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I am a free market capitalist Scott and I disagree with the “rescue” plan that will ultimately cost my household somewhere between $6,000-$8,000. The markets by nature, without interference are Darwinian. Someone had said on this web site before that in modern America profits are privatized and losses are socialized. That was one of the more profound statements I have heard in a long time. Regardless whether Chavez or Bush were properly or improperly elected; the similarity is that they both duped the population electing them, both ignore the constitiution and do as they please and both are ignorant, dangerous men. The differnce is that in the US you are not imprisoned or quietly exterminated if you disagree with your leaders politics. As far as military spending, the US my spend more total dollars, which are becoming worth less every year, but as a percentage of GNP (4%) it is less than it was during Viet Nam. One year in Iraq and Afghanistan would have paid for approx. 30% of the “rescue” plan. Now that is just as messed up as a soup sandwich.
Name ONE Venezuelan who was imprisoned for political disagreement with Chavez. And don’t list a name of a person who was a part of the CIA plot to oust Chavez.
Americans are angry about the “bail out” for the wrong reasons. They should be angry about their relative helpless situation as slaves controlled by the people who are getting the bail out, not about the bail out itself.
The government plan is necessary to stop a general panic run on banks and to shore up home values eventually. Without the plan, the US and the rest of the world will probably cascade into a horrible depression. It may happen anyway.
Those corporate recipients of the trillion dollars already have their fortunes. They are currently holding a gun to head of the American public to “contribute” more to their fortunes. The gun they are holding is a crippling world depression. We have no choice but to pay up. If you are being robbed at gun point, and you are unarmed, you surrender your wallet. Get angry about the fact that you were not carrying a gun for self defense, not sdo much about the 20 bucks you gave up to the crook.
SEE http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/Regions/Americas/venezuela for a brief report
on this “democracy”.
Unless one thinks Amnesty Int’l is a CIA OP. Chavez is BAD NEWS.
Six Years in Guantanamo
Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was beaten, abused and humiliated in the name of the war on terror.
By Robert Fisk
26/09/08 “The Independent’ — – Sami al-Haj walks with pain on his steel crutch; almost six years in the nightmare of Guantanamo have taken their toll on the Al Jazeera journalist and, now in the safety of a hotel in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, he is a figure of both dignity and shame. The Americans told him they were sorry when they eventually freed him this year – after the beatings he says he suffered, and the force-feeding, the humiliations and interrogations by British, American and Canadian intelligence officers – and now he hopes one day he’ll be able to walk without his stick.
The TV cameraman, 38, was never charged with any crime, nor was he put on trial; his testimony makes it clear that he was held in three prisons for six-and-a-half years – repeatedly beaten and force-fed – not because he was a suspected “terrorist” but because he refused to become an American spy. From the moment Sami al-Haj arrived at Guantanamo, flown there from the brutal US prison camp at Kandahar, his captors demanded that he work for them. The cruelty visited upon him – constantly interrupted by American admissions of his innocence – seemed designed to turnal-Haj into a US intelligence “asset”.
“We know you are innocent, you are here by mistake,” he says he was told in more than 200 interrogations. “All they wanted was for me to be a spy for them. They said they would give me US citizenship, that my wife and child could live in America, that they would protect me. But I said: ‘I will not do this – first of all because I’m a journalist and this is not my job and because I fear for myself and my family. In war, I can be wounded and I can die or survive. But if I work with you, al-Qa’ida will eliminate me. And if I don’t work with you, you will kill me’.”
The grotesque saga began for al-Haj on 15 December, 2001, when he was on his way from the Pakistani capital Islamabad to Kandahar in Afghanistan with Sadah al-Haq, a fellow correspondent from the Arab satellite TV channel, to cover the new regional government. At least 70 other journalists were on their way through the Pakistani border post at Chaman, but an officer stopped al-Haj. “He told me there was a paper from the Pakistani intelligence service for my arrest. My name was misspelled, my passport number was incorrect, it said I was born in 1964 – the right date is 1969. I said I had renewed my visa in Islamabad and asked why, if I was wanted, they had not arrested me there?”
