Monday, January 5, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Afghanistan: Drugs, Guns And Money
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Friday, October 17, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Zeitgeist: The Movie
What does Christianity, 911 and The Federal Reserve all have in common?
Divide & Conquer is the Motto
The social manipulation of society through the generation of fear and division has completely detached humans from their sense of power and reality.
Watch Zeitgeist below and open your mind and be exposed to the lies that control your life on a daily basis!
Zeitgeist
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
AmeriKKKa:The World's Greatest Terror
When AmeriKKKa invades a nation they portray themselves as liberators and the saviors of democracy and freedom. We currently are witnessing this great American expansion of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, and pretty soon Iran will also reek the benefits of AmeriKKKa's greatest asset. AmeriKKKa has been known throughout history to create puppet leaders/dictators, use them for their benefits, and when their time is up to quickly dispose of them and make room for the next puppet to be under U.S.'s wings. They have done this to Iran, Irag, Afghanistan, Chile and on and on; as a matter of fact we can cover every country in the alphabet that AmeriKKKa has somehow and in someway influenced to either collapse or be one of the lucky ones to get "liberated".
Anytime a leader such as Fidel Castro of Cuba, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela defy AmeriKKKa's demands and needs they are suddenly labeled as evil doers and men who want to destroy the world and it's people. I find it ironic that when a few world leaders have the balls to defy AmeriKKKa's imperialism they are suddenly called communists and terrorists, but at the same time when this country takes over another nation and destroys its people and their will to live they themselves are labeled freedom fighters. People have to wake up and realize that the rest of the world is not jealous of AmeriKKKa's freedom and lavish lifestyles, but rather the rest of the world is tired of being the SLAVES of this imperialistic country which is only out to protect its rich corporations and it's superior "Christian" beliefs.
AmeriKKKa:The World's Greatest Terror
Saddam and the West - The TRUE Story
Anytime a leader such as Fidel Castro of Cuba, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela defy AmeriKKKa's demands and needs they are suddenly labeled as evil doers and men who want to destroy the world and it's people. I find it ironic that when a few world leaders have the balls to defy AmeriKKKa's imperialism they are suddenly called communists and terrorists, but at the same time when this country takes over another nation and destroys its people and their will to live they themselves are labeled freedom fighters. People have to wake up and realize that the rest of the world is not jealous of AmeriKKKa's freedom and lavish lifestyles, but rather the rest of the world is tired of being the SLAVES of this imperialistic country which is only out to protect its rich corporations and it's superior "Christian" beliefs.
AmeriKKKa:The World's Greatest Terror
Saddam and the West - The TRUE Story
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Immortal Technique's Project Green Light
Immortal Technique is a revolutionary artist who is the epitome of hip hop and who continues to educate and inform the masses who have been blinded by mass media and corporations while being caught up in this materialistic bullshit society we live in. His new project the 3rd world which is released today (June 24th) is what the world and it's youth need. This is the type of album that hip hop needs at this moment. If you are looking for music that informs, uplifts, enlightens, and wakes up the masses than this album is for you. If you are tired of the misogyny, violence, guns, females, bling talk in today's "RAP" music then Immortal Technique's third world is for you. We live in a society where mass media and corporations control and dumb down the people. It is refreshing to have a brother like Technique constantly go against the grain and actually be a voice to all the voiceless who are caught in the struggle and oppression. Support real hip hop and purchase this gem; you will not be disappointed.
OMEID (which means "HOPE" in Farsi) International is a non-profit organization that is on a mission to build an orphanage and school in Kabul, Afghanistan. They plan on hopefully starting the building process around the fall of 2008. Non-profit organizations can have a difficult time to built support and funding for their ventures and missions. I urge you guys to get involved whether it be volunteering, donating, or just spreading the word about the cause; every little bit counts and we as people can unite and bring about change. Not one person can do everything but everyone can do something. There is an old Ethiopian proverb that states when spiders unite they can tie down a lion. Please check out OMEID's web site and their myspace to get more information on volunteering and lending a helping hand.
Please check out OMEID International's main web site at:
And please check out their myspace at:
http://www.myspace.com/omeidinternational
The Children in the Streets of Kabul
Immortal Technique has also launched this project. Please read his statement below...
"Project Green Light"
By Immortal Technique
http://www.myspace.com/immortaltechnique
The Green Light Has Been Given...
On the heels of my new release "The 3rd World" I have taken the opportunity to announce "Project Green Light."
I made the people of the world a promise. Not the music world, not the subdivision of Hip Hop, not the 4th Branch, and not the 3rd World underground. I made the world a promise. I told people that on June 24th the Green Light would be given. I know that people who believe in Revolution are naturally cynical. They expect their leaders to be flawless and almost take pride in finding the subtle or blatantly obvious hypocrisy in those they idolize. That is why I never wanted to be worshipped or followed blindly.
I know it is hard to trust anyone and anything in this life, you feel better when you don't because you feel like you are no longer as vulnerable. But I am a man of my word and I have never let other people's insecurities and self-image dictate my course of action. I gave my word that there would be a serious mission on June 24th. Some of you just thought that was just the release of an album, which it is partly. But it is really so much more than that for me and for the eternal struggle.
The time has come for me to announce the first stage of "Project Green Light." It is the first stage of one of many projects but an important one that I will dedicate myself to completing. I am always contacted by different organizations who reach out to me personally and ask me to fight along side with them in their struggle. I have done so with immigrant groups, youth detention centers, with those organizing against police brutality, gang workshops, funding children's hospitals in Palestine and of course our fight to try and preserve the South Central Farm. So once again I am here to answer the call of my brothers and sisters, whether it comes from across the street or across the ocean.
I have decided to work with a Non–Profit Human Rights Organization called Omeid International. (www.omeid.org) We will come together to build an orphanage/ clinic/ school in Kabul, Afghanistan for children who have been left without families because of the wars and diseases that have ravaged the land. It will be called "The Amin Institute."
- The orphanage section will house 20 children at first, from toddlers to ages 10, while the clinic will service the impoverished community surrounding it.
- There will be caregivers there, widows, dedicated people that have witnessed the violence that has consumed the country since the Russian Invasion first hand.
- There will also be a school the serves the area and will teach K through 5 to the children with certified teachers from here and Afghanistan. And we will also
have the children work with therapists and psychologists to aid their undiagnosed post traumatic disorder that in many cases rivals that of veteran infantry troops.
