sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with antiwar

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs let loose on leftist critics of the administration the other day:

"I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy. ... They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality. ... They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."

Frankly I think this should cost him his job, which is not something I say lightly. It won't, though, because he's only saying what everyone in the White House is thinking. But outbursts like this, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's lovely 'f*cking retards' comment last year, and so on, are going to cost the Democrats dearly on election day this year and in 2012. They can't afford to keep insulting the folks who are most likely to contribute, to volunteer, and to vote on their behalf. They may think they can rely solely on the wealthy donors who flocked to them in 2008, but they can't.

These outbursts also show what they're thinking: we're leftists, they've billed themselves as "leftists," therefore we owe them our vote, our support, and our praise. But leftist bloggers don't work for the Democratic party, and this is what really annoys them. In 2009 they established "Common Purpose," an initiative to essentially get leftist bloggers to start spreading White House talking points for them. Well, hey, it works for the Right, right? ;)

But let's get to the real meat of the problem, which is: the Obama administration is doing a lot of the same things that annoyed leftist bloggers when the Bush administration did them. Leftists complained then, and complain now, not because they are anti-Republican partisan hacks, but because they are anti-injustice.

Foremost in my mind, and the one that I think 20, 30 years from now is going to really tarnish Obama's legacy: the establishment of a permanent authority whose purpose is to imprison people -- citizens and non-citizens -- indefinitely without trial. This is an indelible blemish on the American human rights record akin to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But they "stopped torture" (they didn't, but they said they would), and they "tried" to close the prison at Guantanamo, so we should be happy, right?

Continuing the war in Afghanistan despite the apparent absence of any evidence that it's making the US safer from Islamist terrorism? There's that, too. People can oppose the war for rational reasons that don't involve the desire to replace the Pentagon with a hippie flower garden. Then there's: appointing bankster wolves to watch the economic henhouse... refusing to prosecute telecoms for their willingness to aid DHS in their program of mass invasion of privacy without search warrants... refusing to prosecute agents who committed torture or investigate detainee deaths or accounts of torture... refusing to investigate the Katrina disaster... and these are all things Democrats did of their own free will without being able to blame them on Republican obstructionism.

So this is not, as the White House wants to paint it, a matter of being upset because the public option was taken out of the health care bill or because other legislative compromises were made to pass bills. Yes, those things suck too, but they are forgivable and they can be fixed. But it turns out we're really bad at paying no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Maya Arulpragasam, also known as M.I.A., released a new video, a short movie around her song "Born Free." The music is not my usual speed, but the video is striking (and graphically violent). I watched it last night, and reflecting on it this morning realized I had rarely seen anything like it.

Usually, in American media, whenever you see depictions like this -- stormtroops rounding people up, killing them for fun -- Mel Gibson is there. Or Bruce Willis. Or Sly Stallone. They'll fight back and win, or run away, survive, and get revenge. Our sense of reality is shaped around the idea that the bad guys won't really get away with anything so heinous. World War Two is proof of that, right? The Nazis tried to pull that stuff, and boy did they get handed their asses. If there weren't heroes in real life, Hollywood can just invent some when they tell the story. And even if heroes don't make sense in a narrative, God and nature will set the slaughterers straight.

Maybe this is the nature of narratives. People who participate in overwhelmingly one-sided slaughter don't tell their stories about it. Neither do the ones who are slaughtered. So I suppose the only narratives we have about genocide are from those who survive being slaughtered, or their children.

It's easy to say, "Well, stories with no hero, with no one acting righteous, are just depressing. Who wants to watch that? Who would be enriched by it?" The problem is, though, as I see it, that we've become so used to just assuming that a hero will come along and the bad guys won't win that we've become unable to process reality, because bad guys do win quite a lot of the time. Almost always, I would even say. And since they are winners, certain other aspects of our cultural discourse kick in and we even sympathize with them. The hero stories, though, enable us to side with bullies and abusers even while pretending we don't. It is, unfortunately, a bucket of bull-hockey.

( M.I.A. & Romain Gavras, 'Born Free', NSFW )

This post brought to you by the Thievery Corporation, who started their latest album Radio Retaliation with "Sound the Alarm," a collaboration with Sleepy Wonder:

Sound the alarm, order the attack
Selassie I soldiers beat Babylon back.

