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Today's Stories October 31, 2007 Bill Quigley New Orleans' Broken Criminal Justice System October 30, 2007 David Price Pilfered Scholarship Devastates Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual M. Shahid Alam The Pakistan Question Andy Worthington The Epiphany of Matthew Waxman: a Government Insider Turns Against Gitmo Patrick Cockburn The Bicycle Bomber of Baquba Anthony Papa The Twisted Logic of Drug Laws Floyd Rudmin What "All Options are on the Table" Really Means Sherwood Ross Giuliani and Torture Website of the Day The Worst Lobby? You Decide   October 29, 2007 Lisa Hajjar Inside Israel's Military Courts Joe DeRaymond The Politics of Lethal Injections Patrick Cockburn The High Stakes in Iraqi Kurdistan Isabella Kenfield / Roger Burbach Corporate Murder in Brazil Fred Gardner The Frivolous Investigation of Dr. Sterner Farzana Versey Caricaturing Islam Stephen Fleischman The Greening of the Oligarchy Marcelle Cendrars The Congressional Rip Cord Eamonn McCann Dan Keating, the Last of the Republican Irreconcilables Martha Rosenberg For Halloween, Ann Coulter Dresses as .... Ann Coulter! Website of the Day Campaign 2008   October 27 / 28, 2007 Alexander Cockburn So Much for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Jeffrey St. Clair The Dam That Isn't There James Bovard Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI's Right to Threaten Torture Ralph Nader Beyond the Rule of Law M. Reza Pirbhai The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming! Robert Sandels Pay the Invaders! Cuba, Claims and Confiscations Jacob G. Hornberger Ruling By Decree Missy Beattie The Arsonists in the West Wing John Ross U.S. Eyes on Oaxaca Robert Fantina Condi Rice, the Imperial Cheerleader Ron Jacobs Labor at the Crossroads Ali Moayedian In Search of Logic About Iran David Michael Green What If We Had a President Who Didn't Give a Damn About Terrorism? Poets Basement Block, Davies and Ford Website of the Day Bring 'Em Home: a Music Video   October 26, 2007 Brian Cloughley Revenging Bloodshed Saul Landau Portrait of Rudy Ahmad Al-Akras Getting Justice in the HLF Case Franklin Lamb Does "Loving" Lebanon Mean Never Having to Say You're Sorry? Mike Whitney Murdoch's Cuckoo's Nest Dave Lindorff Home of the Brave? Reducing US Casualties By Killing More Civilians Alan Farago A Castro Behind Every Bush Yifat Susskind Conscripting Feminism into the War on Terror Website of the Day Dead Life in a Political Prison October 25, 2007 Jeffrey St. Clair / Joshua Frank Iraq's Environmental Crisis Manuel Garcia, Jr. Homes of the Crash Test Dummies Paul Craig Roberts The Fraudulent War on Terror Col. Dan Smith The Politics of Paranoia: Jane Harman's War on the First Amendment Alan Farago The Way to Paradise? Chris Kutalik The Lesson of the Chrysler Rebels Brian McKinlay John Howard and the Curse of Bush Cindy Sheehan Pete, Nancy, George and WW III Website of the Day Support the America's Program!   October 24, 2007 Natalie Washington-Weik White Fantasies About Race-Based Intelligence Andy Worthington The Guantánamo Suicides Michael Birmingham What Happened in Nahr Al Bared? Corporate Crime Reporter The Nuclear Democrats Tariq Ali Bush's Cuba Detour Farzana Versey Imagining Serfdom in a Scarf Dave Zirin White Noise James Murren What "Support Our Troops" Means Todd Chretien Looking Reality in the Face Martha Rosenberg What Came First, the Chicken or the Cage? Website of the Day Hillary Clinton on Nuclear Power   October 23, 2007 Ralph Nader Bush's Catastrophic Rhetoric Lawrence R. Velvel Goldsmith Stands Convicted--By His Own Mouth: How a Harvard Law Professor Justified Rendition at the Bush Justice Dept. Vijay Prashad The Nuke Deal is Dead Bonnie Bricker / Adil E. Shamoo The True Cost of War for Oil Dave Lindorff Christopher Dodd's Make or Break Moment Mike Whitney The Big Squeeze Farzana Versey Race with the Devil Stanley Heller / Ben George Something New from the Antiwar Movement Marcelle Cendrars You Too Can Confront the Holy Executive Regan Boychuk Burma and Haiti: Comparing the Media Response Website of the Day King Corn   October 22, 2007 Ishmael Reed Should Blacks Go Green? Marjorie Cohn Mukasey and the Constitution: Another Loyal Bushie Rannie Amiri Is There a Method to Bush's Middle East Madness? Diane Farsetta Time to Pay for Payola: the FCC and Pundit-for-Hire Armstrong Williams Todd Alan Price Renewing No Child Left Behind: A Hurricane Katrina Aimed at Public Education Robert Jensen The Quagmire of Masculinity Stephen Lendman The UAW Leadership Sells Out Its Workers Jemima Khan The Kleptocrat in an Hermes Headscarf Sunsara Taylor David Horowitz Can't Handle the Truth Binoy Kampmark No Ideas, Please: the Australian Elections Website of the Day Support the Center for International Policy     October 20 / 21, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld Tariq Ali A Massacre Foretold Jeffrey St. Clair Greetings from Echo Park Andy Worthington The Shame of Diego Garcia Mike Whitney Housing Flameout Daniel Wolff Play It As It Lays David Rosen Deviants on Parade: Folsom St. Fair and America's 4th Sexual Revolution Saul Landau David and Goliath in Iraq Ron Jacobs COINTELPRO and the Panthers Robert Fantina The Strange Love of Mitt Romney and Bob Jones David Heleniak Erring on the Side of Hidden Harm Joe Allen Hoffa Brown-Nosing at UPS Prairie Miller Lions for Lambs Poets' Basement Gibbons, Holt and Buknatski Website of the Weekend Crash!   