On Monday and Tuesday of this week, if you were anywhere near Canal and 6th Ave., you saw something, well....not Kosher for Passover, or any other event in April, except for the Tribeca Film Festival.
Barry O'Hanessian, erstwhile thorninpaw contributor, designed the balloon, which was built in CA for a few critical scenes in Kevin Jordan's "Lobster Farm"
The film screened by special invitation from Robert DiNero on Tuesday at 3pm after a scourge of people jammed the theater. The anxious folks waiting on line, some for hours, were slightly placated by the free shrimp cocktail handed out, courtesy of the film's major inspiration, Jordan's Lobster Dock in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn.
"The buzz has been incredible"- one movie goer said. "I didn't see too many things on the roster which really looked worth waiting for...."
The viewers gave director/writer Jordan's 90 minute masterwork, based on his family's life story, a standing ovation.....the first of the festival.
Director/Writer Kevin Jordan greets fans at the "Lobster Farm" after-party at Bread Tribeca
The film's star, playing Jordan's father/character, Danny Aiello, waited during the screening in a nearby room. He entered during the exuberant applause to an eruption of cheers from the savvy film aficionados, students, press and tourists.
Thorninpaw finds it hard to fathom how a New York film, based on a New York Story, in a New York setting, with a New York writer and director, and New York actors couldn't be getting all the buzz and excitement that surrounds "Lobster Farm" .....giant elves and shellfish aside.
O'Hannessian vogues at the after-party
Lobster Farm star Daniel Sauli, who's gave a powerful performance as the loyal and conflicted son, chats up fans at the after-party.
In the following Q&A session, Jerry Stiller and his wife Anne Meara complimented Jordan on his directing in their own impromptu-comic style, leaving the crowd in stitches. As Jerry stood up to speak, Anne yelled, "Sit down Jerry, this isn't about you!". A QuickTime movie of the hillarious Q&A will be going up on thelobsterfarm.com. Word has it another screening is in the works for next week, partly on demand from the Tribeca Film Festival's powers-that-be. ---You talkin to the claw Bobby?
This cooked lobster riding Santa Claus was found near the corner of Sixth Avenue & Canal yesterday. The pair were there to help promote an interesting, independent film, "The Lobster Farm"
The film was screened as part of the Tribeca Film Festival and has some serious fans. I do not know when it will be shown again but one can watch the website and IMDB for additional information.
For more examples, see the Blue Bunny's web site and then decide.
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | April 24, 2005
WASHINGTON -- Federal agencies under the Bush administration are sweeping vast amounts of public information behind a curtain of secrecy in the name of fighting terrorism, using 50 to 60 loosely defined security designations that can be imposed by officials as low-ranking as government clerks.
No one is tracking the amount of unclassified information that is no longer accessible.
For years, a citizen who wanted to know the name and phone number of a Pentagon official could buy a copy of the Defense Department directory at a government printing office. But since 2001, the directory has been stamped ''For Official Use Only," meaning the public may not have access to such basic information about the vast military bureaucracy.
After a 1984 chemical plant accident killed 20,000 people in Bhopal, India, Congress in 1986 passed the Emergency Planning & Community Right to Know Act, giving Americans the right to know if they lived downwind from dangerous chemicals. Until 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency posted on its website each plant's plans for dealing with a disaster, leading to public pressure on the chemical industry to maintain safer conditions. The database has been removed from the website for security reasons.
For decades, the Defense Department's map office has made its topographic charts available to the public. Biologists use them to map species distribution, and airlines use them to create flight charts. But the administration has proposed removing the maps from public use this fall, in part to keep them away from ''those intending harm" to the United States.
In these cases and others, the information that the Bush administration is removing from public access is not risky enough to national security to be officially classified as ''Confidential," ''Secret," or ''Top Secret," under rules in place for decades.
The public instead is losing access to large amounts of less-risky information through terms such as ''For Official Use Only," ''Sensitive But Unclassified," ''Not for Public Dissemination," and what Congress has estimated as 50 to 60 other designations developed by federal agencies to keep the public from seeing unclassified information.
Although some of these secrecy terms predate the Bush administration, advocates of open government say their use has grown sharply over the past four years. Precise numbers of documents being shielded are unknown because the administration keeps no records. And there are only vague standards governing the types of documents that can be made secret.
