AFTER A HECTIC WEEK OF FUND RAISING, CELEBRITY IN CHIEF BARRY O TOOK SOME TIME OUT FOR REST AND RELAXATION. AMERICA'S PRINCESS HEADED FOR CAMP DAVID WHERE HE EXPANDED ON HIS THOUGHTS ABOUT HOW THE CONGRESS ISN'T WORKING HARD ENOUGH.
AS HE SAT FOR HIS CUCUMBER FACIAL AND MANICURE, BARRY O EXPLAINED THAT CONGRESS NEEDED TO GET A WORK ETHIC.
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Yesterday on Flashpoints (KPFA, Pacifica), guest host Kevin Pina spoke with Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya who has left Canada to report from Libya on the illegal war.
Kevin Pina: We're now joined again by our special correspondent on the ground in Tripoli, Libya Madhi Nazemroaya. He is also a research associate for the Center on Globalization based in Canada. Mahdi, welcome back to Flashpoints on Pacifica.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya: Thanks for having me again.
Kevin Pina: So what's going on now? I understand you've been seeing on the ground some of the aftermath of the recent bombing campaign by NATO.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya: Yes, I just to my shock found out today -- I should be out of this shocked phase -- but I found out today that just down the street from me, a couple of minutes, that a children's center was bombed. And this is a place where lists of children with Down Syndrome and handicapped children -- all these types of children and there lists are there and it was a place where vaccinations were given out and children were helped. That was bombed to smitherrens. And all the records of vaccinations for children were destroyed. And the night before, the United Nations had somebody there working on the files and after 12 o'clock, when they left, the place was bombed to smithereens. And an American couple informed me of this. I was also at a ceremony today, a children's festival, held in honor of some children that were killed in the NATO bombings on the state of Libya.
Kevin Pina: You're listening to Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio and we're talking directly with Tripoli, Libya with our correspondent Mahdi Nazemroaya. Tell me what is the sense on the ground right now? We understand that yesterday the rebels were announcing that several key towns that they were making their drive toward the capitol of Tripoli. What your sense of it there?
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya: I disagree with those reports. From what I've seen, they're still trying to live in a normal street here in Tripoli. The gates of the city have not fallen to anybody. Yes, it's true that there have been shootings in Tripoli at night -- and it only happens at night. Checkpoints do come out at night but this is part of the destabilization effort against this country. The shootings are random, they're not -- they have no objective. They're at police and they're meant to cause chaos. It's purely for destabilization. Even as I mentioned earlier, their initial protests were held at night. They weren't even real protests. They were destroying property and stuff like that. So I disagree with those reports.
Kevin Pina: Now yesterday we'd also talked a little bit about the US banking role in fomenting the crisis there in Libya and we'd talked a little bit about JP Morgan Chase and I think you were meaning to refer Goldman Sachs as well -- although JP Morgan Chase was involved. You were describing to us how a billion dollars went out of this sort of sovereignty and that Goldman Sachs was responsible.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya: Yes, Goldman Sachs. I wanted to clarify that. It was Goldman Sachs who was responsible and it happened before the war. Their money went missing and Goldman Sachs -- and there was no record of this. And they made the Libyans an offer -- for them to invest and buy a share in Goldman Sachs. What happened was they pushed for this war as well, it's being said in Libya, as a means to keep that money because they stole Libya's money. And there is some sort of a conflict across the Atlantic between HSBC, Goldman Sachs and a group of other banks in the United States for control over Libya's assets right now. This is something that is being talked about in this country. And I'm very sure in the coming days in the United States, Canada, Britain, France, this will become part of the bigger picture and part of the news.
Kevin Pina: Well who's now doing the banking for the National Transitional Council, the so-called rebel forces that are controlling cities like Benghazi?
