Humans Failing As Guardians of the Planet: Extinctions Ensue
China's Rare White River Dolphin Likely Extinct
SHANGHAI (AFP) - China's rapid industrialisation has likely made extinct a species of fresh water dolphin that had been on Earth for over 20 million years, Chinese and British biologists said Wednesday.
Scientists from China, Japan, Britain and the United States failed to find the white dolphin, known as the baiji, during a six-week search of its natural habitat in the Yangtze river last year.
"This result means the baiji is likely extinct," Wang Ding, co-author of the survey and one of the world's leading experts on the species, told AFP.
The dolphin was a victim of devastating pollution, illegal fishing and heavy cargo traffic on the Yangtze, Wang said.
The findings mean the baiji is likely the first mammal to become extinct in more than 50 years. It is the cousin of the bottlenose dolphin, which is also on the critically endangered list.
Wang, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, emphasised that not all hope was lost for the dolphin, which had made its home along the lower reaches of China's now heavily polluted Yangtze River for more than 20 million years.
"We are not saying the baiji is already gone," he said.
But he lamented that further searches this year had failed to find any sign of the dolphin.
Wang said that a letter written by the survey team had been published in the latest issue of the Royal Society Biology Letters journal in Britain to confirm the dolphin was believed to be extinct.
The baiji, identifiable by its long, teeth-filled snout and low dorsal fin, was last officially sighted more than two years ago.
The last confirmed count by a research team was conducted in 1997, when just 13 were recorded.
Up to 5,000 baiji were believed to have lived in the Yangtze less than a century ago, according to the baiji.org website, which was established by a range of international conservation groups.
"The decline in the baiji population has been caused by extreme human pressure on its freshwater habitat," the website said, blaming illegal fishing and massive discharges of industrial and agricultural waste into the river.
Other rare species that live in the Yangtze, such as the Chinese sturgeon and the finless porpoise, are also in danger of extinction.
The British-based zoologist who also worked on the six-week search meanwhile said the loss of the Yangste dolphin was a huge blow.
"The loss of such a unique and charismatic species is a shocking tragedy," said co-author Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London.
"The Yangtze River dolphin was a remarkable mammal that separated from all other species over 20 million years ago."
International environmental group WWF has warned that river dolphins are key indicators of a river's health and of the availability of clean water for people living on its banks.
"River dolphins are the watchdogs of the water," said Jamie Pittock, head of WWF's Global Freshwater Programme in a recent alert over their fate.
"The high levels of toxic pollutants accumulating in their bodies are a stark warning of poor water quality. This is a problem for both dolphins and the people dependent on these rivers," he added.
Turvey added: "This extinction represents the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasises that we have yet to take full responsibility in our role as guardians of the planet."
Habitat Loss Threatens Pygmy Elephants By VIJAY JOSHI
Associated Press Writer
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Satellite tracking of pygmy elephants has found that the endangered animals — unique to Borneo island — are under threat due to logging and commercial plantations encroaching on their habitat, conservationists said Thursday.
A World Wildlife Fund study, based on two years of satellite tracking, found that pygmy elephants thrive best in forests on flat lowlands and in river valleys — the same terrain preferred by loggers and oil palm plantations.
About 40 percent of forest in the Malaysian state of Sabah, where most pygmy elephants live, has been lost to logging, conversion for plantations and human settlement over the last four decades, WWF said.
Very little was known about pygmy elephants until a chance DNA analysis in 2003 revealed them to be a distinct subspecies of Asian elephants, which triggered a new effort to conserve them.
In June 2005, the WWF set in motion a landmark project to track pygmy elephants in the rain forests of Sabah by placing collars fitted with transmitters around the necks of five elephants, known to be leaders of their herds.
The collars beamed their locations via satellite to a WWF-Malaysia computer as often as once a day in the first study of its kind, providing valuable information about the elephants' grazing habits and movement patterns.
Data gathered so far reveals there are probably not more than 1,000 pygmy elephants left in Sabah — less than the 1,600 or so estimated previously.
The study revealed that pygmy elephants prefer lowland forests because there is more food of better quality.
"The areas that these elephants need to survive are the same forests where the most intensive logging in Sabah has taken place, because flatlands and valleys incur the lowest costs when extracting timber," said Raymond Alfred, head of WWF-Malaysia's Borneo Species Program.
The study also showed that elephants' movements are noticeably affected by human activities and forest disturbance. It found that some of the elephants were trekking five times as far as they normally would each day in search of food.
The loss of habitat brings them into more frequent contact with people and cultivated land, generating conflict with humans who sometimes capture or poison them to protect their farms.
While pygmy elephants can live in logged and secondary forests, it is crucial that their remaining habitat is managed in a sustainable manner and not converted into plantations, the WWF said.
Logging in elephant habitat should only occur if there is a long-term forest management plan in place, and oil palm plantations should be established on degraded, non-forested land devoid of elephants and orangutans, it said.
Malaysian officials could not immediately be reached for comment, but in the past they have accused Western activists of trying to undermine the palm oil industry by claiming that forest clearing in Malaysia and Indonesia is threatening wildlife. The government says most palm oil plantations are established where forests have already been cleared for other crops.
Alfred said an initiative aimed at conserving 92,650 square miles of rainforest straddling the border between Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia should ensure that most herds will have a home in the long term.
Adult pygmy elephants stand up to 8 feet tall — a foot or two shorter than mainland Asian elephants. They are more rotund and have smaller, babyish faces with longer tails that reach almost to the ground. They are also less aggressive than their Asian counterparts.
Though smaller than its cousins, an adult pygmy elephant can still devour up to 330 pounds of vegetation each day. One of their favorite treats is the large, thorny and pungent durian fruit, which they often roll in mud to gulp it down whole, spikes and all.
Tornado in Brooklyn New York City Storm Wake-Up
Wednesday, 08 Aug 2007
Heavy rain and thunderstorms brought down trees in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A tornado warning had been issued for the area for several hours. It's not clear if a tornado touched down. SideBar
MyFoxNY.com -- Some people in Bay Ridge Brooklyn think a tornado touched down early Wednesday in a storm that killed one woman. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that at least 40 buildings in Brooklyn had damage from the storm.
The National Weather Service had issued a tornado warning in the 6 a.m. hour for Brooklyn. It expired at 7 a.m.
New York Weather Authority Mike Woods says Fox 5 Sky Guardian showed conditions that could have spawned a tornado. The National Weather Service will send an investigator to the scene to determine if a tornado hit the area.
Heavy rains caused localized flooding and Fox 5 news crews showed dozens of downed trees. Several trees crushed cars and roads were blocked.
A woman on Narrows Avenue reports a tree that would rival the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was uprooted on her block.
There were some power outages reported in the area. That's bad news as it will be a hot and humid afternoon in New York City. The temperatures could climb to over 100 degrees.
At a 12:15 p.m. news conference Mayor Michael Bloomberg said a woman on Staten Island has died as a result of the storm.
Rodents Plague Northern Spain By DANIEL WOOLLS, Associated Press Writer (08-08) 11:24 PDT MADRID, Spain (AP) --
It's been a messy summer in Spain: a blackout in Barcelona, an oil spill in the Mediterranean and giant schools of jellyfish lurking off beaches packed with vacationers.
Now comes another woe: millions of mouse-like rodents called voles feasting on beets and potatoes in an infestation that has prompted desperation in one of Spain's agricultural heartlands.
The invasion of Castille-Leon in north-central Spain began gently 10 months ago but has snowballed to stunning proportions. Farmers' unions say the region is crawling with an estimated 7.5 million voles. The local government doesn't know the cause, or the solution.
Spanish television aired footage of scores of voles darting in and out of holes in what would normally be rich, healthy farmland, or quivering in the throes of death brought on by pesticide. Some of the critters have even made it into gardens of homes in the region's main city, Valladolid, according to news reports.
"There has never been a plague like the one we have now," said the Castille-Leon regional agriculture minister, Silvia Clemente. Officials have asked agronomists, veterinarians and biologists what on earth is happening and nobody really knows, she told Cadena Ser radio.
"There are no measures that have been proven to work against a plague of these characteristics," Clemente said.
For now, crews are fighting with fire. They started igniting controlled blazes Wednesday on harvested farmland to try to kill off the pests, acting with utmost care to keep the flames from spreading to bone-dry terrain prone to forest fires.
Jose Antonio del Brio, head of the local farmers' association in the town of Fresno el Viejo, where the first fires were set, said literally every farm in the area is being eaten by voles. First it was the grain crops — 40 percent lost to the critters — and now beets, potatoes and corn are on the menu.
"We cannot do anything against these animals, who are taking food out of our children's mouths," del Brio said.
A vole problem was first detected in Castille-Leon last September. Then, officials used chemicals to try to kill them off, but ecological groups filed a complaint and the practice was halted. The vole population suddenly exploded.
"Nothing of what is happening with this plague falls within the expected because there are no precedents," Clemente said.
Activists Want Chimp Declared a 'Person'
By WILLIAM J. KOLE Associated Press Writer
VIENNA, Austria (AP) - In some ways, Hiasl is like any other Viennese: He indulges a weakness for pastry, likes to paint and enjoys chilling out watching TV. But he doesn't care for coffee, and he isn't actually a person—at least not yet.