Sami al-Haj speaks slowly and with care, each detail of his suffering and of others’ suffering of equal importance to him. He still cannot believe that he is free, able to attend a conference in Norway, to return to his new job as news producer at Al Jazeera, to live once more with his Azeri wife Asma and their eight-year old son Mohamed; when Sami al-Haj disappeared down the black hole of America’s secret prisons the boy was only 14 months’ old.
Al-Haj’s story has a familiar ring to anyone who has investigated the rendition of prisoners from Pakistan to US bases in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. His aircraft flew for an hour and a half and then landed to collect more captives – this may have been in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital – before flying on to the big American base at Bagram.
“We arrived in the early hours of the morning and they took the shackles off our feet and pushed us out of the plane. They hit me and pushed me down on the asphalt. We heard screams and dogs barking. I collapsed with my right leg under me, and I felt the ligaments tearing. When I fell, the soldiers started treading on me. First, they walked on my back, then – when they saw me looking at my leg – they started kicking my leg. One soldier shouted at me: ‘Why did you come to fight Americans?’ I had a number – I was No 35 and this is how they addressed me, as a number – and the first American shouted at me: ‘You filmed Bin Laden.’ I said I did not film Bin Laden but that I was a journalist. I again gave my name, my age, my nationality.”
After 16 days at Bagram, another aircraft took him to the US base at Kandahar where on arrival the prisoners were again made to lie on the ground. “We were cursed – they said ‘fuck your mother’ – and again the Americans walked on our backs. Why? Why did they do this? I was taken to a tent and stripped and they pulled hairs out of my beard. They photographed the pupils of my eyes. A doctor found blood on my back and asked me why it was there. I asked him how he thought it was there?”
The same dreary round of interrogations recommenced – he was now “Prisoner No 448” – and yet again, al-Haj says he was told he was being held by mistake. “Then another man – he was in civilian clothes and I think he was from Egyptian intelligence – wanted to know who was the “leader” of the detainees who was with me. The Americans asked: ‘Who is the most respected of the prisoners? Who killed [Ahmed Shah] Massoud ([the leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance Afghan militia]?’ I said this was not my business and an American soldier said: ‘Co-operate with us, and you will be released.’ They meant I had to work for them. There was another man who spoke perfect English. I thought he was British. He was young, good-looking, about 35-years-old, no moustache, blond hair, very polite in a white shirt, no tie. He brought me chocolate – it was Kit Kat—and I was so hungry I could have eaten the wrapping.”
On 13 June, al-Haj was put on board a jet aircraft. He was given yet another prison number – No 345 – and once more his head was covered with a black bag. He was forced to take two tablets before he was gagged and his bag replaced by goggles with the eye-pieces painted black. The flight to Guantanamo took 12 to 14 hours.
“They took us on a boat from the Guantanamo runways to the prison, a journey that took an hour.” Al-Haj was escorted to a medical clinic and then at once to another interrogation. “They said they’d compared my answers with my original statement and one of them said: ‘You are here by mistake. You will be released. You will be the first to be released.’ They gave me a picture of my son, which had been taken from my wallet. They asked me if I needed anything. I asked for books. One said he had a copy of One Thousand and One Nights in Arabic. He copied it for me. During this interview, they asked me: ‘Why did you talk to the British intelligence man so much in Kandahar?’ I said I didn’t know if he was from British intelligence. They said he was.
“Then after two months, two more British men came to see me. They said they were from UK intelligence. They wanted to know who I knew, who I’d met. I said I couldn’t help them.” The Americans later referred to one of them as “Martin” and they did not impress al-Haj’s senior interrogator at Guantanamo, Stephen Rodriguez, who wanted again to seek al-Haj’s help. “He said to me: ‘Our job is to prevent “things” happening. I’ll give you a chance to think about this. You can have US citizenship, your family will be looked after, you’ll have a villa in the US, we’ll look after your son’s education, you’ll have a bank account’. He had brought with him some Arabic magazines and told me I could read them. In those 10 minutes, I felt I had gone back to being a human being again. Then soldiers came to take me back to my cell – and the magazines were taken away.”
