blogs

By David Swanson

Tonight, Monday, October 6, 2008, a group of citizens in Charlottesville, Va., organized by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice, will attend the City Council's meeting to urge the Council to take up at its November meeting a resolution opposing a U.S. attack on the nation of Iran. Some members of the Council and of the public can be expected to respond with some well-intended but confused reasons to resist taking such a step. In hopes of clarifying the issue, let me suggest briefly three things: 1.-Why the United States should not attack Iran; 2.-Why there is a serious danger that the United States will attack Iran; 3.-Why Charlottesville City Council should pass a resolution opposing such an attack.

By David Swanson

Why would anyone phone the United States and ask for lawyers, guns, and money? Primarily because, other than bad movies, that's most of what the United States produces. What else could you phone home for if you wanted to? We produce weapons and movies about weapons and weapons that were in movies about weapons, and so on.

MORE BELOW

Tonight, Wednesday, September 24th, you can speak live on the radio or submit your questions through an online chat room for Elliott Adams, the president of Veterans for Peace and one of five veterans who yesterday climbed a 9-foot fence and occupied a 35-foot high ledge to raise a 22x8 foot banner stating, “DEFEND OUR CONSTITUTION. ARREST BUSH AND CHENEY: WAR CRIMINALS!”

Adams was also the only spokesman for any grassroots organization who testified at the six-hour non-impeachment impeachment hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on July 25, 2008, at which he delivered the most powerful testimony and was not asked a single follow-up question:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/35043

About 20 people held vigil in front of the courthouse on the sleepy Main Street of Louisa, VA for hours as the judge waded through dozens of traffic violations and other petty offenses. When it was finally time for the trial of three anti-nuclear activists arrested while protesting plans to build a new nuclear reactor in central Virginia, he had little patience for listening to their motivations. Shutting down all attempts to mount a defense justifying their actions as necessary to prevent a far greater crime, the judge found all three guilty. After three eloquent sentencing statements, he imposed the following penalties:

Paxus Calta - 30 days in jail, 15 suspended Sue Frankel-Streit and Spot Etal - $1,000 fine, $700 suspended, the rest payable through 42 hours of community service All three are banned from the property of Dominion Power for two years

Read more: www.thepeopleunited.org

By David Swanson

Excerpted from remarks at an Augusta Coalition for Peace and Justice event at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, September 23, 2008.

Have you heard the latest news? John McCain is now in favor of regulating Wall Street. But, of course, local son Woodrow Wilson was reelected as a peace candidate. And candidate George W. Bush was opposed to nation building. Now he's borrowing money from China to build a nation in Iraq and another one here in the United States, except that Iraq has not so much been built as irrevocably destroyed, and nobody seems terribly confident that bailing out Wall Street will work.

Why Can't They Count Our Votes?

More Below.

MORE BELOW

By David Swanson

The Miller Center on Public Affairs at the University of Virginia has invited a war criminal to speak on October 27, 2008, on the topic of "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism." Georgetown University employs the very same war criminal as a "Professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy." Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government has made him a "Belfer Center Visiting Scholar." And to Stanford University he's a "Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution." The man's name is Douglas Feith.

By David Swanson

On Monday morning at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, Jane Mayer, New Yorker reporter and author of "The Dark Side," lavishly praised John McCain for passing a legislative ban on torture. She did so in a town-hall Q and A full of lots of very useful insights. And much later in the discussion she did acknowledge that McCain opposes habeas corpus and supports the use of certain "interrogation techniques" by the CIA.

By David Swanson

Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., have edited a new collection of writings called "We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now." Read it and weep … and cheer. Weep because we've been lied into wars in very similar ways for two centuries and have had to discover the deception anew each time. Cheer because some people have been there to denounce the lies on the spot every time, and their ranks have steadily grown.

By David Swanson

Every time there's a new Cheney-Bush scandal, every time we discover that Dick Cheney lied to Dick Armey, or another top Iraqi informed the White House there were no weapons, or another missile kills another large family in Afghanistan, or the wars in Pakistan and Iran get out of control before we'd realized they'd begun, or we discover that Cheney's lawyer signed the Attorney General's name to an authorization to search Democrats' body cavities, or a chunk of the North Pole floats past the Republican convention, every single time this happens … there's a moment of thrilling fantasy in which we can imagine that the American people or their so-called representatives in Washington will snap out of their hypnosis and ship the whole damn kleptocracy to the Hague in wooden crates.