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya: Well in Benghazi, the Transitional Council's national bank is run by HSBC. They sent specialists there immediately to do this and to set up the new central bank there. The problem with the central bank -- one of the problems we're having with the central bank, they don't have the authority yet to do certain things and there was three keys -- I haven't found out what these keys are exactly -- and two of them were in Tripoli for the central bank and one was in Beghazi and the one in Benghazi so this delayed things for them. In regards to the national bank in Benghazi, I want to point out that it's following the same pattern as the Central Bank in Bosnia, the central bank in Bosnia, because in Bosnia, that central bank was also run by foreign banking companies and under the Bosnian Constitution cannot be run by a Bosnian citizen, it's run by a foreigner. This is very important to know. What type of a country's constitution says its own nationals can't run its own bank? That's what happened in Bosnia and essentially that's what's happening in eastern Libya in Benghazi.
Kevin Pina: Now we hear that there is resumption of oil exports. But HSBC is, of course, a British bank. And the British government is heavily invested and behind the NATO bombing campaign and the NATO military campaign against Libya, correct?
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya: Yes, that is correct. The British are heavily invested in this project -- as are the French, as are the Americans, and, strangely enough, the Italians and the Turks who are two -- And the Italians and the Turks are losers in this. The Turks were the second biggest trading partners to this country and the Italians were huge -- 40% of Italy's trade would be to Libya. These two countries -- It was a shock to many people that these two countries would turn their backs on the government here and the country here. They are two big economic losers and unless they regain everything -- all their contracts -- they are on the losing end of this war.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya goes on to discuss other topics including that he sees a strong connection between the US backed-war and currency issues. Kevin Pina and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya will continue their conversation on Tuesday's Flashpoints Radio -- Flashpoints airs Monday through Friday on KPFA at 5:00 pm PST and on other stations around the country.
Moving over to the United States, there is no justice in a company town. Vile KBR's corporate headquarters are located in Houston. They bring a lot of blood money into town. KHOU is the CBS outlet in Houston, this is from their video report.
Brad Woodward: After a month of testimony and just ten hours of deliberations, the jury sided with KBR sending Jamie Leigh Jones out of the courtroom in tears. Jones claims she was drugged and raped six years ago while working for defense contractor KBR in Iraq and was suing for $145 million. The jury not only decided that Jones was not raped but that KBR did not commit fraud by inducing her to work for them.
A KBR attorney, Dan Hedges, appeared in the report to explain that KBR intends to continue it's military work -- which presumably means killing US soldiers and contractors via the KBR burn pits and doing so much more to harm the world. KBR, bringing evil to a neighborhood near you. Dan Hedges meanwhile intends to return to the pits of hell until Satan next needs an attorney or a sexual play thing. On Houston's ABC13, Deborah Wrigley filed a report:
Deborah Wrigley: The jury actually announced their verdict about 30 minutes ago and for the former KBR employee who was suing her former employer, it was a stunning legal defeat. Jamie Leigh Jones was hired by KBR in 2005, just in July of that year, and she was stationed in Iraq at a KBR facility. She said that a few days after her arrival there, she was drugged and gang-raped by other KBR workers and part of the allegation not only the rape, but that KBR failed to protect her by failing to disclose "a sexually charged work environment." That amounted to what was a fraud allegation against the company in its hiring of her. Today after just about a day and a half of deliberation, the jury came back immediately said that Jamie Leigh Jones was not raped and that KBR did nothing wrong
in its hiring of her and disclosing the working conditions. [. . .] The verdict stunned Jones. She could be heard crying very loudly in the courtroom and sobbing. She has not yet come out of the courthouse, neither have her attorneys.
I do not know Jamie Leigh Jones, I have never spoken to her. My guess is she was raped. But what I do know is that she was attacked in the court room. Stephanie Mencimer calls herself a reporter. She's actually something else; however, though I have often thought that word in my head I have, to date, never said that word. I'll try to go my grave never saying that word -- even though it so perfectly describes Stephanie Mencimer. The hack who now works for Mother Jones and whose 'reporting' has resulted in numerous objections (including from National Journal columnists), decided to do a little hit piece on Jamie before the verdict was announced.
Stephanie's such a you-know-what.
We're not linking to that garbage. Mother Jones is already a joke -- a Whoreathon for Barack Obama from the rag that once pretended to be independent and unaffiliated with any political party. Now they just whore and do their little attacks on this Republican or that one and pretend that they've really contributed something when all they've done is demonstrated what trash left out in the hot sun smells like.
