National Organizations

Deadly Blasts Rock Southern Afghanistan | CNN

A series of explosions rocked southern Afghanistan's volatile Kandahar province on Saturday, killing at least 35 people and wounding 47 others, local officials said.

Provincial Gov. Toryalai Wesa confirmed the blasts hit four locations.

One of the explosions struck near the police headquarters in Kandahar, said Wesa's spokesman, Zalmai Ayoubi. Another blast struck near the province's prison and caused the collapse of some residences.

An unknown number of people are believed to be dead or trapped in the rubble, Ayoubi said.

The casualties include security forces and civilians, he said, adding that both the death toll and the injuries are expected to increase. Read more.

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Palestinian Dispossession in East Jerusalem
By Stephen Lendman

For Jews, Jerusalem is its historic capital. Muslims also claim it for the third holiest site in Islam, containing the 35 acre Noble Sanctuary (al-Haram al-Sharif), including the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan designated Jerusalem an international city under a UN Trusteeship Council. After Israel's 1947-48 War of Independence, it was divided between Israel and Jordan, and during Israel's 1967 Six-Day War, East Jerusalem was captured and occupied, its current status today.

In March 2009, a confidential EU report (now public) accused Israel of using settlement expansions, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies, restrictive permits, closing Palestinian institutions, the West Bank Separation Wall, and various other ways to "actively pursu(e) the illegal annexation" of East Jerusalem and "increase Jewish presence" in the city.

In a December 2009 report, the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel affirmed the EU report's concerns. Titled "Dispossession and Eviction in Jerusalem," it provides historical context, a legal overview, and case study examples in Sheikh Jarrah, an East Jerusalem neighborhood between the Old City and Mount Scopus.

The community "has become the site of a protracted legal battle whose implications range from the evictions of more than 25 families to the visibility of a future Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and the" ultimate status of Jerusalem.

Four families have already been evicted from homes they've lived in for over 50 years. The others are awaiting court appearances and rulings to decide their fate, nearly certain given Israel's history of judicial unfairness toward Arabs, including its own citizens having no rights in a nation affording them solely to Jews.

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Crunch Time
By Missy Comley Beattie

Why do I laugh when a major newspaper’s headline is about Eric Massa’s “groping” history? That his staff was uncomfortable with his tickling routines? I guess because I’m reminded of all those Saturday Night Live noogies. Of course, those were skits. But, then, so are these, some among many in today’s political theatre. The Massa example, though, reeks of immaturity—the overly friendly behavior, touching in all the wrong places, is conduct that makes people skittish. And sickish.

Yes, I laugh but, then, so soon, I feel like crying.

Because the salacious is considered headline material or breaking news in our country, today.

Why no large type about the growing numbers of military suicides? Or that more and more troops who’ve had multiple deployments are unfit for service? Post-traumatic stress disorder is, well, very seldom stressed in our disordered world.

Why no photographs of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s parentless, limbless children whose lives have been forever shattered by our smart bombs?

Why no mention of antiwar actions, beginning this month in Washington, DC and lasting until the troops start returning home?

We’re past crunch time here in the USA.

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Kimber Heinz of the War Resisters League wrote:

Join us as we lead up to WRL actions at the NPT Review Conference this May!

Join the War Resisters League in NYC April 30-May 3 for four days of creative nonviolent protest and support a call for unilateral U.S. disarmament at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference at the UN Headquarters.

In 1982, the War Resisters League initiated "Blockade the Bombmakers," organizing mass actions at the Missions to the United Nations of each of the five nuclear powers on the first day of the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament. In total, nearly 1,700 people were arrested in the blockades, which followed a march involving an estimated one million people.

Today, there are nine nuclear powers and the dangers of nuclear proliferation are even more acute than 28 years ago. Despite the White House's pledge to seek a world without nuclear weapons, the 2011 federal budget for nuclear weapons research and development is likely to be more than $7 billion and could (if the Obama administration has its way) reach $8 billion per year by the end of this decade. This steady and growing investment stands in stark contrast to the promising U.S. rhetoric of disarmament.

The 2010 NPT Review Conference represents a key juncture in the work for nuclear disarmament and a vital opportunity to put pressure on the U.S. government and kick-start the anti-nuclear movement. The War Resisters League is organizing a Monday, May 3rd action to deliver a strong message to the United Nations delegates. We are also organizing a WRL contingent and panel discussion for the Disarm Now! international march and alternative conference happening that weekend as WRL joins with thousands of anti-nuclear activists from around the world in resistance to nuclear build-up and global militarism.