Ann Wright is a retired U.S. Army colonel and retired official of the U.S. State Department, who publicly resigned the day the United States invaded Iraq. She has led the peace movement since that day. She is the author, with Susan Dixon, of DISSENT: Voices of Conscience: Government Insiders Speak Out Against the War in Iraq."

Emma's Revolution is the duo of award-winning, activist musicians, Pat Humphries & Sandy O.

Showtime: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - 8:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Eastern.

Go to http://www.thepeoplespeakradio.net/listen-live to listen live.

You'll find instructions there to enter a paltalk chat room where you can post questions.

You can also phone in and ask your questions on the air. Call in tollfree from anywhere in the United States or Canada at 888-228-4494 or anywhere else in the world at 877-489-6350.

By David Swanson

Remarks on September 14, 2008, at Justice Robert Jackson Conference on Planning for the Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals, Andover, Massachusetts.

I want to thank Dean Lawrence Velvel and also Sherwood Ross and Jeff Demers for putting this event together.

These remarks are posted at the top of AfterDowningStreet.org in a version that has links to materials and action pages that I reference. So you don't have to catch everything I say.

I want everyone in this room to please do something before going to sleep tonight. Take a look at Alan Dershowitz's op-ed in Friday's Wall Street Journal and send a letter to the editor responding to it in your own words. It can be a sentence or three paragraphs. It should be polite and include all of your contact info. You'll find links to the op-ed and the Email address in the version of these remarks at the top of AfterDowningStreet.org. Dershowitz thinks the rule of law is no more important than preventing a situation in which a prosecution results from an election, so he wants Obama not to prosecute. But he could have had both that result and the rule of law by asking Mukasey or McCain to prosecute. Dershowitz also suggests that the crimes of Bush and Cheney, IF there have been any, are no worse than those of any previous administration.

Click on the image at left to find out about a national effort to knock on doors on September 20th and talk about peace. In this area, you can take the opportunity to invite people to our event on September 22nd with Ann Wright and Emma's Revolution!

By David Swanson

In defense of that claim, I offer this latest evidence.

Click for PDF flyer. -- Click for large image.

Ann Wright will speak and Emma's Revolution will play in an event beginning at 7 p.m., Monday, Sept. 22, 2008, at the Albemarle County Office Building, 401 McIntire Rd., Charlottesville, Va. The event is free and sponsored by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice, which operates on your generous DONATIONS.

Ann Wright is a retired U.S. Army colonel and retired official of the U.S. State Department, who publicly resigned the day the United States invaded Iraq. She has led the peace movement since that day. She is the author, with Susan Dixon, of DISSENT: Voices of Conscience: Government Insiders Speak Out Against the War in Iraq."

Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris accepts Code PINK thank you for signing National Mayors' Resolution and also signs the Don't Attack Iran petition that we are sending to the City Council.

For more information and additional images, see CVille CodePink.

Join the movement against Sexual Assault in Charlottesville and the surrounding region!

WHAT: The Sexual Assault Resource Agency will provide a 40-hour training this fall for community volunteers to serve on our 24-hour hotline.

WHEN: September 30th through November 13th | Tues/Thurs evenings

CONTACT: Laurie Jean at CrisisServicesCoordinator@SexualAssaultResources.org or 434.295.7273

By David Swanson

There are still people alive in the United States who support the continued occupation of Iraq, and in many cases the same people are open to supporting an aggressive attack on Iran. While they inhabit a very different worldview from my own, they are able to recognize basic facts if made aware of them. If you should meet one of these war supporters, I would recommend making them aware of the two most jarring facts least likely to fit with their preconceptions. One of these facts became known to a certain segment of the population in February 2006, but remains unknown to most consumers of American news media. The other fact was just revealed this month and is certain to remain equally unknown.

Agenda
STATE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTEE
DMHMRSAS
Region Ten CSB Administrative Offices
Large Conference Room
502 Old Lynchburg Road
Charlottesville, VA 22903
August 1, 2008
10:00 a.m. Special Meeting
Welcome / Call to Order
Variance
Western State Hospital
12 VAC 35-115-110, use of Seclusion, Restraint and Time Out
Appeal
Western State Hospital - CC v Jack Barber

By Texas Explorer, Democratic Underground

Willie Nelson, speaking on the Alex Jones show, has just announced that he would be a driving factor in a new Farm Aid-type event that will focus on supporting Dennis Kucinich's efforts to impeach george bush. It will also be an anti-war event. This plan is literally coming together as I type. Willie has just committed to it.