Otpor was formed on October 10, 1998 in response to repressive
university and media laws introduced earlier that year. In the beginning, Otpor's activities were limited to University of Belgrade.
In the aftermath of the NATO air-strikes against FR Yugoslavia in 1999 regarding the Kosovo War, Otpor began a political campaign against the Yugoslav president
Slobodan Milošević. This resulted in nationwide police repression against Otpor
activists, during which nearly 2000 were arrested, some beaten. During the presidential campaign of September 2000, Otpor
launched its "Gotov je" (He's finished) campaign which would galvanize national discontent
with Milošević and eventually result in his defeat. Some students who led Otpor used Serbian translations of Gene Sharp's writings on nonviolent action as a theoretical basis for their campaign.
Otpor became one of the defining symbols
of anti-Milošević struggle and his subsequent overthrow. By aiming their activities at the pool of youth
abstinents and other disillusioned voters, Otpor contributed to one of the biggest turnouts ever for the September 24, 2000
federal presidential elections.
Having succeeded in persuading a large number of the traditional
electorate to abandon Milošević was another one of the areas where the smear-proof Otpor played a key role. Milošević
had in the past succeeded in persuading the public that his opponents were spies and traitors, but on this occasion, it backfired,
as the beatings and imprisonments during the summer of 2000 further cemented the decision to vote against the regime in many
voters' minds
Indonesians Show Wussy Americans How It's Done; Riot In Response To Bank Bailouts
Olympic Resistance: Indigenous Groups, Anti-Poverty Activists, and Civil Liberties Advocates
Protest 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver
Our Olympic coverage begins today in the streets of Vancouver, where some say a historic convergence is taking
place. Indigenous groups, anti-poverty activists and civil liberties advocates are some of the voices being heard in protests
against the Olympic presence. Franklin Lopez of the Vancouver’s Media Co-op has been following the Olympic protests.
He filed this report. [includes rush transcript]
The site is managed by an artist living in the South Korea. The photo in the profile is the children in Osan, near the
Pyeongtaek where the planned US military base hub in the north east Asia and a large US air base exists. They are the children
of a teacher who manages the Children Peace School there. As a part of the class programs, the children in the class drew
and wrote in a cloth, their wishes of the peaceful unification of Korea some day.
There was truncheons and pepper spray in the air when 300 demonstrators on
the night of Thursday the 11th August 2009 attempted to prevent police from entering into Brorson church on Nørrebro in Copenhagen.
In a planned action to police arresting 17 Iraqi male asylum seekers who recently sought refuge in the church in a
last attempt to get permission to stay in the country.
Shortly after the action starting at 01.05 approximately 100
demonstrators stood in front of the church and greeted the many officers welcomed with banners and chanting as pity you, 'child
murderers' and fascist pig, but using the SMS chains increased the number of angry demonstrators quickly to approximately
300th
And the angry protesters worked hard to prevent the police to carry a total of 17 detainees Iraqi men to the
police. Several protesters threw themselves in front of police vehicles, while others in protest against the arrest of Iraqis
laid his head on the pavement in front of the tires of the bus, those detained asylum seekers was in.
The demonstrators
had also tried to barricade a large part of Rantzausgade and Chapel Road with bins, pallets, containers and bicycles in an
attempt to detain the bus with those detained Iraqis.
The unrest ended at 04.15 on Åboulevard, after which the demonstrators
through megaphones urged each other to show up at Kapelvej 44th Here one could 'come and get a cup of coffee and a chat about
the way forward because they do not give up yet,' was the message on the streets.
Thousands of student protesters gathered at universities in Tehran and other cities across Iran on Monday, chanting antigovernment slogans and fighting with security forces in what appeared to be the most violent street
protests since the summer.
Thousands of student protesters, at left, clashed with government supporters in Tehran on Monday. More Photos >
The main entrance to Tehran University was sealed off by security forces, while clashes broke out between protesters and tens of thousands of Basij militiamen in squares around the city, witnesses and opposition Web sites reported. Protests erupted at universities throughout
the country, including Kerman, Mashhad, Isfahan and Hamdean. The opposition staged a street rally in Shiraz.
Witnesses said there was an anger to the protests not seen since the summer months, when protests broke out after the June
12 presidential election, which the opposition has dismissed as fraudulent. The Basij responded with ferocity, using copious
amounts of tear gas, electrical truncheons and stun guns in an effort to disperse the crowds.
There were reports of gunfire, apparently warning shots fired over the protesters’ heads by the security forces.
In Tehran, protesters chanted, “Death to the dictator,” followed by, “This is the last warning.”
They carried Iranian flags missing an emblem of “allah,” which was added after the 1979 revolution, and burned
posters bearing the image of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
A crowd of about 1,000 students gathered at a university in Sanandaj, in the Kurdish region of Iran, unusual for an area
where security is extremely tight, the Kurdish Rawanews reported. Students in Kerman, in central Iran, shouted, “Death to dictator,” “Azadi” — Persian for freedom — and,
“My brother, the street sweeper, take Mahmoud away,” a reference to Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Videos posted to YouTube, Twitter and opposition Web sites early on Monday showed students gathering in large crowds in Tehran and the northeastern city of
Mashhad. The police, who are barred from the universities, had gathered outside the schools and in public squares to head
off the protests, and by early afternoon there were widespread reports of tear gas, beatings and arrests.
An opposition Web site, Fararu, said that the Basijis threw two students, including a young woman, out a second floor window
at Boo-Ali Sina University in Hamedan, injuring both seriously.
The protests came on National Student Day, an official holiday in which the government commemorates the 1953 killings of
three students by the shah of Iran, who was overthrown 30 years ago by Islamist revolutionaries. Antigovernment activists
had signaled they would take advantage of the day to protest despite repeated warnings by the authorities.
Protesters from the opposition movement last thronged to the streets in early November as Iran celebrated another official
holiday, the 30th anniversary of the takeover of the United States embassy in Tehran. Tens of thousands of protesters wearing
green masks marched through the streets shouting anti-government slogans in those rallies, but were beaten back by police.
On Monday, witnesses in Tehran were quoted by Reuters as saying that Iranian police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators
at Vali Asr Square, and they said police officers had used batons to beat protesters at a separate demonstration.
The authorities ordered foreign news outlets not to cover the protests, and Internet service was reduced to a trickle on
Saturday, so slow that it was impossible to “open e-mails or any Web pages,” a journalist in Tehran said. Several
reports said that mobile-phone networks — which protesters have used to coordinate their actions and broadcast messages
outside Iran — had been shut down.
The measure appeared to be aimed at preventing information about the crackdown or the protest to get outside the country
and also to deprive the opposition from its primary means, the Internet and Facebook, to mobilize their supporters. Videos posted online have played a critical role in showing the world what has been happening
inside Iran.
Mir Hussein Moussavi, one of the two opposition leaders who ran against Mr. Ahmadinejad in June, issued a statement on Sunday characterizing the
movement “as alive” despite government suppression.
He warned that the authorities could not end the protests with the arrests of students because 1 in 20 Iranians were university
students, several opposition sites reported.
“They are asking us to forget about the election results as though people are concerned only about the elections,”
he said. “How can we make them understand that this is not the issue? It is not about who the president is or is not;
the issue is that they have sold out a great nation.”
Mr. Moussavi has been issuing statements regularly since June. Despite threats of arrest, he remains free, but his movement
is restricted, according to an ally outside the country.
His comments were followed by criticism of the government by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an influential politician who sided with the opposition but had been silent recently.
“Constructive criticism is not tolerated in the country,” Mr. Rafsanjani said at a meeting with students in
the city of Mashhad, according to the Web site mowjcamp.com. “It was not right to put the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards to confront the people.”
A day earlier, Iran tightened security in an apparent attempt to suppress any antigovernment rallies, arresting more than
20 mothers who were mourning children killed in the unrest that has broken out since the disputed June 12 elections. The mothers
had taken part in a vigil in Leleh Park in central Tehran every Saturday since the death in June of Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, whose shooting became a symbol of the government’s violent repression. The rally had been attacked by the police
before, but Saturday was the first time the mothers were arrested.
An opposition Web site reported that the protest was broken up by the police and that many demonstrators were taken away.
The BBC Persian service quoted a witness who said 29 women were arrested, some of whom were later released. But at least 21 remained
in jail, the BBC said.
It was unclear whether Ms. Agha-Soltan’s mother, who had participated in the vigils, was present on Saturday and
was among those arrested.
Next Saturday, six months after Election Day, protests are planned around the world “to honor the Iranian people’s
peaceful struggle for their human and civil rights,” according to the organizer, United4Iran, a network of activists
supporting human rights in Iran.
Nazila Fathi reported from Toronto and Robert F. Worth reported from Beirut, Lebanon.
An anarchist social worker raided by the feds wants his computers, manuscripts and pick axes back. He argues that
authorities violated the U.S. Constitution and the rights of his mentally ill clients while searching for evidence that he
broke an anti-rioting law on Twitter.
In a guns-drawn raid on October 1, FBI agents and police seized boxes of dubious “evidence” from the Queens,
New York, home of Elliott Madison. A U.S. District Judge in Brooklyn has set a Monday deadline to rule on the legality of
the search, and in the meantime has ordered the government to refrain from examining the material taken in the 6 a.m. search.
Madison, who counsels more than 100 severely mentally ill patients in New York, seems to have first drawn attention from
the authorities at September’s G-20 gathering of world leaders in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There he was arrested on
September 24 at a motel room for allegedly listening to a police scanner and relaying information on Twitter to help protesters
avoid heavily-armed cops — an activity the State Department lauded when it happened in Iran.
A week later, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, armed with a search warrant and backed by a federal grand jury investigation,
raided Madison’s house, which he shares with his wife of 13 years and several roommates. The squad seized his computers,
camera memory cards, books, air-filtration masks, bumper stickers and political posters — all purportedly evidence (.pdf) that the 41-year old social worker had broken a federal anti-rioting law that carries up to five years in prison.
Madison stands in the doorway of his house in Queens.
But a closer look at the court documents leaves the unmistakable impression that Elliott Madison is yet another casualty
of the government’s nasty, post-9/11 habit of considering political dissidents to be threats to national security.
Madison, his wife and his lawyer Martin Stolar say the search violates the Constitution’s protections against general
searches and prosecution for political speech. The police also seized mobile phones, citizen emergency kits, manuscripts,
posters and even the couple’s marriage license.
In this day and age, federally authorized agents entered the private home of a writer and urban planner and seized their
books and writings. The warrant’s vagueness and lack of specificity encouraged the agents to use their own discretion
and their own views of the political universe to seize, or not to seize, items which they thought were evidence of a violation
of the federal anti-riot statute. The law and the Constitution do not allow this. If there really is a grand jury investigation
with possible future prosecution under [a federal anti-rioting law], the use of this statute as applied to demonstrations,
demonstrators, and their supporters has profound 1st Amendment implications.
If Madison were an Iranian using Twitter to coordinate government protests, he’d likely be considered a hero in the
West. Instead, the self-identified anarchist — who volunteered in Louisiana after Katrina — is now facing up to
five years in prison for each count a grand jury cares to indict him on.
Oddly, Madison was in jail during the most dramatic of the G-20 confrontations.
The day after his arrest by Pennsylvania State police on September 24, hundreds of police officers chased protesters around Pittsburgh, using sonic weapons, pepper spray, batons, projectile weapons and tear gas, and arrested a reporter and bystanders. Some self-styled anarchists broke windows of chain stores and pushed a dumpster towards a phalanx of cops in riot gear.
The connection between the federal and state investigation remains unclear, though the feds say they will turn evidence
over to the state, if any is found.
The affidavits justifying the raid remain under seal, but court documents reveal a grand jury is investigating whether
Madison, and possibly his wife, violated 18 U.S.C. §2101, the federal anti-rioting law.
That obscure law was famously used to prosecute the Chicago 7 after the 1968 Democratic Convention’s police riot.
Five of the so-called Yippies were initially found guilty of of inciting a riot, though the convictions were eventually thrown
out.
Madison and his wife both volunteered as paralegals for the People’s Law Collective, their lawyer Martin Stolar said,
and he’d worked with them before defending protesters.
In fact, he suggests that work might have sparked this entire incident.
“If you do your job effectively, then you draw the government’s attentions,” Stolar said.
Madison also belongs to the “Curious George Brigade,” which published a book called Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs. The group was at work on a follow-up, until 50 copies of the first book and the electronic manuscript of the second
were confiscated in the raid. On Monday, Madison described the book in an affidavit to the court (.pdf) as a book of “political theory and practice.”
The published book seems sympathetic to the tactic of confronting police and destroying property of companies considered
harmful, usually — though not always — multinational companies.Writing such a book is not a crime, though, and
many of the other books cited by the police as evidence justifying the search after the fact can be bought on Amazon.com.
Madison, who has no prior convictions, works as a counselor at a mental health facility. He says some of the records seized
by the government include confidential information that should be covered by a shield law protecting mental health records.
The U.S. Attorney’s office disputes that contention, saying the shield doesn’t apply since Madison isn’t
a registered social worker.
Moreover, the government says, Madison’s house was chock full of incriminating materials, including gas masks, pickaxes
and air-filtration masks.
But Madison says that he’d become a believer in civil defense after the 2003 blackouts in New York and that the seized
pickaxes are specialty, anti-sparking devices to be used in emergencies to shut off water mains. In fact, Madison and his
wife told the court they’d made a YouTube video about what to put in a rescue pack. A review of the video by Threat Level confirms the pickaxe in the video matches the one seized by police.
The government countered that his reading material is also very suspicious. “As an initial matter, the government
notes that a publication entitled ‘Manifesto of Rioting’ was seized from the Weisses’ bedroom,” the
U.S. Attorney’s office told the court last week.
Some of the other evidence the feds seized that shows he promotes riots? Steampunk magazine, for one. Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. Anarchist political-theory books. A needlepoint depiction
of Lenin that belonged to Madison’s wife’s grandmother. (Not surprisingly, the police don’t seem to grasp
the irony of an anarchist owning a Lenin bust in any form, given the hatred between the two ideologies since the Spanish Civil
War, when the Communists turned on the anarchists and murdered their ostensible allies.)
His books on poison looks pretty incriminating, too. But his lawyer wonders why the police seized The Poisons and Antidotes
Sourcebook and left the book Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poisons, both of which he says Elliot Madison
uses for his fiction writing.
The feds also found caltrops — four-pronged metal defensive weapons that always land with
a pointy side up, used to give flat tires or hobble horses. Neither Madison nor his attorney has mentioned them in their filings.
They are not illegal to own.
When the feds also found nine packages of fireworks at the rear of a closet, a JTTF agent took him downtown to book him
for the infraction — a ticketable offense. The bomb squad took care of the fireworks, which one supposes must have been
impervious to dousing by a regular police officer.
Federal agents also seized camera memory disks, Madison’s journals, computers and hard drives. These contained his
fiction manuscripts, his wife’s urban planning work and other writings. The police also confiscated a housemate’s
laptop that belonged to the Labor Department.
How did all of this get taken? Doesn’t a search warrant have to specify what exactly is to be seized?
According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, the warrant was legitimate. Signed by Judge Honorable Viktor V. Pohorelsky
on September 26, it authorized the government to seize:
Computers, hard-drives, floppy discs and other media used to store computer-accessible information, cellular phones, personal
digital assistants, electronic storage devices and related peripherals, black masks and clothing, maps, correspondence and
other documents, financial records, notes, ledgers, receipts, papers, photographs, telephone and address books, identification
documents, indicia of residency and other documents and records that constitute evidence of the commission of rioting crimes
or that are designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws, including any of the above items that are
maintained within other closed or locked containers, including safes and other containers that may be further secured by key
locks (or combination locks) of various kinds.
The Madisons’ lawyers are trying to overturn the search on the grounds that the warrant wasn’t specific enough
to pass constitutional muster. They also argue the feds have no business collecting the names of people Elliot communicated
with, and that records from the People’s Law Collective, as well as his work notes, are protected under confidentiality
rules.
