One of my poems with a very long title that’s a dig and a stab after the initial tickle (or so I hope), has been published on the The Philippines Free Press website. I posted the news on my book blog for Alien to Any Skin.
I did a quick search on the event the poem tackles and found this:
 |
-o-
“Going Retro: The Victorious Army of Gobbledygooks Penetrates the City” was written in December 2008.
Philippine President Benigno (Noynoy) Aquino III made a mockery of the nation’s constitution by not just allowing a nuclear-powered ship into our territorial waters. He even boarded it and had smiling photos taken!
The ship is no ordinary nuclear weapons carrier. The USS Carl Vinson is apparently the one that took Osama Bin Laden’s body (or what was declared by Washington, following the murder in utter violation of international law, among other atrocities that are being ignored by the media) and dropped it somewhere in the North Arabian Sea.
Here is a link to the full article.
Mr. President, please review your actions. It took the eruption of a volcano to finally get rid of US Military presence in our country, and here you are all smiles. I wonder if you hugged one of the nuclear weapons like it was a teddy bear. Cute.
Two poems from my book Alien to Any Skin got accepted by Burnt Bridge Online. A new poem, “Imagining Crumbs,” was also accepted. You get a free PDF download of the issue.
FROM A.N.S.W.E.R.
The cover-up of Bush-era crimes is taking a shocking but not unexpected turn. A fateful move has been made and it is certain to backfire.
A prisoner who was horribly tortured in 2002 until he agreed – at the demand of Bush torturers – to say that al-Qaeda was linked to Saddam Hussein is suddenly dead. Several weeks ago, Human Rights Watch investigators discovered the missing inmate and talked to him. He had been secretly transferred by the administration to a prison in Libya after having been held by the CIA both in secret “black hole prisons” and in Egypt.
Under conditions of extreme torture, the prisoner, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, agreed in 2002 to supply the Bush-ordered interrogators what they sought as a political cover for Bush’s marketing of the pending war of aggression against Iraq. Mr. Libi agreed to tell them whatever they wanted in exchange for an end to the torture. The now famous Torture Memos providing legal cover for the torture were written at the same time starting in the summer of 2002.
Libi’s tortured and knowingly fabricated testimony was the source of information used by Bush to sell the war to the U.S. Senate, and the source for Colin Powell’s bogus and lying presentation to the United Nations in 2003.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are now running around saying that the torture regime “protected the country from terrorist attack.” But the torture was used for the personal political goals of Bush and Cheney: namely, to sell their Iraq invasion to a very skeptical and disbelieving country.
Having been discovered by human rights investigators two weeks ago, Mr. Libi’s story coincided with the release of the Torture Memos and the growing clamor for criminal prosecutions of Bush officials.
His testimony is the smoking gun that would reveal that the torture regime was not for “national security” but for the personal political aims of Bush and Cheney.
He was Exhibit A in the indictment that alleges that tortured confessions and the contrived legal justifications of torture set up by Justice Department lawyers in July/August 2002 were central to the launch of the war against Iraq.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died and tens of thousands of U.S. service members have either been killed or badly wounded in a war that was based on lies fortified and promoted by the most sadistic torture.
-o-
Taken for a ride: This award winning documentary needs to be seen again.
From a recent Associated Press report we find this:
Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. “There are still innocent people there,” Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. “Some have been there six or seven years.”
Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a “mosaic” of intelligence.
“It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance,” Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather “sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.”
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt to determine “who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.”
-o-
Your bravery has taken over
your sense of reportage.
What options do they have
as a futile response?
Arrest you on charges of
“Assault with a pair of shoes with the intent of expressing the truth.”
Force on you a one-way ticket
before they close Guantanamo.
Keep you in a windowless cell
without pen and paper.
What could be worse?
Make you eat Dubya’s shoes?
A better aim would have been good,
though unnecessary.
As it was you showed us
how expertly
he dodges.
For in two seconds and a pair of shoes
you have assured history
shall not be written
by those who bombard
with lies.
Unlike the 15 seconds fought for
by those overfed on the idiot box,
your simple, poetic gesture
shall be recorded, applauded,
revered.
-o-
This was written perhaps too hastily on 15 December 2008. Recently Mr Al-Zaidi was sentenced to three years in prison by the Iraqi courts. One wonders whose feet are being kissed by handing down this sentence.
If throwing a pair of shoes warrants such a punishment, what would be the just punishment for the mass murder of innocent people?
I am hoping to be able to write a follow-up piece one day.
They come in a rain of flames and screams.
They seek the softness of flesh,
cracking points of bones.
But many of them unleash the horror
of their intent when all is quiet.
In silence they lurk
among the bushes. Still. Sinister.
