by Julio Godoy

BONN - The food crisis has prompted some looks towards genetically modified food production as a solution. That in turn has led to stronger warnings over the consequences of such food for health and the environment.

These concerns have been raised in Bonn again as more than 3,000 delegates from 147 countries met for the UN conference on biosafety. The conference has sought to ensure safe use of modern biotechnology.

Feeding the debate, scientists, farmers and environmental activists in many countries continue to warn that genetically modified agriculture presents a risk, and not a contribution, to food production.

In France, organic farmers are complaining that genetically modified (GM) plants are poisoning their plantations. Julien and Christian Veillat, two farmers who grow organic maize in the Breton locality of Villiers-en-Plaine some 400 kilometres west of Paris, say their fields have been contaminated with GM maize, even though the nearest GM crops field is 35 kilometres away.

The contamination was established during a routine analysis late in April by an organic agriculture cooperative near the Veillats’ village. Following the detection, the organic maize was diverted for use as cattle fodder.

The Veillats have now filed a legal complaint against the central government in Paris. “The contamination could only have come from the GM maize,” spokesperson for the local association against GM agriculture Georges Castiel told IPS. “At the organic cooperative, they control the seeds very carefully.”

Jean-Pierre Margan, producer of organic wine in the Provence in the south told IPS that contamination of organic farms is a constant problem. “Particles of GMOs are transported by wind and water, and can be carried very far away, and contaminate your plantation even if you have worked hard to protect it from every risk,” he said.

Serge Morin, deputy president of the local government in the province of Poitou Charentes said it is necessary that “the French state revises all procedures concerning GMOs, including the immediate stop of all open air GM plantations. In addition, all organic farmers whose plantations are contaminated should be paid indemnities.”

Such instances have led renowned chefs and wine producers in France to launch a public campaign to prevent the spread of GMOs in food and beverages.

“We don’t have the scientific competence to intervene in the debate on the health consequences of GMOs,” they wrote in a public letter addressed to the French parliament. “But we consider that, in accordance with the precautionary principle in questions of food and health, GMOs must simply remain banned from our tables.” Similar campaigns are under way in other European countries.

Several scientists and environmental activists say that apart from the health concerns, GMOs are not a solution for food scarcity either.

“Most of the genetic modifications introduced in crops aim at making them resistant to pests or weed killing, but not to increase yields,” says Hans-Joerg Jacobsen, biologist at the University of Hanover in Germany.

Jacobsen told IPS that “modern cultures, free of any genetic modification, have higher yields than genetically modified seeds.”

“The idea that GM agriculture could help feed the world is part of the propaganda that the biochemical industry has used for years, but it is false,” Arnaud Apoteker, who heads the campaign against GMOs for the French branch of the environmental organisation Greenpeace, said in an interview.

Some representatives of the biochemical industry acknowledge this. “Genetically modified agriculture will not solve the world’s hunger problem,” Hans Kast, managing director of the plant science branch of the chemical giant BASF told the German newspaper Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

Take Africa, the only continent that does not produce enough food to feed its own population, even though some 70 percent of African people work in agriculture.

“By applying conventional agricultural methods, free of any genetic modification, you can substantially increase agricultural productivity in Africa,” Hans Joachim Preuss, managing director of the German non-governmental food organisation Welthungerhilfe told IPS. “What African agriculture mostly needs is better, more efficient irrigation systems, and not genetically modified seeds.”

According to figures released in Bonn by CropLife International, a global federation representing the biochemical corporations, last year “biotech crops were grown on 114.3 million hectares in 23 countries by over 12 million farmers.”

© 2008 Inter Press Service

Arrests as 400 kangaroos face cull

• David Batty
• guardian.co.uk,
• Wednesday May 21 2008
• Article history

A kangaroo tries to jump out of the culling pen at a military base near Canberra. Photograph: Graham Tidy/AFP/Getty

Australian police today arrested eight people at a protest against a cull of 400 kangaroos on a military base near Canberra.

Local Aborigines joined the campaign against the cull, lighting a small ceremonial fire that they attempted to carry on to the defence communications site near the Australian capital.

Isobel Coe, an elder of the Ngunnawal clan, said they were taking back the land from the military. “We are claiming our land and that’s what our sacred fire means,” she said as protesters forced their way to the site of the cull.

Those arrested - four men and four women - will face trespass charges.

Two-thirds of the 600 kangaroos on the base are to be killed. Animal rights activists say the cull is barbaric, but the authorities say the kangaroos and other animals would otherwise starve due to overgrazing.