But the U.S. Attorney’s Office defended the search in court, arguing that the broad search was just like those used
in drug warrants, which were increasingly broadened over the last quarter century’s ill-fated War on Drugs.
The affidavits that supported the search warrant are under court seal, because the grand jury investigation is “complex
and multi-state,” according to the prosecution.
The federal anti-rioting statute is serious business, and is seemingly easy to violate. For instance, it is a felony to “organize, promote, encourage,
participate in, or carry on a riot; or [...] to aid or abet any person in inciting or participating in [...] a riot.”
By that token, simply telling a person fleeing cops with batons which way to run makes you a felon.
One wonders how the Southern Christian Leadership Council and Martin Luther King, Jr. would have fared under that law,
when he was in a Birmingham jail, writing letters urging people to support the direct-action program of sit-ins and marches.
Those protesters were later attacked by police using dogs and fire hoses on the orders of Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor.
A spokesman for the New York U.S. Attorney’s office, Bob Nardoza, declined to comment on the matter, citing rules
forbidding officials to speak about grand jury investigations.
hi love hey , how was your weekend ? I am here in Athens at the moment.
This weekend we had a protest in the area of Nikaia (an area close to Piraeus Port) . The protest took place because
the police beat up til death Kamran,an immigrant from Pakistan in the end of September! So although this Saturday was
a rainy day, around 700-800 of us gathered and protested in the streets of nikaia . We passed from where Kamran used to
live and then we stopped outside the police station were we threw , as planed , lots and lots of stones . It was like
a rain of stones- lol- and it was the least we could do... Then the riot police was attacked with tear gas and other chemicals
( they dont have another way honey,without that chemical shit they are doomed ) and arrested few of us . We could not allowed
that and so we immediately occupied the town hall of Nikaia , a luxurious 5 floor building. We demand the immediate release
of our comrades but the police state reply that they gonna keep some of them in jail for a year or so . We found this out
on sunday night so we left the town hall of Nikaia and we occupied the headquarters of the university of Athens, located in
the city center.It is Monday morning and I am writting u from there, he have a meeting soon to c what the fuck are we gonna
do with these fuckers we are dealling with . It was nice to be back in athens for a while and c all my friends and comrades,not
to mention the attack on the police station which was something really cool but we have to get out of jail our friends asap!
Anyway, how was your weekend? Did u go out to a nice club ? Or to a nice restaurant ? Did u go to the movies ? Or maybe
u had a romantic walk maybe with a " friend"? so nice... .wish I had time 4 all of that but... c u soon I hope in
athens city and have a lovely week yours (A*) ps: what we did after all ? people know now Kamran's
name , media had to talk about it .WE RULE HERE .
3 comrades are in jail now . if they are not free by the end of
the week maybe we ll get angry . u know we dont only protest in the streets we stones ... we have also lots of alternatives!
WITH the “public option” part of President Obama’s health care reform plan looking dead in the water,
many of its supporters are taking issue with the legitimacy of its opposition. “We call it ‘Astroturf,’ ”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said of the protesters at town-hall meetings. “It’s not really a grass-roots
movement.”
What exactly is Astroturf supposed to mean? Typically, that, in the absence of widespread support for a position, some
unseen entity manufactures the appearance of it. But is that really what’s happening here?
With voters split fairly evenly down the middle on health care reform, it seems presumptuous to label your side “real”
and the other synthetic. Considering today’s 24-hour cable news babbling, down-and-dirty blog activism, and talk-radio
rabble-rousing, it’s worth asking if the Astroturf epithet still has meaning.
Astroturf, in the political sense, is thought to have been coined by Senator Lloyd Bentsen, who used it to describe the
“mountain of cards and letters” he got promoting what he saw as the interests of insurance companies. “A
fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grass roots and Astroturf,” Bentsen said in 1985, “this is generated
mail.”
Generated mail is a pretty old idea. In Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Brutus is persuaded to assassinate
Caesar in part by letters of support from the public — letters that were actually faked by Cassius “in several
hands ... as if they came from several citizens.”
More recently, a Washington lobbying firm working for the coal industry was caught sending bogus letters to members of
Congress — supposedly from community organizations — urging them to oppose the House cap-and-trade bill. Such
brazen fraud is rare, though, and politicians are usually pretty savvy about seeing through it. More effective are campaigns
aimed at generating news coverage to convince people that many other people hold a certain position. This is what Republicans
are now accused of doing. What’s unclear is how this differs from old-fashioned political organizing.
American history is littered with movements that have organized aggressively to exaggerate their sway. Samuel Adams was
a master manipulator of the town hall, rallying opponents of British policy to show up at meetings and then publicizing the
outcomes — communicated through the colonies’ Committees of Correspondence — to embolden patriots in other
towns. While one might resist drawing a moral equivalence between our founding fathers and today’s self-proclaimed Tea
Partiers, the principle is the same: outraged citizens married to savvy organizers.
One reason the town hall protesters are called Astroturf is that they have ties to groups with corporate financing like
FreedomWorks, run by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader. But the Obama administration has been doing its own stage
managing. At a town hall in Virginia last month, the president took questions from members of organizations with close ties
to the administration, including the Service Employees International Union and Organizing for America, which is a part of
the Democratic National Committee. The Web site of another liberal group, Health Care for America Now, instructs counter-protesters
to “bring enough people to drown” out the Tea Partiers.
Is this Astroturf?
Here’s a rule: Organizing isn’t cheating. Doing everything in your power to get your people to show up is basic
politics. If they believe what they’re saying, no matter who helped organize them, they’re citizens and activists.
The language at the town halls may get ugly and rough. But it’s not Astroturf.
Ryan Sager, the author of “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican
Party,” writes the blog Neuroworld.
Today Parliament Square peace protester Brian Haw clocked up 8 years of his 24/7
protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London.
Today (June 2 2009) is the 8th year anniversary of Brian Haw's one-man protest
in London's Parliament Square - he has been there for 2,922 consecutive days and nights.
Initially he was campaigning against the economic sanctions on Iraq and the bombing of the country
by the US and UK. After 11 September 2001, he widened his focus, directing his messages of peace against the 'war on terror',
the terror that the UK and US have inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraq.
This protest, held 24 hours a day (and night) in all weathers is surely quite an achievement. Whilst
corrupt politicians just across the road made absurdly extravagant claims for imaginary expenses Brian has to make do with
a mug of tea and a roll up cigarette. He can't go swanning around in motorcades like Tony Blair.
I feel Brian deserves
a mention in the news and today I contacted a number of newspapers and TV news programmes on his behalf. I phoned and e-mailed
the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, The Sun, Daily Express, the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Record, the Boston Globe, the
New York Times, BBC Radio 4's the World Tonight, BBC 6 O'clock and ten O'clock news, ITN news, the Washington Post and Al
Jazeera. Hopefully some of them will take an interest in Brian's magnificent demonstration.
Demonstrators converging on the G20 summit this evening began taking over squats
on the border of London's Square Mile to use as bases from which to launch a series of co-ordinated "direct action" protests.
The occupation of four buildings prompted the first confrontations with police, and marked the start of two days in
which officers are expected to play cat and mouse with protesters determined to bring the financial heart of the capital to
a standstill.
Protests are expected to centre around the Bank of England, where anti-capitalists and anarchist groups
will converge at noon, and the European Climate Exchange in Bishopsgate, where at 12.30pm environmental activists say they
will "swoop" on to the street and set up an overnight camp.
Financial institutions across the capital are on high
alert, with police fearing that dozens of small, organised cells of anarchists are planning to peel away from the main demonstrations
to force their way into office buildings, tube stations or banks.
Protesters have circulated a map of City targets
that includes the offices of scores of banks, law firms and energy companies. It identifies 138 targets across the City, with
more than 50 financial institutions pinpointed, including some of those blamed for sparking the economic crisis.
Many
offices in the City of London will be closed and boarded-up tomorrow, including branches the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds
TSB. Hundreds of workers have been told to work from home. Those who are venturing into work have been told to "dress down"
to avoid potential attacks.
Organisers of the expressed dismay a their portrayal as violent thugs and accused police
of exaggerating the threat. They did, however, say they feared police warnings of "very violent" clashes may have attracted
agitators who will infiltrate the demonstrations.
Police earlier arrived at an occupied derelict pub, in Shoreditch,
moments after supporters posted the address online, advertising it as "conversion space" "for all anti-G20 action ... and
almost ready for the summer of rage". Officers stopped and searched people entering the building. They arrested three, one
on suspicion of assaulting a police officer, one for carrying a saw and one for going equipped with weapons.
Nearby,
around a dozen protesters had barricaded themselves into an empty Victorian office block.
The activists, their faces
covered with scarves, said they hoped to use it as a base for hundreds of other protesters arriving in the capital ahead of
the summit.
Police sealed off the short street for a period with vans and around a dozen police officers.
"They
were being quite heavy-handed for a while," said Charlotte, 24, a protester. "The police were opening people's wallets and
pulling out cards to look at their name." Friends of hers had been arrested, she added.
Inside the cavernous office
block around 40 protesters were planning how they could accommodate and feed others who might arrive.
At a meeting
they planned rotas to search skips for food and arrange for friends to bring cooking equipment and other supplies.
On
one wall of the meeting room an activist had written instructions in marker pen about what to do if you were arrested, including
the telephone number of a firm of solicitors.
Five other activists affiliated to the group Climate Camp said they
were stopped and searched under anti-terrorism legislation at a cafe around the corner from the squat.
"A lot of police
came in and very forcefully told use they were stopping and searching under the Terrorism Act," said Bradley Day, 22.
"We
were meeting in the cafe to organise food for our camp, so all they found on us were recipes for cakes and lists of ingredients."
Scotland Yard said it had no record of the searches.
The majority of protesters are likely to attach themselves to
one of three events. Climate Camp will alert around two thousands campaigners by text message about the whereabouts of their
planned "camp", to be set up somewhere in the Square Mile. The provisional plan is to meet at 12:30pm at the Climate Exchange.
G20 Meltdown will see a coalitions of anti-capitalist, anarchist and single-issue protest groups converge on the Bank
of England.
Four groups will walk to the Bank from separate tube stations. At 2pm, Stop the War Coalition is leading
a separate march from the US Embassy in Grosvener Square to Trafalgar Square, to demand that Barack Obama pulls US troops
out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Small bands of protesters have also indicated they may convene at the ExCeL Centre in Docklands,
where the summit will take place tomorrow.
David Howarth MP, who yesterday mediated last-minute talks between protesters
and police, warned there was still "mutual misunderstanding" between the sides. He said the meeting between Climate Camp organisers
and Scotland Yard's Commander Bob Broadhurst and chief superintendent Ian Thomas, had been "business-like" and both sides
had exchanged numbers.
But he was concerned police appeared to believe that causing disruption to commuters would
warrant intervening to stop a demonstration.
"I still think the two sides have different views on what's proportional,"
he said. "Police still seemed to think that any disruption of traffic is worth stopping a demonstration for. It's a shame
this meeting did not happen earlier - there are points of mutual misunderstanding and the police really don't like the way
in which Climate Camp is a non-hierarchical organisation."
Police have still not met with the organisers of G20 Meltdown,
although the co-ordinator of the group, Marina Pepper, has said she would "talk about the plans" with police.
Confrontations,
she said, would only occur if police attempted to prevent the protesters from reaching their destination. "When you've got
the side of right on your side you won't be stopped, will you?" she said, adding that protesters would be bringing pillows.
"And yes, we are prepared to fight truncheon with pillow."
A Call for Nonviolent
Civil Disobedience
written in 2008
Defund the War and Declare Peace: Nationwide Nonviolent Civil Disobedience To End the Deepening
US Quagmire in Iraq
As the violence in Iraq escalates, the Declaration of Peace is organizing nonviolent civil disobedience
— and other forms of powerful and dramatic peacemaking – to urge the nation and its leaders to end the US quagmire
in Iraq. We invite people everywhere to respond to this growing emergency by participating in this campaign of conscience
and nonviolent action to defund the war, to support the troops by bringing them home safely, and to launch a comprehensive
peace process.
Why We Must Act
The continuing US military occupation of Iraq is fueling a cycle of devastating violence, a fact confirmed by a growing
number of analysts and military leaders. The prompt withdrawal of US troops and the closure of US bases will help quench the
fire fanned by the occupation and will pave the way for a comprehensive Iraqi-led peace process. Now is the time for the US
occupation to end, for a peace process to begin, and for the US to shift funding from permanent war to reconstructing Iraq
and meeting human needs at home.
The November 2006 midterm elections delivered a clear mandate to our elected leaders: Congress and the Bush administration
must take swift steps to end the war in Iraq. Congress must resist the administration’s plan to send thousands of new
troops to Iraq and declare an emphatic “No!” to the administration’s supplemental funding request (expected
in early February) of upwards of $100 billion for the war. It also must not approve funding for war-making in Iraq for fiscal
year 2008. The new Congress must exercise its most tangible means of charting a new course on Iraq: ending the financing of
the war and occupation.
Under the banner of Defund the War and Establish a Comprehensive Peace Plan, the Declaration of Peace
Campaign is calling on members of Congress to make a public commitment to defund the war and occupation; to co-sign legislation
calling for the safe and rapid withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq and the closure of U.S. bases there; and to work to
establish a comprehensive plan for peace in Iraq, including support for an Iraqi-led peace process.
The Declaration of Peace will organize visits to Congressional offices, phone and email campaigns, rallies and vigils,
town hall meetings, and media outreach to call on all US policymakers to take these steps for peace. If the Bush administration
and the new Congress fail to carry out their clear mandate for peace, we will be led by conscience to respond to this growing
emergency with dramatic and creative forms of peaceful resistance – including nonviolent civil disobedience –across
the country.
Nonviolent Civil Disobedience
Throughout history, people have responded to numerous social and political emergencies and transformed systems of institutionalized
violence by engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. Changes such as women’s suffrage, establishing workers’
rights, ending legal racial segregation, protecting the environment, establishing a moratorium on nuclear testing, and ending
the Vietnam War were the direct result of broad-based networks of ordinary citizens who took action. These and many other
movements have featured nonviolent civil disobedience as a way to sharpen for society the crucial choice for justice and peace.
“There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light,” wrote Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. in his book The Trumpet of Conscience. “But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that
red light… Or when a [person] is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed…
Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance
drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved. Massive civil disobedience
is a strategy for social change which is at least as forceful as an ambulance with its siren on full.” The growing emergency
in Iraq calls us to organize dramatic and widespread civil disobedience with its “siren on full” until the present
crisis is solved.
Responding to the Emergency of the Ongoing War
Civil disobedience is a powerful tool for change because it consciously interferes with the operation of systematic violence
and publicly withdraws consent from it. It involves risking arrest in a principled and conscientious way either by breaking
an unjust law or by breaking a law that directly or indirectly supports an unjust policy, condition or system. It acts on
behalf of a higher law or principle, including the worth and dignity of all human persons. In legal terms, this is known as
a necessity defense: we are obliged to break a specific law to uphold a higher one (for example, the Nuremberg obligations
of international law opposing torture, wars of aggression and crimes against humanity). The power of civil disobedience flows
from a disciplined commitment to refrain from violence and a willingness to accept the legal and social consequences of one’s
action.
In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King wrote “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such
a crisis and establish such a creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront
the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” As the US war in Iraq escalates, the
Declaration of Peace will organize nonviolent civil disobedience across the US to strategically, publicly, peacefully, and
dramatically challenge this growing violence so that it can no longer be ignored. In the face of this growing emergency, it
is crucial that we take action to make unmistakably clear the need for a new course in Iraq and in the world.
We have more power than we think. In the next months, we will exercise this nonviolent people-power in many forms. We invite
all signers of the Declaration of Peace to consider engaging – as conscience leads them – in nonviolent civil
disobedience.
Action Plans
The Declaration of Peace is calling for local organizing of civil disobedience and other diverse and creative
forms of nonviolent action tactics in cities and town across the United States. Additionally, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance have been organizing civil resistance initiatives. The Declaration of Peace supports these campaigns.
