Terrorism Archives — Page 7 of 8 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Contemputf8g Wolf

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July 17, 2007

› sarah@sfbg.com

Months after local videographer and blogger Josh Wolf was released from federal prison — where his seven-month stay was the longest in history for an American journalist for refusing to turn over unpublished materials to criminal prosecutors — the San Francisco Police Commission finally has decided to analyze the incident. That inquiry comes just as Wolf embarks on a campaign for mayor, which he hopes will create a dialogue about the lack of police accountability and the overzealous federal intrusions that marked his story.

Wolf, 24, told the Guardian that he’s still baffled by what transpired after he filmed the July 8, 2005, anti-G8 protest, which involved a heavy anarchist turnout, "got rowdier than local officials would have liked," and left a San Francisco police officer with a fractured skull — an incident that Wolf calls "unfortunate" but of which he claims to have absolutely no knowledge

"I’ve read the evidence that was presented in my case, but to this day no one has pointed out anything that constitutes terrorism," Wolf said.

The day after the protest, Wolf was contacted at his home by members of the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, along with two San Francisco Police Department officers. The four agents who showed up Wolf’s door, one of them dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, demanded that he hand over all his video outtakes after local and national TV stations aired edited footage that Wolf posted on his blog. The aired film included scenes of anarchists setting off firecrackers, turning over newspaper racks, and spray-painting a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. office. It also showed an SFPD officer holding local resident Gabe Meyers in a choke hold while another agent waved his weapon at the crowd and shouted, "Leave or you’re going to get blasted. I’m a fed, motherfucker."

"If any time the SFPD decides it doesn’t want to deal with some local issue, does it have the autonomy to contact the feds, and if so, doesn’t that jeopardize all the laws that the voters of San Francisco have passed?" Wolf asked July 11 as the Police Commission discussed a resolution supporting the First Amendment rights of the "new media," which is how Web-based disseminators of news, such as Wolf, are being described.

Earlier this year, police commissioner David Campos tried to pass a resolution in support of the then-jailed Wolf, but the proposal got no traction until Theresa Sparks was elected as president in May. By then Wolf had been free from jail for a month, leading Campos and Sparks to shift their focus toward investigating exactly why Wolf’s case got federalized in the first place as well as the implications for other groups that are protected locally but at risk federally.

As Campos told the commission, "A lot of people in San Francisco have been talking about how we as a department interact with the feds, to the extent that it has an impact on medical cannabis providers and immigrants and on First Amendment rights, as in the case of Josh Wolf."

Under state law, reporters’ sources and their work products are protected. A recent case involving Apple suggests that the law also extends to bloggers and independent reporters. But under federal law, reporters have no such protections, which is why former New York Times journalist Judith Miller was jailed in the Valerie Plame–CIA investigation and San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada faced potential jail time in the BALCO affair, as did freelancer Sara Olsen in the court-martial of Army Lt. Ehren Watada.

But while these journalists refused to comply with subpoenas that were clearly related to federal matters, there was no such obvious connection in Wolf’s case. An investigation into the assault on SFPD officer Peter Shields normally would have been undertaken by local police and District Attorney Kamala Harris. Police records show that SFPD inspector Lea Militello requested "assistance from the FBI/JTTF regarding investigation of a serious assault against a San Francisco police officer." Federal investigators justified their involvement by maintaining that there had been an attempted arson on an SFPD squad car purchased in part with federal funds, even though SFPD records indicate only that the car’s rear tail light was broken.

"There was nothing incriminating on my tape," Wolf told the Police Commission, recalling how he offered to prove his statement by letting the federal judge view it in his private chambers, an offer the judge refused. "But because I had no federal protections, I had to decide whether to engage in a McCarthyesque witch hunt," Wolf added; he long had suspected that the feds wanted to profile anarchists about whom he has intimate knowledge.

Campos and Sparks hope that last week’s Police Commission discussion will be the first in a series about the protocols and procedures that the SFPD follows in deciding whether to refer matters to federal authorities. Both stress that asking for such a study does not mean they do not care that an SFPD officer was hurt. As Sparks told us, "At this point we don’t know what the deliberations behind everything that night were or how many people were deployed. For us to comment on a police officer being injured is inappropriate unless we have all the information. And all we’re hearing is anecdotal stuff. Our job is not to take sides but to figure out what the policies were, are, and what they should be."

Police Chief Heather Fong has agreed to report to the Police Commission in August on policies and procedures related to the SFPD’s General Orders, the city’s ordinances on immigration and medical marijuana, and protection of journalists’ rights. Sparks predicts that the report will tell the commission "what the SFPD’s policies do, how that compares to the Board of Supervisors’ resolutions, and whether we need to rewrite them or write new rules for the police."

Commissioner Campos told us he hopes the report will clarify whether the police have an obligation to report to the feds if an investigation involves damage to property bought with federal funding. "If it’s the case that we are obligated, then we need a discussion. Do we want to accept funds if doing so ties our hands and forces us to do something that San Francisco doesn’t want to do? For instance, if we accept funding, then does that mean we have to cooperate with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]? If so, then a lot of us, myself included, would be up in arms and would say, ‘Let’s not.’ To the extent that it comes down to money, I’d hope that we’d make the choice that we’d rather not take the money than get in bed with the federal government."

Wolf, who was not convicted of any crime but served 226 days for being in contempt of a grand jury subpoena, was released April 3 after he agreed to post all his unedited footage online — an action the feds claimed as evidence that he had submitted to their demands. But Wolf pointed out that he agreed to do so only after the feds promised that he would not have to testify about anyone whose actions or words he had captured on tape. He also pointed out that he released the tapes to everyone, not just the federal government.

