Tuesday Reads: Freedom Riders, Rape as a Weapon of War, Meltdowns, and Trump in Trouble

Good Morning!!

Last night I watched an inspiring and moving documentary on PBS’ American Experience about the Freedom Rides of 1961–50 years ago this month. If you didn’t watch it last night, please try to find a way to do so. It was wonderful. There were a number of articles published to coincide with the premiere of the documentary last night.

CNN published a fascinating piece about James Zwerg, who is also interviewed in the PBS documentary. Here’s just a bit of it, but the entire article is well worth reading.

Looking out the window, Zwerg could see men gripping baseball bats, chains and clubs. They had sealed off the streets leading to the bus station and chased away news photographers. They didn’t want anyone to witness what they were about to do.

Zwerg accepted his worst fear: He was going to die today.

Only the night before, Zwerg had prayed for the strength to not strike back in anger. He was among the 18 white and black college students from Nashville who had decided to take the bus trip through the segregated South in 1961. They called themselves Freedom Riders. Their goal was to desegregate public transportation.

[….]

The Greyhound bus doors hissed open. Zwerg had volunteered to go first. The mob swarmed him as he stepped off the bus, yelling, “Nigger lover! Nigger lover!”

Then, as the mob grabbed him, Zwerg closed his eyes and bowed his head to pray. “The Lord is my light and salvation, of whom shall I fear … ”

The mob dragged him away.

John Lewis (L) and James Zwerg, freedom riders

New Orleans was the final destination of the freedom rides, and NOLA.com has an article about a 2011 reenactment organized by PBS to coincide with the documentary. Five of the original freedom riders joined college students for the event.

The Public Broadcasting Service’s Freedom Riders bus pulled into New Orleans Monday with five of the hundreds of people who rode buses through the South in 1961 to test court rulings that had desegregated interstate transportation. Many southern states ignored the rulings, and the first buses never made it to their New Orleans destination because of the violence inflicted from mobs in Alabama.

Forty college students joined them on this year’s ride from May 6 to Monday, retracing the route of the first Freedom Ride from Washington D.C. and completing the unfinished trek.

The 2011 ride was organized by PBS in conjunction with last night’s premiere of a documentary about the Freedom Riders. Both the film and the ride are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first Freedom Ride and subsequent rides it inspired in 1961.

Curtis Valentine at Huffpo asks if the graduating classes of 2011 can be today’s freedom riders. I really hate to be a cynic, but good luck with that. I just hope a few of them watch the documentary. Those students back in 1961 were unbelievably brave and idealistic–and they changed America.

Another truly courageous person, Eman al-Obeidi gave an interview today to one of the journalists (Jonathan Miller) who tried to protect her when she rushed into their headquarters in Tripoli and told them of the ordeal she had suffered after being kidnapped by Gaddafi’s thugs. Here is just a bit of the interview.

She speaks matter-of-factly about the extreme sexual violence to which she claims she was subjected. It is clearly distressing for her to recount her ordeal, but she persists, despite my assurances that she need not go on.

She cannot control the floods of her tears as she talks about why she believes she was singled out. It’s because she was from Benghazi, she says. Her accent and ID card betrayed her.

“They asked me: ‘Where are the men from the east? Let them come and see what we do to their women. Let them see how we rape their women, and humiliate them.’”

She pauses to reach for a tissue as tears continue to roll down her cheeks. “They wanted to take revenge because I’m from the east. Nothing more, nothing less. They were drunk.”

Under international law, the use of rape as a weapon of war is a war crime. Women are protected in both international and internal conflicts under the Geneva Conventions. The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court also outlaws rape as an act of war.

Here is Jonathan Miller’s report of his first encounter with al-Obeidi:

Finally it is coming out in the mainstream media–the situation at the Fukushima plant is far worse than we have previously been led to believe. At least one of the reactors completely melted down and the cores of three of the reactors are damaged, and there is a good chance that the containments have been breached. From the Wall Street Journal:

The pressure vessel, a cylindrical steel container that holds nuclear fuel, “is likely to be damaged and leaking water at units Nos. 2 and 3,” said Junichi Matsumoto, Tepco spokesman on nuclear issues, in a news briefing Sunday.

