MSG Exposed
EXCERPT:
MSG Addiction Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic

Genocide in Africa The Worldwide Fund for Nature WWF
WWF
The Worldwide Fund for Nature--WWF--renowned the world over as a charitable organization established to protect endangered species, is provably responsible for the slaughter of animals and human beings across Africa and on other continents around the globe on an unprecedented scale. The 1994 Rwanda genocide is but the latest instance of the WWF in action.

WWF Rwanda
Since 1990, the WWF has been managing a ``gorilla protection program'' in Gorilla Park (1) in Uganda right on the Rwanda-Zaire border, in the adjacent Volcans Park (2) on the Rwandan side of the border, and in Zaire's Virunga Park (4). Along with the Akagera Park (3) in Rwanda along the Kenya and Uganda border, all these parks served as training bases, staging areas, and arms depots for the invading ``rebels''--who were in reality all soldiers and officers in the Ugandan Army of British puppet Yoweri Museveni. Museveni is run by Britain's Overseas Development Minister Lady Lynda Chalker.

So the Rwandan genocide had nothing to do with tribal or civil warfare. It was a British-orchestrated assassination and invasion program. And the parks administered by WWF played a pivotal role in the slaughter. From the same parks, the same WWF apparatus is involved in the planned destabilization and genocide against the rest of East Africa, beginning with Kenya and Sudan.

Under the guise of protecting endangered species, such as the elephant, the rhinoceros and the tiger, WWF ``park rangers'' carry out assassinations and other attacks against so-called ``poachers'' who in many instances turn out to be local patriotic political leaders or farmers who refuse to abandon their land and their food production to the WWF's land confiscation programs.

he shaded sections indicate those areas in sub-Saharan Africa which have been set aside as national parks, game reserves, and ecological reserves. Nearly 2 million square kilometers, or 8.2 percent of the entire sub-Saharan land mass, have been turned over to the WWF or its surrogates. To give an idea of the size of some of these so-called protected areas: Look at Kruger National Park, located on the border of South Africa and Mozambique.

WWF in Southern Africa
Kruger Park is located at number 8 on the map of Southern Africa. It is larger than the state of Massachusetts. It served as a base for both the RENAMO and FRELIMO forces in Mozambique's 20-year bloody civil war. Similarly, the even larger West Zambezi Game Management Area, located at number 1, housed both the UNITA and MPLA forces in Angola's 17-year civil war. Both typical WWF operations.

All across Africa, WWF mercenary armies carry out a brutal population war. Park rangers armed with helicopter gun ships, infantry weapons, and light missiles function as death squads. Between 1987 and November 1988, under a WWF-bankrolled program called Operation Stronghold, assassination squads under the direction of Zimbabwe's Chief Game Ranger Glen Tatham carried out cold-blooded murders of hundreds of so-called poachers, half of whom were unarmed and lured into ambushes. A number were leaders of the African National Congress' military wing. When Tatham and his men were brought up on 70 murder charges, the Zimbabwean parliament rushed through a bill, the Protection of the Wildlife Indemnity Act, which gave the park rangers immunity from prosecution for any actions they took ``in the line of duty.'' It was a license to kill.

During the same period, inside South Africa, WWF was running Operation Lock, ostensibly designed to save the black rhino. WWF Netherlands president, Prince Bernhard, father of Queen Beatrix, and John Hanks, WWF's Africa director and one of the continent's most outspoken Malthusians, financed a team of ``retired'' British Special Air Services commandos to infiltrate and sabotage so-called poaching rings.

We have learned from sources inside South Africa that Operation Lock was at the center of what came to be known in the early 1990s as the ``third force,'' an outside paramilitary force instigating black-on-black violence between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party by carrying out targeted acts of violence, like the June 18, 1992 Boipatong massacre. The goal: to trigger a bloody civil war and prevent the end of the apartheid system and the reintegration of South Africa into the world community.

Today, the same plan for systematic genocide is being directed by the Club of the Isles and the WWF apparatus against all of Eastern Africa.

East Africa WWF
Using the same Ugandan-based parks and WWF ``ranger'' apparatus, the British Crown is waging a war against the other countries of the Horn of Africa, particularly Kenya and Sudan. Club of the Isles figure Tiny Rowland, until recently the chairman of the Lonrho Corporation (``London-Rhodesia''), has boasted on Kenyan radio that he is a longtime member of the South Sudan Liberation Army of John Garang, which has been waging a war against the government in Khartoum. The WWF-Club genocidalists know that the Sudan is potentially the breadbasket for all of Africa, and at all costs they want the Sudan to be a battlefield, not a grain field.

Cover of EIR Windsor Report
Anyone who thinks that the British imperial policy of running gang-countergang warfare went out with Prime Minister Harold McMillan's 1960 ``Winds of Change'' speech announcing Britain's decolonization of Africa needs to read EIR's October 28, 1994 60-page special report, ``The Coming Fall of the House of Windsor.''

And anyone who thinks that the British program of mass genocide, under the guise of protecting endangered species, is something restricted to Black Africa, needs to consider the following information also featured in the EIR documentary.

One of the biggest myths perpetrated by the British Crown and the Club of the Isles is the completely false notion that the British Monarchy-- Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip--are merely powerless figureheads. Nothing could be further from the truth.

British Commonwealth
Just look at a map of the British Commonwealth today. There are 50 countries that are currently members of the British Commonwealth, which is defacto headed by the Windsors. Of those 50 countries, 16 are still to this day British Crown colonies, where the only sovereign is Queen Elizabeth! Among the 50 Commonwealth states you find a string of Caribbean islands that are notorious as the major drug money laundering havens and financial centers for the vast underground economy.

What's more, this global map of British imperial outreach is strikingly similar to the map of the World Wildlife Fund's international operations. So, don't be fooled by Club of the Isles propaganda. The British Empire is alive and well, complemented by the global covert empire of the WWF. This brings us to the next critical point.

While the genocide carried out against the population of sub-Saharan Africa is perhaps the single greatest instance of mass murder in human history, the WWF has not limited itself to one continent. Remember that Prince Philip and the Club of the Isles intend to reduce the world population by 80 percent over the course of the next several generations. In South America, the body count is smaller, but here, the WWF has pioneered a program referred to in its own literature as ``anthropological reserves.'' These are literally human zoos, where primitive tribes, like the Yanomami Indians of the Brazilian Amazon region (1), are kept in a state of enforced backwardness. In Brazil alone, there are currently 250 anthropological reserves. Over 10 percent of the total land mass of Brazil has been already set aside for such human zoos, holding a population of under 300,000, or less than two-tenths of a percent of the total population.

South America Protected Areas
In Peru, evidence is piling up that the murderous Shining Path narco-terrorist group has been financed and armed by WWF. At minimum, Shining Path has served as the WWF's enforcers in areas like the Upper Huallaga River Valley, the world's premier cocaine-producing region and an area dense with ecologically protected areas (4). In the Apurimac Reserved Zone (5), the Peruvian Army recently discovered mass graves and concentration camps run by Shining Path. The victims of the Shining Path brutality: the Ashaninka Indians. As far back as the mid-1960s, WWF had targeted this area of Peru as an ideal site for a future protected area. The obstacle was the Ashaninka, who had farmed and hunted the area for centuries, and were apparently open to modernization and integration into Peruvian society. Shining Path moved into the area in the 1980s, after 1.6 million hectares had been set aside as the Apurimac Reserved Zone and began the systematic murder and enslavement of the Ashaninka. All done under the watchful eye of Prince Philip's WWF.

Central America
Mexico and Central America are equally under the gun of the genocidalists of the WWF-Club of the Isles. No. 1 on the map of Central America and Mexico shows the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, the scene of a year-long guerrilla insurgency by the EZLN, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation. The insert is a blowup of the Chiapas region. All four of the WWF-linked protected areas have been identified by local farmers as staging areas and training grounds for the Zapatistas. A, B, and C denote the Launas de Montebello National Park, the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, and the Agua Azul Cascades National Park respectively. Each of these areas are EZLN strongholds, especially Montes Azules right on the border with Guatemala.

Rigoberta Menchu, a leading Guatemalan terrorist and leader of the narco-terrorist URGN gang (who received the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize!), recently led a cross-border march in support of the EZLN guerrillas, and when she led 1,000 ``refugees'' back into Guatemala from Chiapas, supplies were airlifted in to the demonstrators by a Royal Air Force C-130 transport plane from Belize. You can see Belize on the map at No. 2. It's a British Commonwealth country that has been the base of operations for British commandos for decades. Now the whole operation is being run under the auspices of the WWF.

Looking back at the map of Chiapas, (D) denotes El Ocote Ecological Reserve, which is not a known EZLN staging area, but is a favorite clandestine site for the growing of large quantities of marijuana.

