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Are some of these gun show exhibitors supplying bad guys?
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Dear Craig,
Need an AK-47? How about 6,000 for an army of child soldiers? The International Defense Exhibition and Conference (IDEX), which concluded last week in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, bills itself as one of the biggest arms bazaars in the world. However, among the more than 1,100 companies exhibiting at IDEX were manufacturers whose products have made it a lot easier for bad guys to wreak havoc. After all, there are currently no global checks in place to keep guns out of the wrong hands. We've got less than a month to go before states convene at the United Nations in New York to finalize a historic Arms Trade Treaty. Take action now to make this Arms Trade Treaty strong so that no more weapons can fall through gaping loopholes and into dangerous hands. Amnesty International has been able to trace the flow of weapons from manufacturers exhibiting at IDEX to the very weapons used in countries where serious human rights abuses have taken place. There were no checks in place then to stop the free flow of weapons:
But we can ensure that there are checks in place now if we urge the Obama administration to support a strong Arms Trade Treaty.
All the while, NRA officials keep fueling a false#gunversation about the Arms Trade Treaty claiming that its purpose is to infringe on American gun owners rights -- knowing full well that it has no impact on gun rights within U.S. borders whatsoever. In fact, the gun lobby will be in D.C. today continuing to spread their misinformation campaign during Congressional hearings about gun control. So if NRA officials have their way and the Arms Trade Treaty is weakened, then we would see more children recruited as soldiers, more women raped in conflict zones, more families driven from their homes and more senseless deaths. We've got to make sure the record is set straight before March 18, when Arms Trade Treaty negotiations begin. We must do all we can to close dangerous loopholes, like the one that makes international gun shows an open bazaar for the suppliers of warlords and human rights criminals. The Arms Trade Treaty has the potential to protect families from gun violence on a global scale. Show President Obama that you care about protecting families worldwide against gun violence by taking action now. Your voice makes a difference in the global gun debate. Thank You, Michelle Ringuette Chief of Campaigns & Programs Amnesty International USA |  No background checks needed 
A strong Arms Trade Treaty would help keep guns from falling into the wrong hands.
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© 2013 Amnesty International USA | 5 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10001 | 212.807.8400
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BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
Showing posts with label ATT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ATT. Show all posts
27 February 2013
The world's biggest gun show, NO BACKGROUND CHECK REQUIRED 27FEB13
THE U.S. has a chance to do something this Spring to help reduce gun violence in America and in conflict zones around the world. Pres Obama needs to hear from us, tell him to tell the American people the nra is lying about the Arms Trade Treaty and that America has a moral responsibility to do what it can to help lessen gun violence in the U.S. and around the world. Click the link.....
12 July 2012
Fact vs Fiction: Arms Trade Treaty and Gun Ownership in the US 6JUL12
THE nra's deceptive propaganda campaign against the ATT (Arms Trade Treaty) being considered by the UN is for the protection of the gun manufacturers and the military-industrial complex, not the 2nd Amendment rights of Americans (no matter what your interpretation of that amendment is). There is no threat to gun ownership in the U.S. from this treaty. It DOES regulate the international gun trade, and attempts to stop the flow of weapons to drug dealers, terrorist and "rebel" groups who often use children in their campaigns of violence for their own financial gain. If the position of the nra is justified and true they shouldn't have to resort to lies, but unfortunately if the nra didn't like it wouldn't be the nra as we know it. This from Amnesty International......
As world leaders meet in New York this month to negotiate the first ever global arms trade treaty, the Internet has been buzzing with conspiracy theories that such a treaty would infringe on Second Amendment rights in the US.
This is a fallacy, driven at best by misinformation and at worst by a deliberate effort to undermine the treaty. Given the incredibly lucrative arms trade estimated to exceed $60 billion annually (with the US exporting 34% of all weapons) it’s not a surprise that such a misinformation campaign has taken the Internet by storm.
Here let me break down fact from fiction.