In every city in America we see homeless people. We have become numb and desensitized to it, as if it was an acceptable normality. We have standards around the world about using certain gasses or bombs on people and yet we have no standard, no right to NOT facing starvation or poverty. But if you travel to Africa, South America, South East Asia or The Middle East you will find something we are not used to seeing in America. Homeless children. The children in Afghanistan face starvation, death from disease being drafted into warring factions, and the disgusting child prostitution rings and human traffic of modern day slavery. I cannot change this throughout the world overnight, or I would, but I feel as if we have a good chance to start a small project in Afghanistan that we can build on. I pledge myself to this cause, to this Revolution.
Pledge 1: I will participate in a gigantic Hip Hop fundraiser for the orphanage / clinic/ school to be known as 'The Amin Institute'. I will reach out to those from New York, Atlanta, Chicago, LA, the Bay and anywhere else that Hip Hop has Underground and Mainstream Support so people that I hear talk the talk can join me in this fight to raise the funds and awareness necessary to complete the first phase of this program.
Pledge 2: "Amin" the name of the institute literally means "trustworthy" in Arabic. It is an important word because it was one of the early nicknames of The Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) even before he fathered Islam. I know people are scared to believe in anything as I said before, and regrettably there have been so many charlatans scamming their own people over the years. Therefore to show all that I am working closely and that I fully trust the partners that I have formed at Omeid International. I will pledge $10,000 of my own money into a foundation to support the cause.
Pledge 3: We all have a destiny and I will see mine fulfilled. I will succeed or die trying. And that will come as my vision for this mission is completed. So, I pledge to personally travel to Afghanistan and see the completion of the project that I have decided to dedicate my time and effort to. Omeid after all, is the Farsi word for hope.
This is not a Middle Eastern issue. It is not a Muslim issue. It is a Human Rights issue. And that is why I chose people who came to me with a blueprint, proposal and a passionate desire for real change. We throw that word around a lot, "change" and yet the war hasn't ended…IT has just changed. There has always been an ulterior motive to our involvement anywhere as a nation and so OUR response to that will be motivated by selfless Revolutionary action. It will inter-relate our struggles because I have decided to also create a forum here on my networking site, so that you can all participate in Revolutionary action. This is after all something that will BEGIN in Afghanistan but spread all over the world as different stages are completed. People from all over the globe are being activated and are in motion.
To some people this music is just entertainment, and even if it is that for many people, entertainment can inspire, it can brighten people, and it can feed their imagination. It can also pacify, it can placate and distract, it can shadow and mask real problems around us that we cannot see. But for me this is not about entertainment, it never has been it has always been a mechanism for delivering so much more. Hopefully by this time next year there will be a child in Afghanistan who knows NOTHING about Rap who doesn't even know what an Immortal Technique is, and the money I have made off this music will be giving them a place to live and a chance to learn and rebuild their own nation instead of paying some US corporation trillions of tax payer dollars to do so after we destroyed it. Unless you're brain dead and completely lost on the meaning of what our people's spirit truly is there is no way shape or form to deny no matter what your taste in music is…THAT is Hip Hop. More so because I'm not a Hollywood actor making millions getting tax breaks, I'm not rich at all, and this was done with Underground Hip Hop money. That, my people, is Revolutionary. This is not making music but it is an integral part of the struggle and one that must never be forgotten. It's the foundation of the culture that we owe our identity to.
I thank you for listening and I hope you will spread the word, support "The 3rd World" (www.ViperRecords.com) and of course donate to the cause at www.omeid.org so that we may expedite the coming of our combined strength. If I can succeed here it is a great sign, a sign that I can go to the most violent and distraught place in the world and triumph. That means that everywhere else I go, the Caribbean, Africa, South East Asia, Latin America and anywhere here in the states, that we can succeed.
Con Amor de Revolucion.
Immortal
Technique
PS.
I am not as worthy as those that have come before me, but greater men have achieved less and smarter men have accomplished nothing. I am no longer a Revolutionary Apprentice but a Young full fledged Revolutionary working towards maturing and strengthening his ideas. Learning from his failures and building on his success. There have been many rebels, leaders, and prophets that came before me and there will be others that come after me. None of these men were perfect, as they were human and man is naturally imperfect. But as they lived and died for what they believed in I will devote myself to the causes and the fights that I choose, not to champion religion or national pride, I seek no rewards or trophies that I leave to you, for me the fight is all. Read. Read. Read.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Abu Ghraib
The horrors and atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib will always haunt me and stand out in my mind as the defining moment of this so called war named "Operation Iraqi Freedom". I didn't know liberating the people of Iraq consisted of shaming them, degrading their culture and religion, and destroying their will while scarring them physically, mentally, and emotionally for generations to come. How much more blood for oil? How much more hate, ignorance, and fear of Islam? While some of us sit back and bitch about trivial matters such as high gas prices and not having enough time to take a vacation with the family, please remember and be thankful that you do have a family and that you do have an opportunity to live your life. Look at these victims below; is this what you want your tax dollars to go to? Believe it or not you paid for this and as much as you may not like to hear this, YOU and I both paid and supported these American imperialist terrorists. Take a minute to reflect on the pain and horrors faced around the world by people who are just like you.
Abu Ghraib - Images That Were Never Seen
The History of Abu Ghraib
http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction/print.html
The Abu Ghraib files
279 photographs and 19 videos from the Army's internal investigation record a harrowing three months of detainee abuse inside the notorious prison -- and make clear that many of those responsible have yet to be held accountable.
By Joan Walsh
Mar. 14, 2006 | The human rights scandal now known as "Abu Ghraib" began its journey toward exposure on Jan. 13, 2004, when Spc. Joseph Darby handed over horrific images of detainee abuse to the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID). The next day, the Army launched a criminal investigation. Three and a half months later, CBS News and the New Yorker published photos and stories that introduced the world to devastating scenes of torture and suffering inside the decrepit prison in Iraq.
Today Salon presents an archive of 279 photos and 19 videos of Abu Ghraib abuse first gathered by the CID, along with information drawn from the CID's own timeline of the events depicted. As we reported Feb. 16, Salon's Mark Benjamin recently acquired extensive documentation of the CID investigation -- including this photo archive and timeline -- from a military source who spent time at Abu Ghraib and who is familiar with the Army probe.
Although the world is now sadly familiar with images of naked, hooded prisoners in scenes of horrifying humiliation and abuse, this is the first time that the full dossier of the Army's own photographic evidence of the scandal has been made public. Most of the photos have already been seen, but the Army's own analysis of the story behind the photos has never been fully told. It is a shocking, night-by-night record of three months inside Abu Ghraib's notorious cellblock 1A, and it tells the story, in more graphic detail than ever before, of the rampant abuse of prisoners there. The annotated archive also includes new details about the role of the CIA, military intelligence and the CID itself in abuse captured by cameras in the fall of 2003.
