Iraq-Torture Evidence

KSM and MSM

davidswanson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:17:08 -0500

By David Swanson

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the corporate "mainstream" media make quite a pair. We're hearing a very "balanced" debate over whether KSM should be tried in New York City, and whether the most insane objections to that proposal are really insane or not. But what are we not hearing?

We're not hearing that trying criminals for the crime of 9-11 ought to have been what we did years ago, rather than waging wars in response to a crime. We're not discussing the possibility that had alleged 9-11 criminals been tried years ago rather than being imprisoned and tortured together with hundreds of innocents depicted as subhuman monsters, the "war on terror" might have been replaced with simply the wars on Iraqis and Afghans and Pakistanis. What effect might that have had on Americans' willingness to surrender their Bill of Rights? We aren't hearing about that.

Aside from a column by my friend Ray McGovern, not of course published by the corporate media, what are we hearing or seeing about KSM's motive? Isn't motive a traditionally important element in a criminal investigation? We're told that putting KSM on trial would give him a platform for propaganda, but we're not told what that propaganda might be. If it were really so pernicious, why not expose it and refute it? Isn't that what societies that believe in free speech do with misguided speech? Don't they defeat it with more and better speech? Or is that only when it can be done without using the word "Israel"?

Outside of progressive blogs, we're not hearing that giving a somewhat fair, if less than speedy, trial to those most likely to plead guilty or be convicted, and a less fair military trial to others, and no trial at all to others still, reveals this show of justice to be a sham. If KSM were acquitted, President Obama would order him imprisoned outside the rule of law until he dies. If he is found guilty, as everyone universally expects, he may be officially murdered by the United States, motivating others to take up arms against a nation that wages and funds illegal wars, imprisons people without charge, tortures, kidnaps, renditions, and executes.

If the justice system is bent to ensure that KSM is convicted or permitted little opportunity to speak, will that bending have any permanent repercussions for our justice system? Or, to move in the other direction, having determined that "military justice" is not good enough for alleged mass murders, must we continue to pretend that it is good enough for members of the military? Can we not admit everyone into a single and improved justice system? We're not hearing that discussion.

An improved justice system would require the admission into court of videos of all confessions and interrogations. This would not include admissions made to a journalist prior to imprisonment, as in the case of KSM and Al Jazeera, but would include all interrogations since that time. And in KSM's case it might include video of the "interrogation" of his children. Years ago, allegations were made that the United States had tortured his children, including in little-heard-of manners, such as locking a child in a box with a supposedly deadly insect. More recently, secret memos emerged showing the United States to have authorized just those techniques. If this were a story about missing sex tapes, the media would be all over it. A story about the possible torture of children is far less interesting. It might open up difficult questions, such as whether someone who has been endlessly tortured, and whose children may have been tortured, can -- while still in the custody of the torturers -- give an un-coerced confession. Questions might even have to be asked about leniency in sentencing for someone who has already served time and been horribly tortured.

If this were a story about a singer or actor or athlete, we'd see investigations of the time KSM spent attending college in North Carolina. Why didn't the Americans he lived among persuade him of how horrible it would be to murder people in this country? Our media pundits are completely incapable of asking such a question without either blaming KSM's American acquaintances for his crimes or declaring KSM to be an inscrutable monster whose thinking is of absolutely no interest.

Other questions might be asked as well, such as why Dick Cheney and his supporters never talk about the two memos anymore. Remember the two memos that Cheney claimed would show that the torture of KSM and others revealed important information that saved lives. The memos are now public and show nothing of the sort. Nor was torture needed in order to prosecute KSM himself. In fact, as Marcy Wheeler has pointed out, the ability of the government to prosecute him without using evidence obtained through torture demonstrates that torture was not needed for that purpose. But why are we not talking about the two purposes torture actually serves? We know it does not produce useful information, but we also know that it produces desired lies, such as agreement to false rationales for war. And we know that it scares people, both people who fear they might be tortured and people who fear the wild beasts depicted as reachable only through torture.

As Glenn Greenwald has touched on, behaving as though terrorized, irrationally unable to believe an alleged terrorist can be held in a cell and tried in a court, is to give in to the terrorism. Worse, it is to advance it. More Americans are more terrorized following TV discussions of KSM's possible prosecution than were beforehand, because the voices on the TV promote the terror rather than the prosecution.

We are hearing about the need to avoid evidence obtained through torture. But at the same time we are hearing absolutely nothing about the need to prosecute the torturers and the creators of the torture program, at least one of whom, John Yoo, is given a platform as one of the disinterested media commentators in the MSM. This failure is an ideal way to create more KSMs. Why don't we talk about it?

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

President Obama: Don't Lecture China on Censorship

dlindorff — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:22:53 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.

Let’s just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000
tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it
in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive
dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic
in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the
effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets
because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and
concrete bunker walls. It has refused to disclose where the weapons
were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that would show if they
have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon
hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and otherwise undermine those
military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge
(this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).

