Steve Burns: The religion of violence

In an April 2006 New Yorker report on the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran, journalist Seymour Hersh quotes a former Bush administration official who explained the thinking behind such an attack: "A sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government." The same official added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

I had the same "What are they smoking?" reaction, and you probably did too. Isn't it obvious that aerial bombardment doesn't weaken the public's support of their leaders, but rather strengthens it? Did the British people respond to the Nazi blitz by overthrowing Winston Churchill? Did the American people respond to the 9/11 attacks by forcing George W. Bush from office? Yet these patently obvious lessons of history are lost on the two most powerful men on the planet, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Bush and Cheney aren't the only ones infected with a near-religious belief in the effectiveness of violence in general, and airpower in particular. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak described the bombardment of Gaza that Israel has begun this week as an "all-out war against Hamas," as if the attacks won't strengthen Hamas' credibility with the Palestinian people as the strongest opponent of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. UPDATE: Haim Ramon, the deputy to Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister told the Times of London on Monday that, “The goal of the operation is to topple Hamas."

Just to understand how counterproductive the Israeli attacks on Gaza will be, just consider the context. In Palestine, there is a power struggle between the Fatah party, represented by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, which still retains control over Palestinian land in the West Bank, and Hamas, which controls Gaza after winning a majority of seats in parliament in the 2006 election. Israel - and the U.S. - support Fatah and aim to weaken and even destroy Hamas. Yet, in response to protests in the West Bank against the Israeli attacks, Fatah's President Abbas sent baton-wielding police against Palestinian protesters as part of an effort to "coordinate security" with Israel. When the attacks are over, which party will command the greatest loyalty from the Palestinian people? And if the answer to that question is obvious to you, why isn't it obvious to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert?

But Olmert's belief - or Bush and Cheney's belief - in the effectiveness of force is not open to rational analysis, and stands in the face of all evidence to the contrary. It really is an article of faith, as firmly rooted as the Vatican's belief in Galileo's time that the Sun orbits the Earth. Possessing massive arsenals which they have squandered billions on, they simply must believe that all this hardware is good for something.

Combined with their faith in the power of force is a faith in the power of humiliation. Recall that earlier quote from Seymour Hersh: "A sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership..." Yes, the demonstration of our power will humiliate our opponents and, once humiliated, what choice will they have but to submit to our will? This thinking was in evidence at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, where humiliation was a common component of interrogations. In Errol Morris' brilliant film about Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure, he interviews one experienced interrogator who was shocked to find that an Iraqi General he had been been interrogating over a period of several days had been subjected to the humiliation of having his eyebrows shaved off. "I never got any information out of him after that," the interrogator said. The guards at Abu Ghraib never considered the possibility that humiliation might increase a prisoner's resistance rather than decrease it.

So, to our diagnosis of the power-mad, let's add in a willful blindness to the possibility of resistance. The U.S. leadership never expected the Iraqi people to resist the U.S. occupation, Israel never expected Hezbollah to mount an effective resistance to its 2006 invasion of Lebanon, and so on. These men, the most powerful men in the world, are apparently unable to ask themselves this simple question: "How would I respond? How would I feel if my country was invaded? If fighter jets destroyed my home and killed my children? If I was imprisoned without charge, stripped naked, and tortured?" There's really only one possible explanation for this blindness, and it's the inability to see one's opponents, even the populace of a entire country, as human. "They" won't respond as "we" would, because they are something less than us.

How widespread is this willful blindness and quasi-religious faith in the effectiveness of violence? I can't speak for other countries, but here in the U.S. it infects all levels of our media and foreign-policy elite. These elites accuse those of us who advocate for nonviolent solutions of being naive, of failing to understand the world's hard realities. But who is more naive, more cut off from reality, than the person who believes in the universal effectiveness of violence?

Bill Christofferson: Giving the gift of peace

So you say it's below zero out there, and your garage door's frozen shut, and you don't know if your car will start anyway, and even if it does, shopping malls make you so tense and irritable you want to sit down in the aisle and cry, and you don't even have the slightest idea what to get anybody for a gift anyway, and time is running out?

Is that what's troubling you, Bunky?

Well, be troubled no more.

If you're reading this you're already at your computer, so just relax and take care of your holiday shopping needs in the next few minutes.

Consider giving the gift of peace.

With just a few clicks here and there, you can relieve your holiday stress, help make the world a better place, and encourage those who are working every day for peace and justice. Make a contribution in the name of your friends and relatives, and give them a card telling them what you've done.

Aunt Peg doesn't really need one more scarf, and Brother Joe won't be heartbroken if he doesn't get his usual box of golf balls. Really.

There is an endless list of good causes, of course. You no doubt have some favorites. But in case you're coming up empty on ideas, here are links to a few of mine:

Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice. A statewide organization with 167 member groups ( listed here), working to end the war as well as on prison reform, immigration, and environmental justice. (Disclosure: I am the co-chair this year.)

Peace Action-Wisconsin, Milwaukee-based, fighting the good fight since 1977 when it was known as Mobilization for Survival.

Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort (WAVE), working to end firearms violence. (I'm on the board,)

And on the national scene:

Iraq Moratorium. It urges people to act on the Third Friday of every month to end the war and occupation. It's a growing national grassroots movement that operates on a shoestring. (Disclosure: I am part of the national core committee.)

Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a Chicago-based group which did the walk for peace across Wisconsin to the GOP convention in St. Paul, and which will sponsor Camp Hope Jan. 1-19 in Barack Obama's Hyde Park neighborhood to remind him of his progressive agenda. Good people, great cause.

United for Peace and Justice. The nation's largest antiwar coalition, with 1,400 member organizations.

Veterans for Peace. From the website: Our collective experience tells us wars are easy to start and hard to stop and that those hurt are often the innocent. Thus, other means of problem solving are necessary.

Iraq Veterans Against the War. Our most recent group of combat veterans have come to the forefront of the movement to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their courage and commitment are remarkable.

Granted, it won't work for everyone. Uncle Fred, who's still fuming over the fact that That One was elected president, may not want a membership to the Wilderness Society, Greenpeace or the ACLU.

In those cases, consider a charitable but non-political organization, perhaps one working to alleviate hunger or homelessness. There is no shortage of local and national organizations that do good work and are hit by bad economic times just like everyone else.

Here's a site with a list of 100 major charities, just to get you thinking. I'm not recommending you give through this site; chances are a direct donation will help those charities more. But this is a good list to get you started.

And it sure beats crying in the mall.

Have a great holiday season.

Bill Christofferson is co-chair of WNPJ.

Bill Christofferson: Camp Hope to remind Obama of his progressive promises

Voices for Creative Nonviolence, the Chicago-based group that staged a 500-mile Witness Against War walk to the Republican convention in St. Paul, will sponsor a presence from Jan. 1-19, in President-elect Obama's Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago. It's called “Camp Hope: Countdown To Change.”

It's called Camp Hope because organizers

earnestly hope his presidency will signal the dawning of long-needed progressive change in the United States.

The 19 days of activities are designed to help build popular momentum behind the progressive goals of President Obama’s campaign -- and, one suspects, to remind him of those commitments.

It's what the left should be doing right now. Instead of assuming the worst about Obama, and giving up on him before he even takes office, progressives should spend their energy giving him and the new Congress the political base and cover they need to pursue a progressive agenda.

We know the forces of darkness will be pushing hard in the other direction. A show of support for progressive policies can help offset that provide a brace for Democratic backbones that are in danger of softening at the slightest pushback from the right.

The Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, with 165 member organizations, has endorsed Camp Hope. There's talk of a bus trip from Madison for one weekend.

Camp Hope's agenda is ambitious. It asks Obama to take executive action on eight critical issues upon becoming President: war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan; housing, full employment, immigration, the environment, health care, nuclear weapons, and torture. The "asks" are designed to be actions which President-elect Obama could take on his own initiative and parallel commitments he made in his campaign for President.

Complete information on Camp Hope, and the specific "asks" of the campaign, is available at the website: CampHope2009.org

Camp Hope opens on January 1 at 1 p.m. at Drexel Square Park, at the intersection of E. Hyde Park Blvd and S. Drexel Ave in Chicago. In addition to daily vigils, community forums related to the "asks" are planned by a number of organizations joining Voices for Creative Nonviolence in sponsoring Camp Hope.