In a case that could set a global legal precedent for granting basic rights to apes, animal rights advocates are seeking to get the 26- year-old male chimpanzee legally declared a "person."
Hiasl's supporters argue he needs that status to become a legal entity that can receive donations and get a guardian to look out for his interests.
"Our main argument is that Hiasl is a person and has basic legal rights," said Eberhart Theuer, a lawyer leading the challenge on behalf of the Association Against Animal Factories, a Vienna animal rights group.
"We mean the right to life, the right to not be tortured, the right to freedom under certain conditions," Theuer said.
"We're not talking about the right to vote here."
The campaign began after the animal sanctuary where Hiasl (pronounced HEE-zul) and another chimp, Rosi, have lived for 25 years went bankrupt.
Activists want to ensure the apes don't wind up homeless if the shelter closes. Both have already suffered: They were captured as babies in Sierra Leone in 1982 and smuggled in a crate to Austria for use in pharmaceutical experiments. Customs officers intercepted the shipment and turned the chimps over to the shelter.
Their food and veterinary bills run about $6,800 a month. Donors have offered to help, but there's a catch: Under Austrian law, only a person can receive personal donations.
Organizers could set up a foundation to collect cash for Hiasl, whose life expectancy in captivity is about 60 years. But without basic rights, they contend, he could be sold to someone outside Austria, where the chimp is protected by strict animal cruelty laws.
"If we can get Hiasl declared a person, he would have the right to own property. Then, if people wanted to donate something to him, he'd have the right to receive it," said Theuer, who has vowed to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.
Austria isn't the only country where primate rights are being debated. Spain's parliament is considering a bill that would endorse the Great Ape Project, a Seattle-based international initiative to extend "fundamental moral and legal protections" to apes.
If Hiasl gets a guardian, "it will be the first time the species barrier will have been crossed for legal 'personhood,'" said Jan Creamer, chief executive of Animal Defenders International, which is working to end the use of primates in research.
Paula Stibbe, a Briton who teaches English in Vienna, petitioned a district court to be Hiasl's legal trustee. On April 24, Judge Barbara Bart rejected her request, ruling Hiasl didn't meet two key tests: He is neither mentally impaired nor in an emergency.
Although Bart expressed concern that awarding Hiasl a guardian could create the impression that animals enjoy the same legal status as humans, she didn't rule that he could never be considered a person.
Martin Balluch, who heads the Association Against Animal Factories, has asked a federal court for a ruling on the guardianship issue.
"Chimps share 99.4 percent of their DNA with humans," he said. "OK, they're not homo sapiens. But they're obviously also not things—the only other option the law provides."
Not all Austrian animal rights activists back the legal challenge. Michael Antolini, president of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said he thinks it's absurd.
"I'm not about to make myself look like a fool" by getting involved, said Antolini, who worries that chimpanzees could gain broader rights, such as copyright protections on their photographs.
But Stibbe, who brings Hiasl sweets and yogurt and watches him draw and clown around by dressing up in knee-high rubber boots, insists he deserves more legal rights "than bricks or apples or potatoes."
"He can be very playful but also thoughtful," she said. "Being with him is like playing with someone who can't talk."
A date for the appeal hasn't been set, but Hiasl's legal team has lined up expert witnesses, including Jane Goodall, the world's foremost observer of chimpanzee behavior.
"When you see Hiasl, he really comes across as a person," Theuer said.
"He has a real personality. It strikes you immediately: This is an individual. You just have to look him in the eye to see that."
Bush-Bin Laden Black Market Heroin to Boom in Afghanistan
Record poppy crop to be harvested in Afghanistan By Matthew Lee Associated Press Saturday, August 4, 2007
WASHINGTON - Afghanistan will produce another record poppy harvest this year that cements its status as the world's near-sole supplier of the heroin source, yet a furious debate over how to reverse the trend is stalling proposals to cut the crop, U.S. officials say.
As President Bush prepares for weekend talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, divisions within the U.S. administration and among NATO allies have delayed release of a $475 million counternarcotics program for Afghanistan, where intelligence officials see growing links between drugs and the Taliban, the officials said.
U.N. figures to be released in September are expected to show that Afghanistan's poppy production has risen up to 15 percent since 2006 and that the country now accounts for 95 percent of the world's crop, 3 percentage points more than last year, officials familiar with preliminary statistics said.
But counterdrug proposals by some U.S. officials have met fierce resistance, including boosting the amount of forcible poppy field destruction in provinces that grow the most, officials said. The approach also would link millions of dollars in development aid to benchmarks on eradication; arrests and prosecutions of narcotraders, corrupt officials; and on alternative crop production.
"Afghanistan is providing close to 95 percent of the world's heroin," the State Department's top counternarcotics official, Tom Schweich, said at a recent conference. "That makes it almost a sole-source supplier" and presents a situation "unique in world history."
Almost all the heroin from Afghanistan makes its way to Europe; most of the heroin in the U.S. comes from Latin America.
Afghanistan last year accounted for 92 percent of global opium production, compared with 70 percent in 2000 and 52 percent a decade earlier. The higher yields in Afghanistan brought world production to a record high of 7,286 tons in 2006, 43 percent more than in 2005.
A State Department inspector general's report released Friday noted that the counternarcotics assistance is dwarfed by the estimated $38 billion "street value" of Afghanistan's poppy crop, if all is converted to heroin, and said eradication goals were "not realistic."
"Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is an anathema to these idiots. I predict that in the near future right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus." -- William S. Burroughs
US weighs role in heroin war in Afghanistan By Anne Barnard and Farah Stockman
KABUL, Afghanistan -- The burgeoning illegal opium trade in Afghanistan has become the biggest single threat to democracy, surpassing Al Qaeda and the Taliban and prompting US officials to consider military intervention against the traffickers, US and Afghan officials say.
Even as the Bush administration hails Afghanistan as a major foreign policy success, the country's soaring drug profits now equal about half of its gross national product and have become the principal source of funds for reconstruction, outpacing foreign aid. The drug trade also is fueling corruption at the highest levels of the government, involving army generals and other top officials who routinely work with the US military on antiterrorism operations, according to the officials.
In Washington yesterday, the senior American ground commander in Afghanistan said the United States is considering expanding the role of the roughly 18,000 American troops in the country to help crack down on the skyrocketing drug economy.
"We're assessing exactly how the military's role may be reshaped as we go into this coming year, given the significant threat that drugs is making to the future of Afghanistan," Army Lieutenant General David Barno told reporters. "We're assessing right now how the military will be able to . . . provide further assistance in that fight."
US military commanders have sharpened their focus on the opium poppy trade -- which produces 75 percent of the world's opium and its derivative, heroin -- and plan to target militia commanders who profit from trafficking.
For instance, Hazrat Ali, a former Afghan commander paid by American forces to help fight Al Qaeda, is now widely cited by US and Afghan officials as a key opium trafficker. He is also the police chief of Jalalabad.
"One day, he will wake up and find out he's out of business," Colonel David Lamm, chief of staff for US forces in Afghanistan, said of Ali in a recent interview in Kabul, the capital. "We know where the drug traffic moves, we know who profits, and we are beginning to deal with it."
The approach is a shift for the Pentagon, which has been hesitant to involve the US military in drug-enforcement efforts because its main mission is to combat terrorism. Currently, the standing order to ground troops is to destroy drugs only when encountering them during military operations and not to take initiative on their own against drug warehouses or laboratories. US soldiers routinely have let trucks full of poppies pass on the road once it was clear they weren't transporting Al Qaeda.
"It's only since July that Americans have begun to see the importance of dealing with warlords," said a senior European diplomat in Kabul, on condition of anonymity. "One reason why I'm slightly optimistic about Afghanistan is that the American government appears to have woken up in the last few months to the problem of drugs and the relations of drugs to the power of warlords and commanders."
When US troops first entered Afghanistan in October 2001, they found themselves in a bind: They knew local commanders were involved in a centuries-old drug trade, but they needed help in winning the war against the Taliban.
Major James Hawver, a reservist in Jalalabad in 2002, said Ali's blessing made it easier for US troops to operate in his area.
"He was sort of our benefactor," Hawver said. "He let it be known that if anybody messed with us he'd deal with them." But pressure has been mounting for over a year for the Department of Defense to take more action against traffickers. US Representative Henry J. Hyde, an Illinois Republican, has written to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asking for more intervention and asserting that heroin profits are funding weapons for terrorists and insurgents.
Others argue that Afghanistan's new police and judicial systems are no match for the drug economy, which has become an integral part of the country's much-touted rebirth and the income of too many powerful people.
"I am increasingly worried that the whole economy, the whole social fabric, is going to be dominated by the drug question," said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. "Just like people can be addicted to drugs, countries can be addicted to a drug economy. That's what I am seeing in Afghanistan."
In recent years, it is most often drug money -- not foreign aid -- that has financed shiny new vehicles in towns that had only known donkey traffic and mobile phone communications systems in places that had never had electricity, Costa said.