Join us to demand complete and unilateral nuclear disarmament and to insist that action for disarmament, not more talking, is needed. We will be meeting in-person and by phone to shape and finalize the action over the next month and will offer nonviolence training on Sunday, May 2nd. To find out more and to sign up or get involved, please email WRL Organizing Coordinator Kimber Heinz at kimber@warresisters.org.

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An appeal to anti-war organizations & activists to oppose the increasing threats against Iran | CASMII Press Release

Around the world, anti-war activists are preparing for major protests this spring to oppose the continuing U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, a storm of developments is dramatically increasing tensions between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In response, the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) is issuing this appeal to the anti-war movements in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries to raise the demands of “No war, no sanctions, no internal interference in Iran!”

Iran is a country that hasn’t attacked a neighbor in more than 200 years. Even when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran after the 1979 Revolution and, with support from the West, used chemical weapons against both civilians and combatants, the Islamic Republic did not retaliate in kind. And yet the U.S. government claims that Iran represents a serious threat to the Middle East region and the entire world. Without a shred of evidence, the U.S. charges that Iran's program to develop nuclear power for peaceful energy purposes is just a cover to develop nuclear weapons. Never mentioned is the fact that, as a signatory to the U.N.'s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran's right to develop nuclear energy is enshrined in international law. Just a few months ago, the U.N's International Atomic Energy Chief, Mohammed ElBardai, the person responsible for monitoring compliance with that treaty, stated that “Nobody is sitting in Iran today developing nuclear weapons. Tehran doesn’t have an ongoing nuclear weapons program. But somehow, everyone in the West is talking about how Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world.” (Interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept. 2009) Instead, warning of world disaster if Iran should succeed in its imaginary goal of obtaining nuclear arms, Washington argues that Iran must be forcefully brought to its knees, through a combination of increasingly crippling sanctions, taking advantage of Iran's internal divisions and preparing for a possible military attack.

Consider these recent developments:

• The U.S has been pressuring the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to impose a fourth and more severe round of sanctions against Iran. The only real holdout has been the People's Republic of China, which in January held the council's revolving presidency. On Feb. 1, however, the president's seat passed to France, which is nearly as hostile to Iran's nuclear program as is the U.S. (France itself, by the way, relies on nuclear power for 80 percent of its own energy needs.) The Security Council’s permanent members, including China and Russia, have never been a real barrier for the US. Not only has the council already approved three rounds of sanctions against Iran, but the Obama Administration is now talking of “bypassing” the U.N. in its latest push for sanctions. While sanctions are often promoted as an alternative to war, the world now knows that the sanctions imposed by the U.N. against Iraq during the first Persian Gulf War resulted in the deaths of up to 1.5 million Iraqis, a third of them children.

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The Empire of Bases and the American Anti-War Movement
By Steven Sherman | Dissident Voice

To combat the tendency to go dormant whenever political space in the US starts to close up, the US anti-war movement — at least its most determined core — might want to consider thinking of itself as instead an anti-empire movement. This would facilitate building links with these movements around the world. Understanding their visions would also help undermine the reactive quality of the anti-war movement, wherein we are typically more confident about what we are against than what we are for.

The anti-war movement in the US is in a deep funk. To date, even news of a surge in troops to Afghanistan has not really awakened it. The new book The Bases of Empire may help to clarify what we are trying to do.

Many suggest that the problem with the anti-war movement today is that it does not break with the Democratic Party, but this argument is somewhat ahistorical. When the movement was stronger in the sixties (against the Vietnam war) and the eighties (against intervention in Central America) painful debates raged on about the relationship of the movement to the Democrats. There were similar voices–sometimes the same people!–on each side.

What was different was not that the movement had a great deal of clarity about this (I’m not sure that is possible in a non-revolutionary time in a two party state) but that the movement was larger and livelier. What was different was that a sense of purpose animated the movements then that is lacking now. Read more.

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NYT and the ACORN Hoax
Why can't paper admit its mistakes? | FAIR

Ignoring calls from numerous critics, the New York Times refuses to own up to mistakes in the paper's coverage of the now-famous right-wing videotapes attacking the community organizing group ACORN. Instead, the paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, is relying on an absurd semantic justification in order to claim the paper does not need to print any corrections.