The Bush administration, which recently announced plans to shut the notorious prison and transfer detainees to other sites in Iraq, would like the world to believe that it has dealt with the abuse, and that it's time to move on. But questions about what took place there, and who was responsible, won't end with Abu Ghraib's closure.
In fact, after two years of relative silence, there's suddenly new interest in asking questions. A CID spokesman recently told Salon that the agency has reopened its investigation into Abu Ghraib "to pursue some additional information" after having called the case closed in October 2005. Just this week, one of two prison dog handlers accused of torturing detainees by threatening them with dogs went on trial in Fort Meade, Md. Lawyers for Army Sgt. Michael J. Smith argue that he was only implementing dog-use policies approved by his superiors, and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the former commander of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony at Smith's trial.
Meanwhile, as Salon reported last week, the Army blocked the retirement of Major Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former Guantánamo interrogation commander who allegedly brought tougher intelligence tactics to Abu Ghraib, after two senators requested that he be kept on active duty so that he could face further questioning for his role in the detainee abuse scandal. Miller refused to testify at the dog-handler trials, invoking the military equivalent of the Fifth Amendment to shield himself from self-incrimination, but Pappas has charged that Miller introduced the use of dogs and other harsh tactics at the prison. Also last week, Salon revealed that U.S. Army Reserve Capt. Christopher R. Brinson is fighting the reprimand he received for his role in the abuse. Brinson, currently an aide to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., supervised military police Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. and some of the other guards who have been convicted in the scandal. Now Brinson joins a growing chorus of Abu Ghraib figures who blame the higher command structure for what happened at the prison.
Against this backdrop of renewed scrutiny, we think the CID photo archive and related materials we present today merit close examination. In "The Abu Ghraib Files," Salon presents an annotated, chronological version of these crucial CID investigative documents -- the most comprehensive public record to date of the military's attempt to analyze the photos from the prison. All 279 photos and 19 videos are reproduced here, along with the original captions created by Army investigators. They have been grouped into chapters that follow the CID's timeline, and each chapter has been narrated with the facts and findings of the Taguba, Schlesinger, Fay-Jones and other Pentagon investigations (see sidebar).
But the documentation in "The Abu Ghraib Files" also draws from materials that have not been released to the public. Among these is the official logbook kept by those military soldiers who committed the bulk of the photographed abuse. Salon has also acquired an April 2005 CID interview with military police Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., one of the ringleaders of the abuse. (One hundred seventy-three of the 279 photos in the archive were taken with Graner's Sony FD Mavica camera.) The interview was conducted several months after Graner was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He received a grant of immunity against further prosecution for anything he revealed. The documentation also draws from the unpublished testimony of Brinson to the CIA's Office of Inspector General about the death of a prisoner at the hands of the CIA.
Thanks in part to that additional sourcing, "The Abu Ghraib Files" sheds new light on the 3-year-old prison abuse scandal. While many of the 279 photos have been previously released, until this point no one has been able to authenticate this number of images from the prison, or to provide the Army's own documentation of what they reveal. This is the Army's forensic report of what happened at the prison: dates, times, places, cameras and, in some though not all cases, identities of the detainees and soldiers involved in the abuse. (Salon has chosen to withhold detainee identities not previously known to the public, and to obscure their faces in photographs, to protect the victims' privacy.)
Some of the noteworthy revelations include:
# The prisoner in perhaps the most iconic photo from Abu Ghraib, the hooded man standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his hands, was being interrogated by the CID itself for his alleged role in the kidnapping and murder of two American soldiers in Iraq. As noted in Chapter 4, "Electrical Wires," a CID spokesman confirmed to Salon that a CID agent was suspended in fall 2004 pending an investigation and later found "derelict in his duties" for his role in prisoner abuse. Salon could not confirm whether the agent was punished for his role in the abuse of the hooded man connected to electrical wires, known to military personnel as "Gilligan."
# The CID documentation, as well as other reporting, confirmed that a March 11 New York Times article identifying the prisoner in the iconic photo as Ali Shalal Qaissi, a local Baath Party member under Saddam Hussein and now a prisoners' rights advocate in Jordan, was incorrect. The CID photo archive confirms that a prisoner matching Qaissi's description -- he has a deformed left hand -- and known by the nickname "The Claw" was held at the prison and photographed by military police on the same night as the mock electrocution, but he was not the one standing on the box and attached to wires. The CID materials say all five photos of the hooded man were the prisoner known as "Gilligan." It remains possible that Qaissi received similar treatment, but there is no record of that abuse.
# Chapter 5, "Other Government Agencies," tells the story behind photos of the mangled corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, known as the "Ice Man," who died during interrogation by a CIA officer. No one at the CIA has been prosecuted, even though al-Jamadi's death was ruled a homicide. The chapter adds new detail about the CIA's role in the prison drawn from Christopher Brinson's testimony to CIA investigators.
# As explained in Chapter 1, "Standard Operating Procedure," some of the 279 photos and 19 videos in the archive depict controversial interrogation tactics employed in cellblock 1A. Among the examples of abuse on display in the photos were techniques sanctioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for use on "unlawful enemy combatants" in the "war on terror." These include forced nudity, the use of dogs to terrorize prisoners, keeping prisoners in stress positions -- physically uncomfortable poses of various types -- for many hours, and varieties of sleep deprivation. Some of these techniques migrated from Guantánamo and Afghanistan to Iraq in 2003. (The abuse depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos did not occur during interrogation sessions, but in some cases military guards allege they were encouraged to "soften up" detainees for interrogation by higher-ranking military intelligence officers.)
# Military intelligence personnel and civilian contractors employed by the military appear in some of the photographs with the military guards, and entries from a prison logbook captured in the archive show that in some cases military police believed their tough tactics were being approved by -- and in some cases ordered by -- military intelligence officers and civilian contractors. The logbook also documents prisoner rioting and the regular presence of multiple OGA (other government agency) detainees held in the military intelligence wing.
