De Oorlogsstaat 52

MSNBC bericht: 'Report: Suicidal Troops Sent Into Combat. US military violated own rules on mentally ill troops, newspaper finds. Hartford, Conn. - U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions. The Hartford Courant, citing records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act and more than 100 interviews of families and military personnel, reported numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq. In 1997, Congress ordered the military to assess the mental health of all deploying troops. The newspaper, citing Pentagon statistics, said fewer than 1 in 300 service members were referred to a mental health professional before shipping out for Iraq as of October 2005. Twenty-two U.S. troops committed suicide in Iraq last year, accounting for nearly one in five of all non-combat deaths and was the highest suicide rate since the war started, the newspaper said.
"Chemically Active Time Bombs"
Some service members who committed suicide in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring. Those findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army that caution against the use of antidepressants for "extended deployments."
"I can't imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on (antidepressants), when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal," said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection. "You're creating chemically activated time bombs." Although Defense Department standards for enlistment disqualify recruits who suffer "persistent post-traumatic symptoms," the military also is redeploying service members to Iraq who fit that criteria, the newspaper said. "I'm concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country," said Dr. Arthur S. Blank, Jr., a Yale-trained psychiatrist who helped to get post-traumatic stress disorder recognized as a diagnosis after the Vietnam War.' Lees verder:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12777489/from/RSS/ Of: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051406B.shtml

Big Brother 14

De4 New York Times bericht: 'Cheney Pushed US to Widen Eavesdropping. Washington - In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials. But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001. The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear. As the program's overseer and chief salesman, General Hayden is certain to face questions about his role when he appears at a Senate hearing next week on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Criticism of the surveillance program, which some lawmakers say is illegal, flared again this week with the disclosure that the N.S.A. had collected the phone records of millions of Americans in an effort to track terrorism suspects. By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks. On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress. On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans. As in other areas of intelligence collection, including interrogation methods for terrorism suspects, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Addington took an aggressive view of what was permissible under the Constitution, the two intelligence officials said. If people suspected of links to Al Qaeda made calls inside the United States, the vice president and Mr. Addington thought eavesdropping without warrants "could be done and should be done," one of them said. He added: "That's not what the N.S.A. lawyers think." The other official said there was "a very healthy debate" over the issue. The vice president's staff was "pushing and pushing, and it was up to the N.S.A. lawyers to draw a line and say absolutely not."' Lees verder: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/washington/14nsa.html?ex=1305259200&en=0293d68a68346fda&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss Of:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051406A.shtml

Burgerlijke Ongehoorzaamheid

Rebecca Solnit's Tomdispatch-generated Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities is out in a new and expanded edition. Her most recent book is A Field Guide to Getting Lost. In de laatste TomDispatch schrijft ze: 'Welcome to the Impossible World.
Some of you here today receiving degrees took time off to explore the world, work for a cause, or earn enough money to get to college, but I suspect the great majority of you went straight through from high school and thus were likely born in 1984. What does it mean to be born in 1984, the ominous year that hung over humanity for 36 years after George Orwell made those four numbers a synonym for totalitarianism; what does it mean to be born atop the high wall at the end of the grim future of the imagination? I thought of that as soon as I was invited to give this talk, thought about the enormous gap between when Orwell, on the beautiful isle of Jura in Scotland, wrote this bleakest of anti-utopian novels in 1948, and the actual 1984, as well as the no less profound chasm between 1984, real and imagined, and the present moment. To contemplate those chasms is to recognize, in the most literal sense, just how utterly unpredictable the future is. To recognize that is to realize that a rapidly changing world requires an ability to appreciate uncertainty, and what in books we call wild plot twists, at least as much as the wobbly gift of prophesy. I thought of these things with the tools with which we English majors graduate into the world -- not the tools that enable you to splice genes, cantilever bridges, or make piles of money, but those that enable you to analyze, to see patterns, to acquire a personal philosophy rather than a jumble of unexamined, hand-me-down notions; those that enable you not to make a living but maybe to live. This least utilitarian of educations prepares you to make sense of the world and maybe to make meaning; for one way to describe the great struggle of our time is as the endeavor to become a producer of meanings rather than a consumer of them -- in an age when meaning as advertising and marketing, as others' definitions of pleasure and terror, is daily forced down our throats. To make meaning, to change the world, or just to read it thoughtfully (which can itself be insurrectionary)… And never has our world been so overloaded, so rapidly changing, and so full of surprises that require us to change our minds, rethink possibilities, and then do so again; never has it required such careful reading. In my own case, the kind of critical reading I first learned to do with books, then with works of art, turned out to be transferable to national parks, atomic bombs, revolutions, marches, the act of walking -- a skill transferred not only to feed my writing but my larger path through the world. Books themselves sometimes change the world directly: you can talk about nonfiction like Diderot's Encyclopedia, about the Communist Manifesto, The Origin of Species, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, about an essay that mattered a great deal only a very long time after it was written, Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," and about a book in that Thoreauvian vein whose practical impact we might actually be able to measure.' Lees verder:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=83153