October 19, 2007 John Ross Che's Mexican Legacy Sheldon Rampton Shared Values Revisited: a Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda Rahul Mahajan A Tale of Two Atrocities: Blackwater and Haditha Devra Davis Deadly Secrets: Chemical Pollution and Cancer Christopher Brauchli Blasphemous Science Wadner Pierre Haiti After the Deluge Bill Quigley Jailed for Justice Website of the Day Textbook Sticker Shock   October 18, 2007 Saree Makdisi Academic Freedom is at Risk Meg Dwyer What I Learned from 9/11: Who Wouldn't Want Us Dead? Alevtina Rea Sketches of Russian Life Norman Solomon The United States of Violence Kristoffer Larsson Something is Rotten in Sweden Harvey Wasserman Nukes are Back and So are We Website of the Day Eve Ensler: "A Filibuster Would Stop This War"   October 17, 2007 Steve Niva Counter-Insurgency, American-Style Andy Worthington The Case of Mohamed Jawad Alan Farago The Credit Shock Russell Mokhiber The New Billionaire-Criminal Class Sharon Smith Democrats, AWOL When It Mattered Mike Whitney Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman Robert Fantina Iraq, Iran and the US: Business as Usual Chris Irwin Where Have All the Rednecks Gone? Website of the Day Sex Ed at Oral Roberts University October 16, 2007 Peter Linebaugh Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize Paul Findley Follow the Leader: The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby Robert Bryce Inconvenient Corrections: Al Gore's Wacky Facts Uri Avnery The Mother of All Pretexts Paul Craig Roberts The Iraqi Genocide Ray McGovern What Did Nancy Pelosi Know About NSA Spying and When Did She Know It? Norman Solomon The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal Martha Rosenberg The Curse of Cymbalta William S. Lind Out of the Frying Pan Joel S. Hirschborn Time to Boycott Voting Website of the Day Pipeline Through Paradise: Big Oil's Arctic Play         Subscribe Online

October 31, 2007 A Path to Gang Violence? "Social Cleansing" from Guatemala to LA By LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ One of the "solutions" we often heard in Guatemala to the growing gang violence there was "social cleansing." Repeated by officials and common people alike, this literally means what it says: the active and violent removal of alleged gang members, including by murder. In their view, courts and jails are not quick or harsh enough for them. In fact, this has also been true in El Salvador and Honduras. Cases include the vigilante murders of street kids as young as seven years old. Most of the cases, however, involved tattooed teenagers. In Central America, tattoos for many people represent gang involvement. Of course, those of us in LA know better. When I was involved in gangs in the 1960s and 1970s tattoos were mostly gang affiliated--primarily the Chicano gangs of the time. Not even African American gangs sported tattoos like the Chicanos did, which they had been doing since the Pachuco/Zootsuit days of the 1920s to the 1940s. Chicanos perfected the "fine line" jail-house tattoos that were soon sported by Anglo bikers, prisoners, and even military personnel. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hip Hop artists and sports figures, mostly African American, popularized this style in music videos and movies (as they did other Chicano artistic expressions like lowriding). Well known Chicano street artists like Mr. Cartoon became famous placing ink on people like 50 Cent, Eminem, Cypress Hill, and others. Now tattoos are used by actors, singers, rich people, jet setters, and coffee house afficionados. It's not a big thing. Meanwhile, Chicanos and other Latinos, including the Central Americans who came to LA in the 1980s escaping war and poverty, continued the extensive use of tattoos. Gang members in LA (and most of the Southwest) are known for tattooing every part of their body -- something that also now includes African Americans, Cambodians, Armenians, Anglos, and others. "Smile Now, Cry Later," crosses, chains, spider webs, cholas, area codes (like 213 or 818), gang affiliations, placasos (gang nicknames), Aztec and Mayan motifs, song titles, the Virgin of Guadelupe, LA (Dodger style), and such all became popular among gang youth. Anything and everything. So when the US deported tens of thousands of alleged gang members to Mexico and Central America beginning in 1992 (after the LA Rebellion) and then going strong in 