So in Mexico and Central America, the southern neighbors of the United States, we have all of the ingredients that we saw in such WWF-targeted areas as Rwanda, South Africa, and Peru. It's a ticking time bomb. And it gets worse.

Not only is Ibero-America a target of WWF genocide. North America is as well.

North America Protected Areas
Almost the entire Western third of the United States is either a protected area or an area under the Bureau of Land Management slated to be set aside in the near future. Half of Alaska is already a vast protected zone.

Canada is perhaps the most advanced case of WWF's so-called ``endangered peoples'' insurgency (Prince Philip draws no distinction between human beings and lower forms of animal life). The lined area in the very north of Canada at number 3 is the Nunavut nation, established on June 10, 1993 by Queen Elizabeth II, as a tribal homeland for the Inouit Natives. Through the WWF, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and the WWF-spawned Survival International, Inouit natives were literally herded back into this no man's land over a period of a decade in order to justify this vast set aside ``nation,'' which will obtain its independence as a Royal Crown state in 1999.

California Desert
Under the California Desert Protection Act, passed by the 103rd Congress in October 1994, 8 million acres of land were set aside. Prior to the passage of that act, 12 million acres of land in California had already been set aside. Under existing or pending legislation, 80 percent of the state of California will be off limits by the end of the decade.

Not only is the WWF out to transform the western states of the U.S.A. into a vast nature and game preserve off limits to any kind of economic development: As part of a longstanding British monarchy commitment to overthrow our Federal Constitution, the WWF is working toward the ``Balkanization'' of North America, the bustup of the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico into what one leading ecologist has labeled the ``Nine Nations of North America.''

Nine Nations
On several occasions over the past 200 years, the British have attempted to break apart the United States. The most well-known case was the Civil War--the British were the guiding hand behind the Southern secessionist insurrection. Notice on the ``Nine Nations'' map that one of the ``new'' nations proposed to be carved out of the United States, No. 7, is to be called ``Dixie.''

The British have not forgotten Australia, either. Prince Philip was the personal founder of the Australian branch of the WWF, and he continues to devote a great deal of his personal attention to the continent.

Australia WWF
A look at the map of Australia makes the point very clear. Between indigenous reserves (i.e., human zoos) and other set-aside lands, the WWF has managed to practically cut the continent in half, almost cutting off the eastern and western halves of the country and insuring a semi-permanent state of underdevelopment.

A review of the history of WWF, which we do not have time to go through here, would show that the post-World War II so-called environmental movement, was nothing but a revival of the Eugenics Movement of the late nineteenth and early 20th century. After the Nazi genocide, the term ``eugenics'' was discredited, so the same British and allied European and North American ``elites'' who backed Hitler changed the name to ``environmentalism'' and went right back into the genocide business. To illustrate the point: WWF founder Sir Julian Huxley was president of the Eugenics Society in 1961 when the WWF came into being.

Prince Philip, world spokesman for WWF and the chief officer of the Club of the Isles, put it succinctly at a March 11, 1987 address in London:

``The simple fact is that the human population of the world is consuming natural renewable resources faster than it can regenerate, and the process of exploitation is causing even further damage.... All this has been made possible by the Industrial Revolution and the scientific explosion and it is spread around the world by the new economic religion of development.''

Prince Philip is lying. Lack of genuine economic development, willfully blocked by Philip and his fellow genocidalists at the WWF and in the Club of the Isles, is the only ``limit to growth.'' Destroy the political and financial power of the Club and nothing stands in the way of a new Renaissance.

from: http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/fallhous.htm

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The (WWF), corporations and modern-day eugenics projects
Submitted by Kwa Ali (not verified) on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 19:08.
The World Wild Fund For Nature (WWF), corporations and modern-day eugenics projects
By Kwa Ali
Resources: http://siteresources.worldbank.org

A detailed study, by the Multinational Monitor in 1990, listed that 29 individuals from the World Wild Fund For Nature (WWF ) board of directors and National Councils were affiliated at the highest rank to corporations such as "Union Carbide, Exxon Chemical Co and Monsanto". In the same year, the WWF director was an ex-president of Exxon Chemical Co, the same company "accused of dumping illegally 2.9 million pounds of toxic material in a 1987 lawsuit". Currently, WWF International president, since 2001, is Chief Emeka Anyaoku , an honorary member of the Club of Rome and the Chairman of the Orient Petroleum board. Previously, he held the position of Secretary General of the British Commonwealth, a servant then of to the Queen Elizabeth of England.

In 2000, WWF signed a 5 year contract worth £3.5 million with Lafarge Aggregates, a French multinational (fined in 1994 and 2008 for boosting profits through a cement cartel). In 2003, Lafarge Aggregates used the partnership with WWF to persuade local communities and environmental organisations on the benefits of the construction of a massive quarry in Harris, Scotland. As a WWF conservation partner, the company was assured: "a unique relationship that [...] enhance brand image and add value to (your) marketing and communications strategy." (Source: WWF Web-site).

Another environmental organisation, Friends of the Earth called for an immediate cessation of such partnership. This was by no means the first WWF illegitimacy crisis as the WWF International's first president was a German-born count, later known as Prince Bernhard of Holland , organiser of the first Bilderberg meeting and linked to Nazis groups (IG Farben, the manufacturer of Zyklon B). In 1976, after the Lockheed bribery scandal and “operation Lock”, Prince Bernhard resigned and was replaced by John H. Loudon, a financial advisor to the Rockefeller Group , a former CEO of Royal Dutch Shell and chairman of Shell Oil Co board. Since its creation, the WWF was funded by the 1001 Club, a club whose members comprise of the establishment with a long list of royal entities, powerful families and members of the business elite, with an entrance member fee, set at $10,000.

The top executive positions at WWF seem to be reserved to those who come directly or have had experience in the corporate world, and more particularly the gas, mining or oil industries. Maurice Strong, first president of CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) and adviser to the World Bank Group on environmental matters was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation- which funded the first UN Earth Summit in 1972- over which he presided. He was working for Stronat, owner of ProChemCo and AZL (conglomerate with ventures in land, gas and oil, lead also by Adnan Khashoggi) when he became the Vice President of WWF Canada in the 1970's.

A strange event occurred in 2007 at the WWF office in Toronto, Canada which was investigated by the Medias and the police with great care to tell the "obvious facts" and hide the "crucial facts". In 2007, Glen Davis, one of the wealthiest and largest donor to WWF was murdered at the basement of a garage, after a meeting. Glen Davis, a heir to a Canadian mining giant (NM Davis corporation), had joined WWF in the early 1980's and was sitting at the WWF-Canada board along with representatives from Manitou Investments, AGF Management, Catalyst Paper Corp, JP Morgan (big players in the banking and resource extraction industries) at the time of his death. His assassination has been linked to the trial of another Canadian (and ex-British lord) millionaire, Conrad Black, an ex-associate of his father Neil Davis from whom he had inherited.

Recently, in January 2008, with very little inquisition from fellow environmental and conservation organisations; George Bourne brought his experience as an ex-senior executive to British Petroleum (BP) to WWF Australia. The relationship between WWF and oil companies (and the mining industry) is a close and durable one; Chevron made a very public donation of $ 4 million to WWF while the company was extracting oil in Papua New Guinea in 1999. These oil developments operations provoked much anger and criticism from the local population. By 2000, reports pointed to negative environmental and social spillages; corruption cases of officials linked to pressures by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group on the Government of Papua New Guinea to exchange natural resources for the repayment of the debt. Also, leaked documents from Chevron, during its oil drilling deals, facilitated by World Bank loans, stated "WWF will act as a buffer for the joint venture against environmentally damaging activities in the region, and against international environmental criticism".

Deals such as the one WWF made with Chevron, American Express, Inco Limited (tar extracting company), Canon and Unilever (the Marine Stewardship Council), CitiGroup, Kodak, Bank of America, DuPont (manufacturer of chemical products, with "a record of pollution, communities sickness and workers hazards"); are seen by multinationals as a cheap form of advertising as those "donations" to non-profit organisations are tax-exempt. Furthermore, this "cover-up" strategy by multinationals is part of a long list of image control tactics such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) which perpetuates profits but with less negative public scrutiny.

This attention to public criticism serves also as a diversion from the root problems; the development of economies of scale and its consequences on the environment, the ever-increasing concentration of corporate power in the hands of fewer companies, namely economic globalisation.

Recent examples of such "image control tactics" through the use of Non Governmental Organisations have been largely developed for the "eco-friendly" stamps on products, certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Round Table for Sustainable Soy (RTSS). The RSPO and RSS agendas are controlled by companies among which, some have a record violation of human rights for the control of large lands by the expulsion of local indigenous communities, price fixing and tax evasions (e.g. Cargill) . The participation of WWF in all the Roundtables was heavily criticized by more than 100 organisations who rejected the farce of certifications schemes, with no enforcement or compliance mechanisms to environmental and societal behavioural change for those multinationals causing deforestations, rural migrations and the loss of biodiversity.

