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Letters from a Desperate Veteran part 1: A memorial service yet to be held |
| Cloy Richards | Grassroots America | 5/26/08 | Iraq |
I received two phone calls today. The calls had very similar messages in wording, yet totally different meanings to me. The first was from a fellow veteran and activist, asking that I "try to have a peaceful Memorial Day". The second was from my brother, wishing me "a happy Memorial Day". If you've read my poem "Survivor's Guilt" you already know that I find nothing "happy" about Memorial Day. I type this letter in the hope that I may find some kind of peace today.
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Col. Ann Wright: Five years after government resignation, protester still fired up |
| Nick Lucchesi | blogs.riverfronttimes.com | 4/8/08 | Iraq |
Ann Wright, one of only three U.S. government officials to publicly resign over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was in St. Louis Tuesday night to speak with anti-war supporters at MokaBe's Coffeehouse and at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid Ave.
... An FBI translator noticed that her superiors were changing dialogue on transcripts of conversations between U.S. officials and Turks and Pakistanis about selling nuclear information. When she brought it to the attention of her bosses, she was fired.
Another former translator, this time in England, leaked secret information concerning alleged illegal activities by the U.S. government in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. She was criminally charged.
A naval lawyer based at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp released the names of prisoners being held there, after the military refused to provide any documentation. The lawyer served six months in prison.
These whistle-blowers and the stories of 22 others are chronicled in Dissent: Voices of Conscience.
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| Tom Coghlan | Telegraph.co.uk | 3/21/08 | Iran |
Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, has triggered speculation that he has been using a tour of the Middle East to prepare Iran's neighbours for a possible war with Tehran.
Mr Cheney, whose nine-day tour has included stops in Turkey, the Gulf and Afghanistan, insisted that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
"The important thing to keep in mind is the objective that we share with many of our friends in the region, and that is that a nuclear-armed Iran would be very destabilising for the entire area," Mr Cheney told ABC News before arriving in Kabul, the Afghan capital, after a visit to Oman.
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| Andrew Wimmer | counterpunch.org | 3/19/08 | Iraq |
Getting the Story Right: War Demands Its Due
By Andrew Wimmer
Anniversaries are a time for storytelling. Each year we are afforded an opportunity to expurgate, embellish, tweak. It is a kind of spring-cleaning for our collective psyche. Some bits of the narrative get swept away, allowing others to come into clearer focus. It is a time to tidy up, to get the story right.
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| Howard Zinn | The Progressive | 3/1/08 | The Movement |
There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held—security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness” for working people.
Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail: “Well, I’m writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can’t tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now.”
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| Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. | Address delivered at Riverside Church | 4/4/67 | Militarism |
Every year, almost like clockwork, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech gets airplay. The charismatic orator is frozen on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963. No doubt it was a great presentation, deeply moving and full of dazzling poetry and inspiring images. But it was not his most important speech, nor was it his most courageous one. That was to come on April 4, 1967 in Riverside Church in New York. There King demonstrated his political maturity and understanding of how the system works. He moved beyond a simple race analysis to include class and foreign policy issues. He forcefully denounced the war in Vietnam. He called the US "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and he deplored the "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism." Exactly one year later King was assassinated in Memphis.I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.
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| Hon Wayne Gilchrest Bruce Laingen Trita Parsi | C Span video archives | 10/30/07 | Empire/Intl Relations |
In late October, 2007, the Honorable Wayne Gilchrest, R-Maryland, moderated a panel on Iran-US relations under the auspices of the Washington National Cathedral's Center for Global Justice and Reconciliation.
Rev. Canon John Peterson, who heads CGJR, emphasized that reconciliation deserves more attention in reviewing US-Iran's history, and explained the "track 2 diplomacy" efforts of the Center.
Rev. Peterson introduced Mr. Gilchrest, who, in addition to his other House activities, recently formed the House Dialog Caucus, whose purpose is to push for diplomatic solutions to global crises.
