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Obama Requests Immunity For Kagame re Rwanda Genocide and Congo Wars

admin — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:46:25 +0000

A civil lawsuit lawsuit —Habyarimana vs. Kagame— alleges Rwandan President Paul Kagame is guilty of starting the Rwanda Genocide and Congo Wars. Plaintiffs’ counsel say they can prove Kagame ordered the assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents by shooting down their plane, which crashed into the presidential palace in Kigali, Rwanda, on April 6, 1994, triggering the panic and subsequent massacres that came to known as the Rwanda Genocide. The case has been filed in the US by the widows of former presidents Juvenal Habyalimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira. The case, alleges that Kagame is guilty of masterminding the Rwanda Genocide and Congo wars. It demands damages for the assassinated presidents’ widows.

However, Barack Obama’s State Department has filed a “Suggestion of Immunity Submitted by the United States of America,” for the immunity of Rwandan President Paul Kagame in the civil lawsuit Habyarimana vs. Kagame. This is the first time that the U.S State Department has requested immunity in a civil lawsuit for a foreign head of state in U.S courts. U.S presidents can claim some immunity after Clinton v. Jones, a landmark U.S Supreme Court case establishing that a sitting president of the United States has no immunity from civil litigation against him for acts done before taking office and unrelated to the office. The State Department claimed immunity for Kagame’s alleged wrongful acts that occured before he became the president of Rwanda.

In a recent article, “Rwanda: President Kagame confessed he had predecessor’s plane shot down,” written by Theogene Rudasingwa, he said “Paul Kagame himself, with characteristic callousness and much glee, told me that he was responsible for shooting down the plane.”

Habyarimana v. Kagame alleges that Gen. Paul Kagame and nine of his top military commanders and officials are guilty of “wrongful death and murder, crimes against humanity, violation of the rights of life, liberty, and security, assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, torture, and continuing conspiracy in furtherance thereof” in Rwanda and its neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Plaintiffs allege that many of these crimes, including the assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents, were committed before Kagame succeeded in overthrowing the government and becoming first a government official and then president.

Peter Erlinder and lawyers Kurt Kerns and John P. Zelbst filed the suit on behalf of the widows of Habyalimana and Ntaryamira in the federal District Court of Western Oklahoma in Oklahoma City prior to Kagame’s April 30, 2011, commencement address at Oklahoma Christian University. Kagame failed to answer the complaint within the time allowed, and the court thus declared a default judgment in favour of Madams Habyarimana and Ntaryamira.

Title: Obama Requests Immunity For Kagame re Rwanda Genocide and Congo Wars

By: Ann Garrison

Publication Source: SF Bay View

Date: September 14, 2011

URL: http://sfbayview.com/2011/obama-requests-immunity-for-kagame-re-rwanda-genocide-and-congo-wars/

Title: Obama seeking immunity from prosecution for Kagame
Source: The London Evening Post, September 16. 2011
URL: http://www.thelondoneveningpost.com/obama-goes-to-court-to-seek-immunity-from-prosecution-for-kagame/

Student researcher: Jessica Belluomini, Sonoma State University

Evaluator name: Elaine Leeder, Sonoma State UniversitySimilar Posts:

The Habeas corpus appeal of Garardo Hernandez, one of the Cuban five

admin — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:27:17 +0000

Hernández is one of ten Cubans who, like the Russian agents arrested in the summer of 2010 in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, were arrested by the FBI in Miami in 1998 and charged with failing to register as agents of a foreign government, as well as conspiracy to commit espionage. In the 1990’s as right wing Cuban Americans rejoiced the toppling of the Soviet Union which was the primary sponsor of Cuba grew even more provocative as they aimed for similar results. Small Miami based boats and planes began buzzing in and out of Cuban seas and airspace, shooting at beachside hotels, dropping objects from the skies, and meanwhile, mercenaries were hired to plant bombs and bring weapons into the country, with tragic and lethal results. These attacks made by American citizens grew to severe and agents of Cuba were sent to aid in what they thought was terrorists attacks.

