A Vet Reports from the VFP National Convention in Portland, Maine
Submitted by heuer on Wed, 2010-09-01 03:10.
http://bit.ly/c6gzpn
• Swing into Action — Let’s End the Wars •
• Stand Up for Our Soldiers • Bring ‘Em ALL Home •
• Carry It On •
Veterans for Peace — by John Heuer — 31 August 2010 — Perhaps this time the illusion of the good and noble war will be shattered for good . . . For all those we have lost, from every land, I invite you to signify your support for Bradley Manning, Ethan McCord and the bold truth by standing and raising your fist with a resounding presente!
Portland, Maine — I ARRIVED IN THE BIRTHPLACE OF VETERANS FOR PEACE on Tuesday, August 24th for our 25th annual convention. My companion Sue and I checked into the hotel and repaired to the wharf on Commercial Street for dinner at J’s Oyster. At 11:30pm I picked up Ethan McCord, who flew in from Wichita. I met Ethan at the Albany Peace Conference in July, when he gave his first public testimony about his experiences as a soldier in Iraq.
• Bull Pie • Nothing But Build to Destroy •For many months after his discharge from the Army, Ethan found little interest in his personal accounts of his war experience until the release of the WikiLeaks video “Collateral Murder.” The video recounts a “battle” in New Baghdad in which US Apache heliocopters are shown firing 30mm cannon shells at Iraqis walking down the street, including two Reuters photographers. The Apache gunners requested permission to “engage” the pedestrians with cannon fire, observing that some of the Iraqis were armed, although mistakenly claiming that the photographers’ cameras were weapons. (The official US report of the incident falsely claimed that they were being attacked.) In the video, one of the surviving photographers is seen crawling on the street. At that point a van arrives and begins loading the wounded for transport to medical assistance. The Apache gunners again request permission to “engage” from their command center, and destroy the van with a devastating barrage of 30mm cannon fire.
• Starve the Poor •• Get Soldiers Killed •
• Make Lotsa Money •
• Gotta Problem with That, Sucker? •
At this point, Ethan McCord was radioed to bring his nearby ground forces to the site. In the Wikileaks video, Ethan is seen carrying critically wounded children from the van to a nearby Bradley vehicle for medical assistance. The experience for Ethan was a turning point in his military service. When he saw the barely alive children in the van, he saw his own two children, the youngest of which he had not yet seen, since his son was born after Ethan’s deployment to Iraq.
• It all boils down to this •After the video was released to the public, there was a sudden interest in hearing Ethan’s story. After speaking out publically for the first time in Albany, Ethan was interviewed by Cindy Sheehan (see archives at Cindysheehanssopbox.com) and was featured with a full page photo and story in the August 16th issue of Time magazine. It was a great privilege to lend a hand in Ethan’s arrival at the Portland Convention.
• Marine, America’s Greatest General •• He Exposed the Racketeers Who Made Bucks Off Soldiers Being Killed •
Saturday
I arrived early for the 9:00am VFP Business Meeting. I was especially interested to find out when members could speak freely. Before picking up Ethan for an airport trip, I thought to give him my copy of Paul Chappelle’s book Will War Ever End: A soldier’s Vision of Peace for the 21st Century. To my delight, I found Paul and Ethan talking outside the hotel entrance, and readied my copy of Paul’s book and pen. Meanwhile, Shep (the Smedley Butler Brigade from Boston) was warming up his harmonica, and I joined in on a few bars with mine. He sang great harmony on a rendition of Down By the Riverside, then we traded his version of Waltzing Matilda with Farewell to Nova Scotia.
• Say it Loud • Say it Clear •Paul was happy to sign his book for Ethan, and told me that his 2nd book, The End of War: How Waging Peace Can Save Our Humanity, Our Planet and Our Future was also for sale. Departing from my new brother Ethan at the Portland Airport was both humbling and joyous. So much more work to do, so many wonderful human beings to meet.
At our ’09 Convention in Maryland, our NC Triangle VFP Resolution “Jobs for Afghans” designed by Ralph Lopez and co-sponsored by Northern Virginia VFP, had gone down to defeat. I was dismayed by the defeat of the “Jobs for Aghans” resolution in 2009. I took a different tack here in Portland, and offered an opportunity to endsorse, during the 12:15-1:30 Speak Out opportunity. Here are my remarks to the members of VFP, after I returned to the convention:
• Bring 'em Home, Bring 'em Home •Dear Friends,
I use the Quaker House endearment of ‘Friends,’ and bring greetings from the longest continuously operating GI Rights coffee house in Fayetteville, NC, now in its 41st year. My name is John Heuer. I serve with the Eisenhower Chapter 152, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, and co-chair, with Ron Fisher, the VFP War Crimes Prosecution Work Group. I rise today to speak to the issue.
Millions of Americans felt a wave of revulsion when Seymour Hersch broke the My Lai story during the Viet Nam war. The My Lai massacre shattered the illusion that the US war against Viet Nam was a good and noble cause.
• Release the Dove and Let It Fly Free •With the recent release of the WikiLeaks collateral murder video from New Baghdad, we have a glimmer of opportunity to shatter the same old illusion. The man accused of releasing the classified video, Bradley Manning, recipient of the VFP Courage of Conscience Award here this morning, is behind bars in Quantico, VA. He faces life in prison or possible execution for telling the truth about the carnage that is US warfare in Iraq. Forty years ago, Hugh Thompson and his crew rescued some of the still living My Lai villagers. For his efforts, he faced death threats for many years. Hugh Thompson was the hero of My Lai for demanding that the horrific truth be exposed, and those responsible be held accountable. Ethan McCord, who spoke to us here in Portland, and is now on his way back home to Wichita, was the soldier seen in the video, carrying wounded children for desperately needed medical assistance. Bradley Manning and Ethan McCord deserve our strongest possible support.
Each of us can meet with our congress members to demand that Congressional hearings are called to investigate these crimes, these collateral murders.
Dear Friends,
Perhaps this time the illusion of the good and noble war will be shattered for good.
Tonight we’ll speak the names of our fallen comrades. For all those we have lost, from every land, I invite you to signify your support for Bradley Manning, Ethan McCord and the bold truth by standing and raising your fist with a resounding presente!
When this call was made, the members present stood, raised their fists, and shouted a resounding “Presente!” A proud moment.
NJ ONE PLAN on the Move! Statewide Conferences Saturday Sept. 11th and Oct. 9th! Garden State Leads the Way to Medicare for All!
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Mon, 2010-08-30 03:52.
• UPDATE •
• The Nation Demands Medicare for ALL •
New Jersey One Plan Coalition — by Ray Stever — 30 August 2010 — A Message from New Jersey One Plan, One Nation Coalition President Ray Stever
NJ One Plan One Nation Citizen Leaders:
First, thanks to all who came out to our meeting on July 24th. We now have committees up and running, and we are moving forward with our work plan for 2010-2011. If you haven't yet signed up for one of the committees, please learn what they are and what they will be doing by contacting Paula Friedman at njhcnow@gmail.com.
Our next two state-wide leadership New Jersey One Plan meetings are Saturday, September 11th and Saturday, October 9th. Both will be at 10 AM at the UAW Hall, 56 Vineyard Road in Edison. Click DIRECTIONS. To register click RSVP.
We ask all committees to meet before September 11th, to prepare to report on their plans and progress. We have made arrangements for the UAW Hall to open at 9:30 AM on September 11 so that committees can meet in person prior to the state-wide meeting at 10 AM.
Second, we have firmed up mailing and telephone in formation for the new NJ One Plan, One Nation office in Newark. The address is:
60 Park Place, #504
Newark, NJ 07102-5513
Telephone 973.623.8081
(Voice mail may not be in place yet, but should be very soon.)
We owe thanks to CWA Local 1081 for making this office space available to us.
Third, we need your help tabling at the Rutherford Fair on Labor Day, September 6th. Please contact Ray Stever at rayiuc@aol.com if you can give a little time to help spread the word on Medicare for All. One web site refers to the Rutherford Labor Day Street Fair as the “mother of all street fairs, ...with 200+ vendors ...”
Fourth, we want to give recognition to one of our members, Lynn Petrovich, who is getting some attention for her work on Medicare for All. Healthcare-NOW helped Lynn get an interview with OpEdNews on August 24th, 2010. To read the interview click http://bit.ly/b46OXk.
Lynn is also using her CPA skills to review financial reports that non-profit hospitals must file with the federal government. She is uncovering very disconcerting information that we will learn about soon.
Looking forward to seeing all of you on the 11th, if not before!
Solidarity,
Ray Stever, President
• The War Money Can Pay All the Costs of Medicare for All • And Many Other Programs Too •New Jersey One Plan — by Tom Knoche and Ray Stever — 20 July 2010 — We need YOU to get involved. We need all hands on deck to advance the ambitious work program we have chosen for ourselves.
IT’S TIME TO BUILD ON THE GOOD WORK EVERYONE DID at our Strategy Conference on June 12th. We have clear direction for our work, and now we have to get busy!! We need to pull together state-level single payer legislation, and then start the process of getting it through the legislative process. No easy task. Then we’ll use the win-win strategy, focused on single payer savings for local governments, to build support for both state-wide single payer legislation, and expanding Medicare to cover everyone at the federal level.
The main agenda item are to review a draft work program for the coming year that outlines tasks, sets benchmarks, and distributes responsibility for the work necessary to implement the strategy decisions we made on June 12th. We need YOU to get involved. We need all hands on deck to advance the very ambitious work program we have chosen for ourselves.
New Jersey One Plan One Nation had its first state-wide strategy conference on June 12th, 2010 at the UAW Union Hall in Edison, NJ. Our challenge: we are dissatisfied with the new healthcare bill, so what do we do now?
Rate the video HERE!
The day began at noon with a registration period that also allowed all participants to purchase 50/50 raffle tickets that would be drawn at the end of the conference, as well as discounted Healthcare-NOW T shirts. A literature table provided anyone interested in a wide variety of material including petitions for national health insurance. Every conference attendee also received an information packet that detailed the day’s schedule, and provided back-up information for each presentation.
