Jim Turpin : Assassinations, Anyone?

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from Assassins / IMFDB.

Due process and special ops:
Assassinations, anyone?

By Jim Turpin / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2010

Every American citizen has heard the legal phrase “due process of law,” but do you really know what that means?

The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause has two aspects: procedural and substantive. Procedural due process is concerned with the process by which legal proceedings are conducted. It requires that all persons who will be materially affected by a legal proceeding receive notice of its time, place, and subject matter so that they will have an adequate opportunity to prepare. It also requires that legal proceedings be conducted in a fair manner by an impartial judge who will allow the interested parties to present fully their complaints, grievances, and defenses. The Due Process Clause governs civil, criminal, and administrative proceedings from the pretrial stage through final appeal, and proceedings that produce arbitrary or capricious results will be overturned as unconstitutional.

It surfaced earlier this year that our President (a former constitutional professor of law and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago) is now authorizing, without Congressional consent, and against constitutional authority, assassinations of U.S. citizens abroad. Dana Priest in the Washington Post reported:

As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 (2009) strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said…

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.

Both the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) maintain lists of individuals, called “High Value Targets” and “High Value Individuals,” whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year.

Interestingly, during George W. Bush’s reign, there was intense and heated debated over the indefinite detention and torture of “high value individuals” at Black Ops sites across the world (Bagram Air Force Base, Syria, Egypt, etc.). Even Obama criticized the Bush administration during the presidential race and then promised to close Guantanamo after taking office. This has not happened and most likely never will, even though intelligence shows that Guantanamo remains a recruiting tool, used by extremists around the world.

There have been a number of reports that show the complete innocence of these accused “terrorists” whether U.S. citizens or not:

“There are still innocent people there (Guantanamo),” Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. “Some have been there six or seven years…” Wilkerson told the AP in a telephone interview that many detainees “clearly had no connection to al-Qaida and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head.”

Glenn Greenwald in Salon (1/27/2010) wrote:

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.” They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations… That’s why we have what are called “trials” — or at least some process — before we assume that government accusations are true and then mete out punishment accordingly.

But now, there seems to be little or no discussion over the assassination of U.S. citizens for their alleged ties to “terrorist organizations.”

The only recent outcry has been from Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) who introduced a bill (HR 6010) titled: “To prohibit the extrajudicial killing of United States citizens, and for other purposes.”

Democratic Congressman Kucinich’s draft bill H.R. 6010 states in part, “No one, including the president, may instruct a person acting within the scope of employment with the United States Government or an agent acting on behalf of the United States Government to engage in, or conspire to engage in, the extrajudicial killing of a United States citizen… As Kucinich points out, “The US government cannot act as judge, jury, and executioner.”

So the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) along with the CIA seems to be carrying out these “extrajudicial” (outside of the law) assassinations all over the world.

Who or what is JSOC?

The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is a component command of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and is charged to study special operations requirements and techniques to ensure interoperability and equipment standardization, plan and conduct special operations exercises and training, and develop Joint Special Operations Tactics.

In March 2009, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh described JSOC as “a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently… They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office… Congress has no oversight of it.

A few months later, when it was reported that General Stanley McChrystal would be taking over command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, journalist Gareth Porter noted that McChrystal had been commander of JSOC from April 2003 to August 2008 and commented that his “long specialisation in counter-terrorism operations suggests an officer who is likely to have more interest in targeted killings than in the kind of politically sensitive counterinsurgency programmes that the Obama administration has said it intends to carry out.”

So JSOC is the assassination squad for U.S. citizens or other “high value targets” of interest.

But does the United States train others to do assassinations by proxy? In other words, do the dirty work of eliminating leaders, politicians, social movements or others that are in direct conflict with our “national interest” or “sphere of influence.”

The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) (formerly known as the School of the Americas (“SOA”), is a United States Department of Defense facility at Ft. Benning, Georgia. This benign sounding “school” or “institute,” established in 1946, has been responsible for training more than 61,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen who have been responsible for some of the most heinous human rights abuses in the 20th century.

From 1946-2001, such infamous dictators (that the U.S. propped up and supported) as Manuel Noriega (Panama) and Augusto Pinochet (Chile) and many others had soldiers and police trained at the SOA. The brutal tactics of “counterinsurgency” taught at the SOA included torture, indefinite detention and extrajudicial killings.

“The U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) used training materials that condoned executions of guerillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false imprisonment” asserts an Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) Report issued June 28, 1996, in Washington, DC. The IOB, a four-person, independent board created three years ago(1993) by President Clinton, is charged with investigating excesses and abuses by the US intelligence community.

The term “death squads” is closely associated with the training received at the SOA. Many of the countries (Chile, Bolivia, etc.) that formerly sent soldiers for training, now have refused this offer from the United States.

To counter the operations at WHINSEC (the new and “improved” name as of 2001), the “School of Americas Watch” was founded by Mary Knoll Father Roy Bourgeois and a small group of supporters in 1990 to protest the training of mainly Latin American military officers at the School of Americas. Most notably, SOA Watch conducts a vigil each November at the site of the academy, located on the grounds of Fort Benning, a U.S. Army military base near Columbus, Georgia, in protest over myriad human rights abuses committed by graduates of the academy.

So are “extrajudicial” killings (code for assassinations) OK with the American people? Most would most likely answer “NO,” but what can you do to stop these abuses by the U.S. government?

A first step is to call or email your congressional representative and insist that they support Rep. Kucinich’s bill (HR 6010) to stop “extrajudicial” killings of U.S. citizens.

Ironically, Abraham Lincoln signed General Order 100 in Section IX entitled “Assassinations” in April 1863 that stated:

The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern law of peace allows such intentional outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such outrage. The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.

[Jim Turpin is a native Austinite and member of CodePink Austin. He also volunteers for the GI coffeehouse Under the Hood Cafe at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas.]

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BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : The Odyssey of Our Winter Soldiers

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Nancy Miller Saunders’ Combat by Trial:
Documenting 20th century ‘winter soldiers’

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2010

Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers by Nancy Miller Saunders. (iUniverse, Inc., 2008.) 591 pp, $34.95. Available at www.iuniverse.com.

Turning the Guns Around: Notes on the GI Movement by Larry G. Waterhouse and Mariann G. Wizard (Praeger, 1971). 221 pp., published at $6.95.

In 1971, my second husband and good friend Larry Waterhouse and I, through a fortuitous series of chances and choices, wrote a book on antiwar activity in the U.S. armed forces for a respected New York publisher. Turning the Guns Around: Notes on the GI Movement (Praeger) was researched and written entirely in four months to conform to a deadline occasioned by the failure of a previously contracted writer to deliver a manuscript.

Following Robert Sherrill’s successful Military Justice is to Justice as Military Music is to Music (HarperCollins,1970), Praeger was eager to jump on the military dissent bandwagon, and to fill the hole in their spring line-up.

Turning the Guns Around gave ’em more than they bargained for. With chapter titles like, “Gen. Baconfat vs. the Red Menace” and “Today’s Pig is Tomorrow’s Bacon,” and copiously drawing from the irreverent and often profane underground GI press of the day, we proclaimed the entry of activist grunts, swabbies, jarheads and/or flyboys, along with some servicewomen, into the ranks of revolution.

Drafted out of graduate school at UT Austin on November 25, 1969, Larry made no secret of his sympathy for Vietnam’s National Liberation Front during induction and basic training. As a result, he spent his entire 14-month military career at Ft. Ord, California, near Monterey.

By the time I joined him the next summer, he’d made the transition from leadership in UT’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to leadership in the Ord chapter of Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM). The group rented a house off-post where off-duty soldiers could meet, hang out, and talk; published an erratic newspaper; and engaged in anti-war actions as well as solidarity actions with, groups like the lettuce-boycotting Farmworkers Union, protesting the enormous amounts of lettuce being served in Army mess halls.

