Thousands of New Yorkers chanted "we want arrests" as Trayvon Martin’s parents joined them for a protest calling on police to arrest George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed their unarmed 17-year-old son but has yet to be arrested. These are some of the voices of the protesters, many of whom wore hooded sweatshirts and called for an end to racial profiling.
PROTESTERS: Trayvon Martin could have been my son! Trayvon Martin could have been my son! Trayvon Martin could have been my son! Trayvon Martin could have been my son!
JAMIE GATES: Jamie Gates, Brooklyn, New York.
RENÉE FELTZ: Tell me why you’re out here today.
JAMIE GATES: Support a cause. That could have been me. That could have been my son. That could have been my brother. Justice needs to be served. That man should have been arrested.
PROTESTERS: We are Trayvon Martin! We are Trayvon Martin!
RAHEL TEKA: My name is Rahel Teka. I’m from Minneaopolis through Ethiopia. I’m here because the death of Trayvon Martin isn’t specific to his family. It’s not specific to Florida. It’s something that happens every day in this country, and it’s something which is ignored or is given attention for a week and then swept under the rug. So I think, through events like this, we can bring attention not only to Trayvon Martin and not only to the injustices in Florida, but across this country and throughout this world.
PROTESTER: What do we want?
PROTESTERS: Justice!
PROTESTER: When do we want it?
PROTESTERS: Now!
PROTESTER: What do we want?
PROTESTERS: Justice!
PROTESTER: When do we want it?
PROTESTERS: Now!
PROTESTER: What do we want?
PROTESTERS: Justice!
PROTESTER: When do we want it?
PROTESTERS: Now!
GRACE HAMLER: My name is Grace Hamler, and I’m from Harlem.
VICTORIA CHIRAC: My name is Victoria Chirac [phon.], and I’m from the Bronx.
RENÉE FELTZ: And I see this is a family affair for you. Can you tell us who you brought with you and why you’re out here?
GRACE HAMLER: I’m here with my grandchildren. This is my granddaughter. My daughter is over there with my grandson. And we’re here because of Trayvon Martin. It could be my son. It could be my grandson, my nephew. Today it’s a stranger. Tomorrow it’s your son, your grandson, your nephew. We have to be out here. We have to participate. We have to gather up. We have to stand up for this type of violence against black youth.
RENÉE FELTZ: And how about you? What do you think?
VICTORIA CHIRAC: I think that it was just totally unnecessary. Just Skittles and iced tea, and he gets shot for nothing.
ELGIE: My name is Elgie.
RENÉE FELTZ: And how old are you?
ELGIE: Six.
RENÉE FELTZ: And what do you think about what happened to Trayvon Martin?
ELGIE: Well, it’s just hard stuff to believe.
PROTESTERS: Justice! Now!
CANDICE: My name is Candice. I’m 11. And I’m from the Bronx. We feel like the police are racist, because when a black man died for no reason, they didn’t do anything, and they didn’t prosecute the killer.
FATOU WAGIH: My name is Fatou Wagih [phon.]. I’m from Bronx, and I’m 11. We’re here today because this is a national issue, and probably a worldwide one. I’m also wearing a hoodie, because he died with it and because we want to honor him today, which is what this protest is about.
AUNDRUS: My name is Aundrus, and I’m 12 years old. When I heard what happened, I was kind of confused, because at first—at first I thought it was a regular murder, but I wanted to know why it was like so, like, national. I went to Union Square, and I heard that he got—he got shot since he was wearing a hoodie that, like—like he was bad, he was suspicious. So, I think, like, maybe police might look at me suspiciously because of the color of my skin, and I’m wearing a hoodie.
PROTESTERS: We are Trayvon Martin! We are Trayvon Martin! We are Trayvon Martin! We are Trayvon Martin! We are Trayvon Martin!
Democracy Now! Blog
Friday March 16th marked the 44th anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when U.S. troops killed hundreds of civilians. Journalist Sy Hersh won the Pulitzer for exposing the massacre and the subsequent Pentagon cover-up. This segment features Hersh from 2008, the 40th anniversary of the massacre.
Watch: 1968, Forty Years Later: My Lai Massacre Remembered by Survivors, Victims’ Families and US War Vets
Democracy Now! Blog
The award-winning photographer Paula Lerner has died at the age of 52. She was the principal photographer for the Emmy Award-winning project, "Behind The Veil: An Intimate Journey Into The Lives of Kandahar’s Women
Featuring Photography." It appeared in the Toronto Globe & Mail. In 2009, she provided photographs to Democracy Now! for a remarkable interview with the Afghan activist Rangina Hamidi.
Watch: Democracy Now! interview with Rangina Hamidi (featuring photos from Paula Lerner).
Multimedia: 'Behind The Veil: An Intimate Journey Into The Lives of Kandahar's Women’
View: Paula Lerner Photography
Read: Paula Lerner Obituary from the Globe & Mail
Democracy Now! Blog
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Super Tuesday demonstrated the rancor rife in Republican ranks, as the four remaining major candidates slug it out to see how far to the right of President Barack Obama they can go. While attacking him daily for the high cost of gasoline, both sides are traveling down the same perilous road in their support of nuclear power. This is mind-boggling, on the first anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, with the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission warning that lessons from Fukushima have not been implemented in this country. Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: They’re going to force nuclear power on the public, despite the astronomically high risks, both financial and environmental.