After a welcome and overview of the current healthcare situation, by NJOPON Chair, Ray Stever, everyone heard a 5 minute recording Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) made especially for this event. Re. Kucinich’s address can be viewed on our web site at (link). Our first presenter, Dr. William Thar (PNHP-NJ), discussed the deficiencies in the reform legislation passed in March, and changes necessary to improve the healthcare system. A Q&A session follow-up lasted until lunch.
After lunch, Tom Knoche, coordinator of Healthcare-NOW’s Win-Win campaign, gave brief overviews of the various state-wide campaigns, discussed NJ Single Payer Resolutions, and Healthcare-Now’s Win-Win Campaign. He introduced each panelist, each one to address one of the four strategy options that were under consideration.
• Universal Medicare for All •Marty Schor (Healthcare 4 All PA) talked about PA’s Single Payer achievements and how they can be expanded. Attorney, Bennet Zurofsky, addressed the pros and cons (mostly cons) of sponsoring a NJ ballot initiative on single payer. Mr. Zurofsky cautioned that county-wide is probably a negative because these governments do not have the authority to enact a state-wide program. The State legislature would be able to place a question on the ballot, but the question is will there be enough votes to override a veto should the governor not sign the bill. Tom Knoche outlined how the win-win campaigns work, demonstrating the local government savings that result from single-payer, and using them to win support resolutions from local government bodies.
Ray was the final speaker, and he spoke about the Assembly/Senate passage of the Single Payer Resolutions. A Q&A followed these speakers. After which there were break out sessions to share ideas with everyone. What follows are group suggestions on where we go from here:
1. Concentrate on passing Single Payer at the state level via Win-Win Campaign.
2. Replace use of “Single Payer” with “Medicare for All”
3. Economic Impact Study of “Medicare for All.” (see VT and PA)
4. Market Win-Win Campaign to State organizations: NJ Taxpayer Association and League of Municipalities
5. Expand outreach to nurses, unions, healthcare professionals via rank & file, and also grassroots.
6. Reach out to HCAN
7. Build on Trenton Rally
8. Press Releases re health coverage issues
9. card given to everyone with benefit details
• A Healthy Nation Provides Health Care for All •• It’s the American Way •
Matthew Shapiro from NJOPON moved to accept the ideas. Bonnie Shapiro, also from NJOPON seconded, and the group unanimously agreed. The first conference of NJOPON adjourned at 5:15 PM.
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Sun, 2010-08-29 04:49.
http://bit.ly/dtMVx8
The Tea Party is Today’s Fifth Column:
“People who act traitorously and subversively out of secret sympathy or support for an enemy of their country”
[Editor’s Note: We have maintained for years — and in complete agreement with primo culture analyst Mark Crispin Miller — that America’s oligarchy, backed by billions of their dollars, put in place an operation. Its objective is to subvert the United States and to replace our republic by taking complete control of our country through the imposition of “a Theocratic Christianist Corporate Fascist Government.”
The notion of surreptitiously taking over our country is not new; it goes back to the to the 1880s, when the fabled robber barons started believing that bullying politicians wasn’t enough, and the solution for them was to control everything and to simply “buy” the whole country. The notion grew more sophisticated during Theodore Roosevelt’s “trust-busting” period, and by the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, as he faced the greatest economic crisis in history, worse than the depression of 1897, and he proposed greater regulations on banks plus massive public works programs, the oligarchs, determined the time was right to impose their brand of radical discipline on America by effectively staging a coup to get rid of Roosevelt and to overthrow the United States, replacing it with an American model of Naziism. The videos here are very informative about this Plot to Take the White House. Pay particular attention to the information about the Liberty League, for it was its time’s version of today’s Tea Party. It’s a supreme irony that in the end, FDR saved private enterprise capitalism, yet the oligarchs don’t understand this fact even now.
In a manner eerily similar to the novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” by Sinclair Lewis, which predicted the rise of fascism in the USA way back in 1936, and to Jack London’s prophetic “The Iron Heel,” published in 1908, no less, we see the growth of the Tea Party as the Fifth Column front for this “project for a new American Century.”
• It’s not dark yet • But it’s getting there •This is not a surprise to many of us. What may have many people off-balance is the speed of this movement as it develops. Over the regimes “ruling” the United States since Jimmy Carter’s administration, we witness a momentum that began building in a serious and deliberate way in the withering of fundamental rights, and the denial of information necessary to make informed judgments, during the Reagan and Bush and Clinton presidencies, and then in the rabid terms of Bush the younger and now in President Obama’s administration, the floodgates opened with the Patriot Act and the Continuity of Government plans pushed into place by Dick Cheney (without the approval of an informed congress), the approval of government mandated snooping into anyone’s life with no real probable cause, the destruction of comitatus as the military infiltrates domestic police agencies everywhere in our land, and you know you could go on forever on all this.
We believe all people should watch out when flimflam hucksters come along slapping Jesus and the flag together, and that’s exactly where the Tea Party’s being led. We know there are good-hearted souls trying in their confused way to figure things out, make sense of things, and find some stability and reassurance in their lives — and isn’t that true of us all? But none of this changes the fact that in the main Tea Partyers are intentionally misled and manipulated by the very same people with the really big bucks who aim to enslave them and us all.
• And Parasites Do Lead Them •• Copyright © 29 August 2010 Barry Blitt/New York Times Company •
One more wake up call to implore that all people of good will drop their petty differences and concentrate on organizing an effective progressive response to all the dangerous insanity flying around. The progressive solution must be so powerful that it overcomes the advantage the oligarchs have in owning almost all media. Don’t look to the Democratic Party — much as we love Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders and Alan Grayson and a couple of dozen other Democrats/Independents — it ain’t gonna happen. As the bumpersticker says, Republicans and Democrats are two names for the same party.
What’s to be done?
The only hope is to organize ourselves to extend ourselves to others, all the people in your neighborhood and town you don’t know. Talk by all means, but also act. When you hear somebody’s hurting, can’t afford to fix the plumbing, try to find a person who can help for no money. If you learn of somebody homeless or without food, get some people to go with her to the county or city agency and demand the woman gets what she’s entitled to as a human being. Get with the Green parties and learn what’s up with them and join the effort to put principled, honest people into positions of power.Just think about it. It takes your commitment and time, and probably some of your money too. Your country’s worth it. There are powerful enemies of America among us, a Fifth Column, and we must put them down for the world’s sake. It’s gonna take more than demonstrations, it requires creativity and a perpetual lust for justice. The future of our land and our earth is on the line.]
• Can Americans be Persuaded to Elect Fascism to Power? •New York Times — by Frank Rich — 29 August 2010 — Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.”
ANOTHER WEEKEND, ANOTHER GRASS-ROOTS DEMONSTRATION STARRING REAL AMERICANS WHO are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.
Vive la révolution!
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
• David Koch in 1996 •• David and his Brother Charles: Two Major League Fascists •
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.
• The 1930s FreedomWorks and Tea Party Rolled Up into One •The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.
This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).
Cindy Sheehan: Stop Voting for Either Wing of the War Party! IMPEACH President Obama!
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Sun, 2010-08-29 02:30.
Original post 2009-12-30
Updated 2010-08-07
at Berkeley Free Speech Movement • December 2nd, 1964 •
• The Only Way to Peace is Through US People •
• Be Part of History! •
• High Time to get Tough •
• When Democratic Presidents are the Same or Worse than Republican Presidents, What do YOU do? •Independent Political Report — by Cindy Sheehan — 21 July 2010 — If there existed an antiwar movement that had integrity — it would have said that “all wars are dumb,” and we withhold our support for just another dyed-in-the-wool warmonger.
DURING THE CAMPAIGN, MANY COLLEAGUES AND FRIENDS OF MINE ASSURED ME that Obama was just saying this hostile crap to “get elected” and once he was elected that he would “do the right thing.” Well, first of all, why support such a pandering Jackwagon, and secondly, how has that ever worked? Three days after Obama swore to uphold and defend the Constitution, he drone-bombed a “target” in Pakistan killing 3 dozen civilians — and since that day he has elevated the art of drone bombings to new heights, while the so-called antiwar movement looks on in silent complacency and while Democratic operatives disguised as antiwar groups are hoping against hope that Obama comes out strong with a new antiwar marketing campaign to assure his “re-election.” Even though not one progressive issue has been propagated during his term, these war supporters are looking forward to another four years of the dance of death. Right foot kill — left foot torture — spin around for environmental devastation—allemande left for health care fascism — and shimmy right for bankster bailouts. Wasn’t eight years of this crap during the Bush stain enough for y’all?
Many antiwar groups and people who claim they are for peace lose their minds during election season thinking that the razor-thin difference between the Democrat and Republican is enough to go ape-shit crazy in working for the Democrat. Just take the last two Democratic candidates, for example. Kerry and Obama both supported more war. An “antiwar” movement de-legitimizes itself when it works hard for a candidate who does not promise total and rapid withdrawal of troops from wherever they happen to be at the time AND does not promise to end war as an imperial tool of corporate conquest.
The majority of the so-called antiwar movement, in fact, voted for a candidate that PROMISED to contract one war only to be able to profoundly EXPAND another. Obama all along said that he is not against all war, just “dumb wars.” If there existed an antiwar movement that had integrity — it would have said that “all wars are dumb,” and we withhold our support for just another dyed-in-the-wool warmonger
• Cindy Sheehan • True Progressive • True Leader • True Patriot •Recently, I received an email from Veterans for Peace (VFP) Chapter 136 in Central Florida asking me for an endorsement of its resolution to impeach Barack Obama.
First of all, I would like to commend the Central Florida chapter for its integrity and vision for peace that this resolution exhibits. In my own experience, it’s not even popular to criticize the Dalai Bama, let alone call for his removal from office. Kudos!
Second, even though Chapter 136 uses the EXACT SAME references and charges that National VFP used for its resolution to impeach Bush and Cheney, I have little hope that National VFP will pass a similar resolution at its national convention. It’s unfortunate that standards are rarely applied equally across the board. I “hope” I am wrong.