Activists have written to the former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney and his recently divorced wife, Heather Mills, asking them for A$750,000 (£367,403) to relocate the animals. Moving them has been rejected by the government on the grounds of cost.

Up to 4 million kangaroos are culled each year in Australia to control the total population of about 50m.

VATICAN CITY - Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

The interview, headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother,” covered a variety of topics including the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and science, and the theological implications of the existence of alien life.

Funes said science, especially astronomy, does not contradict religion, touching on a theme of Pope Benedict XVI, who has made exploring the relationship between faith and reason a key aspect of his papacy.

The Bible “is not a science book,” Funes said, adding that he believes the Big Bang theory is the most “reasonable” explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.

But he said he continues to believe that “God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the result of chance.”

Funes urged the church and the scientific community to leave behind divisions caused by Galileo’s persecution 400 years ago, saying the incident has “caused wounds.”

In 1633 the astronomer was tried as a heretic and forced to recant his theory that the Earth revolved around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.

“The church has somehow recognized its mistakes,” he said. “Maybe it could have done it better, but now it’s time to heal those wounds and this can be done through calm dialogue and collaboration.”

Pope John Paul declared in 1992 that the ruling against Galileo was an error resulting from “tragic mutual incomprehension.”

The Vatican Observatory has been at the forefront of efforts to bridge the gap between religion and science. Its scientist-clerics have generated top-notch research and its meteorite collection is considered one of the world’s best.

The observatory, founded by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, is based in Castel Gandolfo, a lakeside town in the hills outside Rome where the pope has a summer residence. It also conducts research at an observatory at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.

Monkeys which were genetically modified to suffer an agonising human disease have added a new twist to the controversy over animal experiments.Five rhesus macaques were created in a laboratory with the defective gene which causes Huntington’s Disease, a deadly and incurable illness which usually strikes humans in middle age.

One of the IVF monkeys, now ten months old, is already suffering from involuntary spasms of the hand and face - both classic symptoms.

Of the others, two died within a day, another lived for a month and the last has yet to show any signs of the disease.

Huntington’s is a hereditary condition caused by a single rogue gene which causes nerve cells in the brain to waste away.

Within ten to 15 years of the first symptoms, most patients die from pneumonia, heart failure or choking.

The monkey experiment is being held at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Centre in Atlanta, Georgia.

Researchers said monkeys and other primates are more likely to help with a breakthrough cure than laboratory rats because they are much closer to humans.

They claim GM primates could be bred to combat other degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

A senior member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said: “It is unconscionable. These monkeys will die a terrible death. There is no justification for it. It is morally indefensible.”

© 2008 The Daily Mail

Eating for Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh

A talk by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on Mindful Consumption

All things need food to be alive and to grow, including our love or our hate. Love is a living thing, hate is a living thing. If you do not nourish your love, it will die. If you cut the source of nutriment for your violence, your violence will also die. That is why the path shown by the Buddha is the path of mindful consumption.

The Buddha told the following story. There was a couple who wanted to cross the desert to go to another country in order to seek freedom. They brought with them their little boy and a quantity of food and water. But they did not calculate well, and that is why halfway through the desert they ran out of food, and they knew that they were going to die. So after a lot of anguish, they decided to eat the little boy so that they could survive and go to the other country, and that’s what they did. And every time they ate a piece of flesh from their son, they cried.

The Buddha asked his monks, “My dear friends: Do you think that the couple enjoyed eating the flesh of their son?” The Buddha said, “It is impossible to enjoy eating the flesh of our son. If you do not eat mindfully, you are eating the flesh of your son and daughter, you are eating the flesh of your parent.”

If we look deeply, we will see that eating can be extremely violent. UNESCO tells us that every day, forty thousand children in the world die because of a lack of nutrition, of food. Every day, forty thousand children. And the amount of grain that we grow in the West is mostly used to feed our cattle. Eighty percent of the corn grown in this country is to feed the cattle to make meat. Ninety-five percent of the oats produced in this country is not for us to eat, but for the animals raised for food. According to this recent report that we received of all the agricultural land in the US, eighty-seven percent is used to raise animals for food. That is forty-five percent of the total land mass in the US.

More than half of all the water consumed in the US whole purpose is to raise animals for food. It takes 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat, but only 25 gallons to produce a pound of wheat. A totally vegetarian diet requires 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat-eating diet requires more than 4000 gallons of water per day.

