Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Chicago Torture, Journalistic Suicide, Imperialism










Illustration:  Kieth Tucker has a new book out and I suppose this amounts to a "plug".  He has been good enough to let us use his cartoons from time to time and they are worth the low price.
Visit him at http://www.whatnowtoons.com
Anyway...



That's quite a title. 

We start with domestic torture and Chicago.  If you grew up in Chicago, you know you don't mess with the police or the mob.  Actually, you'd have a better chance with the mob.  Little Richie did not prosecute this policeman, but let's understand the situation.  First, he failed the Bar Exam at least three times, maybe four.  Rumor is that someone else finally took it for him.  In any case, he knew damn well he wasn't up to a jury trial, especially against the police department.

The the great John Pilger defends Rolling Stone Magazine.  It's been called "counter-culture," and given this culture anything counter to it has to be an improvement.

The last one is on one more of the countries we choose to "Help" overseas.  No wonder we are loved around the world.


Isn't it interesting to hear the term "Gulf Crisis" and know it applies to the Western Hemisphere?

A Nobel Prize in Physics is about as helpful in Oil Well Disasters as a Dickens' novel is in, well, actually less helpful than a Dickens'  novel.


Finally, any Russian spies in your neighborhood?

AMY GOODMAN: Decades after torture allegations were first leveled against the former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, a federal jury has found him guilty of lying about torturing prisoners into making confessions. Burge has long been accused of overseeing the systematic torture of more than a hundred African American men. The police department fired him in 1993 for mistreatment of a suspect, but did not press charges. More than a decade later, Cook County prosecutors looked into the torture allegations and found that although there was evidence to show torture had occurred, the statute of limitations had expired.

Two years ago, federal prosecutors finally brought charges against Burge—not for torture, but for lying about it. On Monday afternoon, after a five-week trial, Jon Burge was found guilty on all counts of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about the abuse. He could face up to forty-five years in prison.

Outside the courthouse, the verdict drew a visibly emotional response from one of the men who had been tortured under Burge, Mark Clements.

      MARK CLEMENTS: These people stole my [bleep] life! I hate to tell you the truth. I sat in a prison cell, and I prayed for this day! Today is a victory for every poor person. I was sixteen years old! This is America! Sixteen years old! What are we going to do about other people who are sitting in those prisons? And I’m sorry if I’m offending anyone, but it’s out!


AMY GOODMAN: This was Mark Clements’s response when reporters asked him how he felt.

      MARK CLEMENTS: Relieved that finally at least one of these people are now going to finally feel the pain. My daughter is twenty-nine years old. I missed all those years with my daughter, sitting in them prison cells for a crime I did not commit. I do not feel sorry for Jon Burge. That’s all I have to say.


AMY GOODMAN: Mark Clements, one of the dozens of men who were tortured under former Chicago police commander Jon Burge.

I’m joined now from Chicago by Flint Taylor, an attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago. He’s represented many of the torture victims.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Your response to the guilty verdict, Flint Taylor?

FLINT TAYLOR: It was a wonderful victory for the African American community and all people here in Chicago who have fought so long and so hard for justice. This fight, as you’ve mentioned, has gone on for decades. It’s a human rights victory that should be understood across the entire country, because here in Chicago we’ve now done something, after thirty years of struggle, that has not happened anywhere else. And that is, we have a conviction of a torturer, a United States torturer. And that is what the lesson needs to be taken by the Obama administration, who seems so leery to prosecute people like Cheney and people under his command for torture abroad by the US. Now we have an example. And actually, it was a Republican prosecutor who did this. So I think that we all across this country should take a lesson from Chicago.

But we’re also saying this struggle has to continue, because there are many men under the command of Jon Burge who are being investigated, who need to be indicted. There are men behind prison bars still who are there because of the torture, by tortured confessions. We need to have a federal statute that says that torture is a crime akin to other human rights violations that has no statute of limitations, so future Burges cannot end up being prosecuted only for perjury and not for the torture that happened. And we need to have full compensation by the city for the men, many of whom have never had or cannot have lawsuits, men who came forward and are the true heroes of this piece and this prosecution, the men who testified against Burge and who were ripped from pillar to post by his lawyer in a very racist way and presented to this jury that it was OK to torture them, it’s OK to torture poor black men who are charged with crimes, who may have been in street gangs.

And this jury, which only had one African American on it, spoke loudly and said no, it’s not right to torture. Doesn’t matter if you’re poor and black and a criminal. And I think the message is, it doesn’t matter if you’re a terrorist either, or an alleged terrorist, that we cannot countenance torture in this country or by this country. And until all people who torture and all those people who are responsible for torturing are brought to justice, the conscience of Chicago and the conscience of this country cannot be cleansed.

AMY GOODMAN: Last month, just as the trial was beginning, I spoke to Darrell Cannon, one of the dozens of men to come forward with allegations of abuse at the hands of the Chicago police. He says police tortured him in 1983 and forced him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. He spent more than twenty years in prison. But after a hearing on his tortured confession, prosecutors dismissed his case in 2004. Now he’s suing Chicago for wrongful conviction. In this clip, he’s describing the torture he was subjected to by the Chicago police under Jon Burge’s command.

      DARRELL CANNON: By them not being successful in getting what they wanted out of me, they then did a third treatment, which was they put me in the backseat of a detective car. They unhandcuffed my cuffs from behind, put them in front. John Byrne had a gun to my head and told me, "Don’t move," when they redid the handcuffs. They put me sideways in the backseat of a detective car and made me lay down across the seat. They pulled my pants and my shorts down, and that’s when Byrne took an electric cattle prod, turned it on, and proceeded to shock me on my testicles. They did this what seems like forever with me, but it wasn’t that long. At one point, I was able to kick the cattle prod out of the detective’s hands, and that knocked the batteries out. He got the batteries, put them back in. One of them tried to take his feet and put it on top of one of my feet, the other one did the same thing, to stop me from kicking. Then this is when they started using the electric cattle prod on me again, while telling me that they knew that I wasn’t the one they wanted, but I had information that could lead them to the other person that they wanted. They continued to do this until finally I agreed to tell them anything they wanted to hear. Anything. It didn’t matter to me. You know, if they said, "Did your mother do it?" "Yes, yes, yes." Because the diabolical treatment that I received was such that I had never in my life experienced anything like this. I didn’t even know anything like this here existed in the United States.


AMY GOODMAN: I also want to turn to an interview I did in 2006 with David Bates, who says he was tortured by men under Burge’s command. This is how he described what happened to him.

      DAVID BATES: I believe it was October the 28th or 29th of 1983, when a few officers knocked on my mom’s door and announced that they were police officers and let my mom know that I’ll be taken away and that I’ll be coming home shortly. There were supposed to be some questions regarding a case. Of course, I got to the police station. I was questioned. I let the officers or detectives know that I had nothing to do with the case. I knew nothing. This went on for two days.

      At that time, it was five sessions of torture, starting with two with slaps and kicks and threats. It was two particular sessions of torture that was very devastating, in which a plastic bag was placed over my head. I was punched and kicked. And I’ll tell you, when you talk about torture, you’re talking about individuals who, most part, were young, had a few brushes with the law, but never in a million years thought that they would have a plastic bag placed over their head.

      More importantly, the torture has never been resolved. No one has ever owned up to the torture. So we have hundreds of individuals who have psychologically been warped, been destroyed. There’s never been any clinical resolution to the torture. No one has owned up to it.


AMY GOODMAN: That was [David Bates]. We talked to him in 2006. Flint Taylor, how is it possible that we’re talking perjury here and not actual torture?

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, it goes right back to the mayor of the city of Chicago, Richard Daley. Back in the early '80s, when this torture first came to light and the doctor from the jail brought definitive evidence to the chief of police, who then brought it to Daley, who was the chief prosecutor at that time, Daley chose not to prosecute Burge, but rather continued to use Burge as a key witness in the prosecution of the person who was tortured. That went on for six or eight years after that, while Daley was the prosecutor. And Darrell Cannon's case arose during that time. David Bates’s case arose during that time. And scores of others were tortured. If those men—those men never would have been tortured if Daley had acted back in 1982 and prosecuted Burge for torture, rather than for obstruction of justice. Since he did not do that, and since the Justice Department, under Reagan, first Reagan, later Bush I, then Clinton, and then Bush II, none of those Justice Departments listened to the movement’s pleas to prosecute Burge for torture when the statute had not run. So the statute was gone by the time that Fitzgerald, the prosecutor who did indict him, after decades of struggle and decades of fighting by the people that were fighting for justice, did indict him. All that was left was his lying in lawsuits that we had brought, that he had lied about torturing people, that he obstructed justice by lying about torturing people. That’s all he could be charged with now.

