text:
Saudis frustrated at military downturn, Bahrainis reject F1 "blood race"
The Saudi aggression on Yemen has come to a virtual standstill, with international indignation mounting and calls for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire persisting. The Pakistani refusal to send troops to defend Al Saud has frustrated Riyadh and pushed it into a corner. Military defeat is looming. Bahrainis have continued their protests against the Saudi-Alkhalifa aggression with daily demonstrations, statements and prayers for the Yemeni victims. The regime's reaction has been to adopt sheer criminality, arresting and abusing anyone declaring a stand against this aggression. The extent of torture of Bahraini natives in the past month has reached unprecedented levels. The Alkhalifa are implementing a policy of "torture to the brink of death, but avoid death". Stories of horror especially in the dungeons and corridors of Jaw Prison have left many families heart-broken. Young people like Abbas Al Sami' had their teeth broken, while others had water hoses f orced into their thighs. For the Alkhalifa, it is time for revenge that justifies any cruel treatment.
As the Formula 1 car race gets underway, native Bahrainis have rejected it calling it "Blood race", as it has become one of the propaganda tools of a torturous regime. Protests marched in tens of towns and villages for several days; braving the chemical and tear gases used by regime's mercenary forces. Many people were injured or arrested as a result. Meanwhile questions are being asked about the deal reached between ADHRB (American for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain) and Formula 1 management with regards to human rights in the countries where the races are held. ADHRB's successful mediation of a complaint to the UK's National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises—concerning Formula One Management's lack of due diligence considerations regarding possible human rights impact in Bahrain—Formula One has committed itself to respecting human rights in Bahrain and other countries in which it conducts business. This week's race must be cancelled unless those who had been jailed in relation to their protest against holding the race in Bahrain are released. Among them is the two women: Nafisa Al Asfoor and Rayhana Al Mousawi.
In a ground-breaking move the internationally renowned human rights activist, Nabeel Rajab sent a letter from his prison cell to President Obama urging him to take the issue of human rights and democracy seriously when he meets GCC leaders this week. After describing how he had spent 28 of the past 36 months in regime's torture cells he urged Mr Obama to present the following to the GCC leaders: The immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners; An end to the criminalization of free speech and expression, including any laws against criticism of government institutions or defamation of a king; The cessation of all acts of torture and reprisal in GCC detention centers; and The protection of free and open civil society space capable of fostering long-term stability and growth in the region. Mr Rajab ended his letter saying: The citizens of Bahrain and her neighbors have extraordinary potential. With unshackled voices, we can build stability and challenge extremism . What we need today is space for tolerance, plurality, and honest dialogue, the foundations of a democratic process that the reprisals against me and my colleagues seek to undermine.
In the week from 6- 12th April at least 20 native Bahrainis were arrested including three children and a woman. Yesterday Mohammad Abdul Hussain from Bilad Al Qadeem was snatched by masked members of Death Squads. From Demstan town, Isa Kamel Mansoor was detained in a dawn raid on his home. From Karzakkan two young native Bahrainis were detained at a checkpoint; Fadhel Hassan Al Madhoon and Ali Ibrahim Ashoor. From Duraz, Hassan Abdul EthnaAshar was arrested in a house raid.
Brian Dooley, Director, Human Rights First's Human Rights Defenders Program, wrote an article titled: "Bahrain's Prison Crisis Deepens". After describing the current prison crisis he said: "Many of the problems in Jaw stem from the growing population of prisoners who shouldn't be there -- political prisoners jailed for expressing their views peacefully." That's still the case. Added to that powerful sense of injustice are several other ingredients guaranteed to provoke unrest in jails: hundreds of young men serving very long sentences, a lack of adequate medical care, poor food, and chronic overcrowding (that last point conceded by the government in a September 2013 report that noted that, at that time, Jaw Prison held 1,608 prisoners, well beyond its capacity of 1,201). Many younger prisoners may feel they have nothing to lose by refusing to cooperate with the prison authorities and are likely to riot again and again. If Bahrain wants to fix its prison pr oblem properly, it will stop trying to hide the truth about what's happened, improve conditions, and release all those prisoners who shouldn't be in jail in the first place.
Bahrain Freedom Movement
14 April 2015
(www.vob.org, email: firstname.lastname@example.com)
Who Dropped The Bag Which Killed Richard Martin, if it Wasn't Dzhokhar?
As the 2015 Boston Marathon approaches, the US Department of Justice has not been able to answer one question: why is the backpack that the FBI says killed eight-year-old Richard Martin black, while the backpack Dzhokhar Tsarnaev carried that day, in every item of photographic evidence, white?
"Carbon Copy": How Big Oil and King Coal Ghost Write Letters for Public Officials, Business Groups
Cross-Posted from DeSmogBlog
The Billings Gazette has revealed that coal mining company Cloudpeak Energy ghost wrote protest letters to the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) on behalf of allied policymakers and business groups.
Reporter Tom Lutey examined numerous letters written to DOI from Montana-based stakeholders and noticed something unusual: the language in every single letter was exactly the same. That is, the same except for a parenthetical note in one of them instructing the supposed writer of it to "insert name/group/entity."
I Will No Longer Pay Taxes for War
By Matthew Hoh
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.
This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
-- Henry David Thoreau
This will be the first year I willfully and intentionally do not pay my full share of income tax. I certainly have no illusions that I am Henry David Thoreau -- frequent readers of mine will attest to that -- nor do I believe that withholding a portion of my federal income taxes will cause the American war machine to grind to a halt, or that the sufferings of millions in wars around the world, wars supported, directly and indirectly, by the U.S. government and U.S. industry, will be ended. However, no longer can I look past the reality that my annual voluntary forfeiture of money to my government pays for violence around the globe, at astounding levels, and I am not able to provide any more excuses or rationalizations that paying without protest, that being complicit in funding war without resistance, is not contradictory to my faith and to my conscience. Quite simply put, I can no longer ignore the basic, yet just, wisdom and truth found in the war tax resisters' dictum: "If you work for peace, stop paying for war."
I fought in our Global War on Terror with the marines, and I even worked as a modern day colonial administrator, at one time having $26 million in cash in two safes in my bedroom in Tikrit, Iraq. My participation in these wars has left me with moral injury, a condition that is, thankfully, becoming better understood in the veterans and medical communities. In 2009, while serving with the State Department in Afghanistan, I could no longer go along with the war, let alone its escalation, and I resigned in protest. For the last five and one half years I have worked as a peace advocate in various degrees and capacities. As I have progressed in my healing from the psychiatric wounds of war, I have continued on my own path of advocacy for peace. I relate this personal information to you, not to proselytize myself, but, rather, to illustrate that the decision to willfully resist taxes to oppose war is not one I have entered into lightly or one that comes as a singular event in my life, but one that is a culmination of my life's experiences.
As I have come to accept that I can no longer justify providing money to my government to pay for the bombs and bullets our forces use to kill millions abroad, or contribute to the funds that supply and resupply the arsenals of our allies, such as Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as they kill others and repress their own people, my choice to willfully not pay taxes has crystallized. It has been aided, in great part, by the testimonies of those who have practiced war tax resistance, in some cases, for several decades, and who by their courage and dedication to laws of love and peace have risked the authority of the federal government to follow what is right. I am also indebted to peers like Rory Fanning and Logan Mehl-Laturi and old friends, like Count Leo Tolstoy, who, by articulating their convictions, have helped not just to educate me, but to embolden me.
I do not have a legal issue with taxation, and I have no interest in self-enrichment. I want to pay my fair share for the services our government provides, so utilizing the information provided by the War Resisters League, I will calculate the income tax I owe, as I have done in any previous year, and pay only the portions our federal government utilizes for services other than war. I will file my taxes and include a letter to the IRS explaining why I am not paying in full and why I will not pay in full. If they want the money for killing, then they will have to take that share.
As a recipient of Veterans Administration assistance, and as someone who thoroughly understands the need to heal the wounds of war, my contribution will include payment for veterans services. I will also pay for the debt owed to past wars, as that is something that cannot be undone. What I do not pay to the government for the functions of war I will redirect and donate to a five star-rated veterans charity.
I do all this with the complete understanding that our government will just allocate the amount I pay to war functions anyway, and that the small amount I am withholding will not cause Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to lay awake at night. However, it is an act I take pride in, as I can now rest my conscience knowing that I am no longer fully and voluntarily participating in wars that are not just immoral, but counter-productive. For how many more millions will we kill just to keep seeing terrorist groups metastasize and ensure kleptocracies remain in power? There is also some edification in putting some element of myself and my life, however small this really is, in the path of militarism and its counterparts: death, suffering and waste.
It is not very common for war tax resisters to have property seized by the IRS, and even more rare for someone to face jail time. The most common consequences that thousands of war tax resistors face each year are accrued penalties and interest, wage garnishment and property liens, plus lots of unfriendly letters. Everyone's case is different and, so, I wonder whether my VA disability pay will be docked or my utility of the GI Bill to pay for attendance at seminary or graduate school thwarted. If so, so be it, I'm done with taking part in war. I urge you to follow your conscience, listen to your heart, find strength in your faith and in humanity, as well as in the brave individuals who have journeyed before us, and join me in a peaceful revolution of conscience.
War Tax Resistance predates Christianity and has, within our own American history, many chapters. I hope this essay makes a difference for someone in their own personal journey of peace advocacy, just as others who have made known their resistance have positively influenced me. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is a great place for individuals who are struggling with issues of war, faith and conscience to turn to, as it has been a great source of support for me, both educationally and inspirationally. Additionally, you can add your voice of support for those who find their conscience violated by paying for war by supporting Representative John Lewis and asking him to re-introduce his Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act and by supporting the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.
Getting what's been stolen by raising employer FICA tax : Time to Recover Productivity Gains Our Bosses Have Expropriating
By Dave Lindorff
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christy, trying to change the subject from his own shabby performance as governor, has called for $ billion in cuts to Social Security and Medicare, claiming it's time for a "grownup discussion" of the alleged funding crisis facing both critically important programs.
Focus: Hillary Clinton - Apr 16, 2015
Hillary racks up endorsements for her campaign, 65 House lawmakers and 28 senators - TheHill
NY State Senate Democrats Poised to Ride Hillary Clinton Wave - gothamgazette.com
Statement of California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton on Hillary Clinton Announcement of Candidacy for President in 2016 - Black News
Divided no longer, Hollywood poised to put big money behind Hillary Clinton - LA Times
POLL: Hillary Clinton Trailing Republicans in Battleground States - Washington Free Beacon
POLL: Hillary Clinton's Image and Standing in Battleground States - politico.com
POLL: Half of North Carolina voters say they'll vote against Clinton - Charlotte Sun Times
POLL: In NH Clinton has one of her weaker performances getting 45% to 23% for Elizabeth Warren, 12% for Bernie Sanders - Public Policy Polling
POLL: Clinton vs. Cruz, Clinton vs. Paul - Rasmussen Reports
POLL: Left-leaning MSNBC conducts simple Hillary Clinton poll, The results shows shows an overwhelming 86 percent say they don't plan on voting for the Democrat in 2016 - TheBlaze.com
POLL: Foreign Policy Not Economy, Voters' Top Concern: A Survey Conducted By GOP Firm - NationalJournal.com
More than 2 MILLION of Hillary Clinton's Twitter followers are fake or never tweet, and she's already under fire for 'buying' fake Facebook fans - Daily Mail Online
Can Hillary Clinton win over men? It's clear that she will make women and being a woman central to her outreach - CNN.com
Opinion: Obama coalition isn't guaranteed for Hillary - Sun Sentinel
Opinion: Clinton represents everything Democrats say they oppose - WashingtonExaminer.com
Will Clinton Win Back Wall Street for Democrats? - OpenSecrets Blog
Hillary Clinton's Wall Street dilemma - CNN.com
Why Hillary Clinton Can't Win the Fundraising Expectations Game - Bloomberg Politics
Hillary Clinton Is Still Too Cautious on Campaign Finance Reform - The Nation
Hillary Clinton names top 3 wonks for campaign - POLITICO
Chipotle manager says Hillary didn't tip - TheHill
Hillary Clinton's father's tombstone toppled - CBS News
Hillary Clinton Changes Stance on Same-Sex Marriage - CNN
Meet The Lesbian Couple Featured In Hillary Clinton's Campaign Video - buzzfeed.com
Hillary Clinton Lesbian Lovers Secret Emails Named - The National Enquirer
Hillary Clinton 2016: Book detailing White House drama tops NYT best-seller list - POLITICO
Hillary Clinton Was Asked About Private Email Account 2 Years Ago, But She Did Not Reply To The Letter - NYTimes.com
Text of the letter from House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa to Hillary Clinton about the private email account - scribd.com
Documents Undermine NY Times Report On Clinton Emails - Media Matters for America
New Clinton email revelation spurs renewed call from Benghazi committee - McClatchy DC
Hillary Clinton 2016: Trey Gowdy says Benghazi committee can't subpoena email server - POLITICO
Hillary candidacy prods Clinton foundation board to consider limits - WTOP
The Clinton Foundation will limit donations from foreign governments to six countries - POLITICO
Foreign grants doubled at Boston unit of Clinton Foundation While Hillary Was At State Department - The Boston Globe
Ex-British diplomat accuses Hillary Clinton of role in meltdown of Iraq - Telegraph
Hillary Clinton as U.S. President 'Wouldn't Fix' Russia-U.S. Relationship, she once compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler - The Moscow Times
What president Hillary Clinton could mean for China - Quartz
The Chinese Internet Hates Hillary Clinton Even More than Republicans Do - Foreign Policy
Opinion: Hillary Clinton will pull the Democrats — and the country — in a hawkish direction - Vox
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I Just Asked Erik Prince To Stop Bribing Politicians
"It's bad enough to be creating more profit incentive for war," I told former head of Blackwater Erik Prince, "but you recycle part of the profits as bribes for more war in the form of so-called campaign contributions. You yourself have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to political parties and candidates. The three of you," I said, referring to Prince, another guest, and the host of a television show that had just finished filming and was taking questions from the audience, "you seem to agree that we need either mercenaries or a draft, ignoring the option of not having these wars, which kill so many people, make us less safe, drain the economy, destroy the natural environment, and erode our civil liberties, with no upside. But this systemic pressure has been created for more war. Will you, Erik Prince, commit to not spending war profits on elections?"