In 2006, the WWF board of the trustees was made up by representatives of telecom and Public Relations companies, investment banks, British tourism authorities, ex-officers of the British army, British intelligence officers and companies linked to Group 4. Group 4 is also known by grass-roots environmental organisations as the British private security firm- working on behalf of powerful arm dealers- to stop criticism by spying on activists.

Hence, WWF does not only serve as "the green card" for multinationals but it serves also as an intermediary between government’s officials and those companies in the North interested in gathering intelligence for investment plans (oil drilling, tourism or mining) in the South.

In present days, WWF is present all over the world with offices in 100 countries. Among the 2000 current projects, one is in the biosphere of Luki (Congo) with the partnership of the Belgian Cooperation, WWF-Belgium is making an evaluation and plan to implement a project for the exploitation of those reserves; which multinational will partnership for socially and environmentally damaging activities in Luki ? At the same time, WWF-Belgium in Congo is also accessing environmental/socio-economic indicators and promoting eco-tourism.

When we go back to the creation of the World Wildlife Fund, we do not see the infamous Prince Bernhard but a biologist, known by the common public as the brother of Aldous Huxley and less known as an eminent Darwinist and eugenicist scientific who worked as a scientific adviser in the colonies of East Africa of the British empire in the 1930's.

Before creating the WWF with fellow conservationists, Julian Huxley saw into the creation of national parks in Kenya, used for tourists and stole from the tribal communities. A member of the British Eugenics Society , he had previously studied the importance of non-human settlements for the need of animal conservation habitats and made often the less than "humanist" aphorism: "no-one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ-plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?"

Population growth has been decried as a problem through its pressure on land, by WWF, since its inception. This recurrent theme of WWF (a reminder, perhaps, of its eugenicist creator) serves for the purpose of the construction of protected "natural parks", designed for foreign tourists and implemented though massive expulsions of local communities, for the great interests of the mining, gas, oil and tourism industries.

With the great efforts of a conservation group such as WWF allied with price-fixing multinationals, the problem of over-consumption of the world poor who "are reproducing too fast" will be resolved through the rise of prices of food commodities and environmental standards will be set through roundtables to commercialise green energies such as biofuels. (continued quote: "Therefore... they [the poors] must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation." (Julian Huxley, Man in the modern world,1947)

The latest alliance of WWF with multinationals against the needs of the communities in the South has been expressed in its endorsement for “biofuels”. With a similar viewpoint, the UN and World Bank experts called for Third World countries to seek into the opportunities of economic development through “biofuels”, as a way of reviving their moribund agricultural sector, before denouncing in a convenient and timely manner the danger of such investments amid world food riots .

Between the first meeting of UNCTAD (United Nations Conferences on Trade And Development) on "partnership for development of the international community", the "Biofuels Initiative" in 2005, sponsored by UNICA (Sugar Cane Industry Union) and the Convention on Biological diversity in 2008; the number of people, in the world, dying of hunger or malnutrition increased from 17 million in 1978 (0.3% of world population) to the predicted 150 million for 2008 (2.2% of world population).

Global food crisis are not a new phenomenon, solely linked to the transformation of food crops into fuel, but have been linked since the 1970's to the integration of world food markets in one market; in which small poor farmers in the South have to compete with the subsidized rich farmers of the North. The current trade system is at the roots of the continuing impoverishment of southern countries; as the system is dictated in the North by corporations against the needs of the common people. As a former WTO official described the institution: “This is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups”.

In going in line with the interests of transnational companies, WWF USA gave its unequivocal support to the North American Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA). This is the same agreement that brought hunger, epitomized during the “Tortilla crisis” to Mexico, important job losses in both the US and Mexican camp.

In “Green politics and the Global Trade: NAFTA and the future of environment”, author John Audley gives an account on the access to institutions (US highest official positions) and the presence at the signature of NAFTA of United States Trade Representatives (USTR) advisors and WWF trustee founder of the WWF Russell E.Train and Kathryn Fuller, president of WWF (1989-2005), also a former USTR and current director of Alcoa.Inc. To know this particular point, explains the incapacity of the WWF to denounce the World Trade regime and its free-trade acolytes, causing global warming by repeatedly banning the practise of environmental policies, seen as barriers to trade.

It is then urgent to ask WWF for whom the organisation works: the business elite? On which grounds can the conservation organisation claim to defend the environment when it is in partnership with the biggest polluters in the world? Can a Not-for-Profit organisation run a budget surplus of more than US$100 million (accounts are protected by the banking secret as the WWF headquarter is in Switzerland) and still call itself a Non-Profit organisation? Can, we, the defenders of social justice let an organisation linked with so many corporate and elite interests control and operate in such a vast areas of lands in the Third World, as a defender of neo-colonialists and eugenicists projects?

See: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/042806-GT-PW-rigoberta...

Genocide in Africa

Winnie the Pooh worships Satan youtube

Satanic influence on children
EXCERPT:
Geraldo's program lasted through two hours of prime time, and reached an enormous TV audience. He discussed Satanism, which was described as "this force that exalts evil and darkness." The episode included discussions of: butchered infants, breeding of babies for later sacrifice during Satanic rituals, ritual sexual abuse of children, mutilation of infants, drinking of blood, dismembered corpses, cannibal cults and sex orgies. There were "gruesome rituals," and "gruesome memories," and "gruesome allegations," and "brutally violent, horrible crimes," and acts "so incredibly outrageous, so incredibly unbelievable," that he was reluctant to describe them. "The most gruesome scenes are left out," Rivera commented.

The Hidden Evil
EXCERPT:
He continues to list specific organizations under a Satanic influence such as:

•The military
•Many law enforcement agencies, including the police
•Courts
•The Federal Reserve and Wall Street
•Education
•The AHA, APA, AMA, ADA
•Hospitals and mental institutions
•The FDA
•Communications such as internet, telephone and postal service
•Transportation such as airlines, trains, roads/highways
•Religion, science and research
•Utilities such as gas, electric, oil
•The entertainment industry including movie production, TV, music industry and casinos
•The mainstream media
•Most major corporations

Tom Hurndall murdered by IDF (another soul mate)youtube

Mazan Dana killed by US military
EXCERPT:
The "unconscionable" death of Mazen Dana
Are journalists being targeted in Middle East war zones? To a colleague of the slain Reuters cameraman, it sure seems that way.

By Laura McClure

Aug 20, 2003 | On Aug. 17, Palestinian cameraman Mazen Dana became the second Reuters journalist to be killed by U.S. soldiers since the start of the Iraq war in March. Dana, who had been filming outside a U.S.-controlled prison in Baghdad following the death of six Iraqis the previous day, was fatally shot through the chest when an American tank crew mistook his camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and opened fire. The American military has called the incident "a terrible mistake" and promised to investigate, but some observers now speculate that the shooting was reckless, at best.


James Miller filmmaker
EXCERPT:
Published on Wednesday, April 5, 2006 by the Guardian / UK
Shooting of British Cameraman by Israeli Soldier Cold-Blooded Murder, Inquest Told
by Vikram Dodd


A military expert yesterday told an inquest that the death of a British journalist who was shot dead by an Israeli soldier was "calculated, cold-blooded murder".
James Miller, 34, was killed by a single shot in May 2003 in Gaza while making a documentary about the suffering of Palestinian children.

No soldier has been disciplined or charged and in court the cameraman's family have accused Israel of a coverup, claiming there is evidence that his killer is Lieutenant Heib of the Israeli defence force.

British journalist James Miller was killed by a single shot in May 2003 in Gaza while making a documentary about the suffering of Palestinian children.

The jury yesterday was told by Chris Cobb-Smith, who investigated Mr Miller's death, that the fatal shot was "deliberate" and not an accident.


James Miller filmmaker murdered
EXCERPT:
James Henry Dominic Miller (18 December 1968 - 2 May 2003) was a Welsh cameraman, producer, and director, and recipient of numerous awards, including five Emmy Awards. He often worked with Saira Shah with whom he founded and operated an independent production company called Frostbite Productions in 2001. He was killed by a single shot fired by a soldier from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on 2 May 2003 while filming a documentary in Rafah.[1] The soldier who shot him was identified in the press as Captain Hib al-Heib.[2]

Is it true that only the good die young?
Sandra Jordan

Palestinian civilians live under the threat of Israeli Defence Force attacks that do not discriminate between militants and children. Israeli setlers live in fear of suicide attacks. But it is not only Palestinians and Israelis who are dying. Since the Gulf war, three Westerners have come under Israeli army attack.

An American peace activist was crushed to death by an IDF bulldozer; a British peace protester was shot in the head by an IDF sniper and remains in a coma; and last weekend, a British cameraman was shot dead by the IDF.

Within hours of arriving Sandra and Rodrigo are shot at and tear-gassed by Israeli troops breaking up a memorial service for Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist crushed by an Israeli Army bulldozer two days before.

