On Tuesday May 1, the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center and the Portland chapter of the National Lawyers Guild will release a written report titled “Whose Streets? Recommend- ations to the Portland Police Bureau for Responding to First Amendment Assemblies”. The report is accompanied by a short video I produced for the Center that richly details how badly the Portland police continue to respond to First Amendment activities on the streets and sidewalks of the city. (Warning: This video is stark.)
This project is compiled from Center files and contains video shot from 2002 to 2006 by street video activists, legal observers, corporate media and the police themselves.
I am posting the video a couple of days early because I will be volunteering with the Portland Legal Defense Network to monitor and respond to arrests or police misconduct during the May Day march Tuesday afternoon.
A Loud, Tuneless Warble
April 30, 2007CNN writes about the graduation ceremony of a new class of Iraqi military recruits:
“With great pride, [the bugle player] delivers a loud, tuneless warble. It trails off in the whipping desert wind.”
Some high-ranking officials have come “to watch final training exercises for 1,500 Iraqi soldiers, who within days will be destroyed in Baghdad.”
Oh, that actually says “deployed”.
In other news from Iraq, the New York Times reports that a federal oversight agency that apparently is still doing its job found that, out of 8 Iraqi reconstruction projects examined, 7 were “no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle”. I can’t figure out if the looting was done by the Iraqis or the American contractors who got all those no-bid contracts.
By the way. The “surge” in Iraq, which Bush and Petraeus keep reminding us has not even gotten started yet, resulted in over 100 dead American soldiers (and an unknown, much larger number of Iraqi civilians) in April.
[Update: It is becoming clearer and clearer that George Dubya will forestall any pullout from Iraq during the remainder of his term. Apparently his plan is to maintain the status quo (i.e. “stay the course”) until a Democrat can be blamed for failure in Iraq. I can see the media script for this revision of history being written now. Of course, the Democrats are equally to blame for getting us mired in this international crime called the War on Iraq, but never let it be forgotten that George W. Bush was at the wheel when America was driven off the cliff.]
Posted in Commentary, Peace | Leave a Comment »