If you are considering engaging in civil disobedience, we strongly urge you to prepare for this by taking Nonviolent
Action Training. To learn about – or to host – a training in your area, please contact us atinfo@declarationofpeace.org.
Scenes such as those seen in London
in January when protestors clashed with mounted riot police at a protest over Israel's action in Gaza could become more common
sights in the UK. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Police are preparing for a "summer of rage" as victims of the economic downturn
take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.
Britain's most senior police officer with responsibility for public order
raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming
"footsoldiers" in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.
Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police's public
order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now
seek to vent their anger through protests this year.
He said that banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite
receiving billions in taxpayer money, had become "viable targets". So too had the headquarters of multinational companies
and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis.
Hartshorn, who receives regular intelligence briefings on potential causes
of civil unrest, said the mood at some demonstrations had changed recently, with activists increasingly "intent on coming
on to the streets to create public disorder".
The warning comes in the wake of often violent protests against the handling
of the economy across Europe. In recent weeks Greek farmers have blocked roads over falling
agricultural prices, a million workers in France joined demonstrations
to demand greater protection for jobs and wages and Icelandic demonstrators have clashed with police in Reykjavik.
In the UK
hundreds of oil refinery workers mounted wildcat strikes last month over the use of foreign workers.
Intelligence reports suggest that "known activists" are also returning
to the streets, and police claim they will foment unrest. "Those people would be good at motivating people, but they haven't
had the 'footsoldiers' to actually carry out [protests]," Hartshorn said. "Obviously the downturn in the economy, unemployment,
repossessions, changes that. Suddenly there is the opportunity for people to mass protest.
"It means that where we would possibly look at certain events and say,
'yes there'll be a lot of people there, there'll be a lot of banner waving, but generally it will be peaceful', [now] we have
to make sure these elements don't come out and hijack that event and turn that into disorder."
Hartshorn identified April's G20 meeting of the group of leading and developing
nations in London as an event that could kick-start a challenging
summer. "We've got G20 coming and I think that is being advertised on some of the sites as the highlight of what they see
as a 'summer of rage'," he said.
His comments are likely to be met with disappointment by protest groups,
who in recent weeks have complained that police are adopting a more confrontational approach at demonstrations. Officers have
been accused of exaggerating the threat posed by activists to justify the use of resources spent on them.
Police were said to have been heavy-handed at Greek solidarity marches
in London in December and, last month, at protests against Israel's
invasion of Gaza. In August 1,000 officers, helicopters and
riot horses were drafted to Kent from 26 UK police forces to oversee the climate camp demonstration against the Kingsnorth
power station. The massive operation to monitor the protesters cost £5.9m and resulted in 100 arrests. But in December the
government was forced to apologise to parliament after the Guardian revealed that its claims that 70 officers had been hurt
in violent clashes were wrong.
However, Hartshorn insisted: "Potentially there will be more industrial
actions ... History shows that some of those disputes - Wapping, the miners' strike - have caused great tensions in the community
and the police have had difficult times policing and maintaining law and order."
Both "extreme rightwing and extreme leftwing" elements are looking to
"use the fact that people are out of jobs" to galvanise support, he said.
A particularly worrying development was the re-emergence of individuals
involved in the violent fascist organisation Combat 18, he said. "They are using the fact that there's been lots of talk about
eastern European people coming in and taking jobs on the Olympic sites," he said. "They're using those type of arguments to
look at getting support."
Hartshorn said he also expected large-scale demonstrations this year on
environmental issues, with hardcore green activists "joining forces" with middle-class campaigners over issues such as airport
expansion at Heathrow and Stansted. With the prospect of angry demonstrations against the economy, that could open the door
to powerful coalitions.
"All you've got to do then is link in with the environmentalists, and look at the oil companies. They're seen
to be turning over billions of pounds profit in issues that are seen to be against the environment."
Kristen Holm, far left, and Theresa Cusimano, far right, stand with the Rev. Luis Barrios at the courthouse steps in Columbus
as he speaks against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formally known as School of Americas. Six
people, including the ones pictured, were accused of crossing onto Fort Benning during the SOA Watch protest in November.
(Shannon Szwarcsszwarc.)
Five SOA Watch Protesters Receive Two-Month Sentences
Louis Wolf was one of six protesters who trespassed onto Fort Benning.
On Monday, in U.S. District Court, he used his one remaining
leg and a cane to walk to the witness stand. The 68-year-old declined Magistrate G. Mallon Faircloth's offer of the seat,
instead choosing to stand and read aloud the motivations that led him to cross the line.
An hour later, he was still reading.
"I'm almost finished, your honor," Wolf said.
Twelve minutes later, he was.
The six defendants pleaded not guilty to a charge
of entering military, naval or Coast Guard property and were found guilty by Faircloth. Wolf was the only one who did not
receive prison time.
Defense attorney Bill Quigley told Faircloth about
Wolf's medical problems and mentioned the sophisticated attention he needs regularly. Faircloth referenced a letter Wolf's
daughter wrote him. She said that if Wolf was taken away from her, she couldn't live.
"She will have her wish, and you will not be taken
away from her," Faircloth said.
Wolf was sentenced to six months' house arrest
and a $1,000 fine. The remaining five defendants received two-month sentences, though their fines ranged from nothing to $500.
The six were accused of crossing onto Fort Benning
around 9 a.m. Nov. 23 at the Interstate 185 entrance. They were stopped about a half-mile onto post.
Theresa Cusimano, 40, was the only defendant to
get a $500 fine and the only one to represent herself. When she stepped up to the lectern, she set down an electric candle.
Several such candles with white bases and flame-shaped bulbs were in the hands of supporters. Many lighted them as Cusimano
spoke to the judge.
"Your honor, I don't want to take up the court's
time," she said.
Faircloth replied, "Take what time you require.
I am not paid by the hour."
Cusimano, who was the last to be sentenced, summed
up the messages given by her co-defendants. She mentioned Sister Diane T. Pinchot, 63, who said she lost a sister to murder
in El Salvador. Cusimano lauded the idealism of Kristin L. Holm, a 21-year-old seminary student.
And she told Faircloth about her family, who Cusimano
said believe she's crazy because she chose to cross the line.
"What do I need to lift to get out of this situation?
I refuse to believe that this is the best our country can offer. I refuse! We have the wrong people in the room for this conversation,"
Cusimano said.
She asked that instead of prison time, Faircloth
sentence her to work for him and his court to ensure that the SOA Watch protest will no longer be needed. The Rev. Luis N.
Barrios, 56, is bilingual, she said; Albert L. Simmons, 64, is a veteran who overcame alcoholism; Wolf has the history under
his belt; Holm is a preacher; and Pinchot has the creative consciousness.
"It doesn't get much better than this," Cusimano
said of the possible team.
Faircloth, however, told Cusimano he had no power
to legislate the closure of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and advised her to seek change with
Congress. Fighting the school by trespassing onto Fort Benning doesn't carry much weight as civil disobedience, he said.
It was that act that many spoke of when they got
the chance. Holm told Faircloth that justice couldn't be found without first finding frustration at injustice.
"And you bet I crossed the line," she said. "I
crossed the line because the SOA is on the wrong side."
Pinchot, an art professor, held a sculpture she
made of four woman in shallow graves as she spoke to the judge.
The sculpture was made of separate pieces and fit
together in a bowl that Pinchot held with two hands as she explained each figure's story of rape and torture.
"These images don't go away from me," she said.
"I believe the spirit of God has asked me to this. I'm hoping that people will listen and the School of the Americas will
be closed."
Barrios, an Episcopal priest, told Faircloth prison
time would not change his behavior. "Neither you nor your system will take away my dignity," he said.
Simmons said he no longer was someone with faith,
but said his mother was and she taught him a Biblical message: As you do to the least of these, you do also to me.
Join us at the March on the Pentagon Saturday, March 21 2009 to demand
"Bring the Troops Home Now"
The ANSWER Coalition is joining with other coalitions, organizations, and networks in a March 21 National Coalition to bring people from all walks of life and from all
cities across the United States to take part in a March on the Pentagon
on the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war: Saturday, March 21.
The Iraqi journalist Muntather Al-Zaidi spoke for millions of Iraqis and outraged people everywhere when he threw his shoes
at George Bush during Bush's publicity stunt "victory lap” in Baghdad yesterday. As he threw his shoes, Muntather said,
“This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans and those
who were killed in Iraq!”
Tragically, the criminal occupation of Iraq will not be over even by the sixth anniversary
of the start of the war in March 2009. People around the world will be marching together on the sixth anniversary in the strongest
possible solidarity with the people of Iraq demanding an end to the occupation of their country.
Marking the sixth
anniversary of the criminal invasion of Iraq, on March 21, 2009,
thousands will March on the Pentagon to say, “Bring
the Troops Home NOW!” We will also demand “End Colonial Occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and
Everywhere” and “Fund Peoples’ Needs Not Militarism and Bank Bailouts.” We will insist on an end to
the war threats and economic sanctions against Iran. We will say no to the illegal U.S. program of detention and torture.
To endorse the March 21 March on the Pentagon,
click here. To sign up to be a Transportation Organizing Center,
click here.
While millions of families are losing their homes, jobs and healthcare, the real military budget next year
will top one trillion dollars--that's $1,000,000,000,000. If used to meet people’s needs, that amount could create 10
million new jobs at $60,000 per year, provide healthcare for everyone who does not have it now, rebuild New Orleans, and repair
much of the damage done in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cost for the occupation of Iraq alone is $400 million each day, or about
$12 billion each month.
The war in Iraq has killed, wounded or displaced nearly one third of Iraq’s 26
million people. Thousands of U.S. soldiers have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have suffered severe physical
and psychological wounds. The U.S. leaders who have initiated and conducted this criminal war should be tried and jailed for
war crimes.
The idea that the U.S. is in the process of ending the criminal occupation of Iraq is a myth. Washington
and its dependent Iraqi government signed a “Status of Forces” agreement, supposedly calling for the U.S. military
to leave Iraqi cities by July 1, 2009, and all of Iraq by 2012. But even this outrageous extension of an illegal occupation
is just one more piece of deception, as was soon made clear by top U.S. and Iraqi officials.
The ink was hardly dry
on the agreement when, on December 12, official Iraq government spokesman Ali al Dabbagh dismissed the idea that U.S. troops
would leave by 2012: "We do understand that the Iraqi military is not going to get built out in the three years. We do need
many more years. It might be 10 years."
The next day, General Raymond Odierno, commander of “coalition (U.S.)
forces” in Iraq, stated that thousands of U.S. troops could remain inside Iraqi cities after July 1, 2009, as part of
“training and mentoring teams.”
Government propaganda aside, the reality remains that only the
people can end the war and occupation in Iraq. To endorse
the March 21 March on the Pentagon, click here, and to sign up to be a Transportation Organizing Center,
click here.
The war in Afghanistan is expanding. The incoming administration and Congressional leaders have promised to send
in more troops.
Federal bailouts and loan guarantees for the biggest banks and investors, many of whom have also made
billions in profits from militarism, are already up to an astounding $7.2 trillion this year. None of that money is earmarked
for keeping millions of foreclosed and evicted families in their homes.
Coming just two months after the inauguration
of the next president, the March 21, 2009, March on the Pentagon will be a critical
opportunity to let the new administration in Washington hear the voice of the people demanding an immediate end to
war and occupation, and demanding economic justice. Joint actions will take place on the West Coat in San Francisco,
Los Angeles and Seattle.
Sincerely, Brian Becker National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition
Greece: Prisoners support and more actions on New Year's eve
author: dim
New year's eve, most of
the people choose to stay in their houses or go to bars, all celebrating the coming of the new year. However there are people
who at these times choose to stand close to those who are alone, locked away and forgotten and there are people who believe
that the social struggle never ends.
In Greece,
at 11.30pm, minutes before the new year, anarchists and solidarists gathered close to prisons around the country and with
their slogans and fireworks sent a message to the prisoners that they are not forgotten. There were gatherings outside the
prisons in Athens, Patras, Chania, Irakleio and when the year
changed, fireworks were lighten and the slogans on prisoners support became louder. The prisoners were watching through the
windows and replied with more slogans and with small fires!
In Athens,
around 1000 took part. They first started at the mens prison and then continued to the womens. There was a small demonstration
on which some banks' ATM machines and surveillance cameras were destroyed. The 6-7 riot squads did not react.
At the same time, at the Sintagma square
(Athens), a gathering against the bombings of the Israeli army in Gaza and the occupation in Palestine was taking place with
many migrants (Palestinians and others), members of peace movements and left wing organizations and parties.
Thousands March to Show No! Uk Iraq Troops NOT WELCOME in Ireland
author: Youth 4 Truth - Ógra Shinn Féin
Thousands of people turned out to the Sinn Fein rally/march
today (Sun 2 Nov 08) which opposed the 'home coming' parade by the notorious RIR regiment of the British Army. Ireland, Iraq
-
End the Occupations!
There was a large Ógra Shinn Féin presence
on the day, with young republicans travelling from across Ireland.
The rally/march was calling for an end to the
ongoing illegal occupations in Ireland, Iraq, and Afghanistan and also to demand the truth for the hundreds of families
who have been bereaved through the official British state policy of collusion and state murder. The UDR/RIR themselves
where part and parcel of the murder machine.
At the Rally in Dunville, Sean 'Spike' Murray, Gerry Kelly MLA and
National Co-ordinator for Relatives For Justice Mark Thompson addressed the assembled crowd.
As the marchers,
led by relatives, made their way to Fisherwick place to protest peacefully and dignified at the passing RIR/UDR coat trailing
exercise, loyalists who had accessed scaffolding adjacent to the protest, lobbed bottles, bits of scaffold and fireworks
to provoke, and injure.
The Sinn Féin protest remained vigilant and dignified and relatives held the portraits
of their loved ones, the victims of Collusion/State murder, high as the RIR/UDR 'victory parade' passed by.
The
rally/march allowed the families, who had been ignored in this highly insensitive parade, get their message across, and
it also allowed the people of Belfast and wider afield to demonstrate their ongoing opposition to the illegal occupation
of Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan.
We just got word from our colleagues in Denver that the trials of people arrested
at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) protests in August are not going so well for the Prosecution.
Mano, a friend and supporter of the Street Medics and community activist for many
years within the networks of indigenous and native sovereignty struggles, just sent us a reporter's view of the trials that
...could be boiled down to this: "they don't have a case".
The article is from the Rocky Mountain News, by Bill Johnson.
Not very well written, it winds around in confusing ways and misses the important parts by trying to "sound smart". But the
reporter's intentions are good; he illustrates that Due Process, the US Constitution, and true enforcement of the Law have
been reduced to the level of Saturday morning cartoons.
So far in the trials stemming from the DNC events, where the
only illegal activities that took place were carried out by illegitimate authorities, the Movement is winning. Defendants
are being acquitted of charges, charges are being dropped, and entire cases being thrown out of Court.
Here is an
excerpt - it speaks very clearly about the level of "evidence" that's being used to "prove" in Court that the people who were
arrested were, indeed, violating the law - from Police testimony of why a particular person was arrested, as summarized by
the author below: "I didn't actually see him break the law, but he was in a group of people the commander told me to arrest,
so I did." Another testimony, "proving" the defendant's guilt: "I didn't actually see her break the law, but she was
in a group of people the commander told me to arrest, so I did."
And so on, and so forth. All in all, the testimony
in Court confirms what those of us experienced in the streets of Denver first hand: that the only violations of the law came
from members of the Police who applied themselves in violence without provocation, and who repeatedly violated the Constitutional
rights of peaceful, non-violent people who had assembled to express themselves.
Events in Denver were only a shadow
of the naked brutality unleashed by Military and Police forces in St. Paul during the Republican National Convention (RNC).
But the battles on the legal front stemming from the RNC protests and arrests will most probably on the whole be - at least
for the mass of the arrestees - even easier. There's an abundance of evidence on video and by eyewitnesses that the only violations
of the law during the RNC were the cowardly excesses and brutal methods used by those in power.