In 2005, National VFP called for impeaching the Bush criminals even before it was en vogue to be against the regime. I remember being severely and thoroughly attacked by the left, right and in between for riding to Crawford in a bus driven by VFP members that had “IMPEACH BUSH” written across the sides in huge letters. On November 5th, 2004, I was myself in the avant-garde of calling for Bush’s impeachment just a day after his “re-election” to a second term.
In 2007, I announced my electoral challenge to Speaker of the House, Nancy “Impeachment off the Table” Pelosi because I felt so strongly in this Constitutional remedy to a criminal executive. Did I believe I would win? Just about as much as I believe that Nancy will impeach someone from her own party if she wouldn’t impeach a scoundrel like Bush.
But like VFP’s resolution says:
of President Obama for war crimes is not based on whether or not
Impeachment is likely to occur, but rather our call for Impeachment
is based on what we as Veterans For Peace feel is our duty
in the case where war crimes are being committed under
the command and authority of any United States President.”
For an excellent Impeach Obama overview by Tom Santoni of Central Florida VFP,
see the printable document attached at the end of this post.
Central Florida VFP Co-Chairman Phil Restino published his essay "Our Covenant" June 3rd, 2010 in "Veterans Today;"
it’s attached at the end of this post as a printable document.
The Resolution to Impeach is also attached as a printable document.
PROSECUTE THEM NOW! endorses this call for impeachment of President Obama
This is the text of the resolution:
IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT BARACK H. OBAMA FOR WAR CRIMES
Whereas Barack H. Obama is Commander In Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces and the head of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government; and,
Whereas the illegal U.S. invasion, bombing and occupation of Iraq initiated by the Bush administration continues under the Obama administration; and,
Whereas the U.S. government is currently engaged in illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and Obama has pledged to increase the number of military personnel and the amount of tax dollars spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and,
Whereas the U.S. military has used and continues to use depleted uranium munitions, cluster bombs and white phosphorous in densely populated areas in violation of U.S. and international laws and treaties prohibiting the indiscriminate killing of civilians; and,
Whereas the Geneva Conventions specifically prohibit the use of especially injurious weapons and materials that cause unnecessary harm by remaining active and deadly after a battle and over large areas of land; and,
Whereas a large number of babies born in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from illness and deformity like Down’s syndrome, weak hearts, severe disfigurement and brain damage that doctors believe are caused by the U.S. military’s massive and widespread use of toxic and radioactive materials; and,
Whereas millions upon millions of Iraqi, Afghani and Pakistani civilians have been killed, maimed, poisoned and displaced from their homes as a direct result of the U.S.’s ongoing, illegal acts of war; and,
Whereas illegal, immoral and counterproductive detainee torture and brutalization at the hands of the U.S. military’s Immediate Reaction Force continue at Guantanamo under the Obama administration; and,
Whereas President Obama is an accessory after the fact for obstructing justice by not initiating an investigation into numerous and blatant U.S. war crimes committed by the Bush administration for which it is manifestly accountable under the rule of law; and,
Whereas Veterans For Peace supported the impeachment of Bush/Cheney for the same war crimes that are now being committed by Obama in violation of the U.S. Constitution, U.S. federal laws, the United Nations Charter, the Hague Convention, the Geneva Conventions, The United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter; and,
Whereas Veterans For Peace is committed to its stated mission to restrain our government from intervening, overtly or covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations, to seek justice for veterans and victims of war, to increase public awareness of the costs of war, and to abolish war as an instrument of national policy; and,
Therefore be it resolved that Veterans For Peace calls on the U.S. House of Representatives to immediately begin impeachment proceedings against President Barack H. Obama for failure to uphold his sworn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies foreign and domestic, and for his commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, obstruction of justice and the violation of numerous national and international laws, treaties and conventions.
Note: This resolution to call for the Impeachment of President Barack H. Obama for War Crimes was debated, voted on, and approved by the members of the Central Florida chapter of Veterans For Peace on 7 July 2009.
I endorse this call, as does my organization, Peace of the Action.
If you would like to individually endorse, or as a group:
Endorsed by:
___________________________________________________________
On this _______ day of ___________________________________, 2010
Please return mail or fax to:
Central Florida Veterans For Peace
P.O. Box 9012
Daytona Beach, FL 32120-9012
Phone/Fax: (386) 788-2918
• Swing into ACTION •
• The President’s lost my support •
• If he doesn’t end the wars, I will work to impeach him •
• UPDATE: Learn, Educate, Organize for Peace! •
Peace of the Action
• SIZZLIN’ SUMMER PROTEST FROM PEACE OF THE ACTION •
Start Summer off with a Bang!
Rethink Tyranny
— CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST! —
PLUS read the text and hear the audio
of Mario Savio’s famous 1964 speech!
BRADLEY MANNING: AMERICAN HERO
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Sun, 2010-08-29 01:30.
Originally posted 2010-08-11
• Give some money, click Bradley Manning Defense Fund •
Baltimore Chronicle — by Stephen Lendmen — 7 August 2010 — Manning exposed cold-blooded civilian murders, the public being unaware that Pentagon ROEs — rules-of-engagement targets them like combatants in every warfare theater. The public has a right to know their country is waging wars of aggression.
MANNING IS THE COURAGEOUS ARMY INTELLIGENCE ANALYST turned whistleblower, who admitted leaking:
• “260,000 classified United States diplomatic cables and video of a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that killed 97 civilians last year,” and
• an “explosive (39 minute) video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the Reuters news agency” — “collateral murder” he felt obligated to expose.
Rate the video HERE
It got him in trouble. On June 7th, the military in Iraq arrested him, saying:
“The Department of Defense takes the management of classified information very seriously because it affects our national security, the lives of our soldiers, and our operations abroad.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the leak “potentially dramatic and grievously harmful....The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that part of the world. Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries.”
Unmentioned is the following:
• our attack, invasion and occupation are illegal under US and international law;
• war crimes, including murder, torture, and targeted assassinations happen daily;
• civilian men, women, and children are willfully targeted;
• since October 2001, millions of Afghans have been killed, injured or displaced, their country perhaps the most hellish anyway, devastated by decades of war, deep poverty, depravation, and unimaginable human suffering, mostly caused by America;
• the same holds for Iraq, Pakistan, and nations where Washington wages proxy wars; and
• our presence and imperial aims cause harm, not Manning or WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, exposing truths the public has a right and need to know.
They deserve praise [in the above context], not prosecutions, compliments, not condemnation, and accolades, not accusations. They are heroes, risking personal harm to disclose disturbing truths, what government and media reports suppress, sanitize and distort, letting warlords plunder lawlessly so war profiteers can cash in, Americans the worse off for it.
• Brad Manning Acts in the Heroic Tradition of Dan Ellsberg •In his August 4th Anti-Empire Report, author William Blum asked:
“So please tell me again: What’s the war about?” Lies, of course, about 9/11 and leaders repeating them, Obama for one last August 17 saying:
“But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.”
On July 28, 2010, Obama lied again, saying:
“the region from which the 9/11 attacks were waged and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been planned.”
Rubbish according to Blum, saying:
“Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.”
“The only ‘war of necessity’ that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for protected oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, (and) establishment of military bases (there), making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran (besides being a land-based aircraft carrier to target Russia and China). What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire? Oh, did I mention that the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex and its shareholders” will profit handsomely?
In 1996, America helped the Taliban gain power, funneling military aid through Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence). Oil was the hidden agenda, Taliban representatives visiting UNOCAL in Houston in December 1997 to negotiate a trans-Afghan pipeline from the oil rich Caspian area. It was nearly agreed, the kicker being America's refusal to extend recognition, a small courtesy to avoid war, occupation, and a deepening unwinnable quagmire.
On December 14, 1997, London's Daily Telegraph reported:
“the US government, which in the past has branded the Taliban’s policies against women and children ‘despicable,’ appears anxious to please the fundamentalists to clinch the lucrative pipeline contract.”
On December 4, 1997, a BBC correspondent said “the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea.”
By recognizing the Taliban government, it would have been built and today’s quagmire avoided. Perhaps America’s graveyard also, no invader ever occupying Afghanistan successfully, not the Soviets or British, the UK government suffering its greatest ever slaughter and defeat in 1842, losing 16,000 soldiers and civilians, except one man, historians believing Afghans let him live to recount the horror. As a result, Britain withdrew all its personnel and left, a lesson now forgotten, about 9,500 UK troops deployed with Americans and other NATO forces.
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai was a former UNOCAL adviser when pipeline negotiations took place. He was also a CIA asset. UNOCAL claimed it abandoned the pipeline project. Secret talks, however, continued up to a few months before 9/11, Taliban representatives visiting the State Department, CIA, and National Security Council. They even had a Queens, New York diplomatic office, and US officials visited Taliban ones in Islamabad.
The French newspaper Le Figaro also quoted Arab specialist Antoine Sfeir, saying CIA operatives met with bin Laden (a CIA asset in the 1980s) and maintained contact with him until his training camp was attacked in 1998.
America’s fine line between enemies and friends is their willingness or reluctance to obey — do what we say or we’ll boycott or bomb you, a threat with teeth, revealed by Manning and WikiLeaks.
Revealing Disturbing Truths Is Risky
Held initially in Kuwait, a July 29 Baghdad Pentagon press release said:
“US Army officials transferred PFC Bradley Manning from the Theater Field Confinement Facility in Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico Brig in Quantico, Virginia, on July 29. (He) remains in pretrial confinement pending an Article 32 investigation (like a grand jury or preliminary hearing) into the charges preferred against him on July 5.”
“The criminal investigation remains open....findings and recommendations (will determine) whether to recommend (if) the case (will) be referred to trial by court-martial.” For sure, that’s what’s planned, the Pentagon and Obama administration to throw the book at him or worse unless somehow their plans are derailed.