It was the government’s contention that Hernández knew in advance about a Cuban government plan to shoot down the planes, that the plan was an illegal one by virtue of the charge that Cuba intended to shoot the planes down in international airspace – not Cuban airspace – and that Hernández agreed to help with that plan. Hernández’s case, along with those of his compatriots, was appealed. In 2005, a three judge appellate panel unanimously HYPERLINK “http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/upload/telechargements/49.pdf”reversed all the convictions due to community prejudice and the failure of the trial court to move the trial out of Miami. In the meantime, in the desolate high desert of California,

Hernández continues to be an active advocate in his own case and that of rest of the Five. This sometimes leads to peculiar resentments on the part of his jailers. “You get too much mail,” he is told, and in the upside-down logic of the federal prison system, the solution is to hold his mail captive on occasion until the excess becomes an avalanche. He continues to endure extra-judicial punishments such as the denial of a visa, 13 years running, for his wife to visit him. He is denied email access which, in contrast, is granted to hardened, proven violent offenders incarcerated in the same facility. Last summer he was suddenly, inexplicably, thrown into the prison “hole” and some weeks later, following an international outcry, released.

Regardless of whether Hernández is ultimately granted his right to due process through a new trial, he guards an undiminished sense of optimism, tempered with realism. Of the multitude of efforts to obtain his freedom he says, “It’s like water on a rock.” And even the hardest rocks give way over time.

The Habeas corpus appeal of Gerardo Hernandez, one of the Cuban five
Author: Leonard Weinglass
Publication: Tlaxaca, 01/19/2011
Url: HYPERLINK “http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=3345″http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=3345

Student: Sean Lawrence
Evaluator: Melissa Costa, MASimilar Posts:

From Snowstorms to Heat Waves, How Global Warming Causes Extreme Weather and Climate Instability and More Disease & Cal. Congressman Waxman Rails Against Koch’s Influence on Climate Change Efforts

admin — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:31:03 +0000

Talk about the fox guarding the hen house: The same U.S. fossil fuel energy companies that have been prosecuted for violating the Clean Air Act are orchestrating the country’s environmental policy and/or spreading disinformation about greenhouse gases. This leads to more frequent extreme weather events, larger, more favorable conditions for pests and pathogens, and in turn, increases rates for disease such as asthma, heart disease, malaria, Lyme, dengue fever and outbreaks from E. coli and Cryptosporidium to name just a few.

Big coal and oil are the largest greenhouse gas culprits in the U.S. Lobbyists have been successful in defeating attempts to close a loophole that allows many aging US coal-fired power plants to operate as if the Clean Air Act doesn’t exist for some emissions. Some, such as Midwest Generation, which is being sued by the federal government for violating the Clean Air Act, are in court trying to keep their “grandfathered” status. Koch Industries, run by billionaire oil barons who have spent millions to remove government oversight and deny climate change, plead guilty in 2001 to covering up Clean Air Act violations after releasing at least 91 metric tons of benzene, a carcinogen.

The U.S accounts for 4.5 percent of the world’s population but leaves the largest global carbon footprint, even behind more densely populated China and India.
The average age of the approximately 500 coal plants in the US is 40 years and many of the U.S. coal-fired power plants are operating as if the Clean Air Act didn’t exist for some deadly emissions as they are “grandfathered in” that exempt them from modern pollution standards.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) tried to address this situation in 2001 and 2005 but lobbyists were successful in killing his attempts to close the loophole, despite Harvard University studies linking their elevated emissions to thousands of pre-mature deaths, asthma attacks and other ill health effects.

Uber-rich billionaire oil barons David and Charles Koch have spent millions to remove government oversight and deny climate change by funding think tanks such as the libertarian Cato Institute, corporate-chummy politicians, Smithsonian Museum exhibits and even junkets for judges. Their Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries has an environmental crime record in Texas that besides the benzene episode include a 1999 guilty jury decision in a deadly butane pipeline explosion that killed two teenagers.