Since being released Wolf has announced his intention to run for mayor of San Francisco this fall, saying he was inspired by the recent Progressive Convention called by Sup. Chris Daly "in which they had a great platform but no declared candidate."

Wolf’s candidacy pits him against Mayor Gavin Newsom, who expressed neither support for Wolf nor criticism of his detention. That stance is in contrast with that of Harris, who is also running for reelection this fall and publicly criticized the US Attorney’s Office in March, a month before Wolf was released. In August 2006, Newsom returned unsigned the resolution of support for Wolf’s plight that was sponsored by Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi, Tom Ammiano, and Daly. The resolution, which passed on a 9–1 vote, with Sup. Sean Elsbernd voting no and Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier absent, declared that the city "resisted the federal government’s intervention in the City and County of San Francisco’s investigation of the July 8th, 2005 G-8 protest; expressed support for the California Shield Law; and urged Congress to pass Senate Bill 2831, the Free Flow of Information Act."

Asked about Newsom’s position on Wolf and related matters, spokesperson Nathan Ballard reminded the Guardian that the mayor authorized a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the assault on Shields. "We take these attacks seriously and will take the appropriate actions necessary to ensure that the person or persons responsible are prosecuted," the mayor said shortly after the assault. As for Wolf, Ballard said by e-mail, "I am not aware of any public statement [by] the Mayor on the case of Josh Wolf. The Mayor is generally supportive of the concept of a better shield law, but he has not taken a position on this particular bill at the present time."

As it happens, Wolf, who has made numerous media appearances since his release, including on The Colbert Report, could find himself in the unusual position of having more name recognition than any of Newsom’s other challengers. And with Congress currently considering a federal shield law, the cause for which Wolf went to jail remains in the news. As media activist Rick Knee put it, pointing to the "Free Josh Wolf" button that he continues to wear on the lapel of his tweed jacket, "Josh may be out, but the issue is still with us." *

We can be heroes

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May 15, 2007

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Imagine a world where your genome isn’t just the result of long-term natural selection and random mutation. Instead, its composition and expression actually mean something — not just about you, but also about the fate of the world.

No, I’m not talking about a genetic engineer’s utopia with humans made by design. I’m talking about the driving fantasy behind hit TV show Heroes, now heading into the homestretch of its first season on NBC. I was a doubter when I first started watching this X-Men homage, which is full of ordinary people who suddenly start manifesting mutant powers (flying, telekinesis, superhearing, time travel) due to some genetic whatsit. Created by Tim Kring, best known for the medical melodrama Crossing Jordan, the show was uneven and slow for the first handful of episodes. We got the boring origin story of each hero and learned that they all have a genetic destiny via an irritating voice-over from the nonsuperpowered (so far) Dr. Suresh, who studies these "special" people to find out what makes them tick.

But then things got interesting. Unlike the mutants of X-Men, none of the special people in Heroes has a visible mutation that makes him or her look strange — there are no giant blue cat professors or women made of pure diamond. Instead, there are, among others, a flying politician, a superhealing cheerleader, a time-traveling Japanese comic book otaku, a comic book artist who can paint the future, a psychic police officer, and a villain who absorbs mutant powers by extracting and possibly eating the brains of heroes. The plot is typical comic book fare: our future-painting artist has predicted that New York will be blown up by one of the heroes, eventually resulting in the election of the corrupt flying politician as president. Somehow, these events will destroy the world. The time-traveling otaku‘s future self warns his past self that the fate of the cheerleader is bound up with all this by using the show’s cult tagline, "Save the cheerleader, save the world."

I’ve gone from being a skeptical watcher to a rabid fan of this show for two reasons: one, the hero team that forms around the wacky time travel plot manages to capture what’s so seductive about comic books generally; and two, I think the TV show is an interesting fantasy about terrorism.

So: the seductions of the comic book. One of the benefits of comic books over, say, movies is that they last for decades and thus have plenty of time to evolve complicated relationships between characters whose powers are foils for their personal vulnerabilities. A superhero team is like a cast of characters in a speculative soap opera — they have bang-pow adventures, but the best writers and artists in the medium force them to grapple with the human cost of being a hero. The Hulk is a good example: over the years Bruce Banner and his green alter ego have fought, gone to therapy to reconcile their warring impulses, joined and then been expelled from superhero teams that couldn’t trust the Hulk, and generally played out the drama of what it means to be a high-functioning manic-depressive.

Heroes offers us the bizarro soap opera pleasures of comic books and at the same time sets up the collective power of the heroes as a foil for the problems of the world. There are no terrorists in Heroes — only heroes whose powers go wrong and destroy New York in the process. In other words, the only menace to the United States is its own citizens. In the show’s fantasy reenactment of 9/11, the al-Qaeda bombers are recast as misunderstood heroes who are hunted by shady pseudogovernment agencies and go mad, or as power-hungry politicians who see destruction as the best route to power. I’m intrigued by the implication, in this season’s plot arc, that the destruction of New York is a deliberate effort to ruin the world on the part of US politicians and businessmen. There’s a strong dose of social criticism in that simple idea. Our heroes aren’t trying to stop terrorists from outside the country — they’re trying to stop forces working on the inside.

Sure, you can watch Heroes just for the bang-pow, and I definitely recommend it for that. At its best the show is action packed and edge-of-your-seat thrilling. But it’s also, like great comic books, about the real world. Best of all, it’s about fixing the real world and making it safe for geeks, cheerleaders, and regular people. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who thinks the Planet Hulk story line should be the basis for the next Hulk movie.