• “Patriot” Mike Rogers • Yeah, right •On August 2, Congressman Mike Rogers (R. MI) told Michigan radio station WHMI that Manning should be executed, saying:
“He release(d) this information to a third party who they say will make the determination that there’s nothing harmful in it, while we know for a fact that there will be people that will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed. That’s pretty serious. If they don’t charge him with treason, they ought to charge him with murder.”
[Editor’s Note: As of 31 August 2010, there’s not a single death of anyone attributed to the documents and videos Brad Manning disclosed.]
Asked if he should be punished by death, Rogers said: “Yes, and I would support it 100 percent.”
Direct Action Blockade at Ft. Hood TX Resists Deployment of Troops to Iraq
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Thu, 2010-08-26 06:20.
http://bit.ly/bmvfYW
• Organizing Ft. Hood Soldiers to Resist Deployment •
• Soldier Gets Fed Up •
Ft. Hood Disobeys
• Like Thieves, the Buses Depart Ft. Hood Under Cover of Night •
• Message to the Man with No Plan •
• BLOCKADE THAT BUS! •
• Some Leaders of the Resistance at Ft. Hood •
• More Soldiers Hear the Message •
• FREE THE ARMY! • DISOBEY TODAY! •
• A MOTHER LAYS DOWN THE LAW •
• JOIN THE RESISTANCE • HELP BRING THE REBIRTH OF CITIZEN SOLDIERS •How to Lose an Election Without Really Trying
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Sun, 2010-08-15 07:17.
• In Our Hands • We Outnumber Them 99 to 1 •
Editor’s Note: In this article Frank Rich points persuasively to what most of us suspect already; the Democrats will take losses in both the House and Senate this November, and there’s a strong chance the more rabid rightwing may take control of one of the bodies.
The president’s performance was weak from the get-go. Almost every one of his legislative accomplishments is qualified with “It should have been better and stronger, but at least we moved a little.” His ponderous healthcare reform is the best example of that. Yes there are some things that are better than before, but the primary effect of the bad leadership is that the president actually strengthened the private-for-profit Health Maintenance Organizations, the insurance companies and drug companies, and increased their stranglehold on “the medical industrial complex.” With all their bleating for more profit at the expense of doctors and patients, what did the poor private medical industry get? Oh, the president delivered to them 32-million plus more clients with which to fatten themselves, after all. President Obama could have succeeded in enacting real reform of the healthcare system by putting all the power of his office behind Medicare for All, but he renegged on his campaign promises and conceded defeat before the battle was joined. And the medical industrial complex laughed all the way to the bank.
The president’s most gigantic failure, after his “Bushification” on the military generally and on his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan specifically — as plans are drawn for conflict against Iran — is on the economy. He would not insist on the massive infusion of capital to support substantial gains in employment, the only path to getting work for millions of people looking desperately for jobs and to economic recovery. Instead, he chooses to go along with the neocon cabal, Canada’s rightwinger Stephen Harper, and their country club pals in Britain, to shove the austerity nonsense down our throats, as though to say, “Suffering and deprivation are good for you; they build character.”
A recipe for certain disaster: one in five people out of work, they haven’t any money to buy with. When there are no buyers, the manufacturers stop producing and lay off or fire more workers, and eventually the whole thing falls apart and . . . crashes. Yet these austerity idiots stand by their twisted logic. Is Milton Friedman clutching his stock portfolio somewhere and giggling?
Prosecute Them Now determined to support impeachment of President Obama for his war crimes, we don’t have a real interest in supporting the president’s party in November. The Republicans are worse than the Democrats, but aren’t we supposed to vote for candidates, rather than always voting negatively out of fear? The only hope for our commonwealth comes when people recognize, as Cindy Sheehan says, there is only one party, the War Party, and the Republicrats and Demicans are the party’s two wings. The bird’s a vulture feeding on humanity, and it needs to be put in a cage.
• Where Tax $ Really Go •• Total Fed Outlay $2,650 Billion •
• MILITARY: 54% — $1,449 Billion •
• NON-MILITARY: 46% — $1,210 Billion •
• If we’re not consistent, how can we demand others to be? •New York Times — by Frank Rich — 8 August 2010 — The leaders who would actually take over should the Republicans regain Congress are far closer to the revolutionaries than most voters imagine. But even if the Democrats sharpen their attack, they are doomed to fall short if they don’t address the cancer in the American heart — joblessness.
COULD GEORGE W. BUSH BE A KIND OF GIPPER-IN-REVERSE AND WIN YET ONE MORE FOR THE DEMOCRATS? Clearly this White House sees him as the gift that will keep on giving. The 2010 campaign against the Bush administration is in full cry, with President Obama leading the charge. The Republicans are “betting on amnesia,” he confidently told the claque at a recent fund-raiser. “They don’t have a single idea that’s different from George Bush’s ideas.” It’s now the incessant party line.
Sounds plausible, but it’s Obama who’s on the wrong side of that bet, to his own political peril.
• Commitment to Serving the People • We Ask No More, We Expect No Less •Betting on amnesia is almost always a winning, not a losing, wager in America. Angry demonstrators at health care town-hall meetings didn’t remember that Medicare is a government program, and fewer and fewer voters of both parties recall that the widely loathed TARP was a Bush administration creation supported by the G.O.P. Congressional leadership. So many Republicans don’t know Obama is a natural citizen — 41 percent in a poll last week — that we must (charitably) assume some of them have forgotten that Hawaii was granted statehood. The G.O.P. chairman is sufficiently afflicted with amnesia that he matter-of-factly regaled an audience with the counterfactual observation that the war in Afghanistan, Bush’s immediate response to 9/11, began under Obama.
The president is also wrong when he says that every single current G.O.P. idea is a Bush idea. Many are not. And those that are not are far more radical.
• We’re Entitled to Better than This •A political campaign built on Obama’s faulty premises cannot stand — or win. The polls remain as intractable as the 9.5 percent unemployment rate no matter how insistently the Democrats pummel Bush. To add to Democratic panic, there’s their “enthusiasm gap” with the Tea-Party-infused G.O.P., and the Rangel-Waters double bill coming this fall to a cable channel near you. Some Democrats took solace in one recent poll finding that if Republican economic ideas were branded as “Bush” ideas, the pendulum would swing a whopping 49 percentage points in their favor. But even in that feel-good survey, only a quarter of the respondents were worried that a G.O.P. Congress would actually bring back Bush policies.
• Endless Variations of the Same Old Thing •Bleak as this picture looks for the Democrats, it is so only up to a point. No one knows what will happen on an Election Day almost three months away. One encouraging sign for the party in power is the over-the-top triumphalism of the right. Conservative pundits are churning out daily prognostications with headlines like “Ten More Reasons Dems Are Toast.” A recent Wall Street Journal front-page news story hyping a far-fetched Republican scenario for retaking the Senate was something of a nostalgic throwback to the kind of wishful thinking that inspired “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
• Ma Kettle Invites Mr. Pot to Tea •
• Says It All •But rather than wait for miracles or pray that Bushphobia will save the day, Democrats might instead start playing the hand they’ve been dealt. Elections, the cliché goes, are about the future, not the past. At the very least they’re about the present. It’s time voters were told just how far right the G.O.P. has lurched since Bush returned to Texas. And the White House might also at long last — at very long last — craft a compelling message, not to mention a plan, to offer real hope to the jobless. Repeated boasts of a resurgent auto industry (where the work force is 30 percent smaller than prerecession) won’t persuade anyone, and neither will repeated assurances that legislation passed months ago will kick in over the long haul. Some 16.5 percent of America’s workers are now either unemployed and trying to find a job, involuntarily working part time, or have stopped looking for work altogether. That figure doesn’t even include the many Americans who’ve had to settle for jobs for which they are overqualified.
• Time now to get off the lazy-boy to save our commonwealth •For Obama even to stipulate that the G.O.P. has ideas about how to deal with this crisis is generous. Consultants are telling Republicans to advance no new programs at all, given how far a simple no to the president has taken them thus far, and they are following orders. But what we can discern of the Republican “ideas” lying in wait almost makes Bush’s conservatism actually seem compassionate.
— To read the rest click HERE! —
Update: Reasons 2 STOP the military madness • 4,415 American DEAD in Iraq • 1,229 DEAD in Afghanistan • Jersey Death Toll at 101
Submitted by impeachthem on Fri, 2010-07-30 10:10.
IMPEACH BEACH
Updated 18 August 2010 - http://bit.ly/bl24GX
• • • • • Bush Lied, Thousands Died: On March 19th, 2003, BUSH INVADED IRAQ. Obama continues the crime. • • • •
Obama “withdraws last combat troops from Iraq,” but leaves over 50,000 military personnel behind. Anyone care to make a bet that U.S. troops will be ordered into combat in Iraq again sometime soon?
As of 17 August 2010, according to the reliable Iraq Coalition Casualties web site: 5,644 U.S. military people DEAD. 1,229 U.S. military DEAD in Afghanistan, 4,415 DEAD in Iraq. We mourn the death of Army Specialist Jamal M. Rhett, 24, of 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. From Palmyra, he died died 15 August in Ba Qubah, Iraq, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his vehicle with grenades.
The totals include 101 DEAD from New Jersey. We mourn them all.
• UPDATE: PENTAGON REPORT PLACES BLAME FOR SUICIDES •
New York Times — by Elisabeth Bumiller — 29 July 2010 — It’s fair to say in some instances it would be a soldier that’s possibly married, couple of kids, lost his job, no health care insurance, possibly a single parent, a soldier is coming in the Army to start all over again, and we see this high rate of suicide.
WASHINGTON — AT A TIME OF RECORD-HIGH MILITARY SUICIDES, COMMANDERS ARE IGNORING the mental health problems of American soldiers and not winnowing out enough of those with records of substance abuse and crime, a United States Army report has concluded.
The report, released Thursday at the Pentagon, found that it was not only the stress of repeated deployments over nearly a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan that has driven the Army suicide rate above the civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War. Significantly, the report said that 79 percent of the soldiers who committed suicide had had only one deployment, or had not deployed at all.