That sets the tone for a five-week stay in which they document the shooting by Israeli troops of the British peace campaigner Tom Hurndall, the death of
James Miller, the award-winning cameraman who worked extensively for Channel 4, killed as he filmed Israeli troops bulldozing Palestinian homes, and the deaths and mutilation of many innocent Palestinians and Israelis.

The Dispatches team reveals what life is like in what has become a fully blown war zone. Their film captures the aftermath of an Israeli missile attack that assassinates a leader of the deadly Hamas group. Children who happen to be playing in the street nearby are killed or have limbs blown off.

They film the aftermath of an attack in which Israeli troops fire modified tank shells that explode in mid air above densely populated civilian areas and spray thousands of razor sharp darts, or flechettes, in an arc some 300 metres long and 90 metres wide. The team encounters sniper fire from Israeli watchtowers, and endures tank shelling alongside a class of terrified school children.

In one of the most shocking moments in the film, Dispatches captures heartbreaking scenes in a Palestinian hospital minutes after Tom Hurndall
was shot through the head, rescuing a seven-year-old child from the line of gunfire.

Jordan and Vasquez also investigate the death of James Miller, the award-winning cameraman. They find that eyewitnesses tell a story sharply at variance with the official Israeli account.

Related Links
Rachel Corrie's Memorial Website

Related Items
Film: Rachel: An American Conscience

Out of work sleeping in fields the people in central valley in California TRUTHOUT
Tiny EXCERPT at bottom of this article:
David Bacon is a writer and photographer. His new book, "Illegal People - How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants," was just published by Beacon Press. His photographs and stories can be found at

Book
Transnational working communities
EXCERPT:
People migrating between the U.S. and Mexico and Guatemala belong to transnational communities - they retain ties to their communities of origin, and establish new communities in new areas as they migrate in search of work. Those ties are often so strong, and the movement of people back and forth is so great, that in some sense people belong to a single community which exists in different locations, on both sides of the border.
US courts against education
EXCERPT:
STUDENTS

U.S. COURTS – ENEMIES OF EDUCATION?
By David Bacon
TruthOut Perspective, 5/8/09

SACRAMENTO, CA

Is there a “constitutional right to education”?

Legal scholar and civil rights advocate Erwin Chemerinsky says there is. “There has to be a right to education in the Constitution,” he declares, “and equal protection is a Constitutional imperative.”

Out of work sleeping in fields the people in central valley in California

Out of work sleeping in fields the people in central valley in California

Brad Will and the Solidarity song

Stop Plan Mexico video

Is President Felipe Calderon
protecting the CIA drug cartel
EXCERPT:
Merida Initiative: Is President Felipe Calderon protecting the CIA Drug Cartel?

“One of the ways we finance the growth of Multinational Corporations and the Big Banks and the rise of the Dow Jones is by selling narcotics to our children.” – Catherine Austin-Fitts


Brad Will a wonderful soulmate that went before

Anarchist Superstar: The Revolutionary Who Filmed His Own Murder
Submitted by worker on Sat, 2008-01-26 05:21.
Tags: Anarchist PeopleHistory
From Rolling Stone - By Jeff Sharlet

HE WAS AN ANARCHIST, AGITATOR AND JOURNALIST WHO WENT TO MEXICO TO DOCUMENT PEASANT REVOLT — AND HE ENDED UP FILMING HIS OWN DEATH

The Martyrdom of Brad Will

Even before he was killed by a Mexican policeman’s bullet, Brad Will seemed to those who revered him more like a symbol—a living folk song, or a murder ballad—than like a man. This is what the thirty-six-year-old anarchist-journalist’s friends remember: tall, skinny Brad in a black hoodie with two fists to the sky, Rocky-style, atop an East Village squat as the wrecking ball swings; Brad, his bike hoisted on his shoulder, making a getaway from cops across the rooftops of taxicabs; Brad, locked down at City Hall disguised as a giant sunflower with patched-together glasses to protest the destruction of New York’s guerrilla gardens. Brad (he rarely used his surname, kept it secret in case you were a cop) wore his long brown hair tied up in a knot, but for the right woman—and a lot of women seemed right to Brad—he’d let it sweep down his back almost to his ass. Jessica Lee, one of the few who spurned him, met Brad at an Earth First! action in southwestern Virginia the summer before he was killed. They skipped away from the crowd to a waterfall where Brad stripped naked and invited Lee in her swimsuit to stand with him behind sheets of cascading water. He tried to kiss her, but she turned away. She thought there was something missing inside him. “Like he was incomplete, too lonely,” she says. Maybe he was just tired after a decade and a half on the front lines of a revolution that never quite happened.


He was one of America’s fifty “leading anarchists,” according to Nightline, which in 2004 flashed Brad’s mug shot as a warning against the black-clad nihilists said to be descending on New York for the Republican National Convention. “Leading anarchist”—that was the kind of clueless oxymoron that made Brad laugh. Brad wasn’t a “leader,” a word he disdained; he was a catalyst: the long-limbed climber who trained city punks on city trees for forest defense in the big woods west of the Rockies, the smart guy you wanted in the front row when you gave your public report on the anarchist scene in Greece or Seoul or Cincinnati, even though he was also the dude who would giggle when he fumigated the room with monstrous garlic farts. In the 1990s, he’d helped hand New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a public defeat, organizing anarchist punks into a media-savvy civil-disobedience corps that shamed the mayor into calling off plans to sell the city’s community gardens. In the new decade, he became a star of Indymedia’s anti-star system, an interconnected anti-corporate press that lets activists communicate—directly instead of waiting to see their causes distorted on Nightline.

Brad seemed to be everywhere: One friend remembers him in Ecuador, plucking his bike from a burning barricade; another remembers him in Quebec City, riding a bike into a cloud of tear gas, his bony frame shaking with happy rebel laughter later while a comrade poured water into his burning eyes.

Now, Brad has become most famous for the final minutes of his last day alive, October 27th, 2006, in the capital of the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. He’d gone to document a massive strike blowing up into revolt against the government. His video camera peers through broken glass at a smashed computer; holds steady on a strangely peaceful orange-black plume rising from a burning SUV; crawls under a truck to spy on a group of… well, most people who watch Brad’s video on YouTube don’t know who they are. Cops, probably, though they wear no uniforms. Brad feints and charges toward them along with a small crowd armed with stones and bottle rockets, improbably chasing men toting .38s and AR-15s.

With two minutes left, Brad inches toward the door behind which he knows men with guns may be hiding. “Si ves a un gringo con cámara, mátalo!” government supporters ranted on local radio around the time Brad arrived in Oaxaca. “If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!” Then there are the last words heard on Brad’s video before he films a puff of smoke—muzzle flash beneath a gray sun—and his own knees rising up towards the lens as he falls, the cobblestones rushing toward him: “No esten tomando fotos!” (“Stop taking pictures!”) Brad didn’t hear.

He was scheduled to fly back to Brooklyn the next day.

-

During the three weeks he spent in Mexico before he was killed, Brad would make fun of his half-assed Spanish by introducing himself as “Qeubrado” (”Broken”). He didn’t look it. Six feet two, with a frame broad as his father’s – a veteran of Yale’s 1960 undefeated football team— he was vegan-lean but ropy with muscle, “a little stinky and a lot gorgeous,” remembers his friend Kate Crane. Back during his twenties, when he’d bring a slingshot to demonstrations instead of a camera, he thought of himself as half-warrior, half-poet, a former student of Allen Ginsberg’s now specializing in crazy-beautiful Beat gestures recast in a militant mode— “sweet escalation,” he called it, protest not as a means to an end but as a glimpse of a world yet to be made.

By the time he got to Oaxaca, in the fall of 2006, he was calling himself a journalist. “His camera was his weapon,” says Miguel, a Brazilian filmmaker who has produced a tribute called Brad: One More Night at the Barricades. “If you survive me,” Brad told a friend after he’d battled cops at a protest in Prague, “tell them this: I never gave up. That’s a quote, all right?” In the end there was just a picture, his last shot, the puff of smoke of the bullet speeding toward him.

“Yo d,” he wrote to Dyan neary, an ex-girlfriend, three days before he died, “jumping around like a reporter and working my ass off—been pretty intense and sometimes sketchy.” The governor of Oaxaca had sent in roving death squads, pickup trucks of paramilitaries firing on the barricades. The bodies were piling up. Brad was getting scared. “I went back to the morgue—it is a sick and sad place—I have this feeling like I will go back there again with a crowd of reporters all pushing to get the money shot— the body all sewed up and naked— you see it in the papers every day—I am entering a new territory here and don’t know if I am ready.”

