By Yifat Susskind
MADRE

If you haven’t thought about the Iraq War as a story of U.S. allies systematically torturing and executing women, you’re not alone. Likewise, if you were under the impression that Iraqi women were somehow better off under their new, U.S.-sponsored government.

In the spring of 2003, Fatin was a student of architecture at Baghdad University. Her days were filled with classes and hanging out in her favorite of Baghdad’s many cafes, where she and her friends studied, shared music, and spun big plans for successful careers, happy marriages, and eventually, kids.

Today, Fatin says that those feel like someone else’s dreams.

Soon after the U.S. invasion, Fatin began seeing groups of bearded young Iraqi men patrolling the streets of Baghdad. They were looking for women like her, who wore modern clothes or were heading to professional jobs. The men screamed terrible insults at the women and sometimes beat them.

By the fall, ordinary aspects of Fatin’s life had become punishable by death. The “misery gangs,” as Fatin calls them, were routinely killing women for wearing pants, appearing in public without a headscarf, or shaking hands and socializing with men.

As the occupying power, the U.S. was legally obligated to stop these attacks. But the Pentagon, preoccupied with battling the Iraqi insurgency, simply ignored the militias’ reign of terror.

In fact, some of the most treacherous armed groups belonged to the very political parties that the US had brought to power. By 2005, the Pentagon was giving weapons, money and military training to these Shiite militias, in the hope that they would help combat the Sunni-led insurgency.

Fatin’s closest encounter with the militias occurred when armed men burst into her university classroom one morning, threatening to kill any female student without a head scarf. After that, young women dropped out in droves. The next semester, Fatin’s parents refused to allow her to re-enroll.

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Corporations, legislators try to sell the Big Lie
By Hoyt N. Wheeler, West Columbia

As every purveyor of propaganda knows, there is no more effective way to fight rational ideas than the Big Lie. This is exactly what is being done by corporate spokesmen and their tame legislators with respect to the Employee Free Choice Act.

We see the effects of this in the attempt in the S.C. Legislature to enact a state constitutional amendment that would establish a right to vote in union representation processes in spite of the fact that this is a matter dealt with by the National Labor Relations Board under federal law.

The Employee Free Choice Act would require an employer to recognize a union as the representative of its employees upon the union showing that a majority of the employees had signed cards authorizing the union to represent them. Under current law, the employer may recognize the union but may also demand that there be a secret ballot election.

The Big Lie being broadcast is that this act would take away from workers something that they already have — the right to vote. Like all good lies, it contains a partial truth. It is true that an election is less likely under the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). However, the employees do not lose the right to vote. You can’t lose what you don’t have. Employees currently have no individual right to vote. It is employers who would lose the right to insist on an election.

The only case in which employees have rights in this regard that would be changed by the Employee Free Choice Act is this: Under a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board under Bush last year, if an employer accepts cards and recognizes a union on that basis, 30 percent of the employees can demand an election. Under the EFCA, they would still have the individual right to refuse to sign an authorization card.

So it is a right of the corporation, not rights of employees, that is at stake here. This, of course, explains the cranking up of a big-time propaganda machine financed by corporations. Is it their deep concern for employees’ rights that has prompted this? Quite the contrary, it is their own power that is at stake. It is this that has led them to savagely attack this legislation.

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From Lamda Legal

Today another historic argument will be made before the state Supreme Court in California to protect the constitutional guarantee of equal protection for all and to fight to restore marriage equality. Lambda Legal, NCLR, the ACLU and others have been working for months to prepare for today’s oral argument in our historic case against Prop 8. And now you can be among the first to know what happened in the courtroom.

At 3 pm PST (6 pm EST), Lambda Legal’s National Marriage Project Director Jenny Pizer and Legal Director Jon Davidson will discuss the latest developments in the Strauss v. Horton case. If you’re interested in watching the argument, we have learned that it will be aired on California’s Public Access TV and streamed online. (High traffic at the site may impair viewing.)

Upholding the California Constitution’s promise to protect the rights of minorities is important for all Americans. In January, hundreds of religious organizations, civil rights groups and labor unions, and dozens of California municipal governments, bar associations and leading legal scholars agreed that the rights of all vulnerable minorities are at stake as they collectively urged the California Supreme Court to strike down Prop 8. The California Attorney General has also argued that Prop 8 is invalid.

By Robert Perry

Consortiumnews.com

It’s widely agreed that there are a number of factors dragging down American newspapers, including the economic recession and the impact of the Internet, but a reason rarely mentioned is that the national news media failed in its most important job – to serve as a watchdog for the people.

As Americans look out over the wreckage of the past three decades – and especially the last eight years – there have been too many times when the constitutionally protected U.S. news media didn’t raise the alarm or even joined in spreading misinformation that advanced the disastrous mismanagement of the U.S. economy and government.

Not that anyone should derive pleasure from watching once formidable institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post fade into pale shadows of their former selves.

But it also must be acknowledged that decisions by senior management of those and other top news organizations contributed to their own decline, especially the failure to stand up to the Right’s increasingly effective propaganda that emerged in the late 1970s in the wake of Richard Nixon’s Watergate debacle and the American defeat in Vietnam.

The Right was determined to prevent “another Watergate” and “another Vietnam.” So, key Republican strategists, such as former Treasury Secretary William Simon, went to work building their own media infrastructure, which included special groups to attack mainstream reporters who got in the way.

Rather than standing up to this pressure and defending the kind of aggressive journalism that exposed Nixon’s criminality and the lies behind the Vietnam War, many major news organizations consciously retreated from that watchdog tradition. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

At the New York Times, neoconservative executive editor Abe Rosenthal talked about moving his newspaper “back to the center,” by which he meant to the right. Washington Post chairwoman Katharine Graham also was uncomfortable with the adversarial position of her newspaper and sidled up to President Ronald Reagan when he came to power in 1981.

When I was hired at Washington Post-owned Newsweek in 1987 – supposedly to pursue the Iran-Contra scandal that I had helped expose while at the Associated Press – I was surprised to find senior Newsweek executives fretting about the possibility that Iran-Contra could become another Watergate.

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March 1 is International Death Penalty Abolition Day, which marks the anniversary of the date in 1847 in which Michigan officially became the first English-speaking territory in the world to abolish capital punishment. It is a day to remember the victims of violent crime and their survivors; it is a day to remember those killed by state-sanctioned violence – guilty or not- and their survivors; and it is a day for intensified education and action for alternatives to the death penalty. See more here.

To view photos from a recent SC vigil as the state executed Luke Williams III, click here.

If you want to connect with South Carolina activists working to abolish the death penalty, email becci@scpronet.com.

Rush has become the mouthpiece of the Republican Party. As embarrassing as you’d think it would be, there has been no effort on their part to shut him up. Maybe Rush is right: he’s just saying what they are thinking.

“The dirty little secret,” he said, “is that every Republican in the country wants Obama to fail, but none of them have the guts to say so; I am willing to say it.”

Jonathan Hafetz to speak Feb. 26, 12:45-1:45 at the USC School of Law Auditorium.

A senior attorney with ACLU’s National Security Project, Mr. Hafetz focuses on post-September 11 detention issues, government secrecy, and immigrants’ rights. Mr. Hafetz is the ACLU counsel in the landmark detention case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, currently before the Supreme Court.

Mr. Hafetz is the author of numerous articles in scholarly and popular publications, including the Yale Law Journal, California Western Law Review, Fordham Journal of International Law, Legal Affairs, and the New York Law Journal. He frequently serves as an expert commentator for television and radio on liberty and national security issues.

For more information, call Jan Landry at 843-720-1423.