That’s why we need a federal stature that not only makes police torture a federal crime, but says no statute of limitations. If you cover it up, you can be prosecuted ten, twenty, thirty years later, because these crimes against humanity, this is like the prosecutions in the South of the Klansmen who blew up the church and killed the little children. No matter how long it takes, how many decades, you have to prosecute these people for what they did. In David Bates and Darrell Cannon’s case, they were both prosecuted by John Byrne and Peter Dignan, the two right-hand men of Burge. They have to be prosecuted, as well. There’s an open investigation, and we’re now calling for them to be indicted and to be prosecuted. And the entire political structure here is in question. And the mayor has still been—is silent at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: Mayor Daley.

FLINT TAYLOR: But the money that the city of Chicago has paid has to be stopped, for defending Burge and his men.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking Mayor Daley.

FLINT TAYLOR: Yeah, of course. The city has paid, and still pays, tens of millions of dollars for pensions for these men. They’ve paid over $10 million to defend the cases in civil courts. They’re still paying for defense of Burge in the civil courts. The Fraternal Order of Police has paid millions of dollars to defend Burge in the criminal cases. So the city is still on the wrong side of this issue after all these years. And one man who testified, Melvin Jones, is homeless. He never has gotten a nickel over all these years, yet he’s come forward and testified. The city has to make these people whole. Just because they don’t have a lawsuit that they can bring, there has to be compensation. There has to be treatment offered to these men. There are over 110 men who have been tortured. That’s been documented. So this jury only heard it from a few of them. There are many others that are still behind bars. All of these issues remain unresolved in the city. And so, the conscience of the city and justice in the city cannot be obtained until all of these issues are dealt with. And that’s why people rejoice in this verdict, but that we know that how many more years, or decades, hopefully not, however much longer it takes, we have to get full justice in these cases and make sure that this kind of thing cannot and does not happen again.

AMY GOODMAN: Flint Taylor, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Flint Taylor, the attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago. By the way, that last clip was David Bates, who I interviewed in 2006.

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Journalists


AMY GOODMAN: It’s been a week since Rolling Stone published its article on General Stanley McChrystal that eventually led to him being fired by President Obama. In a piece called "The Runaway General," McChrystal and his top aides openly criticized the President and mocked several top officials. Joe Biden is nicknamed "Bite me." National Security Adviser General James Jones is described as a "clown." Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is called a "wounded animal."

Since the article came out, Rolling Stone and the reporter who broke the story, Michael Hastings, have come under attack in the mainstream media for violating the so-called "ground rules" of journalism. New York Times columnist David Brooks penned a column attacking Hastings for being a, quote, "product of the culture of exposure." Brooks wrote, quote, "The reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority." He goes on to write, "The exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important," he said.

On Fox News, Geraldo Rivera attacked Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings for publishing quotes McChrystal and his aides made at a bar.

    GERALDO RIVERA: This is a situation where you have to put it in the context of war and warriors and honor and the penumbra of privacy that is presumed when it’s not on the record specifically. When you’re hanging out at a bar waiting for a plane or a train or an automobile and you’re stuck together hours and hours, and you’re drinking in a bar, or you’re at an airport lounge, this is not an interview context. These guys, particularly the staffers who gave the most damning statements about the civilians in office, including the Vice President of the United States, these guys had no idea that they were being interviewed by this guy. BILL O’REILLY: I’m not sure about that, Geraldo. GERALDO RIVERA: This reporter—wait, hold on, Bill. BILL O’REILLY: I’m not sure about that. GERALDO RIVERA: This reporter from Rolling Stone, he was a rat in an eagle’s nest.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Fox News. But other mainstream media outlets have also attacked Michael Hastings for writing the story. This is Lara Logan, the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, being interviewed by Howard Kurtz on CNN.

    HOWARD KURTZ: If you had been traveling with General McChrystal and heard these comments about Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jim Jones, Richard Holbrooke, would you have reported them? LARA LOGAN: Well, it really depends on the circumstances. It’s hard to know here. Michael Hastings, if you believe him, says that there were no ground rules laid out. And, I mean, that just doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, because if you look at the people around General McChrystal, if you look at his history, he was the Joint Special Operations commander. He has a history of not interacting with the media at all. And his chief of intelligence, Mike Flynn, is the same. I mean, I know these people. They never let their guard down like that. To me, something doesn’t add up here. I just—I don’t believe it. HOWARD KURTZ: Washington Post quoted an unnamed senior military official as saying that Michael Hastings broke the off-the-record ground rules. But the person who said this was on background and wouldn’t allow his name to be used. Is that fair? LARA LOGAN: Well, it’s Kryptonite right now. I mean, do you blame him? The commanding general in Afghanistan just lost his job. Who else is going to lose his job? Believe me, all the senior leadership in Afghanistan are waiting for the ax to fall. I’ve been speaking to some of them. They don’t know who’s going to stay and who’s going to go. I mean, just the question is, really, is what General McChrystal and his aides are doing so egregious that they deserved to—I mean, to end a career like McChrystal’s? I mean, Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Lara Logan, the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, being interviewed on CNN. Meanwhile, both the Washington Post and ABC have published articles quoting anonymous military sources attacking Hastings’s Rolling Stone article.

For more on the story, we’re joined by the award-winning investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker John Pilger, began his career in journalism, oh, nearly half a century ago and has written close to a dozen books and made over fifty documentaries. He lives in London but is in the United States working on a forthcoming documentary about what he calls "the war on the media." It’s called The War You Don’t See.

We welcome John Pilger to Democracy Now! John, welcome. Talk about the war you don’t see.

JOHN PILGER: Well, the war you don’t see is expressed eloquently by the New York Times, that range of extraordinary media apologists that we’ve just seen. The reason we don’t see the war on civilians, the war that has caused the most extraordinary devastation, human and cultural and structural devastation in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is because of what is almost laughingly called the mainstream media. The one apology, not these apologies that we’ve seen this morning from Fox to CBS, right across the spectrum, to the New York Times this morning, the real apology that counted was the New York Times when it apologized to its readers for not showing us the war in—or the reasons that led up, rather, to the invasion of Iraq that produced this horrific war. I mean, these people now have become so embedded with the establishment, so embedded with authority, they’re what Brecht called the spokesmen of the spokesmen. They’re not journalists.

Brooks writes about a "culture of exposure." Excuse me, isn’t that journalism? Are we so distant from what journalism ought to be, not simply an echo chamber for authority, that somebody in the New York Times can attack a journalist who’s done his job? Hastings did a wonderful job. He caught out McChrystal, as he should have done. That’s his job. In a country where the media is constitutionally freer, nominally, than any other country on earth, the disgrace of the recent carnage in the Middle East and in Afghanistan is largely down to the fact that the media didn’t alert us. It didn’t report it. It didn’t question. It simply amplified and echoed authority. Hastings has proved—God bless him—that journalists still exist.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting to read the first paragraph of Hastings’s piece. He talks about, yes, this group in a French bar—and, by the way, Rolling Stone said, you should see what we didn’t print, because in fact there were things they said that were off the record. But to say that Hastings violated the off-the-record rule, they said, was not the case. There was many things we didn’t print. But right after they talked about the French—he talked about the French bar and McChrystal and his high officials in the bar, his aides, you know, dancing and singing the words "Afghanistan, Afghanistan," Hastings writes, "opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany’s president [and] sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him." But this is something most people in this country don’t know, that the US, despite the US-led coalition, the NATO troops, is very much almost going this alone.

JOHN PILGER: Yes, it’s going it alone in terms of the American people. And what journalism, like Hastings, does is represent the American people. A majority of the American people are now opposed to this colonial debacle in Afghanistan. I mean, I was very interested to read what President Obama said about Afghanistan, if I can find it. Yes, here it is. On February the 10th, 2007, quote, "It’s time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement [that lies] at the heart of someone else’s civil war," unquote. That’s what President Obama said before he became president. And unless the people of the United States, like the people of Europe, like most peoples in the world, understand that, that this is a long-running civil war, that it needs the kind of sympathy, if you like, for the people of Afghanistan—it certainly doesn’t need this brutal imposition of a colonial force there.

Now, that happens to be a truth that the likes of Michael Hastings and others are expressing. But it’s also a forbidden truth. And the moment you even glimpse that truth in the United States, the kind of barrage that—the grotesque sort of cartoon barrage of Fox, right up to the rather sneering barrage that comes from the New York Times, through to CBS and so on, the barrage against truth tellers becomes—Amy, we’re dependent now on the few Hastings, but also on whistleblowers. The most important exposé was the Wikileaks exposé of the Apache attack on those journalists and children in Iraq. And here they are prosecuting the whistleblower, when in fact those responsible should be prosecuted. But that’s verboten now.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to encourage people to go to our website at democracynow.org. We interviewed Julian Assange, who’s on the run now, afraid that he will be picked, that he will be arrested. He’s the founder of Wikileaks, and we played that 2007 video that someone within the military gave to Wikileaks, to Assange, to show the killing of civilians on the ground in Iraq. Astounding.