But censorship in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at
government-directed control of information. In America, some of the
most potent censorship is done by the privately owned media—supposedly
a bastion of freedom of expression.

There is no reason why the US media cannot report on depleted
uranium and its deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as
Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American
military bases from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just
recently, stories have appeared both on Britain’s SkyTV and in the Guardian newspaper,
reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects and infant
cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities like Basra, Najaf,
Baghdad and Samara—all urban areas where there were major assaults by
US forces both in the initial invasion, when most of the DU weapons
were used, and later during fights against holed-up insurgent groups.

In Fallujah, the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a
staggering 15 times normal—an increase of 1400%! While the article
doesn’t mention depleted uranium specifically, and says that doctors in
Fallujah have been "reluctant to attribute" the astonishing number of
birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US forces in late
2004, they do say those doctors cite “radiation and chemicals” which
were dumped on the city.

There is no such report about this in the US media.

Is that censorship? Of course it is.

The American government doesn’t tell CBS News or CNN not to report
this story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least
generally), contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington
Post and say, “Don’t report on the infant mortality crisis in Iraq, or
on the possible connection to US weaponry” (Though the government did
ask and successfully get the Times to hold a story about the National
Security Agency's massive electronic spying program for a year, and
managed to pressure the Times' editors to kill a Times reporter's story
about President Bush's likely use of a hidden cueing device during the
2004 presidential debates). The editors of those news organizations
themselves most of the time simply decide that either the story is of
no importance to readers or they worry that they may be criticized
either by the government or by other media organizations for being
unpatriotic, or biased.

The end result of such a process of self-censorship, however, is
that the American public is as ignorant about certain things as someone
in China.

More ignorant in fact.

One thing I learned from living and working as a journalist and
journalism teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese
people, with their long experience of living in a totalitarian
dictatorship in which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the
state and the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are
being lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them.
Accordingly, they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up
subtle hints in news articles which honest journalists have learned how
to slip into their carefully controlled reports. They have also
developed a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting
called xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, “back-alley news.” This
system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends. As
telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing
transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet,
which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become known
as China’s “Great Firewall”—effectively all of China is like a vast
corporate “intranet” which blocks access to outside websites—still
allows the flow of email. This is nearly impossible to monitor,
particularly when the messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of
addressees.

So in China, reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes,
of internal struggles within the government or party, or of important
news about the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay,
manage to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship
apparatus.

This alternative highly-personal news network works because the
Chinese people know they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and
they want to break through that official shroud of secrecy and control.

In the US, in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is
blissfully unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored,
filtered and controlled. Like the President (who knows better), we
boast of our “free press,” and our open society, and indeed, as a
journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.

But given that most people get their news either from corporately
owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn’t
really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment
write because it won’t appear in the corporate media. Since most
Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a
society with a free press and no censorship or control of information,
they don’t even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed
to them by corporate media sources.

The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural
Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about
their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites.
Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information she
or he could want is available, but one has to be first of all aware
that one isn't getting certain information via the obvious sources, and
then one has to want to get it, and make the effort to find it. For
most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.

The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the
American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond
just the use of nasty weapons.

Do Americans know, for instance, that all the other modern western
Democracies in the world have some form of national health care—either
a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like
that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or
Switzerland—and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular
that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our
corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems
and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.

Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of
living in the world—or even close? No. Because the American media
continue to portray the US as “number one.”

Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA?
No. This important bit of information doesn’t get mentioned in the US
media, which always starts the organization’s history at 1988, when it
got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of
the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence
service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and
children that our beloved soldier “heroes” are conducting in Iraq and
Afghanistan in our name.

No censorship in America?

Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don’t insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He spent seven
years in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan as a Fulbright journalism
professor and a correspondent for Businessweek magazine. He is author,
most recently, of "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006)
and is the winner of a Project Censored award. His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Congress Must Stop Torture

davidswanson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:18:33 -0400

A Call for Congress to Take Action on Torture
October 28th, 2009

ADD YOUR NAME TO THOSE OF 83 HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS AND LEADERS AT
http://afterdowningstreet.org/stop

Whereas over seven years have passed since President George W. Bush fraudulently induced the U.S. congress, the American people, and the world into the illegal war in Iraq,

Whereas it is nearly five years since Specialist Darby revealed the photos of Abu Ghraib that showed us torture being committed by our government in our name,

Whereas further evidence of torture remains secret and has been hidden from the public, courts, and Congress to insulate the perpetrators from appropriate criminal liability,

Whereas over the past years we have campaigned about the illegality of this war and the need to prosecute the high-level civilian and military officials who put in place the torture,

Whereas, notwithstanding all the congressional hearings and reports so far on these matters, those officials have not been brought to justice,

Whereas a prosecutor has been appointed to address only a very small number, perhaps as few as three, of the crimes committed and none of the crimes "justified" by the clearly illegal torture memos,