Ready for what? Revolution? Blood? Brad had seen both before, in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil. Oaxaca was bigger, more exciting, more frightening. What had started as a strike by the state’s 70,000 teachers had exploded after the governor attacked the teachers with tear gas and helicopters. The federal government feared a domino effect, other states following Oaxaca’s example. In Oaxaca, every kind of leftist organization—indigenous groups, unions, students, farmers, anarcho-punks—came together in an unprecedented coalition and took over the city. The national government declared the entire state of Oaxaca “ungovernable.”

Brad knew what to do: Film it all. He’d send the tapes home, screen them in squats and at anarchist bookstores. Revolution is real, he’d say, here’s the proof. Burning tires, masked rebels stuffing rags into bottles full of gasoline, farmers with machetes; free kitchens, free medical clinics, free buses, commandeered by farmers and fishermen. At a street funeral, old women sing a radical anthem with their fists raised in the air; in a red tent at night a father pounds the silver box that holds his son. “La muerte as gobierno malo!” shout the mourners. (”Death to the government!”) “Viva Alejandro!” Alejandro García Hernández, forty-one years old, shot twice in the head by a group of soldiers who tried to crash through a barricade opened to let an ambulance pass. Brad wrote home, “And now Alejandro waits in the zocalo“—the city plaza—”he’s waiting for an impasse, a change, an exit, a way forward, a way out, a solution—waiting for the earth to shift and open—waiting for november when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song…one more martyr in a dirty war…one more bullet cracks the night.”

-

Kenilworth, Illinois, isn’t a town that raises radicals. A mile wide, tucked away close to the beach on the North Shore of Chicago, Kenilworth is the kind of place in which the wrong side of the suburb means houses cost only a couple of million dollars. There were four African Americans in the most recent census, and if there were any Democrats around when Brad was growing up, says Stephanie Rogers, a family friend, they kept quiet. “If Kenilworth wasn’t the absolute height of preppiness,” she says, “it was only because we were Midwestern. Kids would study that East Coast model, towns like Greenwich, Connecticut. That’s what Kenilworth wanted to be.”

Not the Wills. They didn’t follow anyone. “The Wills were achievers, and leaders,” says Rogers. For Brad’s three older siblings, that meant good grades, sports and student government, Brad was different. “We were all active kids, curious, athletic, and we would roughhouse and play ball,” says his sister Christy, a graphic designer who lives in San Diego. “Brad was less interested in those kinds of things.” He preferred science fiction and fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. And Star Wars, one of the few passions he shared with his all-American dad: Hardy, an engineer who owned a small factory, liked to imagine how other worlds might work. Brad liked to build them. He’d arrange miniature societies with his action figures, write modules for role-playing games. It wasn’t the monsters that enthralled him, it was the struggles between good and evil.

One of his favorite movies was It’s a Wonderful Life; lanky, amiable Jimmy Stewart provided a model for the way Brad would move through the world as he grew older, a Teen Beat-gorgeous geek–a dungeon master!—who was friends with jocks, preps, even Kenilworth’s tiny clique of stoners. With his feathered hair, his rugby-shirt collar standing proud and a broad smile sprawling beneath dreamy eyes, Brad looked like an extra in a John Hughes movie.

But he was slowly splintering away from the high-school-college-back-to-the-burbs loop that was the natural order of things in Kenilworth. “It was a struggle to open my life,” Brad would tell a Venezuelan newspaper years later. “I didn’t know much about the truth of the world, but little by little, I forced my eyes open, without the help of anyone.”

The Will children were expected to be athletes (Brad was a runner) and stick with an instrument. But one day Brad announced he was quitting trumpet to play guitar. Instead of joining clubs, he worked after school, as a flower-delivery boy, a library shelver, selling newspaper subscriptions. “Brad was perplexing,” says his mother, Kathy. “But he wasn’t a loaf.”

The one unbendable rule for Will children was college. His sister Wendy went to Stanford, Craig followed their father to Yale, and Christy went to Scripps College. Brad’s grades hovered between B and C, but after he aced his entrance exams he squeaked into Allegheny, a small school in western Pennsylvania. There he joined a frat, majored in the Dead and studied On the Road. Mostly he liked getting high, passing a pipe back and forth with his friend Matt Felix, an outdoorsman from New Hampshire who introduced Brad to the radical environmentalism of Earth First! That ethos of direct action and theatrical gestures drew Brad west when he graduated in 1992. He followed the hippie highway to Boulder, Colorado, where he began attending classes taught by Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Even more influential than Ginsberg was Peter Lamborn Wilson, who under the pseudonym Hakim Bey was known for a manifesto called The Temporary Autonomous Zone, or T.A.Z., a study in “ontological anarchy” and “poetic terrorism,” and a guidebook to the life of Brad was beginning to lead. “What happened was this,” Wilson writes, “they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.”

Wilson wasn’t offering an indictment so much as a prescription: “Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou“—crazy love—”neither selfless not selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels…” Brad was becoming one of Wilson’s wolfangels. “Very high-energy, extremely bright, not so well-controlled,” Wilson remembers of the student who talked his way into class because he hadn’t bothered to pay tuition. “Loose at the edges, reckless, you might call it courage. Manic sometimes, charming everybody.”

“Brad liked being in a hotbed of ideas,” says his mother, happy, at least, that her son had a job. She didn’t know that he stopped paying rent. “My crazy poet roomies fled the scene,” he later wrote of his accidental introduction to squatting. “I stayed and didn’t even have the phone number of the landlord.” that suited Brad—cash, he was beginning to believe, was a kind of conspiracy, a form of control he was leaving behind. He wanted to write poems, but even more he wanted to become one, a messy, ecstatic, angry, sprawling embodiment of Wilson’s manifesto.

His first attempt came one summer when 50,000 members of a Christian fundamentalist men’s movement called the Promise Keepers descended on Boulder, distributing a pamphlet called “The Iron Spear: Reaching Out to the Homosexual.” Brad wasn’t gay, but he decided to reach back. The Naropa Institute’s lawn abutted the Promise Keepers’rally ground, so Brad put on a show: He married a man. He recruited Wilson to perform the ceremony and a poet named Anne Waldman to play his mother. Another student was the bride, in a white satin gown complete with a train, and Brad scrounged a suit and tie. “I actually am a minister in the Universal Life church,” says Wilson. “I married them in full view of the Promise Keepers.” Then Brad kissed the bride, a long smooch that provoked one Promise Keeper to hop the fence to find out whether he was really seeing two men making out. Brad declared the stunt a victory when the fundamentalist decided to stick around, apparently convinced that poets throw better parties than Promise Keepers.

That was Brad’s idea of politics and poetry at the same time: a party and performance. But Brad didn’t care for stages. He wanted the show to run 24/7. From Boulder he moved to West Lima, Wisconsin, a half-abandoned town that had become an “intentional community”—a commune—called Dreamtime Village. Dreamtime was like a surreal version of the town Brad had grown up in: There was a post office, a school building, little Midwestern houses and almost no rules. Then, in the summer of 1995, Brad became interested in the stories he heard from a group of New York squatters on a road trip. When they headed back east, Brad hitched a ride.

“I moved to the big shitty as Giuliani-time kicked in,” he wrote in an essay for an anarchist anthology, We Are Everywhere. In New York, at least, anarchists were concentrated in a few dozen squats, buildings abandoned at the nadir of the city’s grim Eighties and rehabbed by whoever wanted to live rent-free. It was illegal, of course, which was part of the attraction for Brad—just living in a squat was a form of direct action, defiance of all the rules about property and propriety. Brad found himself an empty room in a squat on East 5th Street, home to around sixty “activists and destructionists,” in the words of Pastrami, a yoga teacher who befriended Brad. They hauled water up from fire hydrants and wired an electricity from a streetlight. Next door they cleared the trash out of an abandoned lot and turned it into a garden with a pear tree. They shared it with their Puerto Rican neighbors, eventually winning over even the nuns of the nearby Cabrini seniors home—their response to the squats went from one of horror to prayers for the wild but lovely young creatures who ate the trash and the toxic soil of the city. This was the life Brad had been looking for.

-

Anarchist isn’t so much a singular ideology as a set of overlapping philosophies, and Brad wanted to explore them all. He’d haunt the anarchist store Blackout Books, in New York’s Alphabet City neighborhood, and then he’d disappear for days into volumes he had bought, borrowed or even dumpster-dived, his long, bony hands cracking the spines of old lefty tomes and the quickie compilations of the writings of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico who was fast becoming the new model for anarchist panache. he read Kropotkin, the early-twentieth-century Russian biologist who gave to anarchism its core idea of “mutual aid,” the simple but radical premise that cooperation, not competition, is the natural condition of humanity, and he worked with movements like the Ruckus Society, Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets, leaderless networks of activists who put anarchist ideas into action through confrontational tactics—Brad was expert in the construction of “sleeping dragons” and “bear claws,” both methods of locking yourself down in front of a bulldozer or in the middle of a city street. The point wasn’t a set of demands but the act of disruption itself. In Brad’s world, action—direct, local, unfiltered—mattered more than ideology. In theory, anyway. In practice, the anarchist factions often succumb to purist notions, refusing even to speak to comrades they consider co-opted. Not Brad. he was tight with anarcho-primitivists, who view language itself as oppressive, and social anarchists, who write books and build schools. “He was the least sectarian person I ever met,” says Dyan Neary. “That’s what made it easy for him to introduce people to ideas. He was just sort of user-friendly.”