One year ago, on March 11, 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit the northeast coast of Japan, causing more than 15,000 deaths, with 3,000 more missing and thousands of injuries. Japan is still reeling from the devastation—environmentally, economically, socially and politically. Naoto Kan, Japan’s prime minister at the time, said last July, “We will aim to bring about a society that can exist without nuclear power.” He resigned in August after shutting down production at several power plants. He said that another catastrophe could force the mass evacuation of Tokyo, and even threaten “Japan’s very existence.” Only two of the 54 Japanese power plants that were online at the time of the Fukushima disaster are currently producing power. Kan’s successor, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, supports nuclear power, but faces growing public opposition to it.
This stands in stark contrast to the United States. Just about a year before Fukushima, President Obama announced billion in loan guarantees to the Southern Company, the largest energy producer in the southeastern U.S., for the construction of two new nuclear power plants in Waynesboro, Ga., at the Vogtle power plant, on the South Carolina border. Since the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and then the catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986, there have been no new nuclear power plants built in the U.S. The 104 existing nuclear plants are all increasing in age, many nearing their originally slated life expectancy of 40 years.
Click here to read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org.
Democracy Now! Blog
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website, has again published a massive trove of documents, this time from a private intelligence firm known as Stratfor. The source of the leak was the hacker group “Anonymous,” which took credit for obtaining more than 5 million emails from Stratfor’s servers. Anonymous obtained the material on Dec. 24, 2011, and provided it to WikiLeaks, which in turn partnered with 25 media organizations globally to analyze the emails and publish them.
Among the emails was a short one-liner that suggested the U.S. government has produced, through a secret grand jury, a sealed indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In addition to painting a picture of Stratfor as a runaway, rogue private intelligence firm with close ties to government-intelligence agencies serving both corporate and U.S. military clients, the emails support the growing awareness that the Obama administration, far from diverging from the secrecy of the Bush/Cheney era, is obsessed with secrecy, and is aggressively opposed to transparency.
I traveled to London last Independence Day weekend to interview Assange. When I asked him about the grand-jury investigation, he responded: “There is no judge, there is no defense counsel, and there are four prosecutors. So, that is why people that are familiar with grand-jury inquiries in the United States say that a grand jury would not only indict a ham sandwich, it would indict the ham and the sandwich.”
As I left London, The Guardian newspaper exposed more of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. phone-hacking scandal, which prompted the closing of his tabloid newspaper, the largest circulation Sunday newspaper in the U.K., News of the World. The coincidence is relevant, as News of the World reported anything but what its title claimed, focusing instead on salacious details of the private lives of celebrities, sensational crimes, and photos of scantily clad women. For this and his other endeavors, Murdoch amassed a reported personal fortune of .6 billion.
Meanwhile, Assange—who, like Murdoch, was born in Australia (Murdoch abandoned his nationality for U.S. citizenship in order to purchase more U.S. broadcast licenses)—had engaged in one of largest and most courageous acts of publishing in history by founding wikileaks.org, which allows people to safely and securely deliver documents using the Internet in ways that make it almost impossible to trace. He and his colleagues at WikiLeaks had published millions of leaked documents, most notably about the U.S. wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, true “news of the world.” The Sydney Peace Foundation awarded Assange a gold medal for “exceptional courage and initiative in pursuit of human rights.” In contrast, the U.S. government targeted him, possibly under the Espionage Act. Murdoch is hailed as a pioneering newsman, while pundits on Murdoch-owned cable-television outlets openly call for Assange’s murder.
Read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org
Democracy Now! Blog
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Eight youths, tending their flock of sheep in the snowy fields of Afghanistan, were exterminated last week by a NATO airstrike. They were in the Najrab district of Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan. Most were reportedly between the ages of 6 and 14. They had sought shelter near a large boulder, and had built a fire to stay warm. At first, NATO officials claimed they were armed men. The Afghan government condemned the bombing and released photos of some of the victims. By Wednesday, NATO offered, in a press release, “deep regret to the families and loved ones of several Afghan youths who died during an air engagement in Kapisa province Feb. 8.” Those eight killed were not that different in age from Lance Cpl. Osbrany Montes De Oca, 20, of North Arlington, N.J. He was killed two days later, Feb. 10, while on duty in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. These nine young, wasted lives will be the latest footnote in the longest war in United States history, a war that is being perpetuated, according to one brave, whistle-blowing U.S. Army officer, through a “pattern of overt and substantive deception” by “many of America’s most senior military leaders in Afghanistan.”
