Navy Petty Officer Pablo Paredes, a Bronx native who refused to board the USS Bonhomme Richard as it was preparing to sail from San Diego in December, was convicted by a Navy judge on a charge of missing his deployment to Iraq. He faces a maximum sentence of one year in prison, a bad conduct discharge, loss of two thirds of his pay and a demotion. Paredes reported to the Navy pier the morning of Dec. 6, but refused to board and was told to go away. After 45 minutes on the pier, he did. He surrendered to military authorities on Dec. 18 after applying for conscientious objector status. The Navy denied his request. That ruling is being appealed. Thomas Jefferson School of Law Professor Marjorie Cohn, an international law specialist, said Paredes had acted from principle. "He said, 'I don't want to be a war criminal,'" she recalled. "He was very concerned about the deaths of more than a thousand American servicemen and women, and of thousands of Iraqis." (Reuters, May 11)

The former U.S. military intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib prison has been removed from his command as part of a punishment that also included a fine and reprimand, the Army has announced. Col. Thomas Pappas became the second senior officer relieved of command over the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. After an administrative disciplinary hearing May 9, Gen. B.B. Bell, the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, relieved Pappas of his command of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. He was also fined $8,000 and given a letter of reprimand for two instances of dereliction of duty at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and early 2004.

Just weeks after India and Pakistan took unprecedented steps towards normalization in Kashmir, the divided province is exploding into violence again. Yesterday, 13 were killed in a car bomb in Srinagar and gunfights between militants and security forces elsewhere in India-controlled Kashmir. (Times of India, May 11) Violence continues today, as a grenade attack on a Christian missionary school in Srinagar killed two women and injured 50, including 20 children. (Reuters, May 12)

BBC reports May 12 on an unprecedented wave of protests against the authoritarian regime of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan. Every day for the past four months, protesters in the eastern town of Andijan have gathered outside a courthouse where 23 local businessmen are on trial, accused of membership in a radical Islamic group, which they and their relatives strongly deny.

Last week, Doonesbury's GI Ray Hightower blogged home bitterly from Baghdad that "Iraq is the new Afghanistan"—meaning the American public has largely forgotten that there is a war going on. Today's news indicates Afghanistan may actually be becoming the new Iraq. A top news story today is a violent anti-US protest in Jalalabad, sparked by a report in Newsweek that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay placed Korans on toilets to rattle suspects, and in at least one case "flushed a holy book down the toilet." Shouting "Death to America," protesters stoned a passing US convoy, attacked the Pakistani consulate and smashed shop windows. Four were killed and over 70 wounded when police fired on the crowd. (AP, May 11)

The Colombian human rights group Red de Defensores (Defenders Network) reports in a May 10 alert of a massive illegal detainment of over 100 students, mostly minors, by an elite National Police unit in the conflicted oil city of Barrancabermeja. The students had been peacefully occupying their school buildings continuously since April 18 to protest budget cut-backs and the laying off of teachers. On April 24, one of the occupied schools, the Colegio Diego Hernández de Gallegos, was invaded by men who identified themselves as paramilitaries and threatened the students. Then, at dawn on May 5, ten of the schools were invaded by the National Police, who arrested 113 students and members of their families. Two of the students' fathers were beaten, and five members of the Syndicated Workers Union (USO), who had been supporting the strike, were also detained. All are still being held without charge at the National Police Magdalena Medio Operation Command post outside the city. The Metropolitan Anti-Disturbance Security Corps (SMAD), the elite unit reposnible for much recent violence in Colombia, carried out the raids.

The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) is requesting international support for a campaign to free three imprisoned trade union leaders in Eritrea. Tewelde Ghebremedhin, chair of Eritrea's IUF-affiliated food and beverage workers' federation, and Minase Andezion, secretary of the textile and leather workers' federation, were arrested by security police on March 30 and remain in detention. They were detained at the offices of the National Confederation of Eritrean Workers. On April 9, police arrested Habtom Weldemicael, who heads the Coca-Cola Workers Union and is a member of the food and beverage workers' federation executive. According to some reports, Weldemicael was urging an industrial action to protest the catastrophic decline in workers' living standards. The three are being held incommunicado and without charges beyond the legal 48 hours within which detainees must be brought before a magistrate. Reports indicate that they are being held in a secret security prison in Asmara.

There is a vigorous if not always civil debate going on in WW4's weblog over the Israel lobby. See here, and here.

Part of the debate is over referring to the US Congress as "Israeli occupied territory" or "Likud occupied territory." WW4 Report editor Weinberg maintains that referring to Congress as "Israeli occupied territory" is anti-Semitic. According to Wikipedia, "Zionist Occupied Government," also known as "ZOG," is neo-Nazi terminology:

The term is believed to derive from the text "Welcome to ZOG-World", written by the American neo-Nazi Eric Thomson in 1976. It appears to have first been brought to widespread attention in a December 27, 1984 article in the New York Times about robberies committed in California and Washington state by a white supremacist group, The Order. According to the newspaper, the crimes "were conducted to raise money for a war upon the United States Government, which the group calls "ZOG," or Zionist Occupation Government."