He had a sharp side, too. “Brad did his fair share of alienating people,” says Sascha DuBrul, who like Brad had migrated from Dreamtime to the Lower East Side. “He was so loud and outspoken, and he wasn’t always a big listener.” At the 5th Street Squat, he’d “talk really loud” about his building skills, but then, friends say, he wired his room incorrectly, resulting in a small fire. The fire didn’t threaten the building, but it gave Giuliani an excuse to tear it down. “When they came for our building,” Brad wrote, “there weren’t any eviction papers, and they came with a wrecking crane. I snuck inside, felt the rumble when the ball pierced the wall. I was alone. From the roof I watched them dump a chunk of my home on my garden…When it was all over: a rubble heap.”

“I almost feel like he wanted to die up there, he felt so guilty,” a friend told The Village Voice. Afterward, Brad undertook a freight-train tour of America, riding in boxcars from city to city, speaking to activist groups about Giuliani’s crackdown. “Brad got incredibly fucking riled up,” remembers DuBrul. “He was on fire, his hands were shaking.”

“He had a certain innocence,” says Stephan Said, a squatter and folk singer Brad admired. “What led him to his death was at the same time what made him so endearing.”

In 1998, Brad went out west to join Earth First! activists for a “forest defense,” which for Brad would consist of spending the summer on a platform built high up around the trunk of an old-growth Douglas fir in Oregon, an anarchist retreat from the laws down below. “I called it the Y plane ‘cause you’re up, up, up off the rules of the X plane,” says Priya Reddy, who’d become one of Brad’s best friends that summer. “The only rule you really have is gravity. It’s homelessness in the best sense.”

A city girl, Reddy–in Oregon she took the name Warcry, a not-so-subtle response to “hippie-ish” tree-sitters like Julia Butterfly—didn’t know how to climb, so at first she provided ground support, hiking from tree to tree in the murky green light, taking orders for supplies. Brad had a different concern. “I dropped a piece of paper,” he called down on her first day. “Could you find it for me?”

Warcry looked into the branches. The voice’s source, 200 feet up, was invisible. So was his piece of paper, fallen amid the thick ferns of the forest floor. When she found it, a folded-up scrap, she took a peek. A battle plan? No; a love poem.

The woods were noisy with the music of the tree-sitters. CDs and tapes of Sonic Youth, Crass and Conflict blasted full volume. The most popular song seemed to be “White Rabbit.” After Warcry heard it for what seemed like the hundredth time, she took a stand. “Why are you people playing White Rabbit over and over again?” she demanded. “You don’t know?” came the answer. “It’s a warning.” White Rabbit meant the cops, spotted by Brad or another tree-sitter from their perches far above, were on their way.

Soon Warcry worked up the courage to join Brad in the trees, spending three weeks on a neighboring platform. She brought a video camera. One day loggers brought down a giant within fifty yards of Brad’s and Warcry’s video, but you can hear his raw scream: “Fuuuck!” The tree settles, and Brad shouts at the loggers below. “How old do you think that tree was? How old are you?” It was a question he might have been asking himself—up in his treehouse, there were times he felt like a child, powerless to respond.

-

What set Brad apart from so many radical activists was that throughout it all, he remained close to his family, the buttoned-down Republican Wills of Kenilworth. When he was jailed for nearly a week at the WTO Seattle protests in 1999, one of his chief worries was getting out in time for his mother’s sixtieth birthday, which the Wills planned to celebrate in Hawaii. When he made it there, he didn’t tell them what had really gone down. “He didn’t want to burden us,” says his mother.

That’s how Brad kept his truce with where he came from. In 2002, when he and Dyan Neary were hopping freight trains from the Northwest to New York, he insisted they take a detour so that Neary—who goes by Glass—could meet his mother. Glass tried to talk politics, telling the Wills about South America coca farmers blasted into extreme poverty by U.S.-funded crop-spraying. Brad’s mom looked confused: “But, dear, how do you think we should deal with the cocaine question?” It wasn’t meant as a question.

“Later, I was like, Oh shit, they don’t really know what you’re doing, do they?” Brad giggled, proud of his ability to move between worlds.

The two had met shortly after 9/11, their first date a six-hour walk around Ground Zero. Brad was thirty-one; Glass was twenty, tall and skinny with big curves and big eyes and a smile like Brad’s, wide and knowing. But she was stunned by New York’s transformation from go-go to grief to warmongering. “What the fuck happened to my city?” she thought. They decided it was time to get out of town.
There were two complications. The first was monogamy. Brad didn’t believe in it. All right, Glass said, no sex. Brad suddenly discovered an untapped well of fidelity. The other problem was thornier: Brad was about to become a father. The mother was a French woman with whom he’d had a brief relationship while she was visiting New York. A month later, she called to tell him she was pregnant. Brad loved kids, but he’d sworn he’d never bring one of his own into a world he considered too damaged. Brad flew over to visit.
“Why don’t you stay?” she asked. “We can raise the child together.”

“I’ll help you out with money,” he said—a major commitment, given that he lived on food he found in dumpsters—“but I’m not moving to France.”

When the woman had the baby, her new boyfriend adopted him. That seemed to Brad like an ideal solution—he loved the family he already had, but he wasn’t looking to start one.

“He wanted to experience revolution,” says Glass. “He wanted to live that every day.” They spent much of the next two years in South America, returning to New York to raise funds by taking temp jobs–Brad was a lighting grip—and throwing all-night benefit parties. In Brazil, they worked with the Movimiento Sin Terra, landless poor people who’ve squatted and won rights to more than 20 million acres of farmland. In Buenos Aires, they joined up with a movement of workers who’d reclaimed factories shuttered by Argentina’s economic meltdown. In Bolivia, they met a radical coca farmer named Evo Morales who would soon become the country’s first indigenous president. This wasn’t the East Village, Brad realized, or a tree platform in Oregon. There was real power at stake.

Now he had a mission. He wanted to show American activists how to join the fight wherever they could find it, or start it. Video, he determined, was his best medium. In 2004, he scraped together $300 for a used Canon ZR 40 and headed back south, this time on his own. He was ready to start telling stories, ready to become a reporter.

In 2005, in a central-Brazilian squatters’ town of 12,000 landless peasants called Sonho Real (”Real Dream”), Brad filmed a police attack that resulted in two dead and twenty “missing.” Brad was the only reporter on hand. He hid in a shack, filming, and waited for the worst. The cops found him, dragged him out by his hair and beat him to a pulp. Then they smashed his camera and arrested him. “The U.S. Embassy refused to do anything,” says Brad’s friend Miguel. “They said, Yes, we know, but he is not an important person to us.” But his American passport still carried weight with the Brazilian police. They let him go. He’d managed to keep his tape hidden; soon, it would be broadcast throughout Brazil, a perfect example of Indymedia in action.

But it didn’t seem like a victory to Brad. “I feel like I am haunted,” he wrote to his friend Kate Crane. “I keep seeing a thin woman’s body curled up at the bottom of a well, her body in a strange position—I can’t escape it.”

-

The Mexico to which Brad traveled in early October 2006 seemed like a nation on the verge. Of what, nobody could say. But something was about to break. It was an election year, and a new force in Mexican politics, the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), appeared certain to win the presidency. Vicente Fox, the Bush clone who had deposed the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000, was constitutionally forbidden from running again. His anointed successor was Felipe Calderón, an angry bully obsessed with oil and secrecy, the Dick Cheney of Mexico. On July 2nd, Mexican television declared the race between Calderón and moderate Andrés Manuel López Obrador too close to call, and the next morning Mexico’s electoral authority made Calderón the winner. Only they hadn’t counted all the votes. Two million Mexicans poured into the streets to protest. Calderón’s only hope was to seduce the PRI, his right-wing party’s traditional enemy, into a coalition against the leftist PRD. In exchange for the PRI’s support, he promised that his party would bail out the PRI’s cash cow: Oaxaca.

Oaxaca is one of the poorest states in a poor nation. In 2004, the PRI installed as governor a rising star with a reputation for electoral fraud named Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Ruiz was a cash machine, skilled at milking the state to kick funds up to the national party organization. What he wasn’t so good at, it turned out, was keeping a lid on the discontent that has been rippling across Mexico since the Zapatistas marched out of the jungle in 2004.