He also said there could be far less cooling water in the pressure vessels of Nos. 2 and 3, indicating there are holes at the bottom of these vessels, with thousands of tons of water pumped into these reactors mostly leaking out.

Tepco found the basement of the unit No. 1 reactor building flooded with 4.2 meters of water. It isn’t clear where the water came from, but leaks are suspected in pipes running in and out of the containment vessel, a beaker-shaped steel structure that holds the pressure vessel.

The water flooding the basement is believed to be highly radioactive. Workers were unable to observe the flooding situation because of strong radiation coming out of the water, Tepco said.

Time Magazine asks if Fukushima “was a China syndrome.”

The China Syndrome refers to a scenario in which a molten nuclear reactor core could could fission its way through its containment vessel, melt through the basement of the power plant and down into the earth. While a molten reactor core wouldn’t burn “all the way through to China” it could enter the soil and water table and cause huge contamination in the crops and drinking water around the power plant. It’s a nightmare scenario,the stuff of movies. And it might just have happened at Fukushima.
Last week, plant operator Tepco sent engineers in to recalibrate water level gauges in reactor number 1. They made an alarming discovery: virtually all the fuel in the core had melted down. That means that the zirconium alloy tubes that hold the uranium fuel and the fuel itself lies in a clump—either at the bottom of the pressure vessel, or in the basement below or possibly even outside the containment building. Engineers don’t know for sure, though current temperature readings suggest that fission inside the reactor core has definitely ceased for good (i.e. there will be no further melting).

Anecdotal evidence doesn’t bode well for how far the fuel melted: Tepco has been pumping thousands of tons of water onto reactor 1 to try to cool it—yet the water level in the containment vessel is too low to run an emergency cooling system. That means the water is escaping somewhere on a course cut by molten fuel–probably into the basement of the reactor building, though it’s also possible it melted through everything into the earth.

At Huffpo, Michael Shaw says the MSM is still mostly uninterested in the horrible situation at Fukushima. He’s right. The story is just barely breaking through as of now. Our government had to be part of the coverup, because the U.S. had helicopters surveying the damage. If you’d like to read a very good article that spells out the current situation in a clear and fairly calm matter, check out this piece by Chris Martenson. It’s excellent.

I’ll leave you with this piece about Donald Trump by Michael Isakoff: Trump escapes further scrutiny by pulling the presidential plug — Real estate developer faced steady drip of disclosures in dozens of suits.

Donald Trump’s decision not to run for president will permit him to avoid making a full public disclosure of his finances and escape further national media scrutiny of business practices that were being litigated in courtrooms across the country.

[….]

Trump abruptly pulled back over the weekend, just days after receiving private polling numbers from Republican pollster John McLaughlin showing that Republican voters were souring on the idea of his candidacy and that his standing had now fallen into the single digits, according to two Republican consultants who were briefed on the poll results.

The decision also came after an unfavorable court decision in Florida last Friday in which a federal magistrate ordered him to turn over a series of business licensing arrangements for his hotel and office building projects that he has long fought to keep confidential, according to court documents reviewed by NBC News.

Read the Florida court decision (.pdf)

“At the end of the day, he was going to face a degree of scrutiny of his business practices that he’s not accustomed to,” said Kenneth Turkel, a lawyer who is representing a group of condo investors who are suing Trump over a Trump-named project that has gone bust in Tampa, Fla. “We were the tip of the iceberg.”

Personally, I hope all those courts throw the book at him. So what are you reading and blogging about today?

How Long Has Dominique Strauss-Kahn Been Getting Away with Rape?