We had each worked with individual anti-war vets in Austin, and with anti-war GIs somewhat through the Oleo Strut, an anti-war coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas, near Ft. Hood, and knew from history the potential importance of rising dissent within America’s armed forces.

Despite rising rapidly to a responsible and even rather sensitive position in Ft. Ord’s payroll office, Larry never earned a stripe, remaining a proud buck private throughout his military servitude. His only bling was a Sharpshooter medal.

We signed our book contract at Christmas in 1970, in a Houston hospital, at the bedside of his Mom, who we thought might not live to see the book (she did). We’d flown to Texas on emergency leave when Gretchen had a heart attack, but tried to save money on the way back by delivering a “drive-away” car to Los Angeles. This became a marathon trip-from-Hell that landed us back in Monterey on Jan. 2, 1971, at about 4 a.m. I fell into bed. Larry put on his uniform and went to work.

An hour or so later he woke me with amazing news: he was being summarily, and honorably, discharged. Apparently the brass didn’t want an active duty private authoring a book about dissent in the armed forces!

Back in Austin, we finished the book, found a place to live, figured out what was next in terms of employment and school, and along the way met and started working with a good-natured Army vet, Terry DuBose, to organize an Austin chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).

It wasn’t long, however, until we found ourselves in the best place organizers can be: not needed. By the fall of 1971, VVAW was an organization of, by, and for combat vets and their spouses, and Larry and I were politely asked to step out. We continued opposing the seemingly endless Vietnam conflict in other ways.

VVAW continued to emerge as a leading anti-war organization, especially as the beleaguered student movement imploded, until the war finally ended and the last U.S. troops came home.

Nancy Miller Saunders’ memoir, Combat by Trial, tells VVAW’s story not only from her point of view, that of a non-veteran “insider,” but also, by skillfully interweaving the stories of veterans, government documents and vintage press reports, paints a collective memoir of a very crazy time. She was not, and does not present herself, as a VVAW leader, but was a trusted collaborator and confidante of many of VVAW’s key players, especially in the Southern region, over several years.

The liberal film school graduate encountered VVAW as a member of Winterfilm, a collective documenting testimony at VVAW’s first nationally-noted action, the Winter Soldier Investigation.

Held in late January and February 1971, WSI grouped combat vets by service and division to give public testimony about atrocities and war crimes in which they had participated, and/or had witnessed. The first panel was made up of veterans of the Marine Corps’ highly decorated First Division that had been in Vietnam since 1965.

From painfully detailed testimony in this and subsequent panels a pattern of officially-sanctioned brutality over overlapping tours of duty emerged, demonstrating unequivocally that the recently-revealed massacre at My Lai had been no accident, and no particular exception.

Saunders describes the haggard, haunted, but still child-like men who made these bloody confessions, and her own growing awareness that these gallant, all-American boys had been maimed not only, all too often, in their bodies, but in their souls. VVAW’s quest for an end to the war was at once a quest for their own healing, and for the healing of a nation.

Describing her journey, that of her then-partner, Arkansas VVAW coordinator Don Donner, and of VVAW as a whole from concerned patriots to targets of government intrigue, Saunders dips willingly into her own interpretations, but takes care to label them as such, urging readers to draw their own conclusions.

Her point of view differs from mine, for example, on the role of more radical anti-war groups, who she generally regarded then and now as “crazies” who drew attention from VVAW’s powerful statements and needlessly endangered peaceful protesters. However, her own militancy was raised by threatening events and the intense persecution of VVAW. This internal shift, from being a total pacifist to someone who, on occasion, could not sleep without knowing that a loaded pistol was within reach, is powerfully evoked.

The book made me remember walking into the MDM house in Monterey for the first time and seeing the sandbags lining the walls to protect against occasional drive-by shootings. The story of her and Donner’s reception by the New Orleans “Red Squad” gave me a chill; the Monterey police department knew of my arrival almost before I did.

If you are among those who can’t imagine what led some anti-war protesters of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Black liberationists, to consider violence, this book is “must reading”! The short version: the U.S. government, through its willful lies, delusional fantasies, and brutally destructive acts, brought much enmity upon itself.

Turning the Guns Around. Dell paperback edition.

Those who read with interest in The Rag Blog about Federal Bureau of Investigation informer Brandon Darby and the impact of his unmasking will be fascinated with the story of VVAW’s snitches. Even now, with the perspective of years and Saunders’ deep research into FBI files, the motivations of such individuals remain obscure, but the VVAW experience demonstrates that this must be a secondary consideration.

Deliberately false “intelligence” was the result of a political program that aimed to destroy VVAW’s credibility through accusations of planned violence and expensive trials, draining group resources. That this was accomplished, in part, through the testimony of paid informers and provocateurs worked eventually to bring in “not guilty” verdicts for most VVAW members charged with crimes, but the damage had been done. The question of how to defend against such betrayals remains open, and urgent.

In the biggest legal case, veterans were charged with conspiring to riot at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. The trial of the Gainesville 6, that then became the Gainesville 8, and of the “Forgotten 4,” involved Austin’s own “movement lawyers,” most notably Cameron Cunningham for the defense.

Saunders recalls the bickering between and among defendants and defenders; between VVAW’s southern regional leaders — most of those accused in the case — and its compromised national office; as well as the convoluted legal wrangling that led to complete acquittal in Gainesville — but only after the RNC was over and Nixon anointed once more as the nominee.

Although Saunders and Donner were not active here, Austin VVAW’s actions are amply chronicled, largely through Saunders’ conversations with and letters from local leader John Kniffen, one of the Gainesville 8, as well as through her direct observations of VVAW actions in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and in Killeen.

Kniffin, a taciturn, wiry, former tank commander who did 32 months in-country, joined Austin VVAW in 1971, and became a force regionally, and then in national VVAW, where he demanded — and got — more democratic decision-making.

His recollections, and those of his widow, Cathy, who continues, after John’s death from Agent Orange exposure, to work for veterans’ rights, brought back vivid memories of actions here in which Larry and I participated, the most awesome of which was a gigantic outpouring of peace and justice forces at the official dedication of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, attended by a Who’s Who of U.S. imperialism, including then-President Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon.

While there are a few errors that old Austinites will readily spot (e.g., the University’s West Mall is referred to repeatedly as the East Mall), it’s also fun figuring out who certain unnamed activists must be, simply from their descriptions.

In what I believe to be an original contribution, using FBI and press reports, Saunders alluringly links dirty tricks played against VVAW with Nixon’s Watergate burglary team. Offices and homes of VVAW members and attorneys were burgled, especially in Florida, where Nixon’s plumbers were based; as in the better-known Washington, D.C. break-ins that ultimately brought down the President, only certain papers were stolen.

In the weeks before the 1972 national political conventions, both of which were in Miami, Florida leaders of VVAW were in discussion with Democratic Party headquarters — one of the targets of Nixon’s buggers — about security for demonstrators (“nondelegates”) who would attend. Democrats feared, and hoped to avoid, a repeat of the 1968 Chicago convention debacle, where anti-war youth had been clubbed through the streets on national television.

Was this discussion the reason Nixon bugged Democratic Party HQ? Did the same crew that burgled Pentagon papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsburg’s psychiatrist’s office burgle VVAW files in Gainesville? Did Nixon hope to tie national Democratic leaders to VVAW’s alleged conspiracy to riot? While no conclusive proof is presented, “coincidences” of timing and personnel movement are compelling. Has anyone offered a more reasoned explanation of what Watergate was all about?