In 2002 and 2003, income from opium reached $4.8 billion, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, nearly twice that of income from international aid for projects that began in that time period. Next year, it is expected to climb even higher, as two out of three farmers questioned by a United Nations survey said they planned to significantly increase their opium crop.
"Drugs are the principle sources of reconstruction money, far outweighing combined international assistance," said James Dobbins, Bush's special envoy for Afghanistan in 2001.
Much of the country's tax revenues come from the import of vehicles and other expensive goods, largely purchased with drug profits.
President Hamid Karzai, whose newborn central government lacks the reach to confront the problem, told a donors conference in April that "drugs in Afghanistan are threatening the very existence of the Afghan state."
Karzai blamed drug smugglers -- not Al Qaeda or the Taliban -- for the attack in September on his vice president, one of the few instances of election violence.
Drugs threaten democracy in other ways. While the slate of candidates in the recent presidential election was largely free of drug connections, local parliamentary elections scheduled for this spring are expected to feature a large number of candidates involved in the trade.
"It's not merely about drug money financing candidates. Drug lords are candidates," said Mark Schneider, president of International Crisis Group.
On the road to the northern village of Balkh, the return of the drug economy -- once severely curtailed by the Taliban -- is no secret. Forests of marijuana plants line both sides of the highway. Their pungent smell penetrates passing cars even with the windows shut. The more profitable opium poppy fields lie farther from the road, but their products aren't hard to find.
Kamaluddin Kuchai, a retired small-time commander in the war against the Soviet occupation and the devastating militia battles that followed, says he makes 10 times more growing opium poppies than he would growing wheat, the other major crop in the region.
"When we grow other crops, I cannot earn a living," he said. "We don't do it because we like it, but because we have no other choice."
Kuchai, who is 49 but looks much older with his gray beard and lined face, invited visitors into his tiny sitting room and brought out a plastic sack that made a squelching sound as he laid it on the carpet. Inside was a brown paste the consistency of cake batter, raw sap from his poppy fields. A kilo brings between 3,000 and 12,000 afghanis, or $60 to $240, depending on the quality, he said.
Poppy sap and marijuana are traded openly in Balkh's central marketplace, along a road ringing a circular park where tall trees shelter a 500-year-old shrine, he said.
Kuchai and his friends describe a business that involves most of the community: The police chief's son charges a tax on all sales.
This past July, in a rare move, the police chief in Balkh seized a cache of drugs and accused a powerful local commander of trafficking. But instead of being punished, the commander, Atta Muhammad, was swiftly promoted. His new job: governor of Balkh Province.
Bryan Bender of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Washington. Barnard reported from Afghanistan; Stockman from Washington.
US and Britain accused of creating heroin trail
War on terrorism: Drugs Trade By Raymond Whitaker in Islamabad
Pakistan's hapless army of three million drug addicts has found that the price of oblivion has halved since the world was thrown into crisis on 11 September. Some of the purest heroin in the world, produced just over the border in Afghanistan, can be had in the streets of Peshawar, Quetta and other cities for as little as 20p a gram.
The sudden torrent of heroin, opium and hashish is being described as the Afghan regime's ultimate weapon. Afghanistan is already responsible for three-quarters of the world's heroin exports, and the Taliban have threatened that if they are attacked, they will lift a ban on opium poppy production in the areas they control.
But as Tony Blair may have discovered during his visit here yesterday, few issues in this region are simple, least of all the drugs trade. When they banned poppy growing, the Taliban were accused of cynically attempting to manipulate the drugs market by squeezing supplies. Now, it is claimed, the Afghan regime is flooding the market. The price of a kilogram of opium in Pakistan soared from $44 (£30) to $400 after the ban and before 11 September. Immediately afterwards, it surged further to $746 before slumping dramatically.
Asked to explain the sudden fall in the street price of heroin, a narcotics official said it could indicate sales by terrorists needing to finance their operations because their bank accounts had been frozen across the world. But at the same time, he added, it was the probable result of a market decision by thousands of smaller players seeking to sell stocks while they could.
"Drugs are a currency in Afghanistan and border areas of Pakistan," he said. "Farmers, traders and ordinary people keep drugs in their homes rather than money in the bank. Today we are in a war situation, so what do people do? They go to the market and sell their assets to realise cash, just as people in the West sell shares."
Britain has just released a detailed indictment of Osama bin Laden, his al-Qa'ida network and their Taliban protectors, which accuses them of jointly exploiting the drugs trade. American officials agree, and have leaked a sensational though thinly substantiated claim that Mr bin Laden's group tried to develop a "super-powerful" brand of heroin that would enslave Western addicts yet further. They admit, however, that proof that either the Taliban or al-Qa'ida actually control the trade is hard to find.
When the Taliban swept to power in Afghanistan in 1996, the drugs industry was already well established. The movement imposed taxes on poppy cultivation, just like the ones that existed for other crops, and charged fees for narcotics production, which brought in $15m to $27m annually, according to a United Nations report. Just over a year ago it finally fulfilled its promises to stamp out poppy growing, reducing production from 3,100 tons in 2000 to virtually nothing in the first half of this year, again according to the United Nations.
But the criminal gangs in charge of refining and distribution remain powerful, and the Taliban did nothing to stop the production and export of heroin from existing stockpiles. The threat to allow poppies to grow again could be a sign of the movement's weakness rather than its strength, observers say. It may be seeking to regain lost support from farmers angered by the ban. One source said confiscated weapons had been returned to farmers in an effort to enlist them in a struggle against any US-led attack.
Before the present intelligence offensive, attempts to link Mr bin Laden directly to drugs had been vague. Congressional staff in Washington who had seen the files said he did not actually traffic in drugs, but made money from the trade by hiring out his fighters to guard refineries and escort convoys on their way out through Iran. The Taliban rake off money from drugs in similar ways. A report to the House of Commons accuses them of protecting stockpiles – but the narcotics official scoffed at the idea of "mullahs selling heroin".
There is also the uncomfortable fact that almost half the heroin flowing out of Afghanistan is thought to come from areas controlled by the Northern Alliance, the West's putative partner in the campaign to oust the Taliban. Any expansion of the alliance's territory could see an increase in the drugs supply.
In his meeting last night with Mr Blair, Pakistan's military President, General Pervez Musharraf, would have been entitled to point out to his visitor that the drugs trade had its origins in the war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Afghan mujahedin, with the full knowledge of the intelligence agencies of America, Britain and other allies, refined and exported heroin – previously unknown in this part of the world – to finance their struggle. Evidence even exists that the CIA encouraged the spread of hard drugs to demoralise Russian troops.
Interview with Alfred McCoy, professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
Barsamian: Was the anti-communist ideology so powerful and so strong that the CIA would risk the worldwide opprobrium of being linked with drug trafficking? Why would they take that risk?
McCoy: It's easy. Look, it's effective. I interviewed a guy named Lt. Col Lucien Conein who, since I published my book now despises me, and I asked Col Conein why they worked with the Corsicans in Saigon, for example. He said that there aren't very many groups that know the clandestine arts. When you think about the essential skills it takes to have an extra-legal operation - to have somebody killed, to mobilize a crowd, to do what it does when societies are in flux, when power is unclear and to be grabbed and shaped and molded into a new state - you want to overthrow a government and put a new one in - how do you do it? Who does this? Accountants? - They go to the office every day. Students? They go to classes - they're good for maybe one riot or something, but they've got to get on to medical school or law or whatever they're doing. Where do you get people who have this kind of skill? You have your own operatives and they're limited.
Particularly if you're a foreigner, your capacity to move something in the streets is very limited. You know, sometimes you can turn to a state intelligence agency in a country you're working with, but most effectively you can turn to the underworld. That's why the CIA always worked very effectively with the warlords of the Golden Triangle. It's worked very effectively with Corsican syndicates in Europe, worked very effectively and continuously with American Mafia - because they have the same clandestine arts. They operate with the same techniques.
And they have the same kind of amorality. They are natural allies. There was a conversion of cultures between the milieu of the underworld and the world of the clandestine operative.
You've got, then, a CIA secret war which in an essential way, in a fundamental way is linked with the opium traffic. More than that, it appears that a number of CIA operatives as individuals got involved. They started smuggling, started wheeling, started dealing and started doing a couple of bags here and there. We know, for example, there's a famous case of a CIA global money-moving bank called the Nugan-Hand bank which was established in Australia. The founder of that was a Michael John Hand. He was a green beret who was a contract CIA operative in Laos. When he first came to Australia in 1969-1970 Australian federal police got intelligence on him - I've seen the files - saying that what he's basically doing is he's bringing down light aircraft that are flying from Thailand to northern Australia into those abandoned air strips that were left over from World War II and he's dealing heroin. That's what Michael John Hand, according to Australian federal police intelligence, was doing. So, as individuals CIA operatives were getting involved and more or less what you've got then as a result of Laos is that the policy of integrating intelligence and cover operations with narcotics gets established.
