The Anti-War Movement is Dead

Chris hedges at Truthdig has an important article-- not just about the anti-war movement-- but also the privatization of the federal government.  It's not good news, but it's news we've got to know.


As an anti-poverty activist, the following paragraph jumped out at me:

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.

(Congratulations, by the way, to Truthdig for winning the Webby award for best political blog.)

Veterans Day: may they all come home (and always HAVE a home)

I saw some of Springfield's Veterans Day parade today as marchers kicked off from State and Federal Streets.

Only a few blocks away, at Worthington St. shelter, I knew that more than a quarter of the homeless men and women "living there" are veterans.

Most are Vietnam Era vets, but the Veterans Administration says there are more than 2,000 vets of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are homeless right now in this country.

War-- especially the kind of wars we're fighting right now-- seem to take the ground out from under the feet of those who serve.  Many never find their footing again.



Maybe next year, with some special outreach to those homeless vets, they can be included in the day's events.

This lovely video is of a returning soldier being greeted by his dog.  The next video is of returning soldiers surprising their kids.  Yes, it's a bit manipulative, but  it helps us civilians remember that it's real people with real families who are sacrificing-- and being sacrificed-- in these unnecessary and unending wars,

Enough! End this stupid war!

This is not quite the post I was going to write for Bloggers Unite's BlogBlast For Peace ~ Dona Nobis Pacem, which is today.  I was going to start by writing about the "Withdrawal from Iraq" widget at the top right corner of my blog and how just about every day I think about removing it because somehow it seems to imply that I am patiently waiting another seven hundred and eighty-seven days for our troops (at least in Iraq) to come home.  I don't feel patient at all.

I returned home tonight to news that an Army major and psychiatrist at Fort Hood had shot and killed 11 soldiers and had wounded 31 others before being shot dead himself. There will be much discussion over the next week about the stress our soldiers are under, how frequently they are deployed and what a difficult time they are having re-adjusting to civilian life.  And then will everything settle down again, a new story for the media and our momentarily heightened consciousness of the insanity of these wars sinking back into our everyday reality?  God, I hope not.

 The great majority of  us in this country want these wars to end-- that's at least part of the reason so many voted for Barack Obama.   So why the hell isn't it happening?  Instead, Obama contemplates sending more men and women-- our children, our parents, our brothers and sisters-- to Afghanistan.

Eight years of war.  More than 5,000 troops killed.  Hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.  And nothing to show for it.  Weren't we supposed to be after the terrorists who attacked us on September 11?  Why wasn't this treated as a criminal matter instead of dragging the nation into war?

I know it's hard to keep the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the forefront of our minds when so many of us are struggling just to make ends meet.  Not long ago General David Grange said that the military is at war but the nation is not.  I beg to differ.  The cost of both wars is approaching $1 trillion and I can only begin to imagine the number of small businesses that could have stayed open and the jobs that could have been saved with that money.

Are we really committed to a war on terror?  If so, there are better ways to do it.  New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff made some interesting calculations last month:  for the cost of a single soldier in Afghanistan for a year, we could build twenty schools.  Educated people are essential for a free society, and if we'd started building schools in Afghanistan eight years ago, we could pretty much guarantee the creation of an extremism-free generation.

So what are we to do?  MoveOn, once a key leader in the anti-war movement, seems to have moved on to health care.  United for Peace and Justice is urging us to take action both before and after Obama sends more troops to Afghanistan, as if such action is inevitable. Only A.N.S.W.E.R. is calling for national days of action and mobilization, on March 19 and 20th.

I'm a community organizer, but right now I just don't know how we can get enough power to enforce our common will on the government of this country.  I do know that on November 13th, at 3 p.m, a march against the war will start at Arise for Social Justice, 467 State St., Springfield ,Masasachusetts, before heading down to the steps of City Hall.  And tomorrow at noon I'm going to stand on the corner of State and Federal Streets and say, Enough of this stupid war.  If you're in town, come join me.  It may not be much, but it's better than remaining silent.

How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate

NYTimes had a story Monday that should be required reading by all media and anyone who uses media to be informed about current events-- guess that's just about everybody. It's the tale of a former CIA official who said on an ABD interview that only 30-35 seconds of waterboarding forced the cooperation of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in interrogations at a secret prison in Thailand.. This assertion was repeated by numerous other media sources over the next years

With the release of the recent torture memos by the Justice Department, it turns out that Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times.