As conventionally reported in the Times and elsewhere, right-wing activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles dressed up as a pimp and a prostitute and visited several local ACORN offices, where office workers gave the duo advice on setting up a brothel, concealing a child prostitution ring and so forth. But many of the key "facts" surrounding the videos are either in dispute or are demonstrable fabrications.

Though O'Keefe appears in various scenes in the videos wearing a garish and absurd "pimp" costume, he in fact did not wear the outfit when he appeared in the ACORN offices (Washington Independent, 2/19/10); he was dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks. This fact undermines one of the key contentions of the ACORN smear--that the group is so hopelessly corrupt that they would dispense advice to an obvious criminal.

What's more, the "advice" that they received, according to the transcripts released by O'Keefe and Giles, does not appear to be as incriminating as it was portrayed in the videos--and echoed in outlets like the New York Times.

A review of the Times coverage:

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To the tune of Maggie's Farm

I ain't gonna buy mandated health insurance
No, I aint gonna buy mandated health insurance
Well, I wake up and I'm coughing
Feel my sides and moan in pain
I got declined for operations
And it's drivin' me insane
It's a shame the way we treat the working poor
I ain't gonna be insured no more.

I ain't gonna buy mandated health insurance
No, I aint gonna buy mandated health insurance
Well, it hands you a nickel
That costs you a dime
It'll charge you once
And then two or three more times
Then they fine you every time you slam the door
I ain't gonna be insured no more.

I ain't gonna buy mandated health insurance
No, I aint gonna buy mandated health insurance
The premiums double
While the co-payments rise
Coverage narrows
The best customer dies
Before costing the company any more
I ain't gonna be insured no more.

I ain't gonna buy mandated health insurance
No, I aint gonna buy mandated health insurance

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Texas Textbook Showdown
By Maureen Miller | AC360

From Anderson Cooper 360: Tonight we look at the battle over what public schools should be teaching your kids. In Texas today the state's board of education approved a new social studies curriculum that conservatives say is meant to correct for a liberal bias among the teachers who initially drafted the standards. The vote came after days of charged debate.

Tom Foreman is following the debate. He's got a look at what may be and out of textbooks. Out: calling the U.S. government "Democratic". In: Calling it a "Constitutional Republic." Also out: too much talk about Thomas Jefferson and the enlightenment, which stressed reasoning and science over blind faith. Also In: More recognition of the contributions of religious leaders, like Moses.

All of this matters, because with almost five million students in Texas, the state buys a lot of textbooks that could determine what publishers put out for America's other school children. Though, in this digital age, that is not as big of a concern as in past years. Read more.

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Click below to check 'em out and order a deck or two.  These are beautiful playing cards, a full deck of 52 plus a joker, information cards, and a box with directions for making a citizen's arrest inside.  You can play any card game and, at the same time, learn a little about the top 53 U.S. war criminals (and what you can do to hold them accountable). Click here:

https://codepink.myshopify.com/products/war-criminal-playing-cards

This project originated 10 a year and 10 months ago when AfterDowningStreet produced a list of the top 50 U.S. war criminals, a thousand voices proposed making a deck of cards, and CODE PINK volunteered to do it.  Some changes have been made to the line-up, however, and you'll have to buy the cards to see who made the final cut.  Below are links to related pages on AfterDowningStreet and CODE PINK:

http://afterdowningstreet.org/warcriminals

http://www.codepinkalert.org/section.php?id=414

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The Democrats' scam becomes more transparent
By Glenn Greenwald | Salon

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what seemed to be a glaring (and quite typical) scam perpetrated by Congressional Democrats:  all year long, they insisted that the White House and a majority of Democratic Senators vigorously supported a public option, but the only thing oh-so-unfortunately preventing its enactment was the filibuster:  sadly, we have 50 but not 60 votes for it, they insisted.  Democratic pundits used that claim to push for "filibuster reform," arguing that if only majority rule were required in the Senate, then the noble Democrats would be able to deliver all sorts of wonderful progressive reforms that they were truly eager to enact but which the evil filibuster now prevents.  In response, advocates of the public option kept arguing that the public option could be accomplished by reconciliation -- where only 50 votes, not 60, would be required -- but Obama loyalists scorned that reconciliation proposal, insisting (at least before the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes) that using reconciliation was Unserious, naive, procedurally impossible, and politically disastrous.