I wanted to go back to this comment of the CBS correspondent, of Lara Logan, who says, "Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has." This is the reporter. You say that the media is not covering the war; it’s promoting the war.

JOHN PILGER: Michael Hastings is serving his country. This country tells the rest of the world about its magnificent beginning, about its magnificent Constitution, about its magnificent freedoms. At the heart of those freedoms is the freedom of speech and the freedom of journalism. That is serving your country. That is serving humanity. The idea that you only serve your country by being part of a rapacious colonial force—and, you know, I’m not speaking rhetorically here. That’s what is happening in Afghanistan. This is a civil war in which European and American forces have intervened. And we get a glimpse of that through the likes of the Hastings article. I really call on journalists, young journalists, to be inspired, if you like, by this Rolling Stone article, not to be put off by the apologists, not to be put off by those who serve their country embedded in the Green Zone in Baghdad, but to see journalism as something that is about truth telling and represents people and does serve one’s country.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting you say this, as up in Toronto—we just came from Toronto yesterday—well, hundreds of people and a number of journalists have been beaten and arrested—

JOHN PILGER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —as they try to cover what’s happening on the streets, the protests around the G8/G20 meetings, as they talk about protecting banks and promoting war—

JOHN PILGER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —in the summits.

JOHN PILGER: Yeah. Well, there is a war on journalism. There’s long been a war on journalism. Journalism has always been—I mean, if you read, let’s say, General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual, which he put his name to in 2006, he makes it very clear. He said we’re fighting wars of perception—and I paraphrase him—in which the news media is a major component. So, unless the news media is part of those wars of perception—that is, that not so much the enemy that is our objective; it’s the people at home—then, you know, they’re out. They’re part of—they can easily become part of the enemy. And as we’ve seen in the numbers of journalists who have been killed in Iraq—more journalists have been killed in Iraq, mostly Iraqi journalists, than in any other war in the modern era—there is a war on this kind of truth telling. And we’re seeing this—another form of this attack on truth telling by the likes of Fox and CBS and New York Times this morning. It embarrasses them. What Hastings has done deeply embarrasses these apologists.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, interestingly, it was Hastings himself that exposed the mainstream media. Just quoting from Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, as Barrett Brown notes in Vanity Fair, "Hastings in 2008 did to the establishment media what he did to Gen. McChrystal—[he] exposed what they do and how they think by writing the truth—after he quite Newsweek (where he was the Baghdad correspondent) and wrote a damning exposé about how the media distorts war coverage. As Brown put it: 'Hastings ensured that he would never be trusted by the establishment media ever again.'"

JOHN PILGER: What a wonderful accolade! My goodness! That’s a tremendous honor for him to bear.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we wrap up, I want to ask you about the coverage of the Gaza aid flotilla that was attacked by the Israeli commandos. You’ve come in from Britain to the United States—

JOHN PILGER: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —to do this piece on the media.

JOHN PILGER: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Your assessment of the media’s coverage?

JOHN PILGER: Well, it’s very different. I mean, there was—I think things—I think the perception of Israel and Palestine has changed quite significantly in Europe, and there was horror at the murder of these people on the Turkish ship. And there was quick understanding, I felt, that how the Israelis manipulated the footage in order to suggest that the victims were actually assaulting those who attacked the flotilla.

The coverage here has been bathed in the usual euphemisms about Israel. It’s always put into the passive voice. Israel really—the Israeli commandos never really killed anybody; it was a tragic event in which people died, and so on and so forth.

Having said that, I must say, Amy, since I’ve been in the United States, I see a—there’s a shift that is in—both politically, but certainly in the media. Since Lebanon, since Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006, since the attack on Gaza, Christmas 2008 and early 2009, and now this assault on the flotilla, Israel can’t be covered up. It can’t be apologized for as effectively anymore. And even in the New York Times, which has always been a stalwart in supporting the Israeli regime, the language is changing. And I think this again reflects a popular understanding and a popular disenchantment with the Middle East and the United States role in the Middle East, the apologies for one atrocity after the other, the lack of justice for the people in Palestine. So, I don’t know whether I’m being optimistic or not, but there is a change. And where that change is going to, I don’t know.

AMY GOODMAN: Are there any other key stories that you feel the media is missing or distorting?

JOHN PILGER: Well, I mean, one of the key stories is the devastation, the economic devastation, in people’s lives, that it seems to me extraordinary. And this is true in Britain, as it is in the United States, that ordinary people have suffered since the collapse in September 2008 of significant parts of Wall Street, since the bubble burst. The idea that a president was elected as a man of the people—at least that’s the way he presented himself—is still, I think, promoted by the media, whereas Obama has made clear that he has very much reinforced Wall Street, he has helped to rebuild Wall Street, his whole team is from Wall Street. He’s reached into Goldman Sachs for his senior people. I think that that anger that I’ve felt in the United States over the last few years, that anger at a popular level, is still not expressed in the so-called mainstream media. I remember in the last year of George W. Bush, someone said that in one day 26,000 emails bombarded the White House, and almost all of them were hostile. That suggests to me a popular anger in this country that is often deflected into—down into cul-de-sacs, like the Tea Party movement. But the root of that anger—and that is a social injustice in people’s lives, in the repossession of houses, the loss of jobs, a rather weak reform, if it is a reform, of the scandalous healthcare arrangements, none of these—this popular disenchantment, disaffection, is not expressed in the media.

AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, I want to thank you very much for being with us. John Pilger here in the United States doing a film, The War You Don’t See, as he covers the media’s coverage of war. He’s an award-winning investigative journalist and filmmaker. Thank you so much.

Creative Commons License The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Tomorrow marks the fiftieth anniversary of Congolese independence from colonial Belgian rule. On June 30th, 1960, the new prime minister of the independent Congolese government, Patrice Lumumba, declared an end to the slavery of colonialism and a new beginning for the country and the liberation of the entire continent of Africa.

But today jubilee independence celebrations in the Democratic Republic of Congo are marred by ongoing violence and increasing political repression, in particular the recent murder of Congo’s leading human rights activist Floribert Chebeya. He was found dead in his car earlier this month, a day after being called to meet the national police chief. The Joseph Kabila government has announced several investigations and suspended the police chief, but no charges have been filed, and the cause of Chebeya’s death remains unknown.

Meanwhile, repression is on the rise in neighboring Rwanda, as well, ahead of the scheduled elections this August, which incumbent President Paul Kagame is widely expected to win. Two opposition leaders have been arrested. Dozens of opposition party members have been detained. Last week a critical journalist was murdered, a case in which Rwandan authorities deny any involvement.

American attorney and law professor, Peter Erlinder, was also arrested in Rwanda last month, and he was held for nearly three weeks and released on health grounds. Peter Erlinder is a lawyer at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. He was jailed shortly after arriving in Rwanda to help with the legal defense of an opposition presidential candidate charged with “genocide ideology.” Erlinder himself stands accused of violating laws barring the denial of the Rwandan genocide. We turn now to Peter Erlinder, who joins us from the Twin Cities, from Minneapolis.

Peter, welcome to Democracy Now! How are you felling? What happened to you?

PETER ERLINDER: Good morning, Ms. Goodman. Of course, I’m feeling much better now that I’m out of detention, but it strikes me that the earlier piece with Pilger is actually an introduction to this piece, because the reality is that most people in the United States don’t know about the US support for the Kagame dictatorship or the US responsibility for about ten million deaths in the eastern Congo, most of which have been the result of the invasions of the Congo by Rwanda and Uganda in the 1990s and the continued occupation of the Congo today. There’s been a massive disservice done to the American people regarding the truth of their government’s involvement in Central Africa. And unfortunately, until we’re able to find the documents in the UN files that tell the other story, the entire world has been misled with respect to what happened in Rwanda in 1994.

AMY GOODMAN: Why were you arrested? Peter Erlinder, why were you arrested?

PETER ERLINDER: Well, you’ll have to ask that of the Rwandan government, wouldn’t you? I was having breakfast and a croissant, finishing a document that I was working on for my client, and six large men surrounded me and took me away from the hotel. As to why that happened, I suspect that only the Rwandan leaders know.

AMY GOODMAN: They claim that you tried to commit suicide. Is that true?