“For us to blame this thing just on the war would be wrong,” Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff of the Army, said at a news conference about the report. “That’s not what we’re trying to do here.”
Nonetheless, General Chiarelli said that he believed — but could not prove statistically — that the overall Army suicide rate had been driven up by the 21 percent of suicides committed by soldiers with multiple deployments. “That has just always been my concern, that they may be it, that may be the reason,” he said. “But I don’t have any data that I can tie that to.”
There were a record 160 active-duty Army suicides in the year from Oct. 1, 2008, to Sept. 30, 2009.
The report said that if the Army added in accidental deaths, which it said are often the result of high-risk behavior involving drinking and drugs, “less young men and women die in combat than die by their own actions.” It concluded: “We are often more dangerous to ourselves than the enemy.”
According to the Army, roughly 20 out of 100,000 soldiers have killed themselves, compared with a rate of roughly 19 out of 100,000 for the civilian population.
The report put a large part of the blame on commanders who either failed to recognize or disregarded high-risk behavior among their troops. “There are instances where a leader’s lack of soldier accountability resulted in suicide victims not being found until they had been dead for three or four weeks,” the report said.
In addition, the report said that the pace of constant deployments in two wars had forced a lowering of recruiting and retention standards. Many new recruits were granted waivers, it said, for behavior that would have kept them out of the service in earlier years. Of 80,403 waivers granted since 2004, the report found that 47,478 were granted to people with a history of drug or alcohol abuse, misdemeanor crime or “serious misconduct,” which it defined as felony.
At the same time, the report found that there was a decrease in soldiers forced to leave the Army for misconduct. “This has likely resulted in the retention of over 25,283 soldiers who would have otherwise been separated in previous years,” the report said.
General Chiarelli said that the majority of Army suicides — 60 percent — are committed during a soldier’s first enlistment, typically four years, and that the most dangerous year is the first. “We see more suicides in that first year than any other year,” General Chiarelli said.
Most new recruits are 18 to 20 years old, a statistically high-risk group for suicide because of their age. But General Chiarelli said the suicide rate for soldiers who first entered the Army in their late 20s was three times higher than for those in the younger group.
General Chiarelli said he did not want to typecast, “but I think it’s fair to say in some instances it would be a soldier that’s possibly married, couple of kids, lost his job, no health care insurance, possibly a single parent.” Such a soldier, General Chiarelli said, “is coming in the Army to start all over again, and we see this high rate of suicide.”
Among the solutions, some of which have already been put in place, the report recommended tightened enlistment standards, expanded mental health screening, a confidential alcohol treatment program and better coordination between primary care physicians and mental health counselors.
Over all, General Chiarelli said, “The United States Army is a fully capable force comprised of 1.1 million men and women,” and “we are in fact expending much, much effort on a very, very small portion of this population.”
Text Copyright © 29 July 2010 New York Times Company
See Highest troop levels EVER.
Includes 208 who died from self-inflicted wounds as of August 2008. As of 14 November, the official military tally of “non-hostile suicides” in the field — NOT accounting for suicides after returning home from the war — is 12 suicides in Iraq, and 2 suicides in Afganistan..
National Priorities “Cost of War” — 31 July 2010 — To date, $1.05 trillion dollars have been allocated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.These appropriations do not include funds to support the “surge” of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan announced by the Obama administration on December 1, 2009. Conservative estimates suggest the surge will cost approximately $30 billion and we anticipate supplemental appropriations for this later in the year.
In addition to this approved amount, the FY2010 budget shows a $130 billion request for more war spending. This would bring total war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan to more than $1 trillion. When all FY2010 war-related amounts are approved, we will adjust our counter so that it reaches the new total at the end of FY2010.
• COST OF WAR • NationalPriorities.org•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
The total cost of war allocated by Congress is
$1.05 trillion, with $747.3 billion to Iraq
and $299 billion to Afghanistan.
Now we confirm more tragic news:
18 Vets kill themselves every day. There are now over one million Iraqis dead due to our war. As of now, the U.S. War On Iraq Costs over $915,000,000,000, give or take a billion. OUR WAR COST IS OVER ONE TRILLION DOLLARS, on the way to a total cost of OVER THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! See National Priorities.
AFGHANISTAN
920 Americans were killed in Afghanistan since Bush took office January 2001, including 13 New Jersey people.
• Suicides Increase Among Troops •
Bloomberg News — 13 November 2009 — There have been 133 suspected suicides among active-duty Army troops this year, putting the service within reach of a new annual high.
The suicides, between January and October and including the National Guard and Reserves, compared with 115 in the same period in 2008. That year the service recorded 140 by year’s end, an annual record, the Army said. The rate of suicide within the Army last year was 20.2 per 100,000 personnel, exceeding for the first time the age-adjusted rate in the civilian population, which was 19.2, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
See The Alarming Increase In Suicides and September Suicide Data — U.S. Labor Against War
— Now the tragic truth comes out: — New York Times — 9 November 2008 — by Associated Press — Army Will Investigate Recruiters’ Suicides — SAN ANTONIO — SEVENTEEN ARMY RECRUITERS NATIONWIDE HAVE COMMITTED SUICIDE SINCE 2001... There are 38 recruiting battalions nationwide, with 8,400 soldiers. The Army’s suicide rate has been climbing as the war in Iraq has increased deployments. Read New York Times — Suicide Rate for Soldiers Rose in ’07 — 30 May 2008 — by Associated Press —The 208 confirmed suicides among active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops who had been activated amounted to a rate of 18.8 per 100,000 troops — the highest since the Army began keeping records in 1980. — WASHINGTON DC — At least 208 soldiers killed themselves in 2007-08 [and the rate of suicide among soldiers is rising], up from 102 the previous year, the Army said Thursday. Nearly one-third of them died at the battlefront, 32 in Iraq and 4 in Afghanistan. But 26 percent had never been sent to either conflict.
Read WASHINGTON — 28 May 2008 — New York Times — Nearly 40,000 military personnel have been given diagnoses of post-tramatic stress disorder since 2003.
Read 126 War Vets Commit Suicide Every Week.
Read Suicide rate among soldiers in '06 was a record — Baltimore Sun.
And Veterans for Common Sense — CBS News — 13 November 2007 — by Laura Strickler, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Armen Keteyian and Katie Couric — Between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides. That’s 188 last year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers. One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000. — Veterans for Common Sense was featured on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. On November 13, Armen Keteyian, the top CBS investigative reporter, reveals an enormous epidemic of suicides among our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.
CBS News has three excellent videos: The CBS Evening News Broadcast, An Interview with Common Sense Vet Paul Sullivan, and Interviews with Veterans' Families. The Veteran Suicide Epidemic NEW YORK — CBS News — THEY ARE THE CASUALTIES OF WAR YOU DON'T OFTEN HEAR ABOUT — SOLDIERS WHO DIE OF SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS. Little is known about the true scope of suicides among those who have served in the military. A five-month CBS News investigation discovered data that shows a startling rate of suicide, what some call a hidden epidemic, Chief Investigative Reporter Armen Keteyian reports exclusively. “I just felt like this silent scream inside of me,” said Jessica Harrell, the sister of a soldier who took his own life.
— To read the rest click HERE!
Recruitment Ed, One Plan, One Nation 4 Medicare 4 ALL, & PTN ON THE MOVE! Next meet’s 7:30-9pm MONDAY September 13th! C'mon!!!
Submitted by impeachthem on Sat, 2010-07-17 19:27.
Lakeland Peace Site Recruitment Education Campaign & Prosecute Them Now and
the New Jersey: One Plan, One Nation Medicare for All Campaign
meet at 7:30 on the second Monday every month.
Our Next Meeting is 7:30-9pm MONDAY SEPTEMBER 13th!
Click DIRECTIONS and read more details below.
• What’s the military really doing with our kids, anyway? •
Join us 7:30-9pm Monday September 13th at the
Lakeland Unitarian Peace Site
Download the flyer — attached below and linked here —
— and print 13 September 2010 flyer —
It’s really important to increase our number of members!
Hand around the flyers everywhere,
ask friendly stores and groups to
put a bunch of flyers on their counters!
• On the basis of our incredible meeting we are going to now concentrate on connecting to teachers direct in order to be heard by students, specially in junior and senior high schools, to counter the relentless marketing used by the armed forces recruiters.
• Our meet May 8th was exceptionally special. It was, and it was actually fantastic.
We enjoyed the company of 3 profoundly excellent people. Sensational — authoritative speakers — Oskar Castro, director of the Youth & Militarism Project for the American Friends Service Committee, based in Philadelphia. Oskar’s also involved with Youth4Peace.org and is expert on the legal aspects and the rights of students and their families with armed forces recruiters.
• OSKAR CASTRO •Matthis Chiroux said, “After five years of service and an honorable discharge, the Army said my ‘service’ wasn’t finished. I served for the army in Afghanistan, Japan, Europe and the Philippines.” When the army ordered Matthis to deploy to Iraq, he said no. He was put on trial and emerged with a precedent setting victory. “I told them I believe that the war is illegal, and that as a Soldier, I thought it was my responsibility to resist it...
I said when we violated the U.N. Charter to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, when we systematically defy the international laws of war to wage occupation, we violate U.S. Law and the Constitution, and that it is all Soldiers’ responsibility to resist the crimes of our Government we are ultimately responsible for...
The Army found me guilty of misconduct for refusing to deploy to Iraq, but recommended I only be discharged from the reserves with a general discharge under honorable conditions.”
• Honorable Matthis Chiroux •
• Ken Dalton •
We invited reps from armed forces recruiting and the American Legion. None showed. Why should they?
Rev. Anna Benedetto, leader of Lakeland Unitarian’s Peace Site Recruitment Education Campaign, gave our welcome to everyone. We enjoyed real discussions between the participants, and everyone who wanted to took part in the discussions.
We had a magnificent supper and afterward we continued the talk between our speakers and all the citizens. We expected to end the event about 7pm, but interest was so high that we didn't break up til after 10pm, when still some people wanted to continue!
