

"Yesterday Jay Bybee sat with the 9th Circuit as they modeled appellate court for 140 law students at the University of NV's law school in Las Vegas. I sent out a plea to PDA's Vegas list of edresses, and about 10 people responded. Of them, two showed up with signs and we handed out Impeach Bybee postcards and talked with the law students as they waited to get through security to go inside. I was appalled at their ignorance and/or lack of outrage. Two older students said he was a friend (he lives in Henderson, just outside Vegas), and a young one said his parents were friends of Bybee.

"We finally got inside, and listened quietly to the cases, as usual. We were ready to speak out at the end, but instead they announced they would hold a Q&A for the students. We moved down to the second row, and I asked the first question:

We owe the residents of the tiny island paradise called Vieques full compensation for the illnesses they are suffering courtesy of the U.S. Navy — and we owe them so much more than that.

We owe them a full accounting of what was done to their Manhattan-sized island, about 10 miles off the coast of Puerto Rico (the island is part of Puerto Rico and hence part of the United States) between 1941 and 2003, when it served as the Navy’s premiere weapons testing site. Bombs were dropped and guns were tested on the eastern portion of the island at least 200 days out of the year for 62 years; an estimated 80 million tons of ordnance pummeled the island’s fragile, tropical ecosystem over that time, contaminating soil, water and air, and bequeathing an array of serious health problems — cancer, birth defects, cirrhosis of the liver and much more — to the island’s 10,000 residents.