A peacemaker's passing

From Linda LeTendre's Waging Peace blog :

Peter DeMott was one of the waging-peace type of people I promised to write about when I started this blog. Unfortunately, the first thing I have to tell you about him is that he died on Feb. 19 during emergency surgery after suffering an accident.

He fell out of a tree while trimming it.

He was one of my heroes and I had the great honor and blessing of witnessing with him a couple of times.

Peter was one of the “St. Patrick's Day Four” and even The Daily Gazette mentioned this group.

On March 17, 2003 (two days before the illegal U.S invasion of Iraq) four peace witnesses from the Magnificat Catholic Worker in Ithaca entered a local recruiting station and poured small amounts of their blood around the vestibule of the building as a symbolic protest to the imminent invasion of Iraq and as a portent of the death and destruction to come. They were alone and prevented no one from entering or leaving the center.

They were all arrested and charged with criminal mischief and trespassing. A trial in county court, where the defendants argued that their actions were consistent with international law and the Nuremberg Principles, ended in a hung jury with nine of the 12 jurors favoring acquittal.

The Nuremberg Principles of international law is one of those civic lessons that is conveniently overlooked in our public education system. They state that individuals have international rights and duties to prevent crimes against humanity which transcend the national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state.

I attended the Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake Central School system (which touts itself as one of the finest in the nation) from K-12 and I never heard of the Nuremberg Principles until this past year when I got involved with the national Campaign for nonviolent Resistance last year. I would like to note that my esteemed alma mater did, however, have recruiters a aplenty in the school. Sadly, BH-BL is an all too typical school in this regard.

Anyway, after losing the trail, the district attorney decided it was too expensive and time consuming to retry the four defendants.

That's when the Federal Government (translation: Bush Administration) stepped in.

Bush & Co. pressed federal conspiracy charges, as well as criminal damage to property and two counts of trespass against the four Christian witnesses; marking the first time they had done this against civilians who were protesting the Iraq war. The felony charge carried punishment of up to a $250,000 fine and six years in jail, with the other charges punishable by two additional years in jail.

Bill Quigely, a public interest lawyer and law professor, who acted as legal advisor to the defendants, said at the time, “Federal intervention in this case represents a blatant act of government intimidation and will have a chilling effect on expression of the first amendment rights of any citizen to protest or speak out against their government.”

Which of course was the whole idea.

The four were found guilty of the charges and the U.S. attorney demanded that they be sentenced at the conclusion of the trial. The presiding judge would have none of that and set a sentencing date so that the four could put their affairs in order.

I believe they spent six months in jail.

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Should George W. Bush be arrested in Calgary, Alberta, to be tried for international crimes?

This text by Anthony J. Hall, Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge was presented at the annual distinguished lecture sponsored by the Sociology Department of the University of Winnipeg, 6 March, 2009

Serious allegations of criminality are swirling around ex-US President George W. Bush and current Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. In late February of 2009 it was reported that the Hague-based International Criminal Court was preparing to issue a warrant for al-Bashir alleging his culpability for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. As the documents were being prepared against Sudan's head of state, ex-President Bush was preparing to initiate a series of high-paying speaking engagements beginning in Calgary Alberta on March 17. Bush's visit to Alberta's oil capital tests the consistency and authenticity of the Canadian government's "unequivocal" position that "Canada is not and will not become a safe haven for persons involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity or other reprehensible acts."

The contrast between the treatment afforded Bush and al-Bashir was inadvertently highlighted by Geoffrey York, a colleague with whom I conferred frequently when we were both reporting regularly in The Globe and Mail about two decades ago on the surprising twists that repeatedly made Aboriginal Affairs in Manitoba a major source of national news. York introduced his story on the charges against al-Bashir by writing, "For the first time in history, an international criminal court is set to issue an arrest warrant for the leader of a country, accusing him of orchestrating a campaign of murder, torture and rape." The reporter anticipated that the ICC's initiative "will be hailed by many as a sign that nobody is above the law."

