I am going to start this diary off with a bit of a plea for forgiveness. It involves a lot of personal stuff, so it if comes off as self-indulgent, then I hope you, gentle reader, might cut me a little bit of slack. If not, then okay, but don’t say I did not warn you in advance.

Being an activist is a hard thing. There are more defeats and galling compromises than there are clear and clean victories. If we are to achieve anything, then we each have to find those reasons to keep going in the face of the grinding nature of trying to make our city or state or nation a better place.

This can take a lot of forms, it can be a desire to leave our children a better world, an inability to see injustice and walk away or inspiration from people in history or our lives.

A big part of why I fight comes from my parents. They were both born in to huge families and poverty. They both became the first people in their families to go to college and to go on to graduate degrees. This allowed them to make a significant amount of money, and yet they did not just focus on getting their own material rewards. Mom became a county commissioner and worked for the people of her district for 17 years.

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By David Swanson

In 2004 I began speaking at rallies and forums around the country on issues of peace and justice, something I've done off-and-on ever since. Up through 2008, it was extremely unusual for questions from the audience to consist of pure defeatism. In 2009, it was rare to get through a Q&A session without being asked what the point was of trying.

And the defeatism is so contagious that it will be hard for me to make it through 2010 if people don't shut up about how doomed we are. If current trends continue, by 2011 the only people showing up at forums on peace and justice will all be old enough to tell my grandparents they're too young to understand how pointless it is to try. And my grandparents are dead.

Most of the defeatist questions I get asked are more statements than questions, mostly informing those in the room of ways in which our nation is corrupted that we are all painfully aware of, but stated as much out of frustration and despair as out of any hope of hearing a miraculous solution articulated.

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By David Swanson

Around the United States, peace groups are engaged in effective campaigns against proposed new military installations, local funding of weapons companies, and the routine destruction of the environment and of workers' health by such companies. Activists are building better media outlets, educating young people, educating old people, keeping military testing and recruiting out of schools, and discouraging the Army from building real-weapon video arcades in shopping malls. But when it comes to stopping our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, our citizens are less clear how to go about it.

The peace movement was defunded and demobilized by the absurd belief that an election alone would make a difference, and now there is widespread desire to tell everyone that it didn't. Certainly, it didn't. We have a larger military budget, bases in more nations, and more troops and mercenaries on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq combined now than before the election. We need to understand that this was entirely predictable and predicted. Those who expected something from an election alone need to be clear that such expectation was entirely - not just partially - misguided. Disappointment with a president needs to be replaced with acknowledgement of strategic error. The latter generates less despair and allows clearer thinking about strategy going forward.

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On 9/15/09, a few good men, actual Marines, told chickenhawks Ex VP Cheney and his Brat Daughter, who have never served in the military, to STFU.

Former Marine commandant Charles Krulak and former Marine general Joseph Hoar, who succeeded Schwarzkopf at Central Command, dress(es) down former VP Cheney on the issue of torture.

"... we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics."

~snip~

"What leaders say matters. So when it comes to light, as it did recently, that U.S. interrogators staged mock executions and held a whirling electric drill close to the body of a naked, hooded detainee, and the former vice president winks and nods, it matters."

ricks.foreignpolicy.com

Bold added by the diarist

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Memo: Attach Bush to torture = make them defend both.

Though Morning Joe doesn't say Bush's name, I think we should, and Democrats will use this to pursue justice and Destroy the GOP. I consider it a great instance of killing two birds with one stone.



Republicans will say this will damage the President's popularity in polls, they will justify and lie and say anything to avoid owning this issue, but the fact is that the law was broken, and I believe this is the beginning of a well timed plan to get the ball rolling now, and then use it against the GOP for maximum effect.

More below the fold, and a call to action . . .

Q: Is sleep deprivation legal or covered under the Geneva Conventions?

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If you have not heard, Texas Tech University has taken on Ex-Bush Attorney General Alberto "I Don't Recall" Gonzalez. According to thinkprogress.org:

Gonzales will be a visiting professor leading a course on “contemporary issues in the executive branch” and focusing on “recruiting and retaining first generation and under-represented students.”

Students and angry alumni quickly spoke out, starting Facebook groups and writing scathing editorials. Many of the Texas Tech faculty, however, remained silent.

Not any longer. Approximately 45 Texas Tech faculty members have signed onto a petition calling Gonzales’ hiring “objectionable.” They charge that Gonzales is nothing more than a “celebrity hire” who won’t be worth his $100,000 salary.

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Perhaps the worst incident at Abu Ghraib involved a girl aged 12 or 13 who screamed for help to her brother in an upper cell while stripped naked and beaten. Iraqi journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, who heard the girl’s screams, also witnessed an ill 15-year-old who was forced to run up and down with two heavy cans of water and beaten whenever he stopped. When he finally collapsed, guards stripped and poured cold water on him. Finally, a hooded man was brought in. When unhooded, the boy realized that the man was his father, who doubtless was being intimidated into confessing something upon sight of his brutalized son.

uswarcrimes.com

Empathy is what keeps men from becoming MONSTERS.

Simulposted at Docudharma

They did it brazenly in front of other prisoners. Nothing but a sheet separated the sound of screaming and the torment of children.

This is how you create your own insurgency.

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The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling.

~snip~

It's going to come out."

salon.com

Many of the sources here can be found in Ralph Lopez's FP essay

I've referenced this before, but this quote haunts me in my sleep.

Please, send an e-mail or call Attorney general Eric Holder. He is said to be strongly leaning towards naming a Special Prosecutor, let's give him a little push in the right direction!

And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

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'Imagination is the word that Reeves uses with most enthusiasm to summarise his work and belief, “the view that there is always something new waiting to be born” — whether in a London parish or a Bosnian town. “And imagination for me is the entry into religion,” he adds, an imagination that combines clarity about where society is and a vision of change.' - From The Times, July 10, 2009

Cross-posted at Blazing Indiscretions and at The Peace Tree.

In The Times (UK) - a Murdoch paper! - yesterday there's a wonderful profile of Donald Reeves, former vicar at the landmark St James's Church - designed by Christopher Wren - in London's West End, promoting his new book, Memoirs of a Very Dangerous Man. I was a member of SJP for a year in 1999; although Reeves was no longer vicar, his mark on the parish was evident in its inclusiveness in celebrating other faith traditions and in its social justice ministries to the marginalised in greater London. St James's, Piccadilly continues to do good work with asylum seekers. In 1999, we were actively assisting Albanian and Bosnian refugees to adjust to life in a strange city and battling with the increasingly hostile UK authorities to prevent their deportations. One Sunday evening, I joined fellow SJP friends to hear Reeves give a talk at Westminster Abbey about his work, just starting to take root in the Balkans.

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(8 am March 15 - promoted by Edger)

See important UPDATE below.
Victory!

In June, 2006, Boots Wardinski and Michael Colby had been arrested for disorderly conduct (it was really civil disobedience) in interrupting a speech given by warmonger John Negroponte at his son's graduation from St Johnsbury Academy (VT).

I met Boots and Michael back in late winter, 2007, when we participated in a sit-in at each of our Vermont congressional delegation's (Leahy, Sanders & Welch) offices in Burlington.

Yesterday Michael emailed me to say that in the case State vs. Colby and Boots Wardinski, the Vermont Supreme Court dismissed the charges. The court says the activists were acting within their free speech rights. Michael was ecstatic in his email, "Look out world, our record is clean..."

For now. Michael and Boots take their activism seriously.

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