There's a lot of meaning in that beyond the historical reference, though we can start there. In 1928, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned King of Ethiopia and he assumed the royal name Haile Selassie I. Ethiopia was then one of only two independent nations in Africa, and many in Africa and the African diaspora saw the crowning of Selassie I as representing African resistance to the European colonial scheme.

In 1935 Benito Mussolini, who aspired to be the ruler of a new Roman Empire, invaded Ethiopia. It's hard to think of this as a "war"; Italian casualties were somewhere between 355 and 500, while Ethiopian casualties were in the order of 275,000. The colonial powers of Europe approved and recognized the occupation and annexation of Ethiopia in 1936 by the Italian Empire. Selassie I, in exile in England, warned Europe: "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow." Three years later saw the start of World War Two; and in 1941 British and Free French forces helped Ethopian troops liberate Ethiopia.

On one level the song is about these historical events, and on another level it is about the larger context of Africa shaking off the colonial powers. It also echoes the present day anti-neo-colonialist movement.

On yet another level, the song is a profession of the Rastafari worldview. "Babylon" is a generic name for empire (taken from those parts of Jewish scripture written after forced exile in Babylon) in a way that blends political reality with religious worldview. In this view all empires are the same; and all emperors, while they may have conflicts with one another, recognize each other as the powers that control the world's businesses, governments, and institutions.

Because my awareness of this worldview started with my investigations of ancient middle eastern Gnosticism, I still think of this as the gnostic view of political reality: worldly rulers are seen as shadows of demigod archons, whose empire over the earth is all-reaching; the faces may change, emperors may be deposed, but the numinous nature of Empire casts a permanent shadow on the human soul, and dominance will always resurface. Resistance against Empire is therefore not just political rebellion, but a challenge to the very concept of fate and to the notion that human nature is forevermore shaped by the desire to dominate others by force when possible. But this view is more than "gnostic": it the response of the religious spirit to the totality of economic and hegemonic domination that exists in the human sphere.

The visage on the album's cover is that of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the EZLN, and I bring this up to point out that while the song casts resistance to Empire in militaristic terms, the EZLN has actually turned away from the militaristic approach. This is good and necessary because, as the Revolution is beginning to understand, there is no way to defeat the Empire by matching the Empire's violence. When you take up arms "against" the Empire, you become of it, because Empire is rooted in the power you gain by pointing a weapon. For a graphic illustration of this point, I recommend Karin Badt's illuminating interview with a former FARC guerilla who was recruited as a young girl.

Jon Stewart skewers CNBC's business news shows for their role in selling the poison kool-aid:

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And, sorry to do this to ya, but, he also skewers Obama's Iraq policy:

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I woke up the other day thinking about peace talks. I've written before about how i think "peace talks" are crap: peace is more than the cessation of violence, but it's warmongers who have these talks. The one thing that earns you a place at the table for "peace talks" is demonstrating you have the capacity to kill lots of people. So the emphasis is on (a) proving you are a big alpha male and (b) finding ways to placate and co-exist with a few other alpha males.

There's a serious crisis of leadership in the world today. By which i mean, there isn't much real "leadership" going on. There's bullies who claim to be leaders, but they consistently fail the populations they are supposed to serve.

So, here was the thought i woke with the other day. Take 500 civilians from each "side" of the conflict. Put them in a room together and let them talk. They can be, should be, people of any socioeconomic class, but none of them can be governmental officeholders. The first rule is, no hitting anyone else. The second rule is, unless someone makes an accusation against you personally, no defensiveness -- you are to listen when someone from the other "side" is talking, and they have to listen to you when you're talking. Once you're able to listen to the other person's anger you can hear their hurt and loss and you can match up what they're saying against your own anger, hurt, loss.

The groups pair up, one from each "side" in every pair, and they go to see where the other half lives and works. They go to visit the graves of friends and family who died in the conflict. They eat at each other's table.

And then they all come back, and, having conceded that they have to find a way to live together somehow, they work out what kind of world they could all live in... and whatever they come up with is what the leaders have to implement.

Yeah, i know, it has flaws. I think it's better than letting people who have a vested interest in war negotiate the "peace." I figure a process like this would work for a few generations, until all the loopholes have been found and the war profiteers and bullies figure out how to game the system to their benefit. But at that point it will be up to someone else to figure out what to do next.