Raising animals for food causes more water pollution than any other industry in the US because animals raised for food produce one hundred thirty times the excrement of the entire human population. It means 87,000 pounds per second. Much of the waste from factory farms and slaughter houses flows into streams and rivers, contaminating water sources.

Each vegetarian can save one acre of trees per year. More than 260 million acres of US forests have been cleared to grow crops to feed animals raised for meat. And another acre of trees disappears every eight seconds. The tropical rain forests are also being destroyed to create grazing land for cattle.

In the US, animals raised for food are fed more than eighty percent of the corn we grow and more than ninety-five percent of the oats. We are eating our country, we are eating our earth, we are eating our children. And I have learned that more than half the people in this country overeat.

Mindful eating can help maintain compassion within our heart. A person without compassion cannot be happy, cannot relate to other human beings and to other living beings. And eating the flesh of our own son is what is going on in the world, because we do not practice mindful eating.

The Buddha spoke about the second kind of food that we consume every day — sense impressions — the kind of food that we take in by the way of the eyes, the ears, the tongue, the body, and the mind. When we read a magazine, we consume. When you watch television, you consume. When you listen to a conversation, you consume. And these items can be highly toxic. There may be a lot of poisons, like craving, like violence, like anger, and despair. We allow ourselves to be intoxicated by what we consume in terms of sense impressions. We allow our children to intoxicate themselves because of these products. That is why it is very important to look deeply into our ill-being, into the nature of our ill-being, in order to recognize the sources of nutriment we have used to bring it into us and into our society.

The Buddha had this to say: “What has come to be - if you know how to look deeply into its nature and identify its source of nutriment, you are already on the path of emancipation.” What has come to be is our illness, our ill-being, our suffering, our violence, our despair. And if you practice looking
deeply, meditation, you’ll be able to identify the sources of nutriments, of food, that has brought it into us.

Therefore the whole nation has to practice looking deeply into the nature of what we consume every day. And consuming mindfully is the only way to protect our nation, ourselves, and our society. We have to learn how to consume mindfully as a family, as a city, as a nation. We have to learn what to produce and what not to produce in order to provide our people with only the items that are nourishing and healing. We have to refrain from producing the kinds of items that bring war and despair into our body, into our consciousness, and into the collective body and consciousness of our nation, our society. And Congress has to practice that. We have elected members of the Congress. We expect them to practice deeply, listening to the suffering of the people, to the real causes of that suffering, and to make the kind of laws that can protect us from self-destruction. And America is great. I have the conviction that you can do it and help the world. You can offer the world wisdom, mindfulness, and compassion.

Nowadays I enjoy places where people do not smoke. There are nonsmoking flights that you can enjoy. Ten years ago they did not exist, nonsmoking flights. And in America on every box of cigarettes there is the message: “Beware: Smoking can be hazardous to your health.” That is a bell of mindfulness. That is the practice of mindful consumption. You do not say that you are practicing mindfulness, but you are really practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness of smoking is what allowed you to see that smoking is not healthy.

In America, people are very aware of the food they eat. They want every package of food to be labeled so that they can know what is in it. They don’t want to eat the kind of food that will bring toxins and poisons into their bodies. This is the practice of mindful eating.

But we can go further. We can do better, as parents, as teachers, as artists and as politicians. If you are a teacher, you can contribute a lot in awakening people of the need for mindful consumption, because that is the way to real emancipation. If you are a journalist, you have the means to educate people, to wake people up to the nature of our situation. Every one of us can transform himself or herself into a bodhisattva doing the work of awakening. Because only awakening can help us to stop the course we are taking, the course of destruction. Then we will know in which direction we should go to make the earth a safe place for us, for our children, and for their children.

Gone are the days when vegetarians were served up a plate of iceberg lettuce and a dull-as-dishwater baked potato. With the growing variety of vegetarian faux meats like bacon and sausages — along with an ever-expanding variety of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants — vegetarianism has taken the world by storm.

With World Vegetarian Week beginning on Monday, here without further ado are PETA’s picks for the top 10 reasons to give vegetarian eating a try.

1. Helping Animals Also Helps the Global Poor

While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the diversion of crops to our cars a moral issue? Yes, but it’s about one-eighth the issue that meat-eating is. Care about global poverty? Try vegetarianism.

2. Eating Meat Supports Cruelty to Animals

The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today’s factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything else that is natural and important to them. They won’t even get to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.