De CIA

De Washington Post bericht: 'Fired Officer Believed CIA Lied to Congress. Friends say McCarthy learned of denials about detainees' treatment. A senior CIA official, meeting with Senate staff in a secure room of the Capitol last June, promised repeatedly that the agency did not violate or seek to violate an international treaty that bars cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees, during interrogations it conducted in the Middle East and elsewhere. But another CIA officer - the agency's deputy inspector general, who for the previous year had been probing allegations of criminal mistreatment by the CIA and its contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan - was startled to hear what she considered an outright falsehood, according to people familiar with her account. It came during the discussion of legislation that would constrain the CIA's interrogations. That CIA officer was Mary O. McCarthy, 61, who was fired on April 20 for allegedly sharing classified information with journalists, including Washington Post journalist Dana Priest. A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that "CIA people had lied" in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading. Whether McCarthy's conviction that the CIA was hiding unpleasant truths provoked her to leak sensitive information is known only to her and the journalists she is alleged to have spoken with last year. But the picture of her that emerges from interviews with more than a dozen former colleagues is of an independent-minded analyst who became convinced that on multiple occasions the agency had not given accurate or complete information to its congressional overseers. McCarthy was not an ideologue, her friends say, but at some point fell into a camp of CIA officers who felt that the Bush administration's venture into Iraq had dangerously diverted U.S. counterterrorism policy. After seeing - in e-mails, cable traffic, interview transcripts and field reports - some of the secret fruits of the Iraq intervention, McCarthy became disenchanted, three of her friends say. In addition to CIA misrepresentations at the session last summer, McCarthy told the friends, a senior agency official failed to provide a full account of the CIA's detainee-treatment policy at a closed hearing of the House intelligence committee in February 2005, under questioning by Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the senior Democrat. McCarthy also told others she was offended that the CIA's general counsel had worked to secure a secret Justice Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the agency's creation of "ghost detainees" - prisoners removed from Iraq for secret interrogations without notice to the International Committee of the Red Cross - because the Geneva Conventions prohibit such practices.' Lees verder:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/13/AR2006051301311.html Of:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051406Z.shtml

Jezus Christus

Zomaar een gedachte. Hoe had de wereld eruit gezien als twee duizend jaar geleden Jezus niet met een kruis maar met een machinegeweer de heuvel Golgotha was opgelopen. Zou de wereld er dan heel anders uit hebben gezien? Misschien een onderwerp voor het dagblad Trouw.

Hirsi Ali 8

Elsevier bericht: 'Dijkstal: geloofwaardigheid VVD staat op het spel. (Novum) - De geloofwaardigheid van de VVD staat op het spel vanwege de ophef over de naturalisatie van Tweede-Kamerlid Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Dat vindt Hans Dijkstal, oud-minister namens de liberalen. Dijkstal zei zondag in het televisieprogramma Buitenhof dat er een debat binnen de partij moet komen over de kwestie. Minister voor Vreemdelingenzaken Rita Verdonk (VVD) onderzoekt het naturalisatieproces van Hirsi Ali, die bij haar komst naar Nederland in 1992 over haar naam en geboortedatum heeft gelogen. GroenLinks-fractievoorzitter Femke Halsema zei in Buitenhof het opmerkelijk te vinden dat Hirsi Ali in 2002 in de Kamer is gekomen, terwijl toen al bekend zou zijn geweest dat zij had gelogen bij haar komst naar Nederland. Deze week werd de discussie over de kwestie aangezwengeld door een uitzending van het televisieprogramma Zembla. Daaruit bleek ook dat Hirsi Ali mogelijk nog meer heeft gelogen over haar verleden als vluchteling. Toen Hirsi Ali in 2002 lid werd van de VVD, heeft zij de partij al gemeld in 1992 niet de waarheid te hebben verteld over naam en geboortedatum. Halsema sprak Dijkstal aan op zijn verantwoordelijkheid: hij was toen fractievoorzitter van de VVD. De VVD'er gaf aan destijds 'zeer ongelukkig' te zijn geweest met de snelle overstap van Hirsi Ali van de PvdA naar de VVD. Volgens de oud-politicus werd zij van het ene op het andere moment van sociaal-democraat tot liberaal. Hij vond wel dat Hirsi Ali ook verantwoordelijk is voor haar eigen geloofwaardigheid.
Halsema zei dat Hirsi Ali niet geslachtofferd mag worden door haar uit de Kamer of het land te zetten. 'Zij heeft niets verkeerd gedaan en heeft altijd bekend gelogen te hebben. In de grondwet staat dat je geen paspoort mag afnemen van iemand die dan statenloos wordt.' Met haar vond ook Dijkstal dat het harde asielbeleid van de VVD niet strookt met de aanstelling en het aanhouden van Hirsi Ali als Kamerlid. De oud-fractieleider is überhaupt niet blij met de 'harde koers' van de partij. Verdonk wenste aanvankelijk geen onderzoek in te stellen naar het naturalisatieproces van Hirsi Ali. Zaterdag gaf zij aan dat toch te laten doen. Dat houdt mogelijk verband met haar strijd om lijsttrekker van de VVD te worden, vermoedde Halsema. 'Nu er een mediarelletje van is gekomen, wordt er ineens een onderzoek ingesteld. En waarom? Zij kan toch haar paspoort niet verliezen.' Dijkstal sloot niet uit dat de beslissing van de minister verband houdt met de interne verkiezingen. Hij noemde de campagnes en debatten van Verdonk en haar twee concurrenten "Idols-verkiezingen zonder inhoud".' Zie: http://www.elsevier.nl/nieuws/laatste_24_uur/nieuwsbericht/asp/artnr/98576/ Opvallend is hoe Femke Halsema meet met twee maten. Kennelijk staat voor haar een Kamerlid boven de wet. Bovendien is ze maar half geinformeerd. Liegen bij naturalisatie is nu juist het enige voorbeeld waarbij het intrekken van het Nederlanderschap wel mogelijk is ook al wordt iemand daardoor statenloos.