Imagine 6 hours for “a public meeting.” That’s some kind of record these days!
Our dear friend Ken Dalton, our treasure, and his partner Joanne, were a tremendous gift to us, and we thank them and always look forward to seeing and working with them, anytime they want.
Oskar Castro and Matthis Chiroux are two of the finest speakers in the USA today. Beyond the important factor that both these men really know the facts in every respect concerning not only recruitment education, but the whole immense panoply of issues regarding the problem of world wide greed and what’s to be done about it before single selfishness and compulsive greed consumes all life on earth and kills our planet. Yes, it’s our earth, and if we’re ever going to achieve truth, justice, dignity, democracy and liberation of all the people of our earth, we must re-dedicate ourselves to the great work of a real revolution in all respects, political, social, and the all-important rebirth of wonder in peoples’ lives.
This is what it takes, these are the stakes, raising the consciousness of all people will bring that day of victory in our lifetimes. It will be done because it must be done.
Mssrs. Chiroux and Castro need to be heard and seen everywhere, and part of our job is to connect these people to all groups — not only progressive groups, but to the bourgeois organizations, churches & synagogues, and yes, even civic groups like Rotary, Kiwanis, Elks, Masons, Sertoma, all of them — we must begin now to break those “barriers of Babbitry” — they must be liberated too.
The secret to their powerful effectiveness is they both possess tremendous charisma. The charisma is derived from more than personal shaping factors of living. It comes from their passionate commitment to do good, to take on the powers that be, to stop that renegade obsession of the power elite.
Matthis Chiroux and Oskar Castro are real leaders, ready, willing and able. They need support and they must have backing. Think of what can become when there’s money enough to put people like them — and others — on the road with enough flash to draw not dozens, but thousands of people yearning to breathe free.
WANNA HELP? YOU CAN VOLUNTEER TO HELP!
Give us a ring at 862.226.6939 . . . and thanks!
• A Vigilant Citizen Prevents Enslavement •Click DIRECTIONS and read more details below.
Prosecute Them In Brief — Make Justice Happen — PROSECUTE THEM NOW!
Here’s what we’re dedicated to — also see our Mission Statement at the top of this page —
• It’s documented that Bush, Cheney and many others in the Bush regime violated our constitution by committing criminal acts, everything from lying us to war against Iraq, to torture, to spying on Americans, destruction of habeas corpus, and the decimation of posse comitatus.
• It wasn’t just Republicans. There are many Democrats who were complicit in these crimes. In order to protect our country from these vicious abuses in the future, crimes that can destroy our USA forever, we must prosecute all the criminals now.
• It’s also documented that President Obama continues the tragic policies of the Bush regime even more aggressively than Bush-Cheney themselves.
• President Obama’s administration is guilty of war crimes too, and his actions force our nation to call for his impeachment. We endorse the Impeachment of President Barack Obama.
• Does democracy exist anywhere any more? Or do we suffer an oligarchy? We do.
• Two jet planes did not bring down 3 buildings in New York City on 11 September 2001. Thousands of engineers and architects have testified to that. All right, then what really happened and why? Those specifics have never come to light. It’s our right to complete, real investigations, and the prosecutions all who were responsible for 9-ll. We’re pleased to work with 9-11 Citizens' Campaign in this great work for truth and justice.
• Recruitment Education: Dealing with military indoctrination and the poverty draft in our public schools. See U.S. MILITARY RECRUITS KIDS and PENTAGON INVADES OUR SCHOOLS and read our “OPT OUT BROCHURE” PLUS our Spanish-English form we’re distributing to families throughout our region.
Please rsvp at INFO
and let us know you’re coming so we know how much food to have.
If you’re inspired and want to bring something,
please let us know what you can do.
THANK YOU!
Hand out copies of our OUR NEW OPT OUT BROCHURE
PLUS the Spanish-English form,
and our Meeting Flyer
at supermarkets & grocery stores & laundromats, community centers,
libraries, any place that looks good to you.
Put a few copies in offices you visit. Doctors’ offices are excellent places
— spread ’em among all the magazines!
Always carry a few copies of our brochure and flyer
to hand out to friends & friendly strangers.
At our meeting in April, we made ambitious plans
for our campaign on Recruitment Education.
We need your participation! Help us organize!
• We’re delighted to announce we’re hooked up with the
New Jersey: One Plan, One Nation Coalition
See also NJ One Plan on the Move
Our meeting is in partnership with the Lakeland Unitarian Peace Site’s campaign on Recruitment Education, an effort to teach parents of junior high and high school age public school students about their right to deny our armed forces access to their children for recruitment purposes.
This is long overdue, and here you can see the brochure that was composed to give students and their families, called the Opt Out brochure PLUS the Spanish-English form.
We want to connect to all progressive teachers in Junior and Senior high schools. Our view must be heard so children don't get the lopsided surreal nonsense the armed forces recruiters bring.
They’re like the urban mythology of the guy hanging around the school in his raincoat offering candy to children so he can get one to go into the bushes where he opens his coat to offer his shortcomings.
Pssst! "Hey kids, you wanna get free season tickets to the Yankees? We’ll pay you $100,000.00 to sign up!" The Lakeland Unitarian minister Anna Benedetto actually heard a recruiter say these words to a couple of teens at Willowbrook mall. Imagine what else they might tell a kid: "C’mere, we can teach you to be a brain surgeon, and you get to travel to exotic places and kill people, and it’s so totally cool like a vid game!!!"
R.E. starts each meeting, and Prosecute Them Now follows immediately. We keep our meetings short and focused and aim to be done before or by 9pm or so! See below
• We’re developing a fine library of resources and supplies at Lakeland Unitarian Peace Site.
1. Our recruitment education campaign is moving along. We sent letters to a number of churches so we can affiliate with people in communities who will join us in approaching public high school principals and superintendents.
2. We continue to follow up and make contacts where we can. We decided to make phone call contact with schools to alert them we’re sending our formal letter regarding recruitment education, and telling them we’ll follow up with phone calls a week after they get our letter.
3. We’re going to approve a script for our people to use when contacting schools and hope to approve it at this meeting.
4. We’re going to assign jobs for all so we can move into high gear.
We will also feature veterans from the Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan wars. We are inviting Armed Forces recruiters and other “pro-military” people to participate.
• Setting up a phone campaign to influence legislators to
push the Department of Justice to initiate prosecutions.
• Discuss the advisability of initiating an effort to
get town and city councils to endorse prosecutions.
• The 9/11 Truth Movement turned a major corner in
February, when AE911Truth announced
it now has over 1,000 professional and licensed architects
and engineers signed to a demand for a Grand Jury
investigation of the collapse of the three buildings
in New York City September 11th, 2001. All have
concluded that two planes did not bring down three
buildings, and the evidence that proves this is
already documented and available. There are
ways we can all support this, come and learn how!
See AE911 Story
Over the last eight years later we suffered the tragedy of 11 September 2001, we were lied to war, our constitution was shredded, the great writ of habeas corpus and posse comitatus were dissolved, as the criminals who stole our country gave over our treasury to their corporate criminal pals. They engaged in withholding the truth from our people and in spying on all Americans.
We supported President Obama as much as we were able. But the plain fact is, the president back-tracked on many of his campaign pledges around the effort to restore justice, protect our constitution, and prosecute all who violated our laws. This is not limited to Republicans.
And speaking of promises made then thrown away, be sure to check out what’s now a famous 15 second video of candidate Obama making a promise concerning Afghanistan that ends with him saying, “And you can take that to the bank.”
Despite “the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq” — a blatant lie, as 50,000 American troops remain there, and supplemented by another 100,000 private mercenaries (Hessians, anyone?) — President Obama continues the George W. Bush policies with a vengeance, even outdoing the shrub in his lapdog’s obedience to the power elite. This is not the man you voted for.
There are many Democrats who were complicit with the Bush gang in their efforts to destroy our freedoms and to convert our government into a theocratic corporate dictatorship.
That’s fascism
We have particular strategies aimed at digging out the whole truth of what happened. With your help we can prosecute the people responsible for the collapses of the three buildings in New York. See 9-11 Citizens' Campaign.
You see above our new bumpersticker. We’re not out to make millions with it,
all we want is to make enough money to keep printing our stickers and pay for our web site.
Recruit yourself! Recruit your family and friends!
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contact Hutch at INFO.
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Or make your check payable to ProsecuteThemNow.com & send to:
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• Matthis Chiroux •
• Matthis In Uniform •
MUST READ: The State of the Union is Comatose. FDR’s got the Answer. It’s Simply Courage and Common Sense.
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Sun, 2010-07-04 22:23.
• Is it possible the president will finally break away
from the stranglehold of USA, Incorporated? •
• Read the whole posting and learn the answer! •
• See “The Up-or-Down Vote on Obama’s Presidency” •
New York Times — 30 January 2010 — by Frank Rich — In an October 1936 speech, nearly four years after Hoover, President Roosevelt was still railing against the “hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government” he inherited. He reminded unemployed and destitute radio listeners that there had been “nine crazy years at the ticker” and “nine mad years of mirage” followed by three long years of bread lines and despair. F.D.R. soon won re-election in the greatest landslide the country had seen.
HANDS DOWN, THE STATE OF THE UNION’S BIG MOMENT WAS PRESIDENT OBAMA’S direct hit on the delicate sensibilities of the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The president was right to blast the 5-to-4 decision giving corporate interests an even greater stranglehold over a government they already regard as a partially owned onshore subsidiary. How satisfying it was to watch him provoke Alito into a “You lie!” snit. Here was a fight we could believe in.
There was more to admire in Obama’s performance as well. He did not retreat into the bite-size initiatives — V-chips, school uniforms — embraced by an emasculated Bill Clinton after his midterm pummeling of 1994. The president’s big original goals — health care, economic recovery, financial reform — remained nominally intact, as did his sense of humor. In a rhetorical touch William Safire would have relished, Obama had the wit to rush the ritualistic “our union is strong” so it would not prompt the usual jingoistic ovation.