Whereas the Department of Justice's limited investigation of torture threatens to invite more torture around the world by undermining the Nuremberg precedent,

Whereas the Attorney General of the United States, under the influence of the President, appears unwilling to follow the facts about the illegal war in Iraq and torture to the full extent of the law,

Whereas we as citizens of the United States do not accept the damage to our country's honor committed by these persons, the threats to the lives and well-being of our children and fellow citizens sent to illegal wars, and the transformation of our country from a beacon of liberty to a beacon of torture,

WE NOW CALL FOR ACTION:

1. We call on Congress to start impeachment proceedings against Judge Jay Bybee of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, as it is unconscionable that one who encouraged violations of such fundamental laws as those against torture and aggressive war be trusted to apply and shape the law.

2. We call on congressional committees to subpoena those responsible for aggressive war and torture, including former president Bush, vice president Cheney, and other former senior officials complicit in war crimes; and to enforce those subpoenas through the Capitol Police, rather than the Department of Justice.

3. We call on state bar associations to begin the process of revoking the law licenses of those lawyers who put in place the legal analysis for the illegal war and the torture.

4. We call on state licensing authorities to begin the process of revoking the licenses of all other professionals who participated in the torture such as psychologists, psychiatrists and other doctors.

5. We call on the American people to contact their congressional representatives and insist that, on our watch, the high, who are the instigators of illegal wars and torture, will be brought low, and that low-level personnel will not be the only ones prosecuted for committing crimes authorized and encouraged by their superiors.

ADD YOUR NAME TO THOSE OF 83 HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS AND LEADERS AT
http://afterdowningstreet.org/stop

Forward and Post Widely!

Help Stop Torture!

SIGNED BY:
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After Downing Street
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Berkeley Fellowship Unitarian Universalists Social Justice Committee
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
BuzzFlash.com
Campus Antiwar Network, Ole Miss
Center for Constitutional Rights
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Christiane Brown, The Solution Zone, KJFK
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Nicole Sandler, RadioOrNot.com
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OpEdNews.com
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SUV Network (Seniors United for Victory)
ThisCantBeHappening.net
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Transylvanians for Peace of Brevard, NC
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VeteransAgainstTorture.com
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Western North Carolina Stop Torture Now
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ADD YOUR NAME TO THOSE OF 83 HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS AND LEADERS AT
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Is America a Sick Country or What?

dlindorff — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:19:32 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

You see, here's the thing. When you hear about the sick, twisted
things that America's torturers have been doing, courtesy of President
George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember
that the US military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when
it came to picking up the real terrorists. In fact, their batting
average was pretty lousy.

According to even the Pentagon's own reckoning, for example,
probably 85% of the captives being held at Guantanamo over the past
eight years were not terrorists at all, and a fair number--probably the
majority--weren't even fighting anyone when they were captured. I'm
sure that the averages at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or at the
secret prison in Iraq are no better. The military was offering bounties
in Iraq and Afghanistan for alleged terrorists, you see, and probably
still is, but in both of those lawless, tribal countries, many people
have used the offer to settle old feuds, turning in people they wanted
to punish or dispose of, and many others just turned in random people
to get the reward money.

Remember this when you hear about torture tactics that we are
learning were used by our side--things that make waterboarding sound
like a walk in the park. We're now getting confirmation of things that
we journalists were hearing rumors of earlier: faked executions using
blanks, faked executions in neighboring rooms, followed by threats of
the same to a person who had just heard the screams and a shot in the
cell next to him, threats with an electric drill, and now perhaps the
worst yet--the threat to kill a captive's children. And of course there
is the already disclosed case of a captive who had his genitals cut
with a razor, and generous use of tasers in places on the body designed
to cause maximum pain. That, and of course there are a lot raped
captives (including young boys), and a lot of bodies yet to be dug up
of captives who were simply killed during torture.

We've got a litany of horror and abuse here that sounds like the
worst kind of stories that used to come out of Saddam Hussein's Iraq,
or the Argentine Junta or Idi Amin's Uganda. About the only thing
missing is word that the military and CIA torturers were eating their
victims, or feeding them their own genitals, but who knows? Maybe we'll
get there yet. It's hard at this point to rule anything out.

What has become of the US? We started out the victims
of an attack in 2001, with the whole world rallying to our side, and
within a matter of weeks, our government, acting in our name, had
secretly embarked on a wholly unnecessary and totally criminal descent
into the barbarity of Middle Ages.

And now? The new administration has claimed to have put a stop to
the atrocities, but it remains adamant that it is not going to root out
the evil that was already done to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.

President Barack Obama says he does not want to look back at any
crimes that were committed. He wants to go "forward." This is not the
voice of justice, though. This is the voice of political gutlessness
and of big power exceptionalism. The same America that demands the
prosecution of war criminals in little countries like Cambodia or
Serbia or Sudan, considers itself exempt from criminal liability for
its own crimes.

