The International Forum on Globalization is the organization spearheaded by Jerry Mander, author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

from Erik Bluhm (Great God Pan mag/blog):

The rainbow as a symbol can represent many different concepts – creative imagination, cultural diversity, God’s promise, fleeting insubstantiality. In the gay community, it has been adopted as a political symbol, only to end up a token of kitsch.

It guy Darin Klein has curated a handsome show entitled The Rainbow Goblins that opens this Thursday in Hollywood.

“In Count Ul de Rico’s 1978 children’s book The Rainbow Goblins, the symbolism of the plight of the rainbow becomes a parable for corporate greed, ecological degradation and cultural commodification,” Klein tells us. “Inspired by this modern fairytale, where a meadow of wildflowers use their collective power to defeat the cruel plot of the eponymous goblins, this group exhibition re-imagines the rainbow as a celebration of the diversity and individuality of the artistic community and highlights the power of that voice to call for and instigate resistance.”

May 31 – July 15, 2007
Reception May 31, 6-9pm
With DJ Jeff Stallings from San Francisco
and a performance by mecca vazie andrews

Advocate Gallery
1125 N. McCadden Place
Los Angeles, Calif. 90038

Featuring the work of Adam J. Ansell, Erik Bluhm, BODEGA VENDETTA & PRVT DNCR, Nao Bustamante, Young Chung, Roy Colmer, Zackary Drucker, David Larsen, Matt Lipps, Jason Mecier, Lucas Michael, Max Miller, Amir Nikrava, Coco Peru, Terri Phillips, Aaron Plant, Steven Reigns, robbinschilds & A.L. Steiner, Christopher Russell, Ami Tallman, Jo-ey Tang, Aiyana Udessen, and Jim Winters.

Also at the Advocate Gallery, Landscapes by our friends from down San Diego way, Julia Dzwonkonski and Kye Potter.

“We’ve been painting greyscale rainbows into amateur landscape paintings for six years. We always try to paint the rainbow so that it compliments the scene and brings out the color and the life in these paintings.”

Well…last week, anyway.

29 May 02007 International Herald Tribune

Boeing unit to face suit in CIA seizures
By Claudio Gatti

NEW YORK

The American Civil Liberties Union plans to file a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that a subsidiary of Boeing aided the Central Intelligence Agency in the forced transportation of three plaintiffs who say they were captured and flown to overseas prisons and in some cases tortured.

The civil suit is to be filed in San Jose, California, under the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789. This law specifies that U.S. government agencies and U.S. corporations can be held responsible for human rights abuses against foreigners resulting from activities in a foreign country.

The legal action against Jeppesen, a flight-support services unit of Boeing based in San Jose, will represent a fresh attempt to shed light on a practice known as extraordinary rendition, under which the CIA arrested, transported and interrogated terrorist suspects after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

“Evidence points to Jeppesen as a major player in the extraordinary rendition program,” said Steven Watt, staff lawyer for the ACLU.

“European flight logs identifying Jeppesen reveal that over a four-year period, the company was actively involved in the provision of flight and logistical support services to at least 15 aircraft which, European investigations confirm, were used by the CIA in its program of extraordinary rendition.”

Watt added, “The evidence here also points to Jeppesen contracting to profit from torture.”

Jeppesen referred any request for comments to Boeing. Tim Neale, director of communications at Boeing, declined to respond “because to do so would mean commenting on the work Jeppesen does for clients under contracts that call for confidentiality.”

“It seems to me you are asking a question about an issue that involves the U.S. government,” Neale said. “Jeppesen, as with the rest of the Boeing company, operates in accordance with the laws.”

Asked about Jeppesen’s role in the rendition program, Mark Mansfield, CIA director of communications, said, “We don’t comment on such matters.”

Companies like Jeppesen typically provide flight-support services like weather forecasts, flight plans, landing permits, overflight exemptions, refueling, ground handling of the aircraft, catering arrangements, hotel accommodations and payment of airport fees.

An investigation conducted by an Italian business daily, Il Sole 24 Ore, also independently found evidence that two of the three plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit and another individual who was also a victim of an extraordinary rendition were transported aboard a Gulfstream V and a Boeing 737 with the logistical support from Jeppesen.

