16,000 Gather at Post, Maintain Peaceful Vigil

School of Americas Watch

Adriana Portillo Bartow has been back to her native Guatemala 15 times since members of her family disappeared more than 20 years ago, never to be heard from again.

"My father and the other adults were tortured and killed," Bartow said. "The bodies were dumped so we would never find them. I hoped my daughters and sister were spared."

Bartow, who now lives in Chicago, was among the record 16,000 protesters who gathered Saturday near the main gate of Fort Benning to protest the U.S. Army's Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. She said the officers responsible for her family's disappearance were trained at the former School of the Americas.
Columbus police Chief Ricky Boren said the crowd exceeded last year's assembly of 12,400 protesters.

First U.S. Woman Conscientious Objector

Katharine Jashinski

Statement made at Ft. Benning, GA on November 17, 2005 by SPC Katherine
Jashinski, first woman in the military to publicly declare resistance to
participation in the war:

My name is Katherine Jashinski. I am a SPC in the Texas Army National
Guard. I was born in Milwaukee, WI and I am 22 years old. When I
graduated high school I moved to Austin, TX to attend college. At age 19
I enlisted in the Guard as a cook because I wanted to experience military
life. When I enlisted I believed that killing was immoral, but also that
war was an inevitable part of life and therefore, an exception to the
rule.

Two Myths That Keep the World Poor

Vandana Shiva, Ode

From rock singer Bob Geldof to UK politician Gordon Brown, the world
suddenly seems to be full of high-profile people with their own plans to end
poverty. Jeffrey Sachs, however, is not a simply a do-gooder but one of the
world’s leading economists, head of the Earth Institute and in charge of a
UN panel set up to promote rapid development. So when he launched his book
The End of Poverty, people everywhere took notice. Time magazine even made
it into a cover story.

But, there is a problem with Sachs’ how-to-end poverty prescriptions. He
simply doesn’t understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as
the original sin. “A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor,” he
writes, then adding: “The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much
of the world was left far behind.”

This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have
been “left behind”; they are the ones who have been robbed. The wealth
accumulated by Europe and North America are largely based on riches taken
from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich
textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the
genocide of the native American tribes, without African slavery, the
Industrial Revolution would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or
North America. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and
markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South.

CAE Artist Steve Kurtz Released From Pretrial Supervision
Despite Dept. of Justice Objections:
Case Continues At
Slow Pace

Buffalo, NY – Artist and
University of Buffalo professor Steven Kurtz has been
released from pretrial supervision following a motion
by his pretrial supervisor Zenaida Piotrowicz to the
federal court of Western New York. Though Kurtz’s
case has not yet gone to trial and motions for its
dismissal are still pending, the beleaguered artist
has been on “probation” for sixteen months: reporting
regularly to a probation officer, subject to random
house searches and drug tests, and limited in his
ability to travel.

The following letter was sent to an International Conference on Elisée Reclus, the 19th century anarchist geographer and political theorist. The conference, which was held in Milan on October 12–13, was one of several planned for this year to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Reclus’ birth and the 100th anniversary of his death. I was invited to do a presentation but couldn’t leave New Orleans to attend. Fortunately, our electricity, which had been out for almost six weeks, resumed shortly before the conference and I was able to write the letter hastily and find a place to email it. It arrived in Milan the day before the conference and was read during the proceedings, and it will be translated and published in the Italian anarchist magazine Libertaria.

A Letter from New Orleans

(Reclusian Reflections on an Unnatural Disaster)

John Clarke

Dear Friends,

I regret that I can’t be with you for the international Reclus conference in Milano this week. I was looking forward very much to seeing all of my good friends there and participating in the extraordinary event that you’ve organized. I decided that to help make up for my absence from my session tomorrow that I’d send you some reflections on what I’ve been doing recently and what has been occurring here in New Orleans.

Rioting in France Spreads to 300 Towns

Angela Doland, Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — Rioting by French youths spread to 300 towns overnight and a
61-year-old man hurt in the violence died of his wounds, the first fatality
in 11 days of unrest that has shocked the country, police said Monday.

As urban unrest was reported in neighboring Belgium and Germany, the French
government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence,
despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm. One riot-hit
town in suburban Paris said it was preparing to enforce a curfew.

No New Trial For Civil Rights Attorney Lynne Stewart

"http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=3&aid=54524" >New York 1

Civil Rights Attorney Lynne Stewart will not be getting a new trial. A federal judge upheld her conviction Tuesday on charges she helped pass
messages from a convicted terrorist client to his followers.

Stewart said Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman was practicing free speech when he
issued a press release about a cease fire by Islamic militants in Egypt. But the judge said: "The First Amendment lends no protection to
participation in a conspiracy, even if such participation is through
speech."

Stewart's sentencing is set for December. She faces up to 20 years in
prison.

Rahman was convicted of planning to blow up several New York City landmarks.

Rosa Parks, 1913-2005

Civil Rights Icon Dies at Age 92

Patricia Sullivan, Washington Post

Rosa Parks, the dignified African American seamstress whose refusal
to surrender a bus seat to a white man launched the modern civil rights movement and inspired generations of activists, died last night at her home in Detroit, the
Wayne County medical examiner's office said. She was 92.

No cause of death was reported immediately. She had been suffering
from dementia since 2002.

Parks said that she didn't fully realize what she was starting when
she decided not to move on that Dec. 1, 1955 evening in Montgomery, Alabama. It was a simple refusal, but her arrest and the subsequent protests began the complex cultural struggle to legally guarantee equal rights to Americans of all races.

Within days, her arrest sparked a 380-day bus boycott, which led to a
U.S. Supreme Court decision that desegregated the public transportation of that
city. Her arrest also triggered mass demonstrations, made the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. famous, and transformed U.S. schools, workplaces and housing.

Barrington Moore Jr., 92, Analyst of Totalitarianism, Dies

Wolfgang Saxon, New York Times

Barrington Moore Jr., a Harvard sociologist whose studies of the contemporary human condition led him to dissect the totalitarian society, particularly as it evolved in the Soviet Union, died last Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 92.

His death was announced by the university, where he taught from 1951 to 1979. He had also been affiliated with the Russian Research Center at Harvard since 1948.

Dr. Moore followed an interdisciplinary approach, always placing social change in its historical context. He distrusted models of social behavior that ignored politics, economics and a multiplicity of other possible factors and events that helped determine it.

Revered Chinese Author Ba Jin Dies at 100

Elaine Kurtenbach, Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — Ba Jin, one of China's most revered
communist-era writers who attacked the evils of the
pre-revolutionary era in novels, short stories and essays,
died Monday of cancer in Shanghai, the official Xinhua News
Agency said. He was 100.

Best known for his 1931 novel "Family," the story of a
disintegrating feudal household, Ba Jin also translated the
Russian writers Ivan Turgenev and Pyotr Kropotkin.

Ba Jin worked well into his later years writing essays and
compiling anthologies of his work.

He was part of the young intelligentsia in the early 20th
century that looked to Western philosophies — Marxism,
anarchism, and liberalism — for solutions to China's
backwardness and social inequality.