Attorney General Eric Holder says he may be ready to appoint a
prosecutor to investigate cases where CIA or private contract torturers
"overstepped" the rules set by the White House and Justice Department,
but he has said he will not allow the investigation to go beyond that
to pursue the people who enabled those acts of torture--people like
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who personally instructed
torturers in Afghanistan to "take the gloves off" in one case, or
Assistant Attorney Generals John Yoo and Jay Baybee (now a federal
judge), who ruled that anything short of the destruction of bodily
organs or of a pain level equivalent to death was okay. Nor will he
allow any investigation to look at acts of torture that were
authorized, like waterboarding, if they had the sanction of the
Bush/Cheney White House.

This position taken by the new administration should sicken us all.
Worse, it should be broadly condemned, because if the descent into
barbarity which occurred with the highest White House sanction is not
investigated thoroughly, and punished fully, there is no way we can say
it will not happen again. In fact, it's safe to say that it will happen again,
the next time another charlatan gets into office and uses fear to blind
the American people to all that is right and decent, and to the
importance of maintaining the rule of law.

I know there are terrible things happening right now which demand
our attention and action--an escalating, endless war in Afghanistan
that increasingly resembles Vietnam in 1966 or 1967, a presidential
cave-on on health care reform, a sell-out on real action against
climate change, and on and on--but this particular crime--the crime of
failing to act to punish violations of the Geneva Conventions on
treatment of prisoners of war, which is being committed today by the
Obama administration--is so obscene, so directly in our faces, and is
such a stain on the whole nation, that it demands action.

We will probably never know how many innocent lives have been
destroyed by America's eight years of officially sanctioned torture,
but we can at least see to it that the people who sanctioned it, and
not just those who engaged in it (and that goes right up through the
chain of command to the Commander in Chief and to the real power behind
the throne, Dick Cheney), are put in the dock like the criminals at
Nuremberg, to face the charge of war crimes. and crimes against
humanity.

As the citizens of what we call a democracy, we can demand nothing less.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadeelphia-area journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net www.thiscantbehappening.net

Six Months of Immunity

davidswanson — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:49:25 -0400

By David Swanson

Drafted in preparation for panel discussion at Veterans for Peace national convention August 7, 2009, on topic of "Holding the Architects of Illegal Wars and War Crimes Accountable."

Seven years to the day after the Downing Street Minutes meeting at which top British officials famously discussed U.S. President George W. Bush's intent to launch a war against Iraq whether or not any means could be found to legalize it, on July 23rd, the United Nations hosted a discussion of ways in which wars of aggression are given pseudo-legal cover. Included were remarks by Jean Bricmont and Noam Chomsky. It is not hard to imagine how different such discussions would be were the architects of the Iraq War ever held accountable for it in any way.

The Iraq War set a new low for the blatant openness of the lies used to justify it, and those lies included a secret memo signed by Jay Bybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, that purports to legalize any illegal wars launched by a U.S. president. If that memo and the OLC memos purporting to legalize specific war crimes like torture are left unchallenged, or if an attempt is made to prosecute those who exceeded the crimes "legalized" by the memos, the United States will henceforth be understood to openly treat as legal anything a president instructs a lawyer to "legalize" including the supreme international crime banned by the UN Charter, except when that crime is committed by nations other than the United States or Israel. Vice President Joe Biden recently remarked that Israel had the right to attack Iran if it chose to, a remark that would legitimize the worst crime there is, and yet a remark that Biden clearly made in an attempt to avoid any scandal or controversy by articulating what he and those he spends his time with understood to be universally accepted.

The crime of aggressive war against Iraq could be prosecuted in a foreign court, potentially in the International Criminal Court, theoretically in U.S. federal court, or -- using an argument made by Vincent Bugliosi -- through a local or state court in the United States where Bush could be tried for the murder of U.S. soldiers. The U.S. Department of Justice could also prosecute Bush for misspending funds on a war that had not yet been authorized in any way -- funds appropriated only for other purposes, or for the crime of lying to Congress, or for using false propaganda domestically, for imprisoning children, employing assassination squads, using the U.S. military domestically, spying without warrant, exposing an undercover agent, obstructing justice, or various other crimes. And an attorney general who would do all of that (or even most attorneys general who wouldn't) would also overturn the prosecutions of political prisoners like Don Siegelman, Paul Minor, and so many others, and hold accountable those who used the Justice Department to target state and local elected officials, 85 percent of those prosecuted being Democrats and the other 15 percent consisting largely of moderate Republicans. Many of the crimes above could also be prosecuted in foreign courts. A foreign or international court could conceivably even prosecute the crime of continuing the occupation into 2009, since the UN fig leaf for the occupation expired in December 2008 and has been replaced only by a treaty drawn up between an occupier and a puppet government of the occupied, a treaty now openly violated by both parties and never properly ratified by either nation. Many of the crimes could be, and several are, the subjects of civil suits as well. Bybee, who is now a federal appeals judge, could be impeached by Congress. He and other lawyers can also be disbarred.