The Bush administration envisions a decades-long U.S. presence in Iraq.

One Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, said, "We aren't talking about staying forever." But he said a long-term training and advisory presence is possible.

"The fact is that if we can withdraw to bases and then eventually ~~close those bases and~~ Iraq will run out of oil and then we can come home, that's the plan," the Arizona senator said.

from Richardson seeks total Iraq withdrawal

Fixed.

The Democrats are removing a requirement from the military spending bill that President Bush seek approval from Congress first if he intends to wage hostilities against Iran.

The Democrats trust President Bush to handle military matters with Iran.

Remind me why we were supposed to support the Democrats in November last year?

Where are the hearings on Hurricane Katrina? Oh yeah, LIEberman deep-sixed them.

Where are the hearings on torture, secret renditions, CIA movements of secret prisoners around Eastern Europe? Where is talk of the extradition of CIA agents to Italy to face charges of kidnapping? Where is the restoration of habeas corpus on the agenda? The repeal of onerous USAPATRIOT Act provisions? The closure of Guantanamo? Reconsideration of the REALID Act? Movement on the matter of Posse Comitatus? A few of these matters are getting lip service, but nothing more.

This weekend i spent a fair amount of time pondering what peace is and how it should be achieved.

Whenever we have a war, there's a bunch of shooting and bombing and fear and rape and famine and torture and maiming, and whole nations are deeply traumatized and face environmental and economic crises for years or decades. And after the primary spasms of horrific violence end, there are "peace talks." Or, often the "peace talks" happen when there's been some terrorism and skirmishing and threats.

This whole idea of "peace talks" though enshrines a number of unspoken presumptions and agendas that i want to unravel a bit.

First, look at who gets to be party to the peace talks: the generals and warlords and state leaders and other people who masterminded the war in the first place. Does anyone ever speak for, or listen to, the refugees, the broken families, the orphans and widows, the children who were prostituted or drugged and made into soldiers?

Also absent are the war profiteers. They would prefer to stay in the shadows, because they benefit most when no one pays any attention to their role in all this and everyone just assumes that they are passive merchants, not power brokers. They want people to think that it wouldn't matter if they stopped selling arms or hiring out mercenaries because the demand exists independent of their supply, so if they got out of the war business someone else would just offer the same products anyway.

The people who do get to participate in peace talks do so in order to advance their agenda -- and i assert this to be the case for all parties no matter what ideology or doctrine they epouse: they want to duck any kind of accountability they might otherwise face for war crimes, and they want a seat in the cartel that has a monopoly on violence in the region. Throughout the peace talks, it is in their interest to make it seem that they are willing to return to violence at the drop of a hat -- as if being violent is the easy option, and not being violent is a perpetual struggle. Running and outfitting an army is not cheap, the resources for training, weapons, and provisions have to come from somewhere, and yet we are to believe that being nonviolent is the harder option? At peace talks, the biggest asset one has is the appearance of having limitless capacity for violence, and how backward is that?

So the idea of "peace" promoted by the state is the absence of factional organized violence, enforced by a cartel who assert the unique authority to use sanctioned violence in that region. Anyone else uses violence, they are criminals; the state uses violence, it is just and heroic. This is "peace:" unrealized potential violence. The state wants you to believe that peace comes at the point of a gun.

Which is where, like so many of the matters i consider, this comes down to one's view of human nature. If people are fundamentally unruly animals, for whom it actually is more difficult to be nonviolent than brutal, then pacificism doesn't make sense, and neither does compassion. Under the pessmistic view of human nature, we should be thankful if we live in an area with a strong state and a healthy culture of fear-respect for God, police and military.

However, i'm not inclined to think that way, for several reasons, not the least of which is that what we are witnessing is not the action of humans in our natural habitat but the action of humans under the severe stresses of crowding and being caged. If our unruliness is fundamentally the reaction to this stress -- along with stress from various other stressors -- then adding the stress of perpetually-threatened state violence cannot be a lasting solution. The better solution, it seems to me, is a more direct response to the stresses which cause our unruliness.

Is peace more than the absence of war? I believe instead that it is the steps we take to foster greater understanding, less prejudice, and reduced stress. If this is the case, then we all have a stake in promoting and developing peace. And we, all of us, not just the ones with the guns and bombs, have a voice in saying what it looks like.

Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack said Tuesday he favors removing most American troops from the Baghdad area and southern Iraq while maintaining a smaller security force in northern Iraq for a limited period.

Vilsack, who announced last week he would seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, said Iraq may have to endure a period of heavy violence following an American troop redeployment, but that it was the only way to force the Iraqi government to make the hard decisions about restoring order to the fractured country.

"It's tough love, no question about it," Vilsack told The Associated Press in a wide-ranging interview. "It may very well require them to go through some chaotic and very difficult times for them to finally decide it is not in their interest to continue down that road."

... Vilsack called the continued presence of American troops in Iraq "both a crutch and an excuse," delaying the Iraqi government from seizing control of the country and tamping down the sectarian violence.

from Vilsack wants smaller U.S. force in Iraq (emphasis added)

This is basically the mainstream view taking form among our politicians, so this is not so much a knock against Vilsack, with whom i am barely acquainted but already beginning to dislike, so much as it is about the attitudes and unspoken assumptions that underline our country's approach to war, politics, and power.

"Going through some chaotic and very difficult times" sounds eerily similar to Bush's comment about the Iraqi people "tolerating" a remarkable level of violence in the aftermath of the invasion.

He thinks they're going to see worse than they're seeing now? The UN is already saying that torture in Iraq now is worse than it was under Saddam Hussein, which is astounding and chilling to contemplate. It's worse than it was when Uday had free reign to put people in wood chippers feet first?

In this view, chaos (IOW, civil war) will rage unabated until the Iraqi government makes "the hard decisions" which will bring about the cessation of violence. NOT the people of Iraq -- you know, the ones who are burying their children -- but the government. Because, unspoken assumption here: peace comes when rulers impose it. Not from neighbors of different ethnicities and sects who talk and work together and shop at the market together and help each other rebuild after bad weather. Not from parents who want to protect their children.

"The hard decisions" is a codeword which means the US government's idea of victory in Iraq now is for another dictator to take over and impose "peace" through violence, intimidation, and strongarming. So basically, Vilsack's proposal boils down to: "We're going to step aside and covertly support the most promising dictator who comes along. We'll ask the media to kindly refrain from posting about the human rights violations of the new regime during the 'transitional period.'"

On a recent Sunday, I was buying groceries in my beloved Amariya neighborhood in western Baghdad when I heard the sound of an AK-47 for about three seconds. It was close but not very close, so I continued shopping.

As I took a right turn on Munadhama Street, I saw a man lying on the ground in a small pool of blood. He wasn't dead.

The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn't dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened.

I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing.

I went on to another grocery store, staying for about five minutes while shopping for tomatoes, onions and other vegetables. During that time, the man managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. Then, a white Volkswagen pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times. The car took off down a side road and vanished.

No one did anything. No one lifted a finger. The only reaction came from a woman in the grocery store. In a low voice, she said, "My God, bless his soul."

I went home and didn't dare tell my wife. I did not want to frighten her.

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from No One Dares to Help

Mr Ramon - a close confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - said ... that in order to prevent casualties among Israeli soldiers battling Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon, villages should be flattened by the Israeli air force before ground troops moved in.

He added that Israel had given the civilians of southern Lebanon ample time to quit the area and therefore anyone still remaining there could be considered a Hezbollah supporter.

"All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah," Mr Ramon said.

from Israel says world backs offensive (thanks to glamwhorebunni for the link)

That's a hell of an assumption, isn't it? To assume that anyone who would not, or could not, leave their own home by now, is now by default an enemy sympathizer, is illogical and unethical.

If your neighborhood were attacked by troops of another country, would you flee your own home? Or would you oil up the gun and bunker down? Some of you would do the latter, thinking, to hell with someone else coming in and taking my home by force.

Congratulations! Wanting to save your home makes you a terrorist.

Hmm, this sounds remarkably similar to the tactics used by the US Army in Iraq -- using airpower to soften urban battlegrounds to save troop lives. It was just as wrong then as it is now.

It basically is an admission that the attempt to win the "hearts and minds" of the Middle East has been lost.

It is also an assertion that the Israeli regime has so much more firepower than its neighbors that at this point it does not have to care what anyone else thinks.