The striking contrast between the treatment of al-Bashir and Bush serves to clarify the division of the world's criminals and suspected criminals into two major categories, one inhabited by a small elite that is essentially above the law and the other populated by figures not rich or influential enough to gain exemptions from the law's coercive force. It is not without a sense of irony that I arrive at this conclusion. On the one hand the ICC's decision to press charges against al-Bashir, as well as to initiate in January of 2009 a full-fledged trial against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, signals a major transformation in the career of the ICC. It indicates that the court is no longer a mere vehicle for the empty expression of lofty idealism but rather a site of real engagement aimed at subjugating the rule of murder, mayhem and intimidation to the higher authority of law.

On the other hand by pointing its initial surge of juridical activism at the local criminality of individuals in those afflicted regions of Africa where resource cartels and their client regimes often dominate, the ICC has called attention to the West's hypocrisy in shielding its own war lords and war profiteers in the military-industrial complex from any legal accountability for the violent acts its operatives, many of them in the so-called private sector, regularly plan, instigate, finance, arm, facilitate, commit and exploit. Indeed, the double standard promoted by the ICC in the choice of its targets for prosecution replicates in the international arena much of the duplicity of the criminal justice system in the United States.

As starkly demonstrated by the scandalously high and inequitable proportion of Blacks warehoused in the failing superpower's privatized jails, law-enforcement officials there obviously shower a disproportionately high amount of their energy on criminalizing poor African-Americans leaving those predominately fair-skinned inhabitants of suburbia and the more rarified enclaves of extreme wealth outside the orbit of their most concerted attention. Will the new global enforcers of international law limit themselves to prosecuting gang leaders in the continental ghetto of Africa while conveniently looking the other way when it comes to more comprehensive global networks of cartelized criminality headquartered in North America, Europe, Israel, and, increasingly, China, India and Russia as well.

While Omar al-Bashir is far from a household name, George Bush is one of the most well known people in the world. Indeed, throughout the eight years of his disastrous presidency, Bush managed to make himself into one of the most reviled individuals on the planet. He is widely disliked for his policies as well as for the assorted war hawks, corporate privateers, lying propagandists, evangelical zealots, loan sharks, torture freaks, and psycho cops and generals who formed the ex-president's inner circle. A significant component of global public opinion sees this discredited man as the embodiment of something far worse than terrible leadership. They see the forty-third US head of state as an abusive lawbreaker. Indeed, many rightfully see Bush as a pathological deviant who harboured the delusional fantasy that the power of his office gave him unlimited global power to authorize his national forces, proxy armies and mercenary operatives to commit the most grave onslaughts of mass murder, disappearances and torture on a genocidal scale.

This widespread belief is informed by the large and growing body of legal scholarship using evidence already on the public sphere to make the case that George Bush and his underlings have violated many domestic and international laws, including the Geneva Conventions and UN instruments prohibiting torture. Philippe Sands, Francis Boyle and Osgood Hall Law School Professor Michael Mandel have been prominent among the international jurists who have developed the legal case that George Bush and his war cabinet have transgressed the law of nations on many, many counts. Indeed, the line up is long of jurists seeking to bring the ex-US president to justice. With his recent book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Vincent Bugliosi, the former prosecutor of Charles Manson, adds his voice to a crowded field.

Given the depth and extent of the documentation already assembled to indict Bush and many of his top lieutenants for domestic and international crimes, the ex-president's ability to cross international borders and address audiences in places like Calgary stands as an indicator of the juridical malaise of our law-enforcement agencies. Is the role of these agencies primarily to protect the property and prestige of the rich from the incursions of the marginalized and dispossessed? Isn't law a mere fiction if it can't restrain the exploitative application of violence to entrench privilege and intimidate dissent? Will officials of the Crown in Canada or public prosecutors in other countries rise to a higher standard in order to demonstrate their respect for the power of law as a force of equalization applying uniformly to president and pauper, native and settler, white and black? How can we transcend the mean and frequently racist codes contained in the rhetoric of law and order in order to rise to the high standards required by adherence to the rule of law?