Saunders also presents evidence that on at least two occasions, VVAW’s release of information gleaned from active-duty contacts (the anti-war movement within the military having continued to grow despite its own problems and persecutions) about U.S. troop and materiel build-ups prevented the war from being intensified on Nixon’s watch, rather than eventually being abandoned. This seems a plausible enough reason for the vengeful, plotting Nixon to want the organization destroyed!

The collective nature of Saunders’ memoir is its true strength. By giving free voice to the many vets who entrusted her with their papers, their unpublished memoirs, their own FBI files, etc., she avoids the self-centered quality common in such memoirs, while still allowing herself free voice.

She knows that no one person has the full story, and in fact not even a group of people such as she draws from see everything that happened around them and to them. Part of the immense satisfaction I found in the book came from seeing other views of events I had seen peripherally, in a time that seems both very long ago and strangely like this morning.

In a funny circle-of-life coincidence, a bus Terry DuBose drove with other veterans to Washington, D.C. — a bus belonging to John Kniffin — and wrote about in an epilogue for Turning the Guns Around, pops up in Nancy’s book, stranded by the side of the road, from a completely different source.

DuBose electronically introduced me to Saunders and her husband, Budd — a sometimes contributor to The Rag Blog from rural “Arkansaw” — a year or so ago, which is how I heard about her book, and requested a swap. As a sometimes self-published author myself, I’m happy to recommend this Internet publication in overall quality and value.

You’ll find as many typos in any book these days, and none of Saunders’ are very off-putting. Spelling errors, etc., in sources quoted, add, in several cases, to the authenticity of her documentary. Saunders still sees life through a film editor’s eye, and has a good gift both for description, especially of people and the places where action takes place, and for dialogue, as well as voluminous resources.

Turning the Guns Around was a snapshot of an emerging movement, a Rorschach blot of a moment. Combat by Trial is a deeper, longer, and more nuanced look at that same movement — military opposition to U.S. military adventurism — as it grew, rose, and fell in the 1970s.

Now it is rising again, in our younger brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, who have been to war in the cauldrons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Saunders doesn’t shy away from drawing parallels between Vietnam and the “Afraq” conflicts, and I will not shy away from pointing out that Turning the Guns Around predicted these wars in some detail 39 years ago. Unlike some Vietnam-era memoirs, Combat by Trial has plenty to offer today’s peace warriors.

[Mariann Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin’s underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

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Posted on August 25, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Tom reports on the dueling demonstrations in New York City near the proposed Ground Zero Muslim community center. He discusses the “objectification of Other as evil incarnate,” and points out how it is easier to hate than to love. He quotes one anti-mosque protester, “If you had a Qur’an here, I’d piss on it.” The grief of those who lost loved ones on 9/11 is real, he says, but it is not ideological, and calls for healing, not hatred.

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Posted on August 25, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

A group of protesters — including veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an army wife — protested in Killeen, Texas, against the deployment of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment to Iraq — and temporarily blocked buses carrying soldiers. They were beaten out of the roadway by cops with dogs and automatic weapons, but were not arrested. The posting includes statements from some of the vets who participated.

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RTÉ News : Iceland to Be Free Press Haven?

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

No more of this? Image from Susan Loone’s Blog.

Iceland set to become free haven
For journalists and whistleblowers

By RTÉ News / August 24, 2010

After Iceland’s near-economic collapse laid bare deep-seated corruption, the country aims to become a safe haven for journalists and whistleblowers from around the globe by creating the world’s most far-reaching freedom of information legislation.

The project is being developed with the help of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

It flies in the face of a growing tendency of governments trying to stifle a barrage of secret and sometimes embarrassing information made readily available by the internet.

On 16 June a unanimous parliament voted in favour of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a resolution aimed at protecting investigative journalists and their sources.

“We took all the best laws from around the world and pulled them together, just like tax havens do, in order to create freedom of information and expression, a transparency haven,” Birgitta Jonsdottir, the member of parliament behind the initiative, said.

Describing herself as an “anarchist,” the 43-year-old said she had decided to get into politics to seize the opportunities to change the system in Iceland following its dramatic financial collapse at the end of 2008.

Ms Jonsdottir was shocked to witness the attempts at censorship in her country, which had long been held up as a model democracy.

In the most resounding example, a court injunction in August 2009 forced Icelandic public broadcaster RUV to back down at the last minute from transmitting a report on one of the country’s three largest banks that all collapsed less than a year earlier, pushing Iceland to the verge of bankruptcy.

Instead of its report on the Kaupthing bank’s loanbook, RUV broadcast images from whistleblower site WikiLeaks, which had published the incriminating documents, in an attempt to draw attention to the limits being put on freedom of expression in Iceland.

“Freedom of information and freedom of speech are the pillars of democracy. Now, if you don’t have that, you don’t really have a democracy,” said Ms Jonsdottir, wearing “Free Tibet” and “WikiLeaks” pins on her jacket.

Icelandic parliament deputy Birgitta Jonsdottir. Photo from AFP.

Blaming the threat of terrorism, “all countries are facing new sets of laws which are making it more difficult in particular for investigative journalists and book writers,” she said.

The aspiring “island of transparency” aims to strengthen source protection, encourage whistleblowers to leak information and help counter so-called “libel tourism,” which consists in dragging journalists before foreign courts in countries with laws that best suit the prosecution.

The idea is to imitate and combine the existing most far-reaching laws in countries renowned for their freedom of expression, like the U.S., Sweden, and Belgium.

“I don’t think that there is anything radical in (IMMI). The radicalism around it is to pull these laws together,” Jonsdottir said.

“We have seen that really (such protections) are necessary,” said WikiLeaks founder Assange, whose name became known after his site last month published nearly 77,000 classified U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan.

“That’s our experience in the developing world and in most developed countries: that the press is being routinely censored by abusive legal actions,” he said recently in a video posted on YouTube.

Mr Assange, who spends much of his time in Iceland and other countries where the legislation is more in his favour, created WikiLeaks’ first global scoop in Reykjavik earlier this year.

Locked up for weeks at a time in a house in the Icelandic capital, he and a handful of other WikiLeaks supporters managed to decrypt and post online a military video showing a U.S. military Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad in 2007 that killed two Reuters employees and a number of other people.

WikiLeaks along with a number of non-governmental organisations and international celebrities like European member of parliament Eva Joly have contributed to developing IMMI.

Journalists in Iceland and abroad have applauded the initiative.

“By offering tight protection to the sources, it will be a lot safer to report on abuses in the government or in the corporate community,” said WikiLeaks insider and Icelandic freelance reporter Kristinn Hrafnsson.

“When you know you can pass on information safely, you’re more prone to do it,” he said.

But the resolution will also have implications beyond Iceland’s borders.

“In countries where they are oppressed such as China and Sri Lanka, journalists risk their lives,” Ms Jonsdottir said.

“We can’t help them with that, but at least we can ensure that their stories won’t be removed” from the internet, by posting them on servers located in Iceland where the censors cannot get at them, she said.

According to Ms Jonsdottir, it will take about a year and a half — the estimated time required to change at least 13 existing laws — before IMMI will go into effect.

© 2010 RTÉ

[This article was originally published on August 19, 2010 by RTÉ News>, a division of Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), an Irish national public service radio and television broadcast service. It was distributed by CommonDreams.]

Source / CommonDreams

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Thomas Good : Hatred and Healing at Ground Zero

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Photo by Bud Korotzer / NLN.

The objectification of Other:
Hatred and healing at Ground Zero

By Thomas Good / The Rag Blog / August 23, 2010

See photo gallery, Below.

NEW YORK — Sunday was another rainy day in New York City, as two sides of the Ground Zero mosque issue squared off in dueling protests — two sides who are responding to a catastrophe with two mutually exclusive answers: hatred and healing.