Flimsy argument in Courtroom 282 By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain
News Published October 21, 2008
As trials go, and I've sat through many, this wasn't much of one. It
went pretty much like this:
Officer No. 1: I didn't actually see him break the law, but he was in a group of people
the commander told me to arrest, so I did.
Officer No. 2: I didn't actually see her break the law, but she was in
a group of people the commander told me to arrest, so I did.
City Attorney No. 1: Your honor, the prosecution rests.
If there is any justice still around, the four women and two men who make up the jury in Courtroom 282 of Denver County
Court will this morning do what they often do on TV, tell Judge Kathleen Bowers that there is no need for deliberations, that
they made up their minds, oh, three days ago: Not guilty.
I get what Denver is trying to do: If you have your police
department corral, hose down with pepper spray and arrest more than 100 people in the middle of downtown during, of all things,
the Democratic National Convention, you better darn well prosecute those who demand their day in court.
The problem
it seems, as the first of the DNC trials got under way Monday, is that everyone who did the actual law-breaking likely has
pleaded out already.
The scorecard thus far on the first five cases to reach Courtroom 282: three outright dismissals
and two of the three charges against the remaining two defendants thrown out.
At the very least, if the jury was paying
attention at all to the case I heard the prosecution put on Tuesday, the "not guilty" verdicts should be returned long before
lunch today.
Eli Hardy and Tiffany Bray remain charged with obstructing a street or public passageway. They were among
the more than 100 people swept up by more than 100 police officers pursuing demonstrators in the early evening of Aug. 25
at 15th Street and Court Place.
They both maintain they were merely in the area at the time the protest march formed,
wanted none of it, yet were prevented from leaving the area by the cordon thrown up by police.
Nothing the prosecution
presented by the close of its case Tuesday proved otherwise.
Lonn Heymann and Qusair Mohamedbhai, attorneys for the
two, looked at each other quite quizzically and for long moments when city attorneys told the judge they were resting their
case.
"OK, who goes first?" I heard one of them say.
Lonn Heymann argued passionately that the charges should
be dismissed immediately, even if the judge were to give the prosecution the best of things.
No one had seen Hardy
or Bray do anything, much less testify to it. He even said, "Are you kidding me?"
Assistant City Attorney Nate Fehrmann
countered that the judge should at least let the jury decide. That officers had testified that members of the group with which
Hardy and Bray were arrested had been seen, well, in the streets on that day.
You could tell the judge was torn. She
took her time. She heard everyone out. And in the end, Kathleen Bowers took the easiest and, perhaps, fairest route.
"Let's
let the jury decide," she finally ruled.
Whatever the outcome, what I walked away with from Courtroom 282 could fill
this newspaper. The first thing is that being within spitting distance of any large crowd that is even remotely protesting
anything means - and this truly is "anti-American" - arrest can happen virtually anytime.
Your day is ruined. I will
later tell the story of Tiffany Bray, of the fear and humiliation she endured on that summer day, an ordeal that even an acquittal
today will never wash away.
Tiffany Bray was new in town and coming back from shopping when she was swept up and told
by officers multiple times to just sit where she was standing, that if she did that, the officers would let her go home. In
her case, that was on the curb, her feet in the street.
Prosecutors on Tuesday tried to use that as proof she was
blocking the street.
No matter what happens today to Eli Hardy and Tiffany Bray, the reality, too, is that more than
50 others like them are also due very shortly inside Courtroom 282.
It has taken three days now to adjudicate the
two of them, a process that at minimum has involved a judge, her clerk, seven jurors, three to four city attorneys, three
defense attorneys and a small forest of trees.
Numbers are not my friend, and I still cannot balance my checkbook,
but even I know that is costing us - meaning you and me - a boatload of taxpayer cash.
Now multiply that number by
at least 50.
And to what end?
It cannot be, not as I sit here, jailing and criminalizing Tiffany Bray and
Eli Hardy.
Yet after hours spent in Courtroom 282, along with my personal road weariness, I must tell you that the
system will say and do as it will. And, in the end, quite sadly, it will do so on the flimsiest of proof.
Espionage, news manipulation, legal threats and even
violence have become the knee-jerk response of Government and big business to the increasing and vocal concerns of environmental
protesters in the UK. Ahead of next month's Climate Camp at Kingsnorth power station, this exclusive and powerful film exposes
the extraordinary tactics being used to reframe concerned citizens engaging in their right to protest, as dangerous terrorists.
The U.S. occupation of
Iraq and Afghanistan is hated by the people there. These wars have no support at home and are ruining the domestic economy.
Instead of pulling out, the Bush administration is preparing for still another war—this time against Iran . This must
be stopped!
AGRESSION TOWARDS IRAN IS ESCALATING
On June 4, George Bush, with
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at his side, called Iran a “threat to peace.” Two days before, acting
as a proxy for the Pentagon, Israel used advanced U.S. fighter planes to conduct massive air maneuvers, which the media called
a “dress rehearsal” for an attack on Iran ’s nuclear facility. Under pressure from the U.S. , the European
Union announced sanctions against Iran on June 23. A bill is before Congress for further U.S. sanctions on Iran and
even a blockade of Iran .
IRAN “THREATS” A HOAX
Iran
as a “nuclear threat” is as much a hoax as Bush’s claim of “weapons of mass destruction” in
Iraq used to justify the war there. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which inspects Iran ’s nuclear facilities,
says it has no weapons program and is developing nuclear power for the days when its oil runs out. Even Washington ’s
16 top spy agencies issued a joint statement that said Iran does not have nuclear weapons technology!
U.S. and Israel
are the real nuclear danger. The Pentagon has a huge, nuclear-capable naval armada in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, with guns
aimed at Iran . Israel , the Pentagon’s proxy force in the Middle East , has up to 200 nuclear warheads and has never
signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran did sign it. WAR
HURTS U.S. ECONOMY
While billions of dollars go to war, at home the unemployment rate had the biggest
spike in 23 years. Home foreclosures and evictions are increasing; fuel and food prices are through the roof. While
the situation is growing dire for many, Washington ’s cuts to domestic programs continue. A new U.S. war will
bring only more suffering.
WHAT WE DO RIGHT NOW CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE
While the summer is a difficult time to call protests, the August recess of Congress gives the White House
an opportunity for unopposed aggression against Iran . We must not let this happen! From the anti-war movement and all
movements for social change, to religious and grassroots organizations, unions and schools, let us join forces to demand “No
war on Iran, U.S. out of Iraq, Money for human needs not war! “
This call to action is issued by StopWarOnIran.org, a network of thousands of concerned activists and organizations fighting to stop a new war against Iran since February
2006.
For Recruiters, Antiwar Protests Raise Perils on the Home Front (Military Recruiters Under Attack) New York
Times ^ | 2/21/05 | DAMIEN CAVE
Posted on 02/21/2005 6:46:29 AM PST by nj26
EAST ORANGE, N.J. - The five United
States Army recruiters who work from a storefront office here arrived on the morning of Feb. 5 to discover that a plate-glass
window above the main entrance had been shattered, along with a window in the Navy office next door.
By noon, about
35 protesters were marching out front with antiwar placards, condemning the American invasion of Iraq and the recruiters'
efforts to enlist new soldiers.
The group's leader, Lawrence Hamm, a New Jersey civil rights activist, said the protesters
had nothing to do with the broken windows, and he condemned any violence against the recruiters. The police have not found
any evidence of a political motive.
But for the men on the other side of the broken glass, and recruiters throughout
the New York area, the vandalism here underscored what they say are the risks of signing up young people for the military
during a war that has polarized the American public.
The shattering of windows here followed two similar incidents
in New York City and a third in the Midwest that week. On Jan. 31, authorities said, recruiters at a station near the Flatiron
section of Manhattan reported that a door had been cracked, and that anarchist symbols had been scrawled in red paint on the
building.
That same day, before dawn, the police arrested a 19-year-old Manhattan College junior who they said threw
a burning rag into an Army recruiting station that was closed for the night in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, and jammed
the door locks with powerful glue. He was caught carrying a handwritten note declaring that a "wave of violence" would occur
throughout the Northeast on Jan. 31, aimed at the "military industrial complex" in response to American military actions,
the police said.
A day later in Toledo, Ohio, a bucket of manure was thrown at the window of a recruiting station
that housed all four branches of the military, the police said, and antiwar obscenities were scrawled on a nearby wall.
Since
the beginning of 2003, there have also been more than a dozen other often violent incidents aimed at military recruiters or
property throughout the country, according to the police, recruiters and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In a few cases,
vehicles have been set on fire; in others, blood has been thrown through windows. Spokespeople for the armed services have
downplayed the incidents even as some recruiters have increased security at their stations.
Douglas Smith, a spokesman
for the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky., said that no recruiters had been hurt and that most of the nation's nearly
1,700 Army recruiting stations had not been harmed or attacked.
"We're aware that there are some instances of damage
to stations, and we're keeping an eye on this," he said. "But it is not something that has us overly concerned."
Several
recruiters in the field, however, said that they remained on edge. On Jan. 20, the day of President Bush's inaugural, several
hundred students at Seattle Central Community College surrounded two Army recruiters on campus, shouting insults and hurling
water bottles until the recruiters were escorted away by campus security. The protest was covered by The Army Times, and several
recruiters said that they feared such situations might become more common.
Sgt. First Class William C. Howard, a recruiter
here in East Orange, said that the antiwar sentiment seemed to have grown more aggressive. Though recruiters are still frequently
thanked for their service, he said, the insults, dirty looks and other signs of discontent seem to be increasing.
"Within
last year, the whole security issue has become more of a concern with me," he said. "I've had people throwing objects at me
when I was driving by. I've had people who as soon as they see me on the street, they cross to the other side. Those situations
never occurred before, and it makes me wonder how far is this all going to go."
The vandalism so far has ranged from
broken windows and antiwar graffiti or Nazi symbols to attempted arson with Molotov cocktails, like one tossed into an Army
station in Vestal, N.Y., near Binghamton, on April 9, 2003.
Some of the most costly vandalism has been aimed at vehicles:
three cars used by recruiters in Silver Spring, Md., were set on fire during the first week of December, according to military
officials; and on March 28, 2003, in Montgomery, Ala., vandals painted antiwar graffiti on five Navy vehicles, and set a large
Navy truck ablaze.
The police in Montgomery, East Orange and several other communities affected by the defacement
and destruction said that the vandalism did not seem to be part of a coordinated national plan. In a few cases, there have
been arrests. Brendan Walsh, 20, described by the police as an antiwar activist, pleaded guilty to the Vestal vandalism in
2003 and was sentenced on Feb. 11 to five years in federal prison.
David Segal, who grew up in Litchfield, Conn.,
and was listed as a government major by Manhattan College in the Bronx before his arrest, was found by the police near the
damaged Parkchester station immediately after the incident. He was wearing rubber gloves, according to the complaint filed
in the case, and carrying a backpack with glue and maps locating the recruiting station. He was charged with destroying government
property and released on Feb. 1 after posting $15,000 in cash bail. Manhattan College says he is no longer enrolled.
Attempts
to reach Mr. Segal in Litchfield were unsuccessful, and his lawyer did not return several calls.
A spokesman for the
F.B.I. in New York, James Margolin, said the agency was trying to determine whether Mr. Segal had accomplices. He said that
the agency was not aware of any related incidents that occurred outside the New York area on Jan. 31, as the handwritten note
suggested, and that there was no evidence of an ongoing effort aimed at recruiters or recruiting stations.
Nonetheless,
in response to the vandalism and other incidents, several Army station commanders in the New York area said that they had
increased security, mainly by requiring that all recruiters travel in pairs. In a two-year-old effort to make stations safer,
the Air Force Recruiting Service has also begun nationwide security upgrades, adding measures like caller ID and darker blinds
on station windows. Senior Master Sgt. Ellen Schirmer, a spokeswoman for the Air Force Recruiting Service's headquarters in
San Antonio, Tex., said that 76 of New York State's 79 Air Force recruiting locations had completed the upgrade.
Some
recruiters said the extra precautions were necessary to ensure safety in and out of the office.
Staff Sgt. Amedeo
Trotta, commander of the Army recruiting station in Vestal, said that in addition to the Molotov cocktail attack, he was threatened
last year by a man with a two-by-four while talking to recruiters near Ithaca College. A recruiter in his office, he said,
was also sucker-punched while pumping gas about eight months ago.
"Our own people are trying to fight us," he said.
"And there's nothing we can do about what they're complaining about."
Many recruiters said that they were accustomed
to dissent, and that the vandalism did not surprise them. "You will always have a certain percentage of people who will want
to show their displeasure with policies in a way that is outside the political system," said Maj. Dave Griesmer, a spokesman
for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command in Quantico, Va. "It's no different than it might be if people were unhappy with a
business or other organization."
But for some of the men and women working to refill the military ranks, the broken
glass, the epithets and fires remain difficult to fathom.
"We feel like we're doing something for the people, like
we're doing something good," said Staff Sgt. Stephen E. Williams, the station commander in East Orange. "It's hard to understand
why they would target us."
This video provides evidence and outlines the case for a full
public inquiry into police covert activities at the Stop the SPP protest in Montebello Quebec
in August. The SQ have publicly stated that their officers did not provoke violence while dressed as radical protesters with
rocks. This video proves that this is a lie -- these covert officers were pushing to start a fight with the riot squad, violating
the Criminal Code of Canada and the constitutional and democratic rights of the protesters. We demand a public inquiry!
While the meetings inside were cordial,
it was far less cozy outside the massive Nordic-style log hotel and the surrounding estate. Lines of police in riot gear jostled
with dozens of demonstrators - the vanguard of hundreds who marched on the front gate of the summit compound shouting taunts.
Officers used pepper spray and tear gas to hold off the protesters, who responded by flinging rocks and branches. Two people
were hauled away in handcuffs.
MONTEBELLO, Que. (CP) - As riot police fired tear gas and
pepper spray to hold back demonstrators outside the Montebello summit, Stephen Harper shook hands with George W. Bush and dismissed the protest as a "sad" spectacle.
The
prime minister welcomed Bush to the North American Leaders' Summit after
the U.S. president landed by helicopter Monday at the posh - and heavily guarded - Chateau Montebello. "I've heard it's nothing,"
the prime minister said when asked whether he'd seen the protesters.
"A couple hundred? It's sad."
Bush looked over his shoulder and smiled when asked the same question, but remained silent
and walked with the prime minister into the building.
...
While the meetings inside were cordial, it was far
less cozy outside the massive Nordic-style log hotel and the surrounding estate.
Lines of police in riot gear jostled
with dozens of demonstrators - the vanguard of hundreds who marched on the front gate of the summit compound shouting taunts.
Officers
used pepper spray and tear gas to hold off the protesters, who responded by flinging rocks and branches. Two people were hauled
away in handcuffs.
The confrontation settled into a face-to-face standoff between a hardcore group of protesters and
police until demonstrators began to drift off in the late afternoon.
As about 200 demonstrators lingered, police pushed
them back, firing many rounds of tear gas to clear the road. By early evening, only a handful of protesters remained milling
about.
Angry anarchists and family-friendly activists converged on the hamlet of Montebello by bus to protest the summit,
but concerns about huge, violent demonstrations fizzled.
Early in the afternoon, more than 500 people marched along
the road toward the gate of the summit compound which is ringed by a four-metre-high steel security fence. They chanted slogans
and carried banners, including one reading: "Say No To AmeriCanada."
Riot police lined up
in front of the front gate as the marchers - some wearing anarchist red-and-black flags and carrying signs condemning Bush as a war criminal - approached.
Despite the jostling, the tear
gas and the pepper spray, it was a far cry from previous meetings - such as the G-8, APEC and the Summit of the Americas -
when thousands of people turned out and demonstrations turned violent.
Protesters are barred from the compound but
their activities were relayed to hotel lobby where they could be viewed on two video monitors.