Once upon a time i bought into the idea that it would be an acceptable use of force to bring a cruel tyrant out of power. I no longer feel that way, and i cannot condone any use of force to remove tyrants from power.

Do not mistake this to mean that i am content with tyrants abusing people. I simply mean that the ethical answer to tyranny is complex and subtle.

The problem is that a tyrant depends upon the participation of most of his subjects. If most subjects participate in the hegemony, then dissidents can be dealt with in whatever fashion the tyrant deems necessary, and everyone will look the other way.

But here are the problems i have with the idea of either armed revolt or "benevolent invasion." First, in either case, human rights go right out the window. Whatever abuses were occuring under the dictatorship, they are going to become far worse with armed conflict going on.

Second, the idea of armed conflict implies that force and violence are acceptable ways of solving disputes between human beings. Parties in an armed conflict frame the discussion about justice and exclude every other voice -- which means primarily that women, children, pacifists, and peasants are excluded from discourse on power or resource distribution.

Third, war is extremely profitable for incredibly unscrupulous people, who might often even encourage armed conflict in order to bolster their own sales.

Fourth, history shows time and again that when rebels win, they establish a regime that turns out to be just as cruel as the one it repulsed. This is because:

Fifth, digging even deeper: the old addage that power corrupts is absolutely true, and so the only way to truly counter tyranny is to deny the validity of power itself.

The only way to counter tyranny is to address it at the social level -- for people to stop playing along. You can't have concentration camps without guards. You can't have arrest-kidnappings and secret detentions without people working as secret police. You can't have oppression without citizen informers and people looking the other way and opportunists snatching what they can.

Furthermore, tyrannies can only survive if the other nations of the world recognize their authority and agree to do business with them. But, since the idea of state itself inherently borders on tyrannical, it is in the interest of any state government to recognize another -- a worldwide cartel of monopoly-on-violence.

The barrier to achieving justice, then, is fear. In an unjust society, people fear not just for themselves but for those they care about. People fear that they will be abandoned by those around them for seeking justice. So what we can do for those who live under tyranny is to seek ways to indicate our solidarity with them, to refuse to participate in any economic or political endeavor that supports the tyrant or his hegemon, and to support those who raise awareness of non-violent resistance and non-participation.

So, recently the two major warring factions in the horrible Sudanese civil war signed a tentative peace agreement. This is being hailed as good news, and if it stops the killing, then i suppose the news could be worse.

But why are only the factions who use violence the ones who get to make the agreement? Why aren't war orphans and war widows and maimed peasants at the negotiating table? Who speaks for them when peace agreements are made?

"Peace agreements" between warring factions reinforce the idea that political power is rooted in the ability to claim that one's use of violence is legitimate. I reject this as a valid rationale for deciding who gets to make the peace arrangements and write the constitutions and enforce the laws. The only valid rationale for claiming this authority is the consent of the governed.

Current Music: Yes "Lift Me Up"

When you see this meme, post lyrics to an anti-war song.

Pet by A Perfect Circle

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Bonus lyrics! 'Merican by The Descendants

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Chris Wilson of Lakeland, Florida, said in an interview that he created the site in 2004 as a simple Internet pornography venture: Users post amateur pictures--supposedly of their wives or girlfriends--and for a $10 registration fee, others can take a look. He claims there are about 150,000 registered users on the site, 45,000 of whom are military personnel. Of the 130,000 unique visitors who come to the site daily, Wilson estimates that 30 percent of the traffic, or 39,000 unique users, are US military personnel.

Early on in his Internet venture, Wilson said, he encountered a problem--potential military customers in Iraq and Afghanistan couldn't pay for membership, because credit card companies were blocking charges from "high-risk" countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not wanting to shortchange US troops, Wilson established a rule that if users posted an authentic picture proving they were stationed overseas, they would be granted unlimited access to the site's pornography. The posting began, sometimes of benign images of troops leaning against their tanks, but graphic combat images also began to appear. As of September 20, there were 244 graphic battlefield images and videos available to members.