Patient. Someone will walk
past them one day. Perhaps
someone who collects metal
scraps for a living.
Or maybe a child
will notice just one of them
with a bright yellow tail
playfully beckoning in the wind:
Take me. Take me.
Take me that I may be
One with your tender flesh.
Take me…
Sometimes there will not even be a scream.
-o-
Abdullah Yaqoob - DCA Archive
Furious at Israel’s horrific siege of Gaza and inspired by the courageous people of Gaza, workers, students and progressive activists are organizing sit-ins, demonstrations and other acts of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Many groups are getting on board and endorsing the Palestinian-led call for an international campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
From South Africa, where union dockworkers heroically refused to unload an Israeli ship, to Irish activists, Basque unionists and students in Britain and the United States, momentum is growing in the struggle to cut ties to Israel.
Students across Britain, including Palestinian and Arab youth, have taken direct action and occupied 21 campuses to protest Israel’s military assaults on Gaza and to demand their schools end links to the Zionist state and to the British weapons maker BAE Systems, which arms Israel.
In London, students held sit-ins at Goldsmith University and the London School of Economics, among others. Similar protests spread through England to Birmingham, Sussex, Norwich, Warwick, Oxford, Leeds, Cambridge and elsewhere. Some protests have won concessions from university officials.
At Manchester University, 1,000 students equated Israel with apartheid-era South Africa and called on the administration and student union to boycott Israeli companies and support Gaza and the BDS movement. The student union agreed.
Strong sit-ins have been held in Scotland at the universities of Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh and at Strathclyde.
Other solidarity actions continue. British MP George Galloway and 300 volunteers left Ramsgate Feb. 14 in a 110-vehicle caravan, whose vans, fire truck and ambulances were filled with community-donated food, medicine, clothes and toys to be donated in Gaza. Viva Palestine, Stop the War Coalition, Muslim groups and trade unions organized this 5,000-mile journey.
Irish organizations join BDS campaign
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, with 600,000 members in 55 unions, is prepared to start a boycott of Israeli goods. The Jan. 31 Irish Times carried a full-page ad, headlined “Irish Call for Justice for Palestine,” sponsored by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Its 350 signers called for the Irish government and people to boycott Israeli products and to support the BDS campaign.
When thousands of Irish marchers in Derry commemorated the 37th anniversary of Bloody Sunday—when British soldiers killed 14 unarmed people in 1972—they carried 1,000 Palestinian flags in tribute to the Palestinians killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza. The names of children killed were posted at the Children’s Wall. Sinn Fein’s banner read, “Solidarity with People of Gaza, Stop the Blockade.”
Welsh activists were arrested in Swansea at a Tesco’s grocery store after they seized produce grown on illegally occupied Palestinian land. The media reported their message calling on Wales’ people to support a countrywide boycott of Israeli goods.
Demonstrations in more than 30 cities in Basque Country, with 30,000 participants, have called for BDS and linked the Basque and Palestinian struggles. Trade unions joined a Bilbao demonstration calling for a boycott of Israel. Ten municipalities called for breaking ties to Israel.
In Catalonia, protesters leapt onto a basketball court to disrupt a Barcelona-Maccabi (Tel Aviv) game, waving Palestinian flags and signs saying “Boycott Israel.”
Professors and university employees in Quebec also endorsed the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees’ call to boycott Israel.
The BDS campaign is growing in the U.S. As Hampshire College students successfully campaigned for school divestment from Israel, a University of Rochester sit-in was organized by Students for a Democratic Society. They demanded no school ties to U.S. and Israeli militarism in the Middle East and aid for Gaza schools. Iraq Veterans against the War and Rochester Against War took part.
Macalester College students occupied the Minnesota Trade Office in St. Paul last month, then picketed there on Feb. 6, demanding that the state end all trade with Israel.
And New York University students began a divestment campaign at their school.
A 24-hour demonstration outside the World Zionist Organization’s New York office, from Feb. 12-13, drew 900 Jewish activists. Jews Say No targeted Israel’s blockade of Gaza and the ongoing occupation and demanded justice for the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, thousands of e-mail endorsements from the U.S., Canada and worldwide have poured in to the Jews in Solidarity with Palestine campaign. (See IACenter.org)
A cultural boycott is also underway. Chicago protesters wearing bandages stained with red paint, symbolizing Palestinian casualties, recently picketed the Israeli Batsheva Dance Company. The International Solidarity Movement and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel plan protests wherever the dance company performs.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee has issued an international call for a Global Day of Action in Solidarity with the Palestinian people and for concrete and bold BDS actions on March 30 to make this mobilization “a historic step forward in the new movement.”
Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Matangmanok 