If the architects of the Iraq War were being held accountable in any way for launching it and, in some cases, profiting from it financially, it is likely that U.S. troops would now be withdrawing from Iraq. As it is, no withdrawal is underway, a war in Afghanistan is being expanded, the possibility of launching a war against Iran is being kept open, and illegal strikes are being launched fairly routinely into Pakistan. We have seen in the past six months not just a period of immunity, but the clear results of that immunity, the clear evidence of why "looking backwards" has an enormous impact on what you see when you look forward. Sadly, much of the peace movement has not only stopped pressing for peace and lost the funding with which to do so, but it has also failed to at long last take up the cause of deterring future war crimes by prosecuting past ones. The positive news is that human rights and civil rights groups have taken up the cause of prosecuting torture. The drawback is that they never mention aggressive war, and it is hard to imagine an aggressive war occurring without torture even if torture has been punished.

For each of the other crimes that Bush and Cheney have been granted immunity for, a similar story can be told. The crimes are not in the past, because they are being continued in the present. In the case of indefinite detention, President Obama has fought in court and made a speech in front of the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives asserting the power to do exactly what candidate Obama said was unconstitutional. Obama is imprisoning people outside of any rule of law in Bagram and Guantanamo, and proposing to keep some of them in prison indefinitely without ever bringing them to trial. He is proposing to formalize such a system and dress it up in "due process" reviews. He asserts the power to render prisoners to other nations, as well. Having promised not to render prisoners for the purpose of having them tortured, Obama now claims the power to render prisoners while promising not to use it for torture, yet failing -- in the view of many human rights advocates -- to justify the practice. It is a safe assumption that Obama's behavior would be different, that he would not be proposing to formalize preventive detention, were Bush being criminally prosecuted or impeached or held liable in civil court cases for it.

On August 4th Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta published a column essentially advocating immunity for all past criminals who held important positions in the federal government. Panetta excused the CIA as having obeyed Bush, failing to recognize that being asked to disobey laws by one's employer does not create legal protection. At the same time, Panetta urged immunity for Bush as well. And Panetta claimed that the United States no longer tortures. One problem with this is that, even if it were true, it would also be true that the United States offers no deterrent against torture by its government employees or future top officials. A deeper problem is found in statements Panetta has made claiming the power to, in fact, torture. Back in May, blogger Josh Marshall was mystified, writing:

"One of the weirdest moments in Vice President Cheney's speech was when he claimed that 'President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it appropriate.'"

But when you take a crime like torture and turn it into a policy question, and you choose the policy of not torturing, you maintain the power to switch to the policy of torturing without any criminal penalty -- unless someone else manages to transform torture back into a crime again. Here's Leon Panetta at his confirmation hearing, as reported by the Guardian:

"Pressed by Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon about a 'human ticking time-bomb' scenario, in which a terrorist knows of an imminent attack on the U.S., Panetta said he believed torture would not be necessary to extract information. 'I'm of the view that when you look at the FBI and the US military, that they have been able to show that it is possible to get the information that's needed to protect our nation's security,' he said. However, he added: 'If we had the ticking bomb situation and I felt that whatever we were using wasn't sufficient, I would not hesitate to go to the president and request any additional authority that we would need.'"

Following Cheney's statement and Marshall's bewilderment, MSNBC asked presidential advisor David Axelrod about it. Axelrod repeatedly refused to deny that Obama believed himself to possess the power to legally torture. Predictably enough, there have been numerous reports of ongoing torture and inhuman and degrading treatment committed by the United States as well as by the government of Iraq. Were torturers being prosecuted, fewer prison guards would still be torturing.

It's the same story with warrantless spying. It's not being prosecuted, and it's also -- predictably enough -- not ending. And it's the same story with a wide variety of abuses of power that Bush engaged in to a greater extent than did those who preceded him: the abuses are being cemented in place by Obama. Rather than throwing out signing statements that altered laws, Obama has begun writing his own. Rather than throwing out executive orders that create laws, Obama has begun issuing his own. Rather than opening up records and accepting court challenges that had been blocked by claims of "state secrets," Obama is repeating and enlarging those claims. Rather than delivering subpoenaed witnesses like Karl Rove to Congress, Obama's White House Counsel is interfering in the work of the Justice Department to negotiate very partial compliance on behalf of Rove, an old friend of his. Rather than declassifying information unnecessarily made secret, Obama is making materials secret that Bush did not. Rather than rewarding whistleblowers who had been punished for their good deeds, Obama has signing statemented away constraints on his power to retaliate against whistleblowers by firing them. Were Congress holding Bush accountable for any of these abuses, Obama would be less likely to engage in them. Once Bush and Obama engage in them without protest, it may become more difficult for Congress to change course and deny the same powers to Obama's successor.

