Bernardine Dohrn : The Obsolete and Dangerous Federal Grand Jury

Bernardine Dohrn, with Bill Ayers and five-year-old Zayd, on the steps of the federal courthouse in New York City, 1982. Photo by David Handschuh / AP.
The curious, mysterious, obsolete,
and dangerous federal grand jury

The federal grand jury is a secret, coercive fishing expedition, a rubber stamp and tool solely of the prosecutor.

By Bernardine Dohrn / The Rag Blog / October 7, 2010

I was subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in May of 1982 in New York City. It has left me as something of a specialist in an arcane, secretive, and obsolete area of the law -- one that has just reappeared with FBI raids, seizures of private papers, computers, and subpoenas to compel testimony in Chicago, Minneapolis, and other cities across the country.

At the time of my subpoena, our sons were just five, two, and one. My five year old accompanied me to federal court that day and waved goodbye when the judge rejected my arguments, declared me in civil contempt, and sent me directly to federal jail. My sons visited weekly, brought separately by steady friends.

With the oldest, he sat on my lap while we did crossword puzzles, made calendars, and read books, and then he hugged goodbye after each visit, went outside and stood on the street corner downstairs signaling until I flashed the lights from my cell.

My middle child came into the visiting room, jumped up and cuddled in my arms, and directly went to sleep during his weekly visits, while I breathed in the sweetness of his breath, his hair, his skin. I tried to send him homemade, hopeful weekly cards.

The youngest was struggling to make nonverbal sense of his losses. I tried not to ask him for anything, but to play toddler games and to be fully present to him as much as I could in those cold circumstances.

My decision not to provide samples of my handwriting to the grand jury -- even though the FBI and federal government admittedly had possession of boxes of my handwriting -- was the most difficult decision of my life. I spent more than seven months in the federal correctional facility, not charged with any crime, allegedly not being punished (according to the judge), but rather being compelled to testify, and not knowing when, if ever, I would be released or if I might even be indicted.

When the same judge who had held me in contempt released me, he instructed the federal prosecutor to utilize the handwritten letters I was repeatedly submitting to him about dangerous jail conditions. He ruled that I was exceedingly stubborn, and that further incarceration would not change my recalcitrant mind and therefore holding me any longer had moved from coercion to punishment.

The federal grand jury is a secret, coercive fishing expedition, a rubber stamp and tool solely of the prosecutor. Although it was once (at the time of the Magna Carta) a check on the singular and arbitrary power of the king, it has become its opposite: a greatly enhanced power of the executive.

It has been abolished in England, virtually everywhere else in the world, and in more than half of the states in the U.S. It embodies fundamental violations of basic rights, and it is not necessary to the investigation and prosecution of crime.

The grand jury is mentioned in the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.”

Inside the grand jury room, there is no judge. The person compelled to appear cannot testify with her or his lawyer present, and cannot have a transcript of the proceedings. The grand jurors are sworn to secrecy. The prosecutor -- alone -- decides who and what to subpoena (testimony, records, computers, letters, photos), what possible crimes to investigate, who will testify, who gets immunity, and what charges to bring. It is famously said that any competent prosecutor can “get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich."

Here are 10 key and surprising elements of the federal grand jury:

• It grants sweeping subpoena powers to prosecutors alone, with no safeguards or checks and balances.
• Prosecutors can use a grand jury to conduct an inquisitorial investigation or fishing expedition where there is not sufficient evidence of a crime.
• Defense counsel is barred from the grand jury, and no judge is present.
• It is not open to outsiders.
• Grand jurors hear one side only; prosecutors draft and read the charges to the grand jurors who are not instructed on the law, or screened for bias.
• Grand jury proceedings are secret.
• A grand jury subpoena compels a witness to testify under threat of an indefinite jail sentence until compliance; this coercion promotes unreliable evidence.
• There is no way to know what the grand jury investigation is about or who is considered a target.
• Grand juries subvert the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ban on unreasonable state seizure of private property).
• Grand juries subvert the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution (ban on compulsory examination under oath).

It is no wonder that former judges and prosecutors, as well as legal scholars and organizations, call for reforms or abolition of the federal grand jury system.

Some will recall that during the Clinton administration, Monica Lewinsky’s mother was subpoenaed to a federal grand jury and compelled to testify about her daughter’s sexual relationships.

Some remember the wave of resistance to federal grand juries during the Nixon administration under Attorney General John Mitchell, against the antiwar movement, anti-racist solidarity activists, and the organizing work of Vietnam veterans who returned to tell the truth. A smaller number recall its use during the McCarthy era witch hunts of the 1950s. Recently, the environmental movement has been targeted by grand juries.

Today’s raids and subpoenas allegedly concern investigations into the sweeping and vague prohibitions of “material aid” to entities that the U.S. has deemed terrorist organizations. This federal legislation has been interpreted so broadly by the courts as to amount to a ban on peaceful opposition to U.S. wars, occupations, aerial bombings, and support for state terror.

