Nonviolent Resistance

VIDEO: Who Decides About War?

"Who Decides About War?," the National Conference on War Powers, Law, and Democracy, took place October 2-3, 2009 in Washington D.C.. Organized by the Guard Home! campaign, Liberty Tree Foundation, and many partners, and hosted by the National Lawyers Guild at the Georgetown Law School, this conference was the first of its kind in many years, uniting academics with activists, attorneys with veterans, in exploring key reforms necessary to democratizing defense in the United States, and making war less likely.

• Keynote Remarks: Dr. Morton Halperin and Jeremy Scahill
• Panel I - War Powers and the States

Panelists: State Rep. Michael Fisher (VT), Sen. Rich Madaleno (MD), Sen. Jamin Raskin (MD)

• Panel II - War Powers Principles: Constitution, Law, & the People

Panelists: Elaine Brower (moderator), Leah Bolger, Ben Manski, Benson Scotch, David Swanson

• Panel III - War Powers in Practice

Panelists: Jean Athey (moderator), John Bonifaz, Prof. Caleb Rossiter, Prof. Don Wallace

• Roundtable: Peace Advocacy and Defense Reform Panelists: Phyllis Bennis, Geoff Millard, Elaine Brower, Kevin Zeese, Jeremy Scahill

For a full listing of speakers at the conference, click here.

To order a DVD of the proceedings, please contact us. Watch videos of the event.

Veteran Fasting Outside White House | Press Release

Thomas E. Mahany, a Vietnam War veteran (101st Airborne Division), now a stonemason and artist from Michigan, has been fasting in front of the White House since Veterans Day. He sent Obama the following letter the day after Veterans Day:

Dear Mr. President,

In May of 1970 I spent 29 days in Lafayette Square fasting for Peace in Viet Nam. I now feel that [it] is time to act once again. Accordingly, as of 0600 Hours, Nov 11, Veterans Day 2009, I have taken my last material sustenance other than water until specific action is taken by your Administration and our Military to stem the tragic and ever-increasing rise in the incidence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which is rapidly approaching epidemic proportions among our Fighting Men and Women.

I served in Viet Nam and I also lost a brother-in law to suicide caused by PTSD. He had two young sons. I have seen firsthand what this can do to a family.

In taking my action, I hope to elicit for you, from the peace loving people of this nation, moral support sufficient to spiritually bolster you as you make your decision concerning our military presence in Afghanistan.

We're calling on activists around the globe to organize an action between December 27th through December 31st to send Obama, the US State Department and Congress a message to pressure the Israeli government to Lift the Siege on Gaza Now!

The timing here is crucial. On December 27, 2008, Israel launched an attack on the Gaza Strip called Operation Cast Lead in which over 1400 Palestinians were killed, including as many as 300 children. In remembrance of these innocent civilians and to mark the fact that it has been one year since the Israeli assault began, some 1,000 people from around the world will join with 50,000 Palestinians in a massive nonviolent Gaza Freedom March on New Year's Eve, December 31, in Gaza. The International Coalition to End the Illegal Siege of Gaza is calling on us to coordinate local solidarity actions to raise awareness and media attention for the big March and the need to end the illegal blockade. Will you join us?

Actions are already being planned in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington DC and other locations. You still have time to plan something in your community. It doesn't take a lot of people. Below are a few ideas, but whatever you do, make sure you write a press release and call the local media to encourage them to attend. The best way to spread the word is to get your event covered by the local press!

The important things:

• Do something public between the 27th through 31st.
• Register your event/action here.
• Tell the press about your action.
• Take a photo and upload it here beginning December 27th.

By David Swanson

I've been reading a brand new book called "The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle," which is in large part an analysis of what worked in the protesting of the World Trade Organization 10 years ago. Why is it, I wonder, that activists were able to shut down the center of this major city in Washington state, but for years we have been unable to shut down the center of Washington, D.C., in opposition to wars.

North Alabama Peace Network says ... It's Obama's War Now!
By Linda Haynes

(Huntsville, Alabama -- Sat. Nov. 14, 2009) Today's North Alabama Peace Network rally focused on the fact that while President Obama inherited a bad situation, he has not pulled troops out of Iraq and has expanded the war in Afghanistan. He's even considering sending additional troops to Afghanistan in the coming weeks. And, Pakistan has become another war front.

These are President Obama's wars now. He owns them, over one year after winning the presidency. Alabama peace activists demand that President Obama bring our brave soldiers home now!