There are seemingly
as many causes as protesters, who condemn North American integration, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the leaders' performance
on the environment, the plight of aboriginals, and human-rights abuses committed in the war on terror.
One common complaint
echoed by all is the secrecy surrounding the meeting.
Susan Howard-Azzey, a homemaker from St.catharines, Ont., criticized
what she called the lack of transparency and consultation in the SPP process.
"I'm not impressed that the SPP is making
such big decisions on behalf of Canadians without consulting us and when we go out to the streets we're criminalized."
A
group of powerful business executives has been invited to make a closed-door presentation Tuesday at the summit on changes
they believe the continent needs. No such invitation was extended to scientists, environmentalists, or other social activists.
While
some protesters main aim was to disrupt the summit, most were orderly. A few hundred labour activists from Ottawa called for
a "family-friendly" demonstration and stood back from the police lines.
In Ottawa, things were remarkably calm. There
were no demonstrators at the heavily-guarded U.S. Embassy and the only strangers on Parliament Hill were camera-toting tourists.
The
final communique from the two-day summit will include an order from Harper, Bush
and Calderon to their respective cabinet ministers to create new border regulations for emergencies, said sources in two countries.
The
leaders want to see rules on who and what would be allowed to cross North American borders amid crises like a terrorist attack
or an outbreak of avian flu.
The move is the latest effort to increase security while allowing goods to flow freely,
and stems from the chaotic aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S. The security clampdowns and protracted
lineups six years ago cost the North American economy billions of dollars. The border announcement is one of several expected
at the summit.
The leaders also plan to announce that they will recognize the research of each country's food and drug
regime in an effort to reduce costs and avoid duplication.
A Canada-Mexico deal is also brewing that would allow more
Mexican migrant workers into Canada under an expanded program for agricultural labourers.
Maude Barlow of the Council
of Canadians said people shouldn't be fooled about who really sets the agenda at these summits: the 30 business leaders who
sit on the North American Competitiveness Council and advise the three national governments on facilitating trade.
Barlow
called for a moratorium on the "profoundly anti-democratic" SPP until the citizens of all three countries are consulted and
their elected representatives are given oversight over the business-driven initiative.
Flanked by U.S and Mexican opponents
of the scheme and Canadian labour activists, Barlow told a news conference Monday that big business is trying to create a
competitive North American trade bloc.
"And for this they need regulatory, resource, labour and environmental convergence
to the lowest common standards," she said, predicting that it will ultimately include a common passport, common currency and
free trade in resources, including oil, gas and water.
"This is not about security for people,
social security, security for the poor, environmental security or job security. This is about security for the big corporations
for North America."
This video provides evidence and outlines the case for a full
public inquiry into police covert activities at the Stop the SPP protest in Montebello Quebec
in August. The SQ have publicly stated that their officers did not provoke violence while dressed as radical protesters with
rocks. This video proves that this is a lie -- these covert officers were pushing to start a fight with the riot squad, violating
the Criminal Code of Canada and the constitutional and democratic rights of the protesters. We demand a public inquiry!
Here goes a whole lot of drumming on all kinds of things from Congas and Quintos and stuff, to upside
down picklebuckets and reclaimed propane tanks, anything you could think really. Very fun.
This took place at the back entrance to get in to the protest. An entrance we've been just kind of
putting up with each year ever since the year they started wanding us with metal detectors.
We fought in courts of law and got rid of those 4th ammendment violations for good, but haven't managed
to delete this border.
Here are speeches and facts about the stryker resistance that went on for the past week in
Olympia Washington. Many brave Peace Patriots went to protest and stand up to the war machine and equipment transfer from
the port to the fort.
BILL MOYERS: It's important who owns the press, as we've just seen and heard...but it's also important who decides
what is news.
Why wasn't it news last weekend when more than 100,000 people turned out in 11 cities across the country to protest the
occupation of Iraq...Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Orlando, Salt Lake City, New Orleans,
Jonesborough, Tennessee. but if you blinked while watching the national news, you wouldn't have known it was a story. We found
less than two minutes of scattered mentions on television, and not even the Associated Press reported on other demonstrations
in smaller cities.
Here in Manhattan, thousands of people took to the streets in a steady rain -- but the national coverage was even damper
than the weather. THE NEW YORK TIMES didn't even run a story at all. and local television coverage was sparse.
40 years ago opposition to war was a big story.
You couldn't miss what happened that October day in 1967 when more than 50,000 protesters moved en masse from the Lincoln
memorial across the Potomac river to the Pentagon...calling on their government to end the war in Vietnam...
This photograph by Bernie Boston of the WASHINGTON STAR circled the globe...to become one of the most enduring images of
the era...
But this one, too, speaks volumes... Secretary of Defense Robert Mcnamara peering out of his window at thousands upon thousands
of his fellow americans who just wanted to stop the killing.
Among them was sixteen-year old Maurice Isserman, a high school student making his first visit to the nation's capitol.
By the end of the day he and other marchers would be tear-gassed and dragged away. 700 would be arrested.
Isserman, forty years later, is a historian teaching at Hamilton college. In the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION last week
I came across his essay reminiscing on that day. press reports, he remind us, disparaged the protesters...despite their solemn
rendition of the Star Spangled Banner which they sang, "Wide-open, high notes and all."" Despite the Secretary of Defense,
above them, breaking down and weeping.
Isserman reminds us that only five months before the Pentagon protest, Mcnamara, one of the war's architects and defenders,
had sent the White House a confidential memo outlining his 'growing doubts' about american involvement in Vietnam.
The march on the Pentagon was a watershed, Maurice Isserman writes, turning dissent into resistance.
But the war went on for another seven years...altogether almost sixty thousand American soldiers died...and millions of
Vietnamese...and America still lost, fleeing the country and leaving Vietnam to the Vietnamese.
In Iraq the war also goes on...despite the protests...despite public sentiment that has turned against it...despite almost
four thousand soldiers killed...another 28,000 wounded...and God knows how many iraqi civilians dead or injured...and the
war goes on.
Look at this story in the WASHINGTON POST. It appeared last weekend as those marchers took to the streets.
Reporter Joshua Partlow told of an American unit fighting in a southwest corner of Baghdad...a once middle class neighborhood
now in ruins... you can hear an audio report from Partlow at our website on pbs.org.
One officer told him: "People are killed here every day, and you don't hear about it. people are kidnapped here every day,
and you don't hear about it."
The unit has lost 20 of their comrades during their 14 months at war...the soldiers, Partlow writes, are tired, bitter
and skeptical.
One of them told the journalist: "I don't think this place is worth another soldier's life."
Here at home, if you were watching the Sunday talk shows, you wouldn't know anyone was paying attention to either the soldiers
or the protesters. The talk was all about politics, fires and Iran.
And if anyone in high office was weeping over yet another war with no end in sight...we'll have to wait until they write
their books to know it.
The protest last weekend came almost exactly five years after Congress had backed the President's rush to war. Five years
later the Capitol and the country alike seem once again to have their fingers in their ears.
In Philadelphia one puzzled protester looked around and wondered aloud why there's not more outrage...as the war machine
rolls on.
ERIC RUDER looks at the role of protests in a movement to stop a U.S. war.
BEFORE THE U.S. war on Iraq began, George W. Bush compared
the immense global protests on February 15, 2003--with some 10 million people taking to the streets on five continents--to
a public opinion “focus group.”
Bush ridiculed the idea that the demonstrations should
have any effect on his war policy, and he launched the invasion a few weeks later.
But since 2003, the idea that antiwar protests don’t
matter has spread far beyond the Bush White House. Today, it is even echoed by people in, or sympathetic to, the antiwar movement.
In 2004, for example, liberal journalist Matt Taibbi wrote
that “marching, as we have seen in the last few years, has been rendered basically useless. Before the war, Washington
and New York saw the largest protests this country has seen since the ’60s--and this not only did not stop the war,
it didn’t even motivate the opposition political party to nominate an antiwar candidate.”
Bush’s re-election in 2004--combined with the fact
that the war only seems to drag on--has served to reinforce the view in some antiwar circles that the movement must find tactics
that will work and abandon ineffective national mobilizations. Such demonstrations may make participants “feel good,”
goes the argument, but they don’t have much to do with ending the war.
The conclusion that “protests
don’t work” is, however, ....mistaken.
FOR ONE thing, the idea that today’s
antiwar movement has really tried protest on a mass scale is wrong. Measured against the movement to stop the U.S. war on
Vietnam, the antiwar movement today is still in its infancy, in terms of both size and militancy.
Take the Vietnam Moratorium Days in 1969. On October 15,
some 10 million people took part in local actions from coast to coast. In large cities, there were rallies of tens of thousands;
on campuses, students wore peace armbands; and in a number of smaller towns, people read names of the war dead.
A month later on November 15, Washington, D.C., was the
site of the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that point--with somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 antiwar protesters
jammed around the Washington Monument for speeches that lasted throughout the day.
The media reported that Richard Nixon paid the protesters
no attention whatsoever, and spent the afternoon watching college football. But the true story was different. As history books
later revealed, Nixon was frantic about the size of the 1969 mobilizations.
“The demonstrators had been more successful than
they realized, pushing Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger away from plans to greatly escalate the war,
possibly even to the point of using nuclear weapons, and back toward their ‘Vietnamization’ strategy of propping
up the Saigon regime,” author Gerald Nicosia wrote in Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement.
Nicosia adds that another accomplishment of the 1969 demonstrations,
“though no one knew it at the time, was the revival of the Vietnam veterans’ movement.”
The Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) had been founded
two years earlier, but by 1969 had become inactive. The task of mobilizing for the Moratorium Days changed that.
“Within a few months, VVAW had several hundred new
members,” writes Nicosia. “Many of them came directly out of VA hospitals, bringing with them word of the terrible
conditions that Vietnam veterans were experiencing in those places.”
By early 1970, the level of protest climbed even higher
in response to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, which sparked a student strike. Police and the National Guard were called out
to confront student protesters, leading to the killing of students at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi
in May 1970--which in turn fed the fires of antiwar outrage.
In all, some 8 million students participated in the strikes;
just in May, some 1,350 colleges were affected. “Faculty and administrators joined students in active dissent, and 536
campuses were shut down completely, 51 for the rest of the academic year,” Tom Wells wrote in The War Within: America’s
Battle Over Vietnam.
The scale of the protests prodded McGeorge Bundy, one
of the war’s principal architects, to declare that “not only must there be no new incursion of Americans across
the Cambodian border, but nothing that feels like that to the American public must happen again, on the President’s
say so alone.”
In 2007, public opinion against the war on Iraq may run
even higher than sentiment against the Vietnam War did in 1970--certainly George Bush’s approval rating is lower than
Richard Nixon’s that year. This is encouraging considering the absence of high-profile protests like those of 1970.
But the tide of antiwar public opinion is having less
direct impact on government policy today, and that’s a result of the fact that the sentiment isn’t backed up by
any organized expression.
The problem isn’t that mass protests don’t
work, but that today’s antiwar movement hasn’t risen to the challenge of mobilizing antiwar sentiment into mass
protests.
THE ISSUE of protest shouldn’t
be looked at narrowly. If the question is whether mass protests on their own change government policy and end wars, then the
answer is no.
Large marches and demonstrations--even militant ones that
include civil disobedience--aren’t sufficient, in and of themselves, to force the U.S. to abandon its foreign policy
aims. This is certainly the case today with the occupation of Iraq, since there is more at stake for the U.S. in Iraq--with
its huge oil supplies and location at the strategic heart of the Middle East--than there was in Vietnam.
But instead of measuring the power of mass marches in
isolation, what’s needed is to understand what role mass protests play in building a movement capable of ending a U.S.
war.
Three necessary elements came together--with each one
bolstering and reinforcing the others--to end the U.S. war on Vietnam.
The Vietnamese resistance kept the U.S. from imposing
its will, but couldn’t expel the U.S. on its own. The rise of resistance among U.S. soldiers undermined the effectiveness
of the U.S. military as a fighting force, but GI organizing didn’t happen in a vacuum. The antiwar movement in the U.S.
shook up American society, but it didn’t have the power to stop the war machine.
Together, however, these three forces combined to compel
the U.S. ruling establishment to conclude that only further ruin of its military and turmoil within U.S. society would result
from continuing the war on Vietnam.
So national antiwar mobilizations are a necessary part
of a movement that can end the war, even if they don’t have a direct impact on war policy themselves.
A large national protest that attracts new as well as
experienced activists helps people in the antiwar movement overcome feelings of isolation they may experience in their own
cities and towns. It also strengthens local organizations that mobilize for the protest--and these groups in turn benefit
from the politicization of individuals who return home invigorated to continue the struggle. And of course, the larger such
mobilizations, the greater the impact they can have on shaping mass public opinion.
This last point is one of the most important ways that
a strong civilian antiwar movement can assist in the development of GI resistance--another crucial ingredient in the antiwar
struggle.
For one, well-publicized and -orchestrated mobilizations
can serve as the first point of contact between recent veterans and the antiwar movement. At the January 27 mobilization in
Washington this year, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) recruited a dozen new members. And recent veterans provide the
best direct links to finding active-duty military personnel who are willing and ready to organize.
What’s more, it’s impossible to imagine a
GI revolt without broad rejection of the war among the public. Soldiers aren’t likely to oppose a war that their mothers,
fathers, brothers, sisters and neighbors support.
During the Vietnam era, the peak of the GI revolt followed
years of domestic protest, the growing radicalization of the student antiwar movement and the obvious futility of the war
effort itself in the face of the Vietnamese resistance.
Many opponents of the Iraq war feel an understandable
frustration as Bush’s surge grinds on with such limited opposition. Unfortunately, though, this has boiled down in some
cases into exhortations to “put your body on the line”--in order to carry out a civil disobedience action the
politicians can’t ignore.
But civil disobedience, even when it involves hundreds
of people, can be ignored in the absence of a confident, growing and sustained mass movement.
This is what distinguishes the Vietnam era from today.
“Every year from 1967 to 1971, a major march occurred in the District, including four of the biggest antiwar demonstrations
in American history [to that point],” according to a Washington Post retrospective on the period.
Mass demonstrations don’t end wars on their own,
but they are an essential part of a larger struggle that can.
Thus, the challenge facing the antiwar movement, given
the weakness of the forces involved at the moment, is to combine large national mobilizations with a focus on strengthening
the local, grassroots base of the movement.
This means careful attention to building local chapters
of Iraq Veterans Against the War, campus antiwar coalitions and citywide antiwar networks.
These forces need to collaborate on reaching out to military
bases, GIs and vets at VA hospitals, unions, civil rights organizations of all sorts--in short, all the potential allies who
together can raise the cost to the U.S. establishment of prosecuting its immoral and brutal war on the Iraqi people.
Last Night I had the Strangest Dream-Women For Peace
Women for
Peace: Women in Black, the Raging Grannies, CodePink, Rose Gentle from Scotland, a street medic from Portland and peace
activists from Port Townsend, Tacoma, Olympia and Aberdeen.
On September 6, 2007, Adam Kokesh (IVAW) and Tina Richards (Grassroots America) were arrested
in Washington, D.C. for defying a federal government ban on posting promotional material for the September 15th Antiwar Rally,
to be held in this city. The rally is sponsored by the ANSWER coalition.
Police use FORCE & ARRESTS to surpress free speech
Three anti-war activists were arrested in front of the White House
Sept 6 2007
The U.S. Park Police moved to suppress a press conference called to protest the fines and threats against the ANSWER
Coalition for putting up anti-war posters promoting the September 15 March and Die-In in Washington DC.
The arrested were Tina Richards, CEO of Grassroots America and mother of Iraq War Veteran Cloy Richards; Adam Kokesh, the
Co-Chair Elect of the Iraq Veterans Against the War and member of Veterans for Peace; and Ian Thompson, an organizer with
the ANSWER Coalition.
The press conference became a chaotic scene as U.S. Park Police interrupted the event on the basis that there was no permit
for a folding table that was used as a speaker’s stand for media microphones. As U.S. Park Police officers surrounded
the group, an officer on horseback rode into the crowd to disperse the media and onlookers.