Will the ATT stop the sale of handguns in the US?
NO it will not.
The UN General Assembly resolution starting the process on the Arms Trade Treaty explicitly states that it is “the exclusive right of States to regulate internal transfers of arms and national ownership, including through constitutional protections on private ownership.”
No ATT can therefore infringe on that exclusive right. To that end, all the papers circulated by the Chair of the UN ATT (Ambassador Roberto García Moritán of Argentina) process clearly reference that right.
Further, Ambassador Moritán has stated that the definitive goal of the small arms treaty “is to try to have common standards to be applied by all countries when they export or import weapons.”
Furthermore, about the ATT, the State Department has said:
It will stop the black market in arms on global level.
Every minute, someone dies from armed violence. Because of the out-of-control worldwide arms trade thousands more are injured, raped, forced into becoming child soldiers and worse.
While the international community regulates things like bananas and dinosaur bones, there are virtually no global rules for the trade of products designed to kill and injure.
There are several factors contributing to the crisis that is being caused by the global trade. Key among those are:
An ATT would improve transparency and accountability, and would establish common standards to regulate the different kinds of transfers that make up the global arms trade.
A robust ATT will require governments to establish stronger, more rigorous systems to manage and regulate their countries’ export and import of weapons and munitions.
In short, the ATT will help keep weapons out of the hands of the worst human rights abusers and save countless lives.
Countries
in several parts of the world grapple with the horrific problem of the
use of child soldiers exacerbated by the unregulated flow of weapons. ©
AFP/Getty Images
This is a fallacy, driven at best by misinformation and at worst by a deliberate effort to undermine the treaty. Given the incredibly lucrative arms trade estimated to exceed $60 billion annually (with the US exporting 34% of all weapons) it’s not a surprise that such a misinformation campaign has taken the Internet by storm.
Here let me break down fact from fiction.
Will the ATT stop the sale of handguns in the US?
NO it will not.
The UN General Assembly resolution starting the process on the Arms Trade Treaty explicitly states that it is “the exclusive right of States to regulate internal transfers of arms and national ownership, including through constitutional protections on private ownership.”
No ATT can therefore infringe on that exclusive right. To that end, all the papers circulated by the Chair of the UN ATT (Ambassador Roberto García Moritán of Argentina) process clearly reference that right.
Further, Ambassador Moritán has stated that the definitive goal of the small arms treaty “is to try to have common standards to be applied by all countries when they export or import weapons.”
Furthermore, about the ATT, the State Department has said:
“There will be no restrictions on civilian possession or trade of firearms otherwise permitted by law or protected by the U.S. Constitution. There will be no dilution or diminishing of sovereign control over issues involving the private acquisition, ownership, or possession of firearms, which must remain matters of domestic law.”What the ATT will do
It will stop the black market in arms on global level.
Every minute, someone dies from armed violence. Because of the out-of-control worldwide arms trade thousands more are injured, raped, forced into becoming child soldiers and worse.
While the international community regulates things like bananas and dinosaur bones, there are virtually no global rules for the trade of products designed to kill and injure.
There are several factors contributing to the crisis that is being caused by the global trade. Key among those are:
- Irresponsible decisions by governments – who regularly flout or ignore their obligations not to contribute to human rights violations;
- Gaping loop holes in the current international regime regulating global arms sales, transfers and other exchanges and,
- A lack of implementation by governments of the regulations that do exist.
An ATT would improve transparency and accountability, and would establish common standards to regulate the different kinds of transfers that make up the global arms trade.
A robust ATT will require governments to establish stronger, more rigorous systems to manage and regulate their countries’ export and import of weapons and munitions.
In short, the ATT will help keep weapons out of the hands of the worst human rights abusers and save countless lives.
10 December 2011
Time to Occupy the Internet Before It's Too Late 9DEZ11
A timely warning from Bob Cesca on HuffPost of the threat to internet freedom in the U.S. from verizon, comcast and at&t. The threat neutrality is real, and if these corporations win in congress EVERYONE will not only pay more for internet access our choices on what we can access will be determined by the internet providers. E mail your Senators here http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm and your representative here https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
and tell them to vote against The Protect IP ACT and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and to protect net neutrality and to keep the net free and open.
There's a bizarre irony in the fact that we're so absorbed and immersed in an online universe, we're not really paying attention to the slow but steady corporate takeover of the very thing that's the center of our nearly constant attention. There's a cold war of attrition being fought for the right to own the Internet, its content and its technology, and you're losing.
For more than a decade, corporations and special interests like the telecom, recording and film industries have been systematically making it impossible to carry on with free speech in the only venue left for us to exercise that right.
This war is so intense and so complicated, there aren't any clear "sides" in Washington. Both the Democrats and the Republicans (frankly, it's mostly Republicans) appear to be joining forces against the rest of us -- whether we're writing about important issues of the day or producing mash-up videos involving talking cats, anime sex and grape stomping, we're all in this together. And if the wrong laws are passed, we could very well lose, and losing would irreparably roll back our last ability to freely express our ideas to large audiences without genuflecting to corporations.
In every session of Congress, net neutrality comes this close to being irrevocably destroyed, allowing Big Telecom to take over and determine which blogs, websites and streaming content will make it to an audience and which sites get killed. In other words, if net neutrality is revoked, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon will get to decide how much bandwidth you will be able to access for your site. That means an almost entirely democratized digital universe will cease to exist -- replaced by a corporatocracy.
The outfits that are prepared to pay for fat tubes through which to pump their corporate crap will win the day and you, specifically, will get whatever is left over, dooming your voice and, in many cases, your livelihood to strangulation and death. In other words, while the Internet was the great equalizer, allowing any content of merit to succeed, corporations are using massive financial and political resources to transform all of this into a television/film model in which a chosen few decide what content makes it to the masses.
Meanwhile, America's access to broadband is embarrassingly awful. We're 15th among other nations in broadband reach, and, unforgiveably, 26th in terms of speed. If you want killer download speeds, you'd might be better off in South Korea or Romania. Put another way, the Republican presidential candidates are releasing YouTube videos in which they hoot and fist pump about American Exceptionalism... at download speeds slower than Greenland (No. 19) and Lithuania (No. 1).
It's no wonder. Advocacy groups like Wireless for America are attempting to ameliorate our pathetic ranking by pushing for a widened broadband spectrum, but they've been thwarted at every turn by special interests and, naturally, puppeteered Republican members of Congress. For example, a company that calls itself LightSquared is attempting to start up a new wireless network, but Big Telecom -- or Big GPS in this instance -- has decided that there's no room for more wireless competition so they're using Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Tom Petri (R-WI) to block the startup. You know, because Republicans are all about competition in a free market, right?
It probably won't shock you to learn that Trimble and John Deere, the "Big" in Big GPS, are huge contributors to both Grassley and Petri. To paraphrase an infamous Grassley line, the senators are sucking from GPS teat. Trimble and Deere insist that LightSquared's network will interfere with their GPS signals even though the FCC has entirely debunked the complaint. Additionally, LightSquared executives think that negative press about its operations have been planted by the GPS industry.
Once again, not unlike the story of the Tucker car, the process of innovation is thwarted by government intervention from politicians who raise money by talking about how government should get out of the way. Strange how that works.
But possibly the biggest threats to free speech in our lifetime are worming their way through both chambers of Congress almost undetected.
The Protect IP Act is being fast-tracked through the Senate, and its counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA, is gaining momentum in the House. Each law will allow the corporate media to literally shut down your domain name if it determines that you're illegally exploiting intellectual property (IP). In technical terms, it will give corporations the power to control the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS). Under the celophane-thin cover of attempting to smoke out content pirates and 12 year-olds who share Justin Bieber songs, massive media conglomerates will be able to -- in yet another way -- silence free speech. Anyone who is believed to be a competitor in the game of delivering content to an audience could be targeted and destroyed without ever having a shot at competing in the actual online marketplace. The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America haven't blinked when it comes to prosecuting kids for illegal downloads, and they surely won't blink about doing the same to a blogger who embeds a video clip or spy photo of a movie on their site.
If you're targeted as a threat to corporate media's market segment, you can and will be destroyed.
Oh, and it's worth mentioning that the roster of co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act is confounding. The bill is sponsored by liberal Democrat Pat Leahy, and the co-sponsors include some extraordinarily strange bedfellows. Sherrod Brown and Chuck Schumer are standing alongside tea party Republicans like Marco Rubio. Saxby Chambliss and David Vitter are right there with Al Franken. Thank goodness Ron Wyden is trying to block the bill from coming to a vote -- a vote, by the way, that would pass.
I've been working in online media since the middle 1990s, and this is easily the most dangerous turn of events so far.
The only way the Internet will remain truly democratic and the only way this informational democracy will prosper is if we're as diligent about protecting it as we are about contributing to it. How do we achieve this? Perhaps the time is right to Occupy the Internet.
and tell them to vote against The Protect IP ACT and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and to protect net neutrality and to keep the net free and open.
There's a bizarre irony in the fact that we're so absorbed and immersed in an online universe, we're not really paying attention to the slow but steady corporate takeover of the very thing that's the center of our nearly constant attention. There's a cold war of attrition being fought for the right to own the Internet, its content and its technology, and you're losing.
For more than a decade, corporations and special interests like the telecom, recording and film industries have been systematically making it impossible to carry on with free speech in the only venue left for us to exercise that right.
This war is so intense and so complicated, there aren't any clear "sides" in Washington. Both the Democrats and the Republicans (frankly, it's mostly Republicans) appear to be joining forces against the rest of us -- whether we're writing about important issues of the day or producing mash-up videos involving talking cats, anime sex and grape stomping, we're all in this together. And if the wrong laws are passed, we could very well lose, and losing would irreparably roll back our last ability to freely express our ideas to large audiences without genuflecting to corporations.
In every session of Congress, net neutrality comes this close to being irrevocably destroyed, allowing Big Telecom to take over and determine which blogs, websites and streaming content will make it to an audience and which sites get killed. In other words, if net neutrality is revoked, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon will get to decide how much bandwidth you will be able to access for your site. That means an almost entirely democratized digital universe will cease to exist -- replaced by a corporatocracy.
The outfits that are prepared to pay for fat tubes through which to pump their corporate crap will win the day and you, specifically, will get whatever is left over, dooming your voice and, in many cases, your livelihood to strangulation and death. In other words, while the Internet was the great equalizer, allowing any content of merit to succeed, corporations are using massive financial and political resources to transform all of this into a television/film model in which a chosen few decide what content makes it to the masses.
Meanwhile, America's access to broadband is embarrassingly awful. We're 15th among other nations in broadband reach, and, unforgiveably, 26th in terms of speed. If you want killer download speeds, you'd might be better off in South Korea or Romania. Put another way, the Republican presidential candidates are releasing YouTube videos in which they hoot and fist pump about American Exceptionalism... at download speeds slower than Greenland (No. 19) and Lithuania (No. 1).
It's no wonder. Advocacy groups like Wireless for America are attempting to ameliorate our pathetic ranking by pushing for a widened broadband spectrum, but they've been thwarted at every turn by special interests and, naturally, puppeteered Republican members of Congress. For example, a company that calls itself LightSquared is attempting to start up a new wireless network, but Big Telecom -- or Big GPS in this instance -- has decided that there's no room for more wireless competition so they're using Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Tom Petri (R-WI) to block the startup. You know, because Republicans are all about competition in a free market, right?
It probably won't shock you to learn that Trimble and John Deere, the "Big" in Big GPS, are huge contributors to both Grassley and Petri. To paraphrase an infamous Grassley line, the senators are sucking from GPS teat. Trimble and Deere insist that LightSquared's network will interfere with their GPS signals even though the FCC has entirely debunked the complaint. Additionally, LightSquared executives think that negative press about its operations have been planted by the GPS industry.
Once again, not unlike the story of the Tucker car, the process of innovation is thwarted by government intervention from politicians who raise money by talking about how government should get out of the way. Strange how that works.
But possibly the biggest threats to free speech in our lifetime are worming their way through both chambers of Congress almost undetected.
The Protect IP Act is being fast-tracked through the Senate, and its counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA, is gaining momentum in the House. Each law will allow the corporate media to literally shut down your domain name if it determines that you're illegally exploiting intellectual property (IP). In technical terms, it will give corporations the power to control the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS). Under the celophane-thin cover of attempting to smoke out content pirates and 12 year-olds who share Justin Bieber songs, massive media conglomerates will be able to -- in yet another way -- silence free speech. Anyone who is believed to be a competitor in the game of delivering content to an audience could be targeted and destroyed without ever having a shot at competing in the actual online marketplace. The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America haven't blinked when it comes to prosecuting kids for illegal downloads, and they surely won't blink about doing the same to a blogger who embeds a video clip or spy photo of a movie on their site.
If you're targeted as a threat to corporate media's market segment, you can and will be destroyed.
Oh, and it's worth mentioning that the roster of co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act is confounding. The bill is sponsored by liberal Democrat Pat Leahy, and the co-sponsors include some extraordinarily strange bedfellows. Sherrod Brown and Chuck Schumer are standing alongside tea party Republicans like Marco Rubio. Saxby Chambliss and David Vitter are right there with Al Franken. Thank goodness Ron Wyden is trying to block the bill from coming to a vote -- a vote, by the way, that would pass.
I've been working in online media since the middle 1990s, and this is easily the most dangerous turn of events so far.
The only way the Internet will remain truly democratic and the only way this informational democracy will prosper is if we're as diligent about protecting it as we are about contributing to it. How do we achieve this? Perhaps the time is right to Occupy the Internet.
15 July 2011
No more ‘ships of shame’ to Africa 14JUL11
THE prc is probably the worst offender, because the cabal in Beijing has no qualms about using weapons on their own people they suffer no guilty consciences in sending weapons to other countries to use on their own people. Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma are just a few of the prc's clients for weapons to be used against their own citizens. From Amnesty International.....
By Alaphia Zoyab, Online Communities Officer at Amnesty International
At a meeting with NGOs on the side-lines of the UN Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) negotiations in New York, China made the claim that it does not transfer arms to conflict states in Africa.
That claim is simply not true and China has clearly forgotten about the notorious “Ship of Shame”. We are happy to remind them.
In 2008 a Chinese ship MV An Yue Jiang arrived in Durban in South Africa with a deadly cargo of more than 3,000 cases of arms. The cases included nearly 3 million rounds of rifle ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar bombs and mortar launchers, all exported by Poly Technologies Inc of Beijing. This cargo was destined for the Zimbabwean Defence Force.
This incident took place shortly after the disputed Zimbabwean elections of 2008 when senior personnel in the Zimbabwean army were beating, torturing and killing anyone suspected of voting for opposition parties.
That was precisely the time this dangerous Chinese cargo would have made it to Zimbabwe had ordinary people in South Africa not stood up in protest. When the ship docked in Durban, trade unions there refused to offload the cargo and even appealed to transport workers in other African countries to do the same. Religious leaders and lawyers in South Africa won a court order to stop the cargo.
Thanks to these actions, there was an international outcry and their counterparts in Mozambique, Namibia and Angola also turned away the Chinese ship. In the end, although some cargo was offloaded in Luanda in Angola, the ship reportedly returned with its military cargo to China.