Who blinked?

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April 10, 2007

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf has been free for more than a week, but the debate over why the federal government released him after 226 days in jail is only getting murkier.

First a US Attorney’s Office press release April 3 claimed that Wolf "complied with the grand jury subpoena." Next a San Francisco Chronicle headline April 4 declared, "Blogger Freed after Giving Up Video." Then a Chronicle op-ed April 9 by the California First Amendment Coalition’s executive director, Peter Scheer, claimed Wolf’s case never should have become a constitutional cause célèbre "because he never had evidence."

"In retrospect," Scheer wrote, "Wolf’s jailing looks like a huge misunderstanding, in which prosecutors assumed, incorrectly, that Wolf possessed relevant evidence, while Wolf believed, erroneously, that he had a responsibility to go to jail even if he had no relevant evidence."

Wolf disagrees with all the above, beginning with the prosecutor’s claim that he complied with the subpoena.

"If I complied, then journalists will be happy to know that the meaning of ‘complied’ has changed," Wolf said, noting that he never capitulated to the feds’ demands that he testify under oath before a grand jury about a July 2005 Mission District protest that turned violent, parts of which he captured on video and excerpts of which were aired shortly thereafter on national television.

Wolf was more forgiving of the Chron‘s misleading headline because, as he put it, "headline writers don’t write the story, and the story itself was accurate." That said, the truth, according to Wolf, is that only after the feds gave up their demand that he testify did he agree to post his unedited video.

It’s a subtle distinction that was missing from some coverage of his release from federal prison, but it’s a significant omission that makes Wolf’s decision look like a coerced surrender. Wolf emphasized, "The subpoena demanded I give up my video and testify before a grand jury."

As for Scheer’s argument that Wolf shouldn’t have gone to prison for nothing, Wolfe said it misses the crucial point: complying with a federal subpoena hurts a journalist’s standing with sources.

"You can’t decide to only protect material if it’s of evidentiary value. And Scheer sidestepped the issue of testimony and the fact that the government agreed to not make me testify before a grand jury," Wolf told us.

The problem with grand juries, at least from a journalistic perspective, is that their inquisitional power is unlimited and their proceedings are secret. In other words, journalists can be suspected of snitching yet can’t prove they haven’t, all of which adds up to the kiss of death for reporters who cultivate the trust of confidential sources.

Wolf said he offered to give up his tape but did not offer to testify about it, as early as November 2006, but the feds rejected the latter part of his demand. Once they did agree in April that he wouldn’t have to testify about the tape’s contents, Wolf said there was no longer any point in refusing to release the tape itself.

Releasing the tape, Wolf said, helped put to rest the "suspicion that I had any relevant evidence."

"Sure, Josh had developed sources in the anarchist community, but that’s not what this was about," Wolf attorney James Wheaton told us. "It was about refusing to appear before the grand jury and testify or name names."

With a parallel debate raging about whether bloggers are journalists, Wolf said he hopes people will give him the benefit of the doubt and say he should have been protected.

"I believe my action served to be the strongest case for the need for a federal shield law," Wolf said. Local officials agree.

"What happened to Mr. Wolf is stark evidence that we need a federal shield law to make sure this does not happen again," District Attorney Kamala Harris said April 3.

Harris’s support for Wolf also highlights questions about the role San Francisco police officials played in this mess.

As part of the settlement that secured his release, Wolf answered no to two questions: did he see anybody throw anything at the squad car that was part of an alleged arson, and did he see whom SFPD officer Peter Shields was chasing before his skull got fractured?

"Answering questions about which you know nothing is not a violation of journalistic ethics," Wheaton told the Guardian. "But those same questions prove that law enforcement misused the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which was set up to investigate terrorism but which they used to get around California’s shield laws."

Public records show that the SFPD requested the help of the JTTF and the FBI to investigate the assault on Shields. That assault should be under the jurisdiction of the DA’s Office. But by framing the case as an alleged arson to a car, for which the department received some funds courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security, law enforcement was able to federalize the investigation.

With Wolf’s unedited video showing one police officer wildly pointing his gun at protesters in apparent violation of the SFPD’s general orders, questions remain as to who will hold law enforcement accountable for what’s on this long-disputed tape. *

Wolf freed!

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April 3, 2007

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After spending more than seven months in prison for refusing to give a federal grand jury video outtakes of a 2005 anarchist protest, freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf’s is today being released. According to one of Wolf’s lawyers, David Greene of the Oakland-based First Amendment Project, Wolf won’t have to testify to the grand jury or identify protesters shown in his video, which has now been posted at his Web site, www.joshwolf.net/blog.

The deal was announced the day after a second three-hour mediation session before a federal magistrate in San Francisco. The 24-year-old Wolf has been held in contempt of court by a federal judge since August 2006 and has been imprisoned longer than any other journalist in U.S. history for withholding information. He is reportedly being picked up from the federal correctional facility in Dublin this afternoon and will appear on the steps of San Francisco City Hall at 5 p.m.

Greene said that the April 3 breakthrough occurred when federal prosecutors dropped their insistence that Wolf testify to the grand jury about people he interviewed for his video. Greene said Wolf was prepared to turn over the outtakes last November if he’d been excused from testifying but prosecutors refused.

In an April 3 press release, Greene wrote, “For the last several months, this (dispute) has been principally about the testimony and not about the video. The only reason he decided to publish (the video) now was their assurances that they would not require his testimony.”

