Duty to Warn

In the months leading up to the most recent protest in Washington, D.C. against the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, activists and writers such as Cindy Sheehan and David Swanson have called for shutting down business-as-usual in the capital city. Comment

But on March 20, instead of a hundred thousand or even tens of thousands of protesters, it was evident from first-hand observation that the event drew, at most, a few thousand people.

Far from disrupting business-as-usual, the anti-war protest---which took place on a Saturday--seemed to blend in with the flow of tourists and locals enjoying the warm, sunny weather in our nation's capital. On that weekend, far more prominent in mainstream news was the health-care reform showdown in Congress and the immigration reform rally which drew more than 200,000 people to the National Mall.

But some of the ordinary protesters who did show up advocate revolution or other ways of intensifying resistance against what they regard as imperialism and militarism.

Part of the dilemma in Palestine is that the more the “peace” process is delayed, moving nowhere, the more Israel gains in the way of confiscated and settled land. There are two basic solutions: either a one state solution (whether bi-national or otherwise); or a two state solution with Palestine existing on some remnant of land left over from Israeli settlement. A recent combination of events/ideas has left me wondering if the one state solution is perhaps the only remaining solution if not the de facto situation now.

Christian Peacemakers

I recently attended a local presentation of Christian Peacemakers (CPT) on their experiences in Hebron in Palestine. The main presenter Johann Funk is a Mennonite who has been to Hebron several times recently. The CPT ideal as presented on their website is a powerful statement of intent:

CPT embraces the vision of unarmed intervention waged by committed peacemakers ready to risk injury and death in bold attempts to transform lethal conflict through the nonviolent power of God’s truth and love.

The most recent anti-war protest in Washington D.C. felt like a festival or a big concert, at least for a while, as I basked in the emotional warmth of the crowd and the physical warmth of that sunny Saturday. But then Joe Lombardo, a member of the National Assembly, a network of anti-war groups, gave a speech that linked globalization with the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whether or not his amplified voice was heard by anyone across the street in the White House, what he said killed the buzz I had from cycling amidst national icons. For better or worse, Lombardo's speech diminished my springtime-induced optimism. Comment

“ The flight of US industry from US shores to find cheaper resources and labor with no unions and no environmental, or health, or safety regulations –a process known as globalization—has required new military thinking. To protect US corporate interests abroad we now have our military in over 135 countries with close to 800 permanent foreign military bases. Our now globalized economy will mean permanent war as US corporate-controlled government seeks to protect US corporate interests abroad.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights organization, released the following statement today regarding the United States Department of Justice’s filing in Log Cabin Republicans v. Gates, a constitutional challenge to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT).
The Log Cabin Republicans challenged the 1993 law in federal court in 2004. On Monday, March 29, the Department of Justice filed a brief defending the law, stating among other things that Congress could have rationally concluded that DADT was necessary to ensure privacy, reduce sexual tension, and maintain unit cohesion and military preparedness.

Statement by Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese:

“We were proud when the President stood before the American people and declared in his State of the Union that it is time to repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ If he’s going to uphold that commitment, however, he must ensure that his Administration doesn’t work against it. The time for repeal is this year, and the time for his leadership is now.

Assigned on hundreds of campuses in every conceivable discipline and from first-year programs to graduate seminars, Paul Loeb’s Soul of a Citizen has become a classic of civic engagement. An antidote to the sense of political powerlessness and demoralization too many students are feeling these days, Soul has helped students of all backgrounds and perspectives learn to make a difference in their communities and in our country. It has inspired them make their voices heard and actions count—and to begin journeys of involvement that could last their entire lives.

Paul spent a year writing a thoroughly updated edition of Soul, incorporating the suggestions of faculty who’d been teaching the earlier edition in classrooms throughout the country. Soul’s new version keeps all the strengths of the decade-old original, while speaking to the new challenge of our very different time. It’s just been published (St Martin’s Press, $16.95 paperback) and St Martin’s is making free exam copies available if you teach a class or supervise a program where you might be able to assign it.

As radiation poured from 3 Mile Island 31 years ago this weekend, utility executives rested easy.

They knew that no matter how many people their errant nuke killed, and no matter how much property it destroyed, they would not be held liable.

Today this same class of executives demands untold taxpayer billions to build still more TMIs. No matter how many meltdowns they cause, and how much havoc they visit down on the public, they still believe they’re above the law.

Fueled with more than $600 million public relations slush money, they demand a risk-free "renaissance" financed by you and yours.

AS IF!

In 1980 I reported from central Pennsylvania on the dead and dying one year after. Dozens of interviews documented a horrifying range of radiation-related diseases including cancer, leukemia, birth defects, still births, malformations, sterility, heart attacks, strokes, emphysema, skin lesions, hair loss, a metallic taste and much more. As reported by the Baltimore News-American among others, such ailments also ripped through the animal population.

If you haven't read "A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments," by H.P. Albarelli Jr., I recommend doing so right away.  Read every word, cover to cover.  You will initially conclude that I, and Albarelli, are crazy.  This is the story of one simple murder that asks who done it and doesn't answer the question for over 700 pages, because every time a new character enters the story the author introduces him with background that includes how his grandparents were conceived and where his field of work originated.  But there is method to the madness, trust me.  Bear with it.

“Everything feels obscene,” a friend said seven years ago, when we carpet-bombed Baghdad, launching the invasion. It still does, but in a dull, chronic, “used to it” way — outrage mixed, these last few years, with “hope,” smearing the war effort with a thick, national ambivalence.

Is it still going on? Well, yeah, with a grinding pointlessness that’s not worth talking about or even debating anymore. The smorgasbord of justifications has been permanently shut down: the 9/11 tie-in, the WMD, “another Munich,” democracy for the Middle East. No one’s hawking Freedom Fries anymore. The war in Iraq simply continues because a war in motion, especially when it’s not really a war, when there isn’t an enemy with whom to negotiate, is incapable of just, you know, stopping. When we don’t really have a mission, completing it is difficult indeed.

So I find myself witnessing the seven-year anniversary in a state of private grief, chewing bitterly on the limits of politics. Whatever slow, cautious change President Obama believes in at the deepest level of his political soul, he can only attempt to conjure it out of politics as usual.

WASHINGTON, D.C. Between the output of existing commercial nuclear reactors and 21 proposed nuclear reactors covered by agreements quietly signed by the outgoing Bush Administration with more than a dozen electric utilities, the United States already has agreed to store enough spent (used) reactor fuel to fill the equivalent of not one, but two, Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste repositories, according to documents acquired under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Given that the U.S. is back to square one for the first repository, U.S. taxpayers would be on the hook for potentially tens of billions of dollars in penalties that would have to be paid to utilities if the 21 proposed reactor projects proceed.

A book that detailed all the military posts around the world would be encyclopaedic in size and nature, for in order to be comprehensive to cover all the bases and all the impacts and affects on human culture and demographics would require a vast array of information. Thankfully that information can be obtained from choosing prime examples of military exploitation as found in The Bases of Empire edited by Catherine Lutz. Lutz’s intention is “to describe both the worldwide network of U.S military bases and the vigorous campaigns to hold the United States accountable for that damage and to reorient their countries’ security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions.”