PETER ERLINDER: Well, it seems to me that there are so many more important issues to talk about, like the ten million people that have been killed in the Congo. The state of my health and getting through that issue, it seems—or that circumstance, seems to me to be not the most important question to talk about. And because it was necessary for me to go public in court, with all of the various ills that I have as a guy who’s getting older, I think I’ve made a complete record of all that up until now, and I’m not talking about that in the media. I’d rather talk about the conditions of the US support for the military dictatorships in Central Africa, which I think is the much larger question.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don’t you talk about who you were representing there and what is the situation in Rwanda today—

PETER ERLINDER: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: —and as it relates to Congo, as well.

PETER ERLINDER: OK, thanks a lot. Yeah, I went there to represent Madame Victoire Ingabire, who had left Rwanda before 1994 to study in Europe. She returned at the beginning of this year with the idea of running for the presidency against the current president, Paul Kagame. Within a few hours after she arrived in Kigali, she went to the memorial for the Tutsis who were killed in the genocide, and she raised the question as to why it was that there were only Tutsis that were memorialized, when even the government says that moderate Hutus and Tutsis were the victims. And based on her questioning of the Tutsi being the only victims, she herself was charged with genocide ideology.

When I arrived in Rwanda, she had been charged. And I went there to consult with her to see if there was anything I could do. And five days later, I was arrested myself, based on, we later found out, my writings, written in the United States that were published on the web in English, which is both a medium that most Rwandans don’t have access to and a language that they don’t understand. It would have to be translated into Kinyarwandan in order for the ordinary Kinyarwandan to—only ordinary Rwandan to know what my articles were about at all.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined from Washington, DC by the Congolese pro-democracy activist Alafuele Kalala, who ran for president in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! on this eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of the Democratic Republic of Congo under Patrice Lumumba. Your thoughts today about where your country is?

ALAFUELE KALALA: That’s a very—thank you. It’s a very difficult question. I think that the country is nowhere. It’s completely destroyed. In fact, it’s a nightmare for most Congolese, and they don’t know what fifty years of independence, formal independence, I should say, means. So, people are suffering. The country is completely bankrupted, at all levels. I say it’s a quintuple bankruptcy: political, economic, social, military, cultural. So, the country is nowhere. It’s completely destroyed. That’s what I can say in a few words.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the death of the human rights activist Floribert Chebeya?

ALAFUELE KALALA: Yeah, as I said it in my—just to summarize how I view it, it’s that this is a horrible murder that reveals the nature of the regime. It was shocking, but I was not surprised, because a couple of months ago I spoke with someone close to the Congolese government who told me, making a comparison between the Mobutu regime and the Kabila regime in the way they were treating human rights activists or human rights pro-democracy movement in the Congo. He said, during the Mobutu years, Mobutu was very cautious with human rights activists. Here we are dealing with people who don’t care, who arrest, torture and even kill pro-democracy activists and human rights activists. So that was told to me just a couple of months ago. And when this happened, I was shocked, but I was not surprised.

In fact, they tried to send a shockwave throughout the Congolese community, the Congolese society, in general, because if they can kill a leading human rights activist, a standing, leading human rights activist, respected in the world, what can they do of ordinary Congolese? And they are trying to frighten the human rights activists in the Congo not to take the ordinary tough stand against them.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, there—

ALAFUELE KALALA: So it’s a sad day for Congelese and for the world, I should say.

AMY GOODMAN: Eve Ensler and other women’s rights activists have been trying to shine the spotlight on what’s been happening in the eastern Congo, the massive number of rapes by soldiers and others there. People hear, and they think, what can we do? It’s so far away. Can you talk about the US role in the Democratic Republic of Congo?

ALAFUELE KALALA: Yeah. I should say, the past, the present and the future. What is happening in the Congo now, I summarize it saying that it’s fifty years of American foreign policy at work. The Americans played a role in the assassination of Lumumba; it’s a secret for no one. They put Mobutu in power and supported him unconditionally, allowing him to destroy an otherwise wealthy country. They knew everything that was happening. I would refer, if I had some time, to an editorial that Jim Hoagland put in the Washington Post in 1993 saying briefly that successive American administration knew everything that Mobutu was doing in the Congo, but they considered it to be a small Cold War tax on Zairians, as it was called at that time. So now, I am—OK, that was explained with the Cold War. I don’t think that it’s a complete explanation of the American role in the Congo. In my opinion, it shows the power and the influence of mining companies on the American foreign policy in the Congo, in particular.

Unfortunately, I thought that after the Cold War, the American administration was going to amend its act and allow the people of the Congo to chart a new course. Unfortunately, in the 2006 elections, they imposed—they worked with other Western countries to impose Kabila on the Congo. It was a sham election. And now we are witnessing a total collapse, deliquency of the country, because we are dealing with a widespread corruption on top of the violence that they use against even ordinary people, political activists, human rights activists. So, so far, to date, the US administration has—

AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds.

ALAFUELE KALALA: —played a negative role in the Congo. Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have—

ALAFUELE KALALA: They also supported Rwanda in its invasion of Congo. So, so far, it has been a totally negative role in the Congo.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we will continue the discussion. Alafuele Kalala, Congolese pro-democracy activist, former presidential candidate in Democratic Republic of Congo, and Peter Erlinder, thank you so much.

Creative Commons License The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.


Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Gaza and a New Source




One of you sent this to me.  The information is a bit dated right now, but correct nonetheless.  Most important, it is a new source.  In our next issue we will talk about what has happened with domestic torture, the attack on journalism by "journalists," and the attorney who spent some time in an African prison without his medications.


45 Flotilla Activists Released from Israeli Detention

author Wednesday June 02, 2010 01:25author by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC & Agencies
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced, Tuesday, that Israel will release and deport the 620 peace activists who were arrested after Israel's violent raid on the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla. Several of the detainees, all of whom signed voluntary deportation orders, were deported to their country of origin Tuesday. Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American activist, was beaten and left on the side of a road in Israel.
Sheikh Raed Salah At the Malke-Shift Israeli Prison
18 lawyers met with 240 of the detained flotilla activists in Ela Prison in Be'er Sheva Tuesday.

Because of the Israeli government's censure of communication with the detained activists, the exact number of those killed, and their names and nationalities, is still unknown. Estimates lists between nine and 19 activists are killed and as many as 60 injured Monday's violent raid.

Ynet News reported that Netanyahu made the decision to release the activists after a meeting with his National Security Cabinet and consultations with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Justice Minister Yaakov Na’eman, and Interior Minister Eli Yishai.

The decision was made in the face of increasing international pressure and outrage against the deadly attack on the Flotilla.

The move was considered as an act of political damage control affected by the international outrage and condemnations.

Most of the will be deported via the Ben-Gurion Airport.

The Israeli Interior Ministry said that nearly 124 Arab detainees will be deported to Jordan. 45 other activists have already been deported.

According to Israeli media sources, the decision was not unanimous and some ministers said that Turkey should not be allowed to send its planes to transport the injured to Istanbul, while several other ministers argued that forcing the planes to return empty would cause further tension.

Yitzhak Aharonovitch, Israel's Minister of Internal Security, demanded that Israel not release any activists who "attacked Israeli soldiers".

He said that Israel must imprison and prosecute 15% of the 620 detained Flotilla activists.
At his urging, the Israeli cabinet agreed to prosecute those who “appeared to attack the soldiers in the video footage.”

In related news, the White House expressed support for the UN Security Council resolution to conduct an investigation into the attack against the ship, and that this investigation should include international participation.

However, the United States did not issue any statement condemning the Israeli Army for the deadly attack.

According to a list published by the Israeli Interior Minister, the activists are from the following countries:

Australia, 3, Azerbaijan, 2, Ireland, 9, Indonesia, 12, Algeria, 28, Italy, 5, Ireland, 9, Bosnia, 1, United States, 11, Bulgaria, 2, Belgium, 5, Bahrain, 4, South Africa, 1, United Kingdom, 31, Holland, 2, Germany, 11, Yemen, 4, Macedonia, 3,Greece, 38, Kuwait, 15, Jordan, 30, Malaysia, 11, Mauritania, 3, Lebanon 3, Egypt, 3, Syria, 3, Morocco, 7, Norway, 3, Pakistan, 3, Kosovo, 1, Serbia, 1, New Zealand, 1, Pakistan, 3, Oman, 1, France 4, Sweden, 11, Canada, 1, Czech Republic, 4, Turkey, 380.

The bodies of the activists who were killed by the Israeli army are still at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine, Ynet reported. The bodies have not yet been identified.
category israel | gaza siege | news report author  email saed at imemc dot org

Monday, June 21, 2010

Chavez

Here is an interview with Oliver Stone and Tarik Ali.  It contains, additionally, some more information about the killing of JFK (Kennedy).  