Under the official system for classified secrets, for example, each level of secrecy comes with clearly defined criteria. There are strict limitations on who is authorized to decide whether a piece of information should be classified. Precisely 4,007 officials have this power. There are time limits after which most classified secrets can become public. There is a process for appealing a classification. And the government tracks how many classified secrets it creates each year.
By contrast, terms such as ''For Official Use Only" have vague criteria that vary from agency to agency. In some departments, any employee, even a clerk, may stamp a document as off-limits. All 180,000 employees of the Homeland Security Department may decide a document is ''For Official Use Only."
There is no system for tracking who stamped it, for what reason, and how long it should stay secret. There is no process for appealing a secrecy decision.
''Information is getting withheld arbitrarily and unnecessarily," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. ''That is bad because it impedes oversight and obstructs accountability. It is the nature of bureaucracies to hoard information, and these new unclassified control mechanisms allow them to do that without restraint."
Asked about government secrecy at a recent conference of newspaper editors, President Bush said he felt that ''citizens ought to know as much as possible about the government decision-making." But he also warned that the country had to be careful about information that could put lives at risk.
''I understand that there's a suspicion that we're too security-conscious," Bush said. ''I hope that we're becoming balanced between that which the public ought to know and that which, if we were to expose, would jeopardize our capacity to do our job, which is to defend America."
But critics contend that the system is far from balanced because the standards for sensitive but unclassified information are so loose. In some cases, the administration appears to have shielded information that posed no realistic security risk, but did threaten its political interests. Other times, bureaucrats appear to have acted overzealously, blocking useful information to no end.
Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, identified a series of incidents in which he said security controls were invoked improperly to prevent political embarrassment.
For example, in the midst of the 2004 presidential campaign, the State Department released a report showing that during the Bush administration terrorist attacks around the world had dropped to their lowest levels since 1969. But after critics challenged the numbers, the department recalibrated and found that attacks were, in fact, at a 20-year high.
That September, just weeks before the election, the department's inspector general completed a report blaming CIA analysts for producing faulty numbers. The administration withheld the report from the public as ''Sensitive But Unclassified."
Now, the State Department has decided not to tabulate attacks in the annual terrorism report. Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA and State Department terrorism specialist, contended that the decision occurred after early results showed that attacks jumped again, undercutting Bush's claim to be winning the war on terrorism.
Said Waxman: ''It is indefensible to conceal the terrorism numbers from Congress and the public."
Hammered by criticism after Johnson's allegations, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher last week denied that the decision to stop tabulating attacks was political. Boucher said the new National Counterterrorism Center would handle any public dissemination of statistics, though he was unable to say when it would provide the official 2004 numbers.
In another recent case, Human Rights Watch earlier this month found an unclassified draft of a new policy on a Defense Department website. The document proposed holding suspected Iraqi insurgents without trial in the same way that accused Taliban members have been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
After Human Rights Watch denounced the idea, the Pentagon took down its entire electronic library of unclassified documents, including many hundreds of unrelated papers. The military later put part of the website back up, but dozens of unrelated documents that were previously available to the public are still gone.
Such secrecy moves have been criticized across the political spectrum. A recent report coauthored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, attacked ''overzealous" decisions to dismantle entire websites over security fears.
It also said that the Bush administration has not conducted a systematic review of formerly public information that has been made secret, by weighing the likelihood that it could help terrorists against the ''countervailing public safety and other benefits of providing" the information.
The move toward withholding unclassified information from the public occurs as the administration's use of the classified secrets system is soaring. It classified 16 million documents in 2004, the highest number recorded since the government began keeping track of them in 1980. That number is up from 14 million in 2003, 11 million in 2002, and 8 million in 2001.
And the number of old documents being declassified dropped from an average of 150 million a year during Bill Clinton's second term to an average of 54 million in Bush's first term. Last year, there were only 25 million declassifications.
Although no numbers exist to track the number of unclassified documents withheld from public view using a bureaucratic term such as ''For Official Use Only" or by dismantling a website, anecdotal examples are mounting.
Last month, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Malden, asked the inspector general of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to examine whether the agency was using security threats as a ''pretext to prevent the public from accessing documents that do not pose a security risk." The inspector general agreed last week to launch an investigation.
Markey contended that the commission had blocked the public from viewing unclassified nuclear information, so that only members of the industry were able to discuss regulatory changes with the government. For example, the NRC recently withheld a National Academy of Sciences report challenging the idea that the industry-preferred way of storing spent nuclear fuel rods was safe from terrorism, prompting Markey to accuse the agency of suppressing information ''based on the fact that it disagrees with the conclusions, not on any legitimate security" fears.
Meanwhile, Wenonah Hauter of Public Citizen has also raised concerns about the NRC's proposal to prevent outside groups from viewing unclassified safety plans. Public-interest groups have used such information to pressure the agency to adopt higher standards for nuclear security, including protecting power plants from truck bombs. If the proposed changes go through, the public would be left ''in the dark about the competency of the nuclear industry," Hauter said.
Sue Gagner, a spokeswoman for the NRC, said the agency is ''very mindful of the public's need to know," but its ''concern is not to release information that could be helpful to a terrorist."
With a few exceptions, the terms such as ''For Official Use Only" lack the force of law, so if a member of the public finds out that the document exists, he or she may still try to obtain it under the Freedom of Information Act. However, the Bush administration is also fighting to avoid releasing information under the act.
Under a Clinton administration policy, FOIA officers were supposed to operate with a ''presumption of disclosure" unless it was ''reasonably foreseeable that disclosure would be harmful."
But in October 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reversed course, instructing agencies to withhold information unless there was no ''sound legal basis" for doing so.
This policy discourages the release of information because few people are willing to go to the trouble of filing a lawsuit. The administration has also stretched the legal definitions of what is exempt, making FOIA exceptions for documents that would invade personal privacy or reveal internal agency procedures apply more sweepingly.
For example, Forbes Magazine reported in July 2004 that the Justice Department cited ''unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" in rejecting an FOIA request for press releases it had already issued concerning terrorism-related indictments.
''If you can control the flow of information, you often can control the process itself," said Peter Weitzel of the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government. ''I think they believe that's the most effective way to govern, and so that's what they sought out to do."
Some Republicans also worry that the government is being too secretive. Two Texas Republicans, Senator John Cornyn and Representative Lamar Smith, have sponsored a bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act by closing loopholes, speeding up responses to FOIA requests, and establishing an FOIA hotline service, among other things. ''Achieving the true consent of the governed requires informed consent, and such consent is possible only with an open and accessible government," Cornyn said in February.
Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general, said the federal government often places documents beyond public view ''without real justification." He called for a system that ''strikes the right balance between the need to classify documents in our national interest and security, and our national values of open government."
"The Harvest of Mipzor, long ago, was when I first saw Beldar's cone. How young and strong he looked as he pursued and captured the greased garfok, which was roasted for all to consume."
(stolen from catch.com)
By AMI BENTOV
Associated Press Writer
April 20, 2005, 11:10 AM EDT
RAMAT GAN, Israel -- When Passover comes around, even gorillas in Israel keep kosher. In line with many other Israelis busy cleaning their homes to remove bread-related products for the Passover holiday that begins Saturday night, the Safari Park Zoo near Tel Aviv does the same.
Since the zookeepers and handlers cannot touch any leavened products during the weeklong holiday that marks the biblical Jewish exodus from Egypt, the gorillas and other animals are also fed matzo -- the unleavened cracker Jews eat to remember that in their rush to flee slavery, the ancient Israelites' bread did not have time to rise.
Accustomed to eating a slice of bread with cream cheese every morning, beginning Tuesday the gorillas and other animals at the safari were fed matzo instead, said Emelia Turkel, the zoo's curator.
"This turns out to be an interesting time for the gorillas and for the other animals because they get a bit of a change in diet," Turkel said. "We call this environmental enrichment, Jewish style."
The zoo has always fed the animals matzo during the Passover holiday, Turkel said, but try to limit their intake to just one or two crackers a day to prevent them from suffering from the most common side-effect of matzo -- constipation.
"If they eat too much it does cause stomach problems, so we hope that our public this week will not be feeding their own matzo to the animals," Turkel said.
Watching the zookeepers throw matzos to the excited gorillas -- romping in the grassy area after the crackers -- visitors to the safari laughed and joked about the holiday tradition.