3. Eating Meat Is Bad for the Environment

A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” In just one example, eating meat causes almost 40 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined. The report concludes that the meat industry “should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.”

4. Avoid Bird Flu

The World Health Organization says that if the avian flu virus mutates, it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken flesh or eggs, eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the disease. Other problems with factory farming — from foot-and-mouth to SARS — can be avoided with a general shift to a vegetarian diet.

5. If You Wouldn’t Eat a Dog, You Shouldn’t Eat a Chicken

Several recent studies have shown that chickens are bright animals who are able to solve complex problems, demonstrate self-control, and worry about the future. Chickens are smarter than cats and dogs and even do some things that have not yet been seen in mammals other than primates. Dr. Chris Evans, who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University in Australia, says, “As a trick at conferences, I sometimes list these attributes, without mentioning chickens and people think I’m talking about monkeys.”

6. Heart Disease: Our Number One Killer

Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including the United States’ three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer, and strokes. Drs. Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn — two doctors with 100 percent success in preventing and reversing heart disease — have used a vegan diet to accomplish it, as chronicled most recently in Dr. Esselstyn’s Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, which documents his 100 percent success rate for unclogging people’s arteries and reversing heart disease.

7. Cancer: Our Number Two Killer

Dr. T. Colin Campbell is one of the world’s foremost epidemiological scientists and the director of what The New York Times called “the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.” Dr. Campbell’s best-selling book, The China Study, is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about cancer. To summarize it, Dr. Campbell states, “No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.”

8. Fitting Into That Itty-Bitty Bikini

Vegetarianism is also the ultimate weight-loss diet, since vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters are, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. Of course, there are overweight vegans, just as there are skinny meat-eaters. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 percent lighter than meat-eaters. A vegetarian diet is the only diet that has passed peer review and taken weight off and kept it off.

9. Global Peace

Leo Tolstoy claimed that “vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.” His point? For people who wish to sow the seeds of peace, we should be eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Eating meat supports killing animals, for no reason other than humans’ acquired taste for animals’ flesh. Great humanitarians from Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi to Thich Nhat Hanh have argued that a vegetarian diet is the only diet for people who want to make the world a kinder place.

10. The Joy of Veggies

As the growing range of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants shows, vegetarian foods rock. People report that when they adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a center-of-the-plate meat item to a range of grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables that they didn’t even know existed.

Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up, “If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”

So are you ready to give it a try? Check out VegCooking.com for recipes and meal plans and to take the World Vegetarian Week 7-Day Pledge.

Bruce Friedrich is vice president for campaigns at PETA. Before joining PETA in 1996, Bruce spent six years running a shelter for homeless families and the largest soup kitchen in Washington, D.C. He has been a progressive and animal activist for more than 20 years.

Just when we were thinking it was becoming safe for sharks to be in Australian waters, the Queensland government in an incredible display of ecological insensitivity has proposed a shark fin fishery in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and in marine parks in Queensland waters.

The practice of shark finning is the most nonsensical, ecologically destructive, and unethical fishery in the world.

Australia is supposed to be one of the most ecologically aware and proactive nations in the world. What are Queensland politicians thinking?

Over 90% of the world’s sharks have already been eradicated from our oceans and this bodes ill for the ecological integrity of marine eco-systems.

Queensland wants to issue licenses to take an unlimited number of sharks in what amounts to an extermination policy against these essential and magnificent creatures.

This announcement has come just as Rob Stewart’s award winning film Sharkwater opens in Australia. This film which features the Sea Shepherd efforts to stop shark finning is raising awareness of the plight of sharks worldwide.

Recently Rob Stewart met and spoke with Andrew McNamara, the Queensland Minister for Sustainability and Climate Change. It was a promising sign that Mr. McNamara attended the Brisbane premiere of Sharkwater.

Sharkwater Director and shark researcher Rob Stewart talks to the Queensland Minister for Sustainability and Climate Change Andrew McNamara at the Queensland premiere of the movie Sharkwater.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been defending sharks in the Galapagos, Ecuador, Cocos Island, Costa Rica and Malpelo Island off Colombia. The last place we thought we would need to intervene to protect sharks would be Australia.

Recently the media has been sensationalizing shark attacks despite the fact that on average less than 5 people die each year as a result of interactions with sharks whereas ostriches are responsible for killing an average of one hundred people a year making the ostrich twenty times more dangerous than the shark.

Yet as our media screams out that that humans are victims, we slaughter between 70 and 100 million sharks each year and we are presently waging a war of extermination on an apex marine predator that has existed on this planet for 450 million years.