...The website has become a stomach-churning showcase for the pornography of war--close-up shots of Iraqi insurgents and civilians with heads blown off, or with intestines spilling from open wounds. Sometimes photographs of mangled body parts are displayed: Part of the game is for users to guess what appendage or organ is on display.

from The Porn of War (some foul language, so perhaps NWS), cited in The Heart of Darkness, linked by antiwar_dot_com

Is the link between sex and violence in pornography, which keeps coming up in myriad ways, an inevitable side effect of the medium? Or does this link form when pornography is produced and consumed in a society rife with imperialism and oppression? I lean towards the latter, and i still hold on to the idea that non-exploitative, non-sexist pornography can be a good thing.

A while ago i wrote about the suggested link between pornography and the Abu Ghraib photos. In that discussion i pondered the ways in which militaristic culture would twist the medium of pornography to the purpose of mischanneling pleasure as part of the culture's efforts to produce a class of soldiers.

If my thesis is right, then woman-positive porn should have some effect towards calming sexism, racism, and militarism -- that is, *if* consumers bottle-fed on high-impact thrill porn can develop a taste for kinder, gentler woman-positive porn.

Unfortunately, exploitation remains profitable, even (perhaps especially) in an industry like pornography. It is as if the archontic forces are aligned against the success of such a project: capitalism, militarism, desensitization, misogyny, racism, addiction, and... i don't know a term for "compulsively seeking prurient thrills in the depiction of violence."

Postscript. I recall having a discussion in my journal at some point, though going back through memories now i can't find it, about the prurient-violent depictions of Hell sometimes given by Bible-thumping preachers, in which it is clear that pleasure is being taken in the thought of sinners suffering in Hell. I think that style of religion plays a role in this too, as part-and-parcel of the cultural pattern of what militarism has done to American culture.

On Monday, March 17, St. Patrick's Day, four of us from the Ithaca Catholic Worker Community - Peter De Mott, who served in both the Marines and the Army including a year in Vietnam as a Marine, Clare and Teresa Grady and Daniel Burns - went to the Army-Marine Recruiting Center in an act of nonviolent civil resistance to war making. We read the following statement and poured blood around the entrance to the center, including on the flag, to call attention to the horror of war. It may seem strange. You may wonder -- why did they have to pour blood, why on the flag?...

...War is bloody. The blood we brought to the recruiting station was a sign of the blood inherent in the business of the recruiting station. Blood is a sign of life, which we hold to be precious, and a sign of redemption and conversion, which we seek as people of this nation. The young men and women who join the military, via that recruiting station, are people whose lives are precious. We are obligated, as citizens of a democracy, to sound an alarm when we see our young people being sent into harm's way for a cause that is wholly unjust and criminal. Blood is a potent symbol of life and death.

Blood is the sacred substance of life, yet it is shed wantonly in war. As Catholics, when we receive the Eucharist, we acknowledge our oneness with God and the entire human family. We went to the recruiting center using what we have - our bodies, our blood, our words, and our spirits - to implore, beg, and order our country away from the tragedy of war and toward God's reign of peace and justice.

from The March 17, 2003 Action of the "Saint Patrick's Four"

The four argued that their actions were legal because the invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law. Because the United Nations had not approved the invasion of Iraq, the invasion was a series of serious illegal acts that constitute war crimes. And, under the Nuremberg Principles of international law, individuals have international rights and duties to prevent crimes against humanity which transcend the national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state.

They further argued that if their actions were indeed illegal, they were authorized under the defense of necessity because the harm they caused was far smaller than the harm they were trying to prevent. They talked with the jury about Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, and the Boston Tea Party. They reminded us, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, that everything done by supporters of Hitler in Germany was illegal, it was only those who tried to stop him who were violating the law.

After twenty hours of deliberation, the jury locked up 9-3 to acquit them. As the jury was released, the crowded courtroom gave them a thunderous standing ovation. The power of the people to present their views about justice had prevailed over narrow law. Later, the District Attorney announced he would not re-prosecute them, stating that he thought another jury trial would yield the same outcome.

Recently, however, the federal government jumped into the fray. Last week the St. Patrick's Four appeared in federal court in Binghamton, New York to be charged on four federal charges arising from the exact same action.

They are now charged with federal conspiracy "by force, intimidation, and threat" to impede an officer of the United States - a felony charge that carries punishment of up to six years in prison and a $250,000 fine. They are also charged with criminal damage to property and two counts of trespass, charges punishable by up to an additional 2 years in prison.

from The St. Patrick's Four and Resistance to the War in Iraq

Their trial on these trumped-up federal charges starts today.