The program so far:

Jan 1, 8am - 6pm Camp Hope Kickoff in Hyde Park

Jan 2, 7-8:30pm Health Care Forum with Dr. Quentin Young

Jan 3, 7-8pm Emancipation Proclamation Pageant- Hyde Park Union Church

Jan 7 6:30-8:30pm Evening discussion on withdrawal of troops from Iraq

Jan 8 7-8:30pm Presentation by Michael McPherson of Veterans for Peace

Jan 9 7-8:30pm Premiere Showing of "War Against the Family"

Jan 10 7-8:30pm Myths and Realities about U.S. War in Afghanistan -A Presentation by Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid

Jan 11 7-9pm Witness Against Torture Forum: From Guantanamo to Streets of Chicago

Jan 15 7-8:30pm Immigration Reform and Workers Rights

Jan 16 7-8:30pm Blackwater Worldwide In Illinois and Beyond: The Dangers of Outsourcing Our Security

Jan 17 10am-noon co-Justice Collaborative- Morning Presentation

Jan 18 8am-6pm Closing of Camp Hope with Candlelight Vigil- Sending off of Caravan to DC

Jan 19 8am-6pm Vigil at the Federal Building to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday

Bill Christofferson is co-chair of WNPJ. This commentary was originally published at the blog Uppity Wisconsin.

Steve Burns: Out of Iraq ... in 2011?

On Thursday, the Iraqi parliament approved, by a vote of 149 to 35, a new "security agreement" with the U.S. government requiring a complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011. The text, according to an english translation obtained by McClatchy newspapers seems quite unambiguous on this point. Article 24, "Withdrawal of the United States Forces from Iraq", states that, "All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011." No exceptions are made to permit any residual troops for training Iraqi forces or engaging in "counter-terrorism" missions - both purposes for which President-elect Obama had stated he would like to keep some troops in Iraq, under a 16-month partial withdrawal plan he had proposed during the Presidential campaign.

The agreement also makes clear that this is the maximum amount of time that U.S. troops can remain in Iraq, and permits an earlier withdrawal, if either the U.S. or Iraqi governments desire it, stating: "The United States recognizes the sovereign right of the government of Iraq to request the departure of the United States forces from Iraq at any time. The Government of Iraq recognizes the sovereign right of the United States to withdraw the United States forces from Iraq at any time."

The possibility of an earlier withdrawal should provide clear direction for those of us in the U.S. peace movement: our job is to continue to bring pressure from our side for a complete and rapid withdrawal, to get the U.S. government to exercise the "escape clause" so clearly spelled out above.

Setting aside the question of the timetable, there are some very positive aspects to the agreement:

-- The agreement eliminates the grant of legal immunity given to U.S. "military contractors", or mercenaries by U.S. consul Paul Bremer in 2003. These hired gunmen can now be arrested by Iraqi police and prosecuted by Iraqi courts, and the agreement may even permit the Iraqi government to prosecute crimes by U.S, mercenaries that were committed before the agreement was passed by the Parliament.

-- The agreement requires the U.S. to withdraw all forces from Iraqi towns and cities by June 30, 2009. All missions by U.S. troops would require approval of the Iraqi government, and U.S. forces could not conduct any house raid or arrest any person without a warrant issued by an Iraqi court.

-- The agreement prohibits any attacks by the U.S. on other countries without the consent of the Iraqi government. Raids like the recent cross-border attack by U.S. special forces on a farm on the Syrian side of the Syria-Iraq border would be prohibited, as would any U.S. raids or attacks on Iran.

Of course, these positive provisions are meaningless if they are not enforced. There is an important role for the U.S. peace movement, working with our counterparts in Iraqi civil society, to publicize here in the U.S. any violations of the agreement by our own goverment. U.S. compliance over the short term will also be motivated by an important change won by opponents of the pact: the agreement must be submitted to the people of Iraq for approval by referendum by July of 2009. Since the U.S. government will want a "yes" vote on the agreement (which is by no means assured) it is more likely to abide closely by the agreement's provisions, at least over the next six months.

What are others in the peace movement saying about the agreement? Iraqi activist Raed Jarrar, of American Friends Service Committee, has been very critical of the process by which the agreeement was negotiated and approved, noting that the Iraqi constitution requires a two-thirds majority to ratify treaties, while Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki claimed that only a simple majority was required (it should be noted that many of Iraq's 275 members of Parliament no longer live in Iraq or attend Parliament - due to the security situation - so the 149 "yes" votes for the agreement constitute a slim majority of the total Parliament.)

Below, Raed comments on the agreement on Iranian TV. I was struck by his claim that for most Iraqis, the idea of a "complete" withdrawal (which the agreement provides) is more important that the idea of "immediate" withdrawal.

Tom Hayden has also written frequently on the agreement, taking a very critical stance. Initially, his position was that the agreement was an attempt by the Bush administration to "tie the hands" of the incoming President. He has become less emphatic on this point as successive drafts of the agreement have been released, although his most recent commentary includes the claim that, under the agreement, "President-elect Obama will be acquiescing in a doubling of his 16 month deadline for withdrawal of combat troops." It's hard to see how this is the case, given that the agreement clearly gives the U.S. the right to withdraw its troops from Iraq "at any time."

Hayden sees the agreement as a "challenge for the anti-war movement", writing, "Unless the pact is violated, it is difficult to imagine hundreds of thousands demonstrating to bring the troops home in 2010 instead of 2011," and, "... the steady return of thousands of American soldiers will send a powerful message to most Americans that the Iraq War is ending, perhaps not soon enough, but ending nonetheless."

How should the peace movement meet the challenge that Tom Hayden sees ahead? I'll write more on this subject later, but please feel free to leave your own ideas in comments.

Steve Burns is Program Coordinator of Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.

Elton Tylenda: When Will We Ever Learn?

Veterans Day one year later and Veterans for Peace members once again erected a Memorial Mile of tombstone replicas to demonstrate the growing cost in blood of our illegal wars of occupation. This year the display is along Speedway road in Forest Hill Cemetery. Walking the mile in the cold and gloom I thought of a poem learned as a child titled "In Flanders Fields." A Canadian officer wrote it in 1915 while viewing the crosses of those killed in WWI, "the great war - the war to end wars." The lines of that poem altered in my mind to: In Madison the tombstones grow amid the leaves row on row.

This year it took hundreds of feet of additional ground and tombstones to represent the wasted lives from year five of Bush's folly. In reality "the war to end wars" actually set the stage for WWII and our present wars of aggression actually generate more hatred and terror throughout the world.

The Memorial Mile is one attempt to resurrect the truth which has been lost in the false glorification and heroism of war fueled by the Pentagon's paid propagandists posing as independent analysts and journalists. There are real heroes in times of war but they go unrecognized until people can see through the "fog of war" that propaganda generates. Friedrich Sigmund-Schultze, the German who refused to be part of his country's war of aggression in 1914 and later co-founded the international peace group The Fellowship Of Reconciliation, is a good example. At the time he was berated and jailed as a traitor.

Today we have a growing number of Iraq veterans like former staff sergeant Camilo Majia who was featured in the PBS documentary, "Soldiers of Conscience." He was jailed and dishonorably discharged from the military for his heroic efforts to inform us about, and take a stand against, the slaughter of civilians and other war crimes in Iraq. As a combat soldier in Vietnam I didn't have the courage to take a stand against the brutal mistreatment and murders of civilians there. So unlike Mejia I was rewarded for being a "good" boy blindly following orders and playing it safe. In the light of Majia's heroism my medal, and honorable discharge feel like a badge of cowardice and shame. Majia and veterans like him deserve the highest honor and not just on Veterans Day. They are the conscience of our nation in these dark times.

People viewing the Memorial Mile might consider the following: the thousands of veterans who committed suicide are not represented here, nor are the hundreds of KBR and Blackwater mercenaries killed since 2001; If VFP set tombstones in the same dense pattern to represent civilians killed in Iraq, the display would run uninterrupted for over 200 miles; and active duty soldiers consider this – When I returned to Vietnam 30 yrs after the war I was asked by a woman, "why did you come half way across the world to kill us?" The reasons I would have given her 30 yrs ago have since been exposed as lies - just three remain: control of the Michelin rubber plantations, corporate profits, and permanent bases to protect corporate profits. In Iraq it will come down to control of oil, corporate profits, and permanent bases to protect corporate profits. Is that worth dying for? Or worse, is that worth killing for?

Looking around the cemetery I see thousands of flowers on hundreds of graves of soldiers killed from the civil war to the present, and Pete Seger's song replays in my head: "where have all the flowers gone?...gone to graveyards every one...when will they ever learn?" We the majority can change this with or without the support of president Obama – yes we can! WE are the ones we've been waiting for. Exposing the truth about slavery led to its end. In the true spirit of Armistice – now Veterans Day, together we can do the same about war.

Elton Tylenda is a Madison resident and member of the Clarence Kailing Vets for Peace Chapter 25.

Hello, Mr. President!

In his victory speech before hundreds of thousands of people in Chicago's Grant Park, President-elect Barack Obama said, "I will listen to you, especially when we disagree."

Peace and Justice activists seem to be taking him at his word, with a proliferation of online petitions aimed at pushing an Obama administration in a more progressive and peaceful direction.

