The complete video:

This is a story that has been getting a lot of coverage this week but I’d like to just give a brief summary for those who don’t know about it. During the run up to the Iraq war there was a lot of noise being made about Saddam Hussein supposedly purchasing Yellowcake Uranium from Niger. The CIA among others asserted that this intelligence was faulty and probably bogus, but even so Vice-President Dick Cheney believed it and wanted it included front and center as a justification for war with Iraq.

Senator Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate these claims. He found nothing, came back and reported his findings, which were swiftly dismissed by Cheney and his cohorts. Wilson subsequently wrote an Op-Ed article for the New York Times entitled, “What I didn’t find in Niger.” This ruffled Cheney’s feathers to say the least. Exactly what happened next is still under investigation, but somehow the fact that Wilson’s wife was an undercover CIA operative was leaked to the press.

It is a federal offense to unmask a CIA operative, so once this information hit the newspaper an investigation was started by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. His investigation led him to Libby as one of the sources for the leaked info. Libby denied being the leaker and tried instead to mislead Fitzgerald in his investigations. This led to Libby’s conviction for obstruction of justice, not the leak itself. The bigger question now is who orchestrated the leak. The common practice when trying to solve a crime is to look for who had the motive, in this case all fingers point to Cheney himself. This thinking is also shared by Fitzgerald who is reportedly preparing a case against Cheney. If this case goes to trial it will be very interesting indeed and may sound the death knell for Bush’s shaky administration.

For more insight into this issue read former CIA analyst Ray McGovern’s column : Why Cheney Lost it When Joe Wilson Spoke Out

By John Scott

This story is hot off the presses. Thousands of students and teachers who were out protesting a new law in Greece that would govern the functioning of Universities were brutally repressed by police. Reports are coming in that the police repression is on-going, and the arrestees are having a hard time. This situation is still developing and more details are likely to emerge over the next couple of days…

On Thursday afternoon, the government began the process of voting on the new legislation despite a enormous public outcry. Students, teachers, and academics have been involved in an ongoing struggle since May 2006 with the government, which has included occupations of schools and faculties, strikes and several demonstrations.

Today, over 35,000 students, teachers, and academics flooded the streets of Athens to participate in a public demonstration surrounding the Parliament. In front of Parliament is where the police brutality began to come into play. Some of the demonstrators purportedly clashed with police while the air was then filled with asphyxiating and tear gass, and rubber bullets were shot. This broke up the march into several factions, and a random 100 or so demonstrators who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time found themselves found themselves beaten and subdued by heavy police force. Several more attacks followed to break up the crowd into even smaller factions, and police began beating teachers as well as the students. Many individuals fled the scene and hid in nearby buildings to escape the situation.

Reports from Athens police headquarters indicate that all of the 62 detainees will be considered as arrestees, 45 people have been taken to the hospital. The prosecutors are not allowing the detainees to meet with lawyers, and are preventing five injured detainees from seeking medical care at the hospital.

Rioting started in Thessaloniki city following a spontaneous solidarity march that formed in protest for the repression that had just taken place in Ahtens. Reports indicate that the riot police are spraying tear gas towards the university, and that students in the Tessaloniki Polytechnic Faculty are suffering. The university’s student radio is reporting that the tear gas has infiltrated the corridors, and that hundreds of students are trying to escape the gas, ducking into rooms or making their way on to the roof tops. 1 student has been reported to have been injured in Thessaloniki after having been hit by one of the police’s tear gas rockets.

The student radio is reporting that they feel as if they are facing only the first implications of the new legislation, and that many of the students and faculty feel as though they are now under a dictatorship.

Amy Berg, the Oscar nominated director of “Deliver Us From Evil”, a documentary of a pedophile priest, is now developing her first narrative feature film. Berg is collaborating with screenwriter Micky Levy on this project, which will be based on the true story of a girl who was taken from her family by the government.

Berg first met the woman (who wishes to remain anonymous) in 2002 when she was an investigative reporter for CNN. CNN, however, wasn’t interested in airing Berg’s segment with the woman. And now, several years later, she still hasn’t forgotten about the injustices experienced by the woman and wants to bring them to the big screen. Berg recently purchased the rights to the woman’s life story, and has begun working on the project.