Popular education about the realities and curiosities of federal grand juries is, again, urgently on the agenda.

[Bernardine Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. She and her husband Bill Ayers were leaders in SDS and the New Left, and were founders of Weatherman and the Weather Underground.]

Also see:

• Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn : Bringing the War Home, 1970 / The Rag Blog / March 22, 2010

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You're in the Army Now : Despair, Dissent and Refusal

'Bad apple?' Soldier with peace symbol on his helmet patrols south of Baghdad, Feb. 4, 2008. Photo by Maya Alleruzzo / AP.
Refusing to comply:
The tactics of resistance in an all-volunteer military

Present-day G.I. resistance to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan cannot begin to be compared with the extensive resistance movement that helped end the Vietnam War... Nevertheless, the ongoing dissent that does exist in the U.S. military, however fragmented and overlooked at the moment, should not be discounted.

By Dahr Jamail / July 2, 2009

On May 1st at Fort Hood in central Texas, Specialist Victor Agosto wrote on a counseling statement, which is actually a punitive U.S. Army memo:

"There is no way I will deploy to Afghanistan. The occupation is immoral and unjust. It does not make the American people any safer. It has the opposite effect."

Ten days later, he refused to obey a direct order from his company commander to prepare to deploy and was issued a second counseling statement. On that one he wrote, "I will not obey any orders I deem to be immoral or illegal." Shortly thereafter, he told a reporter, "I'm not willing to participate in this occupation, knowing it is completely wrong. It's a matter of what I'm willing to live with."

Agosto had already served in Iraq for 13 months with the 57th Expeditionary Signal Battalion. Currently on active duty at Fort Hood, he admits, "It was in Iraq that I turned against the occupations. I started to feel very guilty. I watched contractors making obscene amounts of money. I found no evidence that the occupation was in any way helping the people of Iraq. I know I contributed to death and human suffering. It's hard to quantify how much I caused, but I know I contributed to it."

Even though he was approaching the end of his military service, Agosto was ordered to deploy to Afghanistan under the stop-loss program that the Department of Defense uses to retain soldiers beyond the term of their contracts. At least 185,000 troops have been stop-lossed since September 11, 2001.

Victor Agosto joins others in demonstrating across the street from Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas on Memorial Day. Photo from Dallas Dreamer.
Agosto betrays no ambivalence about his willingness to face the consequences of his actions:

"Yes, I'm fully prepared for this. I have concluded that the wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan] are not going to be ended by politicians or people at the top. They're not responsive to people, they're responsive to corporate America. The only way to make them responsive to the needs of the people is for soldiers to not fight their wars. If soldiers won't fight their wars, the wars won't happen. I hope I'm setting an example for other soldiers."

Today, Agosto's remains a relatively isolated act in an all-volunteer military built to avoid the dissent that, in the Vietnam era, came to be associated with an army of draftees. However, it's an example that may, soon enough, have far greater meaning for an increasingly overstretched military plunging into an expanding Afghan War seemingly without end, even as its war in Iraq continues.

Avoiding Battle

Writing on his blog from Baquba, Iraq, in September 2004, Specialist Jeff Englehart commented:

"Three soldiers in our unit have been hurt in the last four days and the true amount of army-wide casualties leaving Iraq are unknown. The figures are much higher than what is reported. We get awards and medals that are supposed to make us feel proud about our wicked assignment..."

Over the years, in response to such feelings, some American soldiers have come up with ingenious ways to express defiance or dissent on our distant battlegrounds. These have been little noted in the mainstream media, and when they do surface, officials in the Pentagon or in Washington just brush them aside as "bad apple" incidents (the same explanation they tend to use when a war crime is exposed).

But in the stories of men and women who served in the occupation of Iraq, they often play a different role. In October 2007, for instance, I interviewed Corporal Phil Aliff, an Iraq War veteran, then based at Fort Drum in upstate New York. He recalled:

"During my stints in Iraq between August 2005 and July 2006, we probably ran 300 patrols. Most of the men in my platoon were just in from combat tours in Afghanistan and morale was incredibly low. Recurring hits by roadside bombs had demoralized us and we realized the only way we could avoid being blown up was to stop driving around all the time. So every other day we would find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapon caches in the fields and everything was going fine. All our enlisted people had grown disenchanted with the chain of command."

Aliff referred to this tactic as engaging in "search and avoid" missions, a sardonic expression recycled from the Vietnam War when soldiers were sent out on official "search and destroy" missions.

Sergeant Eli Wright, who served as a medic with the 1st Infantry Division in Ramadi from September 2003 through September 2004, had a similar story to tell me. "Oh yeah, we did search and avoid missions all the time. It was common for us to go set camp atop a bridge and use it as an over-watch position. We would use our binoculars to observe rather than sweep, but call in radio checks every hour to report on our sweeps."