"The conclusion that he revealed no new information after being waterboarded appears to be supported by a footnote to a 2005 Justice Department memo saying the use of the harshest methods appeared to have been "unnecessary" in his case. An official with direct knowledge of the case told The Times that watching his torment caused great distress to his captors." NYTimes.

Torture: why is anyone shocked?

This is purely a rant....I am sitting here about as furious as I can be that anyone can act surprised about the fact that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice all knew that Justice Department-authorized torture was taking place. Everyone I know was aware that this torture was authorized at the highest levels.

From the NYTimes: In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

I am particularly infuriated about the officers that were demoted and the enlisted personnel that were imprisoned for crimes that were actually NOT crimes-- in the legal sense, that is-- because those actions were approved by the Bush Administration. Yet no one-- not Bush, Cheney or anyone else-- stepped forward to defend them. They ALLOWED these people to suffer for them.

The lawyer for Charles Graner, currently serving a ten year sentence, plans to seek a presidential pardon. More info on possible appeals can be found at the Guardian.

Now, I understand that the "just following orders" excuse didn't cut it at the Nuremberg trials. But I do believe that the culture of the military makes it very difficult to do so. What do you think?

Withdrawal from Iraq

Having the widget "Withdrawal from Iraq" on my blog is having an interesting effect on me-- probably exactly the effect it's supposed to have! Every morning I find myself wondering what progress Barack Obama is making to withdraw us. (Afghanistan is another story.) Wouldn't it be nice is there was a place on WhiteHouse.gov that specifically addressed Iraq? I've been thru every posting on the WhiteHouse blog but Iraq isn't mentioned; Iraq is listed as on the President's Agenda but it's a simple statement of intent straight from the campaign trail; I suppose I can go thru every press briefing in the Briefing Room although CNN does a pretty decent job of hitting the highlights.

Found another widget...for a March on the Pentagon on the 6th Anniversary of the war, March 21 sponsored by ANSWER. Went to the United for Peace and Justice website, and they are calling for LOCAL actions on March 19-- anything to avoid working with ANSWER. MoveOn.org barely makes a mention of Iraq on its front page, although on another page withdrawal from Iraq is listed as Number 4 of four priorities as voted on by its members. (And if members had voted on the exploration of Mars, would MoveOn be promoting it?) The International Action Center is calling for an April March on Wall St. called Bail Out the People, Not the Banks.

Unity between factions in the anti-war movement has been achieved only sporadically in the last six years.

Some can't forget, some won't forget: prisoner abuse damages all involved

"SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Army Pvt. Brandon Neely was scared when he took Guantanamo's first shackled detainees off a bus. Told to expect vicious terrorists, he grabbed a trembling, elderly detainee and ground his face into the cement — the first of a range of humiliations he says he participated in and witnessed as the prison was opening for business.

Neely has now come forward in this final year of the detention center's existence, saying he wants to publicly air his feelings of guilt and shame about how some soldiers behaved as the military scrambled to handle the first alleged al-Qaida and Taliban members arriving at the isolated U.S. Navy base." Read the rest of Mike Malia's AP story here. Photo from (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)

I'd bookmarked the following photos from Abu Ghriab in Iraq some time ago and found them again for this post. I found that the passage of time made them harder, not easier, for me to look at-- as if these nightmare images when seen in the middle of a nightmare are less shocking than when seen in the cold light of day. Anti-War.com.

How easy to want to look ahead, to forget what's happened. But that would just be crazy. So let me again point to a Care2 Petition to Call for a Special Prosecutor for Bush War Crimes. If you feel the same way, sign it.

My nephew's at Guantanamo-- what I wish I could tell him

My nephew and I have lived in the same house for probably half his life. As a teen he was into heavy metal, sci fi, paintball, martial arts and hanging with his buddies. He also had a wicked tender heart-- still does, I imagine-- particularly for his cousins and stray neighborhood kids and animals.

Two and a half years ago he joined the Navy. Like many young men, he saw the service as an opportunity to have a future and as he'd like to be in some kind of law enforcement when he leaves the service, he became part of the Naval Security Force. Five months ago, he was transfered to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

I had a hope, which I didn't dare examine too closely, that because he was in the Navy, in a bay, that he'd be spending much of his time on board a ship, away from the detention camps.