By the summer of 2003, al-Haj was receiving other strange visitors. “Two Canadian intelligence officers came and they showed me lots of photos of people and wanted to know if I recognised them. I knew none of them.”
In more than 200 interrogations, al-Haj was asked about his employers the Al Jazeera television channel in Qatar. In one session, he says another American said to him: “After you get out of here, al-Qa’ida will recruit you and we want to know who you meet. You could become an analyst, we can train you to store information, to sketch people. There is a link between Al Jazeera and al-Qa’ida. How much does al-Qa’ida pay Al Jazeera?”
“I said: ‘I will not do this – first of all because I’m a journalist and this is not my job. Also because I fear for my life and my family.'”
Many beatings followed – not from the interrogators but from other US guards. “They would slam my head into the ground, cut off all my hair. They put me into the isolation block – we called it the ‘November Block’ – for two years. They made my life torture. I wanted to bring it to an end. There were continual punishments without reason. In interrogations, they would tighten the shackles so it hurt. They hadn’t allowed me to receive letters for 10 months – even then, they erased words in them, even from my son. Again, Rodriguez demanded I work for the Americans.”
In January of last year, Sami al-Haj started a hunger strike – and began the worst months of his imprisonment. “I wanted my rights in the civil courts. The US Supreme Court said I should have my rights. I wanted the right to worship properly. They let me go 30 days without food – then I was tied to a chair with metal shackles and they force-fed me. They would insert a tube through my nose into my stomach. They chose large tubes so that it hurt and sometimes it went into the lung. They used the same tube they had used on other prisoners with muck still on it and then they pumped more food into me than it was possible to absorb. They told us the people administering this were doctors – but they were torturers, not doctors. They forced 24 cans of food into us so we threw up and then gave us laxatives to defecate. My pancreas was affected and I had stomach problems. Then they would forbid us from drinking water.”
Al-Haj says he completed 480 days of hunger strike by which time his medical condition had deteriorated and he was bleeding from his anus. That was the moment his interrogators decided to release him.
“There were new interrogators now, but they tried once more with me. ‘Will you work with us?’ they asked me again. I said ‘no’ again – but I thanked them for their years of hospitality and for giving me the chance to live among them as a journalist. I said this way I could get the truth to the outside world, that I was not in a hurry to get out because there were a lot more reporters’ stories in there.” They said: ‘You think we did you a favour?’ I said: ‘You turned me from zero into a hero.’ They said: ‘We are 100 per cent sure that Bin Laden will be in touch with you…’ That night, I was taken to the plane. The interrogators were watching me, hiding behind a tennis net. I waved at them, those four pairs of eyes.”
The British authorities have never admitted talking to Sami al-Haj. Nor have the Canadians. Al Jazeera, whose headquarters George Bush wanted to bomb after the invasion of Iraq, kept a job open for Sami al-Haj. But Prisoner No 345 never received an official apology from the Americans. He says he does not expect one.
Caladana,
go to the same site and look at the lengthy write up on the good ol U.S.A. My god, we have to be among the most callous vilotaors of human rights on the planet.And you think Chavas is bad? Where did you see that? There was nothing on Venezuela of any substance. In fact, they poointed out there was no death penalty and the site criticized the Venezuelan government for not using enough force to quell demonstrations.Edited on Sep 27, 2008 14:14
Sprite, are you with the Danny Glover crowd that, apart from Bush, sees no evil
and has yet to meet a dictator he doesn’t like? Are you really saying HG is GOOD for his country, GOOD for his neighbors, GOOD for investors in nearby democratic countries like Costa Rica? Incredible!FACT
Venezuela is the now one of the highest exporters of cocaine and the primo exporter to Great Britain. The Chavez government is riddled with drug pay-offs and increasingly ineffectual and non-cooperative in stopping the traffic.FACT
Last year, via a constitutional referendum HC tried to gain unlimited opportunities to stand for re-election. Given the narrow major of rejection 51-49 percent, HC says he’ll try again.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7125689.stm
FACT:
Last June, HC attempted to install a “spy-law” which included a clause requiring citizens to act as informants if authorities believe they have information on national security threats.