Is a bowl of sharkfin soup worth the irreparable ecological damage we are doing to the world’s oceans?
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is urging all Australians who care about the future of our seas to e-mail Anna Bligh MP Premier of Queensland ThePremier@premiers.qld.gov.au to demand that this legislation be quashed.
Also send an e-mail to Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett at: Peter.Garrett.MP@aph.gov.au

And we urge all Australians to go see the movie Sharkwater. It is the first film to tell the truth about sharks and it is a film that is going a long way towards protecting this wondrous and unique family of animals.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society welcomes your support. To learn how to support our conservation work, please visit our donation page.

In April Sea Shepherd 1st Officer Peter Hammarstedt of Sweden was illegally taken prisoner by an armed Canadian government team that boarded and seized the Dutch registered ship Farley Mowat in international waters. He was charged with the terrible crime of approaching a place where seals are being slaughtered without government permission. Apparently witnessing or filming the slaughter of seal pups is now considered by Canada to be an act of “eco-terrorism.”

Peter’s description of his interrogation is amusing in many ways but it is also very serious because it illustrates just how delusional the Canadian authorities are about this issue. They have convinced themselves that opposition to the killing of seals is on par with the policies of Osama Bin Laden.

Peter was released from prison after Captain Paul Watson and Canadian writer Farley Mowat posted his bail with 2500 Canadian two dollar coins. Because the Canadian dollar is called a loon, the $2 coin is a double loon or doubloon - a fitting way to pay a ransom to these pirates.

Peter was then deported to Sweden and will be put on trial in about a year’s time for the “crime” of witnessing a seal being killed. He faces a year in prison and or a fine of up to $100,000.

Captain Alex Cornelissen was also arrested and charged and faces the same penalties if convicted.

However Sea Shepherd is confident that the case will be won because the evidence will prove that the ship never once entered the 12 mile territorial limit.

Should you in one instant find yourself sailing in international waters, documenting fisheries violations at the annual seal slaughter in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and in the next instant, find yourself being dragged away under the threat of firearms by an elite tactical response unit from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), there is only thing left for you to do – use your Constitutionally-protected right to remain silent!

In Canada, the police are forbidden to use violence or physical intimidation to extract a confession, so they rely entirely on psychological techniques that have been perfected and tested over time to make the ‘interviewee’ feel insecure, isolated and afraid. Their primary goal is to get you to talk. When there is little physical evidence to go on, and no witness testimony to rely on, the police are completely dependant on what is said in interrogation to further a police investigation and build a case around you. In over 90% of judicial cases, the primary evidence used to convict a suspected ‘law breaker’ is what is said during interrogation.
But thankfully, you don’t have to say anything at all. Your right to remain silent means just that – you have the right to remain silent. You don’t even have to say ‘no comment’ or explain that you’ve decided to remain silent. And your right to remain silent begins the moment you’re confronted by the police, even before your rights have been read to you.

As soon as the RCMP pushed me to the deck at gunpoint after illegally boarding the Farley Mowat in the Cabot Strait, my lips were sealed, and that silence continued until I was released on bail.

When interrogated by the Serious Crimes Unit for allegedly filming a seal being skinned alive, I shut my mouth, looked at my feet, and bunkered down for what I knew would be a long haul. I was put in a small concrete room, furnished with a table, three chairs, and a bookshelf. Oh, and a video camera that would continue to roll tape even when the officers stood outside of the interrogation room, presumably to get a read on my body language. By looking at my feet, it was impossible for the interrogators to read my facial expressions or reactions to the questions posed; body language can sometimes be read more easily than speaking and the police are experts at deducing its many connotations.

Human beings are social creatures. After spending any amount of time in isolation, the natural urge of any reasonable person is for social interaction. Interrogators know this, so like an old episode of Columbo, I was first praised for being a ‘person of conviction.’ The two officers alone in the room with me were ‘my friends’ and I was encouraged to speak to them as such. We were on a first name basis. They had kids of their own; one even had a son just like me. But like a rock, I continued to sit quiet, remembering that once a person starts talking, it’s difficult to stop. Besides, how could those trying to put me in prison for allegedly trying to stop the single largest slaughter of marine mammals in the world be my friends? Like most interrogations, mine began with classic ‘good cop, good cop’ theatrics.