The four men were Kassim Britel, a Moroccan-born Italian citizen; Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin who was mistaken for a terrorist and abducted from Macedonia; an Egyptian who had asked for asylum in Sweden; and an Ethiopian citizen with resident status in Britain.

“Without Jeppesen’s services, the planes would never have been able to make those flights,” said Francesca Longhi, the Italian lawyer for Britel, one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit. “If Jeppesen hadn’t serviced the CIA’s Gulfstream V, my client would never have been illegally deported to Morocco, where he has endured months of torture and years of illegal detention that is still going on.”

Longhi said Jeppesen was involved in what many legal experts, the British Foreign Office and a special European Parliament commission consider an illegal act under international law.

Britel was arrested in 2002 in Pakistan, where the authorities claimed that he was traveling on a false Italian passport, according to Longhi. Britel was handed over to about six men, Americans he presumes were CIA operatives, who forced him onto of a Gulfstream V jet, Longhi said.

During the nine-hour flight to Morocco, Longhi said, Britel was kept hooded, with his hands and feet bound. After landing in Rabat, he was taken to a special jail run by local intelligence. Eighteen months later, he was tried and convicted on charges of being a member of a local terrorist cell and for “participating in unauthorized meetings” – although he had not been in Morocco for five years.

Britel, 39, is in Aïn Borja prison, in Casablanca, serving a nine-year sentence. Longhi said his conviction was based on a confession that followed weeks of torture.

Neither the Moroccan Ministry of Justice nor the Ministry of Communications, contacted by Il Sole 24 Ore, answered a request for comment.

In Italy, Britel fell under suspicion in 2001 when a booklet containing a transcript of an Osama Bin Laden’s interview on Al Jazeera television and an electronic file with a statement of support for the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas were found in his home near Milan. But last September, the Italian authorities cleared him of any terrorism charges.

“The fact is that Britel never committed any crime,” Longhi said. “Not in Morocco, not in Italy, not anywhere.”

Before the CIA began extraordinary renditions, companies like Jeppesen were in the business of enabling wealthy people to fly smoothly around the globe.

After Sept. 11, 2001, according to human rights organizations and European investigating commissions, new customers appeared – charter companies operating planes on behalf of the CIA.

The first documentary evidence bearing Jeppesen’s name was retrieved in June 2005 by the Spanish Guardia Civil, when it investigated reports in a newspaper, Diario de Mallorca, of CIA planes flying into local airports. The Spanish authorities found that four planes – two Boeings and two Gulfstreams – had repeatedly landed and refueled in Mallorca and that they were serviced by two local companies on behalf of Jeppesen and Air Routing International.

Similar documents were uncovered in Portugal by a newspaper, Diario de Noticias, which found the name of Jeppesen in communications related to rendition planes that used the airports in Porto and Santa Maria de Azores.

Jeppesen UK was also named in British newspapers as the company that arranged for ground support services to a rendition plane that landed at Glasgow Prestwick Airport in June 2004.

Specific mention of the Gulfstream V jet that European investigators and Longhi say was used to transport Britel to Morocco first surfaced in October 2001. On Oct. 23 that year, at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, masked men handed an individual to a group of Americans who had just landed on a Gulfstream V executive jet.

Claudio Gatti is an investigative reporter for Il Sole

link courtesy Dave Reeves!

Architects Berger Devine Yaeger:
Following successful completion of the preliminary concept plans and the full embassy master plan, Berger was commissioned to prepare the design-build “bridging documents” (based on 35% design) for construction of the self-contained embassy compound. Berger Devine Yaeger, Inc. (BDY) was the architect for this work. The construction (currently underway) is being executed in four concurrent packages. This self-contained compound will include the embassy itself, residences for the ambassador and staff, PX, commissary, cinema, retail and shopping, restaurants, schools, fire station and supporting facilities such as power generation, water purification system, telecommunications, and waste water treatment facilities. In total, the 104 acre compound will include over twenty buildings including one classified secure structure and housing for over 380 families.

Washington Post
Thursday, May 24, 2007

Over the years the area was renamed — it’s now officially known as the “International Zone” — the fortifications were expanded and U.S. tanks were parked at the gates. As the security situation in Baghdad worsened, others with the right connections or titles moved in. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government lives and works in the zone, which also houses the Iraqi parliament. Thousands of foreign contractors live there. U.S. civilian officials live there along with their military and contractor protectors. Meanwhile, a massive U.S. Embassy compound — 24 buildings on 104 acres inside the zone, the biggest and most expensive embassy in the world — is under construction and due for completion in August.

Although the State Department has not budged from an original embassy price tag of $592 million, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) complained two weeks ago to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of a “growing size in costs” and a staffing increase of more than 30 percent since Congress approved the State Department’s plans two years ago. Leahy chairs the appropriations subcommittee in charge of the foreign operations budget.

“We have 1,000 Americans at the embassy in Baghdad,” Leahy told Rice at a hearing. “You add the contractors and the local staff, it comes to 4,000 . . . a deviation from the plan that we’d agreed to.” According to Senate staffers, operating costs now total $1.2 billon a year.

More…

A soldier in Iraq asks in despair: Why are we here?

COMMENTARY | May 28, 2007

After watching his roommate fatally wounded in a roadside bombing, an Army private wonders why the lives of good men are being lost when the Iraqis pose no threat to us and don’t want us there.

By Donald Hudson Jr.
donaldchudsonjr@yahoo.com

BAGHDAD, May 12 — My name is Donald Hudson Jr. I have been serving our country’s military actively for the last three years. I am currently deployed to Baghdad on Forward Operating Base Loyalty, where I have been for the last four and a half months.

I came here as part of the first wave of this so called “troop surge”, but so far it has effectively done nothing to quell insurgent violence. I have seen the rise in violence between the Sunni and Shiite. This country is in the middle of a civil war that has been on going since the seventh century.

Why are we here when this country still to date does not want us here? Why does our president’s personal agenda consume him so much, that he can not pay attention to what is really going on here?

Let me tell you a story. On May 10, I was out on a convoy mission to move barriers from a market to a joint security station. It was no different from any other night, except the improvised explosive device that hit our convoy this time, actually pierced through the armor of one of our trucks. The truck was immediately engulfed in flames, the driver lost control and wrecked the truck into one of the buildings lining the street. I was the driver of the lead truck in our convoy; the fifth out of six was the one that got hit. All I could hear over the radio was a friend from the sixth truck screaming that the fifth truck was burning up real bad, and that they needed fire extinguishers real bad. So I turned my truck around and drove through concrete barriers to get to the burning truck as quickly as I could. I stopped 30 meters short of the burning truck, got out and ripped my fire extinguisher out of its holder, and ran to the truck. I ran past another friend of mine on the way to the burning truck, he was screaming something but I could not make it out. I opened the driver’s door to the truck and was immediately overcome by the flames. I sprayed the extinguisher into the door, and then I saw my roommate’s leg. He was the gunner of that truck. His leg was across the driver’s seat that was on fire and the rest of his body was further in the truck. My fire extinguisher died and I climbed into the truck to attempt to save him. I got to where his head was, in the back passenger-side seat. I grabbed his shoulders and attempted to pull him from the truck out the driver’s door. I finally got him out of the truck head first. His face had been badly burned. His leg was horribly wounded. We placed him on a spine board and did our best to attempt “Buddy Aid”. We heard him trying to gasp for air. He had a pulse and was breathing, but was not responsive. He was placed into a truck and rushed to the “Green Zone”, where he died within the hour. His name was Michael K. Frank. He was 36 years old. He was a great friend of mine and a mentor to most of us younger soldiers here.

Now I am still here in this country wondering why, and having to pick up the pieces of what is left of my friend in our room. I would just like to know what is the true reason we are here? This country poses no threat to our own. So why must we waste the lives of good men on a country that does not give a damn about itself? Most of my friends here share my views, but do not have the courage to say anything.

• Donald C. Hudson Jr. is a private assigned to the 1st Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division.