Little Stephie shows up to list numerous ways in which Jamie's wrong. It's a little piece where Stephie whores for the corporations. I get it, Stephie, you have to grab whatever is thrown at you. I get it. And you're jealous of Jamie because she's strong and she's beautiful. I get it, Little Stephie. Let's you attack the pretty girl and play kill-Mommy, works out all your issues at the same time. Got it.
Not counting cruise-by-the-table junkets, my record for most interviews in one day is 52. I bring this up for a reason. When you give 52 interviews in one day, you can do them by rote and repeat everything you said 52 times. Or you can do a little research on the people who will be (briefly) interviewing you and cater your responses to their interests. So if I was speaking to someone who was known for their sense of humor, I would stress the antics of a day. If I was speaking to someone who was known for their love of food, I would stress the catering, etc. Point being, if you looked at those 52 interviews, if you tried to examine them, you would find many differing details. Not because I was lying but because I emphasized different things.
I don't make a point to talk about myself in my own life let alone here unless it's needed. It's needed now because the thrust of Little Stephie's attack on Jamie's integrity is that in five years, some details of her story have varied. In one day, with 52 interviews, details of the basic stories I shared careened around the room.
That was in one day. It is the nature of memory that we will emphasize different details at different times. I don't think anyone doubts that Daniel Ellsberg is the brave whistle blower responsible for bringing the Pentagon Papers to the public. But if you listen to an interview he gave in 1976 or one he gave in 1996 or one he gave last year, you will hear different details.
There's also the issue of condensing and Daniel or anyone can tell you that when you're told to condense for time (or know yourself you need to), you will leave out certain elements.
Little Stephie offers nothing that I see where Jamie had contradicted herself in the public record. I do see that Jamie sometimes emphasizes this and sometimes emphasizes that.
Let me go personal one more damn time. I was sexually molested long before puberty. It's not a story I like to discuss, it's nothing I ever mentioned to the MSM or alternative press. It is something I will and do speak about with feminist groups. If I'm speaking about it, one of the issues is how much do I want to reveal, how much do I feel like hurting right now at that moment? And to decide that, I look around at the other women and see if there's someone there who looks like she wants to talk, needs to talk but needs a push, looks like she needs to hear some details someone else suffered through in order to have a comfortable place she can step onto and tell her story. If I don't see or sense something like that, you're not getting details from me, you're getting the basic overview and that's all you're getting.
Little Stephie seems to think that if you've experienced a sexual assault, you wind yourself up like a mechanical toy and recite verbatim the same details over and over, never varying from the script. That's not reality. But, again, Little Stephie's 'reporting' tends to get called out repeatedly so reality is like a tropical destination Little Stephie hopes to make it to some day but will probably never visit.
First she should probably try finding a solid editor. Jamie Leigh Jones has stated she was held in a container over in Iraq. Little Stephie writes, "The false-imprisonment allegation didn't surface until two years after Jones' original rape complaint, when Jones hired a new lawyer." If she means what she writes, Little Stephie is writing that Jones never made the allegation until she "hired a new lawyer" over "two years after Jones' original rape complaint." That is what Little Stephie wrote. If that's what she meant, she's a stupid as she is ugly because Jones -- and US House Rep Ted Poe -- have long maintained that. It has always been a part of the story. If Little Stephie meant what she wrote she needs to learn to at least function with the English language -- mastery of it obviously being far beyond her grasp.
According to Stephanie, Jamie can't suffer from agoraphobia -- literally, fear of the market place -- because she had two children and she spoke out and she testified to Congress and she gave interviews and she did this and she did that and blah, blah, blah. Little Stephie lives in a little world where her small thoughts touch the low ceilings and she therefore fancies herself grand. I speak in front of dozens of groups each week about the wars. I can do that if my hair looks like crap, I can do that if I'm about to fall over from lack of sleep. I can do that because it has nothing to do with me, it has to do with what is needed. By contrast? In my personal life that's not the story. If I'm invited to a party (I don't mean a group of us decide to go out, I'm talking arrive at ___ p.m.), my bedroom's going to have at least 20 dresses on the floor none of which provided me the courage to make an entrance. And I may come across no dress that does, ring up the florist to send flowers with my regrets for being unable to show. I am someone who is known to literally sweat over the thought of picking up a ringing phone (unless I use a fake voice to answer). (Strangely, cell phones don't bother me. They're less formal.) No one who knows of me or knows me casually would ever suspect that I have any 'shyness' to me or that I suffer from panic attacks. But Little Stephie seems to think she can stand outside Jamie Leigh's life and diagnose her. I wasn't aware Little Stephie was a trained therapist.