Lost

If volume validated an argument then the motorcycle contingent bound for Sunday’s anti-mosque protest would win, hands down. With loud pipes and shrill voices, the bikers from out of town who thundered down Broadway en route to the demonstration — apparently going the wrong direction — would have the final word in any debate whose outcome is measured only in decibels.

But it isn’t that simple. And just as the issues surrounding the proposed building of a mosque-slash-community center in the general area of Ground Zero aren’t so simple — it’s too simplistic to write off all of the bikers as stereotypic toughs, incapable of compassion or human emotion

Some of them lost relatives in the September 11, 2001 attack on the Trade Center.

A short time after the loud cavalcade drove past this reporter, several of their number, now dismounted, emerged on a street corner looking confused, vulnerable, and maybe even a little embarrassed. It was hard to deny their humanity. We’ve all been lost before — alone, wandering unfamiliar territory.

Us vs. them

To those who see the world from the vantage point of an “us versus them” perspective — there is no middle ground, no room for freedom of religion, no Constitution to defend, no reason to wince at racist epithets hurled at the Other side. To those who embrace an ideology based on interpreting 9/11 as a clash of two cultures, as an apocalyptic harbinger of a holy war — one protester’s angry outburst sums up the world view: “Islam is not a religion, it’s a cult.”

This was the statement one New Yorker hurled at another on Sunday.

And as if this statement was not sufficient to choke off discussion, to demonize and objectify an entire faith, the anti-mosque protester continued: “If you had a Qur’an here, I’d piss on it.”

The Others

The objectification of Other as evil incarnate, the demonization of billions of believers, is not a rational construct but it is one that has currency, perhaps because choosing hatred over healing, choosing to adopt bumper sticker slogans over calm dialogue is less threatening, less intimidating than attempting to grasp elusive nuances. There is no doubt that it is easier to hate than to love, to assimilate rather than to accommodate, to shout rather than to listen. This is the sad trajectory of terrorism itself.

The man who uttered that sad statement, who argued that Islam is not a religion, was eventually quieted by a white-shirted NYPD senior officer. The target of the protester’s venom — who had responded angrily — walked off to join the Other demonstration of the day: the group of civil rights activists, peace protesters, and interfaith clerics who support the Muslims looking to build the Cordoba House mosque and community center on 51 Park Place.

From NYC to Oklahoma — and back again

At the anti-Islamophobia rally, Alan Stolzer of the Military Project asked me a question.

“Has anyone built a church near the Oklahoma City bomb site?”

His rhetorical question was pointed: Timothy McVeigh was a blond and blue Christian. A home grown killer. The analogy was not ideal. McVeigh did not profess to kill in the name of his religion. But in our history other Americans have killed in the name of their faith, some acting in concert with other true believers. And yet in these cases, it was the killers who were judged, not the professed faith, not the religion in its entirety. It could not be otherwise. And yet it’s different for Muslims in America.

Beyond binaries

Somewhere in between the 9/11 ideologues — the Islamophobes and racists who look to burning books as a solution — and the Muslim community left holding a fractured First Amendment are the families of 9/11. Their grief is not ideological in nature but their numbers, their “hearts and minds,” are the perceived prize for those who would market rabid xenophobia disguised as patriotism.

The Sarah Palins and other rank opportunists, none of whom have ever lived in New York, some of whom can’t spell xenophobia — even if they can see it from their back yard — are eager to profit from appeals to hatred and racism. But for those who lost loved ones, healing will have to be accomplished without hate. However this is done, whatever path is chosen, healing involves overcoming hate, not embracing it.

As the rain fell on the protesters who challenge the binary world view, those who want to heal and move beyond Islamophobia and the scourge of racism, as the mainstream media swarmed to get their soundbites from the “pro-mosque protesters” — a man in a priest’s collar quietly held up a sign. It read: “Build and Learn Together.”

[Thomas Good is editor of Next Left Notes, where this article also appears.]

Photo by Thomas Good / NLN.

Photo by Thomas Good / NLN.

Photo by Thomas Good / NLN.

Photo by Bud Korotzer / NLN.

Photo by Bud Korotzer / NLN.

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Posted on August 23, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Barbara Hines is a famed immigration attorney and a clinical law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is co-director of the immigration clinic at the UT School of Law. A two-time Fulbright scholar, Hines has practiced immigration law since 1975, and has been involved in landmark litigation defending the constitutional and statutory rights of immigrants. She and her clinic received international attention in recent years for their work in drawing attention to the T. Don Hutto family detention center in Taylor, Texas, leading to a successful ACLU lawsuit that greatly improved conditions at the facility.

In 2000, Texas Lawyer Magazine named Barbara one of 100 Texas “Legal Legends” of the 20th century. This year the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild named her the 2010 recipient of its Carol Weiss King Award for excellence in the pursuit of social justice through organizing, litigating, and teaching.

In the early Seventies, Barbara Hines was active in the women’s movement and the movement against the War in Vietnam. She was also a contributor to Austin’s underground newspaper, The Rag.

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Alice Embree : Protesters Block Fort Hood Troop Deployment

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Participants in the blockade action at Fort Hood, Texas, on August 23, 2010. Left to right: Iraq Veterans Bobby Whittenberg-James and Crystal Colon, Jeff Grant, Military Spouse Cynthia Thomas and Afghanistan Veteran Matthis Chiroux. Photo from Fort Hood Disobeys.

Protesters at Fort Hood in Killeen
Block buses deploying troops to Iraq

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / August 23, 2010

KILLEEN, Texas — Under darkness at about 4 a.m. this morning, buses carrying the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (3rd ACR) to planes were stopped by a group of five protesters that included two Iraq veterans, one Afghanistan veteran, and one military spouse whose husband had been deployed to Iraq three times.

The Fort Hood Disobeys group clambered down from a highway overpass where supporters held banners and signs. Holding banners that said, “Occupation is a Crime” and “Please Don’t Make the Same Mistake We Did. RESIST NOW,” the protesters spread across Clarke Road. Police with automatic weapons and dogs beat them out of the roadway. They were not arrested.

Deployments are usually scheduled for the afternoon with family members present as soldiers board the buses. Whether this deployment left in the dead of night because of planned protests is unknown, but averting media attention was undoubtedly part of the Army calculus.

As the corporate media heralds the “end of combat missions,” the truth about the troops deploying to Iraq has not made mainstream news. Two more deployments of the 3rd ACR, a combat regiment, are scheduled this week. The total 3rd ACR troop deployment to Iraq from Fort Hood will be about 3,000. These will be added to the 50,000 troops remaining.

“Operation New Dawn” is the new brand for the U.S. occupation in Iraq. As combat deployments continue, it rings as hollow as George Bush’s proclamation of “Mission Accomplished.”

Two more upcoming events are aimed at peeling back the mass deception surrounding the “end of combat operations.”

Dahlia Wasfi, an Iraqi-American doctor, will speak next Sunday in Austin about the U.S. Policy in Iraq: A Humanitarian Disaster. The event is co-sponsored by Texas Labor Against the War and CodePink Austin and will take place at the Texas State Employees Union meeting hall, 5 p.m., Sunday, August 29, 1700 South First, Austin.

The following morning, there will be a press conference at Under the Hood GI Cafe in Killeen that will highlight many facets of the Iraq debacle, including the impact on soldiers, military families, Iraqis, and funding to meet domestic needs. Dahlia Wasfi will speak at this press conference and will be joined by Rep. Lon Burnam from Fort Worth, Texas. Representatives from several groups including Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, CodePink, and Texas Labor Against the War will be present. The press conference will take place at 10 a.m., Monday, August 30, Under the Hood, 17 South College, Killeen, Texas.

[Alice Embree is a long-time Austin activist and organizer, a former staff member of The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York, and a veteran of SDS and the women’s liberation movement. She is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and is treasurer of the New Journalism Project.]