Three years and at least six Pentagon investigations later, we now know that many share the blame for the outrages that took place at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003. The abuse took place against the backdrop of rising chaos in Iraq. In those months the U.S. military faced a raging insurgency for which it hadn't planned. As mortar attacks rained down on the overcrowded prison -- at one point there were only 450 guards for 7,000 prisoners -- its command structure broke down. At the same time, the pressure from the Pentagon and the White House for "actionable intelligence" was intense, and harsh interrogation techniques were approved to obtain it. Bush administration lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, had already created a radical post-9/11 legal framework that disregarded the Geneva Conventions and other international laws governing the humane treatment of prisoners in the "war on terror." Intelligence agencies such as the CIA were apparently given the green light to operate by their own set of secret rules.
But while the Pentagon's own probes have acknowledged that military commanders, civilian contractors, the CIA and government policymakers all bear some responsibility for the abuses, to date only nine enlisted soldiers have been prosecuted for their crimes at Abu Ghraib (see sidebar). An additional four soldiers and eight officers, including Brinson, Pappas and Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of military police at Abu Ghraib, have been reprimanded. (Pappas and Karpinski were also relieved of their posts.) To date no high-level U.S. officials have been brought to justice in a court of law for what went on at Abu Ghraib.
Our purpose for presenting this large catalog of images remains much the same as it was four weeks ago when we first published a much smaller number of Abu Ghraib photos that had not previously appeared in the media. As Walter Shapiro wrote, Abu Ghraib symbolizes "the failure of a democratic society to investigate well-documented abuses by its soldiers." The documentary record of the abuse has come out in the media in a piecemeal fashion, often lacking context or description. Meanwhile, our representatives in Washington have allowed the facts about what occurred to fester in Pentagon reports without acting on their disturbing conclusions. We believe this extensive, if deeply disturbing, CID archive of photographic evidence belongs in the public record as documentation toward further investigation and accountability.
While we want readers to understand what it is we're presenting, we also want to make clear its limitations. The 279-photo CID timeline and other material obtained by Salon do not include the agency's conclusions about the evidence it gathered. The captions, which Salon has chosen to reproduce almost verbatim (see methodology), contain a significant number of missing names of soldiers and detainees, misspellings and other minor discrepancies; we don't know if the CID addressed these issues in other drafts or documents. Also, the CID materials contain two different forensic reports. The first, completed June 6, 2004, in Tikrit, Iraq, analyzed a seized laptop computer and eight CDs and found 1,325 images and 93 videos of "suspected detainee abuse." The second report, completed a month later in Fort Belvoir, Va., analyzed 12 CDs and found "approximately 280 individual digital photos and 19 digital movies depicting possible detainee abuse." It remains unclear why and how the CID narrowed its set of forensic evidence to the 279 images and 19 videos that we reproduce here.
Although the photos are a disturbing visual account of particular incidents inside Abu Ghraib prison, they should not be viewed as representing the sum total of what occurred. As the Schlesinger report states in its convoluted prose: "We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere." Also, the documentation doesn't include many details about the detainees who were abused and tortured at Abu Ghraib. While the International Committee of the Red Cross report from February 2004 cited military intelligence officers as estimating that "between 70 to 90 percent of persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake," much remains unknown about the detainees abused in the "hard site" where the Army housed violent and dangerous detainees and where much of the abuse took place.
Finally, it's critical to recognize that this set of images from Abu Ghraib is only one snapshot of systematic tactics the United States has used in four-plus years of the global war on terror. There have been many allegations of abuse, torture and other practices that violate international law, from holding prisoners without charging them at Guantánamo Bay and other secretive U.S. military bases and prison facilities around the world to the practice of "rendition," or the transporting of detainees to foreign countries whose regimes use torture, to ongoing human rights violations inside detention facilities in Iraq. Abu Ghraib in fall 2003 may have been its own particular hell, but the variations of individual abuse perpetrated appear to be exceptional in only one way: They were photographed and filmed.
Abu Ghraib - Images That Were Never Seen
The History of Abu Ghraib
http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction/print.html
The Abu Ghraib files
279 photographs and 19 videos from the Army's internal investigation record a harrowing three months of detainee abuse inside the notorious prison -- and make clear that many of those responsible have yet to be held accountable.
By Joan Walsh
Mar. 14, 2006 | The human rights scandal now known as "Abu Ghraib" began its journey toward exposure on Jan. 13, 2004, when Spc. Joseph Darby handed over horrific images of detainee abuse to the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID). The next day, the Army launched a criminal investigation. Three and a half months later, CBS News and the New Yorker published photos and stories that introduced the world to devastating scenes of torture and suffering inside the decrepit prison in Iraq.
Today Salon presents an archive of 279 photos and 19 videos of Abu Ghraib abuse first gathered by the CID, along with information drawn from the CID's own timeline of the events depicted. As we reported Feb. 16, Salon's Mark Benjamin recently acquired extensive documentation of the CID investigation -- including this photo archive and timeline -- from a military source who spent time at Abu Ghraib and who is familiar with the Army probe.
Although the world is now sadly familiar with images of naked, hooded prisoners in scenes of horrifying humiliation and abuse, this is the first time that the full dossier of the Army's own photographic evidence of the scandal has been made public. Most of the photos have already been seen, but the Army's own analysis of the story behind the photos has never been fully told. It is a shocking, night-by-night record of three months inside Abu Ghraib's notorious cellblock 1A, and it tells the story, in more graphic detail than ever before, of the rampant abuse of prisoners there. The annotated archive also includes new details about the role of the CIA, military intelligence and the CID itself in abuse captured by cameras in the fall of 2003.
The Bush administration, which recently announced plans to shut the notorious prison and transfer detainees to other sites in Iraq, would like the world to believe that it has dealt with the abuse, and that it's time to move on. But questions about what took place there, and who was responsible, won't end with Abu Ghraib's closure.
In fact, after two years of relative silence, there's suddenly new interest in asking questions. A CID spokesman recently told Salon that the agency has reopened its investigation into Abu Ghraib "to pursue some additional information" after having called the case closed in October 2005. Just this week, one of two prison dog handlers accused of torturing detainees by threatening them with dogs went on trial in Fort Meade, Md. Lawyers for Army Sgt. Michael J. Smith argue that he was only implementing dog-use policies approved by his superiors, and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the former commander of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony at Smith's trial.
Meanwhile, as Salon reported last week, the Army blocked the retirement of Major Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former Guantánamo interrogation commander who allegedly brought tougher intelligence tactics to Abu Ghraib, after two senators requested that he be kept on active duty so that he could face further questioning for his role in the detainee abuse scandal. Miller refused to testify at the dog-handler trials, invoking the military equivalent of the Fifth Amendment to shield himself from self-incrimination, but Pappas has charged that Miller introduced the use of dogs and other harsh tactics at the prison. Also last week, Salon revealed that U.S. Army Reserve Capt. Christopher R. Brinson is fighting the reprimand he received for his role in the abuse. Brinson, currently an aide to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., supervised military police Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. and some of the other guards who have been convicted in the scandal. Now Brinson joins a growing chorus of Abu Ghraib figures who blame the higher command structure for what happened at the prison.