Good thing, too, since our union is not strong. It is paralyzed. Many Americans were more eagerly anticipating Steve Jobs’s address in San Francisco on Wednesday morning than the president’s that night because they have far more confidence in Apple than Washington to produce concrete change. One year into Obama’s term we still don’t know whether he has what it takes to get American governance functioning again. But we do know that no speech can do the job. The president must act. Only body blows to the legislative branch can move the country forward.
The historian Alan Brinkley has observed that we will soon enter the fourth decade in which Congress — and therefore government as a whole — has failed to deal with any major national problem, from infrastructure to education. The gridlock isn’t only a function of polarized politics and special interests. There’s also been a gaping leadership deficit.
In Obama’s speech, he kept circling back to a Senate where both parties are dysfunctional. The obstructionist Republicans, he observed, will say no to every single bill “just because they can.” But no less culpable are the Democrats, who maintain “the largest majority in decades” even after losing Teddy Kennedy’s seat — and yet would rather “run for the hills” than accomplish anything.
What does strong Senate leadership look like? That would be L.B.J. in the pre-Kennedy era. Operating with the narrowest of majorities and under an opposition president, he was able to transform a sleepy, seniority-hobbled, regionally polarized debating society into an often-progressive legislative factory. As Robert Caro tells the story in his book “Master of the Senate,” this Senate leader had determination, “a gift for grand strategy,” and a sixth sense for grabbing opportunities for action before they vanished for good. He could recognize “the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away” and turn it quickly. The horse trading with recalcitrant senators was often crude and cynical, but the job got done. L.B.J. knew how to reward — and how to punish.
We keep hearing that they just don’t make legislative giants like that anymore. In truth, the long drought has led us to forget what they look like and to define senatorial leadership down. L.B.J.’s current successor, Harry Reid, could be found yawning on camera Wednesday night. He might as well have just taken the whole nap. Here was this leader’s pronouncement last week on the future of the president and his party’s No. 1 priority: “We’re not on health care now. We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.” Yes, a lot of talk — a year’s worth, in fact — with nothing to show for it. [Editor’s Note: See also Here, Here, and Here.]
— Plus see the complete text of FDR’s legendary speech at Madison Sq. Garden in 1936! —
— And video and audio clips of the speech, PLUS President Roosevelt’s call for a Second Bill of Rights! —
UPDATE: To All Patriots Who Want to Restore Constitutional Government in America
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Thu, 2010-06-17 21:44.
“If we are going to talk about 9/11, why don’t we talk about how not so much the people who died on 9/11 were disgraced by the possibility of an Islamic athletic center several blocks away; how about the fact that they were disgraced by a president who let it happen?” he asked. “Who went on vacation for the entire month of August after he was warned in writing that Osama bin Laden was actually finding targets in NYC and learning how to take these planes and do terrible things with them? The thing itself said ‘hijacking’ and they did nothing about it.”
Text Copyright © 21 August 2010 The Raw Story
Video Copyright © 20 August 2010 MSNBC
• The controlled demolition of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 is not a Conspiracy Theory •
• It’s a conspiracy fact based on undeniable Evidence of Treason •
It demands a Grand Jury Investigation in order that
those who perished “shall not have died in vain.”
911 Citizens Campaign — 17 June 2009 — by Donald Meserlian & Prosecute Them Now — As of August 27th, AE911Truth registers 10,415 people, including 1,267 licensed architects and engineers, all demanding that a truly independent investigation is conducted. The empaneling of a Grand Jury in New York City is called for.
— We must Attack Power with Truth and put our adversaries on the defensive. This is the only way any battle is won; whether nonviolent or violent. —
THE IMPORTANCE OF MOVING FROM “9/11 TRUTH” TO 9/11 JUSTICE cannot be overestimated.
The illegal wars of Iraq and Afghanistan have bankrupted this nation and moved us on a path to becoming a third world nation. The unconstitutional USA Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act have been approved by our congressional idiot representatives of corporate power whereby the predictions of George Orwell in 1984 have become true to life in today’s Amerika, a nation that I no longer pledge allegiance to.
The many groups that want to achieve peace, justice and the nonviolent overthrow of every level of the present government are being asked to join forces to present a united front to our common enemy: Our common goal should be my goal as National Leader of the Citizen’s Campaign for a 9/11 Grand Jury Investigation in 2010 — read the undeniable “evidence of treason” contained in the 9/11 Truth Proclamation and the two laws: USC 18 par. 2382 Misprision of Treason that must be obeyed by every U.S. citizen, and the New York State law on “Obstruction of Justice.”
Click http://bit.ly/9cqmsw to rate this crucially important video recorded 13 April 2010 with Robert Bowman — click http://bit.ly/duMr2g — retired Air Force Lt. Col, who was in charge of a research project under the Ford and Carter administrations later called Star Wars. During the Reagan administration Robert Bowman became a whistle blower knowing from the inside that this technology could only be successful as an offensive weapon. Robert Bowman is one of more than 200 Senior Military, Intelligence Service, Law Enforcement, and Government Officials who question the US government’s “official version” of what happened on September 11, 2001, listed at PatriotsQuestion911. He is also National Commander at ThePatriots.US
Read the three “template” letters to: Andrew Cuomo, New York State Attorney General, your state’s Attorney General and your local Mayor/municipal court judge.
• Letter to YOUR mayor — click http://bit.ly/amfddC
• Letter to YOUR state Attorney General — click http://bit.ly/crmtyj
• Letter to Tom Wornam, Director, Special Prosecutors Bureau,
New York County District Attorney’s Office
— click http://bit.ly/98MR44 —
The key to achieving our common goal is to prove that the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 on 9/11/01 was an “act of treason” based on the use of nano thermite, a military controlled explosive not available in the caves of Afghanistan, and demanding that the Manhattan District Attorney convene a Grand Jury to determine whether “9/11 was an Inside Job.”
You can rate this video at http://bit.ly/aNjVWF
We commend NYCCAN — New York City Coalition for Accountability Now — for initiating the “1000 letters per week in June” campaign to have the “Special Prosecutions Bureau of the New York County Manahattan District Attorney’s office recommend that a Grand Jury Investigation begin as soon as possible. We decided to help NYCCAN by adding the following letter to Tom Wornam, Director, Special Prosecutions Bureau of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office to the three letters at 911 Citizens Campaign to change from a “Triple Threat” to a Quadruple Threat Campaign for 9/11 Justice!
You can rate this video at http://bit.ly/9KkqsB
To rate the video click HERE
We can no longer “Speak Truth to Power” because those in power refuse either to listen or communicate with most non influential citizens. We must Attack Power with Truth and put our adversaries on the defensive. This is the only way any battle is won; whether non violent or violent. Violent revolutions occur when non violent attempts to achieve justice fail; this is the major lesson of history that will be repeated in America if non violent attempts at achieving 9/11 justice fail.
• Send our letters to Tom Wornam, Director, Special Prosecutions Bureau of the
Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
• Be sure to insert your name and organization
• E-mail your letters to all parties listed.
• Copy and fax to 212.335.8914 or mail to:
Tom Wornam, Director
Special Prosecutions Bureau
Manhattan District Attorney’s Office
One Hogan Place
New York, NY 10013
• Phone Tom Wornam’s Secretary, Vicki 212.335.8922
to verify he received your letter.
• Phone as often as necessary until he is forced to obey the two laws and recommend
that the Manhattan Attorney General convene a Grand Jury as soon as possible.
For a printable text of the 911 Citizens for Truth Proclamation,
which you can sign to register your support for a Grand Jury,
Click HERE!
• Art Transforms Sorrow to Pity — The Poetry’s in the Pity •Photo Copyright © 12 September 2001 by Thomas Franklin/Bergen Record
By joining the Citizen's Campaign for a 9/11 Grand Jury Investigation with NYCCAN we can achieve our goals and the goals of all peoploe who receive this letter.
Let’s Kick Ass and get rolling...Let’s Roll! to find the true terrorists who caused the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 on 9/11/01. Nine years is too long to wait to achieve justice for the victims who died and continue to die as a result of the toxic dust when the three towers collapsed.
FAX TO: Tom Wornam, Director, Special Prosecutors Bureau, New York County District Attorney’s Office — Fax 212.335.8914 — Phone Secretary Vicki 212.335.8922
June is NYCCAN’s 1000 Letters Per Week Campaign during the month of June 2010 to “urge the Manhattan District Attorney to investigate the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7.”
To rate the video click HERE
— To Read the Rest click HERE! —
PROCLAIM ETERNAL VICTORY
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Tue, 2010-05-11 07:50.Sherman! Quick! To the Way Back Machine! TO IRAQ 1953!!!
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Sat, 2010-05-08 23:51.
• Click to rate this video •
August 10th UPDATE: US Military Recruits Kids, Meets Quota
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Sat, 2010-05-08 23:51.
Originally posted 2010-01-23
Be sure to print our beautiful opt out brochure to help families guard against military predators. Print front and back on a page, fold it in half and you’re good to go! Put our Spanish-English Opt Out Form to use too. Contact us at info@impeachthem.com for help in building counter-recruitment in your town. Click BROCHURE! and see the Spanish-English form courtesy of Opt Out-NJ
USMilitary.com — 24 October 2009 — “This is much to the amazement and pleasure of the US military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps.”
— THIS HAS BEEN QUITE THE ACCOMPLISHMENT FOR THE MILITARY, which has seen a decline in enrollments in the last few years, since the beginning of the current Iraqi war. The Army alone recruited close to 5,000 people in the month of October, which was over two percent of their originated goal. For the Marine Corps, there were close to 3,000 people recruited that were eager to sign up to join the military. This amount for the Marine Corps was well a little over one percent of their target as well.
The figures for meeting the military quota have been highly pleasurable for all companies that are involved, as they eagerly await the new troops from the registered enrollment. The numbers do not lie — there is now a higher interest for the joining the military’s forces from the civilian end. This is much to the amazement and pleasure of the US military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps, who both saw substantial numbers increase in their recruiting. Many of the civilians that are signing up are high school graduates that have preferred to enroll in the military to proudly serve our country. There is a great number of these recruitments that have claimed that they will continue their education while in the military, which is often paid for.
