-Caveat Lector- [radtimes] # 166 An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities. "We're living in rad times!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to assist RadTimes--> (See ** at end.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: --Prisons Filled During Clinton Years --Quebec summit will see tightest security in history --5,000 cops to get special training for April summit in Quebec City --A time and a place for political assassination --Building the Berlin Wall in Quebec --UN officials and NGOs urge action on climate =================================================================== Prisons Filled During Clinton Years by KAREN GULLO Associated Press Writer 02/18/01 WASHINGTON (AP) -- More Americans went to prison or jail during the Clinton administration than during any past administration, the result of get-tough policies that led to more prisons, more police officers and longer sentences, a criminal justice think tank reports. During President Clinton's eight years in office, 673,000 people were sent to state and federal prisons and jails, compared with 343,000 during President Bush's single term and 448,000 in President Reagan's two terms, says a study by the Justice Policy Institute, an arm of The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. The center advocates more balance between incarceration and treatment for criminals. The incarceration rate at the end of the Clinton administration was 476 per 100,000 citizens, versus 332 per 100,000 at the end of Bush's term and 247 per 100,000 at the end of Reagan's administration, the study said. Incarceration rates for blacks increased to 3,620 per 100,000 from around 3,000 per 100,000 people during Clinton's two terms. Two million people are behind bars and 4.5 million are on probation and parole, according to the study, which is based on Justice Department figures and estimates from 1993 to 2000. The study blamed the surge in prisoners on Clinton administration initiatives that provided more money to states for prisons, police officers and crime prevention programs. The 1994 crime bill, which gave $30 billion to states, was a major factor, said Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Justice Policy Institute. Other factors included tougher sentencing and the abolition of parole, he said. Republicans are thought to have more punitive crime policies than Democrats, but the opposite was true during the Clinton administration, Schiraldi said. ''President Clinton stole the show from the 'tough on crime' Republicans,'' he said. Allen Beck, chief of corrections statistics at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, disputed the notion that Clinton administration crime initiatives were the prime reason for the burgeoning prison population. He said many states had already begun tough crime prevention programs before Clinton came to office and tougher sentencing guidelines for federal drug offenders began in the late 1980s. Moreover, Beck said, people are staying in jail longer because parole boards are not releasing prisoners. ''It's not that more people are going to prison, rather people in prison are staying longer,'' he said. Schiraldi urged President Bush to make good on a campaign promise to provide $1 billion to states for local drug treatment programs. During the campaign, Bush said the surge in the number of prisoners in recent years ''is a necessary and effective role of government -- protecting our communities from predators.'' He advocated using charities and religious-based groups to help the children of prisoners and providing money for a pilot prison ministries program. ---- On the Net: Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/ =================================================================== Quebec summit will see tightest security in history By ALEXANDER PANETTA-- The Canadian Press Thursday, February 15, 2001 QUEBEC (CP) -- The RCMP and other police forces hope that what they are calling the largest security operation in Canadian history will ensure Quebec City is as quiet as possible this April. As many as 5,000 police officers might be on hand to prevent the Summit of the Americas from being disrupted by the kind of violence that rocked Seattle when it played host to international trade talks in 1999. Some protest groups are already using the Internet to warn of a showdown at the April 20-22 summit, which will feature 34 heads of state, including Prime Minister Jean Chretien and U.S. President George W. Bush. One New York City anti-globalization group, the Ya Basta Collective, is encouraging protesters to bring self-defence gear, including shields, padding and chemically resistant suits. The Web site for Ya Basta (translated from Spanish as Enough Already) urges "mass resistance" at the Canada-U.S. border leading up to the summit. Some anarchists have also called for a complete shutdown of the summit with the help of weapons like bricks and incendiary bombs, say recent reports by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the national spy agency. A local prison will be emptied to make room for unruly demonstrators as the RCMP, Quebec provincial police and two municipal forces brace for the arrival of thousands of protesters. "We know there are people who cause trouble and incite the crowd to rail against police, and it degenerates from there," said provincial police spokesman Richard Gagne. "So we're preparing for that as a result. Our mandate is to maintain peace, order and respect for the law -- and we'll do what we must do to fulfil our mandate." That includes requiring thousands of residents and merchants to show special passes to reach their homes and businesses through a giant barricade to be placed around neighbourhoods where the meetings will take place. Canadian police will encounter some of the same protesters who took part in the Seattle demonstrations which led to 600 arrests and caused $3 million US in damage. U.S. officials were forced to call in the National Guard