Source: Democracy Now, December 28, 2010
Title: From Snowstorms to Heat Waves, How Global Warming Causes Extreme Weather and Climate Instability
URL: HYPERLINK “http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/28/from_snowstorms_to_heat_waves_how” http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/28/from_snowstorms_to_heat_waves_how

&
Source: Grist.org March 7, 2011
Title: Waxman rails against Koch’s influence on climate change efforts
URL: http://www.grist.org/climate-skeptics/2011-03-07-waxman-rails-against-kochs-influence-on-climate-change-efforts

Student Researchers: John Dickow, Robert Larson and Tianyuan Ma, DePaul University
Faculty Evaluator: Marla Donato, DePaul UniversitySimilar Posts:

CIA Murderer Release for $2.3 Million

admin — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 22:25:42 +0000

Raymond Davis, a former Blackwater contractor, who was employed by the CIA in Pakistan, was arrested for the killing of two Pakistani citizens in Lahore on January 27, 2011. One of the men was shot in the back as he was running away. The US government first claimed that Davis was protected by diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Conventions. On Friday, US officials paid the two victims’ families a reported $2.3 million and Davis was released less than seven weeks after he went to jail.

Consider the case of Shane Bauer, a freelance journalist that worked to expose US funding of death squads in Iraq. On July 31, 2009, he was arrested by Iranian border guards while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan. Almost 20 months later, he is still a prisoner in Iran, where the US government has barely lifted a finger to help him. The message that the Obama administration sent is loud and clear. If you work for the CIA, the US government will pay your way out of jail even if you are being held on murder charges. But if you are, like Shane Bauers, a US citizen wrongfully accused of being a spy but whose work has exposed the US government’s shame, your case will be no kind of priority.

Read more about the shooting HERE.
Title: ‘Blood Money’ Paid for Raymond Davis, Nothing Done for Shane Bauer

Author: Pratap Chatterjee Source: Commondreams.org 3/17/11

HYPERLINK “http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/17-2″http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/17-2
Student Researcher: Chante Noel

Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Sonoma State UniversitySimilar Posts:

Turning Agriculture From Problem to Solution

admin — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 01:46:55 +0000

After thousands of years of agriculture taking place on China’s Loess Plateau, forests were turned into a dry zone and due to the loss of trees fine yellow soil was left vulnerable to erosion. The erosions filled the rivers with silt and all the flooding resulted in major environmental damage.

However, sixteen years ago, the Chinese government created a project in which the local population constructed silt dams and the planting of fruit trees and grass on slopes to steep for other crops. In addition, locals were paid for their hard work and granted cheap long-term leases on land as it was recovering its viability.

Experts in agriculture are claiming that the farmer delivering a “triple win” with the removal of carbon in soil, to gaining greater resilience to drought and higher temperatures, to the improvement of food security.

In Africa, scientists, researchers, and policy makers should hasten their pace in finding adaption measures because unless action is taken, the impacts of climate change could derail sub-Saharan Africa’s revitalized efforts to change the agricultural sector.

On the much-smaller Humbo Plateau in Ethiopia, smallholders have succeeded in regenerating forest and restoring productivity. Farmers there have adopted new rules for sustainable use of wooded areas – helped by energy-efficient stoves that reduce the demand for fuel wood and charcoal. Alongside nurturing the regrowth of badly degraded woodland, training has allowed locals to diversify into raising livestock and poultry as well as non-farm activities.

The Humbo project is one of the few African Clean Development Mechanism projects, receiving its first $34,000 cheque for carbon stored in its 2,700 hectares of forest in October 2010.

Farmers in Malawi, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Niger and Zambia are also involved in agro-forestry, integrating trees into food crop and livestock systems.