Just Foreign Policy has a customizable e-letter which can be used to ask our new President to:

• Negotiate an agreement with the Iraqi government for the complete and timely withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, as the Iraqi government has demanded
• Establish real diplomacy with Iran, beginning with the establishment of US diplomatic representation in Iran.
• Make a fresh start on US efforts to help resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict and take seriously U.S. policy against Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
• End the embargo against Cuba and establish dialogue with Cuba's government.
• Move quickly to repair relations with Bolivia and Venezuela, negotiating the return of ambassadors.
• Put military spending on the table for cuts and consider Rep. Barney Frank's proposal for a 25% cut in military spending.

The possibility that Obama might select Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers as his own Treasury Secretary has also triggered a quick response. As chief economist for the World Bank, Summers authored a controversial memo arguing that the bank should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries, particularly "under-populated countries in Africa," which Summers described as "under-polluted." Summers added that public outrage over the heightened rates of cancer caused by his proposed dumping would be mitigated by the fact that poor people in developing countries rarely live long enough to develop cancer. Summers was also responsible for much of the deregulation of Wall Street that led to the current financial crisis.

And finally, Bonnie Block, past Chair of WNPJ, has some words for President-Elect Obama, printed recently in the Madison Capital Times:

Dear Mr. President:

I'm not going to congratulate you on being elected, because you will be taking office during what is a dark and difficult time for America. Major changes are needed, and here's what I hope you will do.

I hope you will act in a way that begins to restore trust in government as an instrument for the common good rather than for the special interests that fund campaigns and run Wall Street.

I hope that you won't lie to us -- about the reasons for going to war or about the changes that we must make to halt global warming or about the fact that unbridled capitalism has failed because its focus is on getting more instead of having enough.

I hope you will cut the military spending that now takes almost half of our federal budget, and instead use diplomacy and development assistance to create a more peaceful world. As Jeannette Rankin, the first woman member of Congress, said, "You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." Iraq is a textbook example.

I hope you will act to bring about economic justice so that the top 10 percent of Americans no longer own 70 percent of the wealth. We need social investment, fair taxation and living wages -- not bailouts for the super rich.

I hope you will work to restore America's good name by being a constructive member of the United Nations, by honoring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by supporting the Millennium Development Goals to alleviate the poverty of the 1 billion people living on less than a dollar a day.

I hope you will not pander to our fears or scapegoat any group for the difficult straits we're in. Help us become global citizens who will live with compassion for this fragile "third planet from the sun."

I hope you will appeal to our better nature so that together we can make the dream of our founders for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" a reality for everyone, not just a privileged few.

Bonnie Block
President, Dane County Chapter of the United Nations Association

Joy First: "Ghosts of War" go on trial

I was involved in a jury trial in Washington, DC October 20-24 for an action in the Senate gallery on March 12. In summary, five individuals, including me, were acquitted, and five people were found guilty. But what made this trial so unique was that the government attempted to hide illegally obtained and falsified evidence from us.

On March 12, 2008 at about 1:00 pm, ten activists went to the Senate gallery to again plead with our Senators to stop funding the war in Iraq. This action was organized by the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (www.iraqpledge.org) The activists were Maria Allwine, Linda LeTendre, Max Obuszewski, Manijeh Saba, Tim Chadwick, Ellen Barfield, Judith Kelly, Eve Tetaz, Art Landis, and myself. We each wore a t-shirt that said, “WE WILL NOT BE SILENT” covered by a jacket or shirt and carried a small 12 inch square of cheesecloth. One-by-one, eight of us stood opened our jacket, put the cloth on head and proclaimed, “I am a ghost of the Iraq war. Innocent people have suffered and died as a result of the war. Stop funding the war.” We were immediately arrested, but the Senators did hear our message. Judith and Art were not able to speak. They were arrested, for no cause, as soon as they stood up because the police believed they were part of our group. We were taken to jail and processed. Eight of the activists were held until about 1:00 am. Four of us were held for more than 30 hours, with no food or water and with painful shackles around our ankles for the last 13 hours. All ten of us were arraigned at around 7:30 pm on March 13 and we were all released at that time.

We were charged with disrupting Congress which carries a maximum of 6 months in jail. When there is the possibility of 6 months in jail, the court is required to give us a jury trial. We had a trial date set for September 29 with Judge Robert Morin. Judge Morin has a reputation for being fair and a champion of human rights. When I arrived in DC for the September 29 trial I was told that it was postponed because of scheduling problems on the part of the judge and the prosecuting attorney. So I made an unnecessary trip to Washington, DC. I believe that this type of thing is one of the many things the government does to try to make it difficult and dissuade us from continuing our dissent.

The trial was rescheduled for October 20. So, again, I flew to DC. As usual, nine out of the ten defendants made thedecision to defend ourselves, pro se, with an attorney advisor working with us. We would divide up the roles of the trial among ourselves. By going pro se, we can say more about what we were doing and why than an attorney is allowed to say in the courtroom. Ann Wilcox was helping us as our attorney advisor, and Jack Barringer helped us all, though he was there primarily as attorney for Eve Tetaz. We had been corresponding by email to plan for the trial, and on the evening before the trial was to begin, October 19, we came together to continue our planning – a process that continued throughout the five days of the trial.

Our defense was that we did not have the intention (having intent is a part of the statute that we were being charged with) of disrupting Congress. We went there to practice our First Amendment right to petition our government for a redress of grievances and to fulfill our Nuremberg obligation of speaking out when our government is acting illegally.

On Monday morning, October 20, we took care of some pre-trial matters with Judge Morin and Mr. Warren, the government prosecutor. A few months before the trial began, we received “discovery” from the government. Discovery is information that the government has and will be using as evidence during the trial. They are required by law to provide this to the defendants before the trial. It can include police reports, statements from witnesses, videos of the action etc. In the discovery packet was a report from Capitol Police officers stating that they knew we were coming to the Senate gallery on March 12. For several weeks we had been trying to get additional discovery so we could find out how the police knew we were coming, but the government denied they had any more information for us. So on Monday morning, Max again filed a motion asking for additional discovery so we could understand how the Capitol Police received the information that we were coming.

There has been a recent national news story revolving around the Maryland State Police (MSP) spy scandal, with the MSP illegally spying on peace, death penalty, and environmental groups. A few of the defendants in this trial have also been involved in this incident, being illegally spied on by the MSP. Because of this, we were suspicious about how the Capitol Police were expecting us in the gallery on March 12.

As we filed motions for additional discovery weeks before the trial, the government denied they had any more information. When we filed the motion again on Monday morning, the government again denied that they had any additional discovery to give us.

We in the halls of the courthouse most of Monday for a murder trial to conclude, but at 3:00 pm we began jury selection for our trial. After questioning the jury on everything from whether they knew any of the parties involved in the trial to whether they felt so strongly about the war that they could not render a fair verdict, we had a jury selected by 5:00 pm. Each side was able to strike three people from the pool with no questions asked. We were fairly satisfied with the final jury.

We were set to begin the trial on Tuesday morning. Before the jury was brought in, Mr. Warren, the prosecutor, said that he had just received a 26-page intelligence report from the Capitol Police for March 12, the day of our arrest. He said that he had not had time to look at it, but that he was told that there were three pages relevant to our case that he could give us. He said the rest of document contained sensitive security information and we could not have access to it. He provided us with the table of contents for the document and two pages with information on possible protesters in the Capitol area that was completely irrelevant to our action.

The trial then proceeded with the government’s case after the opening statements by both sides. Linda LeTendre gave a powerful opening statement on behalf of the defendants, asking the jury how far we would allow the door of democracy to open. It was surprising that Mr. Warren raised no objections to any part of her moving statement.

The prosecutor called four witnesses. The first two witnesses were gatekeepers in the Senate gallery. The first witness, in particular, was not a credible witness at all. He didn’t clearly answer questions, went off on tangents for the prosecutor and during the cross exam by the defense, and was extremely nervous on the stand. He talked about how dangerous he thought we were.

The third witness was a Capitol Police officer who was able to identify two of the defendants, Eve and Tim. He was the arresting officer of Eve and Tim and he was able to describe what they were doing in the gallery on March 12. The next witness was also a Capitol Police officer and the arresting officer of the other 8 defendants. He was not at all a credible witness. He claimed he remembered arresting all of us and remembered exactly what we were doing, but he did not tell the truth on the stand. It would have been physically impossible for one man to arrest each one of us as he stated. He said all of us stood up and shouted, but two of the defendants, Judith and Art, stood up and begin taking out their gauze and were arrested before they even said anything.