and declare a state of civil emergency while police beat back angry crowds with batons, tear gas and rubber bullets. A key organizer of those trade protests is coming to Quebec. She says demonstrators are generally peaceful and aren't responsible for violent skirmishes. "It's in the hands of police, the determinate of how much violence there will be," said Juliette Beck, an executive at Global Exchange, an international human-rights organization based in San Francisco. "It's up to the way the Quebec police intend to greet these protesters." Several thousand Americans will demonstrate in Quebec while others will hold similar rallies along the Mexican border, Beck said in an interview from San Francisco. More than 3,000 police officers -- and perhaps as many as 5,000 -- will be on hand in Quebec City. Reports have said the total cost of security will surpass $30 million. In comparison, only 1,200 police officers were present when the Seattle summit began. The Quebec City meeting is expected to make major strides toward a Free Trade Area of the Americas, an agreement that would extend free trade to every country in the Americas except Communist Cuba. Many activists warn, however, that such an agreement would allow large corporations to take advantage of lax labour and pollution laws in developing countries. They also fear it would not deal adequately with the growing global income gap between rich and poor. To reinforce their point, they will hold an alternate summit in Quebec City that will run from April 17 to 21. The Quebec City security operation will provide protection for about 9,000 visitors, including up to 3,000 journalists. It will be larger than when Canada hosted the 1976 and 1988 Olympic Games, said officials from the RCMP and the provincial police. "If we look at the history of past international summits, there has been a prevalence of violent protest," said RCMP Const. Julie Brongel. "That is why we've been preparing for over a year for the strategies we will employ to minimize the violence." In the last 15 months alone, violent clashes have marred trade talks in Windsor, Ont., Montreal, Washington, D.C., and Europe. However, Canadian security officials are being accused of overzealousness in their attempt to thwart protesters. "I find it's a bit excessive," said Bibiane Bernier, manager of a souvenir store at the Loews Le Concorde Hotel, where some summit meetings will take place. "The security perimeter will make people feel like prisoners in their own city, and emptying the jail is a bit exaggerated." Bernier said employees at her store have been subjected to background checks by the RCMP upon applying for access passes to the hotel. "They called one of our employees who'd moved five times in recent years and asked, 'What were you doing? Why did you move?'" Several thousand residents will need to provide a piece of photo identification and proof of residence -- like a phone or cable bill -- to qualify for the passes. Those cards will allow residents to enter checkpoints in the security perimeter. Officials say the barricade, a four-meter-high metal fence, will cover an area of about 4.5 kilometres. However, the area might be extended or reduced, depending on the perceived threat to security in the days before the summit. Several metres of the fence have already been installed on the historic Plains of Abraham, where British soldiers battled the French for control of Canada in 1759. "The first time I saw this fence, I thought, 'What are these people doing?" said Linda Leblond, who takes regular walks along a cross-country ski path that surrounds the plains. "What, have we ended up in a concentration camp? We're hearing so much about the threat of violence that we've come to expect it." One leading constitutional lawyer says not even the threat of violence is an excuse for such extensive precaution. "I'd wonder what law permits them to commit such a serious violation of the freedom of mobility," Julius Grey said in an interview from Montreal. He has joined a committee that will monitor the summit to ensure that fundamental rights are respected. "You obviously don't leave presidents and prime ministers unprotected," Grey said. "And nobody has a right to riot ... but you can't attempt to choke it off before it happens." =================================================================== Thursday 15 February 2001 5,000 cops to get special training for April summit in Quebec City KEVIN DOUGHERTY The Montreal Gazette Thursday 15 February 2001 The 5,000 police assigned to maintain order during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City will receive "intensive training" to ensure that lawbreakers are dealt with while respecting the rights of peaceful protesters, says Public Security Minister Serge Menard. And to ensure police act properly, television cameras will monitor their crowd-control activities, including arrests, the minister added. As well, a committee of international observers will be allowed to mingle with those arrested, who will be transferred to Orsainville prison, north of Quebec City. Menard is also willing to allow television networks to send a pool camera into the prison. "I welcome very favourably the initiative of the Ligue des Droits in creating a committee of observers to monitor security measures during the summit in Quebec City and the people's summit," Menard told reporters yesterday. The leaders of the 34 countries in North and South America and the Caribbean, with the sole exception of Cuba, will gather in Quebec City April 20-22 to discuss creation of a hemispheric free-trade zone. The summit will also mark the first visit to Canada by U.S. President George W. Bush. >From April 17 to 21, the Second People's Summit of the Americas will also be held in Quebec City. Anarchists Plan to Attend Organizers of the leaders' summit have tried to keep the alternate-summit participants away from their event, but people's summit participants also want to demonstrate peacefully against the proposed