You get, then, an entire generation of covert action warriors used to dealing with narcotics as a matter of policy. In short, you get a policy and personnel which integrates covert action with narcotics. This manifests itself in a number of ways. First of all the Nugan-Hand bank. Not only was it moving money globally for the CIA, but it was the major money laundering conduit that was trimming funds up to Southeast Asia from Australia and linking the Golden Triangle heroin trade of Southeast Asia with the urban markets of Australia. In Afghanistan as well, this same distributing pattern that we saw in Laos emerges.
This is one case that hasn't been well studied. I've spoken to one correspondent for the Far East Economic Review which is a Dow-Jones Publication, Mr. Lawrence Lifschultz(?), a friend of mine, and what he found was something of a similar pattern that I found in Laos. He was a correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the Mujahadeen campaign and he wrote articles in the Nation and elsewhere describing this similar pattern. You've got Pakistani government officials very heavily involved in narcotics, you've got the Mujahadeen manufacturing heroin, they're exporting it to Europe and the United States. They're using it to support their guerrilla campaign. the Pakistanis and the CIA are complicitous on the level of (1) not doing anything or (2) actually getting involved in the case of some of the Pakistani elite. So, it's a case where the Mujahadee operation becomes ultimately integrated with the narcotics trade and the CIA is fully informed of the integration and doesn't do anything about it.
Moving on to our fourth instance, one close to home, is the whole Iran-contra operation.
First of all, I think the Laos parallel is very strong in the Iran-contra operation. Just in the formal outlines of the policy - you know, you've got the contras on the border of Nicaragua, they're a mercenary army, they're supported through a humanitarian operation, they're given U.S. logistic support, they're given U.S. equipment and they're given U.S. air power backup to deliver the equipment and the logistic support. All the personnel that are involved in that operation are Laos veterans. Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines, Oliver North, Richard Secord - they all served in Laos during thirteen-year war. They are all part of that policy of integrating narcotics and being complicitous in the narcotics trade in the furtherance of covert action.
In this case, what I think we can see is it's not just the same. It's not just simply that the CIA was complicitous in allowing the contras to deal in cocaine, to serve as a link between the Andes and across the Caribbean into the United States. I think we can see the situation has gotten worse. In Laos, as I said, the CIA was hands-off. Once it got beyond their secret base, they wouldn't touch it. They gave Vang Pao the aircraft and once it got any further they didn't really know about it and didn't want to know about it. They remained ignorant about it. And ultimately what you're looking at was a traffic that was in a remote region which, in a way I don't think the CIA saw was going to happen, wound up serving Americans. An estimate of 50% of U.S. combat forces in Vietnam taking drugs, that was common at that time. But it's still remote and it's still not going directly into the United States.
The level of cynicism in Central America is even worse. We're not talking about original traffic or moving the raw product - we're talking about taking finished cocaine, providing aircraft, moreover providing protection for these traffickers as they fly across the Caribbean with these massive loads of cocaine. Now, I don't know. Can one estimate what percentage of the cocaine was politically protected by these intelligence operations. Until there's a formal investigation, which there's not likely to be, it's difficult to say.
I think that one can say that as you look at the drugs flowing into the United States during the 1960s when this Lao operation was going, there was probably a much smaller percentage of narcotics entering the United States from politically protected brokers than there is today. In other words, this CIA policy of integrating covert action operations with narcotics, both at a level of individuals being involved and also just turning a blind eye to the fact that our allies are drug brokers, this complicity in the narcotics trade has gotten worse. It's closer to home. It's not moving the raw material out in the jungles, it's actually bringing the finished narcotics, cocaine, into the United States. So it's gotten that much closer to home and that much more cynical.
Barsamian: In your view, there will be a marked increase and expansion of drug addiction and drug use in the United States, Europe and Australia - Incidentally, earlier you mentioned that the drug flow went into Europe and Australia, but not into Japan, is that correct?
McCoy: Yes.
Barsamian: Why not?
McCoy: The relationship between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (the conservatives) and the big organized crime syndicates, which are enormous in Japan, is a very tight one and has been historically since the end of World War II. There's been a very close integration with the organized crime operations and the ruling conservative party. The conservatives have been in power now in Japan since 1948. It's one of the longest reigns of any party anywhere in the world. There's a kind of entente, an understanding between the syndicates and the government - it's not rigid - but the basic understanding is no drugs. That's the basic thing. Don't move drugs. And the Japanese police are ruthlessly efficient. If any of the syndicates, any of the big families - some of them have 10,000 members in them - broke this rule, the police have sufficient mechanisms of control to punish them for it. So in this complex politics of organized crime in Japan, they can do prostitution, they can do all kinds of fraud, they can do many things - but not drugs. So Japan's never opened up.
DeGaulle had a very similar relationship with the Corsican syndicates during his reign in the 1960s and early 1970s. The understanding was that the Corsican syndicates in Marseilles would manufacture in Marseilles under protection. But they would not sell in France. They would only export to the United States. That began to break down. DeGaulle died, Pompidoux replaced him and the Gaullists lost power, there was pressure on the syndicates, some new groups came in and started breaking the rule, and France wound up with a drug problem. But for practically a decade that rule held.
Taliban prepare to unleash their deadliest weapon in War on terrorism: Drugs By Raymond Whitaker in Peshawar
Sohrab, an Afghan refugee, stared listlessly from the culvert where he and his companion had taken the heroin they had just bought. The other man was holding a match to a piece of silvered paper, waiting for the fumes to start rising.
"You can see the dealers down there," said Dr Shah Agha Saadat, head of a drop-in centre for street addicts where Sohrab is registered, pointing to a couple of men who sauntered round the corner when they noticed our interest. Every few yards along the road, addicts were lying in the dust.
Dr Saadat had taken us out into the street, a couple of hundred yards into Pakistan's lawless tribal territories, to show us what he called a graveyard for former addicts. I had been expecting a corner of a field with a few whitewashed stones to mark their final resting-place. Instead he indicated a strip of recently-turned earth beside the road, only feet from where Sohrab was crouching. "This is where we bury them if they have no family to take them," he said. "There are 25 in there."
Opium poppies have always been grown on both sides of Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, but the region did not become the world's main exporter of heroin until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 brought near-anarchy. Production and refining exploded as the Afghan mujahedin, with the connivance of Western intelligence agencies, traded in drugs to finance their war against the Russians, with results that can be seen in the streets of Western cities as well as Peshawar.
The culture of narcotics, guns and criminality has taken a terrible toll in Pakistan, where there are more than three million heroin addicts and several senior politicians, military officers and policemen have been implicated in drug-running. Most of the drugs which reach the West now go out through Iran, which has half a million addicts of its own. But even though Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan have almost stamped out poppy growing in the areas they control, the Afghan regime has done nothing to stop the refining and export of heroin from huge stockpiles within their borders.
A diplomatic source in Pakistan said: "The drugs trade continues to finance not only the Taliban, but the terrorism their friend Osama bin Laden carries out around the world. If we had spent more on drugs intelligence, we would have known more about terrorism as well, and that would have enabled us to put greater pressure on the Taliban and Mr bin Laden."
A collapse of the Taliban, however, could lead to a sharp rise in poppy growing in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance, which is hoping for international aid in its five-year campaign to drive out the Taliban, recently staged a public burning of opium for Western television cameras, but the United Nations Drugs Control Project (UNDCP) is expected to report shortly that it has made no effort to stop the production, refining and export of heroin from its territory.
The Taliban themselves are threatening to allow the resumption of poppy cultivation if the Americans attack. According to Lateef Afridi, a Pakistani politician whose base is among the tribal Pashtun on both sides of the border, it may already have done so. "The ban on poppy growing was very unpopular, and right now the Taliban need friends," Mr Afridi told The Independent. "In the past few days I have heard that the Taliban have not only lifted the ban, they have given the farmers back the weapons they confiscated from them."
The crisis since the attacks in the US has halted a $1.5m UNDCP scheme to give immediate aid to Afghan farmers who had ceased poppy cultivation, heightening their incentive to start again. "There are very serious doubts about the future," said Bernard Frahi, head of the UNDCP in Islamabad. "We are seeing all the ingredients for illicit opium cultivation: civil war, an absence of law and order and no alternative for farmers. The criminal gangs which control the refining and shipment of heroin are still very much in place.
"Opium provides credit and savings for farmers, while wheat fetches only two thirds of the price, and there is no guarantee that you can sell your crop when it is ready. If farmers have a choice, they grow opium."
Many of the people seen by the Dost Foundation, a Pakistani charity which specialises in fighting heroin addiction, became hooked by the fumes in the refineries of Afghanistan. Apart from its centre for street addicts, the organisation runs projects for drug victims and their families. But it can treat only a tiny proportion of the region's vast army of addicts.
"The number is still rising, however much we try to get it down, because the supply of heroin is still so high," said Dr Saadat. The project treats the addicts' many skin, eye and digestive ailments, gives them a place to wash, dispenses tea and tries to warn them about the rising dangers of hepatitis and Aids. The increasing minority of addicts who inject can get disposable syringes as well.
Sohrab may well end up buried by the side of the street he frequents, but every month the project sends about 15 street addicts for rehabilitation. The man who goes out to try to persuade them to clean up is Bahar Ahmed Arbab, who used to be hooked on muffara – a fearsome combination of opium, Mandrax and hashish seeds. "It was so powerful that someone once shot me when I was high, and I didn't notice," he says with a grin, pulling up his shalwar kameez to show off the scar. "When addicts say it's difficult to give up, I tell them I'm a role model. If I can do it, anyone can."