Military use of Drones, how it will change our world from GordonSturrock on Vimeo.

Coordinator Trip Report - Talking Drones in Oregon
By Bruce Gagnon | Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

This report follows my short trip to Hood River, Oregon to speak about drones. The event was on November 13 and turned out to be much more important than anyone had expected.

The trip was hosted by the Columbia River Fellowship for Peace. Hood River is a relatively small community in a beautiful part of the state about an hour west of Portland. Surrounded by mountains the area has attracted high-tech types over the years who love to windsurf along the Columbia River. One such group of technologists created a corporation called Insitu that makes drones and was recently bought out by Boeing. Insitu has grown so much in recent years, as demand for drones in Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan has increased, that the company now is operating out of many different buildings in small towns on both sides of the river that separates Oregon and Washington.

Recently activists discovered an Insitu plan to build a central production facility that the company says will employ 700 people. The local media, politicians, and supporters of America's current wars applaud the proposal but local peace activists have been organizing a campaign in the community to force debate about drones.

The BRussells Tribunal president François Houtart (Belgium) and Abdul Sattar Edhi (Pakistan) to share 2009 UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence

The Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, has decided, following the unanimous recommendation of the International Jury, to award the 2009 UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence to the following two laureates, dividing the $100,000 amount of the Prize equally between them:

François Houtart (Belgium) for his life-long commitment to world peace, intercultural dialogue, human rights and the promotion of tolerance, and in recognition of his outstanding efforts to advance the cause of social justice in the world

Note: Chris Cook recorded some interesting audio of Malalai on her current book tour as well as some of the Question & Answer period.

Opinion: U.S. is doing no good in Afghanistan
By Malalai Joya | Mercury News

As an Afghan woman who was elected to Parliament, I am in the United States to ask President Barack Obama to immediately end the occupation of my country.

Eight years ago, women's rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women's rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media.

In 2001, the U.S. helped return to power the worst misogynist criminals, such as the Northern Alliance warlords and druglords. These men ought to be considered a photocopy of the Taliban. The only difference is that the Northern Alliance warlords wear suits and ties and cover their faces with the mask of democracy while they occupy government positions. But they are responsible for much of the disaster today in Afghanistan, thanks to the U.S. support they enjoy.

The U.S. and its allies are getting ready to offer power to the medieval Taliban by creating an imaginary category called the "moderate Taliban" and inviting them to join the government. A man who was near the top of the list of most-wanted terrorists eight years ago, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has been invited to join the government.

Over the past eight years the U.S. has helped turn my country into the drug capital of the world through its support of drug lords. Today, 93 percent of all opium in the world is produced in Afghanistan. Many members of Parliament and high ranking officials openly benefit from the drug trade. President Karzai's own brother is a well known drug trafficker. Read more.

“Peace Mom” Cindy Sheehan to Speak at Central Connecticut State University, November 16, 2009

Her Protests Galvanized National Attention to the Human Cost of the War in Iraq

November 11, 2009 (New Britain, CT)--Cindy Sheehan is an internationally known peace and social justice advocate whose son, Army Specialist Casey A. Sheehan, was killed in action in Sadr City, Baghdad, on April 4, 2004. Sheehan is founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, an organization of Americans who have had loved ones killed in wars. As an act of protest against the war, in August 2005 Cindy took a stand outside of George Bush's home in Crawford, Texas asking what noble cause her son died for; this began the “Camp Casey” peace movement. Sheehan will be at Central Connecticut State University on Monday, November 16, to give two presentations. The events are free and open to the public. Campus map and directions available at www.ccsu.edu/visit. More below the fold.

10-Week Chicago Teamsters Strike Wins Back Health Care
Enku Ide | Labor Notes

Workers at SK Hand Tools were far from lonely in facing the loss of health benefits in the sour economy. According to the Center for American Progress, 2.4 million workers have lost coverage during the recession. Cuts have been most stark in manufacturing, with 733,600 workers losing employer-based coverage between December 2007 and May, when SK Hand Tools quietly stopped paying the bills....Berg says that the national health care debate hit home for Local 743 members. "The workers would look on TV or in the newspaper and only see insurance executives and business people," he said. "Nobody was speaking for working people. When we struck, workers at SK Hand Tools felt that they had become a voice for working people."

While Congress and health care executives played political volleyball with health care reform, workers at SK Hand Tools in Chicago took matters into their own hands.