Dominique Strauss-Kahn flanked by NYPD officers

I’m sure no one here at Sky Dancing is surprised to learn that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who was arrested for attacking a maid at a NYC hotel, now faces another charge of sexual assault–this one from back in 2002. From the Guardian UK:

A local official of the Socialist party claimed that Strauss-Kahn had attacked her daughter, who is goddaughter to Strauss-Kahn’s second wife, in 2002.

Tristane Banon was in her 20s and writing a book when she approached Strauss-Kahn for an interview in 2002. In a TV programme in 2007, in which Strauss-Kahn’s name had been bleeped out, Banon allegedly described him as a “rutting chimpanzee” and described how she was forced to fight him off. “It finished badly … very violently … I kicked him,” Banon said. “When we were fighting, I mentioned the word ‘rape’ to make him afraid, but it didn’t have any effect. I managed to get out.”

So why didn’t Banon press charges after the attack? She thought about it and even talked to a lawyer, but decided that she “didn’t want to be known to the end of my days as the girl who had a problem with the politician.” In addition, her mother thought the attack must have been a rare exception to Strauss-Kahn’s normally “warm” and “sympathetic” behavior.

“Today I am sorry to have discouraged my daughter from complaining. I bear a heavy responsibility,” she said….[because] the attack left her daughter depressed and traumatised. “My daughter, despite the passing years, is still shocked by these facts. Her life was completely upset by this affair and she was depressed for a long time.” She added that it was clear Strauss-Kahn had “difficulty controlling his urges”.

Unfortunately, this man has very likely been getting away with sexually assaulting women for most of his life. Men who rape rarely do it just once. Sure enough multiple media outlets are now reporting that Strauss-Kahn was widely known to have difficulty controlling his impulses with women. From MSNBC:

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s reputation with women earned him the nickname “the great seducer,” and not even an affair with a subordinate could knock the International Monetary Fund leader off a political path pointed in the direction of the French presidency.

The trouble is that the “affair with a subordinate” wasn’t really an “affair,” as I understand that term. Here is how the situation is described by the Guardian:

…in 2008, after a well-documented affair with Piroska Nagy a Hungarian economist and a junior colleague at the IMF, he was forced to publicly apologise for “an error of judgment”, but was cleared of abusing his position. He insisted the relationship was consensual, but when his wife, journalist Anne Sinclair, described it as a “one-night stand”, an indignant Nagy wrote to investigators saying: “I was not prepared for the advances of the IMF director general. I didn’t know what to do … I felt damned if I do, damned if I don’t.” Nagy left her job at the IMF after the affair, and hinted at harassment of female staff, adding that her boss had “without question” used his position to seduce her.

The Guardian also quotes Thierry Saussez, a former adviser to French President Nicholas Sarkozy, as saying that no one should be surprised by Strauss-Kahn’s behavior with a hotel maid in NYC–that it is well known that Strauss-Kahn “has a problem” and that female journalists are loathe to interview him.

More information has come out about what actually happened during that hotel “assault,” and it is much worse than originally reported. From New York Magazine:

IMO, forcing someone to perform oral sex is, in fact, rape. If that isn’t in the definition of rape in the criminal codes, it needs to be included. I’m beginning to think we really do need a new definition of rape–and not the one the Republicans proposed awhile back.

Late Night: Justice Department Won’t Prosecute Banksters but Hints at Antitrust Action Against NCAA

Oh good grief!

The Department of Justice has sent a letter to NCAA President Mark Emmert asking why the association does not have a major-college football playoff and it wants to know if Emmert believes some aspects of the Bowl Championship Series system do not serve the interests of fans, schools and players.

Christine A. Varney, assistant attorney general in the Justice Departmen’s Antitrust Division, pointed out in the letter sent Tuesday that “serious questions” continue to arise as to whether the BCS system is consistent with federal antitrust laws.

[….]

“Your views would be relevant in helping us to deternine the best course of action with regard to the BCS,” Varney wrote.

You can read the full letter here.

Gee…I wonder who is behind this?