After the four witnesses, the government rested its case and the jury was dismissed. It was almost the end of the day and Max renewed the motion for additional discovery. In looking at the table of contents from the security report, Max thought there might be additional information in the report that would help us to understand how the Capitol Police knew we were coming. Max asked for three specific pages from the report. Judge Morin said he would quickly look through the report and determine whether we should have access to any other pages.

Judge Morin decided that we should have two additional pages and when we saw the content of the pages we were stunned and called for a short break. What we realized is that a personal email that Max sent to a small group of people on the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (NCNR) organizing list proposing the action on March 12 was in the hands of the Capitol Police. Not only that, but the document was falsified by adding a false url to make it look like it came from a public domain source.

We suspected that the Capitol Police could have received this information from the Maryland State Police. Because this was a personal email, the only way it could have been obtained was through an infiltrator being on the NCNR organizing list or through hacking into someone’s computer to gain access to personal email – both illegal activities. We held a brief meeting to discuss where to go with this, talking about asking for a dismissal, sanctions against the government, and our lack of opportunity to cross-examine government witnesses on the newly obtained documents because the government had rested its case. If we would have had the information while government witnesses were on the stand, we would have been able to question them about the documents.

We went back into the courtroom and Maria made a moving motion for judgment of acquittal noting that the government had not proved its case. The motion was denied. Court broke for the day and we had the evening to determine where to go with the surprising and chilling discovery of the illegally obtained documents.

On Wednesday morning both Jack Barringer, an attorney to Eve and advisor to the rest of us, and Max introduced a motion for dismissal based on the illegal and falsified evidence that we had received from the government the day before. The judge said that he would rule on this motion post-verdict and we would continue with the trial. It is extremely uncommon to wait until after the jury delivers a verdict to rule on a motion for dismissal. Judge Morin also gave us the option of recalling the government witnesses to cross-examine them about the document in question. After much discussion and some disagreement among defendants, we decided that we would not recall the government witnesses.

We proceeded with our case. Judith gave a beautiful opening statement, introducing our case to the jury. Under the advice of one of our attorney advisors, most of us took the stand to explain to the jury why we did what we did. The statements made by the defendants on the stand were incredibly powerful and moving and for me, helped to deepen my resolve to continue this work.

Max was our third witness and he clearly laid out the case for the jury. Under cross-examination, Mr. Warren, the prosecutor, introduced the illegally obtained document into evidence. He then questioned Max about a statement in the email where Max was discussing what “arrestees” would do after the action. Mr. Warren used this statement to try to show the jury that we knew we were breaking the law and we knew all along that we would be arrested.

Max was able to turn this around and explain that we never go to be arrested. Of course we know that we are risking arrest in our actions, but we do not believe that we are doing anything wrong and we never participate in our actions in order to be arrested. After the prosecutor brought this document to the jury, Max was able to explain to the jury exactly where this document came from and how it fell into the government’s hands in a surreptitious manner. I’m not sure if the jury totally understood the importance of this document.

Two of the defendants, Art and Judith, took the stand and testified that they did not say anything in spite of the government witness claiming they did. They both stood up in the gallery on March 12 and before they could take any action, they were arrested. Maria testified that she was not arrested by the officer who said on the stand that he arrested her.

I testified that I am a grandmother of five children, and that when you are a grandmother you think of all the children of the world. I think of how the children of Iraq are suffering and I have no choice but to do what I do. I also said that Bush is a war criminal, a statement I try to get into the court record every time I am on trial. Others made powerful statements about why they were in the Senate gallery and doing what they did. Several of us stated that it is our First Amendment right to petition our government for a redress of grievances and that it is also our Nuremberg obligation to speak out when our government is committing war crimes. Our intention was not to disrupt Congress, but to call attention to the suffering and death of so many innocent people and call on our Senators to stop funding this horrific war.

We rested our case. I gave a closing statement on behalf of the defendants and Mr. Warren gave a closing statement for the government. The judge gave instructions to the jury and they were dismissed. Maria made another motion for judgment of acquittal. Surprisingly, Judge Morin said he would also rule on this motion post-verdict. It was the end of a long day on Wednesday.

Thursday morning we gathered at the courthouse around 9:30 to wait for a verdict. The jury had a few questions throughout the day that we had to hash out between us, Mr. Warren, and Judge Morrin, but most of the day we sat and waited in the courthouse hallway.

I had been staying by myself at the Hotel Harrington. On Thursday night I woke up at 3:00 am and couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about the trial and why I was there in DC, so far away from my family for such a long period of time. The war and occupation continue and so many people continue to suffer and to die. Sometimes it seems so hopeless, but we must continue to do everything we can to try to stop the war. I called my husband Steve at 2:00 am Wisconsin time and told him I was feeling very sad and lonely thinking about all the suffering that was happening in Iraq that brought me to be where I was. He lovingly listened to me, even though I woke him from a sound sleep. He let me know that he supported me in what I was doing, but I didn’t sleep much more that night.

We returned again to the courthouse on Friday morning. At 11:00 am we found out that the jury had reached a verdict. There is a lot of tension waiting for the jury to come in and announce the verdict. I remind myself that this is not about us. It is about the almost 4200 US soldiers and the million Iraqis that have died, and the uncountable, unbelievable numbers of people that are suffering extremely as a result of the war and occupation.

The jury came in and announced the verdict. We were surprised and dismayed when they read the verdict that five of us were acquitted and five were found guilty. We didn’t understand because we all did the same thing, except for Judith and Art.

A few of us who were not found guilty went into the hallway to see if any of the jurors would be willing to talk to us about the verdict. Four of the jurors gave us information. They said that we should not have taken the stand because some of us incriminated ourselves on the stand. Judith and Art were found not guilty because they testified that they did not do anything. Maria was found not guilty because she testified that she was not arrested by the police officer who said he arrested her. Linda was found not guilty because she did not testify and so did not incriminate herself. I was found not guilty because I talked about my grandchildren and why I do this work, but did not specifically say I was in the Senate gallery on March 12 and took part in the action. I did not do this intentionally and I would have liked to remain in solidarity and have been found guilty with the others. It did not feel like a victory to be acquitted when our friends were found guilty.

The jury knew that we were all in the Senate gallery on March 12 and that we acted or tried to act. In fact, in my closing statement I talked about being in the gallery and described what we did. But the closing statement is not evidence. The jury looked only at the facts of the case presented as evidence during testimony in reaching a final verdict.

After the jury left the courtroom, Max renewed his motion for dismissal based on the fact that the government had illegally obtained and falsified evidence that was withheld from us until the government rested its case. Judge Morin set a date for a hearing on this matter for November 7. He ordered the government to produce witnesses that can testify as to where this document was obtained.

We are guessing that the Maryland State Police illegally obtained this document either through an infiltrator or through hacking into someone’s computer. Again, this document was a personal email that Max sent to a limited group of people as a proposal for our action on March 12 in the Senate gallery. It was not posted publicly. However at the end of document was a source, a false url, to make it look like it was in the public domain.

We all know and kind of joke about the government spying on us. But it is very chilling and unnerving when you discover actual proof that it is happening. We shall see what happens at the November 7 hearing. The charges against the five who were found guilty may be dismissed that day.

As I go through an experience like this trial, as difficult as it is, my commitment to doing this work deepens and I know I can do nothing else. As difficult as this is for me, I know that what I am going through is nothing compared to what the people of Iraq are suffering because of the occupation of their land by US soldiers. I know that what I am doing is nothing compared to what the family members of dead US soldiers are dealing with. We must continue to speak out and resist the illegal actions of our government. In a few days we will be electing a new president, but no matter what happens our work will not be over. Both Obama and McCain are committed to continuing the occupation of Iraq and increasing the fighting in Afghanistan. If Obama wins, we may be able to sway him, but we must take to the streets and let the new administration know that we will tolerate nothing less than working towards peace in the world.

The t-shirt I wore on March 12, the day I was arrested stated “WE WILL NOT BE SILENT”. That has become my mantra as I continue the struggle against our imperialistic government. We cannot and will not be silent as our government is engaged in illegal actions.

I will return to DC on March 9. On March 10, there will be an action at the Department of Justice organized by the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance. In September we sent a letter to Attorney General Mukasey asking him to meet with us to talk about indicting Bush and Cheney for war crimes. He has not replied to us and so on November 10 we will go to the Department of Justice and demand a meeting with Mukasey. If we are refused, some of us will be moved by conscience to take action in a peaceful manner that could lead to arrest. PLEASE JOIN US IN THIS ACTION AS WE CONTINUE TO SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER.

Joy First is a WNPJ member and representative of WNPJ member group National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, Madison Chapter.

Steve Burns: Afghan and U.S. opinion

At a recent WNPJ antiwar working group discussion a question came up about where the US public (and, even more importantly, the Afghan people) stand on the US occupation of Afghanistan.