Tina Richards and Adam Kokesh had announced that they would put a September 15 March to Stop the War poster on a lamppost
following the press conference. The ANSWER Coalition has been fined over $30,000 in the last three weeks in an unprecedented
action aimed at suppressing the September 15 mobilization. The three were taken to the Central District Substation of the
United States Park Police. They will later be transferred to a jail in which they will spend the night before being arraigned
in U.S. Superior Court tomorrow afternoon.
Attorneys at the Partnership for Civil Justice have filed a Free Speech lawsuit to strike down the unconstitutional postering
law. The ANSWER Coalition has refused to pay these illegal fines.
Momentum continues to build for the September 15 Mass March, which will be led by Iraq War Veterans and their family members.
More than 100 cities are mobilizing to bring people by bus, van and car caravan. The September 15 March will culminate with
a large scale Die-In/Funeral for U.S. servicemembers and Iraqis who have been killed in this criminal war of aggression.
While the meetings inside were cordial,
it was far less cozy outside the massive Nordic-style log hotel and the surrounding estate. Lines of police in riot gear jostled
with dozens of demonstrators - the vanguard of hundreds who marched on the front gate of the summit compound shouting taunts.
Officers used pepper spray and tear gas to hold off the protesters, who responded by flinging rocks and branches. Two people
were hauled away in handcuffs.
MONTEBELLO, Que. (CP) - As riot police fired tear gas and
pepper spray to hold back demonstrators outside the Montebello summit, Stephen Harper shook hands with George W. Bush and dismissed the protest as a "sad" spectacle.
The
prime minister welcomed Bush to the North American Leaders' Summit after
the U.S. president landed by helicopter Monday at the posh - and heavily guarded - Chateau Montebello. "I've heard it's nothing,"
the prime minister said when asked whether he'd seen the protesters.
"A couple hundred? It's sad."
Bush looked over his shoulder and smiled when asked the same question, but remained silent
and walked with the prime minister into the building.
...
While the meetings inside were cordial, it was far
less cozy outside the massive Nordic-style log hotel and the surrounding estate.
Lines of police in riot gear jostled
with dozens of demonstrators - the vanguard of hundreds who marched on the front gate of the summit compound shouting taunts.
Officers
used pepper spray and tear gas to hold off the protesters, who responded by flinging rocks and branches. Two people were hauled
away in handcuffs.
The confrontation settled into a face-to-face standoff between a hardcore group of protesters and
police until demonstrators began to drift off in the late afternoon.
As about 200 demonstrators lingered, police pushed
them back, firing many rounds of tear gas to clear the road. By early evening, only a handful of protesters remained milling
about.
Angry anarchists and family-friendly activists converged on the hamlet of Montebello by bus to protest the summit,
but concerns about huge, violent demonstrations fizzled.
Early in the afternoon, more than 500 people marched along
the road toward the gate of the summit compound which is ringed by a four-metre-high steel security fence. They chanted slogans
and carried banners, including one reading: "Say No To AmeriCanada."
Riot police lined up
in front of the front gate as the marchers - some wearing anarchist red-and-black flags and carrying signs condemning Bush as a war criminal - approached.
Despite the jostling, the tear
gas and the pepper spray, it was a far cry from previous meetings - such as the G-8, APEC and the Summit of the Americas -
when thousands of people turned out and demonstrations turned violent.
Protesters are barred from the compound but
their activities were relayed to hotel lobby where they could be viewed on two video monitors.
There are seemingly
as many causes as protesters, who condemn North American integration, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the leaders' performance
on the environment, the plight of aboriginals, and human-rights abuses committed in the war on terror.
One common complaint
echoed by all is the secrecy surrounding the meeting.
Susan Howard-Azzey, a homemaker from St.catharines, Ont., criticized
what she called the lack of transparency and consultation in the SPP process.
"I'm not impressed that the SPP is making
such big decisions on behalf of Canadians without consulting us and when we go out to the streets we're criminalized."
A
group of powerful business executives has been invited to make a closed-door presentation Tuesday at the summit on changes
they believe the continent needs. No such invitation was extended to scientists, environmentalists, or other social activists.
While
some protesters main aim was to disrupt the summit, most were orderly. A few hundred labour activists from Ottawa called for
a "family-friendly" demonstration and stood back from the police lines.
In Ottawa, things were remarkably calm. There
were no demonstrators at the heavily-guarded U.S. Embassy and the only strangers on Parliament Hill were camera-toting tourists.
The
final communique from the two-day summit will include an order from Harper, Bush
and Calderon to their respective cabinet ministers to create new border regulations for emergencies, said sources in two countries.
The
leaders want to see rules on who and what would be allowed to cross North American borders amid crises like a terrorist attack
or an outbreak of avian flu.
The move is the latest effort to increase security while allowing goods to flow freely,
and stems from the chaotic aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S. The security clampdowns and protracted
lineups six years ago cost the North American economy billions of dollars. The border announcement is one of several expected
at the summit.
The leaders also plan to announce that they will recognize the research of each country's food and drug
regime in an effort to reduce costs and avoid duplication.
A Canada-Mexico deal is also brewing that would allow more
Mexican migrant workers into Canada under an expanded program for agricultural labourers.
Maude Barlow of the Council
of Canadians said people shouldn't be fooled about who really sets the agenda at these summits: the 30 business leaders who
sit on the North American Competitiveness Council and advise the three national governments on facilitating trade.
Barlow
called for a moratorium on the "profoundly anti-democratic" SPP until the citizens of all three countries are consulted and
their elected representatives are given oversight over the business-driven initiative.
Flanked by U.S and Mexican opponents
of the scheme and Canadian labour activists, Barlow told a news conference Monday that big business is trying to create a
competitive North American trade bloc.
"And for this they need regulatory, resource, labour and environmental convergence
to the lowest common standards," she said, predicting that it will ultimately include a common passport, common currency and
free trade in resources, including oil, gas and water.
"This is not about security for people,
social security, security for the poor, environmental security or job security. This is about security for the big corporations
for North America."
V.
TECH AND CIA RECRUITING posted by
Joe here on 4-20-07
I copied the article below from
an email I recieved from a group I belong to called "PDX911TRUTH"
From November 2005 - For the second time this
year, the Central Intelligence Agency will be coming to Virginia Tech to recruit students. And for the second time
this year, they will be met with protests from students who view the CIA as an immoral organization that engages in
torture and murder. Nicholas Kiersey organized a protest last spring when the CIA came to campus. He released the
following statement Monday about the CIA's trip to Torgeson 3100 Thursday at 7 p.m.: "Blacksburg,
VA November 13, 2005 - A coalition of concerned graduate students and campus organizations at Virginia Tech are this
Thursday staging a 'teach in' to protest CIA recruitment on campus. Planned events also include the protest of a 'career
information' session to be held by the CIA later that evening. +++===+++===+++=== Sources: Feds Ordered VA
Police To Stand Down - Local authorities were told to take no action to pursue killer
Police and EMT workers at
Virginia Tech tell us that campus police were given a federal order to stand down and not pursue killer Cho Seung-Hui
as Monday's bloodshed unfolded. Though wishing to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, we have received calls from
police and EMT's who tell us that a stand down order was in place, and this is also confirmed by eyewitness Matt Kazee,
who is a Blacksburg local. Kazee talked to local EMT's
and police who told him the same thing, that the order was to wait until federal back up arrived before any action was
taken. This explains the complete non-response of the police in the two hour gap between Cho's first two murders and the
wider rampage that would follow later that morning. The policy of federal control over the University was put in place
following a previous shooting in August 2006 in which a police officer and a hospital security guard were killed. +++===+++===+++=== COLUMBINE
FAMILIES 25 YR GAG ORDER!
I was watching the live MSNBC feed during this horrible tragedy. They had one of the
Columbine family survivors on air. He mentioned a gag order and how he couldn't talk about "details" regarding his
(my heart goes out to him) lost son. he mentioned also that several details regarding this shooting will not be released
for another 25 years. The father of a murder victim, subject to gag orders? esp regarding high school shooting? What
is being kept from US? More importantly what will be withheld during this profound VT case? What will those "law makers"
(aka law breakers) try to pass on us while everyone is distracted by this horrible event?? Watch the media closely
now. +++===+++===+++=== CHO IS A PATSY LIKE OSWALD WAS IN JFK'S DEATH
You know it seems more and more like
a CIA "script", and Cho is the "patsy" in the same way that "Lee Harvey Oswald" was in JFK's death. I listened to
Alex Jones show today and they emphasized how not even the best marksman can easily fire off 50 rounds so deadly and
easily like the VA loner "patsy" is supposed to have done. So where did he get his training to become some a skilled
and emotionless marksman? I think we are indeed dealing with two or more shooters and Cho is being made the "patsy".
He may have been the killer in the dormitory deaths, but for him to send out a media pack then to kill 30 additional
people with three shots each--it begs belief.
There is also the "double" for Cho, an allegedly Chinese student named
Wayne Chiang, who admittedly is into to guns and weapons. You can read about his "I am trying to clear my name" comments
here: http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/04/i_want_to_clear.ht ml
He looks so much like Cho one wonders if they are not the same person.
Granted without proof he should be assumed to be innocent, because America
stands for human rights and if we were charged wit a crime, we would want the burden of proof of guilt on the accuser.
But it does bring up a point: how much do you trust the government and media?
You may recall that there were serious
questions raised about multiple "Lee Harvey Oswalds" by JFK researchers. The most provable of the allegations is in
a photo taken in Mexico City of a man alleged to be "Oswald"
but who in fact looks nothing like LHO. Suppose that there were two or more shooters - then Cho or a "facsimile" Cho
is brought it, (maybe already dead) and the head is blown off to approximate a "suicide". The real shooter(s) may
indeed be brainwashed or mind control victums and may not even realise what they did. They can be killed later in a car
accident, or by cancer, so that they never will talk or be tied to the crime. +++===+++===+++=== I BELIEVE
THAT THE PICTURES SHOW TWO DIFFERENT MEN
Something struck me about the side profile photo of the shooter. If you
look closely, he appears to have abrasions on his face, indicating a scuffle (maybe with police). This is either a photo
of someone else who looks remarkably like the shooter or else they had the shooter in custody at one time or another.
I believe it is someone else because the hairline looks different in the two photos. +++===+++===+++=== Seung-Hui
Cho Was a Mind Controlled Assassin
Deadly accuracy, disturbing revelations suggest outside involvement in VA Massacre,
cocktail of brainwashing from prozac, violent video games contributed to carnage. Seung-Hui Cho was a mind-controlled
assassin, whether you believe he was under the influence of outside parties or not, the fact is that the cultural
brainwashing of violent video games and psychotropic drugs directly contributed, as it does in all these cases, to
the carnage at Virginia Tech on Monday morning.
Charles Mesloh, Professor of Criminology at FloridaGulfCoast University, told NBC
2 News that he was shocked Cho could have killed 32 people with two handguns absent expert training. Mesloh immediately
assumed that Cho must have used a shotgun or an assault rifle. "I'm dumbfounded by the number of people he managed
to kill with these weapons," said Mesloh, "The only thing I can figure is that he got close to them and he simply
executed them."
Mesloh said the killer performed like a trained professional, "He had a 60% fatality rate with
handguns - that's unheard of given 9 millimeters don't kill people instantly," said Mesloh, stating that the handguns
Cho used were designed for "plinking at cans," not executing human beings.
Cho was certainly no slouch, in the
two hour gap between the first reported shootings and the wider rampage that would occur later in the morning, during
which time the University completely failed to warn the students despite having loudspeakers stationed throughout
the campus, Cho had time to film a confession video, transfer it to his computer, burn it onto a DVD, package it up,
travel to the post office, post the package, and travel back to his dorm room to retrieve his guns and then travel back
to the opposite end of the campus to resume the killing spree. The almost inconceivable speed of Cho's actions become
more suspicious when we recall initial reports that there were two shooters.
Even if we rule out the fact that
Cho had received expert firearms training, the cultural mind control of violent video games and mind-altering psychotropic
drugs were themselves a cocktail of brainwashing that directly contributed to the carnage, as they do in nearly all
these cases.
"Several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung Hui from his high school days said he was a fan of violent
video games, particularly a game called "Counterstrike," a hugely popular online game in which players join terrorism
or counterterrorism groups and try to shoot each other using all types of guns," reports Newsmax citing the Washington
Post.
"In December 2005 -- more than a year before Monday's mass shootings -- a district court in Montgomery County, Va., ruled that Cho presented "an
imminent danger to self or others." That was the necessary criterion for a detention order, so that Cho, who had been
accused of stalking by two female schoolmates, could be evaluated by a state doctor and ordered to undergo outpatient
care," reports ABC News, " but despite the court identifying the future killer as a risk, they let him go. Investigators
believe that Cho Seung Hui, the Virginia Tech murderer, had been taking anti-depressant medication at some point before
the shootings, according to The Chicago Tribune.
Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as well as
15-year-old Kip Kinkel, the Oregon killer who gunned
down his parents and classmates, were all on psychotropic drugs. Scientific studies proving that prozac encourages
suicidal tendencies in young people are voluminous and span back nearly a decade. Jeff Weise, the RedLakeHigh School
killer was on prozac, "Unabomber" Ted Kaczinski, Michael McDermott, John Hinckley, Jr., Byran Uyesugi, Mark David
Chapman and Charles Carl Roberts IV, the Amish school killer, were all on SSRI psychotropic drugs.
We have
been receiving numerous calls and e mails alerting us to the fact that VA Tech is pulling links from its website concerning
their relationship with the CIA. Reports from November 2005 confirm that the CIA was active in operating recruitment
programs based out of VA Tech. Several professors from VA Tech are involved in government programs linked with NASA
and other agencies. The CIA's program to create mind-controlled assassins that could be triggered by code words, MK
ULTRA, is not a conspiracy theory, it's a historical fact documented by declassified government files and Senate hearings.
President Bill Clinton himself had to apologize for the program before he left office.
On the Senate floor in
1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said, "The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions
were involved in an 'extensive testing and experimentation' program which included covert drug tests on unwitting
citizens 'at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." One such victim of these experiments was
Cathy O'Brien, who immediately after the shootings re-iterated the revelations in her latest book, that Blacksburg Virginia
is a central location for mind control programs that are still ongoing today.
CIA mind control programs can be
tracked back to the 1950's and Project BLUEBIRD, later renamed ARTICHOKE. From blogger Kurt Nimmo; BLUEBIRD was approved
by the CIA director on April 20, 1950. In August 1951, the Project was renamed ARTICHOKE. BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE included
a great deal of work on the creation of amnesia, hypnotic couriers, and the Manchurian Candidate, writes Colin A.
Ross, MD. ARTICHOKE documents prove that hypnotic couriers functioned effectively in real-life simulations conducted
by the CIA in the early 1950's. The degree to which such individuals were used in actual operations is still classified-
BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE were administered in a compartmented fashion. The details of the programs were kept secret
even form other personnel within the CIA- The BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE materials establish conclusively that full Manchurian
Candidates were created and tested successfully by physicians with TOP SECRET clearance from the CIAS. As well as
being potential couriers and infiltration agents, the subjects could function in effect as hypnotically controlled
cameras. They could enter a room or building, memorize materials quickly, leave the building, and then be amnesic
for the entire episode. The memorized material could then be retrieved by a handler using a previously implanted code
or signal, without the amnesia being disturbed. Hypnosis was not the mind control doctors' only method for creation
of controlled amnesia, however. Drugs, magnetic fields, sound waves, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and
many other methods were studied under BLUEBIRD and ARTHICHOKE.
Researchers into supposed "lone nut" assassinations
time and time again run across evidence pointing to CIA mind control experimentation. The best example is Sirhan Sirhan,
Bobby Kennedy's assassin. Sirhan was found to be in a completely trance-like state after pulling the trigger and couldn't
even remember shooting Kennedy when asked about the incident days later. Sirhan's lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, has presented
convincing evidence that Sirhan was under mind control. Either way you cut it, Seung-Hui Cho was a victim of brainwashing
and mind control. The right questions are not being asked and the finger of blame is being pointed in the wrong direction,
ensuring that another tragedy like the VA Tech Massacre is almost guaranteed. +++===+++===+++=== True
Va. Tech gunman: 6-foot ChiCom assassin?