The law would have punished noncooperative citizens with up to four years in prison, raising concerns that Venezuelans would have been forced to spy on their neighbors.After much outcry from Human Rights groups and particularly the Catholic Church, Chavez backtracked and withdrew the proposal saying it was never intended to tread on anyone’s rights. Yeah right.
FACT
Along with nationalizing oil, cement, steel, and for all practicality, the news media, Chavez has recently nationalized the Bank of Venezuela. (Investors have been tripping over themselves to bail out of Venezuelan companies)http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/07/31/venezuela.bank/index.html
Information below gives three specific instances of arrests reported as prominent violations of human rights. If the remaining information is objectively read and pondered, you’ll have an understanding as to why HC often relies on his own “chavistas” citizen supporters to intimidate and beat the crap out of pro-freedom demonstrators with impunity knowing they’ll not be charged or prosecuted.
Notable arrests:
Carlos Eduardo
Izcaray, a cellist with the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra and music teacher, was reportedly
a bystander as opposition demonstrators clashed violently with the Guardia Nacional (GN)Carlos Ortega- Trade Union leader, led oil workers strike against government policies
Gustavo Azacar Alacala- television journalist who has been a critic of Venezuala’s president, Hugo Chávez. http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=16697
The below excerpts from an Amnesty Report of May 2004
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR53/005/2004
Amnesty International believes that the Venezuela government had a clear duty to guarantee
public order in the face of frequently violent protests – which included the use of firearms by
some protestors. However, there is strong evidence that the use of rubber bullets, tear gas and
batons was frequently indiscriminate and disproportionate and significantly contributed to a
week of spiralling violence rather than preventing it.Furthermore, the cases included in this report indicate that several of those detained were not
only not involved in criminal acts prior to detention, but then faced ill-treatment and torture
while in the custody of the security forces. Reports received also indicate that subsequent
investigations undertaken by the Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas, Penales y
Criminalísticas (CICPC)1, Technical Police, Fiscalía General de la Nación , Attorney
General’s Office, and Defensoría del Pueblo, Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office, to
establish the facts around these alleged abuses and prosecute those responsible have been
slow and inadequate. In comparison, these same authorities have acted with energy against
opposition activists who allegedly participated in or incited violence. Over recent years, these
institutions have failed to fulfil their constitutional role to act with equal impartiality against
government supporters and opponents accused of committing crimes related to the ongoing
political crisis. This lack of impartiality, combined with long standing structural weaknesses
of these key institutions, threatens to strengthen the culture of impunity that has accompanied
human rights abuses over many years in Venezuela.In the civil disturbances of 27 February to 4 March 2004 Amnesty International recognises
that wide scale indiscriminate or extrajudicial killings were avoided in the face of frequently
violent demonstrations. However, rather than acknowledge the use of excessive force and
torture in a significant number of cases and ensure full, thorough and impartial investigations,
the authorities made numerous public statements offering unqualified support for the conduct of the security forces and sought to dismiss or downplay allegations of human rights
violations as merely part of the opposition strategy to discredit the government. The
government only reluctantly agreed the need to investigate alleged abuses in the face of
numerous complaints and strong national and international pressure.In January President Chávez sought to undermine the legitimacy of a number of reputable
human rights organizations, such as Provea and the Red de Apoyo, by questioning their links
to international organizations and making unfounded allegations of links to foreign
governments. The public statements by President Chávez are in direct opposition to the 1999
UN Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society
to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms
and risks encouraging further threats and attacks on human rights defenders. It is vital that the government and the opposition publicly recognise the legitimate role of human rights organizations and make clear that any harassment of human rights activists will not be tolerated.I’d recommend that the entire report cited from Amnesty International be read for its edifying and sobering effects. You can see that there is no need for the death penalty when government-sanctioned thugs can deliver death directly to opponents without the messy business of court hearings.