Prince had hardly been asked a serious question during the past hour of filming, but that of course did not mean he would answer one. The point was to raise the topic and put it in the minds of the people sitting and applauding him. Prince tried to answer by talking about how much the F-35 fighter jet costs, continuing the hour-long pretense that if you oppose mercenaries you favor the rest of the military. I cut him off and told him to answer the question. So he said that he was no longer working with the U.S. government but with other governments around the world. Does that mean he'll stop bribing the U.S. government? Does that mean he doesn't bribe other governments? He didn't say.
The event was held at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, which has a long, long tradition of inviting war makers and war advocates, but has never that I know of asked an opponent of the institution of war to speak. The show, minus the question and answer portion, will air on television on May 3rd. The host, Doug Blackmon, asked challenging questions like, "Do you think contractors should receive medals like other soldiers?" The day before the event he'd emailed me this comment:
"We've featured a lot of people over the past two years, with a lot of objections to the war-making of the United States—as well as a lot of objections to mass incarceration, police violence, and other terrible manifestations of our society. We also have heard from people who would disagree with you—but had nothing to do with making war. In any case, this will be a vigorous dialogue tomorrow. It may not cover everything you would cover if you were organizing the same program, but it's a completely appropriate way for us to explore these hugely important and controversial issues, and to hear two sides in a meaningful way."
At the end of the event I asked him whether Prince would have been invited to speak had most of the people Blackwater killed been Americans. Blackmon refused to answer.
The other guest was Ann Hagedorn, author of The Invisible Soldiers: How America Outsourced Our Security. Her book is not bad, but from the first moments of the event it became crystal clear why Prince had agreed to take part. The subject of drones wasn't broached, but there was a lot of droning, and ummming, and slow and deliberate prefacing of . . . nothing. I could have clicked the audio on my little electronic device to have it read sections of Hagedorn's book and made a better debate than she made in person. This was frustrating, of course, because the well-spoken Erik Prince needed somebody to reply to the outrages he was uttering. In an attempt to figure out where, if anywhere, Hagedorn was coming from, or perhaps to expose her as a commie peacenik, a member of the audience asked after the show whether, if mercenaries were eliminated, Hagedorn would move on to opposing the standard military. This was actually a good question, because most of Hagedorn's critique of mercenaries, even more so at the event than in the book, was of their differences from other soldiers. But she didn't answer the question. She said that she was a reporter who had no opinions or positions. Inspiring!
Hagedorn's book is not a bad primer for people just discovering that the U.S. military hires mercenary companies. In Iraq and Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011, she writes, the use of mercenaries and other contractors climbed -- under Obama/Clinton direction -- to the point where there were 10 for every 1 troop, 18 for every 1 state department personnel, and 100 for every 1 USAID worker. She criticizes the lack of accountability for what this huge number of people do. She admits that the majority of deaths in these wars are civilians. I say "admits" because at the show taping she claimed that if Americans knew about the deaths of U.S. mercenaries they would then have a good sense of the deaths in the wars. She points out the fear mongering done by mercenary companies as well as governments to gin up business. She writes that of 195 Blackwater shootings between 2005 and 2007 in 84% Blackwater shot first and left the scene. She even quotes someone proposing we have fewer wars and cites the example of South Africa banning mercenaries.
Hagedorn notes Obama and Clinton's flip to support mercenaries beginning in 2009, and their use of them to extend the occupation of Iraq in 2011 while "ending" it. Hillary Clinton, she writes, also pushed shipping companies to hire mercenaries to fend off pirates. The United Nations, too, is using mercenaries. The U.S. border with Mexico is being armed with mercenaries. Immigrants are being handled by mercenaries. U.S. police are being trained by mercenaries (with horrible results).
But Hagedorn is big on patriotism and the supposed democratic public institution of war (which would never survive a Ludlow Amendment creating a public vote on wars). When she called war an inherently public operation on Wednesday, Prince ignored any hint that private war creates more wars and simply pointed to the long history of mercenaries and to examples of other operations that have been privatized.
Blackmon began Wednesday's show by asking Prince about the sentencing of four of his former employees to prison on Monday. Part of Prince's defense was that "We've asked for cameras. . . . The State Department denied them." This is bizarre because he never asserted that anything other than the intentional murder of civilians would have been filmed had there been cameras. He also claimed that his killers could not get a jury of their peers among civilians 7,000 miles away. So, does he want crimes committed in Iraq to be prosecuted in Iraq then?
Hagedorn explicitly refused to discuss the details of the Nissour Square Massacre but did point out that it was the sort of thing that boosted recruitment of forces against the U.S. military/mercenaries.
Blackmon asked if mercenaries had been scapegoated for an overall disaster, but Hagedorn said no, that that made no sense if you considered the scale of the mercenary involvement. Prince said that during the war on Vietnam peace activists went after troops and now they go after mercenaries. "Nature hates a vacuum," he argued, suggesting apparently that Congressional contracts are produced by "nature." Prince also pointed to the murder of Miriam Carey by the U.S. Capitol Police as if one inexcusable killing justifies others. "There was no hue and cry," over that killing he lied, but imagine the uproar if it had been poor little old mercenaries who had done it. Of course, most killings of civilians by mercenaries in distant U.S. wars produce in fact no hue or cry at all back home.
I should note that Prince claims his mercenaries are (were) not mercenaries because they were U.S. military veterans. What that changes he never explained. Instead he calls them "volunteers" despite paying them. Asked about financial interests in keeping wars going, he said what was needed was oversight, but not from Washington, from empowering the people at the front. Whatever that meant. Prince advocated a smaller military budget, and Hagedorn said that smaller overall budgets always mean more for mercenaries.
Repeatedly Prince claimed to be fighting evil people "who want to destroy the Western world, you know, our way of life." He claimed that mercenaries could be hired to destroy ISIS, no problem! He also claimed that what's going on in the Middle East is an age-old Sunni-Shia conflict that the United States can only tweak around the edges (through such steps, I suppose, as destroying ISIS). That each war creates more problems to be addressed with more wars, that ISIS would never have existed without the 2003 invasion, didn't come up (except through my comments during the Q&A).
One questioner suggested that "if war were the path to peace we'd sure have peace by now," and Prince claimed to be for peace. So Hagedorn asked him, a-t l-e-n-g-t-h, to fund the peace movement (even though she has no opinions as a Journalist), and he declined, suggesting that the mercenary industry association should do it. That's an association, by the way, that changed its name from the International Peace Operations Association to the International Stability Operations Association in response to criticism of being "too Orwellian" -- as if war brings stability any more than it brings peace.
Prince said that rather than funding peace he would focus on "protecting Christians who are being driven out of the Holy Land." He said this during the Q&A section with the filming of the show already stopped. Someone might have asked why people of a particular religion were of more value. But then we were at an event that never would have happened if the people whom Prince's company killed had belonged to that religion.
Legacy of racism and colonialism targeted: Reparations Movements Meet to Make International Connections
By Linn Washington, Jr.
Dignitaries from three continents gathered in New York City recently to sharpen their strategies for confronting some of the world's most powerful nations over a subject that sizable numbers of citizens support in the nearly two-dozen nations represented: reparations for the legacy of a history of slavery, colonialism and government-sanctioned segregation.
What? Air Defense Missiles to Iran? An Outrage!
Russia Impinges on Israeli 'Right' to Bomb Iran
Editor Note: American neocons are in a lather over Russia's decision to go ahead with the sale of anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. The apparent outrage is that Iran thinks it has a right to protect its citizens from Israel's right to launch airstrikes into Iran's territory.
By Ray McGovern
The front page of the neocon flagship Washington Post on Tuesday warned that the Russians have decided, despite U.S. objections, "to send an advanced air-defense system to Iran … potentially altering the strategic balance in the Middle East."
So, at least, says the lede of an article entitled "Putin lifts 5-year hold on missile sale to Iran" by Karoun Demirjian, whose editors apparently took it upon themselves to sex up the first paragraph, which was not at all supported by the rest of her story which was factual and fair – balanced, even.
Talk Nation Radio: Sheila Carapico: Stop the Saudi (and U.S.) War on Yemen
Sheila Carapico is a Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Va. She discusses the state of affairs in Yemen.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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Denver TSA rigged system to grope men's genitals
From KCNC, the CBS affiliate in Denver, comes this completely unsurprising "news": TSA clerks at Denver International Airport deliberately messed with the strip-search scanners to alarm on attractive male passengers so one of the blue-shirted goons could grope them.
No, Virginia, say it ain't so!
Public Letters from NYU Students
On April 12, 2015, the student-organizers of the Statement of No Confidence in Harold Koh drafted the following letter in response to faculty intimidation:
To Our Classmates and Members of the NYU Community:
"We do not kill our cattle the way the US is killing humans in Waziristan with drones." – Rafiq ur Rehman
In the fall of 2013, Rafiq ur Rehman traveled with his 13-year-old son, Zubair, and 9-year-old daughter, Nabila, from their small village in North Waziristan to Capitol Hill. Their purpose in making this long and painful trek was simple: to appeal to the hearts of U.S. lawmakers by sharing stories of the carnage wrought upon their community and upon their family by U.S. drone strikes. In 2012, a U.S. drone strike had killed Rafiq's elderly mother and severely wounded two of his young children.
Only five members of Congress showed up.
The suffering of thousands of individuals like Rafiq, Zubair, and Nabila, moved a few of us to author a Statement of No Confidence in Harold H. Koh. The Statement is fairly simple. It argues that due to Mr. Koh's role as a key legal architect of the Obama administration's targeted killing program, a program that violates International Human Rights Law, the Law School should not have hired him to teach that particular body of law. The petition extensively documents the factual basis for our position—and echoes the concerns of other students, academics, and human rights activists.
The gravity of targeted killings via drones and the factual basis upon which we built our petition warranted this expression of disaffection. Academic institutions, after all, are supposed to be places for honest and critical debates. At times, we have known NYU Law to be such a place—that is, a setting where compassionate and thoughtful people confront, rather than dismiss uncomfortable facts.
While we welcomed disagreement with the petition, we never fathomed that some faculty and administrators would, intentionally or not, work hard to quash our expression of dissent and intimidate numerous students. Professor Ryan Goodman, for instance, emailed every individual signatory of the petition, including some of his own students and advisees, and urged them to withdraw their support for the Statement. Withdrawal, he stated, "will reflect well on us as a community" [Goodman Letter]. Due to the power imbalances between students and faculty, we find his request inappropriate.
Stephen Bright, meanwhile, a Yale Law professor and known anti-death penalty lawyer, sent a disparaging email to his former intern, an organizer of the petition and an aspiring anti-death penalty lawyer, following repeated phone calls. He asked her whether she didn't have better things to do with her time, and later claimed that the petition arose out of ignorance and inexperience. Concerning our corporate colleagues who signed the petition, Mr. Bright asked, "Does someone who is going to a firm to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year representing corporations [have] any position to express a lack of confidence in Harold Koh?" [Bright Letter] Finally, another student was told that s/he was not welcome at Human Rights First for an internship since the organization held Harold Koh in high regard and was aware of the student's signature on the petition.[1]
Rather than a trial of the Obama administration's targeted killing program, and the distortion of Human Rights Law that it represents, what we have seen unfolding over the past few weeks is the trial of students, mostly women and students of color, who have been dismissed as "naïve" and maligned as "smearers." There has been no acknowledgement of the concern for human life that prompted the petition, or any acknowledgement that the more than 260 supporters of the students' Statement include lawyers, students, scholars and pacifists from all over the globe.