South America is now leading the way to self-determination.  At the end are some remarks from Ali that show Obama the same as Bush.  It seems likely that the Kennedy killing is the reason no American President since has made any sense. 


JUAN GONZALEZ: Today we spend the hour south of the border on the political changes that are sweeping across South America.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone has taken on three American presidents in JFK, Nixon and W. A Vietnam War veteran, he was decorated with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. As a filmmaker, he’s tackled the most controversial aspects of the war in his classics Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. He looked at the greed of the financial industry in the Hollywood hit Wall Street, and the sequel, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last month.

Well, now the acclaimed director of films like Salvador, Comandante and Looking for Fidel, returns to Latin America. In his latest film, releasing this week in the United States, Oliver Stone takes a road trip across South America, meeting with seven presidents from the continent. Here’s the trailer. It includes Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Argentine president Cristina Kirchner and her husband, former president Néstor Kirchner, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa.

    OLIVER STONE: Who is Hugo Chávez? Some believe he is the enemy JOHN ROBERTS, CNN: He’s more dangerous than bin Laden. And the effects of Chávez’s war against America could eclipse those of 9/11. OLIVER STONE: Some believe he is the answer. MAN ON THE STREET 1: [translated] I am with you, Chávez. MAN ON THE STREET 2: [translated] Hello, President. OLIVER STONE: But no matter what you believe, in South America he is just the beginning. GEORGE TENET: Venezuela is important because they’re the third largest supplier of petroleum. PRESIDENT HUGO CHÁVEZ: [translated] Bush made a plan: first, Chávez, oil; second, Saddam, Iraq, oil. PRESIDENT CRISTINA KIRCHNER: [translated] For the first time in the region, the leaders look like the people they govern. If you go to Bolivia and look at the face of Evo, the face of Evo is the face of a Bolivian. OLIVER STONE: Could we say the goal of presidents of the region would be to own their own natural resources? PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] The only thing I want is to be treated as equals. I personally have no interest in fighting with the United States. OLIVER STONE: Rafael Correa is now being cast as one of the bad left. PRESIDENT RAFAEL CORREA: [translated] With all due respect, knowing the North American media, I would be more worried if they spoke well of me. REPORTER: Today, the Argentinian president, with concern about US trade policy, seemed in no hurry to embrace his American counterpart. NÉSTOR KIRCHNER: [translated] Bush told me the best way to revitalize the economy is war and that the United States has grown stronger with war. Those were his exact words. NARRATOR: This summer, take an incredible look at an extraordinary movement. PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] For the first time, the poor are treated like human beings. PRESIDENT HUGO CHÁVEZ: [translated] And perhaps this is one of the things that keeps us going—the optimism, faith and hope, and the concrete evidence that we can change the course of history. It’s possible, Oliver. NARRATOR: South of the Border. OLIVER STONE: I’m just curious. How many sets of shoes do you have? PRESIDENT CRISTINA KIRCHNER: [translated] They always ask questions like this to women. I don’t get it. They never ask a man how many pairs of shoes he has.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was the trailer for Oliver Stone’s South of the Border. It’s being released this week in New York. South of the Border—the leftist transformation in the region might be ignored or misrepresented as nothing but anti-Americanism in the mainstream media, but the film seeks to tell a different story—released in Latin America earlier this month, opening here in the United States this week.

Award-winning director Oliver Stone joins us here in New York. And we’re joined by the acclaimed writer and activist Tariq Ali. He co-wrote the screenplay for South of Border with Mark Weisbrot.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Oliver Stone, welcome for the first time to Democracy Now!

OLIVER STONE: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you here. Talk about why you chose to make this film.

OLIVER STONE: It chose me. I do feature films most of the time, but I do—I’ve done six documentaries and work—this is my fourth one. And it gets right to the point. You know, with a film, you take a year. It’s a lot of money. It’s a lot of actors, costumes, scripts. This is a much simpler way of going about it, and it keeps you humble. It keeps you in the field.

I’ve been going down to South America off and on for twenty years. I did Salvador there in 1985 with—about the Central America situation. I was shocked, what I saw. I just—I had been back from Vietnam for about fifteen years at that point, and I saw all these American soldiers down in Honduras, you know, fighting against the Nicaraguan government. I saw them in Salvador, and I saw them in—a form of them—in Costa Rica. I was shocked. And from that thing, I went back and saw Chiapas. I saw Commander Marcos. I rode with him a bit in the jungle. And then I went down there to Cuba. I had problems with Cuba, because my films were censored here. They were not shown. One of them was not shown; Comandante was taken off the air. It was shown in Europe. And then, so, Chávez—

AMY GOODMAN: Where wasn’t it shown?

OLIVER STONE: It was not shown on HBO. It was pulled from HBO. It was promoed, and then it was taken off the air two weeks before.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

OLIVER STONE: Because that was after 9—it was after that sort of that mindset of post-9/11, you know? There was a lot of hysteria in the air, and Castro had just arrested hijackers. They’d been in confrontation with Bush. So HBO kindly told me, you know, "We’d like you to complete the film and go back and ask him some other questions." I said, "No, this is my film. This is the way it’s finished. I’ll go back, and I’ll do another film called Looking for Fidel," which we ended up doing. So I asked him a lot of hard questions on Looking for Fidel, which was aired. But they never aired the—it’s a heartbreaking story for me, personally, as a filmmaker, because I really put a lot of effort into it. It’s a ninety-minute film. It’s played all over the world, except here.

So, Chávez was sort of a natural, because he was such a demonized, polarizing figure. But when I met him, he was not at all what I thought, you know, what we made him out to be. So I went on from talking to Hugo. He suggested, you know, "Go talk to other people in the region. You know, don’t believe me necessarily." So we went around, and we talked to seven other—eight other presidents—or seven other presidents in six countries. And we got this amazing unity in referendum saying, like, hey, these guys are changing the way Latin America is, and we don’t know this story in America, when you think about it, except Peru and Mexico—well, Peru and Colombia really are the two American allies in the region. So what struck me as a news, as something that’s historic, is that I’ve never seen these countries in South America, in a sense, unified by an idea of reform at the same time, because in the past, when Chile or Argentina or Brazil happened, we picked off the reformers one at a time, because they only happened—they didn’t happen in a unity. And this is the first time I’ve seen that since—what, since Bolívar, maybe. We haven’t—you know, going back to 1820s.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, what struck me also was, I think, the way you were able not only to present their viewpoints, in terms of how they saw the changes in Latin America, but also humanizing them, because for an American audience, the image of Hugo Chávez, of this firebrand, and then you have him on a bicycle in his—riding around in the yard of his former home, breaking the bicycle. And then—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I thought the most comic line in the whole film was when, after breaking the bicycle, he says, in Spanish, "Whose bicycle is this? I guess I’m going to have to pay for it."

OLIVER STONE: He’s not rich. His father is not rich, and he was also a military man. And he comes from a poor family. And he is what he is. He works for the people. I’ve never seen a man work so hard. I mean, he really cares. So do all of them, by the way. Every single one of them I met was elected duly, democratically, which Americans don’t know. And they serve the people, unlike a lot of the oligarchs and dictators who ruled prior and we supported. But we’re against these people. That’s what amazes me. Why is our—what is it about America that makes—needs enemies and makes enemies out of these people who are reformers in their country? Whether it’s Allende or the people in Argentina or Brazil, or Torrijos in Panama, or—the list is long. You know, why? Nicaragua.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You also center in on the IMF and the role of the IMF, which, again, most Americans know little about the operations of the IMF around the world. Yet, in most other countries in the world, the IMF is well known.

OLIVER STONE: Mark Weisbrot is with the Center of Economic Policy and Research, and he’s a co-founder of that, and he brought that element into this. It’s very important. And obviously Americans don’t care about economics as much; it’s hard to follow. But Mark points out that in the 1990s, there was about $20 billion in loans from the IMF to Latin America. Now there’s about a billion, which is interesting. They got rid of it, as Kirchner, Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, is a real hero here. He did technically default on the IMF, but then he paid them off. And he defaulted on the corporate bonds, which was a big scandal, but yet Argentine economy, which was predicted to be a disaster, improved radically. So did Chávez’s economy for six years. I think the gross national product went 90 percent up, up 90 percent. Poverty was cut in half. So all these changes in all these countries have been positive since the IMF is out. They don’t want our money. They don’t want the loans. It’s important.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go right now to a clip of Hugo Chávez talking about oil.