To all the US and expats fellows, angry about their own country and economics policies, and that only know about Chavez because of populist press articles that defend him because of personal interest; and do not know in the flesh the suffering and Drama Venezuelans are Living now under the regime of Chavez please refrain to comment ridiculous statements that he is doing good for the poor people and his country, politics is not an easy theme to debate, my opinion is that BOTH Chavez & Bush are despicable crooks.
Stating that there are no torture or political imprisonment under Chavez mandate is a HUGE ignorance about the reality of Venezuela, especially when is it a fact that Chavez is being surrounded & protected by The Cuban intelligence G2 forces and not by Venezuela own intelligence agency which he dismantle in fear and distrusts of his own people. There is so much to read and learn before making such bold statements.
I was born and raised in Venezuela so I speak with property, a beautiful country with a Huge potential that everyone wanted to move and live there 30 years before, since the 84’s I saw the country coming down way BEFORE Chavez got into power but I can also tell that Chavez is no good for the region and this historic challenge we are all now into.
At least I would expect some people in this board to be more humble when they make statements about Chavez and the reality of Venezuela, and not show such an amount of ignorance about the reality in my country.
In time of crisis the best is to calm down, so please stop comparing like kids that Bush is Bad and Chavez is good, it does offend the wast majority of Venezuelans who are suffering now the tragedy of a tyranny and collapse of their home country.
Rafael
Edited on Oct 01, 2008 07:13
Edited on Oct 01, 2008 07:14
Aren’t you the guy who said the US didn’t sponsor death squads in El Salvador? Yeah, you’re a real credible source of information, but pray tell, how any of this is offbase, and please don’t tell us you got your information from someone who works for the State Department.
@ Sprite, why dont you inform yourself about 18 death and hundreds of injured by Chavez/G2 snipers & clash forces in Puente Llaguno? is that for you enough force to stop a civilian protest? I foresee this conversation will have no end.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4480
Don’t come and say that the article was written by the CIA, Those are Official numbers backed up by the Venezuelan agencies, and being familiar with criminality in Venezuela & Chavez’s abilities of faking numbers in his favor I could adventure to triple those statistics , please STOP speaking nonsense you all who defend Chavez come to me like frustrated communist, and you really have NO idea of the Venezuelan reality.
Edited on Oct 01, 2008 08:03
Edited on Oct 01, 2008 08:15
Well Maravilla I am very credible, but that is a different topic because of my job.
You don’t understand how central and south American countries rely on the U.S and our military. If there is a disaster anywhere in the region the first ones that are proactive is the U.S and it is the Mil support that gets the job done, not USAID or any other government agency.
So if Costa Rica has mud slids and people are dying the U.S. is supportive.
When it comes to Ven, they are all talk and no shows. When Chavez says he is going to do something it is only a 40% chance it will come to pass and this is proven.
Can’t go into details but you should be very glad that the U.S. is helping these countries with out the press other wise the Latin countries would look at YOU (gringa) and ask why don’t you help!
The U.S. is the only one that is pumping in Millions of dollars to help in Humanitarian Aid, I don’t see the U.K, Canada, or any others that make a hemispheric impact with no strings attached!!!!yes, i do understand the political/military climate of latin america, and clearly it is YOU who is clueless. whether we send aid or not doesn’t mitigate all the political assassinations the US has orchestrated to get rid of democratically elected leaders of any country they want. have your read the book “The Art of Political Murder” or “Legacy of Ashes”? I seriously doubt that you have as both those books are very heavy weather, but they will spell it out for you in black and white every nefarious coup we have orchestrated south of the US border for the last 50 years, including the country in which you stated categorically that we did not sponsor death squads. oh yeah, i forgot, your source of credible information was some tour guide for the State Department. sheesh. they must have some good dope in paraguay!
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