Figuring prominently in this trial is Dean Trevor Morrison, who preemptively announced his verdict prior to meeting with the authors of the recent CoLR Statement: "[allegations of intimidation] are unfounded." Ironically, the Dean himself, in his first-year constitutional law class, had described the petition as "smear," "wholly inaccurate" and, once again, urged students to withhold support. Two of his students did, in fact, withdraw their signatures from the petition despite privately expressing agreement with its merits.
Soon after, the Dean initiated a meeting with the organizers of the petition, ostensibly for the purpose of making our upcoming event "productive." In the process, he called our public letters "vitriol unseen in the law school" and accused us of "inflicting wounds that will not heal." His words, uttered to three students of color, two of whom are of South Asian descent, revealed a painful truth: the wounds inflicted upon the egos of the powerful are recognized and defended, while the wounds of Rafiq, Zubair, Nabila and thousands of unnamed others fail to register—not in our university discourse or in the government's civilian casualty count. This, more than anything else, illustrates what this petition aims to counter and why it is so important.
For all that has been said by some members of the faculty and administration, we have been saddened by the silences prevailing in their responses. None of the thousands of people assassinated by U.S. drones are mentioned—not once. There has been no questioning of the "Drone War's" legitimacy or meaningful engagement with our concern that Mr. Koh did in fact provide the legal rationale and cover for this program. There has been no reflection upon the relationship between state-sponsored violence abroad and state-sponsored violence here at home, in places like Ferguson, North Charleston, and New York. And there has been little concern with human rights becoming a field that legitimizes U.S. global hegemony by masking its questionable interference in the social and political structures of other nations.
Indeed, the silences do not stop there. Neither the facts nor the sources that we extensively cite and upon which we base our critique, were genuinely examined. Rather, they were largely dismissed. Meanwhile, we have been accused of leveling attacks that are not "evidence-based" and of launching nothing more than a "smear" campaign. We wonder: if we have gotten the facts wrong about Mr. Koh's well-documented role in shaping and defending the U.S. government's targeted killing program, why haven't the true facts surfaced? Why are we asked to blindly take the word of his friends, who speak of past actions that have no bearing on his role in this particular violation?
We have sought to understand the troubling responses that we have received from some faculty and administrators. It occurs to us that those in government who defend drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now the Philippines, or who justify wars whether in Iraq or Libya, expect to waltz comfortably through the revolving door from government back into the academy, while demanding silence concerning these crimes.
We desire to break these silences in order to demand accountability and to express our outrage with the devaluation of human life that the U.S. extrajudicial killing program reflects.
The Undersigned,
Aman Singh
Lisa Sangoi
Amanda Bass
Calisha Myers
Dami Obaro
Saif Ansari
Jon Laks
[1] For these reasons, the names of NYU Law student signatories have been made temporarily unavailable for public viewing.
The Neocons and the Kremlin
Neocon 'Chaos Promotion' in the Mideast
Editor Notoe: After the Persian Gulf War in 1991, America's neocons thought no country could stand up to the high-tech U.S. military, and they realized the Soviet Union was no longer around to limit U.S. actions. So, the "regime change" strategy was born – and many have died, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
Former Washington insider and four-star General Wesley Clark spilled the beans several years ago on how Paul Wolfowitz and his neoconservative co-conspirators implemented their sweeping plan to destabilize key Middle Eastern countries once it became clear that post-Soviet Russia "won't stop us."
Drone Victims Take Germany to Court for Abetting U.S. Murders
Andreas Schüller is an attorney on the staff of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. He is the lead attorney on a suit being brought by ECCHR and Reprieve against the German government on behalf of three Yemeni survivors of a U.S. drone strike. The case will be heard May 27th in Cologne.
Their suit argues that it is illegal under German law for the German government to allow the U.S. air base at Ramstein to be used for drone murders abroad. The suit comes after the passage of a resolution in the European Parliament in February 2014 urging European nations to "oppose and ban the practice of extrajudicial targeted killings" and to "ensure that the Member States, in conformity with their legal obligations, do not perpetrate unlawful targeted killings or facilitate such killings by other states."
I've always thought of drone murders as illegal under the laws of the countries where the murders happen, as well as under the UN Charter and the Kellogg Briand Pact. I asked Schüller: Is your suit seeking prosecution for murder where (or in one of the places where) the act is committed from a distance?
"The suit," he replied, "is based on constitutional rights in Germany and thus not seeking prosecution, but measures by the German administration to stop the use of German territory for illegal actions by the U.S. in Yemen." The central claim, he said, is that the U.S. air base at Ramstein is involved in drone operations, by transmitting data from and to drones through a satellite relay station as well as transatlantic fiber cables. The suit seeks to stop use of the air base's air operations center for analysis of surveillance images sent by drones as part of combat drone missions.
How, I asked, does this differ from the recent indictment of a former CIA station chief in Pakistan?
"The Pakistani case," Schüller said, "deals with drone strikes in the country where they take place in massive numbers and with high numbers of killed civilians. It's about prosecuting individuals responsible for the strikes set up. Our suit concerns the preemptive protection of our clients that are living in an area with continuing drone operations as well as technical and targeting aspects in drone operations and state collaboration."
In the United States it's common for lawyers to claim that murder is legal if it's part of a war, and to defer to the warmakers to tell them if something is part of a war or not; does it matter in your case whether the act was part of a war?
"It is important to prove that the U.S. practice in conducting drone strikes is illegal in several aspects. On the one hand, strikes in Yemen are conducted outside an armed conflict and thus infringe the right to life without any justification. In line with a legal opinion by the German Federal Prosecutor's Office we don't consider the U.S. to be in a global armed conflict against Al-Qaida and associate forces. Even if there would be the case of an armed conflict, the targeting practice by the U.S. is too broad and includes a large number of targets that do not fall under the category of legitimate military targets in an armed conflict. Attacks against those targets are thus illegal, even in armed conflict."
Is Germany obliged by the European Parliament to end drone murders from its soil? (And does this apply to every EU member country?) And by the German Constitution?
"Politically, the European Parliament made a strong statement against the illegal and expanded use of drone strikes. All EU member states are also bound by laws, such as the European Convention of Human Rights, to respect and protect the right to life. A similar provision is part of the German constitution."
Briefly what is the story of the victims in your case?
"On August 29, 2012, five rockets fired by U.S. drones struck the village of Khashamir in eastern Yemen. The extended family of our clients had gathered in the village to celebrate a wedding. Two members of the family were killed in the strike. Other family members were left with ongoing trauma. The family members killed were outspoken critics of AQAP and active in countering their influence in the region through speeches and social activities."
What do you hope to prove?
"It's about the use of German territory for illegal drone operations and the need for European governments to take a stronger legal and political position against the continuing US practice."
What is the timing?
"The lawsuit has been filed in October 2014 with the administrative court in Cologne. In the end of May 2015 an oral hearing will take place. Further court session as well as rendering of a judgment are not foreseeable, as well as appeals procedures."
What could result if you succeed?
"The result could be that the German government must take a stronger position towards the U.S. government to stop the use of the U.S. airbase in Ramstein for drone operations, including activities to rebuild the relay station or the air operations center."
Any benefit for this movement that I just wrote about?
"In Europe, we need to form a transborder activists network addressing and opposing the use of European allies' soil for drone operations. So the German case will definitely be of interest for Italy and other countries in Europe."
What can people do to help?
"The ultimate political goal is to change the U.S. practice of drone strikes and to conduct them according to human rights standards. People must continue to put pressure on governments worldwide to take a clear position on the legal boundaries of drone strikes as well as the long-term consequences in international relations if such an illegal practice continues in many different places worldwide."
Well let's hope the ultimate goal is not murders by flying robots that meet "human rights standards" whatever in the world those might be! But let's help advance this effort to hold the German government to a higher standard than the abysmal one modeled by the United States.
A key witness in court will be former U.S. drone pilot Brandon Bryant. If you know of any other drone pilots willing to speak about what they've done, please let me know.
© ECCHR / Photo: Nihad Nino Pušija
APRIL 14 -Nationwide Shut-Down Day to Stop Police Killings of Unarmed People
Tuesday in Union Square NYC & Around U.S.
Cornel West, Carl Dix, Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, Eve Ensler, Arturo O'Farrill Call for National Shut Down Day April 14 to Stop Police Killings of Unarmed People
What: Nationwide Shut-Down Day to Stop Police Killings of Unarmed People
When: Tuesday April 14
Where: Union Square 2:00 pm NYC, other cities
Oh Hell, Hillary
I just did a radio show in South Africa on the topic of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps they won't air it since I told them it was a non-story about something long since underway being "launched," but a story the U.S. media likes because it's substance-free. Yet in South Africa it seems to be a story. They really didn't know she was running until now, and they wanted to know if John McCain was her opponent. And yet they had the sense to ask if she would cause more wars and if there was really any difference between Hillary and the Republicans. If even the places that don't know she's running know that, perhaps there is hope for public awareness of basic facts after all.
Of course I pointed out Hillary Clinton's role in wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Ukraine, etc., her profiteering off Boeing while marketing Boeing weapons as Secretary of State, her transformation of the State Department into a fully owned subsidiary of the military, her foundations taking money from Chevron and Exxon-Mobil while she persuades Eastern European countries not to ban fracking. Hillary backs Israel's crimes, opposes the UN and international law. The corruption and nastiness in her hidden emails need hardly be seen to be estimated. She was too corrupt for the Watergate Committee, for godsake, trying to keep Nixon in for Ted Kennedy to run against, just as the Democrats of 2007 kept the war on Iraq going in order to run against it again. See http://WarIsACrime.org/Hillary
Hillary backs the NSA, wants Edward Snowden in prison, gets $2,777 per minute for speeches at which no questioning is allowed, lets her guards beat up Ray McGovern for turning his back on her, and is a candidate from a presidential dynasty in a year (next year, not this!) in which two of them are in play. See http://NoBushesOrClintons.org
And here is our opportunity. It is time for us to dedicate ourselves to fixing a broken system, not working within it. Don't try to elect someone in a system that is clearly broken. Joke about it, sure:
Ideally Hillary Clinton will run with Jeb Bush as her vice president & Bush will run with Clinton as his so they'll both win no matter what
Saving Passengers of the Good Ship 'Titan… Earth'
On 15 April 1912, the Titanic, the largest ship afloat at the time it entered service, sank in the North Atlantic Ocean after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage. The large and unnecessary death toll – more than 1,500 passengers and crew – was the result of many factors.
Understanding the psychology that underpins these factors teaches us why so many people died in the Titanic disaster. This, in turn, gives us insight into how we might be able to improve our chances of averting the sinking of the Good Ship Earth and losing most of its passengers in the years now immediately ahead.
Focus: Hillary Clinton - Apr 13, 2015
Hillary Clinton Announces 2016 Presidential Bid - ibtimes.com
Hillary Clinton Officially Begins Her $2.5 Billion Presidential Campaign - Gothamist
VIDEO: Hillary Clinton's Presidential Announcement: Getting Started - YouTube
Clinton campaign sends memo to supporters ahead of 2016 announcement - Fox News
Full text of the Clinton campaign memo 'Hillary for America' (at the bottom of the page) - bloomberg.com
Here's a look at the key players in Hillary Clinton campaign - thepicayuneleader.com
How Twitter reacted to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign logo - NY Daily News
Interactive graphic: Hillary Clinton's insider network - WashingtonExaminer.com
POLL: Democrats want primary challenge to Hillary Clinton - POLITICO
POLL: Results of the Bloomberg Politics Poll on Clinton - Bloomberg
POLL: Rand Paul best bet in 3 swing states as Hillary Clinton slips - CNN.com
Obama Says Hillary Clinton Would Be an 'Excellent President' - NBC News.com
VIDEO: Obama Says Hillary Clinton Would Be an 'Excellent President' - facebook.com
Jim Webb critiques Clinton-era foreign policy, singling out the U.S.-led intervention in Libya in particular - POLITICO
Rand Paul launches first attack ad against Hillary Clinton - Macon.com
VIDEO: Rand Paul Releases Anti-Clinton TV: Defeat The Washington Machine - YouTube
VIDEO: Interview with Rand Paul on Hillary Clinton - CNN
Paul attacks Clinton's on Benghazi, says 'dozens and dozens of requests for more security all completely ignored' for nine months - PolitiFact
Paul: Hillary Clinton is a big believer in giving arms to Syrian rebels. that made the Islamic State stronger - Washington Times
Rand Paul slams Clinton's 'grand hypocrisy', accepting donations from countries like Saudi Arabia with poor records on women's rights - NBC
VIDEO: Rand Paul criticizes Clinton on Saudi Arabia and women's rights - washingtonpost.com
Rand Paul website hawks anti-Hillary gear - WashingtonExaminer.com
For Republicans, 'Stop Hillary' campaign begins in earnest - The Washington Post
VIDEO: GOP releases 'Stop Hillary' video - Best of Cain
VIDEO: Jeb Bush Releases 'Prebuttal' Video to Hillary's Announcement: Better - YouTube
VIDEO: GOP chief Reince Priebus: Hillary Clinton is not trustworthy - CBS
Chairman of the Republican National Committee Priebus: Clinton should disclose foundation money - POLITICO
Arab nations' donations to Clinton Foundation: Curing world's ills or currying favor? In contrast, six global charities collected no money from those Middle Eastern countries - McClatchy DC
As Colombian Oil Money Flowed To Clintons, State Department Took No Action To Prevent Labor Violations - ibtimes.com
Freedom Watch attorney: Long arm of the law closing in on Hillary! - wnd.com
Freedom Watch attorney to NSA and CIA: Turn over Hillary Clinton documents now - Examiner.com
Republican Benghazi Probe Hangs Over Clinton's Presidential Bid - Bloomberg
State Department watchdog to investigate Clinton aide's special job status - WashingtonExaminer.com
To contact Bartolo email peaceloversingle[at]yahoo[dot]com (replacing [at] with @, [dot] with .)