I was then made to feel guilty for being quiet; even though the first thing mentioned in the interrogation was that I had the right to remain silent. I was told that I was disrespectful and immature - that I was offending them. The police counted on a very natural reaction to being directly confronted with an accusation – that I would try to defend and explain myself. But once again, I kept quiet, remembering that the place to defend my actions was in the media and in a court of law, not to two police officers in a cement box whose only job was to extract a confession.

By that point, an hour had gone by, and we moved on to stage two in the interrogation – ‘good cop, bad cop’. One of the officers, ‘lost his temper’, and I quote this because it was purely theatrical, although it felt very real at the time, and stormed out of the room. The second officer then tried to comfort me, explaining that his colleague “was just trying to understand.” I was encouraged to talk to him instead – he offered me a drink and food. All the meanwhile, the ‘distempered’ officer watched the proceedings from a television screen in the other room. Again, I kept silent.

A few minutes later, the ‘bad cop’ returned, shoving a table aside, removing my hat from my head, and yelling, “when I look at you, I see a twelve-year old Palestinian boy with a backpack full of nails walking into a shopping centre in Israel. Are you that boy!? Are you!?” It was enough for me to almost forget for an instant that the only thing that I was being charged with was allegedly being within 950 meters of a barbarian butchering a defenseless seal pup. I was then told that the only reason that I would have to keep quite was “if I was planning something like the next 9-11.” Again, I was confronted with such outrageous statements that my natural urge was to defend myself, but I continued to remain silent knowing that it was all just a ploy to get me to start talking. Besides, behind my stonewalled expression, I was fuming on the inside, and I knew that anything that I would have said at the spur of the moment would have been ill-thought out and purely emotional.

I was told that the police already had all of the evidence that they needed to convict me, although I knew that they wouldn’t be wasting three hours questioning me if that were the case. Oftentimes, the harder the interrogator, the less information the police have to go on. And so, we moved on to stage 3, ‘bad cop, bad cop’. When all else fails, the police draw out on the interrogation for as long as they can, and believe that if they yell enough terrible things at you, you’ll eventually crack. Typically, if you don’t know your rights, it’s very effective. You’re made to feel that the only way out of the situation, is to ‘cooperate’. The distempered officer yelled,”you’re like a prisoner of war. You just say your name and your rank. But even prisoners of war say what they fight for. They say, ‘I’m fighting for freedom, I’m fighting for American, well, what the Hell are you fighting for!?” Knowing full well that the protocol for any soldier captured in war, in Canada as most any country, is to just give name and rank, I saw this lie for what it was, another futile attempt at gathering information.

By now, three hours had gone by. I was tired. I was frustrated. But I knew that it would be over soon. And I knew that if I started talking then, it would never end as it would give the interrogators hope that they could get me to say more. After storming out of the room for a few minutes, the ‘disgruntled’ officer returned for the second time. He was there to give me one last chance to talk. He ‘just’ wanted me to answer once last question – “was I using my right to remain silent”. He ‘just’ wanted a yes or no answer. Either answer would do and then it “would all be over.” Otherwise he could continue for another few hours, or so he claimed. I called his bluff, said nothing, and two minutes later he said that I was free to go. Before leaving the interrogation room, he asked me if I had anything that I wanted to add, although there wasn’t anything to add to my name and address. I desperately wanted to yell “Free Palestine”, but chose instead to keep my head down and walk out. One day later, I was released on bail, free to continue fighting for animals and the Earth.

I just want to add, that even though I had committed no crime, I chose to remain silent. I saw no point in defending my innocence in interrogation; the physical evidence of the trial will exonerate me and my codefendant. Regardless of whether or not you are guilty or innocent, it is always best to remain silent. Words and statements can easily be twisted and are always subject to interpretation. And interrogations are excellent places for the police to gather intelligence. It is every activist’s responsibility to know his/her rights. The animals and the Earth have more to gain with you out of prison than in prison. So know your rights, keep your mouth shut, and fight to win.

And remember the age old adage, “nobody talks, everybody walks.”

President Bush has resorted anew to the sleaziest fear-mongering and mass manipulation of an administration and public life dedicated to realizing the lowest of our expectations. And he has now applied these poisons to the 2008 presidential election, on behalf of the party at whose center he and John McCain lurk.

Mr. Bush has predicted that the election of a Democratic president could “eventually lead to another attack on the United States.” This ludicrous, infuriating, holier-than-thou and most importantly bone-headedly wrong statement came during a May 13 interview with Politico.com and online users of Yahoo.

The question was phrased as follows: “If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what’s the worst that could happen, what’s the doomsday scenario?”