Greene said prosecutors required only that Wolf answer two questions under oath, in writing: whether he ever saw anyone throw or shoot any object at a police car or learned about anyone who did so, and whether he knew who Officer Peter Shields was trying to arrest when he was hit from behind and suffered a fractured skull. Wolf answered no to both questions in a court filing today.

In a separate filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffery Finigan said Wolf has complied with the grand jury subpoena and should be released from prison. Finigan also noted the government has reserved the right to issue a new subpoena to Wolf in the future.

“I think his sacrifice of his personal liberty for 226 days for the sake of a principle that was for something much larger than him personally was really commendable,” Greene said.

Rick Knee of the National Writers Union say his group believes that, “Josh’s persecution at the hands of the San Francisco Police Department, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco, federal prosecutor Jeffrey Finigan, the federal grand jury and U.S. District Judge William Alsup was morally and ethically reprehensible, and an egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars.”

The Inter American Press Association calls for the immediate release of Josh Wolf from prison

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March 23, 2007

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Cartagena, Colombia March l9–The Inter American Press Association has condemned the U.S. government for jailing Josh Wolf and called for his immediate release from federal prison.

IAPA, at its annual mid-year meeting in Cartagena, noted that Wolf “remains in jail for refusing to turn over his videos and has now been in jail for refusing to comply with a subpoena for longer than any journalist in U.S. history.”

IAPA said that “numerous journalists in the United States have been subpoenaed by prosecutors and required to testify in state and federal court, including the requirement that they name their confidential sources.”
It noted that San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams faced l8 months in prison until their confidential source recently came forward.”

IAPA relied on principle 4 of the Declaration of Chapultepec, the organization’s version of the First Amendment,
that states, “Freedom of expression and of the press are severely limited by murder, terrorism, kidnapping, intimidation, the unjust imprisonment of journalists, the destruction of facilities, violence of any kind and impunity for perpetrators. Such acts must be investigated promptly and punished harshly.”

IAPA is a non-profit organization dedicated to defending freedom of expression and of the press throughout the Americas. It has a membership of more than l,300 representing newspapers and magazines, with a combined circulation of 43,353,762, from Patagonia to Alaska.

In other action, IAPA found that six journalists were killed and one disappeared in the last six months in Mexico, and another was killed in Haiti. “The assassinated journalists were all victims of drug and gang wars, reflecting how throughout the region organized crime was a bigger physical threat to journalists than old-fashioned political differences,” IAPA said. “There were nearly two dozen more cases of reported death threats, in Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Paraguay, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Peru,Venezuela, and Brazil, some related to the reporting of corruption.”

IAPA said that Cuba and Venezuela were the worst countries in terms of government pressure on the press.
President Hugo Chavez threatens to shut down the country’s leading television network, Radio CaracasTelevision, by not renewing its license. And in Cuba, after Fidel Castro replaced himself with his brother Raul as the president, repression has escalated against independent journalists and foreign correspondents.

IAPA reported 47 acts of harassment of journalists (police threats, interrogations, ‘acts of repudiation’ organized by the government, public beatings, temporary arrests, fines for disobedience, raids of people’s homes, evictions, seizures of money and personal items, firings, and restrictions on travel within Cuba). Three foreign correspondents were expelled from Cuba on the grounds that “their approach to the situation in Cuba is not in the best interests of the Cuban government.” In an attack on news sources, four people are being prosecuted for manufacturing or repairing satellite television equipment and may go to prison for three years. Meanwhile, IAPA said, 28 journalists remain behind bars, serving sentences of up to 27 years.

Cuba is now extending its repression to internet users. No Cuban may access the internet freely. Ramiro Valdes, the minister of computers and communications, ahs announced the government’s intention to tame the “wild horse” of new technologies, which it describes as “one of the most horrible means of global extermination ever invented.”

Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia had “lesser but still worrying” tensions between their governments and the media. In Argentina, the government continued to “arbitrarily classify journalists and media outlets as friends and enemies, and use the placing of official advertising to support the one and punish the other. B3

http://www.sipiapa.com/pulications/informe_usa2007ca.cfm

100 years of secrets

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March 6, 2007

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

They’re back.

First Amendment foes are again attempting to criminalize news reporting that exposes questionable if not illegal conduct by the White House, Pentagon, and intelligence agencies, from dispatching terrorism suspects to secret torture chambers abroad to listening in on private phone conversations.

An attempt by Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) in 2005 to pass legislation similar to Britain’s Official Secrets Act failed, but Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) quietly tried to attach an amendment to an unrelated bill scheduled for committee review last month that would have expanded the Espionage Act of 1917.

The amendment’s broad scope was narrowed March 2 before being shifted to another Senate bill amid an outcry by First Amendment advocates. The proposal’s almost laughably vague original legislative language aimed to punish anyone who published or communicated classified information "concerning efforts by the United States to identify, investigate or prevent terrorist activity."

The amendment would have extended jail time for whistleblowers to 20 years. Senate Bill 2, where the amendment now rests, was originally intended to enact the remaining recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. The new amendment would still punish employees working on Capitol Hill or other unauthorized personnel who knowingly disclose classified information contained in congressional reports.

Coalition of Journalists for Open Government coordinator Pete Weitzel told the Guardian that the earlier language seemed to include newspaper publishers as well as government employees in its scope.