So, what can we do? There is, at http://prosecutebushcheney.org a long list of steps we can take to pressure and encourage those who need it, and to create systemic reforms that make future crimes and abuses somewhat less likely. But ultimately, we are going to need to resist through nonviolent mass action, and the sooner we realize and organize that the better. It will not be easy. It will be a lot harder than what we have done thus far. But I have seen a lot of people make great sacrifices these past few years, and their examples have the potential to inspire others. Members of Veterans for Peace have done more than anyone else. And let me give you and example from this week from a friend of ours named Cynthia Papermaster. Here's a woman with a fixed income and no health insurance who has taken a large chunk of her retirement savings out of the bank and used it to purchase air time during the most worthwhile television shows there are for advertisements demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder enforce our laws against torture. I can't advise others to make the same sort of sacrifice, but I can point out that if others did it would radically change our situation, and that by removing money from the largest banks and from health insurance companies (which by and large will not actually cover you if you become seriously ill) it is possible to do more than one sort of good deed at the same time.

Real News Video of Torture Protest at Justice Department

davidswanson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:29:03 -0400

Top Torture Lawyers Still in Government

davidswanson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:59:20 -0400

By David Swanson

We've heard of John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales, and maybe even Jay Bybee. Some of us recall John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey, and even David Addington. William Haynes, Stephen Bradbury, and Douglas Feith occasionally make the news. If I had any say about it all 40 of these facilitators of torture would be universally known -- plus the eight more that readers of this article will call to my attention and angrily accuse me of trying to cover for by only being aware of 40. I would also make universally known the fact that two of the worst now work for President Barack Obama.

Even if you haven't read them, you probably know that the Justice Department under Bush-Cheney produced memos pretending to legalize torture, gruesome memos stipulating exactly how many times a particular victim could "legally" be tortured with a particular technique. John Yoo and Jay Bybee wrote the worst of these memos. But the memos take the form of responses to inquiries from a guy named John Rizzo. Yes, Mr. Rizzo, you may slam that guy against a wall. No, Mr. Rizzo, you may not drown that one unless you have a doctor present. And so on. The memos are all headlined thus: "MEMORANDUM FOR JOHN A. RIZZO."

So, Yoo and Bybee didn't invent the torture techniques out of their own sadistic imaginations. They replied to Rizzo's requests for "legal" permission to use detailed techniques. What if those requests from Rizzo had been turned into news headlines, rather than the Justice Department's responses? Would activists then be focused on demanding Rizzo's, rather than Yoo's, removal from one of our prestigious institutions of higher learning? That's actually a very easy question to definitively answer, and the answer is no. Rizzo doesn't work in academia: he is still, until he retires this summer the top lawyer at the CIA.

Retirement is what counts as accountability these days in Washington. Future consiglieri are hereby put on notice: you back torture and death squads and drone strikes and you'll be forced to retire with the LA Times printing a profile on your great influence and wonderful taste in expensive suits. Rizzo served as top lawyer at the CIA for years, without the title, because the Senate wouldn't approve him. Serving as the "Acting So-and-So" is what now counts as compliance with the Constitution. Senators are hereby put on notice: you fail to confirm an appointee, and he or she will get the job without the title.

Rizzo oversaw in detail the use of illegal detention, rendition, and torture at sites around the world. He requested Justice Department memos to cover his actions. He illegally sanctioned the destruction of videotapes demonstrating what he had done. He brazenly testified before Congress that torture was not torture. He authorized torture prior to receiving the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos. After receiving the memos, he authorized torture that far exceeded what they pretended to allow. He lied to the Justice Department, claiming that a captive (Abu Zubaydah) was not cooperative in the absence of torture. He ignored warnings that all of this was illegal, but made clear his awareness of guilt by requesting the memos and destroying the tapes.

And Rizzo didn't do all of this alone. He had help from another top lawyer at the CIA, Jonathan M. Fredman. Fredman now works in the Obama administration in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with -- as far as I know -- no plans to leave. According to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

"On October 2, 2002, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA's Counter Terrorist Center, attended a meeting of GTMO staff. Minutes of that meeting indicate that it was dominated by a discussion of aggressive interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, death threats, and waterboarding, which was discussed in relation to its use in SERE training. Mr. Fredman's advice to GTMO on applicable legal obligations was similar to the analysis of those obligations in OLC's first Bybee memo. According to the meeting minutes, Mr. Fredman said that 'the language of the statutes is written vaguely. . . . Severe physical pain described as anything causing permanent damage to major organs or body parts. Mental torture [is] described as anything leading to permanent, profound damage to the senses or personality.' Mr. Fredman said simply 'It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong.'"

People like Rizzo and Fredman should not be working for our government a single day longer. They should be impeached. They should be prosecuted. They should be given fair trials and be imprisoned if convicted. And all existing information on what they did should be made public. Fed up with waiting for Congress or the Justice Department to act, a coalition of groups headquartered at http://DisbarTortureLawyers.com has gone ahead and filed complaints with bar associations to have torture lawyers disbarred and to call attention to the need for further accountability. Having already filed complaints against 12 torture lawyers, Disbar Torture Lawyers filed three more on Monday. Two of these were against Rizzo and Fredman.