"There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman." -- André Malraux
Why is Half of Iraq in Absolute Poverty
"This is the first time I've read anything by Layla Anwar (see end for bio). This is one of the most moving articles I've ever read---it makes me as an American feel so helpless, and ashamed. Because I know I would feel as angry as Layla does if I were in her shoes. This is an intelligent, passionate woman, who speaks for all of the women of Iraq." Dr. Reese Kilgo, Retired Professor, University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)
Why Is Half Of Iraq In Absolute Poverty?
by Layla Anwar, August 3, 2007 Information Clearing House
Why? Yes why? What for? What does it say about you? What does it say about your countries? What does it say about your institutions? What does it say about your governments, your "culture", your "civilization", your history, your "progress", your "values", your concepts...?
Have you ever stopped and pondered these questions? Have you ever stopped and asked yourselves; how come? How come we are so advanced, how come we are so democratic, how come we are so great, how come we are so free... And how come we allow so much murder, oppression, abuse, go unaccounted for? Have you ever asked yourself this question?
I was just listening to the BBC World radio. A report from Oxfam - and in your eyes that makes it credible - over 70 % of us Iraqis, no longer have access to clean drinking water. I say no longer have because I remember not so long ago, one could turn on the tap and drink. As simple as that. The report goes on to say that over 50% of Iraqis are undernourished and 1 out of 3 is literally starving. And that 50% live in abject poverty. 50% !!!
Again, I remember a time, even during the "civilized" sanctions that your countries imposed upon us, everyone had something to eat. Not much, but there was food. The Iraqi government had developed a system of rationing that, to this day, still leaves your top U.N reps in awe. When I mention that in my posts, I am accused of waging a war of disinformation, psy-ops and being a paid agent.
Listening to a Concerned Arab Woman
Now you listen to me and you get off your butts and read. Educate yourselves, oh great people of the West. A few years back, you could not even locate Iraq on a map. Now you have all suddenly become experts on Her.
Prior to your liberation, there was no starvation in Iraq. Prior to your liberation, there was no abject poverty, the kind we witness today. Prior to your liberation, kids did not stutter out of fear. Prior to your liberation, they went to free schools, learned, grew up and became fully functioning adults, with degrees, diplomas and expertise. No, we did not have learning impediments before your liberation. Today 92 % of Iraqi children suffer from it. Today, 99% of Iraqi children are traumatized for life.
So I ask you again - Why? What have Iraqis done to you? Did they invade you? Did they steal your homes? Did they imprison you? Did they torture you? Did they rape you? Did they occupy your lands? Of course, some of you will come and present me with your usual condescending, paternalistic, patronizing lists of political theories, attempting to explain the inexplicable.
Save your time and energy. I know all about your theories. I know all about your theories of imperialism, neo-cons, Zionists... I also know all about your handy explanations regarding oil, cartels, monopolies, globalization... None of that satisfies me. I still need to know why?
Why us? Why Iraq? Why this? Why now? If you fail to answer that question, then you would have not learned one single thing about yourselves. And I say yourselves, because your governments are a reflection of who you are, your aspirations, your mindsets, your thinking, your illusions...You are part of it and it is part of you.
And all I can see right now are nothing but murderous thoughts - yours. A few days ago, I was reading an article about a French film producer called Alain Tasma who has just finished directing a film on the Rwandan Genocide.
During "Operation Turquoise", between 700'000 and 900'000 Rwandans perished. None of you, not a single one of you, had any objections to calling it a Genocide. It was a given, it was accepted, it was fact. And rightly so, because it was a genocide. But when it comes to Iraq, all sorts of counter figures pop up. All kinds of other statistics are put forward to try to prove "well, yes but"...
Continuation of Genocide
Again my question is why? Why did you accept it without questions in the case of Rwanda, why did you accept it without questions in the case of the Holocaust, why is it when it comes to Arabs and Arab Muslims in particular, it becomes a topic for debate and nit picking? And "it" refers to Genocide.
Can you answer this question? Why is it that what happened over 60 years ago in your lands, still makes you grovel in mortification and supplications of forgiveness but when it comes to us, you have so many "red flags"? Your phrases are almost always qualified with a "yes but..."
What does that tell me about you? It tells me exactly what I said earlier on, you and your governments are one and the same. And you will come and say "yes but... I did not vote", "yes but, I sent an email", "yes but....yes but...yes but..."
I don't care for your "yes buts". I truly don't. And that applies to all of you. All of you whose governments have a finger in the Iraqi pie.
If you had really wanted, you could have easily gone out en masse, in front of your government's offices... If only 5 million of you, not more, only 5 million, had done that and had thrown your passports in a huge bonfire in front of your White house, 10 Downing Street or wherever the hell you happen to be, then I am sure, we would not be experiencing what we are experiencing now.
There are also mass pickets, sit ins, huge demonstrations, strikes... There are ways, many ways. You just need to get your "creativity" going. Or maybe you are just creative in killing us? I don't care much for your opinions and comments anymore. Actually I don't give a damn. All I know is that you have participated directly or indirectly in the crime. That is all I know.
But there is still a little hope left. Go and sit with yourself for a little while and ask yourself why and then ask yourself what am I supposed to do next?
I can assure you, answers will come to you. For those of you who prefer to sit and engage in quid pro quos of ifs and buts, then I can already tell you in advance, you are a hopeless case. And I will not even bother to ask why.
Layla Anwar, Who am I? The eternal Question. Have not figured it out fully yet. All you need to know about me is that I am a Middle Easterner, an Arab Woman - into my 40's and old enough to know better. I have no homeland per se. I live in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Egypt simultaneously.... All the rest is icing on the cake.
"I read some of the Comments on this article. The one below from Susan is the best one I found, and is partly what I would reply. But I know it's only trying to explain, to say "I'm doing all I can. I wish I could do more. I wish five million of us would and could go to Washington and burn our passports on the Capitol lawn, storm the White House." Dr. Reese Kilgo, Retired Professor, University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)
"I think there were 5 million of us in the USA protesting in Feb 2003. There were 10 million world-wide. The five million was spread out across the country, and there was no passport bonfire. I know lots of people gave up on protesting after that. I didn't. I do it regularly in town and I have gone to DC eight times in the last four years to protest the war on Iraq. And it certainly is a genocide.'' Susan 08.01.07 - 5:30 pm
"Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a big fucking television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disk players and electrical tin openers...choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on the couch, watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing lke that? I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?" Irvine Welsh TRAINSPOTTING
More Hollywood celebrities showed up at the demonstration than buttoned-down Washington typically sees in a month.
Actor Sean Penn said lawmakers will pay a price in the 2008 elections if they do not take firmer action than to pass a nonbinding resolution against the war, the course Congress is now taking.
"If they don't stand up and make a resolution as binding as the death toll, we're not going to be behind those politicians," he said. Actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins also spoke.
Fonda was a lightning rod in the Vietnam era for her outspoken opposition to that war and her advocacy from Hanoi at the height of that conflict. Sensitive to the old wounds, she made it a point to thank the active-duty service-members, veterans and Gold Star mothers who attended the rally.
She drew parallels to the Vietnam War, citing "blindness to realities on the ground, hubris ... thoughtlessness in our approach to rebuilding a country we've destroyed." But she noted that this time, veterans, soldiers and their families increasingly and vocally are against the Iraq war.
The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers, threatened to use congressional spending power to try to stop the war. "George Bush has a habit of firing military leaders who tell him the Iraq war is failing," he said, looking out at the masses. "He can't fire you." Referring to Congress, the Michigan Democrat added: "He can't fire us.
"The founders of our country gave our Congress the power of the purse because they envisioned a scenario exactly like we find ourselves in today. Now only is it in our power, it is our obligation to stop Bush."
White House spokesman Trey Bohn responded that Conyers "needs to learn the difference between fact and fable, between a soundbite and a slur." He said Conyers' "assertion that the president fires generals with whom he disagrees is flat wrong."
On the stage rested a coffin covered with a U.S. flag and a pair of military boots, symbolizing American war dead. On the Mall stood a large bin filled with tags bearing the names of Iraqis who have died.
A small contingent of active-duty service members attended the rally, wearing civilian clothes because military rules forbid them from protesting in uniform.
Air Force Staff Sgt. Tassi McKee, 26, an intelligence specialist at Fort Meade, Md., said she joined the Air Force because of patriotism, travel and money for college. "After we went to Iraq, I began to see through the lies," she said.
In the crowd, signs recalled the November elections that defeated the Republican congressional majority in part because of President Bush's Iraq policy. "I voted for peace," one said.
"I've just gotten tired of seeing widows, tired of seeing dead Marines," said Vincent DiMezza, 32, wearing a dress Marine uniform from his years as a sergeant. A Marine aircraft mechanic from 1997 to 2002, he did not serve in Iraq or Afghanistan.