The project will tell the story of the Yupi’K American Indian girl who as taken from her Alaskan family in the 1960’s by the US government, and was then sent to a series of foster care homes in a government sponsored “Americanization” campaign.

Last week two Florida teenagers, age 16 and 17, were were prosecuted for producing, directing and promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of children. The kicker of it all is that the individuals featured in the photos were each other. Under Florida law it was perfectly legal for the two teens to engage in sexual intercourse, but apparently documenting the act was just too much.

Confused? Let me explain. The two children were prosecuted on the basis of Florida’s child pornography laws, which are in existence to protect children from being exploited. In this case, neither of the two were exploited. They willingly engaged in a sexual act, and both willingly photographed the incident. The photos were never made public. The boy emailed a photo to the girl, and the girl emailed a photo to the boy. They didn’t do anything wrong in my opinion!

I’d be willing to bet that this whole ordeal was the result of an overprotected, somewhat crazy parent of one of the teens. Otherwise, how would anyone have found out? It’s time for parents to get realistic. Teenagers have sex, and that likely includes your own little angel. Publicly humilating and punishing them for something that is natural is sickening and wrong. And just as wrong as that is the state and the courts that actually try cases like this. The pornography laws are in effect to stop the 50-year-old perverts from exploiting children, not to stop teens from having consensual sex and taking photos of it.

In late 1998, Amnesty International issued a report in which they expose how the United States justice system incarcerates more children than any other country in the world. Amongst their findings in the report are that approximately 200,000 children per ear are prosecuted in general criminal courts, with an estimated 7,000 of those held in jail before trial. Over 11,000 children were also currently being housed in prisons and other adult correctional facilities.

When we think of children being tried as adults, we tend to think of a sociopathic or antisocial child that has committed some kind of extremely violent act. But the reality of the situation is very different. More than half of children whose cases were transfered out of the juvenile courts were charged with non-violent offenses.

Sure, the US is a large country, but proportionately the US still puts far more children behind bars than any other country.

Jason Zeidenberg, policy analyst with the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, said:

“The US puts more of its children behind bars than any other nation on earth. To give you a comparison, the U.S. has more than five times the number of incarcerated children as India, a country of nine hundred million people.”

Zeidenberg went on to describe how the incarceration of children affects their future prospects and liklihood of re-offending:

“Children who have been incarcerated are three times more likely to re-offend within the next year as children who are sentenced to alternatives to incarceration. Such alternatives can include counseling, community service, reparations and a whole host of others. Also, all of these alternatives are much less expensive than incarceration.”

Even more startling in the Amnesty International report is a description of the treatment of children who are incarcerated. They are not treated with kid gloves, and in fact, the use of solitary confinement is a very common practice with youth offenders. Amnesty International’s study also pointed to a study conducted in 1992 which found nearly 89,000 cases in which a child was palced in solitary confinement for more than 24 hours.

Children who end up in juvenile jail far worse off than their counterparts who receive some kind of alternative treatment, but those who find themselves in adult instituations find themselves in an even more bleak situation. These children in adult institutions are five times more likely to be raped, three times more likely to be beaten by staff, and eight times more likely to commit suicide than are children in juvenile institutions.

If you are intersted in reading the report, you can find it here in their feature section on Juvenile Justice.

I came across an interesting website today, The Innocence Project, which according to its website is a “national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.” The organization was founded in 1992 to help prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing.

One of the most startling facts presented on the website is this one:

To date, 194 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 14 who served time on death row. These people served an average of 12 years in prison before exoneration and release.

In other words, 194 people since 1992 have been cleared of all charges and were proven to be innocent through the help of DNA testing. These people were innocent and wrongfully convicted, and had their lives nearly destroyed. If 194 cases have thus far been caught, then how many other innocent people are rotting away in jail having been convicted of a crime they did not commit?

The Innocence Project goes even further than just tossing out a bunch of numbers. Available on their website is a national view of exonerations across the United States. By mousing over each state, you can find out how many people have been cleared. Clicking on the state will provide you access to even more information, including the nitty gritty details of each of the individuals cleared - including their full names, pictures, case info, and more.