Disbar Torture Lawyers held a press conference on Monday at the National Press Club, with remarks by Kevin Zeese, who filed the complaints, by Bruce Fein, a former Reagan administration lawyer, and by Shahid Buttar, Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. I was not in town but am certain we can count on the Washington Post to give the story all the coverage it deserves.

Why Demand to Prosecute Torture Will Grow

davidswanson — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:49:00 -0400

By David Swanson

(Remarks at Torture Accountability Action Day rally in Washington, D.C., June 25, 2009 -- video of this and other speeches at AfterDowningStreet.org)

Have you ever held a little baby in your arms? Raise your hand if you have. A toddler is as delicate and precious as a baby, but able to move around and get hurt. Bigger kids can move faster and farther. Our instincts should be to protect them.

I was reading yesterday about a boy who was probably 12 years old when our nation imprisoned him in 2002. We held him in Afghanistan, but I don't mean "held" in the sense in which one lovingly holds a baby. We put a hood on him, stripped him, shackled him and shoved him down stairs. We brought him to Guantanamo, kicked him, beat him, broke his nose, pepper sprayed him, and deprived him of sleep for many days. In 2003 he tried to kill himself by slamming his head against a wall.

This boy, like most Gitmo captives, does not stand accused of international terrorism. And the evidence that this boy had, at 12 years old, fought back against the illegal aggressors in his country comes from torture, so our government is seeking to hold him forever without putting him on trial. He's now 19, having spent his entire teenage years in a death camp, in a place where the only way out appears to be death, and if our government has its way he'll move to some other death camp so that we can "close Guantanamo" and he'll be held there forever and ever until he dies, with his jailers performing annual reviews that they will grotesquely refer to as "due process." Meanwhile, prosecuting those who tortured this child, those who ordered it done, those who provided legalistic justifications, or those who created the entire torture program is not yet even under consideration.

I was on a radio show last night and a man called in to accuse me of perversely targeting the United States government for criticism and taking up the cause of the worst criminals on earth, when I could be focusing on fighting diseases that kill many more people than we have tortured. Well, many of us are active in campaigning for better healthcare, but pointing to some other cause of more deaths and injuries never excuses a crime. Torture is a crime. A president can pardon it. He cannot legally prevent our Justice Department from prosecuting it. And when he does, and we sit back on our couches and cheer for Iranians taking to the streets, then our president and all future presidents acquire the power to ignore all laws. Already our State Department has lost the ability to tell other nations not to torture, including nations that might torture the sort of people that all callers to radio shows in the United States can be counted on to care about, namely Americans. In fact, we can all agree quite easily that torture should be punished when Americans are the victims of it. The trick is to shift our attention to cases in which Americans are the perpetrators and yet maintain our ability to think straight. A poll today says a strong majority supports banning all torture. No news on what percentage knows it already is banned.

It is not at all clear, in fact, that any disease I could be researching a cure for takes more lives than US torture does. We've tortured many people to death. According to the U.S. military and the FBI, US torture has been a major recruiting tool for anti-U.S. terrorists and a cause of the death of thousands of Americans. And we tortured to force false confessions justifying an attack on Iraq. We even did so after the invasion. That invasion and occupation has killed over a million Iraqis and thousands of Americans at enormous cost in dollars and in safety and prospects for peace. One justification for the war was to stop Iraqi torture, but Iraq now tortures and America can say nothing against it. In fact we can say nothing against any war crimes or the crime of aggressive war. We have made the greatest horrors permissible.

Most of the people we have tortured have been innocent of any wrongdoing. And there is no evidence that torture has saved anyone's life. Expert interrogators do not use torture because it does not work as quickly or as reliably as other methods. So torturing someone to save your kidnapped child (which callers to radio shows will explain to you is the purpose of all torturing) would be less likely to save your kidnapped child than relying on a skilled interrogator.

Torturing people brutalizes the torturers as well, damaging them and those they live with. Torturing damages our society, brutalizing the thoughts and practices of prison guards, police, and citizens. And, most damaging of all, torture establishes the myth that certain people cannot be spoken to and must be brutalized. This creates horrible prejudices, because the people who supposedly must be tortured are always defined as part of a certain racial, religious, or cultural group that comes to be seen as sub-human. This allows torturing them to be justified as both an interrogation tool and a punishment without any need for logical coherence.

Torture is illegal and morally wrong with no imaginable utilitarian exceptions to that rule. It is our job not just to condemn torture but to prevent it, to deter it. And the only way to deter it is to stop treating it as a policy difference, start treating it as a crime, and quit attempting to look forward with our heads shoved up our ass.