About 40 people staged a counter-protest, including Army Cpl. Joshua Sparling, 25, who lost his leg to a bomb in Iraq.
He said the anti-war protesters, especially those who are veterans or who are on active duty, "need to remember the sacrifice we have made and what our fallen comrades would say if they are alive."
Bush reaffirmed his commitment to his planned troop increase in a phone conversation Saturday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The president was in Washington for the weekend. He is often is out of town during big protest days.
"He understands that Americans want to see a conclusion to the war in Iraq and the new strategy is designed to do just that," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
Protest organizers said the crowd included people who came on 300 buses from 40 states.
An icon of the Vietnam War peace movement -- Jane Fonda -- joined protesters who rallied in the nation's capital against the U.S. military presence in Iraq
"What Part of "Bush Lied" Don't You Understand?"
By MICHAEL RUANE AND FREDRICK KUNKLE
Washington Post Service Sun, Jan. 28, 2007 WASHINGTON, D.C.
WASHINGTON - A raucous and colorful multitude of protesters, led by some of the aging activists of the past such as Jane Fonda, staged a series of rallies and a march on the Capitol on Saturday to demand that the United States end its war in Iraq.
Under a blue sky, tens of thousands of people angry about the war and other policies of the Bush administration danced, sang, shouted and chanted their opposition.
They came from across the country, and across the activist spectrum, with a wide array of grievances. Many seemed to be younger than 30, but there were others who said they had been at the famed antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s.
They came to Washington at what they said was a moment of opportunity to push the new Congress to take action against the war, even as the Bush administration is accelerating plans to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq. This week, the Senate will begin debating a resolution of disapproval of the president's Iraq policy, setting up a dramatic confrontation with the White House.
Some protesters plan to stay and lobby their representatives in Congress. Other antiwar activists intend to barnstorm states this week urging senators to oppose the troop escalation.
Actor Sean Penn, right, joins Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and his wife, Elizabeth Kucinich, at the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington as they participate in a rally to voice their opposition to the war in Iraq on Jan. 27, 2007.
GROWING MOVEMENT?
While Saturday's crowd was large and vociferous, its size was unclear because there was no official crowd estimate. It was filled with longtime opponents of the conflict and the administration.
''Its primary value is that it keeps up the pressure,'' said former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, of South Dakota. ``There is a sense that, by summer, a march like this will be two or three times as large.''
Many of the demonstrators Saturday were garbed in clothes of many colors -- pink, green, red and black -- and T-shirts and buttons of many sentiments.
''Think,'' read one shirt. ''It's not illegal yet.'' A button read: ''Is It Vietnam Yet?'' Another read: ``Cheney/Satan '08: 'Cause Oil Companies Aren't Rich Enough.''
But the overriding complaint was the U.S. prosecution of the war in Iraq.
''Peace is controversial,'' civil rights and community activist Jesse Jackson, 65, said in a rousing address to the crowd gathered at the east end of the Mall. ``But so is war. The fruit of peace is so much sweeter.''
Some came on behalf of relatives who were in the service. A New York woman came on behalf of her younger brother, who she said was about to be deployed to Iraq. She had a framed picture of him in a knapsack. An Akron, Ohio, woman came with her infant son, saying his father, in the Navy in Kuwait, had yet to see him.
Among the celebrities who appeared was Jane Fonda, 69, the actress and activist who, during the Vietnam War, was criticized for sympathizing with the North Vietnamese.
She told the crowd that this was the first time she had spoken at an antiwar rally in 34 years.
''I've been afraid that because of the lies that have been and continue to be spread about me and that war, that they would be used to hurt this new antiwar movement,'' she told the crowd. ``But silence is no longer an option.''
Members of the conservative Free Republic group picketed an antiwar rally at the Navy Memorial where Fonda spoke earlier in the day. ''Hanoi Jane,'' one sign read. ``Wrong then, wrong now.''
The day's events unfolded peacefully. And after a cold morning with temperatures in the mid-20s, the day quickly warmed, and protesters were unzipping jackets as the mercury topped 50 degrees.
The day's events were organized chiefly by a group called United for Peace and Justice, which describes itself as a coalition of 1,400 local and national organizations. Among them are the National Organization for Women, United Church of Christ, the American Friends Service Committee, True Majority, Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Farms Not Arms, CODEPINK, MoveOn.org and September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.
The day began with a 10 a.m. rally at the Navy Memorial sponsored by the peace group CODEPINK. There, several thousand activists heard speeches by actor Sean Penn, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, U.S. Reps. Maxine Waters and Lynne Woolsey.
Laura Sinderbrand, 79, and her husband, Alvin, 84, of New York City, said they attended dozens of Washington protests against the Vietnam War during the 1960s and early 70s.
''The biggest difference back then, of course, was the draft,'' said Alvin Sinderbrand, a retired patent attorney. ``That made everything much more emotional. There was a sense that everybody was vulnerable.''
The Sinderbrands opposed involvement in Iraq from the beginning, they said, attending a 2003 protest here. The couple made the protest a day trip. ''We're doing it with the hope that it's going to be the last time we need to protest this,'' said Laura Sinderbrand, a retired museum director.
The Peace Alliance Presents: Turning Peace into Political Force February 5th in Washington, D.C.
A night of education and support for Legislation to create a U.S. Department of Peace
Special Performance by Steven Tyler of Aerosmith With
Members of Congress, including Rep. Keith Ellison, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, Rep. Dennis Kucinich & more and Marianne Williamson Plus Special Appearance by Joaquin Phoenix
Monday, February 5, 2007 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm The George Washington University Lisner Auditorium 730 21st Street, NW Washington, DC
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Tickets: $25 General Admission $10 students, seniors and Congressional staff ($10 rate use code 'TPA', I.D.'s checked at door).
BUY TICKETS NOW! Tickets included with conference registration, or order online, visit any Ticketmaster location or call the GW Lisner Auditorium information line at (202) 994-6800. Day of ticket sales at box office are cash only. On Monday February 5th, box office is closed until one hour before program.
Transportation and Parking: The GW Lisner Auditorium is three blocks from the Foggy Bottom/GWU Metro stop (orange/blue line). Parking is available in the University Garage, located on Eye and 22nd Streets.
This event is the 2007 Department of Peace Campaign National Conference Grand Finale. REGISTER FOR CONFERENCE (Monday night tickets included in conference registration.)
Sundance closes with nods to war and family Sun Jan 28, 2007 11:29am ET
PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) - The Sundance Film Festival drew to a close on Sunday with organizers calling it a landmark year for independent filmmakers who added breadth and depth to movies dealing with global issues, war and family.
"Padre Nuestro" on Saturday won the jury prize for best film drama by a U.S. filmmaker with a tale of a young illegal immigrant from Mexico who travels to New York seeking a father he never knew.
"Manda Bala" earned the jury award for best U.S. documentary with a tale of crime and corruption in Brazil.
"Grace is Gone," starring John Cusack as a father of two whose wife dies in Iraq, picked up the audience trophy for favorite drama and a writing award for filmmaker James Strouse. "Grace" also was among the movies whose distribution rights were sold in one of the most active markets in years at Sundance.
"For so many different reasons, this work is exceptional in terms of how much of it will get into the marketplace, and the range of issues and maturity of the filmmakers," said festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, who hailed 2007 as a "landmark year."
Sundance, which is backed by Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, is the top U.S. gathering for movies made outside Hollywood's mainstream studios, and each year festival favorites top movie marquees worldwide.
With wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and African nations making headlines, "indie" filmmakers at the 2007 edition were looking outward for their subject matter as opposed to the insular and more personal movies that often played here in the 1990s.
Yet, even as that world view seemed to dominate Sundance 2007, many festival movies were grounded in the idea that family is where people seek safety in troubled times.
"Padre Nuestro" and "Grace" were both examples of tales of family bonds set against issues of illegal immigration and death during wartime, respectively.
But those movies were not the only ones. The audience award for best documentary went to "Hear and Now," in which filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky detailed a year in the life of her deaf parents who decided to undergo surgery so they could hear.
Sundance juries also handed out honors for international movies, and the World Cinema drama prize went to Israeli movie "Sweet Mud," about a boy dealing with his mentally ill mother on a kibbutz in the 1970s.
Denmark's "Enemies of Happiness," which details the life of an Afghani woman politician, earned the World Cinema jury prize for best documentary, and a special jury prize went to non-fiction film "No End in Sight," about U.S. policy mistakes in the Iraq war.
Like many award winners at Sundance, "No End" director Charles Ferguson took the opportunity to address the U.S.-led war in Iraq with an eye toward the future, not the past.
"It might be too late for Iraq, but I hope it isn't too late for this country to conduct itself differently in the future," he said.
World Cinema audiences gave "In the Shadow of the Moon," an emotional tale of the Apollo astronauts from Britain's David Sington, the trophy for top documentary, while Irish musical "Once" earned the audience award for best drama.
Husband-and-wife Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine won the documentary director's award for "War/Dance" about child soldiers in Uganda -- an issue they said they had no idea existed until they began their work.
Finally, the directing award for film drama went to Jeffrey Blitz for "Rocket Science," about a high school stutterer who learns lessons in love while on the debate team.