trade pact, which they view as a government-to-government process that will not deal adequately with labour and environmental issues, as well as the growing global income gap between rich and poor. In addition, anti-capitalist and anarchist protesters - some favouring non-violent tactics, such as trying to make "civil arrests" of the summit leaders, others prepared to do battle with police to stop the summit meeting - also want to demonstrate. Organizers of the people's summit believe that, by trying to neutralize the violent minority of protesters, the measures Menard proposes will prevent peaceful protesters from getting across their message that, in bringing down barriers to trade and investment, the social impact of globalization is not being considered. Menard said he has first-hand experience with demonstrations, having participated in protests with Deputy Premier Bernard Landry when they were both law students at Universite de Montreal in the early 1960s. "My experience since that time is that police excesses occur when the police are badly prepared, when they are taken by surprise, when they improvise," Menard said. Police at the summit would operate in disciplined units of 10, he said, and would only be allowed to act on orders from their superior. "They will only act as ordered to do so," the minister said, adding he hopes that, by preparing for the worst, violence can be avoided. Weeklong Training Program The intensive training will take a week and during that period police will be exposed to "all sorts of situations," including insults and the tossing of rocks and gasoline bombs. A report for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has identified an anarchist group called the Black Bloc as targeting the Quebec City summit. The Bloc wreaked $17 million in property damage during the Seattle summit of the World Trade Organization in 1999 and used gasoline bombs to disrupt and International Monetary Fund meeting in Prague last year. Research on the Internet found a site operated by La Main Noire, the Quebec affiliate of the Black Bloc. On the site, which is freely accessible, La Main Noire says it will organize in groups of five to seven, operating as cells within the peaceful demonstration. During the inauguration of President Bush in Washington last month, about 600 Black Bloc members infiltrated peaceful protests to attack police. In an anarchist publication called the Barricada, on the Internet, organizers lamented that, because they "paid too much attention to the scare tactics of the police," the Black Bloc was easy to disperse and "were essentially punching bags for the police. "It is essential that this mistake is not repeated in Quebec City this April and we are already working to ensure that Bloc is better prepared for next time," says the Barricada article. =================================================================== A time and a place for political assassination <http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?f=/stories/20010219/478855.html> Alexander Rose National Post Last week, Massoud Ayyad was travelling in his car when two Israeli helicopter gunships swooped and blew it to pieces. He was the latest fatality in a series of killings by Israeli agents of Yasser Arafat's key operatives and militant terrorists. Palestinian officials instantly shouted that Israel was behaving like a "state above the law" by indulging in "political assassinations." Though The New York Times chose to describe him as a "senior Palestinian security officer," the late Ayyad was a lieutenant- colonel in Force 17, the leader of a Gaza-based cell of the terrorist group Hezbollah and a known arms smuggler. Force 17 was established in the 1970s as Arafat's praetorian guard, later undertaking deniable terrorist operations and recruiting various useful idiots for the PLO's international terrorist network. Working on Arafat's orders, Ayyad was responsible for co-ordinating attacks on Israeli civilians. He's no great loss to the world. But was Israel behaving like a "state above the law" in killing Ayyad or the other terrorists recently deceased in "freak" accidents? Not at all. There's no law, no rules, no codes of honour in the secret world, especially in the Middle East, where every cloak conceals a dagger. There, "an eye for an eye" is regarded as sensible business practice. The PLO, the PFLP, Hezbollah and Hamas have killed Israeli civilians for decades. In return, the Mossad eliminates terrorists. Ayyad and the others knew what they were getting into. Murderers such as Abu Jihad, Zuheir Muhsin, Fath Shikaki and Yahya Ayyash (who invented suicide bombing) have been efficiently dispatched. In the 1970s, Arafat would change addresses two or three times nightly, so terrified was he of Israeli commandos and rival PLO factions. The Palestinians' complaint about a "state above the law" would hold more water, however, had Arafat himself been liquidated. Though Palestine as a state does not exist, he is close enough to the throne to count as a nearly bona fide head of state. As such, he is -- or should be -- pretty much immune. The Israelis were simply giving him a warning. The international norm against bumping off heads of state as a tool of foreign policy is a relatively recent one. During the Renaissance, assassination was so commonplace that the Republic of Venice, which attempted some 200 between 1415 and 1525, catalogued them in its official records. One professional, Brother John of Ragusa, used a sliding scale to determine his fee for a job. "For the Grand Turk, 500 ducats; for the King of Spain, 150 ducats; for the Duke of Milan, 60 ducats; for the Marquis of Mantua, 50 ducats; for his Holiness, only 100 ducats." Enlightenment princes, however, regarded the practice as a medieval throwback. From then on, as it became entrenched in international law, assassination almost died out. In 1976, president Gerald Ford authorized Executive Order 12333, which outlawed assassination by the U.S. government. There's a shocking