Against this backdrop of renewed scrutiny, we think the CID photo archive and related materials we present today merit close examination. In "The Abu Ghraib Files," Salon presents an annotated, chronological version of these crucial CID investigative documents -- the most comprehensive public record to date of the military's attempt to analyze the photos from the prison. All 279 photos and 19 videos are reproduced here, along with the original captions created by Army investigators. They have been grouped into chapters that follow the CID's timeline, and each chapter has been narrated with the facts and findings of the Taguba, Schlesinger, Fay-Jones and other Pentagon investigations (see sidebar).
But the documentation in "The Abu Ghraib Files" also draws from materials that have not been released to the public. Among these is the official logbook kept by those military soldiers who committed the bulk of the photographed abuse. Salon has also acquired an April 2005 CID interview with military police Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., one of the ringleaders of the abuse. (One hundred seventy-three of the 279 photos in the archive were taken with Graner's Sony FD Mavica camera.) The interview was conducted several months after Graner was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He received a grant of immunity against further prosecution for anything he revealed. The documentation also draws from the unpublished testimony of Brinson to the CIA's Office of Inspector General about the death of a prisoner at the hands of the CIA.
Thanks in part to that additional sourcing, "The Abu Ghraib Files" sheds new light on the 3-year-old prison abuse scandal. While many of the 279 photos have been previously released, until this point no one has been able to authenticate this number of images from the prison, or to provide the Army's own documentation of what they reveal. This is the Army's forensic report of what happened at the prison: dates, times, places, cameras and, in some though not all cases, identities of the detainees and soldiers involved in the abuse. (Salon has chosen to withhold detainee identities not previously known to the public, and to obscure their faces in photographs, to protect the victims' privacy.)
Some of the noteworthy revelations include:
# The prisoner in perhaps the most iconic photo from Abu Ghraib, the hooded man standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his hands, was being interrogated by the CID itself for his alleged role in the kidnapping and murder of two American soldiers in Iraq. As noted in Chapter 4, "Electrical Wires," a CID spokesman confirmed to Salon that a CID agent was suspended in fall 2004 pending an investigation and later found "derelict in his duties" for his role in prisoner abuse. Salon could not confirm whether the agent was punished for his role in the abuse of the hooded man connected to electrical wires, known to military personnel as "Gilligan."
# The CID documentation, as well as other reporting, confirmed that a March 11 New York Times article identifying the prisoner in the iconic photo as Ali Shalal Qaissi, a local Baath Party member under Saddam Hussein and now a prisoners' rights advocate in Jordan, was incorrect. The CID photo archive confirms that a prisoner matching Qaissi's description -- he has a deformed left hand -- and known by the nickname "The Claw" was held at the prison and photographed by military police on the same night as the mock electrocution, but he was not the one standing on the box and attached to wires. The CID materials say all five photos of the hooded man were the prisoner known as "Gilligan." It remains possible that Qaissi received similar treatment, but there is no record of that abuse.
# Chapter 5, "Other Government Agencies," tells the story behind photos of the mangled corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, known as the "Ice Man," who died during interrogation by a CIA officer. No one at the CIA has been prosecuted, even though al-Jamadi's death was ruled a homicide. The chapter adds new detail about the CIA's role in the prison drawn from Christopher Brinson's testimony to CIA investigators.
# As explained in Chapter 1, "Standard Operating Procedure," some of the 279 photos and 19 videos in the archive depict controversial interrogation tactics employed in cellblock 1A. Among the examples of abuse on display in the photos were techniques sanctioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for use on "unlawful enemy combatants" in the "war on terror." These include forced nudity, the use of dogs to terrorize prisoners, keeping prisoners in stress positions -- physically uncomfortable poses of various types -- for many hours, and varieties of sleep deprivation. Some of these techniques migrated from Guantánamo and Afghanistan to Iraq in 2003. (The abuse depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos did not occur during interrogation sessions, but in some cases military guards allege they were encouraged to "soften up" detainees for interrogation by higher-ranking military intelligence officers.)
# Military intelligence personnel and civilian contractors employed by the military appear in some of the photographs with the military guards, and entries from a prison logbook captured in the archive show that in some cases military police believed their tough tactics were being approved by -- and in some cases ordered by -- military intelligence officers and civilian contractors. The logbook also documents prisoner rioting and the regular presence of multiple OGA (other government agency) detainees held in the military intelligence wing.
Three years and at least six Pentagon investigations later, we now know that many share the blame for the outrages that took place at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003. The abuse took place against the backdrop of rising chaos in Iraq. In those months the U.S. military faced a raging insurgency for which it hadn't planned. As mortar attacks rained down on the overcrowded prison -- at one point there were only 450 guards for 7,000 prisoners -- its command structure broke down. At the same time, the pressure from the Pentagon and the White House for "actionable intelligence" was intense, and harsh interrogation techniques were approved to obtain it. Bush administration lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, had already created a radical post-9/11 legal framework that disregarded the Geneva Conventions and other international laws governing the humane treatment of prisoners in the "war on terror." Intelligence agencies such as the CIA were apparently given the green light to operate by their own set of secret rules.
But while the Pentagon's own probes have acknowledged that military commanders, civilian contractors, the CIA and government policymakers all bear some responsibility for the abuses, to date only nine enlisted soldiers have been prosecuted for their crimes at Abu Ghraib (see sidebar). An additional four soldiers and eight officers, including Brinson, Pappas and Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of military police at Abu Ghraib, have been reprimanded. (Pappas and Karpinski were also relieved of their posts.) To date no high-level U.S. officials have been brought to justice in a court of law for what went on at Abu Ghraib.
Our purpose for presenting this large catalog of images remains much the same as it was four weeks ago when we first published a much smaller number of Abu Ghraib photos that had not previously appeared in the media. As Walter Shapiro wrote, Abu Ghraib symbolizes "the failure of a democratic society to investigate well-documented abuses by its soldiers." The documentary record of the abuse has come out in the media in a piecemeal fashion, often lacking context or description. Meanwhile, our representatives in Washington have allowed the facts about what occurred to fester in Pentagon reports without acting on their disturbing conclusions. We believe this extensive, if deeply disturbing, CID archive of photographic evidence belongs in the public record as documentation toward further investigation and accountability.