Following are personal statements from four of the participants in the action:

Bobby Whittenberg-James:

I am a Marine veteran of the war against the people of Iraq, a Purple Heart recipient, and a third generation military service member. I joined the Marines in June of 2003, believing the lies about weapons of mass destruction and an imminent threat to our safety. I have since come to learn that these wars and occupations do not keep the people of the United States or the Middle East safe, but instead serve the interests of politicians, capitalists, and corporations: the ruling elite.

These unjust wars and occupations rob the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen of their dignity and their right to self-determination and serve to make the people of both the Middle East and the United States less safe. They also serve to further destabilize a region that has suffered under the boot-heel of western colonialism for over a century. The U.S. Empire also supports both financially and militarily the brutal apartheid regime that occupies Palestine. All of this is done in our name with our money, and I am here to say “Not in my name!”

The recent information leaks about the U.S. Empire’s wars lay bare their war crimes and crimes against humanity. We must face the truth, even if it makes us uncomfortable or shows us something about ourselves that we don’t want to see. When we find the truth, we must respond accordingly. I will not be complicit in the killing of people. Since I do not believe that the government or the capitalists will end these wars, I will vote with my body.

Bobby Whittenberg-James
Disobedient

Crystal Colon:

I was a sergeant in the Army for five years, stationed at Fort Hood the entire time, save two deployments to Iraq totaling 26 months. I was a Signal Support Systems Noncommissioned Officer, coordinating communications for various commands. I was honorably discharged in Jan., 2010, and have been organizing in the veterans peace movement ever since.

I first began to question the war in Iraq during my first deployment in ’05-’06. After my friend Robbie was killed, I was very deeply affected. I started questioning why we were in Iraq. It felt like he had died for nothing. After returning from Iraq, I planned to leave the military. I was stop-lossed and forced to return to Iraq for 15 months, in total held beyond the length of my enlistment more than 450 days. Since leaving the military, I have been active with the veterans peace movement, speaking out about my experiences and supporting troops who refuse to fight.

I am doing this today because I can’t allow this war in which I have fought to continue. I can’t allow other soldiers to make the same mistake I did, deploying in support of a war crime. As a veteran of Iraq, how could I not do this today? For the people I helped occupy, for the friends I lost and stilI have over there, for the soldiers on those buses. How could I not do this today? I should have disobeyed. I should have never boarded those buses to Iraq. I wish someone had tried to stop me.

Crystal Colon
Disobedient

Matthis Chiroux:

I am a former Army sergeant and war resister. I was press-ganged into the Army by the Alabama Juvenile “Justice” System in 2002. While in the military, I occupied the nations of Japan and Germany for more than four years, with shorter tours in the Philippines and Afghanistan. I was a Public Affairs noncommissioned officer specializing in strategic communications. In reality, I was a propaganda artist. I was discharged honorably to the Individual Ready Reserve in 2007.

While I have always been against the war in Iraq, I began resisting it actively in 2008, after I received mobilization orders for a year-long deployment to Iraq. I refused those orders in Congress in May of 2008, calling my orders illegal and unconstitutional. I believed appealing to Congress would end the war. When 13 Members signed a letter of support for my decision and sent it to Bush, I thought we had won a victory for peace. This was more than two years ago. The president has changed, and the wars and destruction drag on.

Today, I am blocking the deployment of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment with my fellow vets and military family members because the wars will continue to victimize our communities until we halt this bloody machine from within. I am putting my body on the line in solidarity with the people of the Middle East, whose bodies have been shot, burned, tortured, raped, and violated by our men and women in and out of uniform. I cannot willfully allow Americans in uniform to put their lives and the lives of Iraqis in jeopardy for a crime. We are here because we have a responsibility to ourselves as veterans and as humans of the world. I will not rest until my people, ALL PEOPLE, are free.

In Struggle and Solidarity,

Matthis Chiroux
Disobedient

Cynthia Thomas:

I have been an Army wife for 18 years. My husband has been deployed three times since the wars began. During his second deployment, he was severely wounded and medevaced to Walter Reed Army Hospital on life support. Even though he had posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury,and suffered three fractures in his back, three fractures on his pelvis, and countless other injuries, the Army deployed him a third time. This was devastating to our two daughters, our step-son and to me.

Three months after my husband deployed for the third time, our stepson called to inform me he was joining the Marines. That was the exact moment I realized that our children would be fighting these endless wars. I decided that I needed to start resisting.

The reason I am doing this today is because for the past three years that I have been speaking out and advocating for Soldiers, things have only gotten worse. I have heard countless stories from vets and activevduty soldiers that give people nightmares. I have heard stories from family members that would shock people awake if they would just listen! Our military community is being destroyed!

If these wars are destroying our soldiers and military families with 12 to 15-month, often repeat deployments, how do you think the Iraqi and Afghan people doing? They have been living these wars 24/7, 365 days a year for nearly a decade! My youngest daughter is an Operation Iraqi Freedom baby. She was less than one-year-old when her father left to invade Iraq. I look at her, and I see an Iraqi or Afghan child having to live in constant fear with no end in sight! I am doing this for our community, for my girls, for my husband and our Marine. I am doing this for the Iraqi and Afghan People. Enough is enough. If soldiers really want to go fight, they’ll have to go through me.

Cynthia Thomas
Disobedient

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Harry Targ : Religion, Politics, and War

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Christians fight Muslims in illustration from medieval manuscript. Image from syllabus, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Sanctioned by a wrathful God:
Religion, politics, and war

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 22, 2010

Childhood remembrances

When I was a kid I had to go to Hebrew school to prepare for my Bar Mitzvah. I confess I would have preferred being in the school yard playing baseball to studying Hebrew. One of my few remembrances from days of religious study, aside from my resentment about time away from the ball field, was reading the stories of the tribes of Israel conquering or killing political/religious enemies. Acts of violence and hate seemed to me to be sanctioned by a wrathful God, my God.

Down the street from where we lived were St. Timothy’s Church and school. The building was an imposing broad red-brick structure. There was no contact between the children who went to school there and those of us who attended public school a few blocks away.

Ideology and the place of the United States in the world

When I grew up, began to study international relations, became an activist against the war in Vietnam, and started teaching foreign policy, I saw the power of ideology in mobilizing whole peoples to hate others. War, while a byproduct of economic interest, was facilitated by ideologies of hate; by creating “the other,” who were less than human and believed in the wrong God.

Millions died in the Crusades, the Inquisition in Spain, the taking of the lands of the Western Hemisphere and Africa, the occupations of China, Indonesia, Indochina, and the Middle East. Most of those deaths were justified by obedience to the Christian God.

In 1996 I was asked to give a talk at a church on “Is United States Foreign Policy Moral or Not?” I went to Ruth Sivard’s compilation of data on wars over the centuries, World Military and Social Expenditures, 1996. I counted up the war deaths of peoples in wars in which the United States was a direct participant, such as Korea and Vietnam, or in which the United States was indirectly involved such as Guatemala, Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. The number of those who died in those wars between 1945 and 1995 in which the United States had a role totaled 10 million.

Of course, participation in most of these wars and covert operations was justified by a mix of secular and sacred terms: democracy, markets, and God. President Reagan had reiterated the religious zealotry articulated by virtually every politician, banker, or theologian who called for U.S. militarism. The United States was “the city on the hill,” the “beacon of hope” for the world.

Lloyd Gardner in his recent book, The Long Road to Baghdad, A History of U.S. Foreign Policy From the 1970s to the Present, argues that there is a vision of global perfectibility behind United States foreign policy from its rise to great power status at the dawn of the twentieth century, to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of making the world safe for democracy, to Harry Truman’s announcement of our great struggle against communism in 1947, to John Kennedy’s “new frontier” and Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam, to the Reagan Doctrine, and George W. Bush’s proclamation that nations are either with us or the enemy.