Numerous reports document ongoing torture in Iraq, in Bagram, and in Guantanamo. As long as torture is not treated as the crime our laws make it, prison guards holding people outside any legal system are going to torture. You cannot end torture and yet not punish it, because only punishing it can end it. Justice Marshall back there behind me (a statue in the park) would think we'd put a king back on the throne.

There may be a vote today in Congress on whether to require that the military video tape its interrogations. That would be a start if it could get through the Senate, but will there be a penalty for not doing so, or for destroying the tapes? And what about the FBI and CIA? The president's task force is expected to recommend that teams formed from these two agencies interrogate captives in one way if they plan to charge them with crimes, and a different way if they just plan to illegally hold them. Our founding fathers designed systems expecting the worst of people. This plan requires better than angels. And as long as we do not prosecute torturers, these are the sorts of plans we will see.

The Park Service threatened to charge us with a crime if we demonstrated waterboarding here today. The Park Service should march with us this afternoon to the Department of Justice where we will expect the same demand to be made with regard to Richard B. Cheney.

While I work with a lot of groups on this issue I want to say a word about Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) because Joanne O'Neill stepped up and led the organizing of this day, and PDA is leading events in other cities today, as well as having led the struggle for peace and justice and impeachment and prosecution for a long time now. Principle before party. Peace before profits. Go to PDAmerica.org.

Rallies Around U.S. To Demand Accountability for Torture

davidswanson — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:52:55 -0400

Thursday, June 25, 2009, has been designated Torture Accountability Action Day by a large coalition of human rights groups planning rallies and marches in major U.S. cities, including a rally in Washington, D.C.'s John Marshall Park at 11 a.m. followed by a noon march to the Justice Department where some participants will risk arrest in nonviolent protest if a special prosecutor for torture is not appointed.

http://accountability4torture.com

Events are planned in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco, CA; Pasadena, CA; Thousand Oaks, CA; Boston, MA; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; Las Vegas, NV; Honolulu, HI; Tampa, FL; Philadelphia, PA; and Anchorage, AK, with details available online:
http://tortureaccountability.webs.com/eventsacrossus.htm

In Washington, D.C., groups will maintain literature tables from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at John Marshall Park, 501 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. A rally will begin at 11 a.m. with speakers including:
* Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law;
* Njambi Good, Director of Counter Terror with Justice Campaign, Amnesty International USA;
* Enver Masud, Founder and CEO of The Wisdom Fund, recipient of the 2002 Gold Award from the Human Rights Foundation for his book "The War on Islam";
* Max Obuszewski, member of the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance;
* Marcus Raskin, Cofounder of the Institute for Policy Studies;
* Patricio Rice, torture survivor;
* Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Cofounder of the Partnership for Civil Justice;
* Kevin Zeese, Director of VotersForPeace.US, Board Member of VelvetRevolution.US.
With performances by Jordan Page, Tha Truth, and David Ippolito.

Participants will march at noon to the Department of Justice, where some but not all of the participating organizations will engage in nonviolent resistance if the Attorney General has not yet agreed to appoint a special prosecutor for torture. (Some of the organizations sponsoring the day of rallies do not engage in civil disobedience.)

In Pasadena, Calif., at 12 p.m. PT citizens will submit a formal judicial misconduct complaint against 9th Circuit Judge Jay Bybee, former Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel: Courthouse steps, Chambers Courthouse, 125 South Grand Ave., Pasadena, CA 91105.

Statement of Purpose:
The highest officials in our government have trampled on our traditional ideals of making America a nation of laws, not of men, by illegally narrowing the scope of torture and authorizing waterboarding, walling, and other inhumane interrogation techniques. In doing so, they have violated the Anti-Torture Act, the War Crimes Act, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment.

In order to enforce our laws and restore the free society that our forefathers envisioned, citizens must demand accountability for abuses of the laws pertaining to torture. In the tradition of the Civil Rights movement, change will not occur unless citizens stand up for their rights under the law.

Torture Accountability Action Day Is Sponsored By:
Action Center for Justice
After Downing Street
Amnesty International
Bryn Mawr Peace Coalition
BuzzFlash
Coalition for Peace Action
Code Pink
Consumers for Peace
Democrats.com
Eldoradans Against Torture
Global Exchange
High Road for Human Rights
Hip Hop Caucus
Historians Against the War
IndictBushNow
Individuals for Justice
Marcus Raskin
National Accountability Network
National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance
NJ Peace Action
NJ People's Organization for Progress
Northern Virginians for Peace and Justice
Polygraph Radio
Peace Action
Peace and Justice Forums Billings Montana
Portland Peaceful Response Coalition
Progressive Democrats of America
Project Vote Count
School of the Americas Watch
Senior Action Network
The Torture Abolition Survivors Support Coalition
US Labor Against War
Veterans for Peace
War Criminals Watch
Washington Peace Center
We Are Change LA
Witness Against Torture
World Can't Wait

SEND POSTCARDS TO HOLDER: (PDF).