Sundance Festival Eyewitnesses Suggest Celebs Are Boring
HecklerSpray.com 24 Jan 2007 08:00 AM CST
If you ignore those pesky rumours that films are shown at the Sundance Film Festival, you can really score some useless star-gazing. Although we keep a chateau just a short jaunt from the annual event taking place in Park City, Utah, we’re too lazy to get the first hand experience for ourselves. As tempting as it is to circle narrow, packed city blocks for hours to find parking only to battle the mania of everyday average nobodies dying to catch a glimpse of anyone remotely famous, we’ve decided to continue with our high standard of journalistic integrity and mooch celebrity info from other sources. Interestingly enough, these voyeurs are consistently reporting that celebs are, in fact, boring. It seems stars only do things like disarm nuclear bombs, leap buildings with a single bound, and engage in Kung-Fu fights with mortal enemies when they’re on screen. Instead, they drink their way from party lounge to party lounge, gathering obscene amounts of free swag (because they are truly in need of financial assistance), which will for sure be properly reported on their tax forms.
To the Congress of the United States, Entering Its Third Century
by Howard Nemerov
because reverence has never been america's thing, this verse in your honor will not begin "o thou." but the great respect our country has to give may you all continue to deserve, and have.
* * * here at the fulcrum of us all, the feather of truth against the soul is weighed, and had better be found to balance lest our enterprise collapse in silence.
for here the million varying wills get melted down, get hammered out until the movie's reduced to stills that tell us what the law's about.
conflict's endemic in the mind: your job's to hear it in the wind and compass it in opposites, and bring the antagonists by your wits
to being one, and that the law thenceforth, until you change your minds against and with the shifting winds that this and that way blow the straw.
so it's a republic, as Franklin said, if you can keep it; and we did thus far, and hope to keep our quarrel funny and just. though with this moral:—
praise without end for the go-ahead zeal of whoever it was invented the wheel; but never a word for the poor soul's sake that thought ahead, and invented the brake.
A man removes a bloodied schoolbook at a school gate in a mostly Sunni area of western Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Jan. 28, 2007. Mortar shells rained down Sunday on a girls secondary school killing four pupils and wounding 21, witnesses and police said. AP
LOVE, WAR & MORAL INDIGNATION
By Robin Meyers Senior Minister of Mayflower Congregational Church
I am angry because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus, but whose actions are anything but Christian.
We've heard a lot lately about so-called "moral values" as having swung the election to President Bush IN 2004. Well, I'm a great believer in moral values, but we need to have a discussion, all over this country, about exactly what constitutes a moral value. I mean what are we talking about.
Because we don't get to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are people of faith. We have an inherited tradition of what is right and wrong, and moral is as moral does.
Let me give you just a few of the reasons why I take issue with those in power who claim moral values are on their side:
1. When you start a war on false premises and then act as if your deceptions are justified because you are doing God’s will, and that your critics are either unpatriotic or lacking in faith, there are some of us . . . who believe that this is not only not moral, but immoral.
2. When you live in a country that has established international rules for waging a just war and built the United Nations on its own soil to enforce them, if you then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral.
3. When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teachings, or turn them on their head (the Sermon on the Mount says we must never return violence for violence, and those who live by the sword shall die by the sword), you are doing something immoral.
4. When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse even to count them, you are doing something immoral.
5. When you find a way to avoid combat in Vietnam, and then question the patriotism of someone who volunteered to fight, and then came home a hero, you are doing something immoral.
6. When you ignore the fundamental teachings of the Gospel (which says that the way the strong treat the weak is the ultimate test) by giving tax breaks to the wealthiest among us so that the strong will get stronger and the weak will get weaker, you are doing something immoral.
7. When you wink at the torture of prisoners and deprive so-called “enemy combatants” of the rules of the Geneva Convention, which your own country helped to establish and insists that other countries follow, you are doing something immoral.
8. When you claim that the world can be divided up into the good guys and the evildoers, slice up your own nation into those with you and those who are with the terrorists, and then launch a war that enriches your friends and seizes control of the oil to which we are addicted, instead of helping us to kick the habit, you are doing something immoral.
9. When you fail to veto a single spending bill, but ask us to pay for a war with no exit strategy and no end in sight, creating an enormous deficit that hangs like a great millstone around the necks of our children, you are doing something immoral.
10. When you cause most of the rest of the world to hate a country that was once the most loved country in the world, and act as if it doesn’t matter what others think of us, because God thinks well of you, you have done something immoral.
11. When you use hatred of homosexuals as a wedge issue to turn out record numbers of evangelical voters, and use the Constitution as a tool of discrimination, you are doing something immoral.
12. When you favor the death penalty, and yet claim to be a follower of Jesus, who said an eye for an eye was the old way, not the way of the Kingdom, you are doing something immoral.
13. When you dismantle countless environmental laws designed to protect the earth, God’s gift to all of us, so that the corporations that bought you and paid for your favors will make higher profits while our children breathe dirty air and live in a toxic world, you have done something evil. The earth belongs to the Lord, not to Halliburton.
14. When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killing is righteous while theirs is evil, you have made us resemble the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.
15. When you tell people that you intend to run and govern as a “compassionate conservative,” using the word that is the essence of all religious faith, and then show no compassion for those who disagree with you, and no patience with those who cry to you for help, you are doing something immoral.
16. When you constantly talk about Jesus, who was a healer of the sick, but do nothing to make sure that anyone who is sick can go to see a doctor, even if she doesn’t have a penny in her pocket, you are doing something immoral.
17. When you put judges on the bench who are racist, and will set women back a hundred years, and when you surround yourself with preachers who say gays ought to be killed, you are doing something immoral.
I'm tired of people thinking that because I'm a Christian, I must be a supporter of President Bush, or that because I favor civil rights and gay rights I must not be a person of faith. I'm tired of people saying that I can't support the troops but oppose the war -- I heard that when I was your age, when the Vietnam war was raging. We knew that that war was wrong, and you know that this war is wrong -- the only question is how many people are going to die before these make-believe Christians are removed from power.
This country is bankrupt. The war is morally bankrupt. The claim of this administration to be Christian is bankrupt. And the only people who can turn things around are people like you -- young people who are just beginning to wake up to what is happening to them. It's your country to take back. It's your faith to take back. It's your future to take back.
Don't be afraid to speak out. Don't back down when your friends begin to tell you that the cause is righteous and that the flag should be wrapped around the cross, while the rest of us keep our mouths shut. Real Christians take chances for peace. So do real Jews, and real Muslims, and real Hindus, and real Buddhists -- so do all the faith traditions of the world at their heart believe one thing: life is precious. Every human being is precious. Arrogance is the opposite of faith. Greed is the opposite of charity. And believing that one has never made a mistake is the mark of a deluded man, not a man of faith.
And war -- war is the greatest failure of the human race -- and thus the greatest failure of faith.
There's an old rock and roll song, whose lyrics say it all: War, what is it good for -- absolutely nothing.
And what is the dream of the prophets? That we should study war no more, that we should beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. Who would Jesus bomb, indeed? How many wars does it take to know that too many people have died? What if they gave a war and nobody came? Maybe one day we will find out.
Time to march again my friends. Time to commit acts of civil disobedience. Time to sing, and to pray, and refuse to participate in the madness. My generation finally stopped a tragic war. You can too!
"Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” --Martin Luther King.
Dr. Robin Meyers is Senior Minister of Mayflower Congregational Church (an Open and Affirming, Peace and Justice church in northwest Oklahoma City) and professor of rhetoric at Oklahoma City University. He is also a columnist for the *Oklahoma Gazette* and a commentator for National Public Radio.
When you become aware that madmen are running the governments & militaries, armed with planet-scorching doomsday weapons, and on top of that the climate and atmosphere are degrading by the minute as solar flares are about to increase to maximum... don't you think every living human should be taking emergency measures?
The truly crazy-making realization one comes to when addressing the mass extinction event underway is that most humans are completely oblivious, confused, or too desperate or drugged to care. Entire societies are obsessed with celebrity & entertainment, sports & economics-- while outside the weather is battering at the roof & walls.
You end up asking yourself if this is the sad, tragic, ridiculous end of the planet Earth as we know it? And what will the survivors be reminiscing about, in their underground hovels? Snack foods once in abundance, the great films once playing at the megaplexes, the myriad strange & beautiful creatures which millions of years of evolution unfurled upon the world? All wiped away by human hunger & stupidity... while the society partied & hurried along after money & entertainments.
I feel obligated to pass on the 3-point salvation plan from Haidakhan Baba: Truth, Simplicity & Love can save the world. Truth as in "The Truth shall set you Free." Simplicity as in the scientific rule that the simplest solution is usually the correct, and most practical one. Love seems self-evident & world-reaffirming, yet appears to be the most elusive, in a world filled with murderous disappointment.
I must add the sage advice of Terence McKenna, who believed that only psychedelics ("Visionary Plants") could liberate the human chains of habitual doom in time to avert "Eschaton"-- the end of the world as we know it-- scheduled for the end of 2012. Unfortunately, these plants are mostly deemed illegal in the industrial society of citified folk.