Underlying all this is the proposition, as Bob Dylan suggested, that “God is on our side.” Gardner writes that “Bush equates American foreign policy here with God’s will… God is on the side of justice; America has chosen the side of justice as its goal; therefore, God will bless American policy. Obstacles to this mission were only to be expected from forces on the wrong side of history.”

The campaign against Islam in the United States

Now politicians are demanding that the constitutional right of sectors of the Islamic community in New York to build a community center be denied because they offend the sensibilities of the Christians and Jews living in the city, indeed in the entire nation. They ignore the history of their coreligionists who have misused people’s faith to justify conquest and mass slaughter. They deny the fact that the presence of their religious institutions in other lands or located throughout communities in the United States create fear and anger among those of different faiths or no faith.

Perhaps most scurrilous of all is the way that the public mind is being manipulated and used for purposes of political gain at a time when joblessness, environmental devastation, and hatred spread across the land.

The little boy studying the Old Testament 60 years ago was uncomfortable about aspects of his religion that he could only partially understand. The great American writer, Mark Twain much earlier described the irony of religious fanaticism as he reported on a massacre of Muslim rebels fighting U.S. military occupiers at the dawn of the twentieth century in the Philippines:

Contrast these things with the great statistics which have arrived from that Moro crater! There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded. . . The enemy numbered six hundred-including women and children-and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Tom Hayden : Will Iraq ‘Invite’ Us to Stay?

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from Progressive America Rising.

U.S. combat ends in Iraq
But will Iraq ‘invite’ us to stay?

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / August 21, 2010

See ‘The myth that the combat troops are leaving Iraq’ by Col. Andrew Berdy, Below.

While the Obama administration struggles to keep its pledge to end the Iraq war, a behind-the-scenes plan is developing in which the Baghdad regime “invites” the American military to stay.

Managing the withdrawal of combat troops was a significant achievement for Obama. But while media attention focused this week on the last American combat brigade rolling out of Iraq, US diplomat Ryan Crocker was predicting that if the Iraqis “come to us later on this year requesting that we jointly relook at the post-2011 period, it is going to be in our strategic interest to be responsive.” [NYT, Aug. 19]

That means troops and bases, keeping a U.S. strategic outpost in the Middle East. Otherwise, according to some Pentagon sources, the Iraq war will have been in vain.

To prevent backsliding on the agreement to withdraw all troops and bases by the end of 2011, peace advocates and Congress will have to revisit and reinforce those agreements using hearings and budgetary powers.

To review the history: in late 2008, a secret negotiation resulted in what the Iraqis called “the withdrawal agreement” and the Americans the “status of forces agreement.” The bilateral pact was never debated or approved by the U.S. Congress. By its adoption, the Iraqis could claim a victory for sovereignty while the U.S. could declare a diplomatic end to an unpopular war.

In reality, the Iraq war never ended. U.S. casualties plummeted because fewer Iraqis wanted to shoot Americans who were leaving. Iraqi casualties declined from the feverish high of 2006-7, but continue to be several hundred per month.

Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, which did not exist when the war began, has survived. The forces of Moktada al-Sadr, who waged two uprisings against the U.S., are a powerful factor in Iraqi politics and on the ground. The Kurdish crisis is unsolved. Overall, Iran has prevailed strategically and politically.

And the Baghdad regime originally installed by the Americans seems hopeless deadlocked, inefficient, and on the edge of imploding. The only Western winners are the oil companies headed by British Petroleum, now contracting for the Basra oil fields.

The State Department is expanding a militarized “civilian” intervention to fill the gap as Pentagon troops depart. Thousands of military contractors will conduct Iraqi police training, protect Iraq’s airspace, and possibly conduct continued counterterrorism operations. State Department operatives will be protected in mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles [MRAPS], armored vehicles, helicopters and its own planes.

The immediate future is uncertain. U.S. soldiers currently being sent to Iraq are told their mission is “to shut it down.” But the real story is being hidden by the Obama administration’s insistence that its promise to end the war is being kept. The notion of a continued military presence, according to the Times, “has been all but banished from public discussion.” According to one official, “the administration does not want to touch this question right now.”

A war that started with dreams of bringing democracy to the Middle East is ending by keeping plans for more troops hidden from American voters during an election year. Sound familiar?

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His books include The Port Huron Statement, Street Wars and The Zapatista Reader. He is a contributor to Progressive America Rising, where this article also appears.]

The myth that the combat
Troops are leaving Iraq

By Col. Andrew Berdy, U.S. Army (ret.)

Can you explain to me how, or why, the myth of “all combat troops out of Iraq” is allowed to be perpetuated by the press, much less our senior military leadership? Yes, the mission has changed. But units like my son’s Stryker Brigade (not the one that just left!) are, and always will be, combat infantry units.

This is fiction pure and simple. I just don’t get how the nation has swallowed this and why members of the media are not reporting facts the way they are rather than the political PR message the Administration wants portrayed. Does anyone not think that the likelihood of continued combat operations is a reality? When casualties are taken by these “non-combat forces” will those casualties be characterized as “non-combat” as well?

Does the public not understand that the secondary mission of our remaining forces is to be prepared to conduct combat operations either to defend themselves or to support Iraqi forces if requested? And when these train and assist “non-combat” units have to engage in, dare I say, combat operations, what will the Administration say then?

I can tell you, as a former brigade commander responsible for securing and helping to rebuild Port-au-Prince, Haiti, while we went in prepared for battle, and quickly transitioned to peacekeeping/nation building, there was never a moment that my infantry brigade was not prepared to conduct combat operations (which did occur late in the deployment) and there was never a moment when we were anything but a combat force.

I suspect if you ask those troopers on the ground now they would agree with me and take incredible umbrage with what is being trumpeted on TV and in the press.

Source / The Best Defense / Foreign Policy

Thanks to Carl Davidson and Steve Russell / The Rag Blog

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Posted on August 22, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

MUNICH FOR THE DEMOCRATS

By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver / The Rag Blog / August 21, 2010

In 1938, Hitler and the Nazis were flexing their power in Germany and doing a very good job of scaring the rest of Europe, still scarred by the First World War. By the late summer of 1938, Hitler had successfully bluffed his way into returning the Rhineland to German control in 1936, with an army so weak they were under orders to retreat if the French showed any resistance — which they didn’t. In the spring of 1938 he had annexed Austria, with no international outcry.

Despite the fact that in August 1938 the German Wehrmacht — the army, navy and air force — was in no condition to actually engage in combat with Britain or France, a fact that was so obvious to the German military leadership that they seriously entertained the idea of a military coup against Hitler if he looked like he was really going to go to war over Czechoslovakia, Hitler managed to bluff the Western allies again.

Knowing that the French were in no condition — politically, militarily or economically — to wage war, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to confer with “Herr Hitler” and returned waving a piece of paper and proclaiming “peace in our time.”

Hitler rewarded Chamberlain’s cooperation by upping his demands, with the result that Chamberlain and French Premier Daladier went back to Munich and gave Hitler title to the Czech Sudetenland, even going so far as to browbeat Czech President Eduard Benes — in the presence of the Nazis — into allowing them to sell out Czechoslovakia in the name of “peace.”

Their reward for this appeasement of a fascist dictator and his movement came a year later: the Second World War, with over 40 million deaths worldwide by August 15, 1945.

Over the years since, many American governments have explained away many stupid, even idiotic decisions in international military affairs as “preventing another Munich.” This despite the fact that the facts of each of these situations were never close to those of “Munich.”

2010 is different.