It turns out forensics identified a totally different person as the V-Tech
gunman before the official story concealed around the robotic patsy Cho. From a google cache of the Chicago Sun-Times
Monday night:
"Gunman kills 32 at Virginia Tech before being killed - April 16, 2007 - BY MICHAEL SNEED Sun-Times
Columnist --Sneed hears authorities were investigating whether the gunman who killed 32 people in a rampage on the
Virginia Tech campus was a Chinese national who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa. The 25-year-old
man being investigated for the deadliest college carnage in U.S. history
reportedly arrived in San Francisco on a United Airlines flight on Aug. 7, 2006, on a visa
issued in Shanghai, the source said. Investigators had not
linked him to any terrorist groups, the source added. The shooter reportedly had multiple handguns with high-capacity
magazines, enabling him to kill many students quickly. The rampage also appeared to have been premeditated since the
exits in the campus buildings in which the shootings occurred were chained. The story at that URL was updated Tuesday
morning after ATF had "helped" by taking over the firearm forensics analysis Monday night(though the date on the story
remained April 16). Again, from Chicago Sun-Times:
"Suspected gunman identified April 16, 2007 BY MICHAEL
SNEED Sun-Times Columnist The gunman suspected of carrying out the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead
was identified today as Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old South Korean who was a senior at the school. He was carrying
a backpack that contained 9mm clips, two knives and a bag from Dick's Sporting Goods, a source said. The backpack
was found near the shooter. The initial investigation had led law enforcement authorities to a preliminary suspect
who was a Chinese national, accompanied by details and a description. The man was placed on the suspect list before
fingerprints could be verified. The list in turn was distributed to law enforcement officials via a national network
in place to check on possible terrorism in the United States. Cho was identified following an analysis
of fingerprints and ballistics. Cho was a English major whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred
to the school's counseling service. News reports also said he may have been taking medication for depression.
Also
note that eyewitnesses who survived the slaughter said the gunman was a 6-foot Asian man. Yet the patsy Cho was 5-foot-8,
150 pounds. It is likely that the six-foot Asian gunman was indeed this Chinese man. Independent investigators in
Blacksburg should try to find out who this mysterious might have been -- was there
anyone fitting this description in Blacksburg over the
last several who may have had access to the campus? An employee of the University perhaps?
The janitors'
agreement comes on the heels of an historic week of civil disobedience in Houston. Nearly 80 people demonstrated their courage
and commitment to janitors' fight by risking arrest since the strike began.
The non-violent
protests reached a critical point when,
on Nov.
16, mounted policemen charged nearly 50 Houston janitors
and supporters
from other cities engaged in civil disobedience.
Greece: 45.000 students on the streets - militant protests
March 2007 Report
Since about 3 month half of all universities are occupied and on strike. This Thursday March
8 in Athens and Thessalonica, two great demonstrations took place at the time when the Parliament voted the new law -cadre,
which opens universities to private companies. In Athens, 40.000 demonstrators were in the
streets, 5000 in Thessalonica. The demonstration of Athens was regarded as the main event and gathered
demonstrators from all of Greece. That of Thessalonica was more local and gathered students from the city itself and north
of Greece. The protests become more and more militant, as repression by state escalates.
Tourists in DC" is a documentary about a group of friends who traveled
to Washington DC to participate in the anti-war protests during the last weekend of September 2005. Most of them viewed it
as a long weekend vacation. Many wanted to experience the events from the periphery, maintaining a somewhat detached objectivity.
By the end of the actions, two of the group ended up in jail, another two, armed with a megaphone and a guitar, performed
a re-written version of the Declaration of Independence in front of the White House, as marchers streamed by to cross the
barricades and get arrested. Most recorded their experiences on personal camcorders. Undercover agents dressed as demonstrators
trying to instigate a riot was among the scenes they captured.
"Tourists in DC" was constructed entirely of these home
video recordings. It documents their personal journeys from a somewhat playful and irreverent detachment to finding themselves
in the center of the action.
From the open publishing newswire: After a six-hour siege on the Benito Juarez Autonomous University, which is the home Radio Universidad, voice
of the APPO, the Federal Preventative Police (PFP) was forced to retreat just moments ago.
As helicopters, tanks, and scores of armed federal police approached the University campus, "la doctora," the now famous
host of radio APPO, urged the citizens of Oaxaca to rush to the scene to aid in the defense of the campus and particularly,
of the radio station.
Scores of neighbors and students reportedly surround the PFP troops. Simultaneously, APPO supporters in Mexico City marched
from the hunger strikers' encampment near the Senate to the offices of the PFP to demand a retreat from the campus.
“The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth
and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such calculated and
indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.”
Howard Zinn was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a working-class
family and, though he had few formal educational opportunities, he developed a strong social consciousness while working as
a shipfitter and avidly reading the novels of Charles Dickens. Flying bombing missions in World War II shaped his opposition
to war. After military service he earned a doctorate in history at Columbia University and taught at Spelman College in Georgia
where he was active in the Civil Rights movement. In 1963 he moved to Boston University and became a prominent, outspoken
critic of the Vietnam War.
Best known for his A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (1980, revised
1995), a history of America through the perspective of “those outside of the political and economic establishment,”
Zinn remains an active advocate for the underclass, a proponent of world peace and an articulate critic of corporate power
and greed supported by governmental collusion.
“We need new ways of thinking,” says Zinn. “We need
to rethink our position in the world. We need to stop sending weapons to countries that oppress other people. We need to decide
that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always
indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.”
“We
can not be secure by limiting our liberties, as some of our political leaders are demanding, but only by expanding them…We
should take our example not from the military and political leaders shouting ‘retaliate’ and ‘war’
but from the doctors and nurses and … firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose
first thoughts are not violence, but healing, and not vengeance, but compassion.”
.
The North American Native Americans Land Protest
click on picture below
REFUSE TO FIGHT
First Officer Announces Refusal to Deploy to Iraq
More on Lt Watada
June 12, 2006 This article is originally from Truthout.org
Ehren Watada is a 27-year-old first lieutenant in the United States Army. He joined the Army in 2003, during the run-up
to the Iraq war, and turned in his resignation to protest that same war in January of 2006. He expects to receive orders in
late June. He is poised to become the first lieutenant to refuse to deploy to Iraq, setting the stage for what could be the
biggest movement of GI resistance since the Vietnam War. He faces a court-martial, up to two years in prison for missing movement
by design, a dishonorable discharge, and other possible charges. He says speaking against an illegal and immoral war is worth
all of this and more. Journalist Sarah Olson spoke with Watada in late May about his reasons for joining the military, and
why he wants out.
Sarah Olson: When you joined the Army in 2003, what were your goals?
Ehren Watada: 2003 was a couple of years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. I had the idea that my country needed me
and that I needed to serve my country. I still strongly believe that. I strongly believe in service and duty. That's one of
the reasons I joined: because of patriotism.
I took an oath to the US Constitution, and to the values and the principles it represents. It makes us strongly unique.
We don't allow tyranny; we believe in accountability and checks and balances, and a government that's by and for the people.
The military must safeguard those freedoms and those principles and the democracy that makes us unique. A lot of people, like
myself, join the military because they love their country, and they love what it stands for.
SO: You joined the Army during the run-up to the Iraq war, but you had misgivings about the war. How did that happen?
Watada: Like everybody in America and around the world, I heard what they were saying on television about the stockpiles
of weapons of mass destruction, and the ties to al-Qaeda and 9/11. I also saw the millions of people around the world protesting,
and listened to the people resigning from the government in protest. I realized that the war probably wasn't justified until
we found proof of these accusations the president and his deputies were making against Iraq.
But I also believed we should give the president the benefit of the doubt. At that time, I never believed ... I could never
conceive of our leader betraying the trust we had in him.
SO: What was your experience in the military?
Watada: My first duty assignment was in Korea. It's hard learning to be an officer, and it was hard being stationed overseas.
It is a different kind of situation that you're put in. You're not just being told what to do and execute. As an officer,
you are constantly leading by example. You have to do the right thing even when you don't necessarily want to. When you go
into the field, it's not like a civilian job where you go home at the end of the day, take a shower, relax, and eat a nice
meal.
SO: So you got the order to go to Iraq after you returned from Korea. What were your thoughts at the time?
Watada: Back in Korea we trained for a separate mission, but we all knew what was going on in Iraq. Our commanders were
telling us to be ready for war and to start training for it.
When I came back I still had doubts about the war and why we were in it. When they told me I was going to deploy, I said
OK: I'm going to start training for it, and I'm going to start training the guys under me. And I'm going to do that to the
best of my ability.
SO: So what changed?
Watada: I realized that to go to war, I needed to educate myself in every way possible. Why were we going to this particular
war? What were the effects of war? What were the consequences for soldiers coming home? I began reading everything I could.
One of many books I read was James Bamford's Pretext for War. As I read about the level of deception the Bush administration
used to initiate and process this war, I was shocked. I became ashamed of wearing the uniform. How can we wear something with
such a time-honored tradition, knowing we waged war based on a misrepresentation and lies? It was a betrayal of the trust
of the American people. And these lies were a betrayal of the trust of the military and the soldiers.
My mind was in turmoil. Do I follow orders and participate in something that I believed to be wrong? When you join the
Army you learn to follow orders without question. Soldiers are apolitical, and you don't voice your opinion out loud.
I started asking, why are we dying? Why are we losing limbs? For what? I listened to the president and his deputies say
we were fighting for democracy; we were fighting for a better Iraq. I just started to think about those things. Are those
things the real reasons why we are there, the real reasons we were dying? But I felt there was nothing to be done, and this
administration was just continually violating the law to serve their purpose, and there was nothing to stop them.
The deciding moment for me was in January of 2006. I had watched clips of military funerals. I saw the photos of these
families. The children. The mothers and the fathers as they sat by the grave, or as they came out of the funerals. One really
hard picture for me was a little boy leaving his father's funeral. He couldn't face the camera so he is covering his eyes.
I felt like I couldn't watch that anymore. I couldn't be silent any more and condone something that I felt was deeply wrong.
SO: You made decision to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq. What happened next?
Watada: I alerted my commander this January, and told him I would refuse the order to go to Iraq. He asked me to think
it over. After about a week, I said OK, I've made my decision. I've come to believe this is an illegal and an immoral war,
and the order to have us deploy to Iraq is unlawful. I won't follow this order and I won't participate in something I believe
is wrong.
My commanders told me that I could go to Iraq in a different capacity. I wouldn't have to fire a weapon and I wouldn't
be in harm's way. But that's not what this is about. Even in my resignation letter I said that I would rather go to prison
than do something that I felt was deeply wrong. I believe the whole war is illegal. I'm not just against bearing arms or fighting
people. I am against an unjustified war.
SO: You've had about six months to think about this. It's a pretty heavy revelation that you're quite possibly facing prison
time. How are you feeling now?
Watada: A lot of people including my parents tried to talk me out of it. And I had to tell them, and I had to convince
myself first, that it's not about just trying to survive. It's not about just trying to make sure you're safe. When you are
looking your children in the eye in the future, or when you are at the end of your life, you want to look back on your life
and know that at a very important moment, when I had the opportunity to make the right decisions, I did so, even knowing there
were negative consequences.
SO: What is your intellectual and moral opposition to the Iraq war? What is that based on?
Watada: First, the war was based on false pretenses. If the president tells us we are there to destroy Saddam's weapons
of mass destruction, and there are none, why are we there? Then the president said Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda and 9/11. That
allegation has been proven to be false too. So why are we going there? The president says we're there to promote democracy,
and to liberate the Iraqi people. That isn't happening either.
Second, the Iraq war is not legal according to domestic and international law. It violates the Constitution and the War
Powers Act, which limits the president in his role as commander in chief from using the armed forces in any way he sees fit.
The UN Charter, the Geneva Convention, and the Nuremberg principles all bar wars of aggression.
Finally, the occupation itself is illegal. If you look at the Army Field Manual, 27-10, which governs the laws of land
warfare, it states certain responsibilities for the occupying power. As the occupying power, we have failed to follow a lot
of those regulations. There is no justification for why we are there or what we are doing.
SO: One of the common criticisms of military resisters is that you have abandoned your colleagues, and that you are letting
others fight a war in your place. What's you're response to this?
Watada: My commander asked me, if everybody like you refused to go to Iraq, what would that leave us with? And I guess
he was trying to say we wouldn't have an army anymore, and that would be bad. But I wanted to tell him if that happened the
war would stop, because nobody would be there to fight it.
When people say, you're not being a team player or you are letting your buddies down, I want to say that I am fighting
for my men still, and I am supporting them. But the conscionable way to support them is not to drop artillery and cause more
destruction. It is to oppose this war and help end it so all soldiers can come home. It is my duty not to follow unlawful
orders and not participate in things I find morally reprehensible.
SO: Are your feelings common among people in the military?
Watada: The general sentiment of people within the military is that they're getting a little sick and tired of this war.
You can tell with the recent Zogby poll that said more than 70% of people in the military want to withdraw the end of this
year. That's a powerful statement from people within the military who aren't really given the chance to speak out publicly.
SO: What do you think the US should do in Iraq now?
Watada: I think the US should pull out all troops immediately. The outbreak of the civil war is something that we caused
with our invasion and our war. I don't think it's at a point right now where we can fix it.
SO: You've mentioned your sense of betrayal. Can you explain this?
Watada: The president is the commander in chief, and although he is our leader, there must be a strong relationship of
trust. Anybody who's been in the military knows that in order to have a cohesive and effective fighting force, you need to
have a certain level of trust between leaders and soldiers. And when you don't, things start to break down.
I signed a contract saying I will follow orders, and do what I'm told to do. There are times when I won't be able to question
it and evaluate the legality of these orders, so I have to have the ultimate trust in my leader. I have to trust the president's
word, and trust him to do what's right. I have to trust him to sacrifice our lives only for justified and moral reasons. Realizing
the president is taking us into a war that he misled us about has broken that bond of trust that we had. If the president
can betray my trust, it's time for me to evaluate what he's telling me to do. I've realized that going to this war is the
wrong thing to do.
SO: What do you make of the growing anti-war sentiment in the country?
Watada: I don't see it manifest. Soldiers who come back from Iraq say they get the impression many people don't know a
war is going on; they say even friends and family seem more involved in popular culture and American Idol. People are not
interested in the hundreds of Iraqis and the dozens of Americans dying each week.
SO: How does the plight that faces Iraqi civilians impact your decision not to go?
Watada: Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. He was repressive. He did use torture. But the torture and the killing hasn't
stopped since we've been there. It's something I don't think I or anybody else in this country should be a part of.
In war, each side dehumanizes the other. American soldiers dehumanize Iraqis, to the point where Iraqi civilians are nothing
to them. And that's how these atrocities occur. You have a lot of young American men and women doing things, killing a lot
of innocent civilians without thinking. The Iraqis are probably worse off than they were before we invaded the country.
SO: Now that you've submitted your resignation, what's next for you?
Watada: I submitted a resignation packet, which was disapproved. My commander has asked me again if I am still going to
go along with this. And I said yes of course. I still believe the same things that I did six months ago. And he said he couldn't
charge me until I violate an order. So I've been given an order to deploy in late June. When I refuse, the chain of command
will charge me and court-martial me.
SO: As people learn about your story, are there things you especially want people to hold in their minds and their hearts
about what you're doing and why?
Watada: I think that we are all given freedoms and liberties by the Constitution but I think the one God-given freedom
and right that we really have is freedom of choice. The moment we tell ourselves that we no longer have that choice is the
moment we take that one freedom away. The only freedom we have. And I just want to tell everybody, especially people who doubt
the war, that you do have that one freedom. And that's something that they can never take away. Yes. They will imprison you.