First, let’s look at Afghan opinion. It’s not easy to do polling in Afghanistan, so the most recent poll I could find , conducted by ABC News in partnership with the BBC through “face-to-face interviews with 1,377 Afghans in each of the country’s 34 provinces” was from December 2007.

Here’s a summary:

42 percent of Afghans rate U.S. efforts in Afghanistan positively, down steeply from 68 percent in 2005 and 57 percent last year. For the first time, the survey finds that more than half of Afghans disapprove of U.S. efforts. Just 45 percent of those in Southwest Afghanistan now support the presence of NATO forces there- dramatically down from 83 percent a year ago. Seventy-one percent of Afghans support the U.S. presence in Afghanistan - and where the U.S. is seen as strongest, its approval ratings peak.

At first, this may seem contradictory – how can people oppose US “efforts”, while supporting the US “presence”? In part, this can be explained by Afghan opposition to the Taliban (Just 13 percent of those polled expressed a favorable opinion of the Taliban, and, at the time the poll was take, Afghans preferred their current government to the Taliban by 84 - 4 percent) combined with concern that an immediate US withdrawal would mean a return to Taliban rule. The Afghan people are trapped between two bad choices and see their U.S. occupiers as the “lesser of two evils.”

But opposition to the US is on an upward trend, and opposition to the Taliban is falling. Civilian casualties caused by the US bombing and shelling are one cause for this. The report states, “In the embattled Southwest… 60 percent report civilians killed or injured by U.S. or NATO forces, 55 percent report bombing or shelling by such forces, and as many, 55 percent, report civilian casualties at the hands of the Taliban, al Qaeda or foreign jihadi fighters – so people are witnessing roughly as many attacks by the U.S. as by the Taliban. Asked to name the prime cause of the violence in their country, 36 percent of Afghans name the Taliban, and an additional 22 percent cite al Qaeda or foreign jihadi fighters. Nineteen percent cite either U.S. or NATO forces. Since this poll was taken, there have been some well-publicized U.S. air attacks that have caused large numbers of civilian casualties, so we can expect the balance of public opinion in Afghanistan to have tipped even more against the U.S.

Turning to U.S. public opinion, a Sept. 2008 poll found strong opposition to proposals by both McCain and Obama to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan:

By 66-34 percent, Americans oppose proposals to send more troops to Afghanistan, either redeployed from Iraq or sent from elsewhere. Rather, Americans favor gradually withdrawing troops from both countries by 74-26 percent.

And a July 2008 poll found that 51 percent believe the U.S. must win in Afghanistan for the “War on Terror” to be a success. Although this result was reported by Fox News as “Polls Show Support for Afghanistan Mission”, I find 51% to be remarkably weak support, given the emphasis Obama has given to Afghanistan being the “right war”, while he criticizes Iraq for being the “wrong war.” All of this rhetoric has been good for only a 9 point spread in the polls, since 60 percent responded that the U.S. War on Terror could be a success without winning the war in Iraq. A better reading, I think, is that Americans are becoming more skeptical of the “War on Terror” overall, and don’t make as much of a distinction between Iraq and Afghanistan as their “leaders” do.

Finally, I recommend that anyone interested in Afghanistan read Anand Gopal’s recent report on the situation there. Gopal claims that Afghanistan did see a “surge” of U.S. forces (and U.S. violence) in 2007 (foreign troops increased by 45% in one year), and that this surge only succeeded in turning an even greater number of Afghans against the U.S., while doing little to increase security or advance reconstruction. It’s an especially important warning to hear, given that the number of U.S. troops going to Afghanistan is going to see a large increase next year, no matter who wins the election.

Marc Becker: Report from the Social Forum of the Americas in Guatemala

Thousands of Maya farmers took over Guatemala City’s main boulevard in a massive march on October 12. Men and women, some carrying months-old infants, were dressed in the colorful outfits of their local communities. They carried banners advertising the names of their Indigenous and peasant organizations, and denouncing the privatization of land and water. They shouted out slogans that popular movements are sweeping across Latin America, and that the people united will never be defeated.

This continental march on the Day of Resistance of Indigenous peoples and nationalities brought an end to the Americas Social Forum, a gathering of civil society and social movements. With the participation of more than 7,000 delegates from throughout the Americas and Europe, the 6-day event condemned corporate-led neoliberal economic policies, and pledged to build a better world.

Billed as the “forum of resistance,” the gathering intentionally culminated on the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. Elites previously celebrated October 12 as the Day of the Race, but now Indigenous peoples commemorate it as a day of resistance to exploitation and oppression.

This was the third meeting of the Americas Social Forum, and the first one in Central America. Since the World Social Forum began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, these gatherings have brought together social movements to create alternatives to corporate globalization and empire.
Although somewhat smaller than previous gatherings, the participation of 350 organizations in a wide range of events resulted in a very rich meeting.

Forum organizer Joel Suárez from the Martin Luther King Center in Havana, Cuba, noted that “we tried to have a different kind of forum, one with a strong presence of women, Indigenous peoples, young people, and peasants.” The forum, indeed, did have a large Maya and female face.

Indigenous peoples, not only from Guatemala but throughout the Americas, met to discuss issues of land and water. Blanca Chancoso, an Indigenous leader from Ecuador, proclaimed that “water is not a commodity; water is life. Land is our mother and our mother is not a commodity.”

Tom Goldtooth from the Indigenous Environmental Network based in Minnesota said that “we are witnessing the collapse of capitalism.” He came to Guatemala to join with other Indigenous peoples across that Americas in opposition to “a neoliberal system that is not working and continues to oppress our people.”

The forum came on the aftermath of voters in Ecuador approving a new constitution that embraced that country’s plurinational nature.
Ecuadorian Indigenous leader Humberto Cholango contrasted plurinationalism with pluriculturalism that tends to reinforce neoliberalism and the folklorization of Indigenous peoples.
Plurinationalism, Cholango argued, was a broad political, social, and economic concept. It means fighting for a new political process, not just for a small representation in government, but for a new concept of state structures.

In addition to plurinationalism, “sumak kawsay” or living well was a theme that ran throughout the Indigenous meetings and spread to the rest of the forum. Bolivia's foreign relations minister David Choquehuanca introduced this concept at the 2007 Indigenous summit in Guatemala. He noted that development plans look for a better life, but this results in inequality. Indigenous peoples, instead, look to how to live well, or “sumak kawsay” in Quechua. Choquehuanca emphasized the need to look for a culture of life.

As Joel Suárez noted, the forum did have more of a female face than previous meetings. Women’s groups used the forum to build their ongoing struggles. The Nobel Women’s Initiative, a group of women who have won the Nobel Peace Prize, released a statement at the forum in support of Mesoamerican feminists. They urged government “protection and respect for the rights of women and feminist leaders.” They expressed concern for the deteriorating situation of millions of women in Central America, particularly in regards to attacks on abortion rights and feminicide.

The Nobel Women’s Initiative stated that Another World Is Possible, “and that world must include gender equality and a life free of violence for all women.” Women, they said, “are a central part of our dreams and actions to achieve a better world.”

As a movement that emerged out of the global south, the United States has always played a relatively marginal role in the social forum process. Grassroots Global Justice has worked harder than any other organization to bridge that gap. GGJ was formed in 2002 as a vehicle to build solidarity with social movements around the world, and to develop joint strategies to confront neoliberalism and the conditions people face. They brought an energetic delegation of several dozen activists from the U.S. to the forum.

The forum helped connect broader issues to communities of struggle in the U.S. Maria Poblet, from Saint Peter’s Housing Committee said that “as an organization that works with immigrant Latinos, we have come here to Guatemala to be face to face with the conditions that cause people to migrate.” She was inspired by her experiences at the forum, and in particular the spirit of resistance in Guatemala in the face of extreme violence and repression. “Here we are in Guatemala that presents to us the challenge saying after 200 thousand people disappeared from our country and were killed, we are organizing this forum and we are inviting you to participate,” Poblet says.

Marc Becker is with WNPJ member group of Community Action on Latin America. Mark's photos of the Social Forum can be seen here...

Janet Parker: Celebrating the survival of indigenous people, while standing up for immigrants

All across the country, people are tuned in to political and economic events this month and the stakes are high. October is a time for looking into our nation's history also, as the holiday formerly known as Columbus Day approaches. Last fall, the Dane County Board voted unanimously to pass a bill transforming Columbus Day into Indigenous People's Day. As the bill's author, Ashok Kumar, stated, "To me, Columbus Day is a celebration of occupation and the genocidal massacre of the indigenous population here. We're trying to replace that sad chapter of American history and celebrate the survival of Indians."