Jamie Leigh can be gripped with fear and not even be able to walk out to the porch to get her mail (as far as I know, she's never claimed that to have happened, I'm using it for an example) but if her child needs milk for the cereal, she can force herself to go to the grocery store. She can be having the worst day of her life and just want to lock herself away in the bathroom, but if ABC News is saying, "Jamie Leigh, we want to tell your story and that of two other women who say they were sexually assaulted," Jamie Leigh can pull herself together and do it. Not because she doesn't suffer from agoraphobia but because it's something she feels she has to do.
I think Jamie Leigh Jones' current attorneys made two mistakes. The first one is asking for that amount of money. I am not saying she doesn't deserve it. I wish rape victims were awarded billions. But I'm saying when you're using a figure that large, you are going to risk turning off a jury. My opinion, the figure was too high. I could be wrong, I often am and it wouldn't be the first time. The second mistake? I'm not sure they could have fixed this one during the trial. But KBR presented a psychological portrait of Jamie Leigh Jones that they tried to insist was at odds with reality or with the way a rape victim behaves or speaks, etc. Her attorneys would have done well to have anticipated that (and it might not have been possible -- what seems so obvious right now may seem so obvious because we know now exactly what KBR did) and to have provided expert witnesses to explain to the jury there is not victim m.o. There is no standardized response.
I don't think Jamie Leigh Jones got a fair trial at all. I can understand if some women choose not to talk or write of this trial. It is frightening and there are times when I do think myself, of similar instances, "We'll let's bury this so it doesn't get used again." "Burying it" doesn't refer to Jamie Leigh. It refers to what was done to her and I really fear we're going to see more corporations attempt this sort of smear. If it happens, attorneys for the victims need to be prepared to do a walk-through for the jury. The victim is being put on trial and her responses are being judged to be out of the 'norm.' So the jury needs to hear (over and over) that there is no norm. Each victim -- female or male -- will respond in individual ways that have to do with their own issues, their own attitudes. The assault leaves an impression, it does not create them, it does not birth them, they do not emerge from an assault alll walking and talking exactly the same. Five people shot in five different robberies are not expected to conduct themselves in exactly the same manner. There is no reason that sexual assault victims should be expected to all act alike.
Jamie Leigh Jones fought for the rights of victims over the last years. That can't be denied. She stated she was raped and, again, while I can't know that it happened, I believe her. As awful as what happened to her in Iraq was, I'm willing to bet today was pretty awful as well. And, again, I can understand a desire on the part of some women to bury this for fear that highlighting it will lead other corporations to attack in the way KBR did Jamie Leigh but I do hope that we're not going to all be slient and let Little Stephie's stab in the back be the last word. What this really does is encourage victims of sexual assault to be silent. If you talk about it, if you think it through -- as one does every traumatic event in life, there's a good chance a corporation's going to use that against you. That's the real message in today's verdict and I feel we need to push back against that. For that reason I'm sharing things here that I wouldn't normally.
RECOMMENDED: "Iraq snapshot"
"Nouri uncorks a whole case of crazy"
"Troy Yocum and veterans issues"
"I Hate The War"
"Corn and Summer Vegetables in the Kitchen"
"Joan Baez is a stupid and senile woman"
"He is The Fly"
"Apology"
"4 men, 2 women"
"5 men, 1 woman"
"support for jamie leigh jones"
"oh, the stupidity"
"Show some strength"
"Your new pen pal"
"Which way will Nancy go?"
"Joan Baez needs to get accountable"
"The hypocrisy of The Nation magazine"
"The comic"
"Resurrection"
"Turn out the lights"
"From the kitchen of the Peace Resister"
"9th Circuit"
"Idiot of the week"
"It's us"
"THIS JUST IN! THE WAY HE WAS!"
"Unloved and unwanted?"
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