contributions

European Social Forum 2004 European Programme Working Group meeting, Paris 29/30 May
Saturday 29 May
1. The meeting opened at 11.15am. It was suggested that Sophie Zafari and Alex Gordon would facilitate the morning session and there was consensus on this. Minutes were taken by Anne Kane.
2. Introductions Those present introduced themselves and an attendance list was circulated.
3. Agenda It was agreed that the agenda for the meeting would be: Axes/themes of the ESF; (…)

Middle East Briefing
Overview
The U.S. Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative (BMEI), in preparation since President George W. Bush announced seven months earlier that Washington was adopting a “forward strategy of freedom” and would no longer accommodate friendly but authoritarian regimes in the region, will be launched at the G-8 summit of major industrialised nations on 8-10 June, then expanded upon at U.S.-European Union (EU) and NATO summits later in the month.[1] Its (…)

An eight-year-old girl stood under the blade of a digger on Monday, as women and children stopped the uprooting of olive trees on Az Zawiya land for nearly one hour. Bulldozers began cutting and uprooting trees on Sunday night and by morning, hundreds of trees had been laid waste. Several hundred villagers gathered in the village at 9:00 a.m. and attempted to march to the land, but were blocked by seven jeeps of soldiers and border police who threw sound grenades and shot rubber bullets, (…)

Doug Lorimer
The selection of Iyad Allawi as prime minister of the Iraqi “interim government” is a clear demonstration that Washington has no intention of relinquishing its control over Iraq on June 30.
Allawi was selected as Iraq’s new PM on May 29 by Lakhdar Brahimi, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan’s special envoy to Iraq. Brahimi had previously collaborated closely with US officials to give UN endorsement to the US puppet regime in Afghanistan, following the ousting of the Taliban (…)

Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn’t Bind Bush By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: June 8, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/politics/08ABUS.html?hp
WASHINGTON, June 7 - A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation’s (…)

Praise the Lord and Pass the Thumbscrews
It’s been pointed out to me (tip of the hat to Bernard H.) that the team of lawyers who wrote the Pentagon’s treatise on presidential torture powers
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/06/07/0988582
was led by this woman: http://www.pwfsd.org/article.php?sid=238
U.S. Air Force’s General Counsel, Mary L. Walker, discusses what it takes to leave a legacy of significance
Ms. Walker, it turns out, is a long-time Republican (…)

subject to debate by Katha Pollitt
As crises go, medical insurance is not a very sexy one. It’s not that no one talks about the 43.6 million uninsured, skyrocketing drug costs, emergency rooms crammed with patients in search of routine care or the 18,000 Americans who, according to the Institute of Medicine, die each year for lack of care. Every politician has a stump speech and a plan—usually a rather complicated one. (Insert your Kerry joke here if you must, but give the man credit—at (…)

Security or Legal Factors Could Trump Restrictions, Memo to Rumsfeld Argued
By JESS BRAVIN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Wall Street Journal June 7, 2004
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108655737612529969,00.html
Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
The advice was part of a (…)

By WILLIAM BLUM
Ronald Reagan’s biggest crimes were the bloody military actions to suppress social and political change in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Afghanistan, but I’d like to deal here with the media’s gushing about Reagan’s supposed role in ending the cold war. In actuality, he prolonged it. Here is something I wrote for my book Killing Hope
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512526/counterpunch
It has become conventional wisdom that it was the (…)

By Kim Zetter Wired News
Forget drug-free and nuclear-free zones. A growing grassroots movement seeks to make the United States a Patriot Act-free zone, one city at a time.
Or, at the very least, the people behind the movement hope to make their cities constitutional safe zones.
In the past two years, more than 300 cities and four states have passed resolutions calling on Congress to repeal or change parts of the USA Patriot Act that, activists say, violate constitutional rights such (…)