Conservative members of Congress called for reporters to be punished under the Espionage Act after the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media reported details of the George W. Bush White House’s domestic wiretapping and extraordinary rendition programs. In particular, Post reporter Dana Priest and Times reporter James Risen were condemned and accused of treason by Fox News pundits and jingoistic bloggers for harming national security, today’s ever-present excuse for government secrecy.

"Current laws are sufficient to prosecute anyone who leaks classified information and has an intent to harm the United States," Weitzel told us from Washington. "There’s no impediment to going ahead and prosecuting under existing law. So I don’t see a need for this additional legislation."

Sunshine activists worried the original amendment could plausibly include journalists covering emergency response planning, security failures, public health threats, and federal homeland security spending. In addition, its broadness is simply unconstitutional, according to the Virginia-based Sunshine in Government Initiative.

"The amendment would work to constrain critical reporting on homeland security — even information as basic as homeland security grants — as well as national security and foreign policy matters," the group, which includes the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (of which the Guardian is a member), wrote in a public statement Feb. 27.

The Espionage Act was passed under President Woodrow Wilson and led to a 10-year prison term for one-time Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who was eventually pardoned by President Warren G. Harding after serving three years. Debs had criticized World War I and conscription during a speech in Ohio.

"Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters," he said during the speech, "but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself, and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth." *

Views of Iwo Jima

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February 20, 2007

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima has been met with near-unanimous stateside praise for its humanistic portrayal of the infamous 1945 battle. It became the first film primarily in the Japanese language to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar — on Feb. 25 it vies for an Academy Award in that category and three others. Eastwood himself has called it a "Japanese film." But how have Japanese audiences and critics responded?

There’s been a spate of Hollywood productions set in Japan in recent years — Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, to name a few. Each film scored various degrees of commercial success in the United States, but most Japanese audiences agreed that the portrayals of Japanese ranged from well-meaning but a little bit off to downright offensive. With the exception of The Last Samurai, which rode Tom Cruise’s popularity, none performed particularly well at the Japanese box office.

Letters was met with considerable anticipation as soon as the production was announced. Word spread that Eastwood was considering having a Japanese filmmaker direct the project. (He reportedly muttered, "Akira Kurosawa would’ve been perfect.") Once it was confirmed that Eastwood would be taking the helm himself, there were equal amounts of excitement and skepticism. In Japan, Eastwood had been one of the most highly regarded American filmmakers for many years, particularly after Unforgiven, whose fresh treatment of the western genre resonated with samurai movie fans. Yet given the track record of American directors taking on Japan, some suspicion was inevitable.

Letters‘ companion piece, Flags of Our Fathers, opened first, to generally rave reviews, with solid if unspectacular box office numbers. Letters made its world premiere in Tokyo on Nov. 15, 2006, and opened theatrically Dec. 9, 11 days ahead of the US release. To date it’s grossed more than $41 million in Japan (and still going strong), as opposed to a mere $10 million in the US, despite the Oscar nomination and the praise heaped on the film. (Flags, by comparison, grossed $33 million here and $29 million in Japan.) Pop star Kazunari Ninomiya, one of the notable cast members, helped draw a younger audience, many of whom reported having been averse to war movies until taking the leap with this film.

A quick survey of published reviews and blogs in Japan indicated that critics and audiences alike have responded with extremely, if not unanimously, positive comments. Historians have indicated that with the exception of some minor inaccuracies, the film is well researched and essentially true to the events that occurred, while film reviewers have already anointed it a masterpiece for our times. Here’s a sampling of some comments found:

"If one were to see this film without any prior knowledge of its director or production team, there would be no reason to believe this isn’t a bona fide Japanese film."

"When the two films are seen together, there’s a chemical reaction that’s never before seen in the history of cinema."

"Seeing the American soldiers fill the beach, I’d wonder if Doc [from Flags] is somewhere in that crowd. That’s when I realized the effect that seeing both films can have."

"Japanese American writer Iris Yamashita deserves tremendous praise for the incredible detail with which she depicts what is, for her, essentially a foreign story."

"My generation grew up watching films that showed the ugliness and cruelty of Japanese Imperial soldiers, so I didn’t know how to respond to seeing such proud and beautiful Japanese soldiers in Letters."

To be sure, some have also pointed out blemishes. Chief among them is lead Ninomiya’s all-too-modern speech, which for some Japanese viewers sticks out awkwardly from an otherwise well-executed deployment of the language used during World War II. Cast members Tsuyoshi Ihara and Ryo Kase (who delivers the finest, most underrated performance in the film as the former military police officer Shimizu) have mentioned in interviews that the tight time frame from casting to filming prevented them from being fully prepared for their period-specific roles, and they admit details of the era were missed. Many of the cast members reportedly crowded inside Ihara’s hotel room to watch a DVD demonstrating proper Imperial soldier salutes.

That said, those same actors praise Eastwood for keeping his eye on the big picture and focusing more on the characters’ emotions than the period details. They also give him credit for being extremely open to ideas from the cast. "He’s always standing next to the actors," Kase says. "And if we suggest trying something different, he would always say, ‘OK, let’s try it.’ " Ken Watanabe is said to have personally taken on the task of adjusting the translated dialogue on set to sound more natural and accurate.

It’s not surprising, then, that one of the most often heard comments from Japanese viewers was the following: "Tough to admit, but this is a more Japanese film than even a Japanese director might create." More than a few critics and bloggers have pointed out their mixed feelings that such a remarkable "Japanese film" was made by an American filmmaker. The comments range from expressions of frustration and embarrassment — "Why couldn’t this masterpiece of a portrait about the Japanese experience have been made in Japan?" — to one of gratitude: "The film was made possible only because of an outside perspective like Eastwood’s."

