The Pentagon recently announced plans to detonate 700 tons of Ammonium Nitrate in Nevada on Western Shoshone land. The detonation, called the Divine Strake, is planned for June 2. The testing of weapons on sovereign Native American land is a direct violation of the March 10 decision by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which called for the United States to freeze destructive actions being taken against the Western Shoshone peoples.

According to Lee Dazey, Development Coordinator for the Western Shoshone Defense Project (WSDP), the U.S. government has been detonating explosives on the Western Shoshone’s …

MNN. March 16, 2006. On March 10, 2006, the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination found that the United States was denying the Western Shoshone people “their rights to own, develop, control and use their land and resources”. They warned the U.S. to respect their obligations according to the Convention”. The U. S. was urged to “freeze”, “desist” and “stop” their actions against the Western Shoshone and abide by the Committee’s “Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedure”.

The Western Shoshone land base covers approximately 60 million acres, stretching …

A New Spin on Fighting for Justice
Published by Alternet, 3/10/06
http://www.alternet.org/story/32861/
By Kelly Hearn

Nigeria, 1999: Government soldiers, riding in helicopters owned by Chevron Corp., fire on villages opposed to oil operations. Colombia, 1998: The Colombian Air Force, acting in the interest of U.S.-based Occidental Oil, drops a cluster bomb on the village of Santa Domingo. In Burma, government soldiers use rape, murder and torture to silence opposition to a gas pipeline project of California-based Unocal.

High petroleum prices and rising populist anger are ratcheting up human rights pressures along the world’s remote pipelines. And from Burmese villagers to Nigerian farmers, Colombian …

Native Group Takes Land Dispute to UN, by Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 26 (IPS) - Feeling cheated and betrayed by Washington for nearly 150 years, a Native American tribe is now looking to the United Nations for help in protecting its ancestral lands.

“Where else do we go?” Carrie Dann, a leader of the Shoshone people of the United States, told IPS in an interview about why her people have gone to the U.N. to demand justice.

Dann and other Shoshone leaders maintain that the U.S. government has used a series of illegal tactics to gain control of their ancestral lands, including …

Project for the New American Century
By Arundhati Roy. January 2004

LAST JANUARY thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Allegre in Brazil and declared reiterated that “Another World is Possible”. A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs - to further what many call The Project for the New American Century.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side …