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Brutalizers and the Brutalized
The Nasty Blowback from America's Wars
Editor Note: There are historical warnings to countries that inflict violence abroad, that the imperial impulse will blow back on the domestic society with suppression of public debate and repression of common citizens, that the war will come home — as is happening in the United States.
By Ray McGovern
Brutality thrives in American police treatment of common citizens reflecting an ethos of violence that has flourished over the past dozen years with almost no one in authority held accountable. Much of this behavior can be traced back to U.S. wars of choice – and it is not as though we were not warned of the inevitable blowback.
Connected Murders
by Debra Sweet One may think that police murder of unarmed civilians, particularly people of color, in the U.S. has no connection to the wars perpetrated by the U.S. government across the globe, but there are striking parallels. When police killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, grand juries did not deliver justice; no policewere prosecuted. Black and Latinos, particularly young men, continue to be criminalized, targeted, and outright murdered with impunity, while the U.S. claims to be number one in human rights!
Peace: More Normal and Wonderful Than We Think
Remarks at Michigan Pax Christi annual state conference, April 11, 2015.
How might we get to a world that doesn't plan and produce wars but lives at peace economically, environmentally, culturally, and legally? How might we switch to systems that avoid conflicts and settle unavoidable conflicts nonviolently?
World Beyond War, one project that I'm working on, intends to accelerate the movement toward ending war and establishing a peace system in two ways: massive education, and nonviolent action to dismantle the war machine. I'm going to quote a bit of a section I wrote in a longer World Beyond War report on alternatives to war.
If we want war to end, we are going to have to work to end it. Even if you think war is lessening - by no means an uncontroversial claim - it won't continue doing so without work. And as long as there is any war, there is a significant danger of widespread war. Wars are notoriously hard to control once begun. With nuclear weapons in the world (and with nuclear plants as potential targets), any war-making carries a risk of apocalypse. War-making and war preparations are destroying our natural environment and diverting resources from a possible rescue effort that would preserve a habitable climate. As a matter of survival, war and preparations for war must be completely abolished, and abolished quickly, by replacing the war system with a peace system.
To accomplish this, we will need a peace movement that differs from past movements that have been against each successive war or against each offensive weapon. We cannot fail to oppose wars, but we must also oppose the entire institution and work toward replacing it.
World Beyond War intends to work globally. While begun in the United States, World Beyond War has worked to include individuals and organizations from around the globe in its decision making. Thousands of people in over 100 countries have thus far signed the pledge on the WorldBeyondWar.org website to work for the elimination of all war.
War does not have a single source, but it does have a largest one. Ending war-making by the United States and its allies would go a very long way toward ending war globally. For those living in the United States, at least, one key place to start ending war is within the U.S. government. This can be worked on together with people affected by US wars and those living near U.S. military bases around the world, which is a fairly large percentage of the people on earth.
Ending U.S. militarism wouldn't eliminate war globally, but it would eliminate the pressure that is driving several other nations to increase their military spending. It would deprive NATO of its leading advocate for and greatest participant in wars. It would cut off the largest supply of weapons to Western Asia (a.k.a. the Middle East) and other regions. It would remove the major barrier to reconciliation and reunification of Korea. It would create U.S. willingness to support arms treaties, join the International Criminal Court, and allow the United Nations to move in the direction of its stated purpose of eliminating war. It could create a world free of nations threatening first-use of nukes (Pakistan also makes that threat), and a world in which nuclear disarmament might proceed more rapidly. Gone would be the last major nation using cluster bombs or refusing to ban landmines. If the United States kicked the war habit, war itself would suffer a major and possibly fatal set-back.
A focus on U.S. war preparations cannot work as well without similar efforts everywhere. Numerous nations are investing, and even increasing their investments, in war. All militarism must be opposed. And victories for a peace system tend to spread by example. When the British Parliament opposed attacking Syria in 2013 it helped block that U.S. proposal. When 31 nations committed in Havana, Cuba, in January 2014 to never making use of war, those voices were heard in other nations of the world.
Global solidarity in educational efforts constitutes an important part of the education itself. Student and cultural exchanges between the West and nations on the Pentagon's likely target list (Syria, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, etc.) will go a long way toward building resistance toward those potential future wars. Similar exchanges between nations investing in war and nations that have ceased to do so, or which do so at a greatly reduced scale, can be of great value as well.
Building a global movement for stronger and more democratic global structures of peace will also require educational efforts that do not stop at national borders.
Using a bi-level approach and working with other citizen based organizations, World Beyond War will launch a world-wide campaign to educate the masses of people that war is a failed social institution that can be abolished to the great benefit of all. Books, print media articles, speaker's bureaus, radio and television appearances, electronic media, conferences, etc., will be employed to spread the word about the myths and institutions that perpetuate war. The aim is to create a planetary consciousness and a demand for a just peace without undermining in any way the benefits of unique cultures and political systems.
World Beyond War has begun and will continue to support and promote good work in this direction by other organizations, including many organizations that have signed the pledge at WorldBeyondWar.org. Already distant connections have been made among organizations in various parts of the world that have proved mutually beneficial. World Beyond War will combine its own initiatives with this sort of assistance for others' in an effort to create greater cooperation and greater coherence around the idea of a movement to end all war. The result of educational efforts favored by World Beyond War will be a world in which talk of a "good war" will sound no more possible than a "benevolent rape" or "philanthropic slavery" or "virtuous child abuse."
World Beyond War seeks to create a moral movement against an institution that should be viewed as tantamount to mass-murder, even when that mass-murder is accompanied by flags or music or assertions of authority and promotion of irrational fear. World Beyond War advocates against the practice of opposing a particular war on the grounds that it isn't being run well or isn't as proper as some other war. World Beyond War seeks to strengthen its moral argument by taking the focus of peace activism partially away from the harm wars do to the aggressors, in order to fully acknowledge and appreciate the suffering of all.
In the film The Ultimate Wish: Ending the Nuclear Age we see a survivor of Nagasaki meeting a survivor of Auschwitz. It is hard in watching them meeting and speaking together to remember or care which nation committed which horror. A peace culture will see all war with that same clarity. War is an abomination not because of who commits it but because of what it is.
World Beyond War intends to make war abolition the sort of cause that slavery abolition was and to hold up resisters, conscientious objectors, peace advocates, diplomats, whistleblowers, journalists, and activists as our heroes -- in fact, to develop alternative avenues for heroism and glory, including nonviolent activism, and including serving as peace workers and human shields in places of conflict.
World Beyond War will not promote the idea that "peace is patriotic," but rather that thinking in terms of world citizenship is helpful in the cause of peace. WBW will work to remove nationalism, xenophobia, racism, religious bigotry, and exceptionalism from popular thinking.
Central projects in World Beyond War's early efforts will be the provision of useful information through the WorldBeyondWar.org website, and the collection of a large number of individual and organizational signatures on the pledge posted there. The website is constantly being updated with maps, charts, graphics, arguments, talking points, and videos to help people make the case, to themselves and others, that wars can/should/must be abolished. Each section of the website includes lists of relevant books.
Other areas in which World Beyond War may put some effort, beyond its central project of advancing the idea of ending all war, include: disarmament; conversion to peaceful industries; asking new nations to join and current Parties to abide by the Kellogg-Briand Pact; lobbying for reforms of the United Nations; lobbying governments and other bodies for various initiatives, including a Global Marshall Plan or parts thereof; and countering recruitment efforts while strengthening the rights of conscientious objectors.
World Beyond War believes that little is more important than advancing common understanding of nonviolence as an alternative form of conflict to violence, and ending the habit of thinking that one can ever be faced with only the choices of engaging in violence or doing nothing. In addition to its education campaign, World Beyond War will work with other organizations to launch nonviolent, Gandhian-style protests and nonviolent direct action campaigns against the war machine in order to disrupt it and to demonstrate the strength of the popular desire to end war. The goal of this campaign will be to compel the political decision makers and those who make money from the killing machine to come to the table for talks on ending war and replacing it with a more effective alternative security system.
This nonviolent effort will benefit from the education campaign, but will also in its turn serve an educational purpose. Huge public campaigns or movements have a way of bringing people's attention to questions they have not been focused on.
The WBW Pledge Statement reads as follows:
"I understand that wars and militarism make us less safe rather than protect us, that they kill, injure and traumatize adults, children and infants, severely damage the natural environment, erode civil liberties, and drain our economies, siphoning resources from life-affirming activities. I commit to engage in and support nonviolent efforts to end all war and preparations for war and to create a sustainable and just peace."
World Beyond War is collecting signatures on this statement on paper at events and adding them to the website, as well as inviting people to add their names online. If a large number of those who would be willing to sign this statement can be reached and asked to do so, that fact will potentially be persuasive news to others. The same goes for the inclusion of signatures by well-known figures. The collection of signatures is a tool for advocacy in another way as well; those signers who choose to join a World Beyond War email list can later be contacted to help advance a project initiated in their part of the world.
Expanding the reach of the Pledge Statement, signers are asked to make use of WBW tools to contact others, share information online, write letters to editors, lobby governments and other bodies, and organize small gatherings. Resources to facilitate all kinds of outreach are provided at WorldBeyondWar.org.
Beyond its central projects, WBW will be participating in and promoting useful projects begun by other groups and testing out new specific initiatives of its own. One area that WBW hopes to work on is the creation of truth and reconciliation commissions, and greater appreciation of their work. Lobbying for the establishment of an International Truth and Reconciliation Commission or Court is a possible area of focus as well.
Partial steps toward replacing the war system will be pursued, but they will be understood as and discussed as just that: partial steps on the way toward creating a peace system. Such steps may include banning weaponized drones or closing particular bases or eliminating nuclear weapons or closing the School of the Americas, defunding military advertising campaigns, restoring war powers to the legislative branch, cutting off weapons sales to dictatorships, etc.
Finding the strength in numbers to do these things is part of the purpose of the collection of signatures on the simple Pledge Statement. World Beyond War hopes to facilitate the forming of a broader coalition suited to the task. This will mean bringing together all those sectors that rightfully ought to be opposing the military industrial complex: moralists, ethicists, preachers of morality and ethics, religious communities, doctors, psychologists, and protectors of human health, economists, labor unions, workers, civil libertarians, advocates for democratic reforms, journalists, historians, promoters of transparency in public decision-making, internationalists, those hoping to travel and be liked abroad, environmentalists, and proponents of everything worthwhile on which war dollars could be spent instead: education, housing, arts, science, etc. That's a pretty big group.
Many activist organizations want to stay focused in their niches. Many are reluctant to risk being called unpatriotic. Some are tied up in profits from military contracts. World Beyond War will work around these barriers. This will involve asking civil libertarians to view war as the root cause of the symptoms they treat, and asking environmentalists to view war as at least one of the major root problems -- and its elimination as a possible solution.
Green energy has far greater potential to handle our energy needs (and wants) than is commonly supposed, because the massive transfer of money that would be possible with the abolition of war isn't usually considered. Human needs across the board can be better met than we usually imagine, because we don't usually consider withdrawing $2 trillion a year globally from the world's deadliest criminal enterprise.
Toward these ends, WBW will be working to organize a bigger coalition ready and trained to engage in nonviolent direct action, creatively, generously, and fearlessly.
OK, I'm going to stop quoting my World Beyond War writing. I do think the alliance of all good movements is key. We don't need to re-do the election of Obama and get it right this time. We need to re-do the Occupy Movement and get it right this time. The plutocracy and the warocracy are the same problem. The destruction of the natural world and the acceptance of war as natural are the same problem. Civil liberties and human rights groups that began opposing war would simply be addressing the disease rather than the symptoms. Opponents of poverty and poor education are obliged to oppose the monster that is sucking up all the money. And integral to such a coalition are media and election reform.