The president replied: “Doomsday scenario of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue we face is, it’s bigger than Iraq, it’s this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives.”

Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created, includes “cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives?” They are those in — or formerly in — your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.

Through your haze of self-congratulation and self-pity, do you still have no earthly clue that this nation has laid waste to Iraq to achieve your political objectives? “This ideological struggle,” Mr. Bush, is taking place within this country.

It is a struggle between Americans who cherish freedom, ours and everybody else’s, and Americans like you, sir, to whom freedom is just a brand name, just like “Patriot Act” is a brand name or “Protect America” is a brand name.

But wait, there’s more: You also said “Iraq is the place where al-Qaida and other extremists have made their stand and they will be defeated.” They made no “stand” in Iraq, sir, you allowed them to assemble there!

As certainly as if that were the plan, the borders were left wide open by your government’s farcical post-invasion strategy of “they’ll greet us as liberators.” And as certainly as if that were the plan, the inspiration for another generation of terrorists in another country was provided by your government’s farcical post-invasion strategy of letting the societal infra-structure of Iraq dissolve, to be replaced by an American viceroy, enforced by merciless mercenaries who shoot unarmed Iraqis and then evade prosecution in any country by hiding behind your skirts, sir.

Terrorism inside Iraq is your creation, Mr. Bush!

***

It was a Yahoo user who brought up the second topic upon whose introduction Mr. Bush should have passed, or punted, or gotten up and left the room claiming he heard Dick Cheney calling him.

“Do you feel,” asked an ordinary American, “that you were misled on Iraq?”

“I feel like — I felt like, there were weapons of mass destruction,” the president said. “You know, ‘mislead’ is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional — I don’t think so, I think there was a — not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was.”

Flawed.

You, Mr. Bush, and your tragically know-it-all minions, threw out every piece of intelligence that suggested there were no such weapons.

You, Mr. Bush, threw out every person who suggested that the sober, contradictory, reality-based intelligence needed to be listened to, and fast.

You, Mr. Bush, are responsible for how “intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment.”

You and the sycophants you dredged up and put behind the most important steering wheel in the world propagated palpable nonsense and shoved it down the throat of every intelligence community across the world and punished anybody who didn’t agree it was really chicken salad.

And you, Mr. Bush, threw under the bus, all of the subsequent critics who bravely stepped forward later to point out just how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy you had embraced, and adopted as this country’s policy in lieu of, say, common sense.

The fiasco of pre-war intelligence, sir, is your fiasco.

You should build a great statue of yourself turning a deaf ear to the warnings of realists, while you are shown embracing the three-card monte dealers like Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

That would be a far more fitting tribute to your legacy, Mr. Bush, than this presidential library you are constructing as a giant fable about your presidency, an edifice you might as well claim was built from “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” because there will be just as many of those inside your presidential library as there were inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

***

Of course if there is one overriding theme to this president’s administration it is the utter, always-failing, inability to know when to quit when it is behind. And so Mr. Bush answered yet another question about this layered, nuanced, wheels-within-wheels garbage heap that constituted his excuse for war.

“And so you feel that you didn’t have all the information you should have or the right spin on that information?”

“No, no,” replied the President. “I was told by people, that they had weapons of mass destruction …”

People? What people? The insane informant “Curveball?” The Iraqi snake-oil salesman Ahmed Chalabi? The American snake-oil salesman Dick Cheney?

“I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction, as were members of Congress, who voted for the resolution to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

“And of course, the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes.”

Mr. Bush, you destroyed the evidence that contradicted the resolution you jammed down the Congress’s throat, the way you jammed it down the nation’s throat. When required by law to verify that your evidence was accurate, you simply resubmitted it, with phrases amounting to “See, I done proved it” virtually written in the margins in crayon.

You defied patriotic Americans to say “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” only with the stakes — as you and the mental dwarves in your employ put it — being a “mushroom cloud over an American city.”

And as a final crash of self-indulgent nonsense, when the incontrovertible truth of your panoramic and murderous deceit has even begun to cost your political party seemingly perpetual congressional seats in places like North Carolina and Mississippi, you can actually say with a straight face, sir, that for members of Congress “the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes” — while you greet the political heat and try to run and hide from your presidency, and your legacy — 4,000 of the Americans you were supposed to protect — dead in Iraq, with your only feeble, pathetic answer being, “I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction.”