The Democratic Party, after a historic victory in 2008, has been confronted by a belligerent American Right that has pursued a policy of absolute opposition, despite their lack of power, and despite the fact that the Republicans were seen in 2008 as the party that had created the crisis.

Despite the willingness of the Democrats to “reason together” on a bipartisan basis with their opponents — the functional equivalent of the European appeasement of Hitler in the Rhineland and Austria — they have been rebuffed every time and for their efforts they have been portrayed in the (Republican-controlled) media as “ineffective.” Today, the party that destroyed the economy in 2008 and wrecked the country internationally with their ridiculous wars, is poised to regain control — all as a result of bluffs that were not called when they could have been.

And now, in August 2010, we find ourselves in the same position Chamberlain found himself in 72 years ago this month: a fascist movement that has made itself “strong” in the eyes of the public now makes demands that should not be acquiesced to by the Democrats any more than Hitler’s demands should have been acquiesced to by Chamberlain.

And yet, these demands are being acquiesced to. The demand of the Right is that America cease being America, in terms of our commitment to constitutional civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights for 221 years. The Right has created a “nontroversy” (i.e, a battle over something that does not actually exist) into a campaign of fearmongering that might just put them over the top in November. I refer of course to the fight over the (non-existent) “Ground Zero Mosque.”

President Obama declares the proponents of the Islamic Cultural Center That Is Not A Mosque At Ground Zero to build the center as an activity protected by the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom, and then steps back, saying he will not comment on the “rightness” of the project.

The result? According to the Pew Center poll in Americans and Religion, twice as many Americans now believe the President is a “secret Muslim” as believed this patent right wing lie a year ago.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, caught up in a tight race with an out-and-out right wing looney-tune, responds to the looney-tune’s demand that he “state his position” on the nontroversy by agreeing with the Right that it is “inappropriate” for the Islamic Cultural Center That Is Not A Mosque At Ground Zero to be located where it is planned.

The result is that the Right exhilarates in using Reid’s statement to show opposition to the President’s “radical position.”

Governor Howard Dean — a man I used to respect until this past Wednesday — enters the fray unasked and agrees with Senator Reid, on the basis that 61% of Americans are opposed to having the Islamic Cultural Center That Is Not A Mosque At Ground Zero be not located at Ground Zer, and it is “good politics.”

Let us remember that this is the man who — when 85% of Americans were willing to believe the lies of George W. Bush when it came to the Imperial Wehrmacht‘s Invasion of Poland back in 2002 — stood up and said that was wrong, and built a credible presidential campaign from that principled and honest stand.

Do any of these drooling morons really think that agreeing with the Right that the Islamic Cultural Center That Is Not A Mosque At Ground Zero should not be built at Ground Zero is going to give them any sort of political strength? Do they really think that appeasing these scum will give them the short-term political gain they are so desperate to win this November, when the rubes can go vote for the “real” opponents of the Islamic Cultural Center That Is Not A Mosque At Ground Zero that should not be built at Ground Zero??

Eighty-three percent of my fellow Americans had their political heads up their metaphorical asses in March 2003, and today, seven and a half years later — after destroying Natalie Mains and the Dixie Chicks and (among other unnoticed acts) doing their best to destroy me with their semi-literate e-mails and their campaigns to have me removed from the internet sites I participate at for non-political subjects (on grounds of my “lack of patriotism”), as well as harassing any number of other Americans intelligent enough to see moron stupidity for what it was – most of the people who were such true patriotic believers then now breathe a sigh of relief that the final American combat unit has left Iraq this week. So much for believing the majority of Americans know anything when they are being whipped up by fear mongers and professional propagandists.

61 percent of Americans now believe that the Islamic Cultural Center That Is Not A Mosque At Ground Zero should not be built at Ground Zero, because they are being systematically lied to by professional propagandists who have no central core beliefs or principled connection to the truth, but are willing to destroy the country if, in the process, they can be returned to power.

Like H.L. Mencken said in 1924, at the height of another ginned-up nontroversy, the Scopes Monkey Trial: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” The Republican Party has survived on this truth since before they were Republicans, back when they were the Know-Nothing Party who created hysteria across the country that we were threatened with destruction by allowing the sub-human Irish to come here during the Potato Famine. They did it again, with the Poles, the Italians, the Chinese, and anyone else they could call “the other” in their appeal to fear and ignorance.

I have a personal connection in my opposition to this kind of moron stupidity.

Back in 1918, the American people were ginned-up to support our entry into the First World War – a war the majority had voted against entering when they re-elected that narrow-minded ignorant racist bigot Woodrow Wilson (a man who deserves none of the veneration he is accorded by Democrats) in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” To generate support for saving Wall Street’s war loans to the British and the French, the Government created a campaign against “Germans” that is much like the present campaign against “Islam.”

That spring, my then 5-year old father saw his little Dachshund “Kaiser” kicked by a neighbor for being “German.” He had to rename his beloved pet “Teddy” (for “Teddy Roosevelt”) and keep the dog inside for a year to prevent its “patriotic” murder. It was an event he remembered all his life.

At about the same time, in Alamosa, Colorado, my grandfather Harry Wiest had his barn burned down by his “patriot” neighbors, for the crime of having a German name. His 3 year old daughter – my mother – was terrified by the events of that night and never forgot them. For the ten years they continued to live there, she always wondered which parent of which of her friends had tried to kill her.

The irony was that the Wiest family had come to America in 1849 with a Prussian price on their heads for the “crime” of my great-great-great-grandfather Peter Wiest being a member of the Congress of Frankfurt in the Revolution of 1848, when those who really were the “good Germans” tried to overthrow Prussianism and establish democracy in Germany.

And they weren’t the only ones – nearly all the German-Americans in 1918 were either immigrants or their children who had come to get away from the Kaiser Willie the Idiot and the Prussian morons. But they were tarred with the “Prussian” brush the same way that Muslim Americans who came here to get away from the oppressive ignorance found in most Muslim-run countries are tarred with the brush of Osama Bin Laden.

That the American leaders who are supposed to be “the good guys” are trying to appease the unappeasables of the Right this way fills me with complete disgust.

An old friend of mine said the other day that “The symbol of the Democratic Party should not be a vertebrate.”

He’s right.

And what really truly pisses me off completely is the fact that this appeasement is only going to result in the victory of the conscienceless fascist scum in November.

Finally, there really is a “Munich moment” for American leaders to respond to, and they are failing the test.

And these are the people we have to support if we don’t want November 2, 2010, to be the American January 20, 1933. Goddamnit!

Type rest of the post here

Source /

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Mariann G. Wizard : Dallas Activists Honor Marilyn Buck

Posted on August 21, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Poster of Marilyn Buck on wall in San Francisco. Photo from Interchange.

Black August tribute:
Marilyn Buck honored by
New generation of Dallas activists

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / August 21, 2010

See ‘Black August’ by Marilyn Buck, Below.

DALLAS — On Monday, August 9, 2010, I had the honor of speaking at what I believe was the first of many memorials honoring Marilyn Buck.

Marilyn, the long-time political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austin activist, and my friend who passed away on August 3rd, a victim of uterine cancer, 19 days after being paroled from federal prison, was aware of my planned speech before her death, and told friends that she wanted to hear a tape of it. I joked with attendees at “Free ‘Em All!” — the first public event in this year’s Black August celebration in Dallas — that she must have wanted to check up on what I’d say about her!

In truth, Marilyn would have been more interested in what’s going on in Dallas these days, and in who attended this meeting, than in my rather scattered remarks. Not knowing what to expect when I accepted the invitation to speak, even before Marilyn’s July 15 release, I found myself in the midst of a young, vibrant, committed community of eager activists.