We ought to be seizing the opportunity presented by the looming presidential nomination of the two worst candidates possible and quite possibly for the first time two candidates both from presidential dynasties, to withhold a bit of the mountain of money that we dump into electing this slightly less hideous candidate or that slightly less hideous candidate and instead invest it in activism aimed at moving the window of debate to a better location. Getting the lesser evil candidate is not a long-term solution if the pair of candidates gets worse each cycle.
We need automatic voter registration, as just created in Oregon. Apart from all the other benefits, it frees up countless hours for useful activism. How many times have we watched thousands of people who usually ignore politics invest energy in the busy work of registering voters and then collapse with exhaustion the moment an election is over, precisely the moment in which citizens of a government of the people ought to be beginning their efforts to demand good governance? We need to make voter registration automatic state by state and shame the low turnout states that don't catch up. There's a page at RootsAction.org where I work that lets you email your state legislators and governor all the facts about this. Most importantly we know it can be done because not only do lots of other countries do it which of course proves nothing, but one of the 50 U.S. states also does it which proves it's compatible with human nature.
We need to end partisan gerrymandering state by state and shame those states that don't catch up. And of course if Congress catches up to any of these state-by-state reforms, so much the better.
We need hand-counted paper ballots counted publicly at each polling place. We need ballot and debate access based on signature gathering. We need the national popular vote with no electoral college. We need the vote and full representation for Washington, D.C., and all of the U.S. colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific. We need public financing and free air time and a ban on private election spending. We need voting rights regardless of criminal conviction. We need an election day or days holiday. We need a limited campaign season. Mandatory voting with the option to choose None-Of-The-Above could help as well. Most of these things can be advanced locally, at the state level, and nationally, and can be accomplished through a number of different mechanisms. If a fraction of the money and energy that goes into working within a demonstrably broken system were invested in fixing it, we'd fix it, at which point enthusiasm for participating in it would skyrocket.
But activism is hard. We don't have most of the money. And we get tired out, discouraged, and distracted. How can we, each of us, best advance an agenda of peace, justice, and democracy. I imagine some of you have seen a graphic that a church produced recently matching up anyone's Myers Briggs Personality to a saint. So, based on whether you are more introverted or extroverted, sensing or intuiting, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving, you get to be Saint Patrick the partier or Saint Joan the hard worker, etc. Now I take Myers Briggs with a grain of salt, and none of us are actually saints. And I have my doubts that there would be any saints at all if Facebook had existed over the past millennia and every would-be saint had used it. But I do think there's a type of peace activism for everyone or for every moment.
When I want to do online activism from my computer or phone, I have my job at RootsAction.org. When I want to promote longer discussions in good books, I have my job at Just World Books. When I want to talk with an expert on some area of peace I have my job interviewing people on Talk Nation Radio. When I want to plan events supporting whistleblowers I have my job at Stand Up For Truth. When I want to strategize the creation of a new world, I have my job at World Beyond War. Now, I realize that some of you don't need five jobs to try to make a living, and some of you have other types of jobs, but the point is there is a way into activism for anyone, and as far in as you want to go. World Beyond War welcomes anyone onto any committee who wants to help work on any aspect of ending war.
Here's a vision of where we hope all this work takes us, written by my colleagues at World Beyond War:
We will know we have achieved peace when the world is safe for all the children. They will play freely out of doors, never worrying about picking up cluster bombs or about drones buzzing overhead. There will be good education for all of them for as far as they are able to go. Schools will be safe and free from fear. The economy will be healthy, producing useful things rather than those things which destroy use value, and producing them in ways that are sustainable. There will be no carbon burning industry and global warming will have been halted. All children will study peace and will be trained in powerful, peaceful methods of confronting violence, should it arise at all. They will all learn how to defuse and resolve conflicts peacefully. When they grow up they may enlist in a peace force that will be trained in nonviolent defense, making their nations ungovernable if attacked by another country or a coup d ́etat and therefore immune from conquest. The children will be healthy because health care will be freely available. The air and water will be clean, soils healthy and producing healthy food because the funding for ecological restoration will be available from the same source. When we see the children playing we will see children from many different cultures together at their play because restrictive borders will have been abolished. The arts will flourish. While learning to be proud of their own cultures--their religions, arts, foods, traditions, etc.--these children will realize they are citizens of one small planet as well as citizens of their respective countries. These children will never be soldiers, although they may well serve humanity in voluntary organizations or in some kinds of universal service for the common good.
Steps in this direction exist all around us. Less wealthy nations that forego investment in wars are able to provide education, healthcare, retirement, etc. Costa Rica has no military but is now getting all of its energy from renewable sources. That can't simply be copied. Costa Rica is using dams that won't power anything during a drought. But it's no coincidence that the United States leads in militarism and trails in most everything else.
Why don't we give a leading or at least an equal role in running the world, at the UN and elsewhere, to the nations with the best educational systems, the best healthcare systems, the longest lifespans, the longest periods without wars, the highest happiness rankings, the greatest generosity to others? Why are the permanent security council members the countries with the weapons?
I'm not going to say much about law, because that's Elliott's area today, but the reason I wrote a book about a law, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, was primarily to paint a picture of the peace movement of the 1920s that brought it into being. That there can be a mainstream principled moral movement for the abolition of war is not just possible because anything of the sort if quite obviously possible, but also because it has happened before, less than a century ago, in this very country -- and is therefore compatible with human nature.
But the idea of abolishing war is as old as war. I noticed that we're at St. John Fisher University Chapel. I didn't know who St. John Fisher was, since he's not in the Myers Briggs chart. But I read this about him, which interested me:
"Fisher gave further proof of his genuine zeal for learning by inducing Erasmus to visit Cambridge. The latter indeed attributes it to Fisher's protection that the study of Greek was allowed to proceed at Cambridge without the active molestation that it encountered at Oxford."
So now I'm a fan of St. John Fisher because I was already a fan of Erasmus who has never been as popular among the rich and powerful as has his contemporary Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, but who in 1517 wrote The Complaint of Peace, in which he proposes that we think of ourselves as humans, and thereby become unwilling to make war on any of our brother and sister humans anywhere. Peace, speaking in the first-person, complains about how humanity treats her. She claims to offer "the source of all human blessings" and to be scorned by people who "go in quest of evils infinite in number." The Complaint reads like it was written 500 years ago in Latin for a readership made up of what we would call creationists, astrologers, monarchists, and Eurocentric bigots. Yet it offers rebuttals to defenses of war that have never been surpassed.
On a search for peacefulness, Peace hunts in vain among seemingly polite and amicable princes, among academics whom she finds as corrupted by war as we find ours today, among religious leaders whom she denounces as the hypocrites we've come to know so well, and even among secluded monks. Peace looks into family life and into the internal mental life of an individual and finds no devotion to peace. Erasmus points Christian readers toward the words supporting peace in the New Testament. One might accuse him of hand-picking his quotes and avoiding those that don't support his goal, except that Erasmus quite openly says that that's what he's doing and advises others to do the same. The vengeful God of the Old Testament should be ignored in favor of the peaceful God of Jesus, Erasmus writes. And those who can't so ignore Him, writes Erasmus, should re-interpret him as peaceful. Let "God of vengeance" mean vengeance "on those sins which rob us of repose."
The cause of wars, Erasmus finds, is kings and their war-hungry chickenhawk advisors. The term in Latin is not exactly "chickenhawk" but the meaning comes through. Kings, writes Erasmus, start wars to seize territory when they would be better off improving the territory they have now. Or they start wars out of a personal grudge. Or they start wars to disrupt popular opposition to themselves at home. Such kings, Erasmus writes, should be exiled for life to the remotest islands. And not just the kings but their privileged advisors. Ordinary people don't create wars, says Peace, those in power impose wars on them.
Powerful people calling themselves Christian have created such a climate, says Peace, that speaking up for Christian forgiveness is taken to be treasonous and evil, while promoting war is understood to be good and loyal and directed at a nation's happiness. Erasmus has little tolerance for Orwellian propaganda about "supporting the troops" and proposes that clergy refuse to bury in consecrated ground anyone slain in battle:
"The unfeeling mercenary soldier, hired by a few pieces of paltry coin, to do the work of man-butcher, carries before him the standard of the cross; and that very figure becomes the symbol of war, which alone ought to teach every one that looks at it, that war ought to be utterly abolished. What hast thou to do with the cross of Christ on thy banners, thou blood-stained soldier? With such a disposition as thine; with deeds like thine, of robbery and murder, thy proper standard would be a dragon, a tiger, or wolf!"
" . . . If you detest robbery and pillage, remember these are among the duties of war; and that, to learn how to commit them adroitly, is a part of military discipline. Do you shudder at the idea of murder? You cannot require to be told, that to commit it with dispatch, and by wholesale, constitutes the celebrated art of war."
Peace proposes in her complaint that kings submit their grievances to wise and impartial arbiters, and points out that even if the arbiters are unjust neither side will suffer to remotely the extent that they would from war. Perhaps peace must be purchased -- but compare the price to the cost of a war! For the price of destroying a town you could have built one, Peace says.
For arbitration to replace war, Peace says, we will need better kings and better courtiers. You can't get any more timely and relevant than that.
Let's get to work.
War: It's Human Nature only if Collective Suicide is Natural
Remarks at Michigan Pax Christi annual state conference, April 11, 2015.
Thank you for having me here. I know a lot of people have been involved in planning this event. Thank you!
I'm going to try this morning to address the question of how we can best talk our fellow human beings out of one of the primary myths that allows war to continue. And in a second speech later today I'm going to turn more to the question of activism and building a peaceful world.
I mailed a box of my books here, and I had to mail another one because the first box arrived undamaged except that all of the books were missing. Although I don't know who stole the books, Mary Hanna recommended I inform you that the message I bring you was so threatening that the books were taken, and the empty box delivered, by a bunch of -- and I quote -- Weannie-heads!
Now, you see what I've done. I've called somebody a weannie head in a speech about peace but arranged it so you'll blame Mary (and maybe the U.S. Postal Service) instead of me. But of course when Michigan State's basketball team beat Virginia's I said something worse than Mary has probably said in her life, just as I'd done the year before, not that I'm holding any grudges.
Now, we all know that resentment and blame are tools of war propaganda. So, in Mary's defense and mine: neither of us called anybody a name in the presence of that person or proposed to harm any person or armed ourselves with massive machinery of death in preparation for books going missing or a basketball team losing. I didn't put any Michigan State fans on a kill list and blow them and everyone near them to bits with hellfire missiles. Neither of us launched any invasions.
It's rather a key distinction, isn't it, getting angry with or without war weapons. But try to find a discussion of wars in the Middle East that even mentions that 80 to 90 percent of the weapons there are from the United States, with weapons sales and gifts up significantly under the Nobel Peace President.
So, when you come down to it, we would all probably be better people if we didn't get angry at any other people -- only at injustice. But since I didn't organize millions of people to plan and prepare for carefully executed crusades of mass murder, my anger did considerably less damage than, say, George W. Bush's feelings about Saddam Hussein having tried to kill his daddy.
I bring all of this up in order to comment on the idea of what's called "human nature." If "human nature" is something distinct from culture, then -- whatever it may be -- one might speculate (why you would I have no idea, but one could speculate if one wanted to) that my emotions watching basketball are "human nature." War, on the other hand, is a collective effort. It requires plans, preparations, manufacturing, training, conditioning. How can such a group effort be distinct from culture? War is absolutely central to our culture. One would have to speculate baselessly and pointlessly that parts of our culture are "human nature" while other parts are not. But then which would be which?
When you take war participation on the individual level, you find that most individuals want nothing to do with it, nobody gets post traumatic stress from war deprivation, and in fact intense conditioning developed over decades of cultural experience is required to get most individuals to participate, many of whom never recover from having done so.
And when you take war participation at the group level, you find that many groups of humans, large and small, rich and poor, now and in the past, have had nothing to do with war. For most of human existence there was nothing that could be called war. Since war's creation it has been sporadic. Societies have abandoned it for centuries and brought it back again. Most groups, most of the time, have left it well alone. And war today bears very little resemblance to war as it was 1,000 or even 100 years ago. In addition, the 95% of humanity that lives outside the United States mostly thinks about war very differently from how it is discussed in the United States. Discussion of "the next wars" as if war is inevitable is not normal. Debates over whether to bomb people in trouble or leave them alone are far less common than debates over how to help them. Concern over a nation resisting the presence of one's own nation's troops and missiles is unheard of outside of the imperial Homeland.
An American raised on Hollywood will tell you war is "natural," "human nature," inevitable, and genetic. But there are numerous well-documented accounts of human cultures not only free of war but unable to even understand what it is. An anthropologist asked a man why he didn't use a dart gun, meant for hunting animals, against slave raiders coming to enslave his family, and he replied "Because it would kill them." Probably I shouldn't think of that as ignorance of the possibility of killing. We always want to treat difference as ignorance. The fact is that killing is the worst thing possible. It's worse than enslaving. Logically a perfectly good case can be made for the man's action and justification. In the United States, however, the idea that you would hold a gun and not use it against someone enslaving your family is almost incomprehensible. Probably we should think of that as ignorance. In our culture we praise people by saying "You really killed!" Probably we should think of that as prejudice. What we shouldn't think of it as is "human nature."