Will truth ever be given its day in court in trials calling not only Bush, but also Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condollezza Rice and others to account for their decisions and actions in supervising aggressive wars. As key strategists, lobbyists, and propagandists for the oil, armaments and mercenary industries, most of these figures helped to plan through the Project for the New American Century the our current privatized terror economy and the pseudo-justifications for so-called "preemptive wars." It was PNAC that announced a year before 9/11 the need for "a new Pearl Harbor" in order to produce the necessary climate of public hysteria to achieve its sponsors' objectives. The most ambitious of these was to create a pretext in order to seize control of oil resources in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

Imagining the Rule of Law Internationally and Globally

For several generations the principle has been developing that all the world's peoples and governments must recognize our shared interest in expressing forms of universal jurisdiction when it comes to dealing with the highest order of criminality. On his return from Africa in 1890 George Washington Williams, a Black missionary from the United States, helped point subsequent legal thought in this direction. As Williams reached for words evocative enough to describe the appalling scope of the violations of human rights he had just witnessed in King Leopold's so-called Congo Free State, the commentator came up with the expression "crimes against humanity." In 1944 a Polish Jew who had escaped the Nazi horror in Europe drew on his experience and scholarship to enhance the vocabulary of international crime. Raphael Lemkin invented the word, "genocide," to advance the project of trying to deal with crimes so severe that they undermine the wellbeing of the entire human family. In the world Lemkin sought to bring about there could be no immunity, no safe refuge, for those involved in the elimination of religious, ethnic and racial groups through industrialized murder and also through the assimilative machinery of cultural genocide. Lemkin was instrumental in helping the delegations at the United Nations to entrench in 1948 the Convention on the Prevention and Prohibition of the Crime of Genocide. This basic pillar of international law was not adopted by the United States until 1989.

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Open extraterrestrial (UFO) contact will occur during Obama years says time acceleration researcher

Alfred Webre, Seattle Exopolitics Examiner

in Examiner :

Part VI of a series of investigative articles on the Obama administration, the United Nations, and unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and extraterrestrial life


On February 24, 2009, Pres. Barack Obama delivered what media outlets are calling his “Luke Skywalker” speech to a joint session of the U.S. congress with all trappings of a state of the union address.  Luke Skywalker is reference to a Jedi knight in the Star Wars series who leads the rebellion against the empire beholden to the dark force.  By casting Obama in the role of Luke Skywalker, media outlets like Mother Jones are seeking to imbue Obama's political agenda and persona with the revolutionary aura of a Jedi Knight, rescuing America and the world from war, crime, disease and poverty.

Other researchers contend that insiders from the Trilateral Commission have covertly trained Obama since his early 20s at Columbia University for his present role as leading implementer of a global “friendly fascism.”  The Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller and Obama's mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski, is considered by some analysts to be a front organization, promoting the depopulation policies of an international war crimes racketeering organization.

2011-12 & passage through the plane of the galactic center black hole

The Luke Skywalker reference overlooks one major gap in Barack Obama's congressional address – any reference to our populated, organized solar system, galaxy, and universe.  One agenda item that Obama conspicuously left out of his speech is probably the most certain and impactful event and outcome to occur during his presidency – the impending passage of our solar system through the plane of the massive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.   In the run-up to alignment of our earth to the plane of the galactic black hole in 2011-12, there exists a virtual certainty of open extraterrestrial contact with our human society.

Barack Obama's first term as U.S. president (ending January 20, 2013) includes the expected passage of earth through the galactic plane sometime between October 28, 2011 and December 21, 2012, according to researchers Carl Johan Calleman and Barbara Hand Clow. If Obama is elected for a second term he will serve through January 20, 2017.

Obama's omission of the impending passage of the earth through the plane of the galactic black hole in 2011-12 is all the more surprising because of the vocal emphasis that Obama has placed on science in his administration.

With the approach of the year 2000, there were worldwide preparations for a “Y2K” problem that were based upon a possible planetary emergency.  

Where are the similar preparations for 2011-12 by the U.S. government, with respect to the likelihood of open planetary contact with an extraterrestrial civilization as we approach these coming years of 2011-12?

There is accumulating evidence that open planetary contact with an extraterrestrial civilization will occur between now and 2011-12, and thus far the Obama White House and U.S. government agencies under Barack Obama such as NASA (National Aeronautic and Space Administration) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency continue to cover-up an extraterrestrial presence they have fully documented and in some cases liaison with rather than acclimating the public to the extraterrestrial presence.

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Report: Major banks supporting corrupt regimes

 WASHINGTON, Mar 13 (OneWorld.net) - Some of the world's biggest banks are doing business with corrupt regimes, facilitating state looting and human rights abuses and keeping the world's poorest poor, according to a new report.