    OLIVER STONE: Chávez’s reforms provoked fierce resistance from the country’s oligarchy. OLIGARCHY MEMBER: We have a government that lies. They’re all a bunch of liars. OLIVER STONE: They control the Venezuelan media and used it to foment opposition. They also mobilized support within the military and received help from the United States and Spain. GEN. CAMACHO KAIRUZ: [translated] I think the most reasonable thing for the President and his cabinet to do is resign voluntarily or disappear from the country. OLIVER STONE: A businessman, Pedro Carmona, was chosen to be the new president. He supposedly flew to Madrid to be measured for a presidential sash. PRESIDENT HUGO CHÁVEZ: [translated] The coup against Chávez had one motive: oil. Bush made a plan: first, Chávez, oil; second, Saddam, Iraq. The reason behind the coup in Venezuela and the invasion of Iraq is the same: oil.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Oliver Stone, talk about how the US media portrays Chávez.

OLIVER STONE: Well, all you have to do is go to YouTube, and you’ll see. I mean, we put in the movie, it’s hysterical and outrageous. And by the way, mainstream—Washington Post, New York Times—it’s awful. I mean, it’s almost as if the New York Times guy—Simon Romero is his name—he sits there for years, and he’s a sniper. He doesn’t say one positive thing. It’s like every week or two he has to file his story, make it negative. It seems like that’s a directive. And he goes out—I mean, you read this stuff. All of it—and he never goes to the other side. He never gets the other side of the story. And he gets very complex little incidents, and he builds it up into this madhouse. It seems like it’s Chile again, like Allende. It’s like the economy is crashing. And the contrary is true. I mean, it’s a very rich country. It’s a regional power. It’s got, apparently, $500 billion—5,000 billion barrels of oil in reserve. It’s a major player for the rest of our time on earth, as long as we go with oil. You know, they’re not going to go away. So, Brazil and Venezuela.

And that raises a whole interesting thing about what recently happened in Iran, you know, when Lula from Brazil went over there with Turkey, Erdogan. That was a very interesting moment for me and for Tariq, because I grew up in the '50s, so did he, and we remember the neutral bloc, remember the—remember Nehru and Nasser and Sukarno and fellow in Cambodia.

TARIQ ALI: Sihanouk

OLIVER STONE: Sihanouk. I mean, there was a bloc of people who used to say, "Hey, this is what we want. This is not what the United States wants." And they were a mediator, a third rail between the Soviets and us. That's gone in the world, and people don’t seem to realize it who are growing up. So when Lula did that, I couldn’t believe the outrage by people like Tom Friedman attacking him. And it was disgusting, I thought, really disgusting, because he never presented the point of view of Brazil and Turkey, which are major countries, huge powers, regional powers.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the New York Times, of course, before that trip, was blasting the possibility of Lula being able to negotiate any kind of arrangement and basically saying he was naive, he was out of his league. And Tariq, your response? The impact of that deal that was brokered by Turkey and—

TARIQ ALI: Look, I mean, everyone was surprised in the West, that how dare these countries have the nerve to go over our heads and negotiate an independent deal with Iran. But this is what the world once used to be like. No one accepted US hegemony unquestioningly, as many of the Security Council members do. The other point is that Brazil was very courageous to do this, Lula particularly, because Brazil has been trying to get a Security—permanent Security Council seat for a long time, and they’ve now jeopardized that process. They will never be allowed it. So they did it for good principled reasons, showing the world Iran is prepared to do a deal; it’s you who don’t want to do it, because you’re permanently under pressure from Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break and then come back. Our guests are Tariq Ali—he co-wrote South of the Border—Oliver Stone is the Oscar award-winning director and screenwriter. His latest film is South of the Border, and he also has Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps coming out. That’s Wall Street 2. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Oliver Stone, who has done this new film that’s coming out this week in the United States called South of the Border. Tariq Ali co-wrote South of the Border. And we want to turn to the Brazilian president, Lula da Silva, talking about Brazil.

    PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] I learned as a trade unionist that one only respects someone who respects themselves. I personally have no interest in fighting with the United States. The only thing I want is to be treated as equals. When I met with the head of the IMF and paid off the debt in full, he did not want me to pay the debt. He said, "Don’t worry about the money. We can roll it over. Keep the money." We paid off the IMF. We paid off the Paris Club. We do not owe anything to anybody. And now we have $260 billion surplus. I am truly optimistic.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president. Oliver Stone uses the clips to talk to us. Now we’re going to say that right on the air, what you’re saying about Lula da Silva, about Chávez, and now they’re covered and how they’re censored in various ways.

OLIVER STONE: You go.

TARIQ ALI: Well—

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ali?

TARIQ ALI: Why? Why does this happen? That’s the question we have to ask. Why are these people so hated by the mainstream media in the United States? And the answer is simple: that they present an alternative. What they’re doing is using their wealth, especially the oil wealth of Venezuela, to bail out the poor. Here, it’s the rich who are bailed out by taxpayers’ money. In South America, it’s the poor who are bailed out by the wealth, which they regard as owned commonly by the people.

And they were the first countries to attack neoliberal economics, which collapsed in Wall Street in 2008. The whole Wall Street system collapsed. These guys had been doing it for ten, fifteen years previously. So none of them were surprised by the Wall Street crash, because of what they’d been doing. So we should look at them as pioneers. Hey guys, you were the ones who taught us that this could happen in Argentina, in Venezuela, and later Brazil, Ecuador.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Oliver Stone, we’re going to play a clip, when you were interviewing Néstor Kirchner. And you see him as a real hero in this, even within the pantheon of these leaders, because he actually stood up directly to George Bush at a summit, an important summit a few years back in Argentina, over this issue of neoliberalism.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, not only him, but he’s also now the president of UNASUR, which is the union of these countries. This is a new deal. And it’s not just him, but he led—he was the first one to say no to the Western neoliberal economics. And he actually was—they were predicting disaster. There had been like four or five Argentine presidents right before him, one after another. And he lasted. And he brought the country out of this horrifying cycle, and it prospered enormously, up until recently, with the—the world recession has put some of these countries, no question.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But let’s take a look at that clip of Kirchner.

OLIVER STONE: Were there any eye-to-eye moments with President Bush that day, that night?

NÉSTOR KIRCHNER: [translated] I say it’s not necessary to kneel before power. Nor do you need to be rude to say the things you have to say to those who oppose our actions. We had a discussion in Monterey. I said that a solution to the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. And he got angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war and that the United States has grown stronger with war.

OLIVER STONE: War. He said that?

NÉSTOR KIRCHNER: [translated] He said that. Those were his exact words.

OLIVER STONE: Was he suggesting that South America go to war?

NÉSTOR KIRCHNER: [translated] Well, he was talking about the United States. The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by the various wars. He said it very clearly. President Bush is—well, he’s only got six days left, right?

OLIVER STONE: Yes.

NÉSTOR KIRCHNER: [translated] Thank God.

JUAN GONZALEZ: That was former President Kirchner. And these comments of President Bush that he says about the United States growing strong through war, I don’t think that’s ever been reported anywhere.

OLIVER STONE: Well, it goes to the heart of the issue. And, you know, we know it, but we sound jaded when we say it. But why do we all—why does America go to war? I went to Vietnam. We went—right after that, we didn’t—I made three movies about it. And then we went back to Panama. We invaded Panama, Grenada, then we went into Iraq twice and now Afghanistan. I don’t get it. And there has to be a reason for all this corporate march to war. Why do—and the press supports it. And we saw it in Iraq most vividly. It was very depressing to be a Vietnam veteran at that time. And now we’re seeing it again with Iran and with Afghanistan, the support of this war. I don’t—there’s no sense to it, because we don’t resemble the Afghani or the Vietnam average person. Our soldiers have to go. If they’re going to go there, they’ve got to stay. That’s all there is to it. They’ve got to become citizens of Afghanistan. That’s the only way they’re ever going to make it. They’re not. There’s no way we’re going to say, and they know it. And as long as they know we’re leaving, I don’t see any victory, any exit, any exit strategy at all.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go, since you talked about your time in Vietnam, to one of your most well-known films, a clip of Platoon.

    SGT. BARNES: What about the [bleep] rice and the weapons? Who are they for? An OVC? That [bleep] knows what I’m saying. He understands. Don’t you, pop? ACE: Goddamn right, he does. SGT. BARNES: [inaudible] JUNIOR: He’s lying through his teeth! Come on! TONY: Waste the [bleep], then see who talks. SGT. BARNES: OVC! Where’s OVC? LERNER: He doesn’t know anything. VIETNAMESE VILLAGE WOMAN: [speaking Vietnamese] LERNER: He swears he doesn’t know anything. He hates the NVA, but they come when they want, and they just take the place over. SGT. BARNES: What’s the [bleep] saying? LERNER: I don’t know. She’s going on about why are we killing the pigs, their farmers. They’ve got to make a living. All that kind of [bleep]. SGT. BARNES: Jeez! SOLDIER: Shut up! SGT. BARNES: [shoots village woman] You tell him he starts talking, or I’m going to waste more of them. Tell him, Lerner! LERNER: [speaking Vietnamese] VIETNAMESE VILLAGE MAN: [speaking Vietnamese] ACE: Sir, let us in on this, alright?