Well, it turns out that the Navy runs security for the camps now-- it used to be the Marines, but not any longer.

My nephew called home the other day and talked to his mom. Of course, for security reasons, there is much he can't say. What he did tell her, however, was about the excrement thrown at him and his fellow security force members by the detention camp prisoners as they walked between the rows of cells.

Here's what I wish I had a way to tell my nephew-- not only tell him, but have him hear.

You are a good person and you don't deserve to have excrement thrown at you. However, it will be nearly impossible for any prisoner at Guantanamo to see you as anything other than a representative of a government that has incarcerated him for seven years without access to the due process of law. No matter what else you may be, you are their jailer.

The United States has just come through nearly eight years of incredible lawlessness. You were barely into your teens when Bush was elected, but I wish you had had a chance to get to know this country before the war. Perfect it definitely was not. Yet even I, cynic that I am, couldn't have guessed how much damage could be done to civil rights.

The Senate Armed Services Committee released a bipartisan report this week about how torture, abuse and death became commonplace in the prisons where "enemy combatants" were held.

Do you know that many of those held prisoner in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere were incarcerated on the word of informants who were rewarded with cash? For many there was little evidence to begin with, and torture produced no worthwhile information. At Guantanamo, of the peak population of 775 at Guantanamo Bay, only 250 prisoners were still there as of November 20; more than two-thirds have been released.

When torture began in those prisons, high government officials including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales used two main strategies to justify it.

First, they changed the definition of torture so that even techniques that could lead to the death of the person being interrogated were not out of bounds.

Second, they announced that the Geneva Convention did not apply to those who were captured in the "war on terror." You probably learned in basic training that the Geneva Convention protocols would protect you if you were ever captured in war. Many of us with family members in the armed forces feared that other countries would change their definition, too.

You will be happy to know-- if you don't already-- that every branch of the armed forces protested that the torture of prisoners violated the law. According to a New York Times editorial commenting on the Senate Armed Services Committee report, Rumsfeld rescinded some of the worst practices at Guantanamo "only after the Navy’s chief lawyer threatened to formally protest the illegal treatment of prisoners." But "by then, at least one prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, had been threatened with military dogs, deprived of sleep for weeks, stripped naked and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks. This year, a military tribunal at Guantánamo dismissed the charges against Mr. Qahtani."

The bottom line, of course, is that the armed forces must obey the Commander-in-Chief, and you must obey your commanding officers. But how I wish you weren't there, at Guantanamo, in an environment drenched in the moral corruption of torture. Affairs may have improved, but the past cannot be undone. When the a prisoner at Guantanamo looks at you, he sees all seven years of his incarceration, every humiliation he and his fellow prisoners have suffered, every pain, every snarling military dog, every sleepless night. He does not see the nephew with a tender heart that I know and love so well.

Please just keep remembering who you are, and come home soon.

Don't forget Iraq and Afghanistan

As word comes this morning that seven U.S. soldiers have been killed in a helicopter crash in Iraq, time to check in on the loss of life so far in our war on enduring freedom.

4,106 U.S. military personnel have been killed in Iraq; 597 have been killed in Afghanistan. Bush and McCain call this "winning," a term that makes sense only out of context: don't forget that all of our reasons for starting a war in Iraq have been totally discredited: no link to 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction, and no hotbed of Al Qaeda activity (at least until after we invaded.)

Even if some of us think that the war in Afghanistan was justified (funny how Pakistan has gotten off so easily), how much more successful would our policy there be if we had spent more on building hospitals, schools, roads and communications than we have on armed action.

While some but not all of our economic crisis can be blamed on these wars, at the least they've diverted attention from taking care of business at home. When will it be over?

No War in Iran

It's pouring now but the rain held off this afternoon long enough for 200 people to surround Springfield's Federal Building. We had speeches, signs, all the usual props that go with an anti-war demonstration...and determination to speak out against the possibility of war.

I won't say that anti-war activists aren't tired....we are. But still we rise.