The event, sponsored by the People’s Lunch Counter (PLC), Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Dallas Brown Berets, and Prisoners of Conscience Committee, took place in an upstairs meeting room at the Pan-African Connection (PAC), an incense-fragrant art gallery, bookstore, and fount of community wisdom on seedy East Jefferson Boulevard, presided over by Akwete and Bandele Tyehimba.

When we arrived at about 6 p.m. and started getting ready — putting programs in the comfortable seats, setting up a book table in the hall –- someone started playing a DVD about rapper Tupac Shakur; I would like to see this whole thing! Assata Shakur, freed from prison by Marilyn Buck and others, was Tupac’s aunt.

About 50 folks were present for an informative and entertaining program. (Latecomers, stuck in traffic or delayed by stifling heat, came in well after the 6:30 start time.) My hostess, Satori Ananda, a non-stop mother of three and poet-activist, opened with a brief welcome and summary of the agenda, then read Marilyn’s poem, Black August.

Comrade Erick made a brief presentation on the history of Black August, established after Black Panther Party leader, theorist, and author George Jackson was slain in California’s Soledad prison on August 21, 1971.

I hadn’t realized it had been so long ago — almost 40 years — but this short presentation brought the events back to me, and were even familiar to many in the youthful audience. Many freedom fighters, it turns out, have died or faced some great trial in the month of August; yet there are events to be celebrated as well.

Black August is an occasion to learn about such fighters, and remember their lives. In Dallas, four presentations are taking place, as well as a month-long PLC program of political education, physical exercise, and, for some participants, fasting or dietary cleansing.

The final event will feature two members of the Africa family, whose story, along with that of their organization, MOVE, is crucial to understanding the story of acclaimed journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who sits today on death row in Pennsylvania.

Cassandra Guerra, Mariann Wizard, and Charles Goodson celebrate life of Marilyn Buck in Dallas. Photo by Satori Ananda.

Cassandra Guerra, a second-generation Brown Beret activist, spoke about some current political struggles in Dallas, informing those present of upcoming meetings and actions. The knowledge and assurance of all these young speakers and leaders was impressive.

An “edutainment” portion was presented by the Black Chamber Movement, two young hip-hop poets, Sam-U-Ill and Pihon, who each performed totally off-the-hook poems covering history, current events, and future developments with ease. I could have sworn that these young men were both Dallas born and reared, and was amazed to learn that both are actually African African-Americans!

I was next, with a 40-minute speech that was, I fear, all over the place; I rewrote it three times as events unfolded with Marilyn’s release and passing, while I was also reporting these events here on The Rag Blog and at NOKOA The Observer.

It’s hard to summarize the life of a person you’ve known for 44 years in 40 minutes. It’s hard to detail anyone’s political and personal journey, and relevance for today, in 40 minutes. I tried to do it all, digressing from my carefully-scripted remarks more than once. I read from my poetry, her poetry, and her little-known essay on the practice of meditation that appeared in Tricycle, a Buddhist publication, in 2004, one of the most self-revealing of Buck’s works.

I talked about the definition of “political prisoner,” with heavy reliance on former political prisoner Robert King’s opinions, discussing Marilyn on several levels of the phrase. She was first a political prisoner as is everyone living in this society, second a political prisoner because her crimes were politically motivated, third because she was given “special treatment” by political authorities, and finally because, as a prisoner, she continued to choose political activism over passive resignation.

I ended by talking about the defective health care system found in every county jail, and state or federal prison in the world, except for those that may be staffed by well-funded saints. This was an issue close to Marilyn’s heart long before she experienced the first symptoms of the cancer that would claim her, and one many of her supporters will continue to champion. Marilyn’s highly committed legal counsel and extensive network of supporters may have insured better care for her than many prisoners experience, but her concern was always with the powerless.

Past my planned endpoint, I think I won my listeners’ hearts for myself as well as Marilyn with a spontaneously voiced theory about the crucial role of rock’n’roll in revolutionary unity, and a quote from Port Arthur rappers Underground Kings, first asking, “Do y’all listen to UGK?” This is pronounced, for those of you who don’t know (now you know), “oo-gee-kay,” and for some reason the fact that I know this brought down the house. The quote? Not fatalistic, but merely factual, words to live well by: “One day you’re here, and then you’re gone.”

After some lively Q&A, the program resumed with gardening information from Eka, a beautiful dark-brown woman with curlicue locks; I learned later she is a teacher, and would say, from my brief exposure, that she must be a very good one! PLC is working on sustainable organic gardens, to be maintained and shared in by community residents. The Dallas City Council, in response to an evident public desire for more healthy, less expensive produce, is considering new regulations, permits, and fees for community gardens! Attendees were urged to express themselves at an upcoming Council meeting.

Seidah, with colorful locks topping her turban, spoke briefly towards the end of the meeting, reminding everyone of upcoming events, thanking me for coming, and expressing her desire to know even more about Marilyn Buck. She mentioned other political prisoners who need our support.

Finally, Tori, a smiling, cherubic woman, led a beautiful call-and-response memorial, pouring libations to the spirits of the ancestors, of whom Marilyn Buck is now one, to the spirits of freedom fighters everywhere, and to the spirits of the children of the future who will carry on our work. Participants were given small votive candles to light at home.

Later, Satori and her family took me to eat at the Café Brasil, where we were joined by some of those who had attended the meeting and others whose work had caused them to miss it; all were eager to hear more about Marilyn’s life. I moved around our three tables to try to visit with everyone.

Personable Charles Goodson had lots of thoughtful questions. Satori’s daughter and her friend, sitting at the merchandise table in the PAC hallway, hadn’t been able to hear my speech, so I asked if they would like to have the written version; the 16-year-olds responded with actual enthusiasm. Poet Abstrakt and I hit it off right away; this is someone still growing, already with a story to tell!

I was really impressed with the intergenerational acceptance and ease within this group. Satori’s youngest son is already a leader and an avid reader, and not even a pre-teen yet! This is what comes of treating children like thinking, responsible creatures!

The experience left me even more convinced that Marilyn Buck’s real work among us is only now starting, as hundreds of friends and admirers around the world, and those who are hearing about her for the first time, reach out to each other to share memories and discuss her evolution as an activist and human being. A number of creative projects may be in the offing, including, if we are lucky, a collection of Buck’s previously unpublished poems.

Although she clearly wasn’t perfect, Marilyn remained true to her principles and gave herself wholeheartedly to representing them through her poetry, her friendships, her endless networking, and her personal struggles, as well as her overtly political statements. As a result, her presence was clearly felt at this Dallas gathering.

One, Two, Three, Many Marilyn Bucks!

[Mariann Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin’s underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

Marilyn Buck in 1971. Photo by Jeff Blankfort.

Black August

Would you hang on a cliff’s edge
sword-sharp, slashing fingers
while jackboot screws stomp heels
on peeled-flesh bones
and laugh
      “let go! die, damn you, die!”
could you hang on 20 years, 30 years?

20 years, 30 years and more
brave Black brothers buried
in US koncentration kamps
they hang on
Black light shining in torture chambers
      Ruchell, Yogi, Sundiata, Sekou,
      Warren, Chip, Seth, Herman, Jalil,
and more and more they resist:    Black August

Nat Turner insurrection chief executed:    Black August
Jonathan, George dead in battle’s light:    Black August
Fred Hampton, Black Panthers, African Brotherhood murdered:    Black August
Kuwasi Balagoon, Nuh Abdul Quyyam captured warriors dead:    Black August
Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells
Queen Mother Moore – their last breaths drawn fighting death:    Black August

Black August: watchword
for Black liberation for human liberation
sword to sever the shackles

light to lead children of every nation to safety
Black August remembrance
resist the amerikkan nightmare for life

— Marilyn Buck, 2000

The Rag Blog

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