Those are the words written by Lt. Col. Danny Davis in his 84-page report, “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort.” A draft of that report, dated Jan. 27, 2012, was obtained by Rolling Stone magazine. It has not been approved by the U.S. Army Public Affairs office for release, even though Davis writes that its contents are not classified. He has submitted a classified version to members of Congress. Davis, a 17-year Army veteran with four combat tours behind him, spent a year in Afghanistan with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, traveling more than 9,000 miles to most operational sectors of the U.S. occupation and learning firsthand what the troops said they needed most.
Click to read the rest of this column on the Truthdig website.
Democracy Now! Blog
The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid died of an apparent asthma attack today while covering the conflict in Syria. One of the most celebrated journalists covering the Middle East, Shadid, 43, had been a guest on Democracy Now! several times over the past decade reporting on Libya, Tunisia, Iraq and Lebanon.
Here are links to our interviews with Anthony Shadid:
April 06, 2011: 'Freed from Captivity in Libya, Anthony Shadid of the New York Times Recounts Ordeal under Gaddafi’s Forces'
April 06, 2011: 'Intervention Could Make Things Worse: New York Times’ Anthony Shadid on Rebellions in Libya and the Middle East'
January 18, 2011: 'Anthony Shadid in Beirut: Tunisia Has Electrified People Across the Arab World'
July 18, 2006: 'World Health Organization: Lebanese Residents Displaced by Israeli Bombardment Expected to Top 900,000'
November 19, 2004: 'U.S. Continues Air Strikes and Ground Assault On Fallujah Despite Claims of Victory'
Democracy Now! Blog
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
The leadership of the Catholic Church has launched what amounts to a holy war against President Barack Obama. Archbishop Timothy Dolan appealed to church members, “Let your elected leaders know that you want religious liberty and rights of conscience restored and that you want the administration’s contraceptive mandate rescinded,” he said. Obama is now under pressure to reverse a healthcare regulation that requires Catholic hospitals and universities, like all employers, to provide contraception to insured women covered by their health plans.
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League said, “This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets.” In the wake of the successful pushback against the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood, the Obama administration should listen to the majority of Americans: The United States, including Catholics, is strongly pro-choice.
Rick Santorum most likely benefited from the 24-hour news cycle this week with his three-state win. Exactly one week before the caucus/primary voting, on Jan. 31, The Associated Press broke the story that Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, a billion-per-year breast-cancer fundraising and advocacy organization, had enacted policies that would effectively lead it to deny funding to Planned Parenthood clinics to conduct breast-cancer screenings and mammograms, especially for women with no health insurance. Linked to the decision was a recently hired Komen vice president, Karen Handel, who, as a candidate for governor of Georgia in 2010, ran on a platform to defund Planned Parenthood. The backlash was immediate, broad-based and unrelenting. By Feb. 3, Komen reversed its decision. On Feb. 7, Handel resigned from Komen.
Adding fuel to the ire was news that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had issued the regulation requiring employer insurance plans to provide contraception. The coup de grace, on primary/caucus day, was the decision handed down by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturning California’s controversial Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages.
READ MORE
Democracy Now! Blog
Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón is known for ordering the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and seeking to indict members of the Bush administration for their role in torturing prisoners. Now, Garzón himself is facing a trial in Madrid, after right-wing groups objected to his investigation of atrocities committed by supporters of the dictator Francisco Franco. While prosecutors reportedly disagreed with the charges that Garzón had exceeded his authority, Spanish law allows civilians to lodge criminal charges. If convicted, Garzón could lose his right to sit as a judge in Spain. He appeared before Spain’s Supreme Court today. On Wednesday we will interview Reed Brody, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch who has been in the courtroom observing Garzón’s trial.
Speaking on Democracy Now! last year, Garzón said between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians disappeared during the Franco regime, which seized power during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
Garzón has used the doctrine of universal jurisdiction to investigate war crimes and torture across national lines, famously indicting Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda in 2003 and attempting to indict members of the Bush administration for authorizing torture at Guantánamo Bay and overseas. In 1998, he ordered the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, leading to Pinochet’s arrest in Britain.
Democracy Now! Blog
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Corrections tells Democracy Now! it has transferred Mumia Abu-Jamal out of solitary confinement and into general population. The move comes seven weeks after Philadelphia prosecutor Seth Williams announced he would not pursue the death penalty against the imprisoned journalist. Abu-Jamal’s legal team confirmed the move in an email from attorney, Judy Ritter. "This is a very important moment for him, his family and all of his supporters," Ritter wrote.
Supporters of Abu-Jamal note prison officials just received more than 5,000 petitions calling for his transfer and release. Superintendent John Kerestes has previously said Abu-Jamal would have to cut short his dreadlocks, and meet several other conditions, before a transfer would be allowed.
While on death row at SCI Green, Abu-Jamal made regular phone calls to Prison Radio in order to record his columns and essays, but prison officials revoked his phone privileges after he was moved to SCI Mahanoy, the Frackville, PA prison in which he’s currently being held. Prison Radio has since announced it will continue to record and distribute Abu-Jamal’s essays as read by his well-known supporters.
Click here to listen to Noam Chomsky read Of Idiots and Sages.
See all of Democracy Now’s coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Democracy Now! Blog
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