It really makes you think about the whole justice system here in the United States, how things aren’t always fair or perfect, and how the system can be abused and manipulated. And for those who believe in the death penalty, I hope that these figures at least give you cause to think about how you feel about that issue again.

Julie Amero, a 40-year-old Connecticut substitute teacher, faces up to 40 years in prison after she was convicted in January of four counts of risk of injury to a minor. Amero was charged and convicted for exposing her students to pornography on a classroom computer.

Prosecutors insist that she intentionally was looking at lewd and pornographic images, while experts believe that it was more likely the fault of hidden spyware and adware, which can cause pop-up ads to take over a computer. Furthermore, Amero and her supports insist that the computer lacked a firewall and anti-spyware software that could have prevented the pop-up porn.

Amero was working as a substitute in October 2004 in a seventh-grade classroom. Some of the students were working on computers looking at hair styles, and then the pop-up ads began appearing on the one of the screens, featuring pornographic images. While the logical thing to do would have been to shut the computer off, Ms. Amero was under strict orders not to shut down any computer. So, she thus proceeded to shoo the students away, and shield the screen from their view.

Unfortunately for Julie Amero, her case seems to have been handled by a bunch of computer illiterate old men, who don’t understand not only is pornography readily accessible online whenever you want it, but it is also rampant in places and times when you don’t want it, such as in the form of pop-up ads.

Julie Amero was scheduled to be sentenced earlier this month, but it was delayed and will now occur on March 29. While we don’t yet know what kind of sentence she will be given, the fact that she has the potential to receive up to 40 years in prison for something that wasn’t her fault, is appalling. Rapists and child molesters get lesser punishments than this.

The people who should really be charged in this case are those working in the school district’s IT department who were too incompetent to protect the computers from today’s ever-present spam, spyware, and adware.

This week, the US will begin initial hearings for fourteen individuals that were transferred from secret CIA jails to the Guantanamo Bay military prison camp in Cuba. The trials are set to begin on Friday, March 9th, and amongst the detainees is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11th attacks. Noticeably missing from the trials, however, will be the press. The Bush administration made the decision to bar news media from being present at the hearings, closing off the hearings entirely.

The Associated Press, in a letter to Pentagon officials, criticized the decision to close off the hearings completely violates the Defense Department’s own regulations. And while they understand that some portions of the trial may need to be conducted without the press present, the AP notes that it is “an unconstitutional mistake to close the proceedings in their entirety.”

The purpose of the hearings is to determine whether a prisoner is an “enemy combatant”. If a prisoner is found to be an enemy combatant, the President may then designate him as eligible for a military trial. The first military trials are expected to begin this summer.

The Pentagon states that the hearings will be closed to the media to protect national security interests that could be compromised by statements made by the detainees. However, others don’t quite believe that that is the true reason behind barring the media. According to Scott Horton, chair of the international law committee of the New York City Bar Association, what they are really concerned about is that “these 14 will open their mouths and say what was done to them. They were tortured and mistreated, and that fact is classified secret, which just shows you the perversity in which this whole process is traveling.”

Not only will no press be allowed, but the detainees are also not allowed to have an attorney present, placing the legal burden on the detainee himself to demonstrate that he is not an enemy combatant. Classified evidence that the US military uses against the detainees is not revealed to them, which makes the possibility of them proving themselves innocent nearly non-exsistant.

Around the world on March 8th, countries celebrated International Women’s Day, which is a a day set aside internationally to celebrate achievements in women’s rights, and to protest injustice and violence against women and girls.

In Ghana, advocates spoke out against the removal of the rape clause from the country’s Domestic Violence Law. The marital rape clause sought to criminalize marital rape, but by removing it, it has exempted the perpetrators from punishment. Palestinian and Lebanese women came together in the Middle East for a conference which focused on the status of Palestinian women in Lebanon. The women came together to discuss the current state of women’s rights and injustices towards women, as well as celebrate achievements of the past.

All around the world, from Canada to India and everywhere in between, women made a call and pledge to stop the injustices committed towards women around the world, and within their own countries.