No, I'm not advocating that you let someone enslave your family. I'm simply pointing out that cultures exist that view murder very differently from how ours does. So, if acceptance of killing and total avoidance of killing both exist, as they do, how do we choose which one is "human nature." Or if neither is "human nature," is there something else that is "human nature"?
Well, if you try to define "human nature" as what every single human does, its content is vanishingly small. If you try to define it as things that most humans that you know of at a particular time and place do, how do you pick which things to include? And why bother? What is the point? The fact is that "human nature" is a meaningless and, to state it another way, a purposeless concept.
So why does it exist as a concept? Because there are purposes it has tried to serve. I can think of two, which might be called the normative and the excusatory. By normative I mean the habit some people have had of declaring that anything most people do should be done by everyone. If it's normal for people to care for their children then everyone should care for their children. That sounds harmless enough. But what if it's normal in Indiana to be heterosexual? What if it's normal to hit kids or burn gasoline or eat dogs or sacrifice virgins? Why in the world should something's being common make it good? On the contrary, whatever is good we should work to make common.
By excusatory I mean to refer to what has probably been the most frequent use of the concept "human nature" over the years, namely as a means to excuse horrible actions. Am I supporting something cruel and unfair, brutal and destructive? Do I hit or humiliate people? Do I exploit the weak? Do I steal and cheat? Do I participate in the large-scale murder of foreigners or the destruction of the natural world? Well, that's OK. It's "human nature," so I'm powerless to stop. Stopping would require that I transform into some other species. Of course thousands of other people I know of don't do the evil thing I'm doing, and they're humans, but in my position they would do it too because it's "human nature" — meaning no more and no less than it's what I happen to be doing at the moment. If we don't do it, supporters of continuing the slave trade argued in Parliament, other nations will do it. But other nations didn't. If we don't garrison the planet, says the Pentagon, others will. Of course, they might or might not, but this won't be determined by their sharing "human nature," only by their sharing Pentagon nature.
"Human nature" has got to be the grandest term for the most mundane concept ever created. Have you ever heard of anyone doing something good and announcing that it wasn't human nature? When a dog does something unusual, do the other dogs, or even the humans around chastise the dog for violating dog nature? Why does the human species alone get to drag around this bizarre concept of a "nature" that is both just whatever somebody happens to be doing and something very vaguely more than that?
Last October, Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore took out an advertisement in the National Catholic Reporter that read:"CRUSADES, INQUISITION, SLAVERY, TORTURE, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, WAR: Over many centuries, Church leaders and theologians justified each of these evils as consistent with the will of God. Only one of them retains that position in official Church teaching today. We believe it's time for the Catholic Church to reject 'just war' as inconsistent with the teaching and example of Jesus and to become a Just Peace Church."
Not a bad statement, huh?
Do you know what people who don't have special access to the "will of God" called and still call slavery, torture, capital punishment, and numerous other evils? That's right, "human nature." And if two people disagree about the will of god or the content of human nature they can appeal to exactly the same evidence to settle their dispute, namely nothing whatsoever -- except either an agreement to disagree or the violent removal of the person disagreeing with one's claim.
We've reached a point, of course, at which continuing with war risks the existence of humanity. The twin dangers of nuclear apocalypse and climate chaos are advanced more by war than anything else. The primary way in which war kills is by diverting massive resources away from where they could do good, including the good of environmental protection. In addition war is, in some ways, our top destroyer of the environment. On top of which wars are fought for the fuels that we use to destroy the environment. And in addition, the proliferation of nuclear energy and weaponry and the increasing ease of robotic war increases dramatically the risk of war destroying us all before the climate can.
Now, I'm not a professor of logic but I think we have arrived at something that qualifies as a logical proof.
· If war is "human nature," collective suicide is "human nature." In other words, the nature of humanity is to cease to be.
· But everybody from Aristotle to Bill O'Reilly would agree that the nature of something cannot be its absence.
· Therefore, whether "human nature" means anything or not, it isn't war.
Because "human nature" is an excuse for war, you'll hear it most in the places that most frequently make war. And this of course leads to the humorous situation of the people who make war appealing to all the people who don't to justify their war-making. The United States is far and away the world's leading supplier of war weapons, buyer of war weapons, user or war weapons and all around facilitator of war. Ninety five percent of humanity is governed by governments that don't have anything remotely like the U.S. investment in war. Many countries invest between 0 and 5 percent what the United States does in war. But if you ask an American why they can't reduce the militarism a bit, they'll tell you it's "human nature." See, the other 95% of humanity is not really part of "human nature." "Human nature" turns out to be American nature. You find this same phenomenon across issues. No other country destroys the natural environment, at least on a per capita basis, remotely like the United States. But the waste and consumption are defended or accepted as "human nature."
The United States spends over a trillion dollars a year on war preparations, about $1.3 trillion in fact, which is exactly what U.S. students and former students owe in total accumulated student debt which is understood to be an outrageous and massive crisis, yet it's what Congress spends on war preparations each year - year after year -- without comment, discussion, or debate. U.S. military spending has doubled since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, yet the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget this year proposed to cut it by a grand total of 1 percent and didn't even mention that in any of its statements about its budget. The rest of the world spends about another trillion dollars all together. So the average among about 200 other countries is about a half a percent of what the U.S. spends. If the United States, for whatever cockamamie reason, felt obliged to comply with a "human nature" that included the rest of the, you know, humans, it would be compelled to reduce its military by 99.5 percent. And if it did that, I'd be glad to let it defend its behavior with whatever language it wanted.
By the way, if you did the calculation based on per-capita military spending the reduction for the U.S. to meet the rest of the world's average would be similarly extreme. The U.S. spends about $3,135 per person per year, and the rest of the world's average is about $143, meaning about a 95 percent cut for the U.S. to start acting human.
If you did the calculation as a percentage of a nation's economy, even by the most conservative measure, you'd still have to cut U.S. military spending by over a third -- but the idea (quite common in Congressional testimony) that a country should have more weapons if it can afford them, rather than if they serve some good purpose, is -- in my view -- completely unacceptable, is in fact the root of the problem itself; excusing rich countries' greater levels of killing because they're rich seems to add insult to injury.
And if the United States reduced its militarism significantly, the path would be made smooth to reduce it entirely. That is, without losing faith in militarism, the United States could limit its Defense Department to things that serve a defensive purpose. It could guard its borders with all kinds of weaponry. But doing just that, and closing the foreign bases and occupations, scrapping the aircraft carriers and submarines, dismantling the nuclear weapons, abandoning all work on weapons in space, would have some major results. Without the U.S. threat and arms supply, arms races could reverse. Korea could reunite. Palestine could potentially reach a one-state solution. Without U.S. troops kicking in doors -- excuse me, I mean policing -- the globe, the U.S. government, the primary holdout, would be able to support international law.
Most importantly perhaps, any significant fraction of $2 trillion has the power to transform the world for the better if put to proper use. Gone would be starvation. Gone would be unclean water. (And lack of water in Detroit.) Gone homelessness. These are problems that end with the proper use of a tiny fraction of $2 trillion a year. Imagine if in 2003 the United States had simply given each citizen of Iraq a quarter of a million dollars. That expense wouldn't approach what's actually been spent, but I'm willing to bet at least some Iraqis would have appreciated the act. Of course giving away money is not simple and there are more effective ways to invest in health and education and green energy then just handing out cash. The point is we spent more money than that and what did we get? Over a million killed. Millions injured. Millions traumatized. A nation destroyed. The natural environment severely damaged. Our economy drained. Our civil liberties eroded. Our culture corroded. Our morality poisoned. And most of the world viewing the United States as a threat. For a smaller expense, the U.S. government could be loved. It chooses to spend more to be hated. When Gallup polled 65 nations at the end of 2013, and asked what nation was the greatest threat to peace in the world, the overwhelming winner was the United States.
I recommend pointing that poll out to people. It seems to me you either have to declare the world severely and irrationally deluded, perhaps requiring yet more militarism. Or you have to begin opening your eyes to the failure of militarism on its own terms, at which point you can notice that the United States loses all of its land wars, exacerbates whatever it claims to be fixing with its air wars, and plants seeds of evil with its drone wars -- and countless recently retired U.S. officials admit all this.
Our neighbors up in Canada are trying to follow our warlike path, and I've been trying to tell them that they will regret it, but that it will take them years of work to build up anti-Canadian terrorist groups to rival those the United States has generated. So-called "defense" spending is counter-productive, but it's not for amateurs. To have each new militant group in the Middle East using your weapons and imitating your rhetoric while releasing full-length films begging you to attack it, then growing by leaps and bounds when you do attack it, so that even your own citizens (with some FBI prodding) want to join it and your media can start pretending that the foreign group has infiltrated your cities -- that takes skills that the United States has been mastering since before it stopped invading Canada. Did you see the headline "ISIS IN BROOKLYN"? Of course, no one from Iraq or Syria had come to Brooklyn to work for ISIS or even contacted anyone in Brooklyn; rather someone in Brooklyn had been poked and prodded into something by an FBI agent pretending to be ISIS.
The U.S. began in Yemen with murders by missiles, and drone defenders would tell you that missiles are better than other kinds of war, because with drones nobody dies. Meaning no Americans. A year ago, President Obama was claiming some sort of success. Several years ago, even I who couldn't predict the basketball final four worth a darn, predicted that the drone war on Yemen would create a wider war. And now you have the U.S. assisting Saudi Arabia in slaughtering children to blow up U.S.-supplied weapons using U.S.-supplied weapons. And we get to sit back and think of those Yemenis as backward violent beasts because of their human nature which justifies our Pentagon which created this disaster.
Did you know there was a big protest in the Czech Republic recently of the U.S. militarism directed at Russia? And one in Kiev? On Hitler's upcoming birthday, April 20th, the United States will start training Ukraine's neo-Nazi volunteer military force. The United States has troops and weapons in Ukraine and throughout Eastern Europe now, right up to the border of Russia. People take this sort of thing a bit seriously, while we watch our basketball. The U.S. lied to Russia when the two Germanies reunited, claiming NATO wouldn't expand an inch eastward. The U.S. facilitated a coup in Ukraine and is building up hostilities there, and Europeans and Russians are outraged. Last July Fourth I spoke outside a U.S. military base in England where the locals celebrate an Independence from America holiday. I've been talking with protesters in Sicily who are resisting construction of a U.S. Navy communications base. On Jeju Island, South Korea, resistance to a new U.S. Navy base is intense. In Okinawa the local government has heeded the protesters and halted U.S. base construction, against the will of the Japanese government. The Philippines is in an uproar over U.S. military action there. Around the world, people know the United States through its military occupation of their land. And as I watch basketball the announcer thanks U.S. troops for watching from 175 countries as if that's good and normal.
Some know it isn't. I applaud Pax Christi for speaking against the idea of a "just war." Once we rid ourselves of the idea that some wars are good wars, we ought to be able to rid ourselves of the idea that we should be funding the permanent presence of either troops or robot death planes in darn near every country on earth. One doesn't generally hear about cases of just child abuse or just rape or just racial discrimination. The Washington Post recently ran a column headlined "War on Iran May Be Our Best Option." Imagine if it had said "Racism may be our best option" or "Killing kittens may be our best option." Some things are, quite rightly, unacceptable. What if war were made one of those?
This is the case we're making at World Beyond War: there is no upside to war, no excuse for war. It is all negative and it is the most negative thing we do, the most evil institution on earth. And there is no way to fix it. Human Rights Watch recently wrote a report on the horrors inflicted on Iraqi towns, not by ISIS, but by the Iraqi militias said to be "liberating" people from ISIS. But rather than acknowledge that such horrors have been part of every single war ever waged, Human Rights Watch urges reform plans and benchmarks and compliance with the so called laws of war. Amnesty International just came out with a report on the 2014 assault on Gaza that condemns the rockets shot out of Gaza for being insufficiently precise, as if better U.S.-made rockets would be more legal and acceptable. The UN is planning another meeting on inhumane weapons, but which are the humane weapons? You cannot use laws to reform the greatest violation of law. You cannot reform an institution of mass killing. Imaging trying to reform cancer.
Studies have actually found that talking about a so-called "war" on cancer hurts the cause of reducing cancer because people don't adjust their behavior to avoid risks, focusing instead on medical hopes to eliminate cancer from the world. But at least the understanding is there that cancer is entirely undesirable, that we don't need Geneva Conventions for the proper creation and use of good cancer.
A remarkable article appeared in the June 2014 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. I quote:
"Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq. During the 20th century, 190 million deaths could be directly and indirectly related to war -- more than in the previous 4 centuries."