When their employer unilaterally dropped health insurance and tried to strip pensions and cut pay, 70 members of Teamsters Local 743 struck on August 25.

Now they’re returning to their production lines, where they make wrenches and other tools for Sears, having saved their health care and pensions. They took big pay cuts, but not as deep as what management had demanded: dropping pay from an average $14 to just above Illinois’s minimum wage, $8 an hour.

Although management dumped health care in early May, workers weren’t told. Many had to find out by word of mouth from other workers, or were clued in when hit with surprising medical bills. Workers said managers later told them they’d been too busy to inform employees. Since May, many workers have had to forgo needed medical care or are now amassing debt. Read more.

Larry “Bill” Elliott is scheduled to be killed by the Commonwealth of Virginia at 9 p.m. on November 17th. He was convicted of the 2001 murders of Robert A. Finch and Dana Thrall.

Mr. Elliott has a strong claim of innocence. There is no evidence that he was ever inside the house where the murders occurred and there is DNA evidence that someone else was inside the crime scene. The jury was never told that an eyewitness saw a man of a different race running from the crime scene and the prosecution’s star witness failed a polygraph test regarding her involvement in the murders. She only came up with the story implicating Mr. Elliott when police told her that she was going to be charged with the murders. Additionally, Mr. Elliott’s trial attorneys failed to locate an alibi witness who would have testified that he saw Mr. Elliott at his workplace at a time that made it impossible for him to commit the murders.

Please take a few minutes to say "Enough!" and that Virginia should not execute a man where so many questions remain about his guilt remain. Help us stop the cycle of violence that state sanctioned killing perpetuates.

Please take one or more of the following actions - Details below:

Camus, Ideology, and the Will to Power
By Wade Lee Hudson | Charter for Compassion

Shortly after the end of World War Two, Albert Camus published "Neither Victim nor Executioner" in Combat, the magazine he edited for the French Resistance. This remarkable series of essays addressed key moral questions incisively. Shortly thereafter, he elaborated on these concerns in The Rebel, a lengthy book. In 1957, Camus, who wrote novels and plays as well as non-fiction, received the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.”

Camus’ apprehensions about violence, dehumanization, ideology, and the will to power remain relevant today. All of us, I suspect, have been guilty of many of the mistakes he describes.

The Essay

In the fourth paragraph of "Neither Victim nor Executioner," Camus announced his non-ideological approach when he declared:

We have seen men lie, degrade, kill, deport, torture – and each time it was not possible to persuade them not to do these things because they were sure of themselves and because one cannot appeal to an abstraction, i.e. the representative of an ideology.

Mankind's dialogue has just come to an end. And naturally a man with whom one cannot reason is a man to be feared....

We live in terror because persuasion is no longer possible; because man has been wholly submerged in History; because he can no longer tap that part of his nature, as real as the historical part, which he recaptures in contemplating the beauty of nature and of human faces; because we live in a world of abstractions, of bureaus and machines, of absolute ideas and of crude messianism. We suffocate among people who think they are absolutely right, whether in their machines or in their ideas.

Camus proposed a thorough, profound, yet realistic, non-violent response to these conditions. “It would be completely Utopian to wish that men should no longer kill each other,” Camus said. “I am convinced that we can no longer reasonably hope to save everything, but that we can at least propose to save our skins.” So he aimed “to define the conditions for a political position that is modest - i.e. free of messianism and disencumbered of nostalgia for an earthly paradise.” Read more.

Squadron13 and Oregon Veterans oppose manufacture of Drones in the Hood River Area | Press Release

What: Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space speaks and movie, "Rethinking Afghanistan."

Where: St. Mark's Church, 11th & Eugene in Hood River, Oregon

When: Tonight, Friday, Nov. 13, 2009 at 6:45 PM

In a new form of warfare, death is now being delivered by remote control from thousands of miles away. It's a new form of "Justice," It's a trial by Hellfire missile, quick and cheap. No need for expensive time consuming trials. No risk at all to American lives. Being a "suspect", or sitting next to one, is all the reason needed to murder anyone our government has designated as a "terrorist". No more PTSD damaged veterans to worry about, killing will become as easy as a push button video game. Just think of the career opportunities for our children in a world of unemployment, already pre-trained and desensitized to violence by years of exposure to violent video games and obscenely violent TV shows. Wages won't be high with such a large pool of skilled workers to pull from, but it will be comfortable work, a regular 8 to 5 type office job Our military shouldn't have any problem finding volunteers to 'serve' their county, and a large financial bonus offered by military recruiters for your child's commitment to military service will ensure a steady stream of young people.