I want to welcome you to our Dane County celebration of the day at the Capitol Square this Sunday afternoon. This weekend, peace and immigrant rights activists across the country will join together to observe Indigenous People's Day. Rallies will call for an end to the brutal occupation of Iraq as well as human rights for all, including an end to the war here at home on immigrants. In Dane County, at the Capitol, on what promises to be a beautiful warm and sunny afternoon, we will celebrate the survival of indigenous people while we dance and listen to Mexican folk music performed by K-Libre Sierreño, from Chicago. The Immigrant Workers Union is the sponsor, with many other local groups supporting.

We call on our next president to act quickly in the first 100 days of the new administration to bring the troops home from Iraq and to reform our broken immigration policy to create a legal path to citizenship for immigrant workers.

Every day there are on average 29,000 people held in U.S. jails because of their immigration status. Many of these are people who migrated from Mexico and Central America, driven by poverty created by NAFTA and other trade agreements that give Walmart and other multinationals every right to move freely to do business across borders, but deny individual people that right. These lands were conquered by Columbus, but they belonged to indigenous peoples for millennia. Some quite reasonably argue that the borders that have been drawn on their lands should not stop them from migrating for survival.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, our military is occupying a country against the clearly expressed will of the people and the legislature, where multiple times bills have been passed by a large margin asking the U.S. to remove all troops. The colonial rule and extraction of mineral wealth that is going on now in Iraq parallels Columbus' entrance to the Americas five centuries ago. In Iraq the conquest was called "liberation" while here it was called "discovery." We call on our government to stop its shameful occupation that has cost so many lives, and we demand peace and human, civil, and workers' rights.

Let's spare a thought for the victims of war and occupation, and together let's call for change. Please join me at the rally and celebration this Sunday at the Capitol, from 3 – 6 pm. Details are here...

Steve Burns: Starting from “No!” A citizen's guide to crisis response

It's been encouraging to see how many commentators – from Democracy Now's Amy Goodman to the Daily Show's Jon Stewart – have made the connection between the scare tactics used by the Bush administration to sell its Wall Street bailout plan and the scare tactics used by the same administration to sell the war on Iraq. In these dark times, I take this as a small ray of hope, an indication that Naomi Klein may be right when she suggests that crises - or “shocks” - are an effective tool for powerholders* who wish to work their will on a reluctant public, but that societies subjected to repeated shocks can become more “shock-resistant” as the public learns to see through and work around the shock tactics of their leaders.

In the end, Bush's Wall Street bailout has gone through with some modifications (like giving the public equity shares in the companies that are bailed out). Economist Nouriel Roubini, who accurately predicted the crisis when others were claiming the “fundamentals of our economy are sound”, describes the bailout as "a disgrace" and "a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer.”

So we can't say that the American people's shock-resistance has reached the point where we can actually thwart - or even significantly alter - the plans of the powerholders. Nevertheless, eight years of the Bush administration have provided us all with a useful (if expensive) course in government shock tactics and how best to resist them. We should be codifying these lessons, so we have them handy in the next crisis. In that spirit, I offer a short list of rules:

1) Watch out for power grabs
The first reponse by powerholders to any crisis will be to act to increase their own power (for the good of the nation, of course). You saw the 9/11 attacks as an unprecedented tragedy, but Dick Cheney saw them as an unprecedented opportunity to accumulate more power in his own office and the Executive branch – power that he felt had been illegitimately taken by Congress in the preceding thirty years. In the same way, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson saw the mortgage crisis as an opportunity to gain powers that no Treasury Secretary has ever had, including the right to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of public money with no oversight and no possibility of legal review afterwards.
All powerholders have plans for increasing their own power in a desk drawer waiting for the "right” moment. For this reason, the best response to the first plan that comes out the door is always “no.”

2) You will be lied to
In the first days of a crisis, the government will hold a monopoly on information, as the mass media rush to “respected” authority figures for their take on the crisis. Most of these people will be the same people who participated in the creation of the crisis, either through action or inaction. Dissident voices will be absent from the “debate.” Trust nothing you hear in the first weeks, and be especially wary if there appears to be a “consensus” about what to do.

3) Don't defer to the “experts”
In any real crisis, their will be disagreement among the experts about what to do. This disagreement will be hidden from you in the early days, so powerholders will be able to claim that they are merely acting on expert advice, when they have, in fact, been engaged in a sophisticated process of “expert-shopping” to find the experts who will back them up while discarding experts with alternative views or plans. When asked, “Shouldn't we listen to the experts?” it's best to respond, “Which experts?”

4) Stall for time
Powerholders will want to precipitate a rush to judgement in the early days while they still hold a monopoly on information and proposals. Delaying the “solution” will help to create a space for alternative experts and solutions to come forward. Every additional day is a victory for the citizenry, because it allows more time for power grabs to be exposed and for self-interested proposals to be rejected. More time also increases the number of people who will be asking these questions: “How have others dealt with similar crises? What worked and what didn't?”

5) Refuse to be silenced by “What's your alternative?”
In a crisis, citizens often hesitate to reject the proposals put forward by powerholders because they don't know what to do themselves. Aren't we being unreasonable if we oppose the powerholders plans without offering a plan of our own? And since I lack the necessary expertise to create such a plan – or even to know which plan might be best – isn't it best for me to just stay out of the matter entirely?
But this approach misunderstands our role as citizens of a flawed quasi-democracy. Our primary role is not to spend our days roaming the internet, conducting research in an attempt to craft the best “solution.” In a crisis, the most useful thing the non-expert citizen can do is to slow the decision-making process down, so that the powerholders proposals can be subjected to the necessary scrutiny and people who really do know more about the problem than the rest of us can come forward with alternative proposals. Waiting until you yourself know what to do simply removes you from the game in the most critical early days, and having the best plan in the world won't help if the decision has already been made.

For these reasons, the most important demands that citizens can make in a crisis are not demands for specfic policies (which the powerholders will always ignore anyway) but demands for time, transparency and democracy. Time allows popular opposition to be marshalled and alternative solutions to be brought forward, transparency allows the self-interested proposals of the powerholders to be exposed and defeated, and democracy corrects the imbalance of power that makes crises so attractive to powerholders in the first place.

Focusing on these three demands rather than specific policy demands places the citizens on firmer ground, where they can assert their demands with confidence. One doesn't have to be an economist to know that a deal rushed through in a few days in a closed-door process by the same people who caused the crisis is going to be a bad deal. Many Americans recognized this basic fact in the first days of the recent crisis. If they weren't joined by enough of their fellow citizens to create the kind of popular uprising that could reassert the public interest over the self-interest of Wall Street insiders, we shouldn't be surprised. One phrase we've heard repeatedly over the last week is "crisis of confidence", in reference to the loss of trust in investment banks and the pieces of paper that they had gotten so rich promoting. But there's another "crisis of confidence" we should be addressing: the loss of confidence among "ordinary" citizens that they can play any meaningful role in decision-making when they are confronted with policy "debates" featuring derivatives of mortgaged-back securities or shipments of Uranium ore from Niger. I offer the five rules above in an attempt to address this more fundamental crisis of confidence, confident that we will have many opportunities in the near future to test them out.

*For the sake of brevity, I'm following the terminology of social-movement theorist Bill Moyer, who used the term "powerholders" rather than the clunkier "those in power". Marxists might want to substitute the term "ruling class."

UPDATE:
Here's economist Dean Baker talking about the bailout:

Steve Burns: Stop the Bailout

In her book Shock Doctrine, journalist Naomi Klein explains how those in power use crises - whether economic or military - to suspend the normal democratic process and push through policies that they could never get in "normal" times. It's a warning we should all heed today, as the Bush administration rushes to push through a bailout of investment banks that made bad investments in mortgage-backed securities.

It's a routine the Bush-Cheney (or is it Cheney-Bush?) administration knows well. While most Americans saw the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an unprecedented tragedy, Dick Cheney saw a tremendous opportunity for a massive expansion of executive power. Some of that power-grab went on behind closed doors, but when Congressional approval was needed, Congress acted as a virtual rubber-stamp. In the Senate, only Wisconsin's Russ Feingold voted against the Patriot Act.

And, when genuine crises couldn't be found, the Bush administration was adept at creating phony crises. In the Fall of 2002, we were told that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was too urgent to allow any delay in action. The government must act, we were told, and it must act now. As usual, Congress complied, and handed Bush the authority he needed to take us into a war that cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

This history must be foremost in our minds as we consider the Bush administration's demand for $700 billion of our money, along with the right to spend that money with no Congressional oversight at all. Predictably, Democratic leaders in Congress seem eager to comply, and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi has promised the Bush administration a vote on the bill before Congress goes on recess at the end of the week.

