December 10, 2008
Saul Landau, an internationally-known scholar, author, commentator, and filmmaker on foreign and domestic policy issues. His most widely praised achievements are the over forty films he has produced on social, political and historical issues, and worldwide human rights, for which he won the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, the George Polk Award for Investigative Reporting, and the First Amendment Award, as well as an Emmy for "Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang." Landau has written over ten books, short stories and poems. He received an Edgar Allen Poe Award for Assassination on Embassy Row, a report on the 1976 murders of Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his colleague, Ronni Moffitt. He is a senior Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and a senior fellow of the Transnational Institute. His latest book is A Bush and Botox World. His latest film is We don't play golf here! And other stories of globalisation .
Cindy Sheehan is an American anti-war activist, whose son, Casey, was killed during his service in the Iraq War in 2004. She attracted international attention in August 2005 for her extended demonstration at a camp outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch, garnering her both support and criticism. In 2008, she ran against Congress Speaker Nancy Pelosi in California, because Pelosi did not introduce articles of impeachment against President Bush, but came second to Pelosi in the election.
Nelson P. Valdés is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of New Mexico, specializing in Latin America . He is a director of the Cuba-L Direct Projec and has written extensively on Cuban history and politics.
Cynthia McKinney is a former United States Representative and the 2008 Green Party nominee for President of the United States. McKinney served as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993–2003 and 2005–2007, first representing Georgia's 11th Congressional District and then Georgia's 4th Congressional District. She is the first African-American woman to have represented Georgia in the House.
On the morning of December 10, 2008 Cindy Sheehan, Nelson Valdes, Saul Landau, and Cynthia McKinney signed a declaration as the U.S. delegates to an international conference assessing sixty years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sponsored by the Network of Networks in Defense of Humanity held in Havana Cuba. Here is our declaration:
We celebrate sixty years of failure. Human rights have been converted from a noble goal into an instrument of foreign policy used by rich and powerful nations against the poorest and weakest people of the world.
In 2008, almost three billion people throughout the world suffer the most basic privations.
After sixty years of empty human rights rhetoric, we demand that governments focus their attention on fulfilling the promises of 1948. We write this document on the parchment of environment, which everyone shares, and has warned us all to drastically change the ways in which mass production and consumption take place.
1. The United States is a member of the commonwealth of nations;
2. Benefits accrue to those who cooperate with the global community and view other countries as potential partners for the upliftment of humankind;
3. Unfortunately, the leadership of the United States Government has consistently been a disappointment to those of us who value the tenets and the possibilities for humankind embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
4. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms the rights of self-determination, the rights of women, the indigenous, and the rights of association, expression, and resistance to protect and preserve these precious rights;
5. Poverty, severe income inequality on one hand and greed and over-consumption by a few, on the other hand, deny for far too many on the planet universal application of the Universal Declaration;
6. Climate change, unsustainable agriculture, unbridled militarism, terrorism with impunity, nuclear proliferation represent threats to our planet and threats to humankind;
7. The current implosion of the engine of U.S. imperialism and global capitalism contains the seeds of a new global order in which the rights of humankind and the Universal Declaration can find universal application;
8. The incoming Barack Obama Administration has a unique opportunity to make a clean break with the policies of the past, including installation of dictatorships, campaigns of invasion, terror, and slander, torture, and occupation, and can build bridges of peace and justice with dignity and respect to Africa, Latin America, and Europe;
9. Therefore, we call on the President-elect to put the United States on a clear course of global fraternity by
* a) invoking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
* b) rejecting torture and terror and demonstrating this by closing and vacating Guantanamo and ceding to Cuba its rightful patrimony,
* c) ending the U.S. embargo,
* d) releasing the Cuban Five, and
* e) extraditing Luis Posada Cariles;
10. While this list is not exhaustive, it represents a much'needed down payment on hope and change.
11. We will disseminate this document through our respective networks.
Signed: Saul Landau, Cindy Sheehan, Nelson Valdés, Cynthia McKinney
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"And advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." PNAC, Rebuilding America's Defenses, p. 60
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. -- Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time
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