"I think it's a good idea for them. They're influenced by the Jews here," said Moshe, a visitor to the safari who gave only his first name.
New York, April 24, 2005)—The United States should name a special prosecutor to investigate the culpability of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and ex-CIA Director George Tenet in cases of detainee torture and abuse, Human Rights Watch said in releasing a new report today.
The report, Getting Away with Torture? Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees, is issued on the eve of the first anniversary of the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos (April 28). It presents substantial evidence warranting criminal investigations of Rumsfeld and Tenet, as well as Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Gen. Geoffrey Miller the former commander of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
“The soldiers at the bottom of the chain are taking the heat for Abu Ghraib and torture around the world, while the guys at the top who made the policies are going scot free,” said Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch. “That’s simply not right.”
Human Rights Watch said that there was now overwhelming evidence that U.S. mistreatment and torture of Muslim prisoners took place not merely at Abu Ghraib but at facilities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq as well as at Guantánamo and at “secret locations” around the world, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the laws against torture.
“This pattern of abuse across several countries did not result from the acts of individual soldiers who broke the rules,” said Brody. “It resulted from decisions made by senior U.S. officials to bend, ignore, or cast rules aside.”
Among Human Rights Watch’s findings:
Secretary Rumsfeld should be investigated for potential liability in war crimes and torture by US troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo under the doctrine of “command responsibility”—the legal principle that holds a superior responsible for crimes committed by his subordinates when he knew or should have known that they were being committed but fails to take reasonable measures to stop them. Secretary Rumsfeld approved interrogation techniques which violated the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture, such as the use of guard dogs to frighten prisoners and painful “stress” positions. There is no evidence that, over a three-year period of mounting reports of abuse, Rumsfeld exerted his authority and warned those under his command that the mistreatment of prisoners must stop. Had he done so, many of the crimes committed by U.S. forces certainly could have been avoided.
Under George Tenet’s direction, and reportedly with his specific authorization, the CIA has “rendered” detainees to countries where they were tortured, making Tenet potentially liable as an accomplice to torture. The CIA has also “disappeared” detainees in secret locations and it is said to have used “waterboarding,” in which the detainee’s head is pushed under water until he believes he will drown, also reportedly with Tenet’s authorization.
Gen. Sanchez approved illegal interrogation methods—again, including the use of guard dogs to frighten prisoners—which were then applied by soldiers at Abu Ghraib. Gen. Sanchez does not appear to have intervened to stop the commission of war crimes and torture by soldiers under his direct command.
Gen. Miller, as commander at the tightly-controlled prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, may bear responsibility for war crimes and acts of torture there. He may also bear responsibility for bringing illegal abusive interrogation tactics to Iraq.
Despite this evidence, Human Rights Watch said, the United States has deliberately shielded the architects of illegal detention policies through the refusal to allow an independent inquiry of prisoner abuse and the failure to undertake criminal investigations against those leaders who allowed the widespread criminal abuse of detainees to develop and persist. Rather, the Department of Defense has established a plethora of investigations, all but one in-house, looking down the chain of command. Prosecutions have commenced only against low-level soldiers and contractors.
“A year after Abu Ghraib, the United States continues to do what dictatorships and banana republics do the world over when their abuses are discovered—cover up the scandal and shift blame downwards,” said Brody. “A wall of immunity surrounds the architects of the policy that led to all these crimes.”
Human Rights Watch requested the appointment of a special prosecutor, saying that because Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was himself deeply involved in the policies leading to these alleged crimes, he had a conflict of interest preventing a proper investigation of detainee abuse. U.S. Department of Justice regulations call for the appointment of an outside counsel when such a conflict exists and the public interest warrants a prosecutor without links to the government.
Human Rights Watch also repeated its call to Congress and the president to establish a special commission, along the lines of the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the issue of prisoner abuse. Such a commission would hold hearings, have full subpoena power, and be empowered to recommend the creation of a special prosecutor to investigate possible criminal offenses, if the attorney general had not yet named one. Although Human Rights Watch said that existing evidence already necessitated criminal investigations, it emphasized that an independent commission could compel evidence that the government has continued to conceal, including the directives reportedly signed by President Bush authorizing the CIA to establish secret detention facilities and facilitating the “rendition” of suspects to brutal regimes.