Kees Schaepman

Dit is het hoofd van Kees Schaepman. In het laatste nummer van Spreek'buis, het nogal suffige blad voor Nederlandse omroepmedewerkers, staat op pagina twee een kort bericht over Kees: 'Daalmeijer voorzitter NVJ. Met ingang van woensdag 3 mei is Joop Daalmeijer, hoofdredacteur van de Wereldomroep, voorzitter geworden van de Nederlandse Vereniging van Journalisten. Hij volgt Kees Schaepman op, die door zijn drukke werkzaamheden bij de VPRO het voorzitterschap niet meer kon combineren. Ook Joop Daalmeijer gaat het voorzitterschap van de NVJ naast zijn huidige functie bekleden.' Opvallend bericht, want nu blijkt dat het hoofdredacteurschap van een omroep minder tijd kost dan het eindredacteurschap van de inmiddels miniscule Radio I-redactie van de VPRO. Hoeveel zouden de Hilversumse chefs verdienen dat ze toch tijd kunnen vrijmaken om buitenschoolse activiteiten te verrichten? Opvallend is ook Schaepman's motivering. Uit welingelichte kring weet ik dat Schaepman als VPRO-chef medewerkers met een jaarcontract en freelancers de afgelopen jaren bij de VPRO eruit heeft gewerkt. In verband met de bezuinigingen. Tegelijkertijd pleit Schaepman als vakbondsman voor het behoud van werkgelegenheid. Hij wordt in Hilversum dan ook gezien als iemand die met twee tongen spreekt. Zijn vertrek als vakbondsvoorzitter zou hiermee te maken hebben. Bekend is dat de omroepen fors moeten inleveren van Den Haag. In verband daarmee gaat het gerucht dat bij de VPRO uiteindelijk nog maar 100 van de ongeveer 350 medewerkers zal overblijven. Of dat juist is, valt moeilijk te achterhalen, want de VPRO leiding is uiterst zwijgzaam daarover. Feit is wel dat 'gedwongen ontslagen niet uitgesloten worden. Ook vaste medewerkers zullen ontslagen worden.' Inmiddels is het ontslagbeleid van de vroegere hoofdredacteur Radio A.J. Heerma van Voss zo succesvol gebleken dat er geen hoofdredacteur meer nodig is. Er zijn door ontslagen en het niet verlengen van contracten domweg te weinig programmamakers en programma's om een hoofdredacteur noodzakelijk te maken. A.J. is nu vervangen door een driemanschap van chefjes, onder wie Kees Schaepman. Als oud vakbondsman heeft hij nu de eer om de laatste drastische ontslagronde ten uitvoer te brengen. Ook radiomakers met jarenlange ervaring dreigen weg bezuinigd te worden door de oud weekbladjournalist Schaepman. En dus heeft hij net op tijd zijn voorzitterschap van de vakbond opgegeven. Men kan veel van hem zeggen, maar uitgeslapen is Schaepman zeker. Zie voor Schaepman ook: http://home.planet.nl/~houck006/autisme2.html Zie voor A.J. Heerma van Voss: http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.com/2006/03/arend-jan-heerma-van-voss.html En:
http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.com/2005/12/harold-pinter-2.html