If the United States were a functioning democracy we would expect Congress to suspend its recess and hold full public hearings to drag the CEO's of every one of these investment banks up to Capitol hill to explain their reckless investment decisions. Government regulators would be called too, to explain why they looked the other way while this rickety financial house of cards was constructed. Members of Congress would be also called before the cameras to explain their 1999 vote to repeal the Glass-Steagall act. Alongside them, sweating and fidgeting before the hot lights, we would see the main proponents of that disastrous decision to de-regulate the financial industry: former President Clinton and then-Treasury-secretary Robert Rubin, now the main economic adviser to Barack Obama.

There is much that could be said about the financial crisis and the Bush administration's proposed bailout. Progressive economist Dean Baker lays out a response that protects us from economic collapse without rewarding corporate criminals. But the first thing that must be said in response to the Bush plan is "No!" If we can't rouse ourselves to say at least that much to our representatives in Congress, then our country will head further towards bankruptcy - and not just economic bankruptcy, but bankruptcy of the very idea of democratic governance. The "experts" will be in charge, and the Congressional vote that may take place this week will be a mere formality.

In the documentary film Body of War, we follow the story of Tomas Young, an Iraq war veteran paralyzed from the chest down by a sniper's bullet. The filmmakers cut back and forth between Tomas, struggling to live with his disability, and the Congressional debate and vote that sent Tomas and hundreds of thousands of other young Americans into that war. As the "yes" votes roll in, the camera cuts to West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd. His hands shaking, the 87 year old Senator holds his pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution aloft, and cries, "Stop! Don't rush this through!" That's pretty good advice for us to listen to today.

Steve Burns: Two wars not enough?

Updated 9/15 (updates below)

Vice President Cheney was in Georgia this week, offering $1 billion in aid and repeating a long-standing U.S. commitment to push for NATO membership for the country.

Georgia had recently been overrun by Russian troops after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had sent his own army into the territory of South Ossetia, a region on the border between Russia and Georgia that had maintained its autonomous status since the last armed conflict over the territory in 1991.

Now that his army has been routed, it's clear the Saakashvili's attack was a disastrous blunder, and it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking. Saakashvili was elected on a nationalist program of "taking back" the autonomous territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which many Georgians believe should be part of Georgia, but his attempt to actually follow through on this promise was reckless in the extreme, and thousands of people in both South Ossetia and Georgia have paid for his recklessness with their lives.

Which brings us back to Cheney and his eagerness to push NATO membership for Georgia. Expanding NATO right up to the borders of Russia has been a dream of Cheney and his fellow "neoconservatives" since the fall of the Soviet Union. If they had gotten their way, and Georgia had been a member of NATO at the time of Saakashvili's attack on South Ossetia and the resulting Russian counter-attack, the United States and other NATO members could have found themselves facing a treaty obligation to come to Georgia's defense. Instead of being entangled in two disastrous wars - in Iraq and Aghanistan - the U.S. could have found itself in three wars, one them with Russia, a nuclear-armed former superpower.

But did that prospect give Cheney, or anyone else in our Executive branch, cause to rethink the "expand NATO" program? Of course not. Three trillion dollars and more than four thousand American lives and more than a million Iraqi and Afghan lives squandered in our current wars produced absolutely no hesitancy to push our country into a possible third war.

But Cheney doesn't appear to be alone in his lack of concern about the potential for engaging our country in yet another war. Both John McCain and Barack Obama were quick to take sides in a squabble halfway around the world over a territory whose name most Americans cannot pronounce. McCain was the most bellicose, saying, "we can't turn a blind eye to aggression and international lawlessness that threatens the peace and stability of the world and the security of the American people", but Obama was not far behind, promising to "renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can curb Russian aggression."

For both candidates, a decades-long ethnic conflict whose most recent flare-up was actually prompted by Georgian aggression gets reduced to a cartoonish need to stand up to "Russian aggression."

And, while McCain assured us that he would "work to establish good relations with Russia so we need not fear a return of the Cold War", both his statements and Obama's made clear that cold-war habits die hard.

There really are no brakes on the American drive to empire. No matter how great a price we pay to purchase it, experience teaches our rulers nothing. And let's be clear that this is really a problem - a compulsion, really - that infects our ruling elites, and not the public at large. Although it's a little-reported fact, 76% of Americans believe the U.S. should not be playing the role of global policeman. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether "policeman" is an accurate description of our role in the world, even when our role of meddling in others affairs is put in that benign light, less than one-quarter of Americans think we should be playing that role.

And yet, despite this overwhelming consensus on the part of the American people that we should be less involved in disputes like the one over South Ossetia, there exists an iron-clad bipartisan consensus among our rulers in Washington that we must come to the rescue of plucky little Georgia, no matter the cost.

In the end, I suppose constraints will have to be imposed on us from the outside. Perhaps cooler heads in Europe might impede the U.S. drive to expand NATO. Perhaps our foreign creditors, who now support the mountain of debt produced by our "all war, all the time" policies, may finally call in their chips and tell us that they're not willing to finance yet another military adventure. We should all pray that this happens, and happens soon, because this election year is showing us that our political system is not capable of self-restraint.

UPDATE: I'm shocked to learn that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times agrees with me.

UPDATE II: In an interview with ABC news' Charles Gibson, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sara Palin advocated NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, while admitting that this may obligate the U.S. to go to war with Russia:

When Gibson said if under the NATO treaty, the United States would have to go to war if Russia again invaded Georgia, Palin responded: "Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help."

UPDATE III: Ever heard of the 1994 NATO Participation Act? Or the 2002 Gerald B. H. Solomon Freedom Consolidation Act? Both of these bills, passed without debate by both houses of Congress, signed into law by a Democratic President (Bill Clinton) and a Republican President (George W. Bush) made it the policy of the United States to treat "countries emerging from communist domination" as de facto allies, even though no formal decision had been made on their applications to the NATO club - while also pushing for full NATO membership for those countries. The bills also allowed for weapons sales and the stationing of U.S. military advisors in countries right up to the Russian border. The step-by-step expansion of the U.S. empire proceeds apace, with no need to consult - or even inform - the public. A "bipartisan consensus" ensures there is no debate about this extremely risky program of expansion, and a compliant media ensures the public is in the dark, at least until we're dragged into another war.

Read more...

Steve Burns: Out of Iraq in 2011?

UPDATE: Journalist Raed Jarrar has posted a draft of the Bush-Maliki agreement on his blog. You can read Raed's comments here...
Read the text of the draft agreement here...

The US and Iraqi governments have announced an agreement for a complete withdrawal of all US forces by the end of 2011. As part of the withdrawal plan, the agreement also calls for US troops to withdraw from Iraqi cities by June of next year.

What does this mean? Has the main goal of the U.S. peace movement, a complete withdrawal from Iraq, been achieved? The response from national peace organizations has been muted. A survey of the websites of national peace organizations found no commentary (so far) on the agreement.

In July, when the outcome of the negotiations was less certain, Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies posted a report on the negotiations in which she called into question the sincerity of Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s demand for withdrawal of U.S. troops. She wrote: “…regardless of whether Maliki used the clearer "timetable" or the ambiguous "time horizon" language, what is clear is that a real, complete withdrawal of U.S. troops would likely mean the end of his power. It is unlikely that is really what he wants.”

But has the balance of power shifted since then? The Iraqi army has been increasingly assertive – and increasingly independent of its US mentors – in recent months, and Maliki may no longer feel the need for US military support to maintain his hold on power. If so, he may now see the U.S. as a source of interference in his own efforts to consolidate power. Recently, for example, the U.S. and Iraqi governments have come into conflict about U.S. support for Iraqi “Awakening Councils”, composed of predominantly Sunni former members of the insurgency. Along with payments from the U.S. of $300 a month, the members of these groups were promised jobs in the Iraqi army. But now, the Iraqi government has been targeting their members for arrest, forcing them to disarm, and barring them from the army.

A newly assertive Iraqi army may not need as many Americans kicking down the doors of Iraqi homes and placing sandbags on the heads of the people they find inside – preferring to do the job themselves – but they will certainly want to maintain access to America’s “shock and awe” airpower. So an agreement for U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities will be a positive development in some respects (for example, we might see fewer Iraqi taxicabs run over by tanks just for fun) but it also likely means a huge escalation in the use of aerial bombing. And without U.S. troops on the ground to direct the fire, with the Maliki government able to call in airstrikes – unchecked - whenever it deems necessary, we could see the U.S. Air Force turned into even more of a tool for sectarian warfare.

Then there’s the matter of the timetable. December 2011 is more than twice as long as Obama’s proposed 16 month withdrawal timetable, but Obama is only calling for a partial withdrawal that would leave a “residual force” of US troops in Iraq, while the Iraqi government appear to be calling for a complete withdrawal. In any event, this is a much longer withdrawal timetable than the one demanded by a large majority of the Iraqi people, 70% of whom want all U.S. troops out in a year or less.