But all those claims were put to the test -- all those bluffs were called -- once the White House decided that it had to use reconciliation to pass a final health care reform bill.  That meant that any changes to the Senate bill (which had passed with 60 votes) -- including the addition of the public option -- would only require 50 votes, which Democrats assured progressives all year long that they had.  Great news for the public option, right?  Wrong.  As soon as it actually became possible to pass it, the 50 votes magically vanished.  Senate Democrats (and the White House) were willing to pretend they supported a public option only as long as it was impossible to pass it.  Once reconciliation gave them the opportunity they claimed all year long they needed -- a "majority rule" system -- they began concocting ways to ensure that it lacked 50 votes. Read more.

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By David Swanson

Congressman David Obey (D., Wis.) is the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He's in charge of spending our money. For years he spent it on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without any resistance.  Until last October, Obey maintained that spending hundreds of billions of our dollars on wars was something he just had no choice about.

Three years ago, 180,000 people watched this Youtube video, which was also shown on tv news shows, of Obey screaming at a military mother and denouncing "idiot liberals" for suggesting that Congress use the power of the purse to end wars. Liberals debated other liberals on the question of whether we really were idiots. Now Obey has taken several steps in the direction of joining us.

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By David Swanson

Would the United States military lie about how four Marines were killed? Would abuse continue at Abu Ghraib after the scandal exploded? Any soldier you talk to has a story you may not want to hear. I recently had occasion to speak with two that were particularly troubling.

Part I: Snipers Dead in Ramadi:

Here's a military report from August 2006 on how four Marines died in Iraq in 2004. Christian Lowe, a Marine Corps Times staff writer, tells us:

"It was supposed to be a mission like many they had done in Iraq. Ride the Humvees to a position at a building abutting a busy street in Ramadi. Relieve the four Marines on the roof there. . . .

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Bill Moyers Journal featured a discussion with Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and first woman editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. She is now a Harvard professor in the Department of Social Medicine. In this clear and concise discussion, Dr. Angell explains what is wrong with the proposed health insurance reform legislation and the coming consequences.

Excerpts:

• What this bill does is not only permit the commercial insurance industry to remain in place, but it actually expands and cements their position as the lynchpin of health care reform.
• Not only does it keep them in place, but it pours about 500 billion dollars of public money into these companies over 10 years. And it mandates that people buy these companies' products for whatever they charge.
• It will take money out of Medicare and put it into the private sector. Medicare is the source for a lot of the funds that are going to go to subsidize the private health insurance industry.
• ...we have chosen, alone among all advanced countries, to leave health care to for-profit industries, to leave health care to businesses that then distribute health care as a market commodity according to the ability to pay and not according to medical need.
• Senator Rockefeller referred to the private insurance companies as rapacious, rapacious, and said, "Like sharks, they swim under the water, and you don't know they're there until you feel their teeth." Now there are not many people in America who would disagree with that description and so what this plan does is says, "This is a terrible industry, so let's force people to buy their commercial products. And let's subsidize it and put a lot of money into it." Read or watch entire interview.

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Days before torture memo architect John Yoo speaks at University of Virginia (protest plans), two New York artists are to present a new composition in Charlottesville built around excerpts of poetry written by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Composer Annea Lockwood and new music baritone Thomas Buckner will perform their latest collaboration, In Our Name, in a concert at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Saturday March 13, 8pm.

In Our Name draws upon poetry by three prisoners, Jumah Al Dossari, Emad Abdullah Hassan and Osama Abu Kabir, whose work first came to prominence through the publication of 2007 anthology, Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, edited by Marc Falkoff, University of Iowa Press.

Forbidden access to pen or paper, some of the Guantanamo prisoners wrote poetry using toothpaste or by scratching onto styrophone cups with pebbles. The US military has declared that poetry coming from Guantanamo "presents a special risk", and that allegorical imagery might convey coded messages to outside militants. But speaking to the Independent, Falkoff argued that the poems' real potency lies in the "power of words to make people outside realize that these are human beings who have not had their day in court."

Annea Lockwood is a composer and sound artist known for her use of environmental sound and life narratives, from her infamous piano burnings of the 60s and 70s to her recordings of volcanoes, earthquakes and the Hudson and Danube rivers. In 2000 Lockwood was included in the Whitney Museum's major sound art retrospective, I Am Sitting in a Room: Sound Works by American Artists 1950-2000. Her numerous compositions include Jitterbug, commissioned by Merce Cunningham Dance Company for the dance eyeSpace.