The comments are similar to those I heard while traveling to Japan five times during the past two years as a coproducer of the new HBO documentary White Light/Black Rain, directed by Steven Okazaki. We were there to shoot interviews with survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many documentaries — both in Japan and the US — have tackled the subject before, but surprisingly few have focused on the stories of survivors. Filmmakers, peace activists, and survivors all expressed appreciation for our endeavors but admitted embarrassment that an American production was taking on the important duty.

Indeed, many seem to concede the Japanese film industry is currently incapable of producing films like Letters or White Light that dare to expose the horrific consequences of war. The increasingly conservative society has seen a recent surge in the movement to remove Article 9 of the Constitution, which forbids the nation from maintaining an army, navy, or air force. Reflecting the growing nationalism and the call for remilitarization, recent Japanese blockbusters such as Aegis, Yamato, and Lorelei depict the Japanese military defending the nation in war or against terrorism, though they stop just short of glorifying battle. Even warriors from a different age — the samurai — appear to be gaining in onscreen popularity once again.

In this climate, Letters appears to have had a cathartic effect on the Japanese audience. What many had felt yet couldn’t fully voice, the film spoke loud and clear. Though the awareness of the Pacific War had been waning among the younger generations, the success of the film has spawned new books and TV documentaries renewing interest in the period and sending people rushing to try to visit Iwo Jima. (Because of the US military presence on the island, access is extremely limited.) Most important, Eastwood’s dual-film concept has more than accomplished its objective of offering a perspective from both sides of the battle. Japanese reviews of Flags often mentioned some degree of surprise at seeing the hardships encountered by American soldiers during the war and their ability to emotionally identify with the American characters. And Letters, in turn, has been embraced in Japan. As one blogger wrote, "That the film’s creators broke down the walls of race and language to make this film that has moved so many people on both sides may be the best response to war yet." *

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

Now playing in Bay Area theaters

For a discussion between Taro Goto and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa about Letters from Iwo Jima and the films of Clint Eastwood, please go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

The secret spies

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January 17, 2007

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

To view the TALON documents in PDF format (524 pages) click here.

To view the full ACLU report click here.

The Pentagon has released to the Guardian and the American Civil Liberties Union 534 pages of documents reutf8g to domestic surveillance — and we don’t know much of anything new about the notorious Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) program.

The vast majority of the documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, are entirely blacked out or heavily redacted. It’s clear there has been a lot of high-level discussion about policies and procedures related to military spying on civilians — but the government isn’t coming clean about more than a sliver of it.

One thing the records do show is that the Pentagon at one point had between 12,000 and 13,000 files in its TALON database — and 2,821 contained information about "U.S. persons." At least 186 of the reports in the files involved antiwar or antimilitary protests.

The Guardian and the ACLU went to federal court in 2006 to demand access to Pentagon records related to domestic surveillance after Santa Cruz Students Against the War and the Berkeley Anti-War Coalition compiled evidence to suggest that they had been the subject of TALON spying.

TALON was originally designed to monitor threats against military bases, but its mission expanded to encompass, for example, protests against military recruiters on the Santa Cruz campus. Pentagon officials admitted in December 2005 that the Santa Cruz student group was spied on under the TALON program.

In fact, documents we received earlier show that data about the student group were shared with the Department of Homeland Security and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which works with local police agencies (see "No End to Pentagon Spying," 7/5/06).

Initial documents received last year showed that, as of early 2006, there were no clear rules barring the military from conducting surveillance on peaceful protesters. The new documents indicate that in January and February of that year top Pentagon officials ordered a review of procedures and set some restrictions on retaining files on people who were not considered imminent threats.

One document states that information on protesters "has not been provided by recruited sources of information" — in other words, the military wasn’t sending spies to watch protests — but concludes that "this statement is not intended to state that TALON reporting could not result from recruited sources or tasked personnel."

That only confirms what we had learned already: that there is no formal ban on armed forces personnel spying on protesters or planting sources inside peaceful groups or peaceful protests.

However, the operation seems to be winding down a bit. By June 16, 2006, one of the few uncensored documents shows, TALON reports had dropped by 80 percent.

It wasn’t easy to get even these highly censored records. The Guardian-ACLU request was stymied at first, and only after Federal Judge William Alsup on May 25, 2006, ordered an expedited review did the US Army, Navy, and Air Force begin to grudgingly release a few tidbits of information.

It’s astounding how heavily redacted the documents are. Page after page after page shows that high-level policy discussions around TALON and domestic surveillance were taking place at the Department of Defense in January and February 2006 — but military officials won’t reveal a bit about the nature of those talks or the policies that resulted.

"The amount of information that’s redacted is significant," ACLU police practices lawyer Mark Schlosberg noted. "We understand the need for certain information to be kept confidential, but discussion about policies involving domestic surveillance is something the public has a strong interest in." *

Preparing for nuclear attack

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December 20, 2006

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By Tim Redmond

I grew up in the 1960s, the era of elementary school bomb drills and “duck and cover.” I thought we’d gone beyond all of that, but apparently not: i just received from the federal Department of Health and Human Services a “Wallet guide for the media” called “Preparing for terrorism and other public health emergencies.” It folds out into a nice handy tip sheet on what to do if we’re attacked by mustard gas, nerve gas, antrax or a number of other awful things. In most cases, of course, there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do except “immediately seek medical care.”