Title: Turning Agriculture From Problem to Solution

Source: IPS, 12/5/10 http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53777

Author: Mantoe Phakathi

Student Researcher: Cassie Petersen, Sonoma State University

Evaluator: Jim Bertoli, 4-H State Climatology Medalist

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Europe Ponders U.S Election Results

admin — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:03:58 +0000

After the recent U.S. presidential election, Europeans praised the selection of Barack Obama but also had speculations from the beginning that the U.S. government would return back toward the Bush-Cheney period. At a conference this past September (2010), many conservative Europeans attended and commented on the most eye-catching observations about America. There was a dominant view that the U.S. has been dealing with the harshness of the recession along with the dilemmas of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the overall inability to “change.” With Obama’s failure at the Copenhagen meeting on climate change along with other struggles, Europeans began questioning what the real American problem was. They determined the problem was more intense and was concerned more with America’s broken political system, which would prevent any leader like Obama, from conveying. With the large amount of venting these conservative Europeans did at the conference, there is no question about how they would have voted if they were allowed to vote in America at the time. However, the results of the election left striking headlines throughout the European media questioning whether or not the American dream was over.

Source: Hill, Steven (2010, Nov 13). “Europe ponders U.S election results,” Commondreams.org, http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/13-3

Student Researcher: Stacey L. Finley

Faculty Evaluator: Dr. Christina M. Knopf Department of English & Communication, SUNY Potsdam

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Feds Warn Residents Near Wyoming Gas Drilling Sites Not To Drink Their Water

admin — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 01:31:20 +0000

Pavillion, Wyoming is a small town where the skies are the blue, the grass is green and the water is contaminated. Pavillion is home to multiple gas drilling sites owned and run by a company called Encana. In 2008, Pavillion residents first began complaining “about foul smells, illness and discolored water.” The government ignored their request to look into it, so the EPA took it into their own hands to investigate. Two years later they finally are beginning to get some results. After extensive testing by the EPA, traces of benzene, metals, naphthalene, phenols and methane have been found in the water. Government officials were told about this and residents expressed concern yet this concern was ignored. Now two years later, the government’s best advice for these residents is to not drink their water, and avoid using fans or any form of ventilation while showering or using water to avoid an explosion. As for Encana, the company responsible for the gas drilling and the contaminated water, there solution to this problem is to supply bottles of water to residents so they do not drink the methane polluted tap.

Source: Lustgarten, Abrahm (2010, Sep 2). “Fed Warn Residents Near Wyoming Gas Drilling Sites Not To Drink Their Water,” CommonDreams.org http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/09/02-1

Student Researcher: Ashlie Klepper

Faculty Evaluator: Eric J Ziegelmayer, PhD

photo from sourceSimilar Posts:

Supplanting the United States Constitution: War, National Emergency and “Continuity of Government”

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:11:40 +0000

In July 1987, during the Iran-Contra Hearings grilling of Oliver North, the American public got a glimpse of “highly sensitive” emergency planning North had been involved in. Ostensibly these were emergency plans to suspend the American constitution in the event of a nuclear attack.

Oliver North was involved with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in plans to take over federal, state and local functions during a national emergency. This planning for “Continuity of Government” (COG) called for “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law.” Two of the key COG planners on the secret committee were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the two men who implemented COG under 9/11.

In other words extraordinary emergency measures, originally designed for an America devastated in a nuclear attack, are now to be applied to anything the White House considered an emergency. Cheney and Rumsfeld continued their secret planning when Clinton was president; both men, both Republicans, were heads of major corporations and not even in the government at that time.

9/11 met the conditions for the imposition of COG measures, and we know for certain that COG planning was instituted on that day in 2001. The 9/11 Report confirms this twice, on pages 38 and 326. It was under the auspices of COG that Bush stayed out of Washington on that day, and other government leaders like Paul Wolfowitz were swiftly evacuated to Site R, inside a hollowed out mountain near Camp David.

What few have recognized is that, nearly a decade later, some aspects of COG remain in effect. COG plans are still authorized by a proclamation of emergency that has been extended each year by presidential authority, most recently by President Obama in September 2009. COG plans are also the probable source for the 1000-page Patriot Act presented to Congress five days after 9/11, and also for the Department of Homeland Security’s Project Endgame — a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone.

The National Emergencies Act says that ,“Not later than six months after a national emergency is declared, and not later than the end of each six-month period thereafter that such emergency continues, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated” Yet in nine years Congress has not once met to discuss the State of Emergency declared by George W. Bush in response to 9/11, a State of Emergency that remains in effect today.

