NYC Indymedia Journalist Brad Will
Shot Dead by Government Forces in Oaxaca

Calamity, NYC Indymedia

[Confirmed by La Jornada (Mexico) and Radio APPO Oaxaca]

A shooting occurred today in Oaxaca City, Mexico, leaving New York City Indymedia journalist Bradley Will dead after being shot in the chest. He died before reaching the hospital, according to La Jornada. A photographer from the newspaper Milenio Diario, who was at Will's side, was shot in the foot and reported injured, his status unknown.

Radio APPO, the radio of the Popular Assembly of the Oaxacan People, is reporting truckloads of armed paramilitaries entering the city. They are calling for people to reinforce the thousands of barricades that have been constructed for months as part of the statewide teachers' strike and popular uprising that has demanded the removal of PRI governor Ulisis Ortiz Ruiz.

Solve et Coagula writes:

"The United States of Barbarism"

James Bovard, Future of Freedom Foundation

September 25, 2006

The U.S. Senate is cutting a deal with President Bush to make America a banana republic. Last week, three senators reached an agreement with the White House that will de facto permit the CIA to continue torturing people around the world. And the deal will prevent anyone — including Bush administration officials — from being held liable for the torture.

This is latest sign that our elected representatives in Washington believe that the federal government deserves absolute power over everyone in the world. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell warned recently that Bush’s efforts to gut the Geneva Conventions would cause the world to "doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

But more important, the Senate-White House torture deal should cause Americans to doubt the moral basis of their entire government. After 9/11, many Bush administration officials seemed determined to use any and every means to bludgeon people suspected of terrorism or terrorist intent. The Justice Department delivered to the White House a memo in August 2002 explaining why Bush was not bound by the War Crimes Act or the Anti-Torture Act.

The memo began by largely redefining torture out of existence. It then explained why even if someone died during torture, the torturer might not be guilty if he felt the torture was necessary to prevent some worse evil. The memo concluded by revealing that the president has the right to order torture because he is above the law, at least during wartime (even if Congress has not declared war).

The Justice Department declared that the president may effectively exempt government officials from federal criminal law, noting that “Congress cannot compel the President to prosecute outcomes taken pursuant to the President’s own constitutional authority. If Congress could do so, it could control the President’s authority through the manipulation of federal criminal law.”

The memo’s absolutism would have brought a smile to despots everywhere: “As the Supreme Court has recognized... the President enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commander-in-Chief authority and in conducting operations against hostile forces.... we will not read a criminal statute as infringing on the President’s ultimate authority in these areas.”

Thus, the “commander-in-chief” label automatically swallows up the rest of the Constitution. Yet, as Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh observed, “If the president has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”

This is the doctrine that the Senate-White House deal largely codifies. It will be up to the president to declare which interrogation methods U.S. agents can use — almost regardless of the Geneva Conventions. It will be up to the president to decree who will face “rough” interrogation.

The details of the torture deal vivify how our politicians no longer give a darn about maintaining even a pretense of due process. The agreement will permit the use of coerced confessions in military tribunals — turning the judicial clock back to the 1600s. The Washington Post noted that the agreement permits “defense attorneys to challenge the use of hearsay information obtained through coercive interrogations in distant countries only if they can prove it is unreliable.” Thus, there is a presumption of correctness to whatever accusation is bludgeoned out of people in secret prisons around the world.

And it will be almost impossible to disprove an accusation when a defense lawyer is not allowed to question — or perhaps even know — who made the charge.
But that is fair enough for the U.S. Congress.

The New York Times noted that the agreement “would impose new legal standards that it forbids the courts to enforce.” Thus, it will be impossible for the vast majority of detainees at Guantanamo to challenge their detention.

The unverified accusations of U.S. government officials will still be the highest law of the land. The habeas corpus rights that go back to the Magna Charta of 1215 will be null and void under the agreement for many, if not most, detainees.

The torture scandal shows what happens when politicians and political appointees are permitted to redefine barbarism out of existence. If the government can effectively claim a right to torture, then all other limits on government power are practically irrelevant. What would it take to make the public acquiesce to the torture of Americans? Would simply applying an “odious” label (such as “cult member” at Waco, or “Muslim” with John Walker Lindh) to the victims be sufficient?

[James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0609f.asp.]

December 2006 Launch for Thomas Pynchon's Latest Novel

Guardian

The long wait could be over for Thomas Pynchon fans. His first novel in nearly a decade is coming out in the US on December 5.

But the release, as with so much else about the elusive author of contemporary classics such as The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, is shrouded in mystery. Since the 1997 release of Mason & Dixon, a characteristically broad novel which followed the travails of two 18th-century astronomers charting the disputed borderline between Pennsylvania and Maryland, new writings by Pynchon have been limited to the occasional review or essay, such as his introduction for a reissue of George Orwell's 1984. He has, of course, continued to shun the media and avoid photographers, though he has turned up twice on "The Simpsons," appearing in one episode with a bag over his head.

Eye on ELF: Were Eco-Radicals Illegally Wire-tapped?

Kera Abraham

On Aug. 22, federal judge Ann Aiken demanded to know whether the government used National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance to indict three eco-sabotage defendants. Just a week earlier, a federal judge in Detroit had ruled NSA surveillance illegal on the grounds that it violates the Fourth Amendment freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. If it's found that warrantless wiretapping was used to indict the eco-tage defendants, the entire case could be thrown out.

With the high-profile prosecution of 14 radical environmentalists for a slew of eco-sabotage acts across the West between 1996 and 2001, the federal government broadened the definition of "terrorist" to include members of the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, monkeywrenchers who like to set wild horses free and burn SUVs in defense of the planet. Although the eco-tage defendants haven't been charged with terrorism per se, prosecutors' frequent use of the label has given them access to counter-terrorism tools such as the Joint Terrorism Task Force, "enhanced" sentences and gobs of taxpayer money.