AMY GOODMAN: A scene from Platoon.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Oliver Stone.

OLIVER STONE: I don’t get it. I think—I mean, we trashed Vietnam, I mean, completely. We didn’t even recognize it for so many years after the war. We did the same thing to Iraq. I wouldn’t want to live in Iraq. I mean, they call it democracy? That’s not democracy. It’s the same thing over and over. Why? Why does—I see all the—I don’t watch TV as much as a lot of people, but what I see is people all get on the air, they talk about our discretionary spending, they talk about the Tea Party people, they talk about education, cutting this, this—I don’t get it. Why, if the majority of our discretionary spending is Pentagon—it’s like a trillion dollars, with a shadow budget in there, a trillion dollars a year, that’s most of the discretionary spending in this country—why is it going to war? If we’re in such bad shape, why are we not taking care of ourselves? Why is Obama embracing this?

And why is Clinton down in Latin America, when I’m there, trying to separate these countries? And we’re still doing the same thing. We’re trying to divide one country from the other. She goes to Bolivia—she goes to Ecuador. She goes to Argentina. She tries to separate them. She’s trying to pull Brazil away from Venezuela. It doesn’t work. They’re together in this. This is the first time—I repeat, Amy—the first time in our lifetime that I’ve seen these so many countries in Latin America together, with the exception of Peru and Colombia.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to talk about Colombia in a minute, but Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, on this issue of war and, of course, the statement that President Bush made, which to me was startling, is, in essence, when our government goes to war, not only does it spend huge amounts of money that it turns over to the contractors who assist the war, but also technological development always increases sharply, sponsored by the government. And then, after the war, these same companies then use the new technological development to open up new arenas of business. So, in that sense, I think Bush was talking about how war—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —forces the productive forces ahead and allows capitalism to continue to exploit.

OLIVER STONE: It’s a hard way to die.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Tariq?

TARIQ ALI: Well, no, that—he was very honest. The thing is that Bush used to spell it out straight, which is why people didn’t like him that much, because he just said it. I mean, often what he said was true from his point of view, and from the point of view of the corporations. He didn’t wear a mask. He didn’t use emollient words, which is what happens now.

But the other thing I was thinking, as we were just seeing that clip from Platoon, is, why isn’t there a movie like that about Iraq now? I mean, quite a lot of the movies we are seeing, the Iraqis don’t appear. And yet, we know what has been done to Iraq: a million have died. A million Iraqis have died since the occupation. But we don’t really get a glimpse of them. So the enemy is dehumanized, or that they’re all Muslims and so it doesn’t matter if we kill them—after all, they did 9/11. And all this rubbish that goes on endlessly to misinform the public, that’s what we’re seeing.

AMY GOODMAN: Before you leave, Oliver Stone, I wanted to ask you about the sequel you’ve made to your hit Wall Street. It’s called Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. This is a famous clip from the original Wall Street, featuring Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko.

    GORDON GEKKO: Point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed—you mark my words—will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: So, is Gordon Gekko making another appearance?

OLIVER STONE: The film is, you know, a visit to another planet. It’s twenty-three years later, that Wall Street has become worse. We know that. I mean, millions of dollars have become billions of dollars. The currency is now completely inflated. And the values are the same. The bank—but the big difference is the banks are doing it now. I mean, it’s not the hedge funds, it’s the banks. And they overloaded, and we all overloaded, but the banks led the charge, and the government allowed it to happen. But we know the story. I don’t want to go there.

The movie is a movie, and it’s fun, and it’s got five people in it who are—it’s a triangle, essentially, between Gordon and his daughter, Carey Mulligan, and her fiancé, Shia LaBeouf. And Josh Brolin and Frank Langella play mentors to Shia LaBeouf. It’s a fun movie, but, you know—and in that transaction, you come to this—for me, what’s the essential question: what is your life about? Is it going to be about money, or is it going to be about love? Is it going to be about family values and things that matter, human values, or is it about money?

It’s like South America. It’s the same thing. And the Wall Street guys, I mean, the big guys, you know, they’re part of the IMF, International Monetary Fund. They’re part of the whole deal, which is, make loans to people, get them on the hook, get them into—they’re drug addicts—keep them to be drug addicts, keep people stupid, and make money. Nothing has changed since my father’s day, and he started in 1930s.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did he do?

OLIVER STONE: He was a broker.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Wall Street, you thought, was a warning to people.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet you attracted people to Wall Street.

OLIVER STONE: It was a melodrama about financial movies, which had not been made in this country. As he said, why don’t they make a movie about Iraq? They were not making any movies about financial situation. Now they have it wall to wall on TV. I’m glad, but it’s not really dealing with the fundamental issues. It’s about the surface: who’s making money, who isn’t, right? Who’s a big star, who isn’t? All these CEOs make the magazine covers. I think that’s pretty vile, considering that in the old days, when I grew up, if you had a lot of money, like John Rockefeller, you kind of like hid. You know, you always tried to do—tried to stay low-key. But now it’s gotten insane. There’s a scene in the movie with a thousand billionaires are listed. A thousand billionaires—can you imagine that? You grew up when, what, there were four or five billionaires in the world. It’s unfortunate.

But it ties into the whole thing. It’s organic. Latin America comes from Wall Street, too. Wall Street, you know, you could say—I’m sure Tariq could make a better argument—runs the world. Wall Street, the pharmaceutical lobbies, the oil lobbies, they run our government. We should consider, in the wake of this spill, perhaps doing something about nationalizing our own government and trying to get the profits back to the people, because Latin America has shown us that they care about the people more than the profits. And they’ve done well with the people. We haven’t.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And through all of these films now that you’ve made over decades, the overriding message that ties them together in terms of what your artistic vision is?

OLIVER STONE: Well, I believe in—movies have to be fun. You’ve got to go and have a—you know, if you can take the JFK story and make it exciting, I mean, that may be not—that’s good. I mean, it makes people interested. A new generation looks at it. Wall Street's the same thing. It makes them interested in what's going on in the world. That’s all I can do. Documentaries is another form of filmmaking.

AMY GOODMAN: The five million-dollar question on JFK today, your thoughts on his assassination?

OLIVER STONE: Listen, I think JFK is a much-maligned president, but I think he really changed in 1963. I stick to the—and, by the way, James Douglas has a new book. McGeorge Bundy came out recently. Gordon Goldstein, I believe is the name, wrote a wonderful book about Bundy. He said I was all wrong. Kennedy wanted to pull out. He confirms what McNamara said. In '63, Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam. He wanted to make a deal with Cuba, with Castro. And he wanted—he certainly—the most important thing was he had a détente going with Khrushchev. All these things ended when he was shot. And Johnson, whatever they say, went the other way completely, 180 degrees.

AMY GOODMAN: And who you think killed him?

OLIVER STONE: The motive is in that answer.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Oliver Stone. Tariq, you're going to stay with us. Tariq Ali—

OLIVER STONE: Thank you, Amy, thank you, Juan, for having me. I’d love to come back some day.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you so much, and good luck with South of the Border.

OLIVER STONE: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re staying with Tariq Ali. He’s a well-known writer and activist, co-wrote South of the Border, Oliver Stone’s film that’s opening this week. And we want to stay on this film. We want to go to Ecuador, to Oliver Stone speaking with Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa.

    OLIVER STONE: Where are you with the United States? PRESIDENT RAFAEL CORREA: [translated] We love the United States very much. I lived there. I studied there. We love the people of the United States very much. But obviously, the US foreign policy is questionable. That’s why when they want to pressure us to maintain their military base in our country, a foreign base that they don’t pay anything for, either, and they accuse us of being extremists because we don’t want the base—if there’s no problem having foreign military bases in a country, we set a very specific condition: we would keep the North American base in Manta, provided they let us put a military base in Miami. If there’s no problem with foreign bases, then we should be able to have one over there.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa. Tariq Ali?

TARIQ ALI: Well, I mean, you know, what can one say? He says, "When the American media attacks me, I know I’m doing right." And that is a view which large numbers of South American leaders have now. The fact that they are traduced, denounced in the mainstream media in this country doesn’t bother them so much. You know, Hugo Chávez says if the New York Times started supporting me, I would be very surprised. So, outside the United States, and probably for large numbers of people inside it, as well, the media is now a central pillar of the needs of the state and the government and what it does. I mean, that whole thing during the Cold War, when diversity and diverse voices were allowed on the networks and in the press, that’s gone now. They’re very blatant about it. And no one takes it too seriously. I mean, it’s irritating, and sometimes it’s slanderous, but it’s not a surprise.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Tariq, I’d like to ask you, because you were there when a lot of these interviews were conducted with these various presidents. And obviously, while they’re all united around a new independent role, they have considerable differences among themselves, in terms of what are the proper approaches or strategies on a variety of issues, certainly between Lula and Hugo Chávez or the Kirchners. Could you talk about that some?