“If they want to kill our teachers,” Oaxaqueños declared after Ruiz’s police killed several striking teachers on June 14th, 2006, “they should kill us all now.” From that day on, Oaxaca City was in open revolt. “Con Ulises’pelotas, yo haré los huevos fritos,” women chanted in the streets. (”With Ulises’ balls, I’m going to make fried eggs!”). It was as if Louisiana’s poor converged on New Orleans, shoved aside the political hacks and ran the city themselves for months, even as National Guardsmen drove around shooting into houses.

And yet the American press ignored Oaxaca. That made it a perfect story for Brad. Friends tried to talk him out of it. “The APPO”—the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, in effect its revolutionary government—”doesn’t trust anyone it hasn’t known for years,” Al Giordano, the publisher of a report on Latin American politics called Narco News, told him. “They keep telling me not to send newcomers, because the situation is so fucking tense.”

“I think I will go,” Brad wrote back. When he showed up at an Indymedia headquarters in Mexico City en route to Oaxaca, they told him his white skin would make him and anyone standing near him a target.

“You’re treating me like my mom,” Brad said. “What are you made of? This is what it’s about. This is the uprising.”

John Gibler, a radical print journalist with deeper roots in Mexico, remembers Brad showing up in Oaxaca City’s central square, a tall hipster American with a fancy camera—Brad had sunk his life savings into it—that made him look like a professional. “The media painted a picture of a gung-ho idealist who didn’t know which way was which, but the guy was not clueless,” says Gibler. “That first day I said, Hey, Brad, you wanna come along to the barricades tonight?” He looked at me, and he said, “I can’t wait to get out there, but people are getting killed. I need to get a feel of the place. Walking around at night without that is not a smart move.”

He found a place to sleep (the floor of the headquarters of an indigenous-rights group) and a place to stash his videotape—he’d learned from Brazil that a hiding place was a requirement for an Indymedia journalist lacking the protections of a big news agency. He ate with the APPOs, as the protesters were called, marched with them, slept on the ground beside them on hot evenings. He told them about his politics before he asked about theirs. He laughed a lot, his ridiculous guffaw. Slowly, the APPOs began to trust him. Brad was on the inside of what Rolling Thunder, an anarchist rag back in the States, would call “the closest our generation has come to seeing an anarchist revolution.” Mexican authorities evidently agreed—they were preparing to make an example out of Oaxaca.

-

Brad’s footage on October 27th begins on a suburban street, strewn with rocks and sandbags, a pillar of black smoke rising in the background. Minutes before, there’d been a battle, paramilitaries with automatic weapons versus protesters with Molotov cocktails. Brad zooms in on a silver van consumed by flames. Then he cuts back to the crowd, old men in straw hats, teenagers in ski masks, big mamas with frying pans. They begin to shout. “the people, united!” Bullets pop from a side street, and the fight careens onto a narrow lane of one-story buildings. “Cover yourselves, comrades!” someone shouts. The protesters advance car by car, lobbing Molotovs that bloom from the blacktop. The sky darkens, bruised blue over green trees. A dark-skinned boy in a black tank top kneels and aims his bottle-rocket bazooka. Bullets are cracking. Brad remembers a war photographer’s maxim: “Don’t get greedy.” That’s when you get killed. He turns of his camera.

When he starts shooting again, the protesters are crouching outside a white building in which they believe a comrade is being held prisoner. They batter the door, darting out into the open to deliver drop kicks. “Mire!” Brad shouts. (”Look!”) From down the street, more gunfire. Brad runs. Next to him someone is hit. “Shit!” Brad shouts. “Are you OK, comrade?” someone asks. Brad zooms in on an old woman fingering her prayer beads.

Then the final footage played around the globe half a million times: a red dump truck used as a barricade and a battering ram, a wounded man led away, gunfire answered by bottle rockets. “Diganle a este pinche wey que no este tomando fotos!” somebody shouts. (”Somebody tell this fucking guy to stop taking photos!”) Brad keeps shooting. He steps up onto the sidewalk, his camera aimed dead ahead. The compañeros are crouching; Brad rises, a pale white gringo above the crowd.

“I watch this, and I say, Brad, stop! Don’t do this!” says Miguel, the Brazilian filmmaker. “I ask myself if he really knows where he is. I ask myself if he knows he can die.”

Bang–a bullet hits Brad dead center, just below his heart, exploding his aorta.

“Ayúdeme!” he screams. (“Help me!”)

“Tranquilo, tranquilo,” someone says. (“Take it easy, take it easy.”) A photographer gives Brad mouth-to-mouth, and he gasps and opens his eyes. There are last words, but nobody knows what they are; the men who rush him to the hospital don’t understand English, and Quebrado has forgotten how to speak his mind.

-

His old girlfriend Glass was in Hawaii when she heard. She’d been e-mailing Brad a lot. She missed him, and it seemed like he missed her too. She’d been in New York right before he’d left for Oaxaca, and they’d gone on a pub crawl. He’d had a girlfriend with him, but in the pictures from that night it’s Glass on Brad’s arm. The day he died, she was sitting in a park, singing songs she learned from Brad. She sang the anarchist anthems, then Woody Guthrie’s “Hobo Lullaby.” Most of all she wanted to sing his favorite, “Angel from Montgomery.” She tried to hear Brad’s voice. He’d be John Prine, she’d be Bonnie Raitt.

Just give me one thing that I can hold on to/To believe in this living is a hard way to go.

“I have to e-mail Brad,” she thought. “This is so great!” Then her phone rang. “This is Dyan, right?” a stranger’s voice said. “Can you call Brad Will’s mom? He’s hurt.”

“What? How?” The stranger wouldn’t answer. “I’m not calling his mother until I know what happened,” Glass said. The stranger gave Glass another number. She dialed. “I was told to call this number about Brad?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s been confirmed,” said the voice on the other end, another stranger.

“What’s been confirmed?”

“Oh, he’s dead.”

All Glass remembers after that is screaming.

-

In Oaxaca, the APPOs combed Brad’s long hair and dressed his body in white. They draped a gold cross around his neck and laid him in a coffin. There were no fiery speeches, just weeping. Then-president Fox used the death of the gringo as an excuse to invade Oaxaca with 4,000 federal police. The U.S. ambassador, a Bush crony from Texas, blamed the violence on schoolteachers and said that Brad’s death “underscores the need for a return to law and order.” In the coming months, the APPO would be crushed; Calderón would slam through a Mexican version of the Patriot Act, allowing police to tap phones and make arrests without warrants or charges; and, this past fall, the Bush administration proposed a $1.4 billion military aid package for Calderón’s regime, ostensibly to fight drugs and “terrorism.”

And Brad’s killers? It seemed like an open-and-shut case—a Mexican news photographer had even taken a picture of the men who appeared to be the shooters, a group of beefy thugs in plain clothes charging toward Brad and the APPOs with pistols and AR-15s. The Oaxaca state prosecutor, a Ruiz loyalist, grudgingly issued warrants for two of them, police Commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar and Abel Santiago Zárate, known as “El Chino.” But at a press conference two weeks later, the prosecutor announced a new theory: Brad’s murder had been a “deceitful confabulation” planned by the APPO. In this version of events, Brad was only grazed on the street. The fatal bullet was fired point-blank by an APPO on the way to the hospital—a physical impossibility, according to the coroner. No matter. At the end of November, a judge set the suspects free.

Last March, Brad’s parents traveled to Mexico to request that the investigation be turned over to federal authorities. They won that fight, only to be fed the same story with a half dozen variations. Believability wasn’t the point. “In political crimes in Mexico,” notes Gibler, who came to act as the family’s translator, “there’s an impeccably neat history of immediate obfuscation and destruction of evidence. The authorities immediately flood all discussion with conspiracy theory. There’s a tradition of exquisite incompetence, so that later only speculation is possible.”

The Wills are not, by nature, speculative people. At age sixty-eight, Hardy is a solid, fit man with white hair worn in a boyish curl. He still drives more than an hour each way every day to his factory in Rockford, Illinois. Kathy Will bounces like a loose electron around the Wisconsin lake house in which they now live. Designed and built by Brad’s great-grandfather, the home is a mansion of broad, dark cypress beams, spotless, disturbed only by neat stacks of documents, arranged at the great oak dining table, like settings for a seminar on Brad’s achievements as a boy, Mexican politics and ballistics.

It’s on this last matter that the case still turns. If the Wills are ever to be able to say, “This is what happened, this is how Brad died, this is the man who killed him,” they must determine what sort of bullet killed him and where, exactly, it came from. The initial coroner’s report said the bullets were 9mm, which would rule out the .38s carried by the cops Brad filmed. But a re-examination of the evidence has revealed that the bullets were .38s after all. Hardy shows me a photograph of them, two squat slugs hardly dented. “They only passed through soft tissue,” he says. But from how far away? The government says Brad was shot nearly point-blank. The Wills are certain he was shot by the policemen at the end of the street. Proving that, they believe, may start the wheels of justice turning. I’ve come bearing what passes for good news to the Wills these days: a frame-by-frame analysis of Brad’s last minute made by his friend Warcry, who has entrusted me to act as her courier.