Beyond the death, war injures and traumatizes on a far vaster scale. It is the leading cause of homelessness. It is, by various measures, the leading destroyer of the natural environment. It is by far the leading justification for the erosion of civil liberties and self-governance. It is the leading drain on wealth and prosperity in the world. Imagine if such an institution were newly proposed. Wouldn't we immediately reject it out of hand?
It was wonderful to see push back when Indiana proposed to allow discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation. Imagine if Indiana proposed the creation of the institution of war. I mean, imagine if we didn't have war, and Indiana came up with the idea. We'll dump over half of government spending into this new operation, Indiana would propose, and it won't do us any good, but it will put our lives at risk while murdering thousands upon thousands of innocent people, and we'll lose a lot of rights in the process. Who would stand for such an outrage?
But then why should something be acceptable just because it already existed yesterday? Shouldn't we bloody well be outraged? Isn't there an appropriate anger here? Might there not even be a place, at least generically, for the term Weannie-heads?
What if, instead of Indiana, it was a foreign country that did some of the things the United States does? When Ecuador said the United States could keep its bases there if Ecuador could have a base in Florida, the idea was seen as ludicrous. Why? When Iran tries to keep U.S. ships a bit further from its coast, the U.S. sees this as aggressive, but how close would the U.S. like Iranian ships to be to its coast? If Mexico was murdering people with drones in the United States, would the U.S. approve? If Cuba bombed Miami for harboring terrorists, would U.S. State Department lawyers defend that action? This is always a good test of morality, sometimes known as the golden rule, but also in this case a good test for nationalism. One way to test whether you're identifying with a nation is to ask yourself if you would approve of the same actions if performed by a different nation. You can identify with a nation but want it to behave fairly toward other nations, but only if you're identifying more so with humanity.
Another way for people to question their beliefs is to ask how you would feel if the so-called collateral damage, that is to say the bulk of the people killed in a war, the innocent civilians, were in the United States. Could you justify it as a price worth paying for ... whatever it is supposedly a price worth paying for? Most people clearly could not, but do not ask the question and do not let themselves even know that wars are one-sided slaughters of people from the dispensable nations rather than the indispensible one.
Another good test is to ask yourself what you would approve if another political party did it. If a Republican president were going through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays and picking which ones to murder, would you react in exactly the same way in which you have reacted to President Obama's kill list? This question begins with the question of whether you would allow yourself to know about a story that has been public knowledge for three years since a frontpage New York Times article covered it, or would you avoid knowing about this outrage? Secondary is the question of what you would do if you allowed yourself to know.
A similar question is what you would think if a different branch of government did something. If the House Armed Services Committee were going through a kill list, picking victims, and murdering them and anyone nearby, would you approve, dissent, or ask for details?
In the case of the one war that President Obama does not want, Iran, people have suddenly discovered that they can advocate for alternatives to war. Another good question to put into people's minds is this: Why not prefer alternatives to war in the case of each of the other wars being waged or contemplated? Why only in Iran? Why object to the rush to war only when one U.S. political party does so? Why object to gruesome executions by ISIS but not by Saudi Arabia? Why get outraged on command rather than everywhere events are outrageous?
I think we need to ask these questions and get organized to work for a stronger push to eliminate war and replace it with nonviolent means of resolving conflicts, because contrary to certain Western academic pretenses war is not going away, much less going away on its own. On the contrary, war is worsening its destruction, and the use of drones is normalizing war in a way that makes greater and greater destruction likely.
I've drafted some remarks for later today in which I look at how we might get to a world beyond war and what a world beyond war might look like. I think properly understanding a world devoted to war is the only place to start. And I think we should understand it not as an entire world hopelessly condemned to war but as a world making the completely optional decision to proliferate war primarily at the insistence of the United States government. Understanding that war is a choice, means that peace too is an available option.
I had planned to leave time here for questions but learned that there's a whole separate section on the schedule for questions, so let me instead begin the topic of What Do We Do About It?
How do you get enough people sufficiently active to push back against war and militarism? Well, we had enough people active from 2001 to 2007 to spread a great deal of at least short-lived awareness of at least some of the evils of war and to force an end, temporary as it turned out, to the U.S. war on Iraq -- albeit on a three-year delay.
And we had enough people informed and active in 2013 to prevent a massive assault on Syria that Wall Street, the corporate media, and all the top politicians in Washington favored and expected to begin imminently.
But by 2014, President Obama, who'd been forced out of Iraq by Bush's treaty, was right back in, and the U.S. was engaged in the same war it had failed to fully join in 2013, albeit on the opposite side.
Yet in 2015 publicly supported diplomacy with Iran was holding off the neocon vision of a war there.
What makes the difference between moments when peace succeeds and moments when war does? Well, it helps when other interests align. Obama wants peace with Iran but Iranian war along with U.S. war against ISIS. The reason peace only succeeds for a moment, though, is that peace doesn't advance beyond a pause for reloading. The U.S. didn't bomb Syria two years ago, but it didn't invest in aid, diplomacy, or arms embargoes either. Instead it armed and trained killers, bided its time, and waited for better propaganda. The propaganda that seems to do best is not that of the humanitarian war but that of the war against evil demons coming to get us: ISIS throat slitters bringing Ebola from Mexico to our children's schools.
What makes the difference in terms of public engagement in the United States at the moment -- and we'd better change this or it will kill us all -- is partisanship. A couple of scholars, Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas have a new book out called Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11. Some of you may have run into them as they did surveys of participants in peace events for years. They found that identification of the Democratic Party with peace was the primary factor in enlarging the peace movement toward the beginning of the Bush presidency and in shrinking it toward the end of that presidency.
So the obvious answer as to how you enlarge the peace movement is not really a secret at all: you install a Republican president. Now, you can debate whether the cure is worse than the disease, but the cure is as certain as Advil for a headache. You want a big peace movement, swallow a Republican President and a Republican Vice President and see how things look in the morning.
Now, determining whether Republican presidents are worse war makers, even with activist resistance, is not so simple and not actually going to help us. Unless we build a peace movement larger and more principled than alliance with either big political party will allow, we're done for.
The top risk from war is nuclear holocaust. That danger continues to grow with active U.S. assistance. The second worst thing a U.S. president can do about war is grab more war powers and pass them on to all future presidents. In that regard, President Obama has outdone President Bush. Lying to Congress is now totally routine: Congress and the United Nations can simply be ignored. Secrecy has mushroomed. President Obama picks out men, women, and children to murder from a list on Tuesdays. The public, the Congress, and the courts have no say and often no knowledge. President Obama has dramatically increased U.S. weapons sales abroad -- the U.S. being far and away the top supplier of weapons to regions that the U.S. public thinks of as inherently violent.
While Obama's body count doesn't yet begin to approach Bush's in terms of people directly and violently killed, that's not a standard that will get us to survival, much less peace and prosperity.
We should not, of course, think of the political party that lied the United States into two world wars, the Korean war, the war on Vietnam, the Kosovo war, the Libya war, and the war on ISIS -- the party that dropped the nukes on Japan -- as a party for peace. Longtime war advocates like Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton shouldn't get a pass. Hillary was instrumental in persuading her husband to bomb the former Yugoslavia against the will of Congress. She pushed for the 2003 attack on Iraq and the 2011 attack on Libya. She tried to get a U.S. war on Syria going in 2013. She pushed for the Obama-era escalation in Afghanistan -- a war that is now more Obama's than Bush's by every measure. Hillary has urged Iran to be aware that she could "obliterate" it. She has giggled with pleasure at having killed Muamar Gadaffi. She's hawkish on Ukraine. But the sort of candidate the Republicans will nominate will be just as bad. The answer to a broken electoral system begins with ceasing to look for new messiahs through elections. Imagine the world survives to 2024 and the Democrats are dedicated to electing a Latino warmonger or perhaps even a gay warmonger, valuing tokenism over human life. I don't think such a world would last to 2026.
But Democratic-party-style opposition to a Republican president won't save us either. Opposing the war on Iraq because of the 3 percent of the deaths that were American or because of the fraction of the financial damage that was American left people ill-informed and ill-prepared to oppose other wars. Opposing the war on Iraq because the war on Afghanistan was more important, was not a way to end war. Opposing the war on Iraq because it drained military preparedness was a way to elect a new regime intent on enlarging the military and preparing for more wars. Opposing Pentagon corruption and wasting money on weapons that don't even work is not the way to oppose war. I love the weapons that don't even work, when compared with the alternative.
What should give us some inspiration is the public resistance in 2013 to the so-called missile strikes into Syria, because the support for it was bipartisan, and the opposition was bipartisan. That opposition is what we can build on. But it needed to be far stronger to make its momentary success last. It needed to undo the phony debate between bombing and doing nothing. It needed to make clear the alternatives of diplomacy, cease fires, arms embargoes, negotiations, aid, peaceworkers, human shields, journalists, and video cameras, rather than weapons and trainers and war planners and that horror of an embarrassment known as the CIA.
So we need a bigger better peace movement, and we need it allied with other movements, including one to create open, free, and verifiable elections. And I'll talk about that in my second speech.
OK, do you want to hear my paranoid suspicion as to why my first shipment of books arrived here as an empty box? I think I annoyed the CIA. There was a trial of Jeffrey Sterling. Raise your hand if you know about Jeffrey Sterling. He was the CIA handler of a former Russian used by the CIA to slip nuclear bomb plans to Iran in 2000. The plans had mistakes inserted into them, which was supposed to slow down Iran's nonexistent nuclear bomb program, except that the mistakes were glaringly obvious, to the Russian among others. So, Sterling went to Congress with this information, and Congress did nothing. So, somebody went to a New York Times reporter named James Risen, and the New York Times would do nothing, but Risen published it in a book. So they've now convicted Sterling of giving secret information to Risen based on what the NSA calls meta-data. That is, they know Sterling spoke to Risen on the phone but not what he said. Many other people could have told Risen. And it was secret not to protect you and me but to protect the conniving weannie heads at the CIA.
In the course of the trial, the CIA made a document public with certain words blacked out. It was a report on plans in 2000 to give nuclear bomb plans to another country. Well, I wrote about this document and pointed out that the country was Iraq, that not long before the big Iraq mushroom cloud scare of 2002, the CIA had been at least planning to give nuke plans to Iraq. There were two clues, which frankly Encyclopedia Brown could have found quite easily, that made the blacked out country in the CIA report Iraq. First, it was proceeded by the article "an," not "a," meaning that it began with a vowel. Second, the document was written on a grid, with the characters lining up in vertical columns, so it was obvious exactly how many letters had been blacked out. Only Iraq or Oman would work, and Oman made no sense at all.
Of course, my goal is not to annoy the CIA but to encourage those working at the CIA to quit, those funding the CIA to cut it off, and those tolerating in the CIA a secret warmaking machine to at least imagine how they would feel about that if the president were a Republican.
Thanks for being here today.
Wisconsin Climate Change Gag Order Part of Multi-Front, Industry-Tied Attacks
Cross-Posted from DeSmogBlog
On April 7, Wisconsin's Board of Commissioners of Public Lands voted 2-1 to ban those employed by the agency from doing any work pertaining to climate change or global warming while doing public lands related work.
Real-time photo evidence of a cop planting evidence on his victim: Killer Cops like Officer Slager Must be Called to Account
By Dave Lindorff
Locals Protest, Sabotage U.S. Navy Base Construction in Desert in Sicily
There's a popular movement in Sicily called No MUOS. MUOS means Mobile User Objective System. It's a satellite communications system created by the U.S. Navy. The primary contractor and profiteer building the satellite equipment at the U.S. Navy base in the desert in Sicily is Lockheed Martin Space Systems. This is one of four ground stations, each intended to include three swivelling very-high-frequency satellite dishes with a diameter of 18.4 meters and two Ultra High Frequency (UHF) helical antennas.
Protests have been growing in the nearby town of Niscemi since 2012. In October 2012, construction was suspended for a few weeks. In early 2013 the President of the Region of Sicily revoked the authorization for the MUOS construction. The Italian government conducted a dubious study of health impacts and concluded the project was safe. Work recommenced. The town of Niscemi appealed, and in April 2014 the Regional Administrative Tribunal requested a new study. Construction goes on, as does resistance.
I spoke with Fabio D'Alessandro, a giornalist and law school graduate living in Niscemi. "I'm part of the No MUOS movement," he told me, "a movement that works to prevent the installation of the U.S. satellite system called MUOS. To be specific, I'm part of the No MUOS committee of Niscemi, which is part of the coalition of No MUOS committees, a network of committees spread around Sicily and in the major Italian cities."
"It is very sad," said D'Alessandro,"to realize that in the United States people know little about MUOS. MUOS is a system for high-frequency and narrowband satellite communications, composed of five satellites and four stations on earth, one of which is planned for Niscemi. MUOS was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense. The purpose of the program is the creation of a global communications network that allows communication in real time with any soldier in any part of the world. In addition it will be possible to send encrypted messages. One of the principal functions of MUOS, apart from the speed of communications, is the ability to remotely pilot drones. Recent tests have demonstrated how MUOS can be used at the North Pole. In short, MUOS will serve to support any U.S. conflict in the Mediterranean or the Middle East or Asia. It's all part of the effort to automate war, entrusting the choice of targets to machines."