While we want readers to understand what it is we're presenting, we also want to make clear its limitations. The 279-photo CID timeline and other material obtained by Salon do not include the agency's conclusions about the evidence it gathered. The captions, which Salon has chosen to reproduce almost verbatim (see methodology), contain a significant number of missing names of soldiers and detainees, misspellings and other minor discrepancies; we don't know if the CID addressed these issues in other drafts or documents. Also, the CID materials contain two different forensic reports. The first, completed June 6, 2004, in Tikrit, Iraq, analyzed a seized laptop computer and eight CDs and found 1,325 images and 93 videos of "suspected detainee abuse." The second report, completed a month later in Fort Belvoir, Va., analyzed 12 CDs and found "approximately 280 individual digital photos and 19 digital movies depicting possible detainee abuse." It remains unclear why and how the CID narrowed its set of forensic evidence to the 279 images and 19 videos that we reproduce here.
Although the photos are a disturbing visual account of particular incidents inside Abu Ghraib prison, they should not be viewed as representing the sum total of what occurred. As the Schlesinger report states in its convoluted prose: "We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere." Also, the documentation doesn't include many details about the detainees who were abused and tortured at Abu Ghraib. While the International Committee of the Red Cross report from February 2004 cited military intelligence officers as estimating that "between 70 to 90 percent of persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake," much remains unknown about the detainees abused in the "hard site" where the Army housed violent and dangerous detainees and where much of the abuse took place.
Finally, it's critical to recognize that this set of images from Abu Ghraib is only one snapshot of systematic tactics the United States has used in four-plus years of the global war on terror. There have been many allegations of abuse, torture and other practices that violate international law, from holding prisoners without charging them at Guantánamo Bay and other secretive U.S. military bases and prison facilities around the world to the practice of "rendition," or the transporting of detainees to foreign countries whose regimes use torture, to ongoing human rights violations inside detention facilities in Iraq. Abu Ghraib in fall 2003 may have been its own particular hell, but the variations of individual abuse perpetrated appear to be exceptional in only one way: They were photographed and filmed.
Monday, June 9, 2008
The Horrors in Bhopal
What Can YOU Do?
You can start by going to this website below and faxing the Indian Prime Minister Office about how troubled you are by the events of this tragedy.
http://www.boston4bhopal.org/write_fax.php
For more information please read below about the facts of Bhopal.
What Happened in Bhopal
On December 3rd, 1984, thousands of people in Bhopal, India, were gassed to death after a catastrophic chemical leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant. More than 150,000 people were left severely disabled - of whom 22,000 have since died of their injuries - in a disaster now widely acknowledged as the world’s worst-ever industrial disaster.
More than 27 tons of methyl isocyanate and other deadly gases turned Bhopal into a gas chamber. None of the six safety systems at the plant were functional, and Union Carbide’s own documents prove the company designed the plant with “unproven” and “untested” technology, and cut corners on safety and maintenance in order to save money.
Today, twenty years after the Bhopal disaster, at least 50,000 people are too sick to work for a living, and a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed that the children of gas-affected parents are themselves afflicted by Carbide’s poison.
Carbide is still killing in Bhopal. The chemicals that Carbide abandoned in and around their Bhopal factory have contaminated the drinking water of 20,000 people. Testing published in a 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women living near the factory.
Although Dow Chemical acquired Carbide’s liabilities when it purchased the company in 2001, it still refuses to address its liabilities in Bhopal - or even admit that they exist. Till date, Dow-Carbide has refused to:
1) Clean up the site, which continues to contaminate those near it, or to provide just compensation for those who have been injured or made ill by this poison; 2) Fund medical care, health monitoring and necessary research studies, or even to provide all the information it has on the leaked gases and their medical consequences; 3) Provide alternate livelihood opportunities to victims who can not pursue their usual trade because of their exposure-induced illnesses; 4) Stand trial before the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s court in Bhopal, where Union Carbide faces criminal charges of culpable homicide (manslaughter), and has fled these charges for the past 15 years.
Amnesty International estimates that 22,000 people were gassed to death in Bhopal, including thousands of women and children. Today 30 people die each month from the effects of their exposure, and the death toll from Dow-Carbide’s chemical violence continues to rise. (6) More than 120,000 people are critically ill and in desperate need of medical care, and thousands of children have been born with birth defects, learning disabilities, and stunted growth. Even the breast milk of nursing mothers has been contaminated, and the chemical terror won’t end until Dow cleans up its killing fields.
Bhopal is the corporate crime par excellance – quite literally. Long before the Enron or Worldcom scandals, the CEO of Union Carbide, Warren Anderson – and the Union Carbide Corporation itself – were charged with culpable homicide in India after Bhopal. Both the corporation and its former CEO are considered “fugitives from justice” by the Indian Government, and Warren Anderson lived as a fugitive, in hiding, for more than a decade. They remain fugitives today.
Bhopal began as a classic instance of corporate double-standards: Union Carbide was obliged to install state-of-the-art technology in Bhopal, but instead used inferior and unproven equipment and employed lax operating procedures and maintenance and safety standards to those used in its US 'sister-plant'. The motive was not simply profit, but also control: the company saved $8 million, and through this deliberate under-investment managed to retain a majority share of its Indian subsidiary. On “THAT NIGHT,” none of the plant’s safety systems - six in all - were operational, and the plant siren had been turned off.
Following the massacre, Bhopal became a test case for corporate accountability. While the world anticipated an exemplary punishment for Carbide - such as ownership of the $10 billion corporation's assets being transferred to the survivors - US courts allowed Carbide to take the case to India, far away from its asset base.
Confused by Carbide's PR/BS?
"Sabotage"
"Indian Managed"
"No Liability"
Learn the TRUTH behind Carbide's lies. Visit www.bhopal.net/bhopal.com
There, the company used a strategy of delay, denial and disinformation. It contested the legitimacy of courts it had asked to be tried before. It denied it was a multinational. It claimed the gas was not ultra-hazardous. It blamed an unnamed saboteur. It appealed court orders for humanitarian relief, while professing its concern for the victims.
The strategy worked. Once Union Carbide and the government of India had hatched an out-of-court settlement, hazardous enterprises everywhere had the go-ahead to carry on business as usual, safe in the knowledge that the price for industrial massacre had been set at just 48 cents a share.