*  "The same lax regulation that created the credit crunch has let some of the world's biggest banks facilitate the looting of natural resource wealth from poor countries," said Gavin Hayman of the British human rights group Global Witness, which published the report, "Undue Diligence," Wednesday.

*  "Undue Diligence" names Citibank, Barclays, and HSBC among the major banks that have done business with corrupt regimes. "By accepting these customers, banks are assisting those who are using state assets to enrich themselves or brutalize their own people. This corruption denies the world's poorest people the chance to lift themselves out of poverty and leaves them dependent on aid," the rights group noted, offering a series of suggestions for governments, regulators, and banks to begin tackling the problem.

*  The U.S. bank Riggs folded in 2004 after it was discovered that it had dealings with the rulers of Equatorial Guinea that breached U.S. money laundering laws. Since 1979, Equatorial Guinea has been ruled by President Teodoro Obiang, a dictator who has "systematically plundered, robbed, and assassinated to inconceivable extremes, amassing a fortune that makes him one of the world's richest men in one of Africa's poorest countries," notes author Fernando Gamboa in the African newsletter Pambazuka News, describing the massive corruption he discoverd when researching a novel set in the country. According to Global Witness' report, however, the son of the dictator was still doing business with Barclays in Paris as of 2007.

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Riots break out in Kenyan capital

Riots have broken out in Kenya's capital Nairobi at a rally involving hundreds of students against alleged extra-judicial killings by police.

Police used tear gas to disperse university protesters who were hurling stones and looting shops.

The rally was held to protest against last week's killing of a student by police and also alleged shootings of two human rights activists.

Police deny any involvement in the killings of the two activists.

Oscar Kamau Kingara and John Paul Oulo were shot dead in their car in central Nairobi last Thursday.

They were attacked just hours after a government spokesman accused their group of aiding the Mungiki criminal gang.

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From Kenyan rights body says activist killings part of pattern

NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya's top human rights group charged Friday that the slaying of two activists who investigated extrajudicial killings was part of a pattern of assassinations of people who made allegations about police death squads.

Oscar Kamau Kingara and John Paul Oulu were shot at close range Thursday night while their car was stuck in traffic near the University of Nairobi.

Kingara was the head of the Oscar Foundation, which had released a report on extrajudicial killings and the disappearance of thousands of Kenyans in police custody. Oulu was the foundation's communications and advocacy director. The two activists had met last month with Philip Alston, the UN's Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, and provided him with testimony on police killings in Nairobi and Central Province.

They were on their way to meet with a senior member of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights when they were attacked, Alston said, calling for an independent probe into the killing.

A former police driver was shot dead last year after he told the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights he had witnessed over 50 suspects being executed by police. And in January, a Kenyan journalist who said he had been threatened by officers after writing about police malpractice was found decapitated in a forest.

No suspects have been charged.

"It is obvious that there is a pattern," said Florence Simbiri-Jaoko, chairwoman of the state-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. The victims "are linked by the fact that they were doing work on extrajudicial killings."


From Kenya: Human rights activists murdered

Days after a senior UN official severely indicted the Kenyan police for killing innocent people, two human rights activists belonging to a vocal organization were executed on Thursday in mysterious circumstances.

Oscar Kamau King'ara, the Executive Director of Oscar Foundation, and John Paul Oulu were driving to meet Kamanda Mucheke of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights at his office when three men caught up with them and shot them at point blank. A University of Nairobi student was also shot dead in riots that ensued after the killing of the two.

The killings happened only hours after the Government Spokesman Alfred Mutua accused the Oscar Foundation of being a civil society front for the banned ultra-traditionalist Mungiki sect. Mungiki, accused of bizarre killings and extortion, had called nationwide protests that paralyzed Kenya's public transport to push for the implementation of the UN officials.

Local and international civil society organizations have reacted angrily to the killing of the activists.

“We know that the Foundation recently met the UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-judicial killings and presented their report on the same,” KNHRC said in a statement. “We believe that statements attributed to the Government Spokesman must be taken very seriously and therefore we demand that an independent inquiry on what he knows about the death.”

Oscar Foundation is a registered charitable organization that offers free legal services to the poor. Some of its major projects include organizing caravans to offer free legal aid to the poor around the country.

KNCHR said the foundation has a strong track record researching corruption in the police force, the prisons, and police brutality against the urban poor. The latest activity was researching and documenting cases of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings.