An overt political rant is simmering within me. As some of you know, I spent a good chunk of my life, resources, and precious time when my daughter was in her teen years doing peace work. I joined with CodePink Women for Peace in February of 2003 in the streets of DC and last worked with them in DC in October of 2010. Seven years of my life were spent countering the deceit that the Bush administration promulgated to justify waging war on Iraq. All the information that has “come out” in the last many years was known in 2002. Barbara Lee reminds us of this.
I have little respect left for “the media.” The well-scripted talking heads on most cable news and Sunday shows court, kowtow, and lend the legitimacy of broadcast to the architects of the lies that created the framework to support the invasion of Iraq. MSNBC is a notable exception. But they too, far too often, synthesize and sanitize the reports that they air with repetitive sound bytes rather than journalistic presentations.
It can be easy to forget that the “borders” of countries are usually nothing more than calcified artifacts of the spoils of war. I recommend reading The Map that Ruined the Middle East. to refresh your knowledge about the historical partitioning of the old Ottoman and Persian empires. It is a very readable article for those of us who have little tolerance for military history and will allow you to speak on why the words Sunni and Shia, and Arab and Persian are at the core of the violence and horror that is playing out in the Middle East, Africa, and in parts of the old Soviet empire. When reading this, do remember that all writing stems from a viewpoint. The viewpoint behind The Tower is conservative and comes from The Israel Project that is based in Jerusalem. We screwed up an already mangled situation in the Middle East when we supported the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq (Yes, Virginia we supported Iraq during the Iran Iraq War. Remember the infamous scene shown below?) and later when we invaded Iraq under both Bush I and II.
As women, as mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, isn’t it time that we say, “Stop.” Stop marching blindly forward. Stop acting from political positions. Stop acting like walking on the path we are on will lead us to anywhere but extinction.
At some point every mother learns that you cannot change everything in the world, but you can give your children the healthiest meals you can, provide the safest shelter for your children that you can, and inform the individuals we have entrusted with our governance what we need to raise our children. All we can do is the best we can. We are facing environmental and climate change on a scale that will leave our descendants in an unstable, scarcely life-supporting world that we would not even recognize as our dear old Mother Earth. It is time for the leaders of the world to listen to the leaders of families.
It is time to think sensibly, like a woman, and clean this mess up. There is no room in our planetary home to allow religion, corporate profits, or political or technological allegiances to distract us from the real work of building a sustainable future for our children’s children’s children. Let’s put down the placards, the weapons, the labels of left and right, and even the dogma that overlays our Holy Books, and start building a sustainable peace. Like always, it is ultimately up to the women organize ourselves and our families in productive, sustainable tasks that work toward a better tomorrow.
We cannot all run for office, but we all sure as eggs is eggs, can tell every one of our elected officials that we want war to stop, we want them to stop funding war, and for all of them to start discussing sane, logically constructed approaches to responding to and redirecting processes that are destroying our lives and world.
Recap by David Swanson of August 29 D.C. Iraq War Teach-In @ Busboy's & Poets
Peace Movement Pushes for End to War on Iraq
By David Swanson
As news stories are leading those still aware of the war on Iraq to believe it’s over, it was encouraging to see Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., packed Sunday evening for a four-hour forum on actions needed to actually end that war, make reparations, and deter future wars of aggression. The event was advertised with the following description:
“Is the U.S. military really leaving Iraq or just rebranding? What is the toll of seven years of occupation on Iraqis, U.S. soldiers and our economies? What is the status of Iraqi refugees around the world? Is it still possible to hold accountable those who dragged us into the war or committed crimes such as torture? What role did Congress and the media play in facilitating the invasion/occupation? We’ll also look at the role of the peace movement — its strengths and weaknesses — and draw key lessons to make our work for peace, including in Afghanistan, more effective.”
Serving as moderators for the event were Andy Shallal, an Iraqi artist and the owner of Busboys and Poets, and Felicia Eaves, a peace activist. The event began with playwright and performer Kymone Tecumseh Freeman reading from “Letters from Iraq,” which set the tone for the event with the view of the crime scene from one of its participants, a U.S. soldier.
The first of two panels included:
Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies
Raed Jarrar, Peace Action
Manal Omar, author
Gene Bruskin, US Labor Against the War
This first panel focused on the perspective of Iraqis and the state of the disaster in Iraq. Bennis gave her usual excellent overview. I say usual because of course we’ve been holding these events for a decade now, but Bennis provided new reason for energetic engagement by describing plans for a major march on Washington on October 2nd that will bring the peace movement together with those focused on jobs and economic justice, something that’s been badly needed since before the current wars began, as the funding of global militarism has been hollowing our country out from the inside. See: http://www.onenationforpeace.org
Raed Jarrar rebutted the idea that Iraqis are in any way grateful for what the United States has done to their country. Iraqis, he said, see this invasion as the 21st foreign invasion of their country and as evil as any of the other 20. As all the panel’s speakers made clear, Iraq is now in worse shape than in 2003. There’s no safety, no electricity, no water, and millions of Iraqis are unwelcome in the nations they’ve fled to but unable to return home. The Iraq of the 1980s with its advances in education and women’s rights is long gone. Manal Omar described grandmothers with college education and foreign travel whose granddaughters are illiterate and have never been far from their homes. Gene Bruskin described the heroic efforts of Iraqi workers to organize, claim their rights, and block the privatization of resources — the efforts to privatize being a key reason why Iraqis still lack electricity. Jarrar stressed that Iraqis want a fully sovereign national government to provide their nation’s services. They want electricity, but do not want it in the way the government overseen by the United States wants to provide it.
Jarrar was very hopeful about the new Iraqi Parliament, expecting strong resistance to the occupation, but he also argued that there are no grounds to complain that the occupation isn’t ending now, that it is supposed to end by December 31, 2011. Jarrar seemed fully confident that, in some sense, the occupation would end by that date, although leaving behind a major presence in the form of the world’s largest embassy, additional consulates, and soldiers and mercenaries whose presence would be justified as guarding those locations. However, Bennis pointed out that Congress played no role in the creation of the unconstitutional treaty through which Bush and Maliki set the deadline for complete withdrawal, giving reason to question our ability to properly enforce compliance with it, assuming — as I do — that such enforcement will in fact be needed.
Congresswoman Donna Edwards spoke next. She raised a fear I share that between now and the end of next year President Obama will attempt to put in place a new treaty to extend the occupation. She also spoke of the upcoming elections. I wish she’d advocated electing congress members who would defund the wars, or even Democratic congress members who would defund the wars. Instead she advocated electing Democrats because a Democratic majority would make all the difference. My concern is that we have had that majority in the House for the past five years. We have 115 congress members who will oppose war funding, 103 of them Democrats. We need to build those numbers, I think, more than any others. And we need to establish our ability to follow through on commitments to unelect those who vote for the war funding.
Head-Roc, a hip-hop artist, performed next, his subject matter dealing with the attacks on public school funding, affordable housing, and child care in Washington, D.C., and the rest of this country — the areas defunded by the funding of wars, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the rest of the corporate agenda driving our government.
The second and last panel included:
Josh Stieber, Iraq Veterans Against the War
David Swanson, author
Bill Fletcher, labor leader, scholar
Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK and Global Exchange
Stieber discussed, from the point of view of a soldier who believed the war lies and came to reject them, the incoherence of the bundle of excuses for this war that we’ve all been offered. On the one hand this is a war to kill evil Muslims. On the other hand it’s a war to spread human rights. We help people out by bombing them, something Stieber said many U.S. soldiers end up joking about, most of them quickly losing any belief in the morality of their cause.
I argued for voting out of office those who fund the wars, and for holding the war makers criminally and constitutionally responsible, including through launching an effort to impeach Jay Bybee and open up a congressional review of war lies and the crime of aggression.
Bill Fletcher picked up where Head-Roc had left off, arguing for the need to make peace not just a preference people have when a pollster asks them, but something that resonates with them as central to the betterment of their daily lives. He pointed to the Chicano Moratorium exactly 40 years earlier as a movement to learn from.
Medea Benjamin inspired, as always, with tales of recent activism by CODE PINK to oppose the war funding, to build alliances, and to hold accountable war criminals including Karl Rove and Erik Prince. And she pushed for participation on a massive scale in the march on October 2nd:
http://www.onenationforpeace.org
Sunday’s event, which benefitted from lots of questions and participation from everyone in the room, was sponsored by the wonderful organizations CODEPINK, Peace Action, Institute for Policy Studies, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Global Exchange, Just Foreign Policy, Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), U.S. Labor Against the War, ANSWER, World Can’t Wait, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, War is a Crime, Rivera Project, and the Washington Peace Center.
D.C. climate shifts from disagreeable to downright hostile
No time for much other than links. The following description of the weekend march and efforts by police and military to keep people from joining the march follows. After that thre are some links about harassment and arrest on Capitol Hill.
Tens of Thousands March on the Pentagon and Call for Impeachment
The March on the Pentagon, March 17, 2007
Congratulations to everyone who made it through the snow and freezing rain to get to Washington and join together in the tens of thousands and March on the Pentagon marking the beginning of the fifth year of the war against Iraq. The Impeachment message was broadcast loud and clear and reached a national and worldwide audience!
The Demonstration Stikes A Nerve
Disgraced Tom Delay went on television Sunday morning and complained on Meet the Press that “we shouldn’t have had what we had yesterday…in Washington, D.C.” with people calling for “impeaching the commander in chief.” Much as Tom Delay would probably like to see the First Amendment removed from the Bill of Rights, the stark reality that he and the White House faced was a huge outpouring of people from across the United States calling for the Impeachment of Bush, Cheney and other high officials. Feeling the heat from mass demonstrations around the country, Bush was forced to go on national television Monday and “plead for patience” from the people of the United States.
Led by a contingent of Iraq war veterans, active-duty service-members, Gold Star families, and veterans from other past and present wars, the demonstration received a large amount of media coverage. CNN featured the demonstration, which the report described as a march of tens of thousands, in its rotation Saturday and Sunday. There were hundreds of articles in US newspapers and world wide, and photographs featuring thousands of impeachment signs including, “Guilty of War Crimes, ImpeachBush.org.” The major French newspaper, Le Monde, ran a significant article under the headline, “More than 50,000 People Protest Against the War in Iraq,” about the March on the Pentagon and wrote that the protestors were calling for the impeachment of Bush for war crimes. The rally was broadcast live on C-span and Al-Jazeera. Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Cynthia McKinney; Jonathan Hutto and Liam Madden, co-founders of Appeal for Redress; Iraq Veterans Against the War; Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson; constitutional rights attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, and others spoke. You can view the rally by going to http://www.cspan.org/ and clicking on the March 17 anti-war rally under the video section. Ramsey Clark’s speech is available on YouTube by clicking on this link.
The March on the Pentagon was not a solitary action but one of more than 1,000 protests that are taking place in the U.S. between March 17 and March 20. ImpeachBush.org played a major role in co-sponsoring the March on the Pentagon as well as the Los Angeles demonstration that drew 50,000 and the San Francisco demonstration of 40,000 that filled 15 blocks of Market Street, a six-lane avenue. Impeachment supporters have been out at rallies around the country all week.
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The March on the Pentagon took place the day after a severe winter snow and sleet storm suddenly hit northeastern states that prevented many buses from traveling, 700 fights from taking off, and thousands of cars from reaching the March. Motorists were advised throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic region to stay off the road. The large turnout at the demonstration was all the more significant given the hardships people had to endure to participate in the activity. People marched to the Pentagon and stayed as long as they could braving 20 mile-an-hour winds and a windchill factor into the teens.
A great thank you is owed to the committed volunteers who endured a torrential downpour of freezing rain though Friday night to help set up the assembly and rally sites. People stayed overnight with the equipment and then began working again at 5:00 am in complete darkness. The assembly area had become a lake on March 16 and filled with mud by the time the march stepped off. The windchill in the early hours was not far above zero. At the rally site the large tents, including the Impeachment Tent, and canopies blew down. Volunteers continued to work long hours after the rally ended to take-down, pack, clean the entire area and unload trucks. The anti-war movement and impeachment movement are growing both numerically and in their organizational capabilities and the tireless work of volunteers forms the core of this success.
Pentagon Prevents People from Joining the Rally
The Pentagon and Virginia State Police, many clad in riot gear, wearing gas masks and wielding batons, blocked people coming from the subway/metro who wanted to attend the demonstration. They also blocked buses from accessing the Pentagon in contravention of the agreements reached in the permit. This required people to walk nearly two miles to get to their buses following the rally.
Many people who came to the rally after it had begun – some who had seen the huge march at a distance as it crossed over the Memorial Bridge across the roadways and wanted to then join the activity – were blocked by the Pentagon and the police from entering the rally site through a maze of misdirection, road closures and threats of arrest at multiple different locations. March organizers worked to get people in and they and their attorneys went to the site of sudden police confrontations and shutdowns, but many people were still unable to get in including the hip-hop artist Immortal Technique who was scheduled to perform.
Ramsey Clark on Impeachment and the War
As Ramsey Clark stated at the Pentagon rally, the effort to Impeach Bush has immediate and long term consequences. The Bush regime is rotting from within. Growing scandals are an indicator. The public revulsion to the endless lies about Iraq has set the stage even more so. Impeachment can and must become a reality and we can do it with your continued support.
Ramsey Clark challenged all of us when he spoke at the Pentagon: “We¹ve got work to do. If you thought about what will happen in the next 22 months if we don’t act now, there will be a big buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq. That’s what the surge is about. It’s a permanent surge.”
end of article by impeachbush.org
Capitol Police were doing similarly illegal police actions on the Hill during recent arrests of Ann Wright and Gael Murphy. Conyers needs to censure and fine these guys for way overstepping their bounds. Show your outrage. http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/0320-02.htm
And of course we can’t forget the secret service thugs who are protecting Hillary from opposing voices. Geesh, no wonder the Hillary/Apple mashup made by non-Obama folks is getting so much play.
More later.
A soldier's dilemma and honorable action.
Justin Watts is an honorable man. A local Tucson man showed a strength of character that few possess and fewer still can maintain when confronted with horrific knowledge that if disclosed will permanently alter untold numbers of lives and indeed the course of a nation.
Justin is the man who voiced his concern about what his brothers in arms appeared to have done — raped a young teenage girl and then killed her and her family. The story is here in the Arizona Daily Star.
What amazed me is comment 63 on this story.
I’m very happy this man [Justin] was so brave to come forward. He is a hero to me and to my kids now. He will never know how much he helped my family alone. One of the soldiers he told on is my husband. He used to beat me and make me sleep on the floor while pregnant. In april he was home on a leave and he wanted me to be alone with him but i said no. I’ve been trying to divorce him for more than 2 years now and i had a restraining order against him. He violated it so many times that I had to move. I told the army what was going on and they did not help at all. they left me with no option but to run and hide. Now thanks to Justin watt, my children are safe and so am I. God bless him and I hope things get better for him.
This is a neglected aspect of the horrific situation our country faces. Violence begets violence. Allowing violence upon women is symptomatic of a cultural suppression of morality. Thank you Justin for keeping the tiny spark of belief in the essense of good alive within me. This heinous war is creating a generation of military vets who have been wounded in unimaginable ways — scars unlike anything ever before seen are forming.
Thank you Justin for showing me that although our troops are being asked to ignore international law and conventions, and because of this evil cultivation are having their darkest sides emerge that men and womenof character are refusing to go along with an immoral status quo. Justin and those others who will now step forward because of his bravery, along the folks who are refusing to go back to fight in this immoral attrocity, are showing that Americans still have among them the best, the brightest, and the most honorable citizens who serve because they believe in justice and what Americans hold in their hearts as the essence of what our country is and can be.
Let us all send safe energies to him, pray for his safety, and for this shining example of courage to be followed and to inspire other soldiers to do what is right and just.
Breathe in courage. Breathe out action.