Thomas Buckner, a former student of legendary Metropolitan Opera baritone Martial Singher, and trained in the classical tradition, has for the last forty years dedicated himself to the world of new and improvised music. Along the way, Buckner has performed with many of the world's top musicians, including Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Gerald Oshita, Borah Bergman, Wu Man and Earl Howard. More than 70 composers have created works for him, including Robert Ashley, Morton Subotnick, Annea Lockwood and Alvin Lucier.

To request more information or arrange interviews, please contact Raymond Beegle at booking@thomasbuckner.com.

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Health Reform Myths
By Paul Krugman | NY Times

So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.

Health reform is back from the dead. Many Democrats have realized that their electoral prospects will be better if they can point to a real accomplishment. Polling on reform — which was never as negative as portrayed — shows signs of improving. And I’ve been really impressed by the passion and energy of this guy Barack Obama. Where was he last year?

But reform still has to run a gantlet of misinformation and outright lies. So let me address three big myths about the proposed reform, myths that are believed by many people who consider themselves well-informed, but who have actually fallen for deceptive spin.

The first of these myths, which has been all over the airwaves lately, is the claim that President Obama is proposing a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, the share of G.D.P. currently spent on health.

Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated. Read more.

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AFRICOM's First War: U.S. Directs Large-Scale Offensive In Somalia
Rick Rozoff | Stop NATO | Blog site

Over 43 people have been killed in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in the past two days in fighting between Shabab (al-Shabaab) insurgent forces, who on March 10 advanced to within one mile of the nation's presidential palace, and troops of the U.S.-backed Transitional Federal Government. The fighting has just begun.

The last ambassador of the United States to Somalia (1994-1995), Daniel H. Simpson, penned a column for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on March 10 in which which he posed the question "why, apart from the only lightly documented charge of Islamic extremism among the Shabab, is the United States reengaging in Somalia at this time?"

He answered it in stating "Part of the reason is because the United States has its only base in Africa up the coast from Mogadishu, in Djibouti, the former French Somaliland. The U.S. Africa Command was established there in 2008, and, absent the willingness of other African countries to host it, the base in Djibouti became the headquarters for U.S. troops and fighter bombers in Africa.

"Flush with money, in spite of the expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense obviously feels itself in a position to undertake military action in Africa, in Somalia." [1]

Fulfilling its appointed role, the New York Times leaked U.S. military plans for the current offensive in Somalia on March 5 in a report titled "U.S. Aiding Somalia in Its Plan to Retake Its Capital." (Note that the Transitional Federal Government is presented as Somalia itself and Mogadishu as its capital.)

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Falluja's birth defects
By Riz Kahn | Al Jazeera

Joining the conversation will be Dr Muhamad Tareq al-Darraji who authored the report Prohibited Weapons Crisis about the impact of the US military assault on the Falluja population, and Dahr Jamail, an American journalist who reported extensively from Iraq on the US invasion and its aftermath.

Doctors in the Iraqi city of Falluja are handling up to 15 times as many birth defects as they were one year ago.

The chronic deformities include multiple tumours, heart problems, nervous system anomalies and eye deficiencies.

Residents of the city blame the surge in chronic deformities on controversial weapons used by US forces against Sunni fighters in 2004.

White phosphorus and depleted uranium shells were allegedly among the munitions used.

Most doctors are unsure about the reasons for the surge in birth deformities over the past year but say it could be a result of the chemicals left over from the fighting.

Send us your views and get your voice on the air

The US military has dismissed those allegations. Read more.

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By David Swanson

Tom Hayden wants peace, but he's sincerely mistaken about how to get it. He claims that Wednesday's unsuccessful vote to end the war in Afghanistan makes ending the war less likely, and that the way to end the war is to pass a bill that would then have to pass the Senate and the President, a bill requiring an exit strategy, any exit strategy -- it could be "redeployment" to Iran in 2038 or anything else.

I'm not against moving bills forward, even meaningless bills if they send a helpful message. I'm not against ending the war in a way that leaves the president in charge of Congress, if that proves the fastest way to end the war -- even though it leaves us in a state in which more wars are inevitable. I don't think we're especially likely to force the House to cut off the funding next month.

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