moral disconnect here, of course. Why should the very men who inflict misery be immune? Such questions have prompted recent efforts to overturn the ban, most recently by Bob Barr, a Republican congressman who, on Jan. 3, introduced a bill aptly titled the Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001. To demonstrate that the West will not tolerate attacks on its citizens, the blanket ban should be nullified, but with the caveat that the United States will not specifically target individual heads of state. This is not for moral reasons, but for practical ones. Foreign leaders are unlikely to sit around waiting for a bullet without taking their own steps to kill our leaders. Also, the words Operation Mongoose should ring alarm bells. This was the secret plan hatched by president John F. Kennedy to kill Fidel Castro. The CIA, famously, tried for years to get him with a variety of techniques; all were humiliating failures. The biggest bastards, as they say, are always the hardest to kill. And if you fluff the headshot, they come right back at you. But even if you hit him, it never solves the problem as easily as you might have thought. If Saddam Hussein were killed, we would still be faced with a bellicose Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction, this time controlled by one of his vengeful sons. That's the difference between quietly capping terrorists and heads of state. The latter, for the most part, can be made to understand balances of power and diplomacy and veiled warnings, whilst the former are fanatics who love to kill. Talking rationally in our nice Western way to terrorists is regarded by them as weakness, but lethal force cramps their style. Just as the military must use illiberal means to defend liberal democracy, so is the task of counterterrorists to terrify terrorists. The knowledge that if they strike they will be struck harder obliges them to go underground and take paranoiac precautions to protect themselves. On these occasions, while covert action, intrigue, subversion and assassination should not be openly lauded as admirable behaviour, we can sleep easier knowing someone is doing the dirty work. =================================================================== Building the Berlin Wall in Quebec By Judy Rebick The Ottawa Citizen 17/02/01 The hypocrisy of Jean Chretien's call for the respect of human rights in China is stunning. You can almost see his wink, wink, nudge, nudge to Chinese leaders as he leads a delegation investing billions in China, whatever Beijing does on human rights. The less obvious hypocrisy is the fact that Canada is preparing to massively violate its citizens' human rights in Quebec City. A veritable Berlin Wall is being constructed in Quebec City to separate demonstrators from delegates to the Summit of the Americas, being held April 20-23. Riot police will stand guard to prevent demonstrators from getting anywhere near the 34 heads of government coming for the Summit of the Americas. The RCMP says it will be one of the largest security operations in Canadian history. The security zone will cover much of old Quebec City's upper town, both inside and outside the fortress wall. Access will be tightly controlled, with special passes required to enter. RCMP insist the over-the-top security is necessary to protect heads of state planning to attend the meeting. What danger could there possibly be to deny the rights of thousands of young people who will be exercising the most basic democratic right in a free society? Newspapers in Canada are outraged that a couple of Canadian businessmen in China heckled two brave protesters outside Team Canada's meeting with Chinese officials. Will the same newspapers protest when thousands of domonstrators are pepper sprayed, beaten and rounded up into jails in Quebec City? >From the traffic in my e-mail in basket, it looks like organizing for the Quebec City protest is greater than for any North American event in recent memory. Teach-ins are being held in campuses across Quebec and Ontario. There are several "travelling road shows" originating in Portland Oregon and Montreal to inform activists about the issues. The worldwide movement against corporate globalization is getting so strong that delegates to the World Trade Organization have to go to the end of the Earth to meet. The last meeting was shut down by protests in Seattle. It is to avoid such a shut-down that massive police repression is being planned for Quebec City. Yet no one was killed in Seattle. As far as I know, the worst violence from the demonstrators were a few broken windows in a Starbucks. Yet this event has been used to justify extraordinary police violence and repression. I witnessed it in Windsor last summer, when hundreds of riot police moved in on a peaceful sit-in. I saw a police officer forcibly remove a young woman's goggles and fire pepper spray directly into her eyes. These protesters are not going away. Like the students in Tiananmen Square, so brutally attacked 10 years ago in China, these young people are fighting against the development of an international regime that is unelected and unaccountable and that is massively increasing the gap between rich and poor, North and South, the haves and the have-nots. As internationally known anti-trade activist Gerard Greenfield has written, "It's not just the absence of democracy in the WTO and NAFTA that is the problem, but the outright hostility towards democracy. Aggressively cutting back our ability to impose democratic priorities on capital is not an afterthought - it lies at the vry hearat of the globalization project." The WTO and Free Trade of the Americas are not really about trade. The protests against these international meetings are shining a light on a very threat to democracy. As the British business magazine The Economist said in September, "The protesters are right that the most pressing moral, political and economic issue of our time is Third World poverty. And they are right that the tide of 