(Thanks to John Fournelle)

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 29, 2005; A21

The U.S. military staged the interrogations of terrorism suspects for members of Congress and other officials visiting the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to make it appear the government was obtaining valuable intelligence, a former Army translator who worked there claims in a new book scheduled for release Monday.

Last weekend, the Attica to AbuGhraib Conference was held in Berkeley, California.  It brought
a wide range of testimony from former and present political prisoners, and opponents of the
continuing imperialist globalization of incarceration and torture.  The opening assembly was
addressed by a recorded message from Mumia Abu-Jamal, the best known political prisoner
in the U.S. today.  

There are echoes of 1789 in the spring air. “Is this a revolt?” the powerful ask in consternation. “No, sire,” comes the historic reply, “it’s a revolution”.

Haiti has two predominant ruling classes, one based on land and one based on money. Duvalier’s base was among the landed class that exploited peasants in a sharecropping system. Their dominance was challenged by the mechanized capitalist form of agriculture that was imposed on much of the island in conjunction with the 19-year US Marine occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. This accounts for Duvalier’s hostility to the US, which was only resolved when both Duvalier and the US were alarmed by a leftist uprising in Haiti. Duvalier massacred the communists, and from then on the US and Papa Doc were on fine terms.

In 1994, when my last Special Forces team, Operational Detachment Alpha 354, entered the Haitian city of Gonaives, I along with three members of that detachment waded through a huge and agitated crowd to encounter four soldiers and two plainclothes death squad members about to fire into that crowd with M-1 Garands. They were surprised to see us, and we took advantage of that surprise to compel them to lay their weapons down and submit to arrest. One of the plainclothes gents hesitated to relinquish his weapon, and I came very near shooting him. I’m only being honest – knowing this will put some people off – when I say that I now wish I had gone ahead and pulled the trigger. Instead, I protected him from a very angry crowd, one member of which lambasted him across the head with a heavy stick when he finally laid his weapon down, obliging my own team’s medics to suture his gaping scalp laceration.

Elaine Brown, the only woman to lead the Black Panther Party, has declared
her intention to run for Mayor of Brunswick, Georgia, as a member of the
Green Party.

Military to military relationships usually have as their underlying basis the tacit approval of the ‘limiting boundaries’ set by the political leadership of the two countries involved . The United States has a long and somewhat controversial history of such relationships that it has forged with countries around the world, particularly in the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Latin America and nearer home in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey and now in East Europe and the Central Asian and Caspian Sea region. Its military to military relationships with European nations have been of a different character, though immediately after WWII they had a very large covert undercover objective, that of the elimination of the communist Resistance which had gained popular acceptance in countries such as France, Italy and Greece to give some examples, in view of their anti-fascist peoples movements and militia organization at a time when most governments had capitulated to Nazi /fascist atrocities.

by Mike Davis

Last February the sirens howled in Hollywood as the LAPD rushed reinforcements to the 5600 block of La Mirada Avenue. While a police captain barked orders through a bullhorn, an angry crowd of 3000 people shouted back expletives. A passerby might have mistaken the confrontation for a major movie shoot, or perhaps the beginning of the next great L.A. riot.

by Susanne Soederberg

[I am including only a snippet of Soederberg's lengthy paper on this as a teaser, with a link. I hope those who are interested in this will read the whole thing. Anyone seriously interested in class struggle needs to read it. Because Seoderberg, like a few others, describes a system in which the financial pole of capital now runs things. This has huge implications for worker organizing, for example, when the worker is no longer faced with a productive capitalist who must protect his profit and his investments by guaranteeing productivity, even when it means bargaining with angry workers. The new boss is a hedge fund, a highly diversified portfolio that reads the hot-money numbers of the whole portfolio, and when one eneterprise falls behind in its speculative value, it is simply liquidated. In many respects, everything we ever knew about organizing the old union way is being rendered, with a few exceptions, obsolete. This means workers need a new form of organization, directly political, to fight back with. For the life of me, the only thing I can think of is a party. -SG]

In a centuries deep sea of clichés despairing that ‘prostitution will always be with us’, one country’s success stands out as a solitary beacon lighting the way. In just five years Sweden has dramatically reduced the number of its women in prostitution. In the capital city of Stockholm the number of women in street prostitution has been reduced by two thirds, and the number of johns has been reduced by 80%. There are other major Swedish cities where street prostitution has all but disappeared. Gone too, for the most part, are the renowned Swedish brothels and massage parlors which proliferated during the last three decades of the twentieth century when prostitution in Sweden was legal.