Half an hour or so into our demonstration, three guys with two sign each stood across the street from us, protesting our protest. Unfortunately for them, that meant they couldn't wave at the passing cars and get honks of confirmation. I don't remember all of what their signs said...some reference to the "Loony Left"...but the one that stuck in my mind said, "Peace is achieved when our enemies are defeated." I guess it can seem that way sometimes.....but I'm more inclined to believe peace is achieved when we can turn our enemies into friends.

Our permit to protest was from 4 - 5 pm. About 4:45, two cruisers arrived and four officers got out. One of them told us that at 5 pm, we would have to leave. Ellen from Arise, one of the planners, negotiated an extension so that the monks and nuns from the Peace Pagoda could finish their prayers. A few minutes after 5 o'clock, we were finished...for the moment.

Tonight CNN's Jack Cafferty reported that U.S. troops serving abroad have donated to Obama at six times the rate they've donated to McCain! Hmm...wonder what that could mean.

Some comments emailed to Cafferty about why:
Michael from Greenfield, Wisconsin writes:
As a Vietnam era ex-Marine veteran with a son who is in the Army and was wounded in Iraq in 2003, I would never give a penny to John McCain. I personally do not know any other veterans who are donating to McCain either. Jack, veterans hate war, wrong wars, and the people who talk so cavalierly about waging them. Usually those who never served during war, or never served at all, are the ones who talk so loosely about war. The veterans who I knew that liked war were either stupid, crazy, homicidal, or all of the above. Where does that leave McCain?

Ronald writes:
As a resident of Arizona and a combat veteran, I have had occasion to contact “our” senator on a matter of interest to veterans. Not only did his staff do nothing, they didn’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge they received my emails (2). McCain can say he is “always there” for veterans, but that is just hot air. Contrary to what George Bush said, both he and McCain opposed the new GI bill.

Shana writes:
As an active duty sailor who has been in the Navy for the entire Bush administration, I am tired - sick and tired of fighting in a war I opposed from the beginning. I did donate to Obama’s campaign because the U.S. needs change and not more of McBush. Who wants to spend 100 years in Iraq if need be? Not me. If McSame is elected, I would have spent my whole 20 years in the military in Iraq.

David from Tampa, Florida writes:
Jack, The reason is the lower ranks, guys with their butts on the line doing the dirty work, want to return home quickly. They will support that candidate who will extract them from harm’s ways, they hope. Higher-ranking officers, who spend most of their time brown-nosing for their next promotion and are in the rear areas and pretty much out of harm’s way, support those they believe will increase their lot in life. Respectfully a Vietnam era vet.

The war that keeps on giving-- when will it end?

Joseph Patrick Dwyer died in a Pinehurst, NJ hospital last week at the age of 31. He was a former Army medic who served in Iraq. He was killed by Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome in the form of a drug overdose. There's more about him at AP.

Joseph Dwyer became well-known-- at least an image of him-- when, during the first week of the Iraq War, he was photographed carrying an injured Iraqi boy to a makeshift hospital. Dwyer's mother says the photo embarrassed him.

Millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, tens of thousands of U.S. military killed and wounded-- and for the most part, we in this country are so insulated from this war that opposition to it is an exercise of intellectual will-- unless you are a family member or a friend of someone serving in the military, and then the war is never far from your mind. How clever this administration has been in hiding the reality of war from our eyes: remember the flag-draped coffins we weren't allowed to see, the embedded reporters, the media's complicity and all the dirty secrets-- the lies, the torture-- that seem like an episode of 24?

On and off through much of my adult life I flashed on two black and white images, both involving hands. First, the white flash of an explosion, then two hands, torn from a body, gripping barbed wire. Next, a butterfly drifts near a trench. A hand comes out tremulously, reaching toward the butterfly. A shot rings out; the hand recoils, loosens in death.

Ten years ago I watched All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1930 movie version of Erich Maria Remarque's novel of World War One, and recognized those hands in an early scene and then in the final scene. It is war as we need to understand it if we are ever to end it.

"It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck." Paul , who once was a boy who collected butterflies before he was a soldier.

Bush is only funny if you like your humor black

I can hear arguing from the offices down the hall where I work. Can't quite make out what they're saying until I hear one woman's voice, suddenly louder and filled with frustration.

"Well, I'm gonna vote for whoever the hell can undo the mess Bush has made!"