“This is what we’ve been waiting for,” says Hardy. We gather in a TV room. “That’s it!” Hardy exclaims. There, on the left side of the screen, above the hood of the red dump truck, in the green of the trees, a tiny white starburst appears, expands, drifts like smoke, visible for a fraction of a second, blown up into giant, pale pizels—very possible the bullet that’s about to hit Brad.

“Should we watch it again?” Hardy asks. Kathy’s head drops, and she backs out of the room. Rewind, pause; Brad falls down, over and over. “Yes,” says Hardy quietly, “this is what we need.”

He’s excited, his face flushed. It’s 11:30 at night. I call Warcry; she’s up, waiting for the Wills’ response. Hardy wants to see a still she’s isolated of a man who appears to be holding a sniper rifle, more potential evidence for a long-distance kill shot. “This could really change everything!” Hardy says. We gather around his computer in his study, a dark room filled with hunting trophies and memorabilia from Hardy’s Yale football days. I pull up the image, a man in a yellow shirt at a distance, a long gun barrel rising above his left shoulder. Hardy sighs. He walks over to a well-stocked gun cabinet, removes a rifle and turns around, posing perfectly as the man Warcry believes is his son’s killer.

“It’s not a sniper rifle,” he says, looking at the gun in his hand. “It’s a carbine.”

The puff of white smoke is the best piece of evidence they’ve seen in the year since Brad died, but they still can’t explain how he was shot twice at long range by such a clumsy old weapon. Hardy slumps into a seat in the corner, thinking of one more theory—one more chance at certainty—dashed.

Kathy brings us tea. Like Brad, she has soft, sleepy eyes and a broad smile. “I like talking to people,” she says. “I’ll talk to anyone. I guess that’s where Brad got it from.” Hardy is exhausted, but Kathy sits up, watching Brad’s old videos—Brad fleeing tear gas in Miami, bullets in Brazil. Hardy was always the skeptical one, shielding his wife from the ways of the world, but now it’s Kathy who’s gaining a worldly wisdom, grasping the roots of her son’s political discontent. She still doesn’t get the politics, tsk-tsks when she sees Brad sitting in front of an upside-down American flag—a crisp Stars and Stripes snaps on a pole outside the house, and there are three bands of red, white, and blue stones on her finger. It’s not anything that Brad said that has changed her point of view. It’s what the Mexican government says, the lies they told her to her face.

“It’d be laughable if they weren’t serious,” she says. “What they’re really telling me is that Brad was there for a very good reason. Believe me, I didn’t want him there. But he was absolutely right. He was right about all the injustices. I didn’t know it then. I really didn’t know. I know it now. In spades.”

One of the most common clichés about radicalism in America is the myth that it’s all about the parents, activists rebelling against or proving themselves to Mom and Dad before they settle down and become Mom or Dad. That wasn’t what Brad Will was doing. Had he come through that fire-fight on October 27th, 2006, he probably wouldn’t have mentioned it to his mother. Instead, he’d tell her about the great Mexican food he’d had, and she’d say that the lake was flattening in the cold, that soon it would be frozen, that maybe when he came home for Christmas he could go ice-skating. His footage likely would not have been seen outside activist circles in the United States, the echo chamber of the already persuaded. Yet the bullet that killed him ended up broadcasting what he had learned far beyond his usual channels, all the way back to where he’d begun. With Brad’s death, knowledge came to Kathy Will. It was the most awful kind of knowing: a new understanding of the world as it is, almost blinding her to the glimpse she had caught, maybe for the first time, of the world as Brad had imagined it could be.

“The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself,” writes Hakim Bey in the long and wild poem that turned Brad Will on to those possibilities, “an invisible golden cord that connects us.”

BofA offers illegal aliens credit cards.

I'm sorry if I seem a bit 'confused' about this. I remember back in the day when my brother-in-law (a major drug dealer)told me there was a place on his tax forms for illegal money??????? OMG! The world has totally become 'The Twighlight Zone'.

I would like to see the banking industry address these jerks in AZ about illegal immigrants........ hmmmmmmm A quote from BofA director........ “These people are coming here for quality of life, and they deserve somebody to give them a chance to achieve that quality of life,” says Brian Tuite, the bank’s director of Latin America card operations and one of the architects of the program. (WHAT DID HE JUST SAY???) omg HE SAID “These people are coming here for quality of life, and they deserve somebody to give them a chance to achieve that quality of life,” and yet AZ has got a profiling law in the works???????? OMG!!!

Bank of America targets Illegals for credit cards video

Illegals to get credit cards pilot program BofA

Bank Defends Credit Cards for Illegal Immigrants
by Scott Horsley

February 13, 2007 In Los Angeles, immigrants who don't have credentials to work in the United States can still get a credit card, thanks to a pilot program run by Bank of America. The bank is hoping to tap a fast-growing market by offering credit cards to illegal immigrants without Social Security numbers.

Bank of America is testing the new credit-card program at about 50 Los Angeles branches. Applicants don't need a Social Security number or a traditional credit check to qualify. But they do need to have a Bank of America checking account with no recent history of bounced checks.

Critics are condemning the program, saying the bank is knowingly marketing credit cards to illegal immigrants.

Under the pilot program, cardholders typically put up a deposit to guarantee payment of their credit card bills. They also pay a relatively high interest rate — in some cases, more than 21 percent.

Bank of illegal aliens in America

EXCERPT:
Bank of America defends the program, saying it complies with U.S. banking and antiterrorism laws. Company executives say that the initiative isn’t about politics, but rather about meeting the needs of an untapped group of potential customers.

“These people are coming here for quality of life, and they deserve somebody to give them a chance to achieve that quality of life,” says Brian Tuite, the bank’s director of Latin America card operations and one of the architects of the program.

wouldn’t give a penny to the March of Dimes or any other health charity that funds cruel animal experiments—but would your bank?

Unfortunately, Bank of America is a corporate donor to the March of Dimes, a charity that bankrolls scientifically useless experiments on primates, cats, dogs, rabbits, sheep, and other animals.

PETA has informed Bank of America about the cruel, irrelevant experiments funded by the March of Dimes, but to date, Bank of America refuses to designate that its donations be used only for non-animal research.

After multiple letters, phone calls, and pleas for a meeting garnered little more than empty rhetoric from the bank, PETA pulled its accounts from Bank of America and switched to a new bank. We’ve asked other animal protection organizations to do the same, and already United Poultry Concerns has dumped Bank of America, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is breaking its ties with Bank of America.

The animals are banking on you to do the same. Please, put your money where your mouth is. Take your money and … protest. Close your account at Bank of America and let bank officials know why.

March of Dimes-funded experimenters have spent millions of dollars forcing cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine on pregnant rats and newborn opossums, even though we have known for years that these substances can harm developing babies. The March of Dimes has also funded cruel experiments in which monkeys have been kept in restraints for days at a time and ferrets and other animals were given severe brain damage yet it has not funded a birth-defect registry, something that would give physicians and others real data from babies that could help save lives.

The charity spends nearly a million dollars a year on animal experiments, yet according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rates for many birth defects have gone up.

Although humans and animals both feel pain, fear, sadness, joy, love, and other emotions, physiologically there are vast differences between species. Data from one species cannot always be correctly applied to another. Drugs such as thalidomide, DES, and Accutane, for example, were thoroughly tested on animals and judged “safe,” yet many people who took these drugs died or unknowingly harmed their unborn children.

Instead of pouring resources into animal experiments, researchers could more effectively use these resources on programs that truly help save lives. Many similar charities, including Easter Seals, Birth Defect Research for Children, Child Health Foundation, and the Heimlich Foundation, put all their funds into programs that directly benefit babies and families and never spend a cent on cruel animal experiments.

Bank of America claims that it would be too difficult to earmark the donations, but other large corporations, such as Kmart, Publix supermarkets, and Sara Lee, have agreed to do so. In fact, Sara Lee not only designates that its corporate donations to the March of Dimes be used for non-animal testing, it also provided information about the health charity’s animal experiments to all 154,000 Sara Lee employees.

Please write to the CEO of Bank of America and suggest that the bank follow Sara Lee’s lead:
Kenneth D. Lewis, Chair, CEO, and President
Bank of America
NC1-007-56-01
100 N. Tryon St.
Charlotte, NC 28255


Please also join other caring activists at a demonstration at your local branch to pressure Bank of America to spend money more wisely.
To organize or join a demonstration at a Bank of America near you or for more information on how you can help stop the March of Dimes’ cruel experiments on animals, please visit http://www.marchofcrimes.com/wycd.html.

If you are a Bank of America employee, you are in an excellent position to influence the company’s policy on corporate donations. Please inform your employer in writing that you don’t support the company’s donations to cruel charities such as the March of Dimes.