Today was the first time i'd ever heard of the Saint Patrick's Four. The news media are not reporting on them for the same reason that they were reluctant to say anything about the Pope's condemnation of the war on Iraq or of his criticism of Israel: namely, because the Chaliban desperately wants Catholics to vote Republican. Thinking they can sway American Catholics to vote GOP because they agree on abortion, they have to downplay the potentially more serious issue of disagreement over the war.

When i marched against the War in New Orleans in 2003, the only visibly Christian group with us was Pax Christi. Catholic opposition to the war is a serious threat to the Chaliban, who want to present Christianity as a united force.

A STORY THAT the U.S. government hoped would never see the light of day finally has been published, 60 years after it was spiked by military censors. The discovery of reporter George Weller's firsthand account of conditions in post-nuclear Nagasaki sheds light on one of the great journalistic betrayals of the last century: the cover-up of the effects of the atomic bombing on Japan.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later, Nagasaki was hit. Gen. Douglas MacArthur promptly declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the news media. More than 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of the cities, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. Instead, the world's media obediently crowded onto the battleship USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the Japanese surrender.

A month after the bombings, two reporters defied General MacArthur and struck out on their own. Mr. Weller, of the Chicago Daily News, took row boats and trains to reach devastated Nagasaki. Independent journalist Wilfred Burchett rode a train for 30 hours and walked into the charred remains of Hiroshima.

Both men encountered nightmare worlds. Mr. Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: "In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly - people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague."

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from The Hiroshima cover-up (thanks to jenlight for the lead)

To: the Boston Globe

In an opinion piece titled "Failures of Intelligence," dated July 26, 2005, your columnist Jeff Jacoby argued that

"When the enemy is an international terrorist organization or a violent and dictatorial regime, preemption must trump reaction."

In a nutshell, what Jacoby is saying is that we should "shoot first and let God sort 'em out." This argument is deplorable, dishonest, and racist, because it values American lives over non-American lives. It is dishonest because Jacoby is attempting to excuse an inexcusable error.

In his view, anything we do to minimize the deaths of our own people is acceptable; we need not even feel obligated to consider the consequences of errors made, to consider how many non-Americans are going to die. Now that Iraq is on the verge of a full-fledged civil war, with 25,000 Iraqi civilians dead in the last two years, we have to ask if they or the world are truly better off.

The argument that intelligence failures were errors and not lies, as Jacoby asserts, requires us to overlook evidence that the White House suppressed dissent in the CIA. This is what the complex Valerie Plame affair is about. CIA "intelligence" about Saddam's WMD programs was provided in an environment where dissenting CIA agents could expect retribution from the administration. Furthermore, there have been anecdotes alleging that intelligence which did not support the Administration's policy of "regime change in Iraq" was ignored or suppressed. Given these facts, it is not feasible to argue that the WMD claims were mere "errors."

Jacoby then tries to minimize these lies by arguing that Democrats said the same things first, as if those of us who opposed the war from the very beginning would have supported it instead if the lies came from a Democrat instead of a Republican. This war is not a liberal vs. conservative issue; many liberals support the war and many conservatives oppose it. This is also becoming clear as more Republicans voice opposition to the war.

"Shooting first and asking questions later" is reckless from the standpoint of homeland security as well, because it only adds to the growing list of grievances which people in the Arab world have against US meddling in their affairs.

Best regards,
Sabrina R______

( for antiwar folks: open in case of terrorist attack )

Uzbekistan's "Dear John" letter to the U.S.: Maybe we should stop seeing each other. I'm just not getting enough out of our relationship and don't see it going anywhere.

Justice-loving human rights supporters in the U.S. to Uzbekistan: That's okay. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Edit. Do you suppose this is a response to the new, and suddenly yet very quietly developed, US-India military alliance?

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sophiaserpentia

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with antiwar

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how the hero narrative distorts our view of crimes against humanity

the revolutionary gnosis

jon stewart at the top of his game

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peace versus the absence of violence

the hard decisions

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israeli regime argues it must destroy the village to save it

responding to dictatorships

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meme from snakefeathers and <user site="livejournal.com" user="

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"killing cannot be with Christ"

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