Then I realize she must be talking to the office manager of the union headquarters down the hall. The office manager, a sweet and kindhearted woman, is so disappointed that Hilary Clinton didn't get the Democratic nomination for president that she's planning to vote for John McCain.

I've talked to her about this myself, even saying, "Is that what you think Hilary would want you to do?"

"I don't care," she said, "it's just not right, it's just not fair she didn't win. They stole the nomination from her."

So what I feel like doing, if McCain wins, is throwing it in her face every time that:

• A soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan
• A storm linked to global warming devastates our coast (or any other country's)
• Unemployment goes up

Well, I won't go on. And I probably wouldn't do it; she's a nice lady. Just completely crazy.

Not everyone can walk their way out of hunger

For every mile you walk, you burn about 250 calories. How much do North Koreans take that into account as they attempt to walk into South Korea and China? Surely they are aware of the shoot-to-kill orders issued to North Korean border guards. On the Chinese side of the border, Chinese border guards invade the homes of ethnic Koreans living in China who may be harboring refugees from starvation.

Biofuels, increased food demand in developing countries and the high cost of fuel are taking the blame for the current world crisis but there are many reasons more people are hungry right now.

Global warming may very well bear the blame for the cyclone that destroyed 65% of Myanmar's rice fields. That same area is responsible for 50% of its poultry and pork production and 85% of its aquaculture.

Global warming is definitely one of the factors responsible for the salmon shortage that is leaving the Stellat'en people in British Columbia with only one salmon for every twenty-five people, not enough to meet their caloric needs. Warmer waters mean fewer salmon spawn. The salmon shortage has involved the region in difficult discussions over catch-sharing and fishing practices. The Tyee.

The 1,100 inhabitants of Christmas island shouldn't be hungry, but the company the island contracts with to deliver food hasn't made a delivery since January. Planes fly over from Australia once a week with small amounts of fresh produce; lettuce is selling for $11 a head.

While the U.S. may be coming to think of the typical Indian as working in a call center, India still has more poor people-- some 600 million-- than any country on earth. Yet farmers are abandoning their farmland and rice fields because they cannot recoup the cost of seeds, fertilizer and pesticides, much of it a result of patented seeds from multinationals like Monsanto, which forbids farmers saving seeds from one harvest to the next. More than 36,000 farmers have committed suicide in the years from 1997 to 2006, the last year for which statistics are available.

Other people around the world are still (and increasingly) dealing with the shortage of rice and the cost of food, exacerbated in many places by poverty and unstable governments. Boarding schools in Zimbabwe are so short of food they are asking students to bring their own groceries. The Ugandan government said this week that increasing competition for scarce food supplies in Kenya and Sudan are leading to shortages in Uganda, also.

Finally, a full belly is one of the first casualties of war. 130,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria received subsidized food aid last month, but the U.N. agency that provides the food is running out of money.

Solutions to hunger exist, but the longer we wait, the more difficult it will become.

10 things you should know about John McCain

This may very well be the only post I write about the Presidential election; I'm an optimist but my optimism does not come from believing in electoral politics.

However, this week I met three different Hilary Clinton supporters who told me they would rather vote for John McCain than vote for Barak Obama.

"I'm not a racist, but..." is the way all three conversations began. Yeah, sure, buddy......

Anyway, borrowed from Bligbi who borrowed it from MoveOn:

. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.

4. McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”

5. The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.

6. He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.

7. Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”

8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.

9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”

---

Pet cemetery used to cremate U.S. soldiers' remains

If you didn't catch this article in the Washington Post, apparently some American military killed in Iraq have been cremated in a pet cemetery in Delaware near Dover Air Force Base. The base itself has no crematorium for the arriving dead, and so contracted with a local pet cemetery.

The practice came to an end May 9 after photos of the site taken by an Army officer worked their way up to Secretary of defense Robert Gates. The officer had been there to attend the services of a fallen comrade and was appalled to see the crematorium labeled "Friemds Forever Pet Cremation Service."

Five years of war: in case you've forgotten

Won't get fooled again? Some highlights from ThinkProgress' five year timeline of the Iraq war. Check out the whole list.