Another avenue of addressing the epic endtime is questioning who benefits from the devastation & suffering? I suggest searching: Weapons, Drugs, Oil. All of which you will find leading the current US administration in the White House, whose friends are making billions upon billions of profit dollars while most of the world is going to hell.
Let us all pray that the changes in political sensibility in the new year will awaken a radical shift toward planetary survival. Otherwise, enjoy the luxuries & creamy essence of the world we are are witness to rapidly disappearing from under us. Shake up your community, go postal, make a scene. What do you have to lose? Only the livable planet & all its wonders...
"There have never in history been so many opportunities to do so many things that aren't worth doing." -- William Gaddis
"God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars." -- Elbert Hubbard
This is not your father's war protest Young people need to speak out, folks from days of Vietnam say By SUMMER HARLOW, The News Journal
Posted Sunday, January 28, 2007 The News Journal/SUCHAT PEDERSON
June Eisley has spent most of her life protesting war.
In the 1960s and '70s, she marched on the Capitol, attended rallies at the University of Delaware, and even organized a local chapter of Mothers United for Peace.
With millions of other Vietnam War protesters across the country, she hoped to make a difference, and prevent the United States from engaging in any such conflict again.
Fast-forward to today. Eisley, of Wilmington, has watched with dread as the United States has enmeshed itself in another unpopular war.
"I had hoped Americans had learned their lesson not to believe the government about their reasons for getting into a war," she said. "More people should have been paying attention at the start of this war."
Many have drawn parallels between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War -- both guerrilla wars in unfamiliar countries with histories and cultures the United States knew little about; both long-term conflicts with conflicting views about when to withdraw troops.
But peace activists, war veterans and historians all note one major difference -- Saturday's march in Washington aside, Operation Iraqi Freedom has not generated nearly the same level of anti-war demonstrations that were sustained throughout much of the Vietnam era. And without protesters pressuring politicians, they say, policy is unlikely to change.
"There's not the same kind of groundswell today," said Rudi Matthee, a University of Delaware history professor specializing in the Middle East. "Which is exactly why Bush has been able to push through his plans and vision. ... The Bush administration hasn't gotten the same kind of pressure from the populace as the administration did during the Vietnam era."
Keith Pluymers, a sophomore at the University of Delaware and co-president of the campus Civil Liberties Union, called the political activism on campus "comatose."
"During the Vietnam era, there was the very pressing concern of the draft that was making young people concerned about what was happening with the war," he said. "Today, people are concerned solely with getting a job and securing that middle-class lifestyle. Politics aren't that big a concern."
Back then, the resistance was about more than just protesting the war, said Darlene Battle, campaign director for Delaware ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
"It was about peace, and women recognizing their empowerment," she said. "We were finding ourselves, so it was a lot different then."
Until the war hits home -- such as with the delivery of a letter ordering someone's child to report for duty -- parents and youths alike aren't likely to take to the streets in protest, said Susan Mangini of Newark, who as a child in the 1960s and '70s accompanied her mother to demonstrations.
"It would be over my dead body before they ever took my son," she said. "You'd see me out there protesting then."
Alan Muller, who heads Green Delaware, was in his early 20s during the Vietnam War.
"People were being forced to go to Vietnam against their will. They were being taken out of college and forced to go and fight," said Muller, who said he wasn't a pacifist and had been in the ROTC program. "If the government were to tell students today they would be drafted, their interest in opposing the war would perk up greatly."
'The draft is inevitable'
Tom Daws, president of the New Castle County and state chapters of Vietnam Veterans of America, said he believes the Iraq war is as unpopular as the war in Vietnam.
"I don't know why more young people aren't protesting, because I think the draft is inevitable," Daws said. "And it's not going to be just young men, but young women, because the troops already in the military are spent. They're worn out from serving two or three tours and not having any new replacements."
And with the president calling for more than 20,000 additional troops, more bodies are going to have to come from somewhere, he said.
Young people should be the ones questioning this war, Daws said, because they're the ones who can do something about it.
Andrew Christy, a University of Delaware sophomore and president of the Men Against Rape Society, said he thinks students are cynical, and don't believe protesting would accomplish anything.
And while the Princeton Review recently rated the university as the fourth-most apathetic campus, he said he believes the problem isn't unique to Delaware.
"People care, but they're not motivated to get involved," he said. "They don't pay attention to what's going on in the world or how it will affect them in the long run."
Matthee said it's easy to blame the lack of constant protesting on an apathetic public in an age of consumerism.
"In the '60s, there was this notion of a new utopia, and high ideals," he said. "Not all idealism is gone, but some of the energy has gone out of it. A grand vision is lacking. Capitalism absorbs everything."
Peter Jackson, a senior at the Charter School of Wilmington, said many students are more focused on school than activism.
"A lot of kids don't really think the war's affecting them," said Jackson, who said he was the only one of his friends to protest during Bush's visit. He wore a homemade sign that read, "Send me to college, not Iraq."
"They don't expect a draft, so they don't really get involved," he said.
Emily Taylor, a University of Delaware sophomore and chairwoman of the Delaware Federation of College Republicans, said there aren't as many protests now because today's generation came of age after Sept. 11, 2001.
"That shaped the way we look at things, and I think a lot of people understand that if we want to be successful in the war on terror, we have to be successful in Iraq," she said. "We support our soldiers and we want them to do well."
Vivid memories of Vietnam era
Mangini was only 10, but she remembers the Vietnam protest skits enacted on the green at the University of Delaware.
Like the time she played a Vietnamese child, beaten and killed in a simulated jungle massacre.
Other times, she marched with the demonstrators -- she still has the buttons and patches to prove it.
"I understood what was going on because there was something on TV every night, and in the paper, there were these horrible pictures of people with napalm and people getting shot in the head," she said.
Sally Milbury-Steen, executive director of the local peace organization Pacem in Terris, was in college during much of the Vietnam era.
She recalled one protest in the nation's capital in 1972 that had a "picnic-type" atmosphere.
"It was a combination of a protest and a love fest," she said.
Although the University of Delaware wasn't a hotbed of political activism, Muller said, the campus wasn't as "dead" then as it is today.
"When I went away to the University of Delaware, I had no political consciousness, but I developed some, even in Newark," he said. "The administration was afraid of the students. There was this tremendous anger, and tremendous determination that the war had to stop. There was also fear of being sent to a remote place to be killed."
Protest, treason not synonymous
Before the Iraq war started, massive protests and marches conjured up images of the activism of the 1960s and '70s. But that activity quickly died out.
"It was like treason to oppose the war, like we were anti-American," Battle said. "People were scared to speak out."
As the war has worn on, Milbury-Steen said, people have come to understand that one can oppose the war and still support the soldiers.
After nearly four years now, the war has been going on for too long without accomplishing anything, Muller said.
"People were willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt," he said. "American people will give you two or three years, but then if they don't see a result, they will call it off, and I think that's what's been going on."
"It was the people on the streets who got us out of Vietnam," said Fred Sinton of Unionville, Pa., who protested President Bush's visit to Wilmington on Wednesday.
If demonstrators can mount the same type of pressure against the Iraq war, it could help shape policy. Without a groundswell, Eisley said, the government won't act.
"There has to be a public outcry if you want to make a difference," she said. "That's why things are changing now, because people have had enough."
Pluymers said a lack of people in the streets means the administration isn't forced to be accountable. And young people need to realize they are partly to blame, he said.
"It hurts progressive movements when no young voices are behind it," he said.
"Young people are more concerned about where they're going to get their illegal booze for the weekend or where they're going to get their new-technology toy. Whether we realize it or not, everything we do, from the toys we buy to the protest this Saturday that people won't attend, it makes an impact."
If Bush succeeds in sending more troops to Iraq, Milbury-Steen said, she expects to see demonstrations become more common.
"People are suspect of what's going to happen with this surge, and the question of whether the current administration wants to let time run out so a new administration will have to deal with ending this thing," she said.
Just as was true during Vietnam, Americans are doubting the Iraq war, said Matthee, the history professor.
"For Vietnam, the tipping point was the early '70s, and from there they were just trying to rescue and salvage a mission," he said.
"I think we're very close to the same place in Iraq. I think we've reached the point of no return and America will have to leave, probably ignominiously."
With reservists being called up repeatedly, resentment is growing among the public, Matthee said.
"Especially since it's been made clear this war is not winnable and body bags are coming home for perhaps no reason at all," he said.
Pacem in Terris -- Latin for "peace on earth" -- organized three 47-passenger buses to transport protesters to the Capitol on Saturday.
"People are coming out because they see this is a pivotal time and they want to prevent the surge and call for the war to end and bring the troops home," Milbury-Steen said.
"This is an important time because a new Congress is just getting under way, and people are holding their feet to the fire."
Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the US House of Representatives, is in Afghanistan where she has held talks with President Hamid Karzai. Pelosi and her congressional delegation earlier paid a visit to US troops at a base in Bagram, the largest US base in Afghanistan. The trip to Afghanistan followed a stopover in Pakistan on Saturday, where Pelosi met with President Pervez Musharraf to discuss the situation in Afghanistan and cooperation in countering terrorism.
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