TARIQ ALI: Well, I think you’re absolutely right, Juan. I mean, Lula’s economic policies are very different from those of Chávez and Morales. He decided soon after he came to power that he couldn’t basically dismantle the neoliberal system. It was too much, and he thought it was safer to go that way. So, essentially what they did was a few cosmetic things, not unimportant, by giving subsidies to the poor, which is important, but they didn’t touch the system. And I think that has been a problem for some of his supporters. However, in terms of foreign policy, Lula made a big break. He said Brazil will no longer be used to demobilize countries like Venezuela or Bolivia. We will not participate in destabilizing them, in demobilizing those people. And he told that very clearly to the United States. Don’t even try and do it. I don’t necessarily agree with everything that these people do, but it’s their right to do it. And that, for South America, marks a big leap forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what happened in Colombia, the election.

TARIQ ALI: Well, I mean, Colombia, it’s just now beyond a joke, really. It was bound to happen. Uribe couldn’t stand again, for constitutional reasons, and he’s put in his minister. The guy largely responsible for the repression, the guy largely responsible for supervising some of the death squads, the guy totally in the pocket of the US embassy, is now president of Colombia. Colombia is the big US base in South America now. Peru, to a lesser extent. Colombia is the big base. This is where money is being poured in. This is where US military bases are being built. And Correa recently, the president of Ecuador, made it very clear. He said to the Colombians, if your troops ever come into our country again, like you did once before, for whatever the reason, we are going to fight back, so don’t do it. And this is from Correa, who is regarded by the State Department here as the more reasonable of the Bolivarian leaders. He is warning the Colombians about this. So Hillary Clinton’s trip to try and divide them from each other really backfired. It’s not going to work, because South America has changed.

AMY GOODMAN: The new foreign—the new president of Colombia will be the former defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos.

TARIQ ALI: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, in the film, you deal with all of the new presidents, but then you go back to Raúl Castro of Cuba and one of the, I think, first interviews that Americans have seen of Raúl Castro after he replaced Fidel as the president of Cuba. Let’s go to that clip.

    PRESIDENT RAÚL CASTRO: [translated] The Cubans are the heirs of the liberators of the Americas, starting with Bolívar, Sucre, Toussaint L’ouverture, the Haitian, the first and only successful revolution led by slaves in the history of the world. We are the heirs of some of the more recent battles of other companions who have fallen, like Che Guevara. Now some are young, like President Correa and President Chávez. But each one is learning their own identity and finding their own identity within the continent.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Raúl Castro. And by the way, Tariq Ali has written the book Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, about Evo Morales, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. So what do you think of Raúl Castro and where Fidel Castro fits into this picture?

TARIQ ALI: Well, Fidel was, you know, I mean, an iconic leader, still is. And even people in South America who hate him know that he is one of those figures produced in South American history once or twice maybe in a hundred years. So that will never go.

The interesting thing now is what will happen in Cuba. And this is literally a million-dollar question. Which way are they going to go? The US has certainly not made any conciliatory moves, though there were a lot of hopes that Obama would do it. But as in every other thing, the continuities between Obama and the Bush administration are more striking than any breach. So, the Cubans could go the Chinese route, keeping the party in power, opening up the economy. It’s very difficult to find out, penetrate what is being discussed at the upper levels.

However, what is not difficult to see is that the Cuban social services—their medicine, their education—is now helping the whole of South America, Amy. It’s quite—you know, this is what is very noticeable, that you have Cuban doctors now in most South American countries, helping the poor, setting up clinics, and often going to, you know, parts of Africa, as well, and doing the same thing, and training people. And the Cuban medical university has got people from all over, including hundreds and hundreds of Venezuelan kids from poor families. I remember when I was in Havana, and they took me to the school. And there were some Afro-American kids from the United States learning to be medical students. And I said, "How do you guys find it here?" And they said, "We’ve never known anything like this before. We would never be able to get this education in our own country." And the government here was aware of it, because Colin Powell exempted these students from the boycott. So they know that what the United States can’t do, this tiny little island is doing.

So there are lots of good things to be understood and learned about Cuba, which, I mean, I’ve always said that the Cubans and the Venezuelans could learn a lot from each other. The Venezuelans could learn on how to produce a social infrastructure that serves the people, and the Cubans could learn that having critical voices in a country is not always harmful. It keeps you on your toes, and it makes you more alert.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Let’s go to a clip from Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo from the film.

    PRESIDENT FERNANDO LUGO: [translated] It hasn’t been easy to create change in this country. Here, there’s a group which has historically been privileged in the government with the country’s resources. We want to be consistent with the theory of liberation theology. If there are going to be the privileged, then it has to be those who in the past have been forgotten: the indigenous, the landless, the uneducated, the sick. Those are the ones who need to be the first priority. We are committed to honesty, transparency, and to give back dignity to our institutions, and with much more social justice.

AMY GOODMAN: The Paraguayan president Lugo. The significance of this priest-turned-president?

TARIQ ALI: Well, the significance is that Paraguay is a country which has essentially been a one-party state for so long that people forgot when it was anything else. And the stranglehold of this party and the country’s rich prevented anything from coming up. And then you have this priest, you know, a bishop who sort of was later discarded his bishop’s frocks, leading the people, fighting for the poor, and actually winning an election.

And I think one reason that happened is because of the changes taking place elsewhere in South America. I remember I was giving a talk in Porto Alegre at one of the World Social Forums, and sitting in the sixth row somewhere was this priest from Paraguay, which was Lugo. And later on, he told a friend of mine, "Oh, I know him. I heard him speak at Porto Alegre." So, the mixture that was South America helped propel him to power. And people felt confident. They think, if they can do it in other parts of South America, why can’t we? So he was an incredibly popular figure. And as I must say, the scale of his victory stunned us, because we thought they might rig the elections or do something. But the mood was so overwhelming and the number of poor who turned up to vote was so huge that they couldn’t do it. So it goes to show that the collective spirit of South America, which we haven’t seen for a very long time, which the Cubans in the '60s and ’70s were hoping for, you know, OLAS and this and that, is now coming to fruition. For how long, we don't know. But 'til now, the US hasn't been able to turn that tide back. And with allies like Colombia, it is very unlikely that they will. And had they not rigged the elections in Mexico, we would have had a different president there, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Before you leave us, Tariq, we wanted to go to another continent. We wanted to talk about Afghanistan and Pakistan. You are from Pakistan.

TARIQ ALI: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: Your latest book is on Pakistan—you’ve written many—the book called The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. What do you think of Obama’s war now in Afghanistan and what’s happening in Pakistan?

TARIQ ALI: Look, if you look at Obama, that on all the other foreign policy shows he basically continued with Bush’s policies. Let’s be blunt about this. In Afghanistan, he went beyond Bush. He escalated the war. He went along with this policy of the surge. And he ordered more drone attacks on civilians in Pakistan in his one year in office than Bush had done during his last term. So, for the people of that region, Obama’s presidency has been a total disaster. And it’s not working. If you read the reports coming out of Afghanistan, they’re losing more people. There are more casualties. More Afghan civilians are being killed. They have a puppet leader, Karzai, who’s developing his own sort of dynamic, because he’s grown very wealthy through corruption and thinks that he has genuine support. Puppets sometimes have these illusions. And he can’t be got rid of, because they’ve got no one to replace him. So they are really stuck in Afghanistan. And if—and they’re deficient, as we know, within the US military-political establishment on this war. And the ones who are saying that this is an unwinnable war are absolutely right. It’s a stalemated war. They can’t win it unless they destroy half the population of the country.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the impact on Pakistan of the continued drone attacks and the continued secret war going on in Pakistan?

TARIQ ALI: Well, this is it. They’ve been—the drones have been killing civilians. I mean, I point out that the day that the tragedy happened in Tehran and that young woman Nehda was killed—accidentally, it so happens, but she was killed, which was terrible and a tragedy—we had a moist-eyed president in the White House talking to the media on what a terrible tragedy that was, and the same day, a drone attack in Pakistan killed fifteen innocents, mainly women and children, who didn’t even make it onto the news bulletins. So that is what people see. And then, why are they surprised that people are so hostile to the United States in that part of the world?

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll have to leave it there, Tariq Ali, British Pakistani political commentator, historian, activist, filmmaker. He co-wrote the screenplay South of the Border. His latest book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.

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