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September 12, 2006

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MEXICO CITY (Sept. 14th) – In an epiphany of how he might have to govern Mexico if, in fact, an aggrieved left opposition allows him to assume the presidency December 1st, right-winger Felipe Calderon had to be helicoptered to the bunker in the deep south of this conflictive capital, where the nation’s top electoral tribunal doing business as the TRIFE was to hand him the certificate attesting that he had, in the judges’ less-than-august opinions, won the hotly-contested July 2nd election from leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO.).

Upon emerging from the chopper, which had been accompanied by a military gunship, the stubby, balding Calderon, his eyes darting like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights, was quickly hustled into the TRIFE headquarters by the back door, a full 90 minutes before the actual ceremony was to commence, a subterfuge necessitated by the presence by thousands of AMLO’s enraged supporters, some of whom had already stripped naked.

Calderon’s witnesses – members of his campaign team and functionaries of the archly-rightist PAN party who had the misfortune to arrive by land — were greeted by clods of earth and screams of “Rateros!” (Thieves) and “Fraude!” (Fraud.) The ritual unfolded under a steady barrage of rotten eggs and tomatoes that AMLO’s people kept hurling at the TRIFE bunker, a kind of Aztec version of a U.S. missile silo, to express their unhappiness with the seven-judge panel that had neither heard nor seen any evil in the maladroit machinations of President Vicente Fox, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and the PAN to steal the election from their candidate.

On September 5th, just hours before the constitutional deadline for confirming the next president of Mexico, the TRIFE had finally handed down its eagerly anticipated decision. In the learned justices’ unanimous judgment, outgoing president Vicente Fox’s unconstitutional intromission in the electoral campaign on behalf of Calderon had put the validity of the July 2nd balloting “at risk.”

Moreover, months of venomous anti-AMLO hit pieces designed by U.S. carpetbagger Dick Morris that labeled Lopez Obrador a DANGER to Mexico in big red letters “unquestionably” impacted the results and were illegally financed by big business councils that included such transnationals as Wal Mart and Halliburton, a patently criminal act.

In addition, the election was riddled with “arithmetic mistakes.” The TRIFE’s own recalculation of the actual vote count, effected by its much-maligned twin the IFE, demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Calderon had been credited with hundreds of thousands of votes that could not be substantiated by the number of ballots inside the ballot boxes. A partial recount of 9.7% of the 130,000 “casillas” (precincts) had turned up a total of 237,000 questionable votes that the TRIFE had chosen to annul, a quarter of those cast in the sample, and more than Calderon’s supposed margin which had been reduced to 233,000 out of a total 41.5 million cast.

Having duly noticed these egregious outrages, the seven judges concluded that they could not calibrate the impact of such organized criminal activity upon the final outcome and awarded the presidency to one Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa to the great delight and immediate congratulations of Mexico’s masters in Washington D.C.

Did the TRIFE go into the tank? Three of the justices are expected to be promoted to the Mexican Supreme Court when and if Felipe Calderon takes over the presidency. A fourth, Alejandro Luna Ramos, who will remain at the helm of the electoral tribunal, is a business partner of PAN topdog “El Jefe” Diego Fernandez de Cevallos – El Jefe won millions for the Ramos family from the Mexico City government before AMLO became mayor in a shady land deal involving the site of the Aztec football stadium. A Ramos sister sits on Mexico’s Supreme Court.

Lopez Obrador has suggested that the judges were willing recipients of “canonazos” (cannonades of pesos) to help them better contemplate the “validity” of the election. Porfirio Munoz Ledo, a hoary political chameleon who was Fox’s ambassador to the European Union, describes a post-electoral huddle at the home of Chief Supreme Court Justice Mariano Azuela, a Fox ally, where the Presidente warned the “TRIFitos” that should they declare the election null and avoid due to the overwhelming evidence of fraud, the Mexican economy would collapse and anarchy would reign in the streets. Although Munoz Ledo is an unsavory sort, his sources are usually impeccable.

Now that the TRIFE has legitimized the fraud, the IFE brain trust under the beady gaze of the chief architect of the July 2nd debacle, Luis Carlos Ugalde, is moving quickly to destroy the evidence. Following the modus operandi established after the stolen election of 1988 when the then-ruling PRI in connivance with the PAN ordered the ballots to be burnt by the military, the IFE has refused petitions from 16,000 suspicious subscribers to PROCESO magazine and a blue-ribbon commission of prominent members of the civil society to allow them to conduct a citizens recount of the ballots that are now, once again, under the protection of the military. Never! Ugalde and his mafia scoff. The ballots are “inviolable!” “The property of the people!”

But, on the other hand, the ballots are not “documents” open to public scrutiny as guaranteed by law, the IFE contends, and therefore are eminently “burnable” under current electoral stipulations. Ugalde’s ruling was described as “metaphysical” by National University law professor John Ackerman. According to the IFE’s hypothesis, the ballots were “documents” before they were marked by the voters but now they have been reduced to symbolic “expressions of the people’s will” and thus are candidates for the incinerator.

AMLO is sworn to preventing a repeat of the 1988 flimflam and his people are pleading with Azuela’s Supreme Court to stay the December date set for the burning – after all, an Ohio court just stepped in to save what ballots remain from Bush’s stealing of that state’s electoral votes in the smarmy 2004 presidential balloting. Not without a certain sense of déjà vu all over again, the final arbiter in this dispute may well be (who else but?) the TRIFE.