1996 after the changes in immigration law emphasized the deportation of felons and gang members, tattooed youth flooded these countries that for the most part did not sport tattoos for fashion or otherwise. In El Salvador and Guatemala, the two countries in Central America I've visited since the early 1990s when LA-based gangs like the Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and Eighteen Street (called Mara 18 in El Salvador) were first introduced, I saw heavily tattooed youth (including on their faces, necks, heads, hands, arms, backs, stomachs, and elsewhere) in prisons and in the streets. You can imagine the impact they've had on countries not familiar with this kind of style or substance. But also the impact it would have on the tens of thousands of homeless, abandoned and glue-sniffing kids (most of them orphaned by war and poverty). In time, many of these joined MS or 18 Street (many home-grown gangs have also been absorbed by these two gangs). Today death squads and other vigilantes, as well as police, have unfairly targeted tattooed and US-raised or influenced kids as gang members. Many youth have showed up in hospitals beaten and tortured. Others are brought into morgues with their hands tied behind their backs. And still many more are warehoused in the overflowing prisons--some of the most stark, inhumane and overcrowded places you'd ever want to see. For example, in 1993, I visited two prisons in El Salvador that housed many gang youth: Mariona (the main prison in San Salvador) and San Vicente de Gotera (interviewing gang youth and officials). And I did the same thing this past week with Fabian Montes and Pascual Torres of Homeboy Industries. We entered two Guatemalan prisons: Centro Preventivo Para Hombres, Zona 18, Sector 11 (a maximum security men's prison with over 1,000 inmates) and Centro Preventivo Para Mujeres, Zona 18, Santa Teresa (a maximum security women's prison with 160 inmates). In Guatemala there are 19 prisons housing more than 7,000 prisoners. MS and 18 Street are housed in separate facilities. While most of the prisoners in the two places we visited were not in gangs, they did have a cell block solely dedicated to alleged gang members. We were able to go into this cell block, past the locked bars, and hang for a couple of hours with the inmates there. The gang members were leery of us at first, but as we talked (and I showed them copies of my books in Spanish), they opened up. Fabian, Pascual and I told them about our concerns to bring a new vision and imagination to working with gang youth in Guatemala--including more resources, jobs (getting companies to hire gang members), training, education, and other meaningful & effective means to incorporate these young people, tattooed or not, into the country. Incipient efforts of rehabilitation was being done there--including painting (inmates were working on murals as we talked), religious studies, and silk screen. In the women's prison, we went through several barred gates to the deepest sections where the most violent and alleged gang women were being held. We saw women learning theater, dance, and religion (Christian). Others were making bags (from plastic-like thread), amazingly beautiful candles, and household cleaning solutions that had odors of fruit, flowers, and even bubblegum. We spent all day in the two prisons, including talking to the rehabilitation counselors and arts volunteers. In the end we were able to meet and talk to intelligent, artistic and articulate young people (including with tattoos all over their faces). Our message to the country--to say no to "social cleansing" and instead focus on social healing. To help bring real jobs, training, understanding and a human face to the issue of gangs in Guatemala. We left the mud-strewn colonias and open-air jail blocks (as well as the community centers, universities, and other places we talked at) with much clarity on the extremely difficult situation that places like Guatemala are facing today. But we also left with the need to help provide whatever experiences we've gained working with gang youth (which I have been doing for 30 years, and Homeboy Industries has done for 20 years). Note: For those who are up and about, I'm on the air this whole week from 4:20 AM until 6 AM on LA's KJLH Radio, 102.3 FM. I'll be guest hosting again (it's truly an honor to be invited back) with "Front Page" host Dominique DiPrima. Please tune in if you can. Luis Rodriguez is a co-founder of Rock A Mole Productions and a contributing editor at Rock & Rap Confidential . He is the author of several books, including Always Running: Mi Vida Loca--Gang Days in LA, The Republic of East LA and the novel Music of the Mill published by Rayo/Harper Collins. For more information about his cultural center in LA, visit tiachucha.com. For more on his writing and activism, visit Luisjrodriguez.com. Your Ad Here

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