Today, they’re not so sure. Setting a legal precedent, in March 2004 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals – second only to the US Supreme Court – ruled that Union Carbide can be held accountable in US courts for environmental cleanup and medical monitoring costs in Bhopal, a world away. Dow has been summoned to appear in Bhopal to explain why it continues to harbor its subsidiary, a fugitive, from trial, and its Indian assets risk seizure. And Dow-Carbide has the dubious honor of becoming the first corporation ever indicted for crimes against human rights by Amnesty International. Bhopal remains a test case for corporate accountability: one it’s possible for us to win, and which we can’t afford to lose.
Source: http://www.studentsforbhopal.org/
The Bhopal Chemical Disaster: Twenty Years Without Justice
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Photos That Changed The World
Execution of a Viet Cong Guerrilla [1968]
This picture was shot by Eddie Adams who won the Pulitzer prize with it. The picture shows Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam's national police chief executing a prisoner who was said to be a Viet Cong captain. Once again the public opinion was turned against the war.
By Eddie Adams
The lynching of young blacks [1930]
This is a famous picture, taken in 1930, showing the young black men accused of raping a Caucasian woman and killing her boyfriend, hanged by a mob of 10,000 white men. The mob took them by force from the county jail house. Another black man was left behind and ended up being saved from lynching. Even if lynching photos were designed to boost white supremacy, the tortured bodies and grotesquely happy crowds ended up revolting many.
By Lawrence Beitler
Soweto Uprising [1976]
It was a picture that got the world's attention: A frozen moment in time that showed 13-year-old Hector Peterson dying after being struck down by a policeman's bullet.
By Sam Nzima
Hazel Bryant [1957]
It was the fourth school year since segregation had been outlawed by the Supreme Court. Things were not going well, and some southerners accused the national press of distorting matters. This picture, however, gave irrefutable testimony, as Elizabeth Eckford strides through a gantlet of white students, including Hazel Bryant (mouth open the widest), on her way to Little Rock's Central High.
By Will Counts
Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire [1911]
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company always kept its doors locked to ensure that the young immigrant women stayed stooped over their machines and didn't steal anything. When a fire broke out on Saturday, March 25, 1911, on the eighth floor of the New York City factory, the locks sealed the workers' fate. In just 30 minutes, 146 were killed. Witnesses thought the owners were tossing their best fabric out the windows to save it, then realized workers were jumping, sometimes after sharing a kiss (the scene can be viewed now as an eerie precursor to the World Trade Center events of September, 11, 2001, only a mile and a half south). The Triangle disaster spurred a national crusade for workplace safety.
Phan Th? Kim Phúc [1972]
Phan Th? Kim Phúc known as Kim Phuc (born 1963) was the subject of a famous photo from the Vietnam war. The picture shows her at about age nine running naked after being severely burned on her back by a napalm attack.
By Hu?nh Công Út
Kent State [1970]
The news that Richard Nixon was sending troops to Cambodia caused a chain of protests in the U.S. colleges. At Kent State the protest seemed more violent, some students even throwing rocks. In consequence, The Ohio National Guard was called to calm things down, but the events got out of hand and they started shooting. Some of the victims were simply walking to school. The photo shows 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller who had been shot by the Ohio National Guard moments earlier.
By John Paul Filo
Tiananmen Square [1989]
This is the picture of a student/man going to work who has just had enough. The days leading up to this event thousands of protesters and innocent by standers were killed by their own government because the Chinese people wanted more rights. He tries to stop the tanks in Tiananmen Square by standing in front of them and climbed on the tank and hitting the hatch and yelling, the tank driver didn't crush the man with the bags as a group of unknown people came and dragged him away, we still don't know if the man is alive or dead as the Chinese government executed many of the protesters involved. China is still controlled by a communist regime, but while there are strong willed men like this the country still has hope.
There are two well know photos taken of the protester by two different photojournalist, so I thought I would show both images and give both photographer credit for there work as many people think that both images where taken by the same person.
By Stuart Franklin
By Jeff Widener
Thích Qu?ng --?c [1963]
Thích Qu?ng Ð?c was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection on June 11, 1963. His act of self-immolation, which was repeated by others, was witnessed by David Halberstam, a New York Times reporter, who wrote:
" I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him."
By Malcolm Browne
Portrait of Winston Churchill [1941]
This photograph was taken by Yousuf Karsh, a Canadian photographer, when Winston Churchill came to Ottawa. The portrait of Churchill brought Karsh international fame. It is claimed to be the most reproduced photographic portrait in history. It also appeared on the cover of Life magazine.
By Yousuf Karsh
Albert Einstein [1951]
Albert Einstein is probably one of the most popular figures of all times. He is considered a genius because he created the Theory of Relativity, and so, challenged Newton's laws, that were the basis of everything known in physics until the beginning of the 20th century. But, as a person, he was considered a beatnik, and this picture, taken on March 14, 1951 proves that.
By Arthur Sasse
Nagasaki [1945]
This is the picture of the "mushroom cloud" showing the enormous quantity of energy. The first atomic bomb was released on August 6 in Hiroshima (Japan) and killed about 80,000 people. On August 9 another bomb was released above Nagasaki. The effects of the second bomb were even more devastating - 150,000 people were killed or injured. But the powerful wind, the extremely high temperature and radiation caused enormous long term damage.
Hiroshima, Three Weeks After the Bomb [1945]
Americans -- and everyone -- had heard of the bomb that "leveled" Hiroshima, but what did that mean? When the aerial photography was published, that question was answered.
And here is a ground view of the destruction.
Dead on the Beach [1943]
Haunting photograph of a beach in Papua New Guinea on September 20, 1943, the magazine felt compelled to ask in an adjacent full-page editorial, "Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore?" Among the reasons: "words are never enough . . .
By George Strock
Buchenwald [1945]
George Patton's troops when they liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. Forty-three thousand people had been murdered there. Patton was so outraged he ordered his men to march German civilians through the camp so they could see with their own eyes what their nation had wrought.
Anne Frank [1941]
Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. For many throughout the world, one teenage girl gave them a story and a face. She was Anne Frank, the adolescent who, according to her diary, retained her hope and humanity as she hid with her family in an Amsterdam attic. In 1944 the Nazis, acting on a tip, arrested the Franks; Anne and her sister died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen only a month before the camp was liberated. The world came to know her through her words and through this ordinary portrait of a girl of 14. She stares with big eyes, wearing an enigmatic expression, gazing at a future that the viewer knows will never come.
V-J Day, Times Square, [1945]
or "The Kiss", at the end of World War II, in US cities everybody went to the streets to salute the end of combat. Friendship and unity were everywhere. This picture shows a sailor kissing a young nurse in Times Square. The fact is he was kissing every girl he encountered and for that kiss, this particular nurse slapped him.