Peterson also introduced the other panelists: Dr. Abbas Amat, professor of Middle East Studies at Yale University; author and Northwestern University professor Stephen Kinzer; Ambassador L. Bruce Laingen, who was Charge d Affaires of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979; and Dr. Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council and author of "Treacherous Alliance: The Hidden Dealings between Iran, Israel, and the United States."
Each panelist spoke on the question posed to him by the Moderator, then answered questions from the large and actively engaged audience.
A personal note: This video, this conference, is among the most hopeful and intelligent discussions on US-Iran relations that I have heard. I listen to it repeatedly to reaffirm my commitment and skills to advocate effectively for improved US-Iran relations.
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| Fatemeh Keshavarz | | 9/22/2007 | Iran |
Fatemeh Keshavarz is Professor and Chair of the Washinton University Department of Asian & Near Eastern Languages & Literatures. She is the author of Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran, and writes a regular email newsletter, Windows on Iran. She read this poem at the No War, No Warming rally in downtown St. Louis on October 20, 2007.
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| Scott Ritter | AlterNet | 10/5/07 | Iran |
The countdown to war with Iran is both real and terrifying. And it won’t be stopped so long as Iraq is in the spotlight.The long-awaited “progress report” of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on the status of the occupation of Iraq has been made, providing Americans, via the compliant media, with the spectacle of loyal Bush yes men offering faith-based analysis in lieu of fact-based assessment.
In the days and weeks that have since passed, two things have become clear: Neither Congress nor the American people (including the antiwar movement) have a plan or the gumption to confront President Bush in anything more than cosmetic fashion over the war in Iraq, and while those charged with oversight mill about looking to score cheap political points and/or save face, the administration continues its march toward conflict with Iran unimpeded.
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| Chris Hedges | truthdig.com | 8/6/07 | Iraq |
The war in Iraq is about to get worse—much worse. The Democrats’ decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses. This will be sudden. The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached. Command and control will disintegrate. And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated. But this will not be the end of the conflict. It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests. More...
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| Mark Townsend | The Observer | 8/5/07 | Afghanistan |
If you've read Zbigniew Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives" (BasicBooks, 1997), then you'd already know that a long-term occupation (or at least control through a puppet goverment) was always the plan. More...
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| James Ingalls and Sonali Kolhatkar | Foreign Policy In Focus | 6/13/07 | Afghanistan |
James Ingalls and Sonali Kolhatkar are the co-directors of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a US-based nonprofit organization that works in solidarity with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). They are also the co-authors of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence, published in 2006 by Seven Stories Press. More...
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Is Bush Planning to Nuke Iran? If So, Say Goodbye to Democratic Outcomes |
| Paul Craig Robert | counterpunch.org | 6/18/07 | Iran |
The Reign of the Tyrants is at Hand
"It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral."The surprise decision by the Bush regime to replace General Peter Pace as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been explained as a necessary step to avoid contentious confirmation hearings in the US Senate. Gen. Pace's reappointment would have to be confirmed, and as the general has served as vice chairman and chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the past 6 years, the Republicans feared that hearings would give war critics an opportunity to focus, in Defense Secretary Gates words, "on the past, rather than the future."
General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Press Club, February 17, 2006.
"They will be held accountable for the decisions they make. So they should in fact not obey the illegal and immoral orders to use weapons of mass destruction."
General Peter Pace, CNN With Wolf Blitzer, April 6, 2003
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| Tony Karon | Rootless Cosmopolitan blog | 6/14/07 | Palestine/Israel |
This is a very revealing analysis... More...
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Iraqi Lawmakers Pass Resolution That May Force End to Occupation |
| Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland | AlterNet | 6/7/07 | |
Will Bush honor the will of the Iraqi people? Yeah, right... What did Donald Rumsfeld say? "This is what free people do." More...
[0] comments (369 views)
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