Source:Global Research, May 19, 2010

Author: Peter Dale Scott

URL http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19238

Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Sonoma State UniversitySimilar Posts:

The Poisoning of Puerto Rico

admin — Wed, 12 May 2010 23:22:21 +0000

Mississippi attorney John Arthur Eaves filed a lawsuit in 2007 against the US Government on behalf of more than 7,000 residents of the heavily polluted, Puerto Rican island of Vieques. From 1941 until 2003 the U.S. Navy operated a base here, conducting bombing runs and testing chemical weapons for use in foreign wars, from Vietnam to Yugoslavia to Iraq.

The three-quarters of Vieques’ population listed as plaintiffs in the suit blame the billions of tons of bombs dropped by the Navy on Vieques’ eastern half, and the toxic chemicals released into the water, air and soil during that period, for their physical and psychological illnesses. Viequenses today suffer 30-percent higher cancer rates than other Puerto Ricans, 381-percent higher rates of hypertension, 95-percent higher rates of cirrhosis of the liver and 41-percent higher rates of diabetes. Twenty-five percent more children die during infancy in Vieques than in the rest of Puerto Rico.

Before lawsuit can be heard, however, it must first be approved by the First Circuit Court in Boston after the suit was rejected on April 13, 2010 by federal judge Daniel R. Dominguez, who sits on the U.S. District Court in San Juan. Eaves will officially appeal the case to the First Circuit Court during the summer. But the U.S. Navy has invoked sovereign immunity, a strategy that comes from the monarchic period when kings were immune from being sued. Unless a federal judge in Boston rejects sovereign immunity, no scientific evidence will ever reach the courtroom. In February 2005, the EPA identified Vieques as a Superfund site, which placed the cleanup of hazardous sites in federal hands.

Title: The Poisoning of Puerto Rico

Author: Jacob Wheeler

Source: In These Times, 5/5/10

http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1951/1/

Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Sonoma State UniversitySimilar Posts:

NY Times Missed the Mark on Native American Border Story

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 03:24:24 +0000

The Tohona O’odham native American tribe skirts the border of southwest Arizona and Mexico. The New York Times covering a drug running story failed to tell the real story of the Tohono O’odham human rights issues and the complicity between elected Tohono O’doham officials, tribal police and US Border Patrol agents. News reporter Erik Echholm offered a superficial view of the situation, focusing on cross-border drug trafficking, rather than revealing the real story of on-going human rights abuses.

The US government has spy towers on the Tohono O’odham Nation and continues to arrest Indigenous Peoples. The Tohono O’odham Nation made it a crime for O’odham to offer water or aid to migrants, including Indigenous Peoples, even if they are dying.

Since 9/11, a climate of fear has led the US Border Patrol and tribal police to ignore laws and basic human rights. O’odham are beaten and killed by the US Border Patrol.
Bennett Patricio, Jr., 18, Tohono O’odham, was walking home when he was run over and killed by a US Border Patrol agent. His family believes that he walked upon Border Patrol agents involved in a drug transfer in the predawn hours in the desert and was murdered. Patricio’s family has taken the case all the way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
In federal court, in Bennett Patricio, Jr.’s case, as in the majority of cases filed against US Border Agents who have murdered people of color, injustice prevailed. The Border Agent was not held responsible. (The case files are in Arizona federal courts.)
The Tohono O’odham government is dependent on the US government for funding dollars and does not support the Tohono O’odham people who are abused by the US Border Patrol.

“The US Border Patrol is an occupying army,” says Mike Wilson, Tohono O’odham, who puts out water for migrants at water stations. Wilson points out that non-O’odham have failed to hold the Tohono O’odham Nation, the elected politicians, responsible for crimes against humanity.
The New York Times article fails to describe the abuse by the US Border Patrol when O’odham living along the border cross for family and ceremonial reasons.

New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/us/25border.html

Title: Shame on the New York Times for Fueling Border Misery

Source: Brenda Norrell Blog Spot: 1/25/10

http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/01/shame-on-new-york-times-for-fueling.html

Author: Brenda Norrell

Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips

Sonoma State UniversitySimilar Posts: