Public interest ‘angels’
descend on FCC

On Friday, Mar. 22, 2002, the “Angels of Public Interest” descended upon the FCC headquarters in Washington, DC.Photo by Hans Bennett, courtesy of DC Indymedia

By John Tarleton

Washington, DC, Mar. 24— Nikki Larson helped start an eclectic 60-watt pirate radio station in Knoxville, Tennessee last fall after her campus station switched to an automated playlist and eliminated local news coverage. Two weeks ago, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) marshal and the local sheriff ordered First Amendment Radio to cease programming from a 250-foot-high ridge overlooking Knoxville.

On Friday afternoon, Larson, 20, joined a small but plucky band of public interest “angels” who descended on FCC headquarters.

Singing anti-corporate hymns and wearing white sheets, tinsel halos, and wings made of cardboard, Larson and a dozen other “angels” were among an ad-hoc group of 60 media activists who gathered on a bitterly cold day to call for a reversal of government policies that have left the US media system in the hands of a small group of global conglomerates. When the angels tried to deliver a public interest crystal ball to FCC Chairman Michael Powell, they were rebuffed at the building entrance by a phalanx of security guards.

“I didn’t expect them to come out and say anything,” Larson said. “But, I don’t know how long they can ignore us. Speech is meant to be free. That’s what the First Amendment is all about.”

Friday’s speakers included Inja Coates of Media Tank, Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, Dee Dee Halleck of Deep Dish TV, Richard Turner of the Alliance for Community Media, Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Reverend Billy of New York City’s Church of Stop Shopping, and Terry O’Neill of the National Organization for Women. They warned that democracy was being eroded by media concentration.

“Without a broad array of voices we cannot have the kind of public discussion of public issues that we need to have in order to maintain our democracy,” O’Neill said.

Jim Land, a 27-year FCC employee, came down from his office to watch the protest. He said the biggest impact of pending media mergers would be an increase in advertising rates. He was confident that the public interest would still be served.

“In the future people are going to find their information on the Internet,” Land said.

The FCC was established in 1934 to ensure that broadcasters would serve the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.”

As media ownership restrictions and public service obligations have been erased in recent years, critics have accused the FCC of abandoning its mission.

The Commission is currently moving to end cross-ownership rules that keep newspapers from being absorbed by the broadcast industry. On Feb. 19, a federal appeals court nullified a pair of long-standing government regulations that limited the size of media giants like AOL Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp., and General Electric/NBC. One rule prevented the same company from owning TV stations and cable franchises in the same market. The other rule limited the number of TV stations a single company could own.

Chester warns that the Internet is the next target as cable providers look to monopolize high-speed broadband services.

“The Internet is being hijacked by old media companies in order to integrate it into their existing production and distribution apparatuses,” Chester said.

Stephanie Finneran, 17, of Asheville, North Carolina believes FCC policies represent an attack on the public good. “It seems like another case where the community and the people don’t really matter and that profit wins out over what society really needs,” she said.

Chairman Powell (son of Secretary of State Colin Powell) has become a lightning rod for media activists since he was appointed to the FCC in 1997 by Bill Clinton. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has hailed him as an “outstanding choice” while Powell in turn has referred to broadcast corporations as “our clients,” denounced regulation as “the oppressor” and stated that “my religion is the market.”

“If Michael Powell was a city planner and he was planning New York City, he would probably pave over Central Park and put in another Times Square, or he would take all the neighborhood bodegas and sell em all and turn them into Burger Kings,” said Pete Tridish of the Philadelphia-based Prometheus Radio Project. “There is no room in Michael Powell’s future for either public spaces or small businesses because it’s just the law of the big fish in the sea as far as he is concerned.”

Powell’s office was unavailable for comment.

Organizers envision Fri., Mar. 22, event as the kick-off of a multi-pronged campaign for media democracy in the United States. Plans are underway for protests at NAB’s Sept. 12-14 annual meeting in Seattle and for Media Democracy Day on Oct. 18.

As for Larson, she and her friends have no plans to take their tiny station off the air. “We’re going to keep broadcasting,” she says, “because everybody has a right to good radio. ”

Source: Washington DC Indymedia

Imperial overstretch is back

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Mar. 19 (IPS)— Even the business press is beginning to grow nervous about the US administration’s pursuit of counter-terrorism.

“Is Washington fighting terrorism on too many fronts?” asked a headline in the most recent issue of Business Week magazine.

“The Bush Administration is now combating terrorism on fronts in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Even the globe’s sole superpower needs to be careful not to overreach,” the article concluded. It failed to mention Washington’s plans to ramp up its military involvement in Colombia.

In a Mar. 19 editorial entitled “The clear and present danger,” the Financial Times newspaper warned that victory in Afghanistan itself remained some ways off and that Washington needed to concentrate its efforts there for now “rather than allowing its efforts to be diffused in too many theaters of war.”

Even as Vice President Dick Cheney toured the Middle East to prepare US allies there for a new military campaign against Iraq, Washington was busy deploying troops and military advisers in an ever-expanding quest to defeat terrorism around the world.

“I have set a clear policy in the second stage of the war on terror,” President George W. Bush said last week on the six-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. “America encourages and expects governments everywhere to help remove the terrorist parasites that threaten their countries and peace of the world. If governments need training or resources to meet this commitment, America will help.”

Since Sept. 11, Washington has promised or provided new military aid in the form of training or equipment to dozens of countries only a few of which face a credible external threat, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Yemen, not to mention Afghanistan where it intends to build a national army.

Last week’s promise -- to help “governments everywhere” fight terrorism -- is fueling still-whispered concerns that Washington is well on its way to what Yale University historian Paul Kennedy once referred to as “imperial overstretch.”

The urgent dispatch of some 1,700 combat-ready British troops to Afghanistan in the wake of what the US commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, called “an unqualified and absolute success” in Operation Anaconda has only served to raise new doubts about the decisiveness of the two-week battle. Afghan commanders insisted that most of the al-Qaida troops supposedly trapped there had escaped, presumably to fight another day.

The reported engagement of US Special Operations Forces (SOF) advisers on a “training mission” in fighting with Abu Sayyaf guerrillas on Basilan Island in the southern Philippines brought home the reality of risks in that battle against what most observers describe as a small band of no more than 100 bandits.

Peace talks between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), with 15,000 men under arms in the same region where Abu Sayyaf is active, have been effectively suspended amid charges by Manila’s brass that that the MILF is a “terrorist” group with close ties to al-Qaida.

A contingent of 200 SOF trainers is en route to the Republic of Georgia to train and equip four anti-terrorist battalions to bring the unruly Pankisi Gorge, a haven for Chechen rebels and armed Islamist militants -- including, so the administration has said, al-Qaida and Taliban forces who have fled Afghanistan -- under control.

With embattled Chechnya just over the mountains from the Gorge, as well as at least two other major insurgencies in Georgia, the question that bothers analysts here is whether Washington could become entangled in any of these larger struggles, or even in neighboring Azerbaijan, to which the administration has also promised anti-terrorism assistance despite its still-unresolved conflict with Armenia and rising tensions with Iran over Caspian Sea oil claims.

In Kyrgyzstan, where Washington is not only providing military training and equipment but is also building a major air base, an opposition protest last week ended in the deaths of 13 people and the destruction of several government buildings in a remote village where an opposition leader was being held on corruption charges.

The violence marked a first for Kyrgyzstan since its independence from Russia10 years ago and followed a lengthy period in which increasingly authoritarian President Askar Akayev has moved against opposition figures and reduced basic freedoms. This process has accelerated since Sept. 11, according to analysts here.

In Yemen, where Washington plans to send some 100 military advisers to help the army assert control over heavily armed tribal areas that have always resisted central control, a US military plane carrying visiting US Vice President Dick Cheney resorted to evasive maneuvers to land at the capital for a quick, two-hour visit with President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

“A show of nervousness” is how New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof described Cheney’s arrival in a country to which Washington hopes to help bring order. “[S]ending American soldiers to places like Yemen, where the great majority of people seem to oppose their arrival, raises precisely the problems of over-deployment that President Bush complained about during his campaign,” Kristof noted.

Last weekend’s lethal attack on a church in Islamabad, Pakistan, in which two US citizens were killed raised new and disturbing questions not only about the authority and security of Pakistan’s military leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf — perhaps the single most important regional leader in Washington’s war on terrorism to date — but also on the next phase in the war itself.

Both US and Pakistani analysts agree the weekend attack, coming so soon after the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, presumably by al-Qaida sympathizers — was aimed both against Washington and Musharraf. They also report that many Pakistani militants who fought for al-Qaida in Afghanistan have returned home and are regrouping.

Columbus hate crime attack latest in national epidemic

By Shawn Gaynor

Mar. 27(AGR)-- Last Saturday’s attack and attempted murder of a 25-year-old Arab-American in Columbus, Ohio, is the latest in a string of racist attacks that have plagued the city of Columbus in the last six months. The man, a US citizen, was in his home at 1659 Summit Ave., a main thoroughfare, when two men with guns forced their way into his half of a duplex apartment.

He was then brutally beaten and robbed. The gunmen bound him to a chair and upon leaving set the building on fire. The man escaped with minor injuries after throwing himself, still bound, through a window to the relative safety of the Columbus streets.

Police are investigating the case as a “possible hate crime” after finding a note left by the attackers reading, “We don’t want your kind in our country.” Police have no reported leads in the case.

The city’s response to this shocking crime has been muted. Last Tuesday, after the incident was reported in a brief buried in the Columbus Dispatch, a small group of roughly ten concerned residents gathered outside the burnt remains of the house holding signs reading, “Racism is Terrorism.” One of the people present stated, “Government has predictably failed to stop the rising tide of hate crimes in Columbus.” Columbus city government and the city’s Human Relations Commission have failed to respond.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, hate crimes against all minorities — but especially against those perceived to be Muslim — have been on the rise.

Columbus has been the rule rather then the exception in this area. With the largest Arabic population in Ohio, many of whom are refugees from the US war on Somalia, harassment and attacks have become common.

In the same campus area as Saturday’s attack, an Indian/Pakistani restaurant that used to boast perhaps the best Pakistani cuisine to be found in the city has changed its street front sign to advertise only Indian food. This came after vandals damaged the business following the Sept. 11 attacks.

In November, the Islamic Foundation of Central Ohio, located at the edge of the downtown area, was severely damaged. Vandals tore up religious books and writings, then flooded and destroyed the mosque. After that attack, the city’s Human Relations Commission, headed by Rev. Jim Stowe, held a brief rally outside the mosque calling for tolerance. Police still have no leads in the case.

Since Sept. 11, hate crimes against Muslims, Sikhs, and Indians have been a national epidemic. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, they alone received over 300 reports of harassment and abuse in the two days following the terrorist attacks — more then half of what they receive in a typical year.

A report released two weeks ago by the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium states that, unlike the hate crime incidents typically reported, which generally involve relatively young male offenders and male victims, the post-Sept. 11 backlash victims and perpetrators include women, senior citizens, shop owners and even children.

There are roughly seven million Muslims living in the US.

Targeting of Arabs, Muslims in the US assailed

By Emad Mekay

Washington, DC, Mar. 22 (IPS)— Arab and Muslim individuals and institutions in the United States are suffering increased interrogations and state raids, sending shockwaves through their communities. The latest clampdown has followed last week’s announcement by US Attorney General John Ashcroft of a new round of interrogations of some 3,000 foreigners in the country. They are being questioned in a bid to root out any connections they might have with militant groups.

The announcement has been roundly criticized by Arab-American and civil liberties groups and have brought Ashcroft’s own credentials as a right-wing Christian under the hot lamp.

Critics of the questioning say it is part of a multi-phased, multi-faceted racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims that has swept the United States since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The campaign has succeeded in intimidating entire sections of the US population but not in netting terrorists or their supporters, they say, citing a recent Justice Department report. In it, Ashcroft’s department acknowledged that “interviews” with a first batch of 5,000 Muslims aged 18-32 have yielded only a few arrests for immigration violations.

The Justice Department said the second round of “interviews” would complement the first set, which had targeted young Muslims who had come to the United States from countries where the al-Qaida group of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden was said to be active.

The department, in its report, admitted most detainments to date have uncovered no knowledge about the terrorist attacks.

Ashcroft, however, said the real purpose of the months-long process was to send a message to the Arab and Muslim communities that they are being watched.

“Such a climate could cause would-be terrorists to scale back, delay, or abandon their plans altogether,” Ashcroft told reporters. He said this proactive strategy “may well have contributed to the fact that we have not suffered a substantial terrorist attack since September 11th.”

Officially, all the interviews are voluntary, meaning interviewees can choose not to cooperate. During the first round, however, teams of two or more investigators — typically from the Federal Bureau for Investigation (FBI) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — often paid unexpected visits to the interviewees and forced their way into their homes and places of work.

The officials routinely asked Arabs and Muslims what they thought of bin Laden, al-Qaida and the war in Afghanistan, and whether there were things they did not like about the United States.

Usually armed, the investigators told interviewees their eligibility for successful immigration to the United States would improve if they volunteered information about anti-American statements or individuals who were possibly angry at America.

The young Muslim males were also required to account for their background, contacts in the United States and elsewhere, places visited prior to arriving in the United States, and their future plans.

Dozens of raids by US law enforcement officials were reported on the heels of Ashcroft’s latest announcement. Arab and Muslim homes, businesses, and institutions were targeted in at least two states last week, namely Virginia and Georgia.

Community advocates decried the operations as fishing expeditions, meaning they were intended to net evidence but were launched without legally defensible cause to believe the evidence would be found. Federal agents retorted they had enough probable cause to persuade a federal magistrate to issue warrants authorizing the raids.

Among those raided was the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a think tank based in Herndon, Virginia, near Washington, DC. Agents of the FBI and other federal agencies stormed the building and ordered staff members to leave their desks without touching anything. A number of homes also were raided.

“The Muslim community is deeply concerned about what appears to be a fishing expedition by federal authorities using McCarthy-like tactics in a search for evidence of wrongdoing that does not exist,” said Jason Erb of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based advocacy group.

Erb referred to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led an anti-Communist campaign of intimidation characterized by false charges and character assassination and who was finally censured by the Senate in 1954.

Some Arab and Muslim Americans say they now live in an atmosphere of coercion and fear that could prove counter-productive in the US administration’s self-proclaimed “war against terror.”

Worshippers at the Dar-al-Hijra mosque, a few minutes’ drive from the Pentagon in Northern Virginia, said they noticed muscular men in dark glasses video-taping their car license plates and taking pictures of those who entered the house of worship.

“They were not trying to hide themselves,” said one worshipper. “I think they are trying to let us know they are monitoring the place. This could actually mean that their video cameras have no tapes.”

Many attribute this wave of intimidation to the attorney general himself.

“He said bad stuff about Islam before,” said the same worshipper. “The funny part is that he is meant to be religious.”

The Muslim man, who asked not to be identified by name, referred to an Ashcroft interview with syndicated columnist Cal Thomas published on the Christian Internet site crosswalk.com.

In it, Ashcroft was quoted as saying: “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.”

Muslim groups said these and other of Ashcroft’s statements included inaccuracies about Islam.

NATION BRIEFS

Native groups resist Senate land bill
A bill before the US Senate, if enacted, would violate the land rights of Western Shoshone Native Americans in Nevada and pave the way for further exploitation of the region’s natural resources, according to tribal leaders.

Under the controversial proposed Western Shoshone Claims Distribution bill, the government would pay the 6,000 strong Western Shoshone tribe about $130 million from a federal trust fund to settle long-standing claims that the US illegally usurped the tribe’s land and resources.

The Western Shoshone National Council argues the claims do not represent an adequate accounting of land taken by the government. (IPS)

Plan would lessen patients’ say on records
The Bush administration proposed Mar. 21 to change some of the federal rules designed to protect the confidentiality of Americans’ medical records, including the ability of patients to decide in advance who should be able to use their personal health information.

The proposal would alter the federal safeguard that compels patients to give written permission before their records may be disclosed to doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and insurance companies. The new version would erase that requirement and, instead, say that patients must at some time be notified of their privacy rights by those who use their records.

In other changes, the administration wants to enable parents to find out what medical services their teenagers have received. Also, business associates of health care providers would be given more time before they have to follow confidentiality rules. (Washington Post)

Three charged in racist attack
Three men alleged to be white supremacists were charged on Mar. 19 with arson and a hate crime in connection with the torching of a garage and two vehicles belonging to a predominantly Black church in Joliet, Illinois. The Greater Way Apostolic Temple was the scene of the arson attack which took place in January 2002. The garage was also painted with a swastika and a threatening racial epithet.
(Joliet Herald News, Black Voices, Chicago Tribune)

Human rights groups criticize tribunals
While Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld insisted Mar. 21 that military tribunals for al-Qaida and Taliban suspects being held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be “fair and balanced,” US human rights groups say they fell short of minimum due-process standards.

While the rules governing military tribunals have been changed since the original proposals were put forth by the Bush administration last fall, they still violate basic procedural rights, including the right to appeal to a civil court independent of the executive branch, according to Human Rights Watch. (OneWorld.net)