They'll throw the book at you. They'll try to make an example out of you, but you do have that choice. And that is something
that you'll have to live with for the rest of your life.
---- Sarah Olson is a radio producer and independent journalist based in Oakland, CA.
"My husband sits in a military prison because he dared to speak the
truth. This war did not need to happen...The truth was more important to him, and he was sent to prison on trumped up charges
because he was not afraid to stand alone and speak it."
An Open Letter To the Congress of the United States From Monica Benderman
December 7 , 2005
…. at the exclusion of the few courageous members who are willing to stand
on their own and speak the truth… with all due respect.
What are you afraid of? That without your office you are nothing? That it is your
elected office that makes you who you are, and if you lose it, you will be nothing more than a common citizen again? Perhaps
that is what has to happen, for you to realize that even in office, you are a common citizen. You are failing us – time
to go back to the beginning and start again.
My husband went to war because you ALL agreed that there was no other choice. Hundreds
of thousands of our American soldiers were sent to war, sent to sacrifice for what you all agreed was a significant defense
of this country, to die because you all agreed there was no other option.
But that was not the truth. It was an illusion presented, not because you felt
the American people needed to believe war was needed to ensure the greatest defense of this country, but because you, almost
to a letter, wanted to make sure the American people believed enough in you that they would re-elect you to another term.
Without examining all the facts, without demanding precise verifiable evidence to show that war was necessary, you voted,
en masse, to send our soldiers to war.
My husband sits in a military prison because he dared to speak the truth.
This war did not need to happen. He didn't care if he had the support of the American people. He risked everything to tell
the truth, his health benefits, his children's college education, his career, and everything he had worked for, including
ten years of honorable service, and a combat tour in Iraq. The truth was more important to him, and he was sent to prison
on trumped up charges because he was not afraid to stand alone and speak it. His command presented false testimony, manipulated
evidence and lost witnesses and ultimately sent him to prison, to keep him from telling the truth. BUT he persisted –
and today we persist together – the TRUTH matters – and in the end the TRUTH wins.
What are you doing to tell the truth? What are you willing to risk? Not one thing.
You sent our soldiers to war to protect your elected office. You banded together
because you saw the polls and you knew it was what the American people wanted. Why did they want it? Because a president,
vice president, secretary of defense, secretary of state and a myriad of tongue-wagging, drooling groupies all gathered together
and told them this administration could be trusted. Somewhere in the mix, people forgot – POWER CORRUPTS – and
most assuredly makes those who believe they have the power forget.
You forgot that the American people put their trust in you to lead them well, as
one of us – with integrity, and honesty – with the TRUTH.
You forgot that our soldiers are human beings. They bleed and they die.
You forgot that our military commanders are human beings, common citizens. They
may be leading “troops” but that doesn't make them heroes, and it does not make them know how to command. They
were not promoted because they were good leaders, they were promoted because they were good followers.
I can assure you – good leaders are not allowed to exist in the US military
– and it is becoming more apparent by the day that good leaders are not allowed to exist in our US government either.
Good leaders are not afraid to stand alone. Good leaders don't care if they are
re-elected, they care if the choice they make is the wisest choice for the country they have been elected to serve.
Good leaders remember that volunteers, such as those in our military, demand greater
respect than any person who has been elected to office. These volunteers dared to step out, to take a risk, to offer their
lives for what they believed in. These volunteers are the leaders for it wasn't money, nor public opinion that drove them,
it was a commitment to defend the constitution on which this country was founded, a commitment which you, in your need to
preserve your office, have betrayed.
You all have forgotten that. As elected officials, you must work harder to prove
yourselves leaders. You have volunteered nothing. You have sacrificed nothing. You did vote yourself a pay raise – but
in my book, raises are earned. Sorry – but you all are failing. You owe this country, and it's time to pay. We've given
you opportunities, we've waited for you to show your integrity and moral courage, to speak in defense of this country and
the soldiers who sacrifice for it. You have not come through.
This war is over – it shouldn't be about winning or losing. It should be
about stopping the madness, and facing the truth. Winning is that no more people die at the hands of this administration,
and in the name of the American people.
Winning is realizing that we know nothing about the Iraqi culture, and didn't care
about it to begin with. We didn't go to war to save Iraq – we went to war to establish a presence in the Middle East,
to overthrow a dictator we put in place, and could no longer control. We went to war because we knew that a weak but defiant
dictator wouldn't be around much longer, and it was better to replace him with a US friendly government than risk the alternative.
Winning is knowing that trying to control that which is not ours to control fails every time.
Winning is that we do not allow members of this administration to use our soldiers
to reconcile their own guilt for commitments left unfinished and promises broken. Winning is that we, as a country, do not
allow “born-again Christians” to use our sons and daughters, our money and our lives, to save their souls before
the judgment day.
Winning is that we put LIFE first – not political position, not government
perks – fancy offices, high-priced tickets at exclusive Christmas presentations, scripted exits from chartered jets.
Winning is that the American people turn on C-Span and hear their elected officials
leading the way with the truth, in speeches that criticize, that differ, that challenge, that are recognized as original because
they are spoken from the heart, with wisdom and intelligent research providing the basis for the presentation – not
concern for how many votes will be garnered in the next election. How can anyone believe an elected official who doesn't speak
his own words? Speech writers??? We are not voting for the speech writers.
Talk is cheap – and the rhetoric of today's politicians isn't worthy of being
given away.
Soldiers are dying – Innocent civilians are dying. America is dying –
because power corrupts.
Where are the leaders? I know where one is. He is sitting in a military prison
because he is unafraid to give everything he has to tell the truth. So, Congress wants someone to follow, there's a man to
follow. What's it going to take? You want greatness – you want to be remembered – you want another plaque to hang
on your wall – “a true servant of the people”?
A true leader doesn't respond to the will of the people. A true leader responds
to wisdom, knowledge and the Highest good, knowing that at first he will stand alone, but with the courage and strength to
lead others to what he knows.
Who among you has moral courage? Who among you will stand with my husband, Sgt.
Kevin Benderman, and put the truth before your career?
A man rides his bicycle down a street littered with cobblestones and burning debris after clashes between police and protesters
staging a sit-in Sunday Sept. 24, 2006 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Police detained more than 200 people Sunday after a youth demonstration
in Copenhagen turned violent, with protesters hurling cobblestones, bottles and eggs at officers in riot gear. The demonstrators
were protesting a court ruling last month ordering a group of young squatters to leave a downtown building and hand it over
to a Christian congregation that bought it five years ago.(AP Photo/POLFOTO, Uffe Kongsted)
Danni said... Two of my friends were there but did not take part in any rioting. The riot started
after armoured police cars smashed into youths dancing in the street. No violence until then, but after the police attack....well.
Anyway,
the ones that got arrested was the kids who didn't do anything. Policemen said the cause for arrest was "you took part in
an illegal protest". There is no such law in any scandinavian country so now the over 200 wrongly arrested youths are going
to sue the ass of the danish lawsystem << posted by
Riot Porn at 3:12 PM on Sep 27 2006 >>
Anti War Protesters with
Cindy Sheehan,
Interrupts
Democrat Press Conference
4th Mobile Unit of the South Korean Combat Police corps fight
a communist student group outside city hall.
The Lieutenant told the protesters at the start that the protest was illegal,
but the students attcked with molotovs.(more)
THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION (from Gene Sharp, The Methods of Nonviolent Action, Boston 1973)
THE
METHODS OF NONVIOLENT PROTEST AND PERSUASION FORMAL STATEMENTS 1. Public speeches 2. Letters of opposition or
support 3. Declarations by organizations and institutions 4. Signed public declarations 5. Declarations of indictment
and intention 6. Group or mass petitions COMMUNICATIONS WITH A WIDER AUDIENCE 7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications 9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books 10. Newspapers and journals
11. Records, radio, and television 12. Skywriting and earthwriting GROUP REPRESENTATIONS 13. Deputations 14.
Mock awards 15. Group lobbying 16. Picketing 17. Mock elections SYMBOLIC PUBLIC ACTS 18. Displays of flags
and symbolic colours 19. Wearing of symbols 20. Prayer and worship 21. Delivering symbolic objects 22. Protest
disrobings 23. Destruction of own property 24. Symbolic lights 25. Displays of portraits 26. Paint as protest
27. New signs and names 28. Symbolic sounds 29. Symbolic reclamations 30. Rude gestures PRESSURES ON INDIVIDUALS
31. "Haunting" officials 32. Taunting officials 33. Fraternization 34. Vigils DRAMA AND MUSIC 35.
Humourous skits and pranks 36. Performances of plays and music 37. Singing PROCESSIONS 38. Marches 39. Parades 40. Religious processions 41. Pilgrimages 42. Motorcades HONOURING THE DEAD 43. Political
mourning 44. Mock funerals 45. Demonstrative funerals 46. Homage at burial places PUBLIC ASSEMBLIES 47.
Assemblies of protest or support 48. Protest meetings 49. Camouflaged meetings of protest 50. Teach-ins WITHDRAWAL
AND RENUNCIATION 51. Walk-outs 52. Silence 53. Renouncing honours 54. Turning one's back
THE METHODS
OF SOCIAL NONCOOPERATION OSTRACISM OF PERSONS 55. Social boycott 56. Selective social boycott 57. Lysistratic
nonaction 58. Excommunication 59. Interdict NONCOOPERATION WITH SOCIAL EVENTS, CUSTOMS, AND INSTITUTIONS 60.
Suspension of social and sports activities 61. Boycott of social affairs 62. Student strike 63. Social disobedience
64. Withdrawal from social institutions WITHDRAWAL FROM THE SOCIAL SYSTEM 65. Stay-at-home 66. Total personal
noncooperation 67. "Flight" of workers 68. Sanctuary 69. Collective disappearance 70. Protest emigration (hijrat)
THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: ECONOMIC BOYCOTTS ACTION BY CONSUMERS 71. Consumers' boycott 72.
Nonconsumption of boycotted goods 73. Policy of austerity 74. Rent withholding 75. Refusal to rent 76. National
consumers' boycott 77. International consumers' boycott ACTION BY WORKERS AND PRODUCERS 78. Workers' boycott 79.
Producers' boycott ACTION BY MIDDLEMEN 80. Suppliers' and handlers' boycott ACTION BY OWNERS AND MANAGEMENT 81.
Traders' boycott 82. Refusal to let or sell property 83. Lockout 84. Refusal of industrial assistance 85.
Merchants' "general strike" ACTION BY HOLDERS OF FINANCIAL RESOURCES 86. Withdrawal of bank deposits 87. Refusal
to pay fees, dues, and assessments 88. Refusal to pay debts or interest 89. Severance of funds and credit 90.
Revenue refusal 91. Refusal of a government's money ACTION BY GOVERNMENTS 92. Domestic embargo 93. Blacklisting
of traders 94. International sellers' embargo 95. International buyers' embargo 96. International trade embargo
THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOOPERATION: THE STRIKE SYMBOLIC STRIKES 97. Protest strike 98. Quickie
walkout (lightning strike) AGRICULTURAL STRIKES 99. Peasant strike 100. Farm workers' strike STRIKES BY SPECIAL
GROUPS 101. Refusal of impressed labour 102. Prisoners' strike 103. Craft strike 104. Professional strike
ORDINARY INDUSTRIAL STRIKES 105. Establishment strike 106. Industry strike 107. Sympathy strike RESTRICTED
STRIKES 108. Detailed strike 109. Bumper strike 110. Slowdown strike 111. Working-to-rule strike 112.
Reporting "sick" (sick-in) 113. Strike by resignation 114. Limited strike 115. Selective strike MULTI-INDUSTRY
STRIKES 116. Generalised strike 117. General strike COMBINATION OF STRIKES AND ECONOMIC CLOSURES 118. Hartal
119. Economic shutdown
THE METHODS OF POLITICAL NONCOOPERATION REJECTION OF AUTHORITY 120. Withholding
or withdrawal of allegiance 121. Refusal of public support 122. Literature and speeches advocating resistance CITIZENS'
NONCOOPERATION WITH GOVERNMENT 123. Boycott of legislative bodies 124. Boycott of elections 125. Boycott of government
employment and positions 126. Boycott of government departments, agencies, and other bodies 127. Withdrawal from governmental
educational institutions 128. Boycott of government-supported institutions 129. Refusal of assistance to enforcement
agents 130. Removal of own signs and placemarks 131. Refusal to accept appointed officials 132. Refusal to dissolve
existing institutions CITIZENS' ALTERNATIVES TO OBEDIENCE 133. Reluctant and slow compliance 134. Nonobedience
in absence of direct supervision 135. Popular nonobedience 136. Disguised disobedience 137. Refusal of an assemblage
or meeting to disperse 138. Sitdown 139. Noncooperation with conscription and deportation 140. Hiding, escape,
and false identities 141. Civil disobedience of "illegitimate" laws ACTION BY GOVERNMENT PERSONNEL 142. Selective
refusal of assistance by government aides 143. Blocking of lines of command and information 144. Stalling and obstruction
145. General administrative noncooperation 146. Judicial noncooperation 147. Deliberate inefficiency and selective
noncooperation by enforcement agents 148. Mutiny DOMESTIC GOVERNMENTAL ACTION 149. Quasi-legal evasions and delays
150. Noncooperation by constituent governmental units INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENTAL ACTION 151. Changes in diplomatic
and other representation 152. Delay and cancellation of diplomatic events 153. Withholding of diplomatic recognition
154. Severance of diplomatic relations 155. Withdrawal from international organisations 156. Refusal of membership
in international bodies 157. Expulsion from international organisations
THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT INTERVENTION
PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTION 158. Self-exposure to the elements 159. The fast a) Fast of moral pressure b)
Hunger strike c) Satyagrahic fast 160. Reverse trial 161. Nonviolent harassment PHYSICAL INTERVENTION 162.
Sit-in 163. Stand-in 164. Ride-in 165. Wade-in 166. Mill-in 167. Pray-in 168. Nonviolent raids 169.
Nonviolent air raids 170. Nonviolent invasion 171. Nonviolent interjection 172. Nonviolent obstruction 173.
Nonviolent occupation SOCIAL INTERVENTION 174. Establishing new social patterns 175. Overloading of facilities
176. Stall-in 177. Speak-in 178. Guerrilla theatre 179. Alternative social institutions 180. Alternative
communication system ECONOMIC INTERVENTION 181. Reverse strike 182. Stay-in strike 183. Nonviolent land seizure
184. Defiance of blockades 185. Politically motivated counterfeiting 186. Preclusive purchasing 187. Seizure
of assets 188. Dumping 189. Selective patronage 190. Alternative markets 191. Alternative transportation systems
192. Alternative economic institutions POLITICAL INTERVENTION 193. Overloading of administrative systems 194.
Disclosing identities of secret agents 195. Seeking imprisonment 196. Civil disobedience of "neutral" laws 197.
Work-on without collaboration 198. Dual sovereignty and parallel government
homepage: 
e-mail: 
address: Edinburgh, Scotland
![[Kristen Holm, far left, and Theresa Cusimano, far right, stand with the Rev. Luis Barrios at the courthouse steps in Columbus as he speaks against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formally known as School of Americas. Six people, including the ones pictured, were accused of crossing onto Fort Benning during the SOA Watch protest in November. (Shannon Szwarcsszwarc.)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/protesters-2.jpg "protesters-2.jpg")
Kristen Holm, far left, and Theresa Cusimano, far right, stand with the Rev. Luis Barrios at the courthouse steps in Columbus
as he speaks against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formally known as School of Americas. Six
people, including the ones pictured, were accused of crossing onto Fort Benning during the SOA Watch protest in November.
(Shannon Szwarcsszwarc.)
The Iraqi journalist Muntather Al-Zaidi spoke for millions of Iraqis and outraged people everywhere when he threw his shoes
at George Bush during Bush's publicity stunt "victory lap” in Baghdad yesterday. As he threw his shoes, Muntather said,
“This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans and those
who were killed in Iraq!” 
From the 