Will the Bush-Maliki agreement go forward? An AFP report on the agreement states that “The [Iraqi] parliamentary stamp is a crucial legal requirement,” and quotes Iraqi parliament speaker Mahmud Mashhadani saying “Iraq's lawmakers would never endorse it in its current form.” If the Iraqi parliament refuses to approve a plan that calls for a three-year withdrawal timetable, what happens then? The feverish negotiations between the Bush and Maliki administrations are motivated by the knowledge that U.S. forces remain in Iraq under a year-to-year mandate from the UN Security Council which expires in December and is not likely to be renewed. Failure to come to an agreement by the end of the year means that U.S. troops remain in Iraq without any legal basis for the occupation. Not that international law has ever been an impediment to the U.S. doing what it wants, but this is a complication the U.S. would prefer to avoid, if possible.

Knowing that the clock is ticking on the U.S. occupation, nationalist members of the Iraqi parliament may decide that it’s in their interest to delay ratification until after the U.S. election, to see if they can force a better deal out of the next administration. (As an aside, the same article says that “U.S. lawmakers would not be asked to approve the pact,” showing that while Iraqi lawmakers insist on their right to ratify agreements their government makes with a foreign government, our own Congress doesn’t see a need to act as a similar check on our own imperial President.)

All of this presents a significant challenge to the US peace movement. If the U.S. and Iraqi governments are able to come to an agreement on a complete withdrawal – but not on a timetable to our liking – then our position gets reduced to: “Yes, but.” As in: “Yes, but it’s not happening fast enough.” It may prove to be difficult to motivate people to take to the streets over the difference between a one-year withdrawal plan and a two-year withdrawal plan, especially if U.S. troops have been withdrawn to bases and are experiencing greatly reduced casualty rates.

This recalls President Nixon’s “Vietnamization” plan, which combined a partial withdrawal of U.S. ground troops with a huge escalation in bombing, and massive transfers of weapons to the South Vietnamese military. There’s no denying that this had a dampening effect on domestic opposition to the war. But there’s a major difference this time around: Vietnamization was bound to fail, because the U.S. was propping up a puppet regime that had no ability to stand on its own. Maliki’s government, with its base among Iraq’s majority Shiite population, is no mere puppet of the U.S.

It now seems clear that Iraq won’t end as Vietnam did, with Americans and their collaborators being plucked from the roof of the U.S. embassy by helicopters. Instead, our occupation of Iraq may end without a clear defeat for the US, but with an outcome that could hardly be considered a victory, either. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, the neoconservatives in the Bush administration had dreams of a strong US ally in the Middle East, giant and permanent U.S. military bases, and a privatized “free market” economy that would be a model to other Middle Eastern states. If Maliki gets his way, the U.S. will have failed to achieve all of these goals, and at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of (U.S.) lives.

Both Iraq war supporters and opponents of the war will try to put their own spin on the outcome, of course. No amount of positive spin is going to make the American people eager to repeat the Iraq experience, but a key question for the peace movement is the extent to which the millions of Americans who marched against the war will see their own actions as resulting in the end of the war. When U.S. forces finally left Vietnam, millions of Americans, mostly young people, felt that their actions had played a role in ending the war. These young people took that sense of confidence in their own ability to effect change into other struggles for social and environmental justice, and many of them still constitute the core of the peace movement today. If our occupation of Iraq ends with an orderly withdrawal resulting from a signed contract between U.S. and Iraqi elites, will the rank and file of today’s peace movement feel they had any role in the outcome? Future struggles for peace and justice depend on the answer to that question.

Steve Burns: Why do we have war instead of peace?

It's a big question, I know, but I'm inspired to ask big questions but the recent release of a War Resister's League report, “Where to from here?” which attempts to asses the state of the peace movement based on interviews with 90 peace and justice organizers.

One quote in particular caught my eye. Patrick Reinsborough, of the smartMeme Strategy and Training Project said, “...the antiwar movement doesn't have many staffing opportunities. What happens then is nonprofits working on other issues scoop up the best organizers and activists. That is a real consideration for training and leadership development in the antiwar movement. It's different if you're training college activists who have an orientation towards worker's rights. There's a very good chance that the best, high-capacity folks are going to get jobs with labor unions if they want to. It's the same if they have an environmental orientation. That's just not the case with antimilitarism work.”

I think this is an essential point. Why do we have war instead of peace? Because making war is the job of very many people and making peace is the job of very few people. The U.S. has about 1.5 million active-duty military personnel, and another 2.2 million are employed in manufacturing the equipment and weapons needed to fight wars. And, of course, those weapons manufacturers employ thousands of lobbyists to represent their interests. On the peace side of the scale, add up all the half-time and even quarter-time jobs in all the peace organizations in the country, and you'd get... a thousand people, perhaps? United for Peace and Justice, the nation's largest peace coalition, employs about a half-dozen people on staff.

The fundamental source of this imbalance is that the benefits of war-making are direct and easy to identify, while the benefits of peace are diffused among the entire population. The company that makes billions selling helicopter gunships is highly motivated to allocate a few percent of that income to a crew of lobbyists to ensure the contracts keep coming, while the parent whose child isn't killed in the war that doesn't happen never thinks to write a check to a peace movement that prevented the war from happening (assuming for the sake of argument, that a peace movement could actually prevent a war from happening).

None of this is meant to disparage all of the amazing work that's done for no pay at all by the millions of Americans who struggle for peace. But it stands to reason that if peace-making is something we fit in between our other commitments, while war-making is something that millions are allowed to devote their full energies to, then the result is likely to be more war and less peace. And anyone who's ever looked around the room at a peace-movement organizing meeting and seen our characteristic mix of college students and retirees can tell that there's a “missing generation” - people at their peak of ability and energy, off doing what they need to do to raise and support a family.

Must it be always this way? If our society was capable of a rational allocation of resources, certainly not. The Iraq war has been estimated to cost our country at least three trillion dollars before it ends. Could a million paid peace organizers, placed in a million communities in our country, have organized enough opposition to defeat the Congressional vote that sent us into that war? If we paid those million peace organizers a million dollars each for their work, we'd still have saved $2 trillion. That's a bargain, by anyone's standard.

But cost-benefit analysis, however persuasive, won't create peace jobs from thin air. One answer, championed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, is the creation of a Department of Peace. However laudable this may sound, there are some obvious problems with this idea. Since it seems to be the business of our government to go to war, it should be the business of peace activists to stand in opposition to the government. Could we expect government employees to do this? And what about the risk of creating a deadening “peace bureaucracy” that squeezes the vibrant life and grassroots initiative from the peace movement we've got now?

I have a different idea. It's a crazy idea, but I ask you to hear me out. Imagine that 2% of the adults in Anytown USA, a small town of about 10,000 people, decide that they're so fed up with endless war that they're willing to take a radical step. These 100 people agree to donate 1% of their annual income to a common fund, and with this money, they hire a full-time organizer. They're so committed to this idea that they also agree to attend a weekly meeting at which the paid organizer reports on the state of the peace movement and the work of their newly-created peace organization. In fact, they're so committed to peace that they decide that they will even bring their children to these weekly meetings, in order to pass on their desire for peace to the next generation.

What have I just described? Would it help if I added that the weekly meeting of this peace organization takes place on Sunday morning? Yes, this model for creating an army of a million paid peace organizers is so impractical that a million communities in our country make it happen every week. It's your local church, and it provides a powerful antidote to the argument that “we don't have the resources” to create real, family-sustaining jobs in the peace movement. Go into the poorest neighborhood in Milwaukee, for example, and you'll find a storefront church sustained entirely by the donations of its members, working-class folks who are donating much more than the 1% that our imaginary Anytown residents are donating.

No, the peace movemen can't offer you eternal salvation in return for your 1%, but we can offer some benefits in the here-and-now that your local church can't match, like a country with the resources to provide universal health care and a free college education, and thousands of not-dead young people at home instead of in Arlington National Cemetery.

But aren't the Anytown residents taking the easy way out? Aren't they simply fobbing off their peace work on a paid servant? I think the opposite is more likely to happen: with a paid organizer to make the phone calls, reserve the room, arrange the meeting with the Congressman, our Anytown peace activists can leverage their efforts, and would likely become more active. Besides, wouldn't people who had committed a substantial amount of money to a peace organization be willing to do more to ensure that it was successful? Don't church members do more charitable and volunteer work precisely because there's a paid minister who's able to encourage, direct, and focus their efforts?

Often, those of us in the peace movement argue that people need to “step it up” in terms of their willingness to sacrifice for peace. Usually this argument is made by the advocates of direct action, who call on us to step outside our legally-permitted-march comfort zone and risk arrest at a defense plant or Senator's office. But I think of “step it up” in terms of this question: Do we want peace enough to do what your average Methodist or Episcopalian does?