As illustrated by his armed airlift to the TRIFE silo, Felipe Calderon has a problem meeting the people he intends to govern over the next six years. In his first junket as president-elect, Fecal (as his detractors have dubbed him) took a sentimental journey to his native Morelia, the capital of the narco-ridden western state of Michoacan, where he was scheduled to lay a wreathe at the feet of that city’s namesake, Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon, a black defrocked priest who led the guerrilla war against the Spanish Crown several centuries before the 44 year-old Calderon first slithered from the darkness of his PANista mother’s womb.

Calderon’s family on all sides is a founding pillar of the PAN, an Opus Dei-like creature of Catholic bankers formed to denigrate Mexico’s beloved depression-era “Bolshevik” president Lazaro Cardenas, also a Michoacan native whose grandson, also Lazaro Cardenas, now besmirches that hallowed name as governor. Indeed, Calderon ‘s trip to Michoacan was designed to split Lopez Obrador’s three-party Coalition for the Good of All – young Cardenas is titularly a member of the PRD, AMLO’s home party, founded by his father Cuauhtemoc after he was swindled out of the presidency in 1988.

But Felipillo never made it to Morales’s feet (the good padre probably exhaled a sigh of relief). Hundreds of AMLO’s faithful tore down the barricades, tossed the usual rotten eggs and tomatoes at Calderon’s entourage, battled Cardenas’s state police and the elite Presidential military guard, and generally made the venue so unsafe that the wreath-laying had to be called off and the president-elect sped into a nearby locked-down convention center for a speech to a carefully-culled audience of “perfumados” (literally the perfumed ones.)

The draconian security measures at the convention center – sniffer dogs, metal detectors, pat-down searches – were not unwarranted. On the eve of Calderon’s confirmation, in Michoacan’s second city Uruapan, the capital of the state’s “hot lands” where drug cropping accounts for the whole economy, a ski-masked commando burst into a local dance hall, forced the patrons to lie face down on the dance floor under pain of being Swiss cheesed by the automatic weapons they were waving convincingly, and carefully removed five severed human heads from black plastic bags which they artfully arranged in the center of the “pista” (dance floor) with the accompanying message: “the family does not kill for money. It does not kill women. It does not kill innocents. Those who deserve to die, die. Justice is divine.”

This country has been visited by unspeakable acts of narco-terrorism in the months that Calderon has been blaspheming Lopez Obrador as “a DANGER to Mexico” (thanks Sasha for this observation). Such beheadings are now a regular feature of the cityscapes in Acapulco and Tijuana. Corpses are strewn in Baghdad-sized numbers each month in the rural outback of Sinaloa, Jalisco, Guerrero, Michoacan, and Chiapas. Judges are gunned down on their way to court at La Palma, Mexico’s maximum narco-lockup – published reports speak of a “psychosis of fear” spooking the nation’s judiciary. The brains of industry and the stock market are not immune from being splattered all over the street. Last week, the top official of a privatized customs agency part-owned by Fox’s financial secretary Francisco Gil, was cut down by professional hit men on a busy Mexico City street as the end-of-the-administration chickens begin to come home to roost. La Jornada, the left daily, has even gone on “suicide” watch – officials often blow their brains out or sever their veins with box cutters at such moments in the Mexican political dynamic.

The TRIFE’s confirmation of the stealing of the 2006 election has generated an avalanche of accolades for Felipe de Jesus – Bush and his crony ambassador Tony Garza were first in line to extend their congratulations all over again (they did so hours after the deeply flawed preliminary vote count came in July 2nd.) Spain’s Rodriguez Zapatero and his pals at REPSOL were right behind, looking to get in on the ground floor of the fire sale of privatization Calderon has pledged for PEMEX, the once-nationalized state petroleum enterprise. The U.S. State Department’s “democratic” answers to Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, Alan Garcia and Oscar Arias, along with Salvador’s fawning Tony Saca chimed in. Improbably, so did Nestor Kirschner – can Fidel and Lula be far behind?

But to my ear, the most appropriate toast to Felipe Calderon ‘s confirmation as the next president of this dangerous neighbor nation was one that was not sounded (at least not yet.) In 1994, after Ernesto Zedillo had finally relieved the reviled Carlos Salinas at the wheel of state, the still missing-in-action Subcomandante Marcos scribbled salutations to the new prez that began, much as does this chronicle, “Welcome to the Nightmare.”

This past Sunday, Lopez Obrador’s weekly packed-as-usual revival meeting in the Zocalo transpired parallel to Felipe Calderon’s “victory” celebration, held appropriately enough in a bullring in an affluent district of the capital. AMLO’s numbers as always dwarfed his diminutive rival’s – the PAN reportedly padded out the crowd by requiring the compulsory attendance of Catholic school children and their parents. and the wealthy burghers in the south of the city were said to have obligated their servants to attend.

While the President-elect swore vengeance on his enemies across town, AMLO did not. As always, he let his furious flock call Fecal bad names but eschewed even mentioning his rival. Lopez Obrador had other plans. The seven week, seven mile encampment of his followers that so vex upper and middle class “capitolinos” would stay in place through Friday night, September 15th, the eve of Mexican Independence Day when AMLO intends to deliver the “Grito” of “Viva Mexico!” to the multitudes gathered in the great square, an honor reserved for the President of Mexico.

But rather than challenging the Mexican military, AMLO’s people will then dismantle their encampments and retreat from the Zocalo for 12 hours to allow the Generals and Admirals to conduct their traditional Independence Day parade. “The army belongs to the people, not the government – we have no argument with this institution,” AMLO explained seeking to mollify his militants who are reluctant to step back. “Many members of military families voted for us July 2nd. And besides the troops are so badly paid that they can’t even support their families.”