"There are many reasons to oppose MUOS," D'Alessandro told me, "first of all the local community has not been advised of the installation. The MUOS satellite dishes and antennas are built within a non-NATO U.S. military base that has existed in Niscemi since 1991. The base was constructed within a nature preserve, destroying thousands of cork oaks and devestating the landscape by means of bulldozers that leveled a hill. The base is larger than the town of Niscemi itself. The presence of the satellite dishes and antennas puts at serious risk a fragile habitat including flora and fauna that exist only in this place. And no study has been conducted of the dangers of the electromagnetic waves emitted, neither for the animal population nor for the human inhabitants and the civilian flights from the Comiso Airport approximately 20 kilometers away.
"Within the base there are already present 46 satellite dishes, surpassing the limit set by Italian law. Moreover, as determined anti-militarists, we oppose further militarizing this area, which already has the base at Sigonella and other U.S. bases in Sicily. We don't want to be complicit in the next wars. And we don't want to become a target for whoever attempts to attack the U.S. military."
What have you done thus far, I asked.
"We've engaged in lots of different actions against the base: more than once we've cut through the fences; three times we've invaded the base en masse; twice we've entered the base with thousands demonstrating. We've blocked the roads to prevent access for the workers and the American military personnel. There has been sabotage of the optical communication wires, and many other actions."
The No Dal Molin movement against the new base at Vicenza, Italy, has not stopped that base. Have you learned anything from their efforts? Are you in touch with them?
"We are in constant contact with No Dal Molin, and we know their history well. The company that is building MUOS, Gemmo SPA, is the same that did the work on Dal Molin and is currently under investigation subsequent to the seizure of the MUOS building site by the courts in Caltagirone. Anyone attempting to bring into doubt the legitimacy of U.S. military bases in Italy is obliged to work with political groups on the right and left that have always been pro-NATO. And in this case the first supporters of MUOS were the politicians just as happened at Dal Molin. We often meet with delegations of activists from Vicenza and three times have been their guests."
I went with representatives of No Dal Molin to meet with Congress Members and Senators and their staffs in Washington, and they simply asked us where the base should go if not Vicenza. We replied "Nowhere." Have you met with anyone in the U.S. government or communicated with them in any way?
"Many times the U.S. consuls have come to Niscemi but we have never been permitted to speak with them. We have never in any way communicated with U.S. senators/representatives, and none have ever asked to meet with us."
Where are the other three MOUS sites? Are you in touch with resisters there? Or with the resistance to bases on Jeju Island or Okinawa or the Philippines or elsewhere around the world? The Chagossians seeking to return might make good allies, right? What about the groups studying the military damage to Sardinia? Environmental groups are concerned about Jeju and about Pagan Island Are they helpful in Sicily?
"We are in direct contact with the No Radar group in Sardinia. One of the planners of that struggle has worked (for free) for us. We know the other anti-U.S.-base movements around the world, and thanks to No Dal Molin and to David Vine, we have been able to hold some virtual meetings. Also thanks to the support of Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space we are trying to get in touch with those in Hawaii and Okinawa."
What would you most like people in the United States to know?
"The imperialism that the United States is imposing on the countries that lost the Second World War is shameful. We are tired of having to be slaves to a foreign politics that to us is crazy and that obliges us to make enormous sacrifices and that makes Sicily and Italy no longer lands of welcome and peace, but lands of war, deserts in use by the U.S. Navy."
Fabio D'Alessandro in his own words:
Io mi chiamo Fabio D'Alessandro, sono un giornalista prossimo alla laurea in Legge. Vivo ormai in modo stabile a Niscemi. Durante gli anni universitari ho fatto parte di collettivi politici ed ho occupato un teatro da destinare a centro sociale. Faccio parte del Movimento No Muos, un movimento che lotta per bloccare l'installazione e la messa in funzione dell'impianto satellitare Usa chiamato Muos. In particolare faccio parte del Comitato No Muos di Niscemi, che fa parte del Coordinamento dei Comitati No Muos, una fitta rete di comitati territoriali sparsi in tutta la Sicilia e nelle maggiori città italiane.
È molto triste sapere che negli Usa si sappia poco di Muos. Il Muos, (Mobile User Objective System) è un sistema di comunicazioni satellitari ad alta frequenza (UHF) e a banda stretta composto da cinque satelliti e quattro stazioni di terra, una delle quali è stata prevista a Niscemi, in Sicilia. Il programma MUOS è gestito dal Dipartimento della Difesa USA. Scopo del programma è la creazione di una rete globale di comunicazione che permetterà di comunicare in tempo reale con qualunque soldato o mezzo in qualunque parte del mondo. Inoltre sarà possibile inviare informazioni criptate. Una delle caratteristiche fondamentali del Muos, oltre alla velocità di comunicazione, sarà la capacità di teleguidare i droni, aerei senza piloti. Recenti test hanno dimostrato come il Muos sia utilizzabile al Polo Nord (north pole), zona strategica. Insomma, il Muos servirà da supporto a qualunque conflitto Usa nel mediterraneo e nel medio e lontano oriente. Il tutto nel tentativo di automatizzare la guerra, affidando la scelta dei bersagli alle macchine. Un'arma strategica e fondamentale per i prossimi conflitti e per tenere sotto controllo un'area ormai destabilizzata.
Ci sono molti motivi per opporsi: anzitutto la comunità locale non è stata avvisata dell'installazione. Le antenne Muos sorgono all'interno di una base militare USA (non Nato) presente a Niscemi dal 1991. La base è stata costruita all'interno di una riserva naturale (regional park) distruggendo sughere (oak) millenarie e devastando il paesaggio a causa delle ruspe che hanno sbancato una collina. La base è più grande della stessa città di Niscemi, la città più vicina all'installazione. La presenza delle antenne mette a serio rischio un habitat delicato, fatto da flora e fauna presenti solo in questo territorio. Inoltre nessuno studio è stato mai fatto circa la pericolosità delle onde elettromagnetiche emesse, né per quanto riguarda la popolazione animale nè per quanto riguarda gli abitanti e i voli civili dell'aeroporto di Comiso, distante circa 20 km dalle antenne. All'interno della base sono già presenti 46 antenne che superano i limiti previsti dalla legge italiana. Inoltre, da convinti antimilitaristi, riteniamo che non si possa militarizzare ulteriormente il territorio, avendo già la base di Sigonella e altre installazioni militari USA in Sicilia. Non vogliamo essere complici delle prossime guerre, non vogliamo diventare obiettivo sensibile per chiunque intenda colpire gli Usa.
Contro la base sono state fatte diverse azioni: abbiamo più volte tagliato le reti di recinzione, abbiamo 3 volte invaso la base in massa, in particolare per ben due volte siamo entrati dentro in migliaia di manifestanti. Abbiamo effettuato dei blocchi stradali per vietare l'ingresso agli operai e ai militari americani. Inoltre sono stati fatti dei sabotaggi riguardanti le fibre ottiche di comunicazione e molte altre azioni.
Siamo in costante contatto con i No Dal Molin, e conosciamo bene la loro storia. La "company" che sta realizzando il Muos, la Gemmo SPA, è la stessa azienda che ha realizzato i lavori del Dal Molin e attualmente è indagata a seguito del sequestro del cantiere Muos da parte dei giudici di Caltagirone. Chiunque provi a mettere in dubbio la legittimità delle basi militari americane in Italia è costretto a fare i conti con la politica, di destra e di sinistra, da sempre filo-Nato. Anche in questo caso i primi sponsor del Muos sono stati i politici, così come accadde con il Dal Molin. Spesso incontriamo delegazioni di attivisti di Vicenza e per 3 volte sono stato ospite dei No Dal Molin.
Molte volte i consoli Usa sono venuti a Niscemi ma non ci hanno mai permesso di parlare con loro. In nessun modo abbiamo contatti con senatori Usa, nessuno ci ha mai chiesto un incontro.
Abbiamo contatti diretti con i No Radar della Sardegna, uno degli ingegneri della lotta No Radar ha lavorato (gratis) per noi. Conosciamo le altre questioni contro le basi Usa nel mondo e, grazie ai No Dal Molin e David Vine, siamo riusciti a realizzare alcuni meeting virtuali. Inoltre, grazie all'appoggio di Bruce Gagnon del Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space stiamo cercando di ottenere contatti con gli abitanti delle Hawaii e di Okinawa.
L'imperialismo che gli Usa obbliga ai paesi che hanno perso la seconda guerra mondiale è vergognoso. Siamo stanchi di dover essere schiavi di una politica estera per noi folle, che ci obbliga ad enormi sacrifici e che rende la Sicilia e l'italia non più terre di accoglienza e di pace ma terre di guerra, deserti in uso alla marina statunitense.
Ukraine News - Apr 10, 2015
Ukraine outlaws Communist names in fresh break with Soviet past, It also bans Nazi symbols and propaganda - Yahoo News
Decommunisation: Dismantlement of monuments, all cities and streets with Soviet names to be renamed - EN.Censor.net
Poroshenko: Hitler and Stalin to blame for World War II - UNIAN news
VIDEO (English Subs): Poroshenko blames Hitler and Stalin for outbreak of WWII - YouTube
Ukraine's Parliament Votes To Open Soviet-Era KGB Archives To Public - ibtimes.com
Ukraine recognizes ultranationalists as freedom and independence fighters, Organizations include the UPA and OUN - Sputnik
Historian on the legal status of Ukrainian independence fighters: Was this crude distortion of the past really necessary? Can one legislate historical events in such a fashion? - ukraineanalysis
Martial law bill passed in first reading by Verkhovna Rada - Russia Beyond The Headlines
New Martial Law Lets Poroshenko Seize Assets at Will - offguardian
Ukraine sets sights on joining NATO - Reuters
Ukraine to sign new cooperation agreements with NATO: PM - Global Times
Ukrainian Armed Forces working towards meeting NATO military standards: Poltorak - interfax.com
Ukroboronprom to shift to NATO arms production standards by 2019 - Russia Beyond The Headlines
US, Russian war games rekindle Cold War tensions in Eastern Europe amid Ukraine crisis - Fox News
Russian Defense Ministry: NATO needs Ukraine crisis to justify its existence - TASS
Russia Warns US That It Can Counter Its Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems: Sees PGS Of US As A Serious Threat - ibtimes.com
Russian Missile Operators Brought Up to Speed on Iskander-M - Sputnik International
As Russia Improves Its Surface-to-Air Missiles, US Looks To Counter - Defense One
Amnesty International reports execution-style killings of captured Ukrainian soldiers - Reuters
Amnesty: Separatists must urgently remove from their ranks anyone suspected of war crimes and cooperate with an investigation - Amnesty
Interview with Amnesty official on the executed Ukrainian soldiers, 'I must emphasize that we have evidence of this happening on both sides' - rferl
'I kill if I want to': Russian rebel commander 'Motorola' says he shot dead 15 Ukrainian POWs (VIDEO) - mashable.com
Ukrainian rebel 'Motorola' can officially be considered a war criminal now (VIDEOS) - Ukraine@war
Ukraine separatist leader Zakharchenko warns of possible return to war - Yahoo News
Pro-Russian Rebels Told: Major Attack on Ukraine Imminent - newsweek.com
East Ukraine Ceasefire Violations Increase Near Mariupol As Pro-Russian Rebels Prepare For Combat - ibtimes.com
OSCE: Ukrainian forces moving new heavy weaponry to buffer zone in Donbas - InSerbia News
Fortification work on demarcation line in Donbas to cost UAH 1 bln: ATO deputy commander - interfax.com
OSCE mission reports increase in ceasefire violations in Donbas - interfax.com
Two Ukrainian servicemen killed in past 24 hours-military spokesman (VIDEO) - uatoday.tv
Main players in Ukraine debt battle prepare to face off - Reuters
Ukraine Creditor Group Has Plan to Avoid Writedown in Debt Talks - Bloomberg Business
IMF expects Ukraine agreement with creditors by June - Reuters
Ukraine's Tanking Economy, Car-Production Plunges 96% And Many Banks Also Fail - Dissident Voice
Ukraine's exhausted economy to rely on agriculture in Q2 - Reuters
Ukraine: Another crisis for ′Europe′s bread basket′ - DW.DE
Ukraine's cash-strapped Metinvest announces default, seeks breather from debt repayments - Reuters
Ukraine Seeks to Scrap Utility Sales in Move Against Tycoons - Bloomberg Business
Ukraine: Poroshenko earned $16 mln last year: report - InSerbia News
VIDEO: Supposedly another vid of Ukrainian radicals humiliating an allegedly corrupt official, in Ivano-Frankivsk. Nasty - Shaun Walker on Twitter
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