'globalization,' powerful as the engines driving it may be, can be turned back. The fact that both these things are true is what makes the protesters - and crucially, the strand of popular opinion that sympathizes with them - so terribly dangerous." Seems to me that Chinese officials might have been thinking the same things about the danger of the student demand for democracy in face of their plans to open up their markets to Western investment. Of course, we have much greater democratic rights in Canada than do people in China. What young protesters are arguing is that these democratic rights are becoming meaningless in a world where the most important decisions are made behind closed doors, by leaders who need steel walls and riot police to protect them from the voices of protest. If Jean Chretien really wants to champion human rights and democracy, he will order the Quebec City RCMP to pull down that wall and show the world that Canada has nothing to fear from the exercise of the democratic rights of freedom of speech and association. =================================================================== UN officials and NGOs urge action on climate <http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9862> by Robert Evans February 20, 2001 Reuters GENEVA - United Nations officials and environmental bodies on Monday urged governments to act quickly to slow global warming by shaping meaningful international pacts to reduce carbon emissions. Heads of UN agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) issued their appeals in the wake of a report by an influential panel of scientists warning that rising temperatures were pushing the world towards potential catastrophe. While the UN officials were diplomatic, the NGOs pointed the finger firmly at richer countries, and especially the United States, as the main culprits for warming. "This catastrophe was made in the rich countries of the North," said Frances Maguire of the Netherlands-based Friends of the Earth International. "Governments in industrial countries must agree radical cuts in our use of coal, oil and gas, and big increases in our use of renewable power. If we don't act now it will be too late." He said talks in the Hague last November on reducing the "greenhouse effect" caused by carbon dioxide from fossil fuels had collapsed because the United States would not match European Union commitments to cut emissions. "US MUST ACT" The Swiss-based World Wide Fund for Nature-International (WWF) as well as Greenpeace International, headquartered in the Netherlands, also saw the United States as a key obstacle to a full global pact. "It is time for governments, particularly the new Bush administration, to show that they are taking the reality of climate change seriously," said Bill Hare, climate policy director of Greenpeace. Jennifer Morgan, director of WWF's Washington-based Climate Change Campaign, noted that the more-than 100 governments who approved the report at a closed-door meeting in Geneva last week had accepted that global warming was happening: "It is time for governments such as the United States to get serious about reducing their carbon dioxide emissions." Godwin Obasi, Secretary-General of the UN World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), said: "Life as we know it today will be forced to respond to the shift to a warmer world." "We have to use mitigation and adaptation strategies to face the changes...." "COMPELLING SNAPSHOT" Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the UN Environmental Programme, said the report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was "a compelling snapshot of what the Earth will probably look like later in the 21st century". "In addition to minimising global warming through cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, we need to understand the powerful changes our industrial economy has set in motion and anticipate them," he declared. "Governments should also factor these new conditions into their long-term investment and planning decisions." Michael Zammit Cutajar, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said the report "has powerful implications for how we deal with poverty and sustainable development over the coming decades". "No country can afford to ignore the coming transformation of its natural and human environment," he added. "This report is a timely reminder that we need to pay more attention to the costs of inaction, and that the costs of action to cut emissions are just part of the climate change equation." =================================================================== "Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control." -Jim Dodge ====================================================== "Communications without intelligence is noise; intelligence without communications is irrelevant." -Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ====================================================== "It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." -J. Krishnamurti ====================================================== "The world is my country, all mankind my brethren, and to do good is my religion." -Thomas Paine ______________________________________________________________ To subscribe/unsubscribe or for a sample copy or a list of back issues, send appropriate email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. ______________________________________________________________ **How to assist RadTimes: An account is available at <www.paypal.com> which enables direct donations. If you are a current PayPal user, use this email address: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, to contribute. If you are not a current user, use this link: <https://secure.paypal.com/refer/pal=resist%40best.com> to sign up and contribute. The only information passed on to me via this process is your email address and the amount you transfer. Thanks! <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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