***

Then came Mr. Bush’s final blow to our nation’s solar plexus, his last reopening of our common wounds, his last remark that makes the rest of us question not merely his leadership or his judgment but his very suitably to remain in office.

“Mr. President,” he was asked, “you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?”

“Yes,” began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans on our history. “It really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander in Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Golf, sir? Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our men and women butchered in Iraq? Do you think these families, Mr. Bush, their lives blighted forever, care about you playing golf? Do you think, sir, they care about you?

You, Mr. Bush, let their sons and daughters be killed. Sir, to show your solidarity with them you gave up golf? Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn’t give up your pursuit of this insurance-scam, profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war.

Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn’t even give up talking about Iraq, a subject about which you have incessantly proved without pause or backwards glance, that you may literally be the least informed person in the world?

Sir, to show your solidarity with them, you didn’t give up your presidency? In your own words “solidarity as best as I can” is to stop a game? That is the “best” you can do?

Four thousand Americans give up their lives and your sacrifice was to give up golf! Golf. Not “Gulf” — golf.

And still it gets worse. Because it proves that the president’s unendurable sacrifice, his unbearable pain, the suspension of getting to hit a ball with a stick, was not even his own damned idea.

“Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?”

“I remember when [diplomat Sergio Vieira] de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life. And I was playing golf, I think I was in central Texas, and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it’s just not worth it any more to do.”

Your one, tone-deaf, arrogant, pathetic, embarrassing gesture, and you didn’t even think of it yourself? The great Bushian sacrifice — an Army private loses a leg, a Marine loses half his skull, 4,000 of their brothers and sisters lose their lives — and you lose golf, and they have to pull you off the golf course to get you to just do that?

If it’s even true.

Apart from your medical files, which dutifully record your torn calf muscle and the knee pain which forced you to give up running at the same time — coincidence, no doubt — the bombing in Baghdad which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello of the U.N. and interrupted your round of golf was on Aug. 19, 2003.

Yet CBS News has records of you playing golf as late as Oct. 13 of that year, nearly two months later.

Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you 6 1/2 years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, but the war in Iraq is not about you.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about your grief when American after American comes home in a box.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about what your addled brain has produced in the way of paranoid delusions of risks that do not exist, ready to be activated if some Democrat, and not your twin Mr. McCain, succeeds you.

The war in Iraq, your war, Mr. Bush, is about how you accomplished the derangement of two nations, and how you helped funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to lascivious and perennially thirsty corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, and how you sent 4,000 Americans to their deaths for nothing.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game! And, sir, if you have any hopes that next Jan. 20 will not be celebrated as a day of soul-wrenching, heart-felt thanksgiving, because your faithless stewardship of this presidency will have finally come to a merciful end, this last piece of advice:

When somebody asks you, sir, about Democrats who must now pull this country back from the abyss you have placed us at …

When somebody asks you, sir, about the cooked books and faked threats you foisted on a sincere and frightened nation …

When somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble, self-abnegating sacrifice of your golf game so as to soothe the families of the war dead.

This advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up!

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URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24632990/

Huckabee Jokes About Gun Aimed at Obama

May 16, 2008 5:42 PM

ABC News’ Kevin Chupka Reports: Former GOP hopeful and Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is back in the news this week, making a splash when he took a hit at Senator Barack Obama during the annual National Rifle Association meeting.

Huckabee made an off-color joke during his speech in Louisville, Kentucky, when a loud bang was heard off-stage.

“That was Barack Obama,” Huckabee quipped, “He Just tripped off a chair.  He was getting ready to speak.  Somebody aimed a gun at him and he…he dove for the floor.”

Watch the VIDEO HERE.

Huckabee was always quick on his feet on the campaign trail.  There was the time the lights went out in the auditorium and he suggested it was a sign from God to wrap up his speech, or the time a cell phone
rang in the audience and Huckabee suggested it might be a McCain supporter calling to tell him to leave the race.  But, did this one cross the line?  After all, a joke about Obama’s safety runs a fine line given that Obama accepted Secret Service protection quite early in the race for fear of violence against him. 

The question remains, how might this effect Huckabee’s chances at landing the coveted slot at the bottom of the GOP ticket?  Earlier in the week, a U.S. News and World Report blog quoted a top McCain fundraiser as saying Huckabee topped the list for potential GOP vice presidential candidates.  After a week of buzz pertaining to just such a possibility, did Huckabee shoot himself in the foot today in front of the NRA?  Perhaps only John McCain knows.

Calls to the Huckabee camp for comment were not immediately returned