See also Pentagon Invades Our Schools
A FEW GOOD KIDS???
JOHN TRAVERS WAS STRIDING PURPOSEFULLY into the Westfield mall in Wheaton, Maryland, for some back-to-school shopping before starting his junior year at Bowling Green State University. When I asked him whether he’d ever talked to a military recruiter, Travers, a 19-year-old African American with a buzz cut, a crisp white T-shirt, and a diamond stud in his left ear, smiled wryly. “To get to lunch in my high school, you had to pass recruiters,” he said. “It was overwhelming.” Then he added, “I thought the recruiters had too much information about me. They called me, but I never gave them my phone number.”
Nor did he give the recruiters his email address, Social Security number, or details about his ethnicity, shopping habits, or college plans. Yet they probably knew all that, too. In the past few years, the military has mounted a virtual invasion into the lives of young Americans. Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students’ GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect like Travers, the soldier may know more about the kid’s habits than do his own parents.
The military has long struggled to find more effective ways to reach potential enlistees; for every new GI it signed up last year, the Army spent $24,500 on recruitment. (In contrast, four-year colleges spend an average of $2,000 per incoming student.) Recruiters hit pay dirt in 2002, when then-Rep. (now Sen.) David Vitter (R-La.) slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires high schools to give recruiters the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors. Schools that fail to comply risk losing their NCLB funding. This little-known regulation effectively transformed President George W. Bush’s signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft. Students may sign an opt-out form — but not all school districts let them know about it.
Yet NCLB is just the tip of the data iceberg. In 2005, privacy advocates discovered that the Pentagon had spent the past two years quietly amassing records from Selective Service, state DMVs, and data brokers to create a database of tens of millions of young adults and teens, some as young as 15. The massive data-mining project is overseen by the Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies program, whose website has described the database, which now holds 34 million names, as “arguably the largest repository of 16-25-year-old youth data in the country.” The JAMRS database is in turn run by Equifax, the credit reporting giant.
Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says the Pentagon’s initial failure to disclose the collection of the information likely violated the Privacy Act. In 2007, the Pentagon settled a lawsuit (filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union) by agreeing to stop collecting the names and Social Security numbers of anyone younger than 17 and promising not to share its database records with other government agencies. Students may opt out of having their JAMRS database information sent to recruiters, but only 8,700 have invoked this obscure safeguard.
The Pentagon also spends about $600,000 a year on commercial data brokers, notably the Student Marketing Group and the American Student List, which boasts that it has records for 8 million high school students. Both companies have been accused of using deceptive practices to gather information: In 2002, New York’s attorney general sued SMG for telling high schools it was surveying students for scholarship and financial aid opportunities yet selling the info to telemarketers; the Federal Trade Commission charged ASL with similar tactics. Both companies eventually settled.
The Pentagon is also gathering data from unsuspecting Web surfers. This year, the Army spent $1.2 million on the website March2Success.com, which provides free standardized test-taking tips devised by prep firms such as Peterson's, Kaplan, and Princeton Review. The only indications that the Army runs the site, which registers an average of 17,000 new users each month, are a tiny tagline and a small logo that links to the main recruitment website, GoArmy.com. Yet visitors’ contact information can be sent to recruiters unless they opt out, and students also have the option of having a recruiter monitor their practice test scores. Terry Backstrom, who runs March2Success.com for the US Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, insists that it is about “good will,” not recruiting. “We are providing a great service to schools that normally would cost them.”
Recruiters are also data mining the classroom. More than 12,000 high schools administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a three-hour multiple-choice test originally created in 1968 to match conscripts with military assignments. Rebranded in the mid-1990s as the “ASVAB Career Exploration Program,” the test has a cheerful home page that makes no reference to its military applications, instead declaring that it “is designed to help students learn more about themselves and the world of work”" A student who takes the test is asked to divulge his or her Social Security number, GPA, ethnicity, and career interests — all of which is then logged into the JAMRS database. In 2008, more than 641,000 high school students took the ASVAB; 90 percent had their scores sent to recruiters. Tony Castillo of the Army’s Houston Recruiting Battalion says that ASVAB is “much more than a test to join the military. It is really a gift to public education.”
Child As Flag
Concerns about the ASVAB’s links to recruiting have led to a nearly 20 percent decline in the number of test takers between 2003 and 2008. But the test is mandatory at approximately 1,000 high schools. Last February, three North Carolina students were sent to detention for refusing to take it. One, a junior named Dakota Ling, told the local paper, “I just really don’t want the military to have all the info it can on me.” Last year, the California Legislature barred schools from sending ASVAB results to military recruiters, though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill. The Los Angeles and Washington, DC, school districts have tried to protect students’ information by releasing their scores only on request.
To put all its data to use, the military has enlisted the help of Nielsen Claritas, a research and marketing firm whose clients include BMW, AOL, and Starbucks. Last year, it rolled out a “custom segmentation” program that allows a recruiter armed with the address, age, race, and gender of a potential “lead” to call up a wealth of information about young people in the immediate area, including recreation and consumption patterns. The program even suggests pitches that might work while cold-calling teenagers. “It’s just a foot in the door for a recruiter to start a relevant conversation with a young person,” says Donna Dorminey of the US Army Center for Accessions Research.
Still, no amount of data slicing can fix the challenge of recruiting during wartime. Last year, a JAMRS survey identified recruiters’ single biggest obstacle: Only 5 percent of parents would recommend military service to their kids, a situation blamed on “a constant barrage of negative media coverage on the War in Iraq.” Not surprisingly, more and more kids are opting out of having their information shared with recruiters under No Child Left Behind; in New York City, the number of students opting out has doubled in the past five years, to 45,000 in 2008. At some schools, 90 percent of students have opted out. In 2007, JAMRS awarded a $50 million contract to Mullen Advertising to continue its marketing campaign to target “influencers” such as parents, coaches, and guidance counselors. The result: print ads that declare, “Your son wants to join the military. The question isn’t whether he’s prepared enough, but whether you are.”
Not far from the mall in Maryland, I asked 21-year-old Marcelo Salazar, who'd been a cadet in his high school’s Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, why he decided not to enlist after graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 2005. Now a community college student, he replied that his mother was firmly against it.
Then, as if on cue, his cell phone chirped: It was a recruiter who called him constantly. He ignored it. “War is cool,” he said, flipping on his aviator sunglasses. “But if you're dying, it's not.”
NEW UPDATE
• Military Training Program for Teens Expands in USA •
Dozens of teens dressed in uniforms provided by the US Marines stand at attention in the gym of a Chicago public high school as a drill sergeant goes through a list of the day’s do’s and don’ts.
Bring your books to class. Come for extra help if you need it. And wear your uniform with pride.
“Young men, you think you can get a haircut and say I'm done for two or three weeks. WRONG,” Sgt. Major Thomas Smith Jr. intones.
“Young ladies. There's been no problem with your uniforms but there is a problem with your ties. Again, I will go through it again. Wear your ties when you come to my class.”
One in 10 public high school students in Chicago wears a military uniform to school and takes classes — including how to shoot a gun properly — from retired veterans.
That number is expected to rise as junior military reserve programs expand across the country now that a congressional cap of 3,500 units has been lifted from the nearly century-old scheme.
Proponents of the junior reserve programs say they provide stability and a sense of purpose for troubled youth and help to instill values such as leadership and responsibility.
But opponents say the programs divert critical resources from crumbling public schools and lead to a militarization of US society.
“To call these young people child soldiers might be technically inaccurate, but it does reveal the truth of it,” said Oscar Castro, a spokesman for the National Youth and Militarism Program, an advocacy group.
Military recruiters already have the right to give presentations in public schools and to access databases with the contact information of all public school students whose parents do not remove their children from the list.
But they don’t have nearly the same impact as daily interaction with teachers and students in uniform, Castro said.
While military officials say the junior reserve programs are not used as recruiting tools, about 30 to 50 percent of cadets eventually enlist, according to congressional testimony by the chiefs of staff of the various armed services in February 2000.
This is particularly troubling given that the programs are concentrated in low-income and minority neighborhoods, said Sheena Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the Chicago branch of the American Friends Service Committee which lobbies against the programs.
GOOD CHEER: A Magnificent Lesson from the True North
Submitted by PROSECUTE EM on Sat, 2010-05-08 23:51.
Originally posted 2009-12-29
SINGLE-PAYER UNIVERSAL MEDICARE FOR ALL
— It’s no privilege, it’s YOUR RIGHT in our country! —
• See MOBILIZE FOR HEALTH CARE •
— Canada Leads the Way: We Learn A Lot From Our Northern Friends —
• Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story •
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — 29 December 2009 — Tommy Douglas was the most influential politician never to be elected Prime Minister of Canada.
Way beyond a celebrity by association, at a time when he was actor Donald Sutherland’s father-in-law, Tommy Douglas was one of north America’s greatest Socialist leaders. He led the NDP — New Democratic Party. While the NDP’s been very successful over the years in gaining power in several provinces — Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia — the party’s never won national leadership and the Prime Minister’s office for the entirety of Canada. Despite the huge amounts of money spent by big business in Canada, with huge infusions of money from the United States’ corporate behemoths to kill such popular programs as Canada’s highly respected nationalized health care system — a true Single-Payer Universal Medicare for All program — the Canadians wisely choose to ignore the imperialists from the South.
In 1944 Douglas led the Saskatchewan CCF to a massive victory, winning 47 of 53 seats and achieving the first democratic socialist government elected in North America.
Tommy Douglas introduced universal hospitalization in Saskatchewan in 1949 and a Medicare plan for Saskatchewan in 1959.
The video is from a CBC Television production, “Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story.” In the dark times today, this brings much needed cheer over what we can achieve in the face of the insatiable greed that infects our country. CFC stands for Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; the organization became the New Democratic Party. Have a look and feel a warm smile for our future.
You can view and rate the video clip HERE