Speaking at a packed event co-hosted by Amnesty International at the UN headquarters today, Seydi Gassama, Executive Director of Amnesty International in Senegal said, “Illicit arms are wreaking havoc in Africa. Only if states commit to transparency in the form of stronger compliance measures will the Arms Trade Treaty improve the lives of men and women in the continent.”
If States commit to compliance and enforcement under the ATT then they will have to annually report on such transfers and import and export transactions. “This transparency will help strengthen the feeling of trust amongst States and diminish the risk of illicit transfers and enable monitoring by civil society,” said Seydi Gassama.
But many States are saying they are unable to gather and report on such transactions because of lack of capacity and the “administrative burden”. But fact is that every State has a customs department that is already gathering this information. Their obligation under an ATT should be to publish this data on international transfers in an annual report.
Only if States commit to greater transparency will they be more accountable for their arms trading and transfers and thus better ensure our collective security.
The small Caribbean states, long-suffering victims of armed violence and many European States are showing much greater enthusiasm for transparent reporting than any of the larger States such as India, China, Russia or the US. Many are still undecided.
If States dilute transparency and accountability under the ATT, they will be forsaking their responsibility to save lives in Africa and the rest of the world.
Read more:
Arms transfers: States love secrets, but we want the facts (Blog, 13 July 2011)
Arms Trade and Human Rights (Amnesty International campaign page)
At a meeting with NGOs on the side-lines of the UN Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) negotiations in New York, China made the claim that it does not transfer arms to conflict states in Africa.
That claim is simply not true and China has clearly forgotten about the notorious “Ship of Shame”. We are happy to remind them.
In 2008 a Chinese ship MV An Yue Jiang arrived in Durban in South Africa with a deadly cargo of more than 3,000 cases of arms. The cases included nearly 3 million rounds of rifle ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar bombs and mortar launchers, all exported by Poly Technologies Inc of Beijing. This cargo was destined for the Zimbabwean Defence Force.
This incident took place shortly after the disputed Zimbabwean elections of 2008 when senior personnel in the Zimbabwean army were beating, torturing and killing anyone suspected of voting for opposition parties.
That was precisely the time this dangerous Chinese cargo would have made it to Zimbabwe had ordinary people in South Africa not stood up in protest. When the ship docked in Durban, trade unions there refused to offload the cargo and even appealed to transport workers in other African countries to do the same. Religious leaders and lawyers in South Africa won a court order to stop the cargo.
Thanks to these actions, there was an international outcry and their counterparts in Mozambique, Namibia and Angola also turned away the Chinese ship. In the end, although some cargo was offloaded in Luanda in Angola, the ship reportedly returned with its military cargo to China.
Speaking at a packed event co-hosted by Amnesty International at the UN headquarters today, Seydi Gassama, Executive Director of Amnesty International in Senegal said, “Illicit arms are wreaking havoc in Africa. Only if states commit to transparency in the form of stronger compliance measures will the Arms Trade Treaty improve the lives of men and women in the continent.”
If States commit to compliance and enforcement under the ATT then they will have to annually report on such transfers and import and export transactions. “This transparency will help strengthen the feeling of trust amongst States and diminish the risk of illicit transfers and enable monitoring by civil society,” said Seydi Gassama.
But many States are saying they are unable to gather and report on such transactions because of lack of capacity and the “administrative burden”. But fact is that every State has a customs department that is already gathering this information. Their obligation under an ATT should be to publish this data on international transfers in an annual report.
Only if States commit to greater transparency will they be more accountable for their arms trading and transfers and thus better ensure our collective security.
The small Caribbean states, long-suffering victims of armed violence and many European States are showing much greater enthusiasm for transparent reporting than any of the larger States such as India, China, Russia or the US. Many are still undecided.
If States dilute transparency and accountability under the ATT, they will be forsaking their responsibility to save lives in Africa and the rest of the world.
Read more:
Arms transfers: States love secrets, but we want the facts (Blog, 13 July 2011)
Arms Trade and Human Rights (Amnesty International campaign page)
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