By Alfred Eisenstaedt
Casualties of war [1991]
Image of a young US sergeant at the moment he learns that the body bag next to him contains the body of his friend, killed by "friendly fire".
The widely published photo became an iconic image of the 1991 Gulf war - a war in which media access was limited by Pentagon restrictions.
By David Turnley
The Falling Man [2001]
The powerful and controversial photograph provoked feelings of anger, particularly in the United States, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The photo ran only once in many American newspapers because they received critical and angry letters from readers who felt the photo was exploitative, voyeuristic, and disrespectful of the dead. This led to the media's self-censorship of the photograph, preferring instead to print photos of acts of heroism and sacrifice.
Drew commented about the varying reactions, saying, "This is how it affected people's lives at that time, and I think that is why it's an important picture. I didn't capture this person's death. I captured part of his life. This is what he decided to do, and I think I preserved that."9/11: The Falling Man ends suggesting that this picture was not a matter of the identity behind the man, but how he symbolized the events of 9/11.
U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima [1945]
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a historic photograph taken on February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five United States Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman raising the flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.
The photograph was extremely popular, being reprinted in thousands of publications. Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and ultimately came to be regarded as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war, and possibly the most reproduced photograph of all times.
By Joe Rosenthal
Lunch atop a Skyscraper [1932]
Lunch atop a Skyscraper (New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam) is a famous photograph taken by Charles C. Ebbets during construction of the GE Building at Rockefeller Center in 1932.
The photograph depicts 11 men eating lunch, seated on a girder with their feet dangling hundreds of feet above the New York City streets. Ebbets took the photo on September 29, 1932, and it appeared in the New York Herald Tribune in its Sunday photo supplement on October 2. Taken on the 69th floor of the GE Building during the last several months of construction, the photo Resting on a Girder shows the same workers napping on the beam.
Here's a rare image by the same photographer showing the workers sleeping on the crossbeam.
Migrant Mother [1936]
For many, this picture of Florence Owens Thompson (age 32) represents the Great Depression. She was the mother of 7 and she struggled to survive with her kids catching birds and picking fruits. Dorothea Lange took the picture after Florence sold her tent to buy food for her children. She made the first page of major newspapers all over the country and changed people's conception about migrants.
By Dorothea Lange
Omayra Sánchez [1985]
Red Cross rescue workers had apparently repeatedly appealed to the government for a pump to lower the water level and for other help to free the girl. Finally rescuers gave up and spent their remaining time with her, comforting her and praying with her. She died of exposure after about 60 hours.
By Frank Fournier
A vulture watches a starving child [1993]
The prize-winning image: A vulture watches a starving child in southern Sudan, March 1, 1993.
Carter's winning photo shows a heart-breaking scene of a starving child collapsed on the ground, struggling to get to a food center during a famine in the Sudan in 1993. In the background, a vulture stalks the emaciated child.
Carter was part of a group of four fearless photojournalists known as the "Bang Bang Club" who traveled throughout South Africa capturing the atrocities committed during apartheid.
Haunted by the horrific images from Sudan, Carter committed suicide in 1994 soon after receiving the award.
By Kevin Carter
Biafra [1969]
When the Igbos of eastern Nigeria declared themselves independent in 1967, Nigeria blockaded their fledgling country-Biafra. In three years of war, more than one million people died, mainly of hunger. In famine, children who lack protein often get the disease kwashiorkor, which causes their muscles to waste away and their bellies to protrude. War photographer Don McCullin drew attention to the tragedy. "I was devastated by the sight of 900 children living in one camp in utter squalor at the point of death," he said. "I lost all interest in photographing soldiers in action." The world community intervened to help Biafra, and learned key lessons about dealing with massive hunger exacerbated by war-a problem that still defies simple solutions.
By Don McCullin
Misery in Darfur [2004]
It's an image which depicts a depressed, shoulders-down figure of a child in a cluster of what remains of her family.
The very weather-beaten arm of her mother goes over her left shoulder and there are the very small weather-beaten hands of the child, who is about five or six, clinging on to this one piece of security that she has, which is the weather-beaten hand of her mother.
The mother is not in the image, she's in the background. But then slightly further in the background you see the other hands of her brothers and sisters as they wait in this village.
By Marcus Bleasdale
Tragedy in Oklahoma [1995]
The fireman has taken the time to remove his gloves before receiving this infant from the policeman.
Anyone who knows anything about firefighters know that their gloves are very rough and abrasive and to remove these is like saying I want to make sure that I am as gentle and as compassionate as I can be with this infant that I don't know is dead or alive.
The fireman is just cradling this infant with the utmost compassion and caring.
He is looking down at her with this longing, almost to say with his eyes: "It's going to be OK, if there's anything I can do I want to try to help you."
He doesn't know that she has already passed away.
By Chris Porter
How Life Begins [1965]
In 1957 he began taking pictures with an endoscope, an instrument that can see inside a body cavity, but when Lennart Nilsson presented the rewards of his work to LIFE's editors several years later, they demanded that witnesses confirm that they were seeing what they thought they were seeing. Finally convinced, they published a cover story in 1965 that went on for 16 pages, and it created a sensation. Then, and over the intervening years, Nilsson's painstakingly made pictures informed how humanity feels about . . . well, humanity. They also were appropriated for purposes that Nilsson never intended. Nearly as soon as the 1965 portfolio appeared in LIFE, images from it were enlarged by right-to-life activists and pasted to placards.
By Lennart Nilsson
First Flight [1903]
December 17, 1903 was the day humanity spread its wings and rose above the ground - for 12 seconds at first and by the end of the day for almost a minute - but it was a major breakthrough. Orville and Wilbur Wright, two bicycle mechanics from Ohio, are the pioneers of aviations, and although this first flight occurred so late in history, the ulterior development was exponential.
By John T. Daniels
Earthrise [1968]
The late adventure photographer Galen Rowell called it "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken." Captured on Christmas Eve, 1968, near the end of one of the most tumultuous years the U.S. had ever known, the Earthrise photograph inspired contemplation of our fragile existence and our place in the cosmos. For years, Frank Borman and Bill Anders of the Apollo 8 mission each thought that he was the one who took the picture. An investigation of two rolls of film seemed to prove Borman had taken an earlier, black-and-white frame, and the iconic color photograph, which later graced a U.S. postage stamp and several book covers, was by Anders.
By William Anders
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