• MARCH 30, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld: We know where the WMD are
• APRIL 11, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld: Stuff happens
• APRIL 23, 2003: USAID Administrator Andrew Nastios Claims Rebuilding of Iraq Could Be Accomplished With $1.7 Billion
• APRIL 28, 2004: Images of torture at Abu Ghraib are revealed
• JANUARY 30, 2005: U.Sloses track of nearly $9 billion in Iraqi funds
• APRIL 23, 2006: A former top CIA official, Tyler Drumheller, reveals evidence that Bush was told before the war by a high-level Iraqi informant that Iraq did not possess WMD.
• JULY 27, 2007: Baghdad residents receiving just one hour of electricity per day
• FEBRUARY 11, 2008: Tony Snow reveals “80 Percent” of Bush advisors opposed the “surge.”

Which do YOU choose?

Tell Congress, ‘No more tax dollars for war’

On “tax day,” April 15, AFSC and friends will send the U.S. Congress a clear message that tax dollars should be used to address human needs in the U.S. and Iraq, not to prolong the war. Join with AFSC’s Cost of War project in spreading the word about the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars being used to prolong the war in Iraq. Sign our letter to Congress, find how you can bring the Cost of War information to your community, and stay tuned for a Congressional call-in day on April 15. Sign here:

Our Tory at the IRS building, Washington D.C.

Five years of broken hearts

OK-- so one thing I know now that I didn't know then: it's easier to stop a war before it starts than to stop a war once it's started, and it's damn near impossible to do that.

Today I've been remembering what I and so many others were doing-- not so much exactly on March 19-- but in the months leading up to the war in Iraq. Every minute of every day that we weren't asleep was spent organizing: setting up meetings, leafletting, demonstrating, planning for demonstrating, calling Reps. Neal and Olver, training for civil disobedience, phone calling, mass mobilizations, doing everything we knew how to do.

And it wasn't easy, and I don't think we ever kidded ourselves that we had much chance of success, but we had to try.

And it wasn't easy, because let me tell you, people were mean. Bush and his cohorts in crime had done such a good job tying September 11 to Iraq that in many people's minds that to be against the war was the same as supporting the terrorists. But we had to try. We took a lot of abuse but knew it was nothing compared to what our troops and the Iraqi people would suffer.

Then the war began, and then followed forty-eight hours of demonstrations and mass arrests. I've never been much of a one for what I thought of as getting arrested for the sake of getting arrested-- but knowing that the war had begun, there really was nothing left for us to do, for the moment, to witness and resist, and that's what hundreds of us did at Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee and many other places.

Five years. One piece of this insanity that has never ceased to simply floor me is how Bush has been able to get away with it, even when the proof that he lied began to be uncovered almost right away: no weapons of mass destruction, no terrorist threat in Iraq, no ties to September 11. When I think how Nixon was brought down by Watergate, it almost seems like that happened in another world, that we could demand and receive accountability from our government-- not all the time, but when it really mattered.

Five years. In the end, activists have had to return to what we can accomplish, while never being quiet about what we know about the war. It seems like most of the U.S. has finally come around to opposing this misadventure, although I still see people's vulnerability to a good spin. But we are still so powerless to bring this war to an end. No wonder so many people have so much invested in the next presidential election. I myself am less convinced that electing a good Democrat will bring about a sea change.

Five years. I did not choose to go down to the Federal Building tonight to join the Move On demonstration in the rain-- long day organizing, I worked hard, and have to go to Boston early. But some friends of mine who are in the affinity group "8 at the Gate" were arrested at Westover today. And we will all be together again soon on another day.

Eliot Spitzer's Greatest Crime

Eight U.S. soldiers were killed in bomb attacks in Iraq yesterday, but Mr. Spitzer has stolen the headlines.

This week economist Joe Stiglitz has announced the war in Iraq will cost the U.S. people $3 trillion, but Eliot Spitzer's $5,000 dalliance gets more attention.

Spitzer's hypocrisy has hurt his wife and children, but the loved ones of the 33,000 U.S. servicepeople killed or wounded in Iraq feel a hurt that won't be assuaged by a public apology which, in any case, will never come.

Spitzer prosecutes-- and engages in!-- a crime that shouldn't be a crime, while the authors of this country's greatest crime in forty years will retire with pensions and a packed schedule of speaking engagements.

Shame on him, shame on the media and shame on any one of us who allow him to dominate our thoughts for any more than his requisite 24 hours of infamy.