Does this sound like a nightmare? It's not, it's our children's future and Oregon is becoming a part of making that nightmarish future come true. In fact, all of the above is already happening, much of it documented at the links below. The horrid plan is to greatly escalate this new form of warfare. It will be highly profitable for some Oregon businesses like InSitu who are gearing up to produce more surveillance drones. This is just a manufacturing hop, skip and a jump from producing the much larger armed versions which shoot a variety of extremely deadly weapons. Is it a stretch to think this could happen? Consider that InSitu got it's start designing drones to track schools of fish, now they are designing drones to track humans. We don't want to see this happen and are calling on concerned citizens from all over the United States to become aware of this new trend of war, "death by remote control". How can we stop this?

Tomorrow (Friday) in Hood River, Bruce Gagnon, one of our nations experts on space weapons will be speaking on these issues. His talk is titled, "Military use of Drones, how will it change our world?" The public is invited to attend the event with Gagnon who is scheduled to speak at 6:45pm at St. Mark's Church, 11th & Eugene in Hood River, Oregon. There will be a movie showing afterwards, "Rethinking Afghanistan" scheduled to start at 8pm. Please come and join us if you can. Armistice Day Vigil at 5pm. Full details at the first link below, including 11/13 event flyer and additional documentation links to support the nightmarish scene described above.

British soldier faces 10 years in jail after being arrested during anti-war demonstration | Daily Mail Reporter

A soldier facing charges of desertion for refusing to return to Afghanistan has been arrested and charged with five further offences after joining an anti-war demonstration.

Lance Corporal Joe Glenton led a protest in London last month against the continued presence of British troops in Afghanistan.

He was already facing a court martial but according to the Stop the War Coalition the new charges carry a maximum of 10 years imprisonment.

The group's convener Lindsey German said last night : 'This is not about breach of military regulations. In the last few days a range of military personnel have been speaking in the media in defence of this appalling war. I doubt if any of them have been arrested. Read more.

A Morally Bankrupt Military: When Soldiers and Their Families Become Expendable
By Dahr Jamail | Truthout

The military operates through indoctrination. Soldiers are programmed to develop a mindset that resists any acknowledgment of injury and sickness, be it physical or psychological. As a consequence, tens of thousands of soldiers continue to serve, even being deployed to combat zones like Iraq and/or Afghanistan, despite persistent injuries. According to military records, over 43,000 troops classified as "nondeployable for medical reasons" have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan nevertheless.

The recent atrocity at Fort Hood is an example of this. Maj. Nidal Hasan had worked as a counselor at Walter Reed, hearing countless stories of bloodshed, horror and death from dismembered veterans from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While he had not yet served in Iraq or Afghanistan, the major was overloaded with secondary trauma, coupled with ongoing harassment about his being a Muslim. This, along with other factors, contributed towards Hasan falling into a desperation so deep he was willing to slaughter fellow soldiers, and is indicative of fissures running deep into the crumbling edifice upon which the US military stands. Read more.

Korean naval base to bring unwanted change
Gagnon encourages Jeju residents to fight for the preservation of the Island
By Nicole Erwin | JeJu Weekly

Despite heavy opposition from Jeju residents the proposed Korean naval base is scheduled to begin construction later this year. Jeju Governor Kim Tae-hwan survived a recall vote over his plan to allow the base in early October. The Jeju Elections Commission resolved the vote was invalid after a turnout of only 11 percent of the 33 percent required showed. In lieu of the negative attention surrounding the contradictory notion of missile defense warships docked at Jeju’s proclaimed “Island of Peace,” people from all over are coming out of the wood work to shout about how destructive the base would be not only to the ideal of a peaceful society, but to the precious environment that will inevitably suffer as well.

The southern part of the island, specifically Gangjeong, the proposed location of the base, bears international significance for multiple reasons. Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space and recently, he visited Jeju to determine the severity of the proposed naval base. He says the most noteworthy reason for the base is structured around the fact that Jeju is the crossroad for the Malaka Straight where 80% of China’s oil is transported from the middle east.

“If the United States is able to militarily choke off the straight then the U.S. would be able to hold the keys to China’s economic engine. As the U.S. economy is collapsing the U.S. military strategy has been determined that the way we will control the world is to control the distribution of oil and natural gas…I believe that the base at Jeju is the key for this particular strategy and particularly for choking off the straight and controlling China,” said Gagnon. Read more.