According to Private First Class Clifton Hicks, who served in Iraq with the First Cavalry from October 2003, only six months after Baghdad was occupied by American troops, until July 2004, search and avoid missions began early and always had the backing of a senior non-commissioned officer or a staff sergeant. "Our platoon sergeant was with us and he knew our patrols were bullshit, just riding around to get blown up," he explained. "We were at Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport. A lot of the time we'd leave the main gate and come right back in another gate to the base where there's a big PX with a nice mess hall and a Burger King. We'd leave one guy at the Humvee to call in every hour, while the others stayed at the PX. We were just sick and tired of going out on these stupid patrols."

These understated acts of refusal were often survival strategies as well as gestures of dissent, as the troops were invariably undertrained and ill-equipped for the job of putting down an insurgency. Specialist Nathan Lewis, who was deployed to Iraq with the 214th Artillery Brigade from March 2002 through June 2003, experienced this firsthand. "We never received any training for much of what we were expected to do," he said when telling me of certain munitions catching fire while he and other soldiers were loading them onto trucks, "We were never trained on how to handle [them] the right way."

Sergeant Geoff Millard of the New York Army National Guard served at a Rear Operations Center with the 42nd Infantry Division from October 2004 through October 2005. Part of his duty entailed reporting "significant actions," or SIGACTS -- that is, attacks on U.S. forces. In an interview in 2007 he told me, "When I was there at least five companies never reported SIGACTS. I think 'search and avoids' have been going on for a long time. One of my buddies in Baghdad emails that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda, and shoot at the cans." Millard told me of soldiers he still knows in Iraq who were still performing "search and avoid" missions in December 2008. Several other friends deploying or redeploying to Iraq soon assured him that they, too, planned to operate in search and avoid mode.

Corporal Bryan Casler was first deployed to Iraq with the Marines in 2003, at the time of the invasion. Posted to Afghanistan in 2004, he returned to Iraq for another tour of duty in 2005. He tells of other low-level versions of the tactic of avoidance: "There were times we would go to fix a radio that had been down for hours. It was purposeful so we did not have to deal with the bullshit from higher [ups]. In reality, we would go so we could just chill out, let the rest of the squad catch up on some rest as one stood guard. It's mutual and people start covering for each other. Everyone knows what the hell's going on."

Iraq war vet Ronn Cantu spoke out against the war on a panel at the University of Texas in Austin, Nov. 11, 2008. Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.
Staff Sergeant Ronn Cantu, an infantryman who was deployed to Iraq from March 2004 to February 2005, and again from December 2006 to January 2008, said of some of the patrols he observed while there: "[They] wouldn't go up and down the streets like they were supposed to. They would just go to a friendly compound with the Iraqi police or the Kurdish Peshmerga [militia] and stay at their compound and drink tea until it was time to go back to the base."

As a Stryker armored combat vehicle commander in Iraq from September 2004 to September 2005, Sergeant Seth Manzel had figured out a way to fabricate on screen the movement of their patrol and so could run computerized versions of a search and avoid mission. As he explained:

"Sometimes if they called us up to go and do something, we would swiftly send computer reports that we were headed in that direction. On the map we would manually place our icon to the target location and then move it back and forth to make it appear as though we were actually on the ground and patrolling. This was not an isolated case. Everyone did it. Everyone would go and hide somewhere from time to time."

Former Sergeant Josh Simpson, who served as a counter-intelligence agent in Iraq from October 2004 to October 2005, said he witnessed instances of faked movement. "I knew soldiers who learned to simulate vehicular movement on the computer screen, to create the impression of being on patrol," said Simpson. "There's no doubt that people did it."

Saying 'No' One at a Time

"There was nothing to be done," Corporal Casler says of his time in Iraq, "no progress to be made there. Dissent starts as simple as saying this is bullshit. Why am I risking my life?"

Sometimes such feelings have permeated entire units and soldiers in them have refused to follow orders en masse. One of the more dramatic of these incidents occurred in July 2007. The 2nd Platoon of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, in Baghdad had lost many men in its 11 months of deployment. After a roadside bomb killed five more, its members held a meeting and agreed that it was no longer possible for them to function professionally. Concerned that their anger might actually touch off a massacre of Iraqi civilians, they staged a quiet revolt against their commanders instead.

Kelly Kennedy, a reporter with the Military Times embedded with Charlie Company prior to the revolt, described the shape the platoon members were in by that time: "[T]hey went right to mental health and they got sleeping medications, and they basically couldn't sleep and reacted poorly. And then, they were supposed to go out on patrol again that day. And they, as a platoon, the whole platoon -- it was about 40 people -- said, 'We're not going to do it. We can't. We're not mentally there right now.'"

In response, the military broke up the platoon. Each individual involved was also "flagged" so he would not get a promotion or receive any award due.

To this day, troops in Iraq continue to be plagued by equipment and manpower shortages, and work long hours in an extreme climate. In addition, their stress levels are regularly raised by news from home of veterans returning to separations and divorces, and of a Veteran's Administration often ill-equipped and unwilling to provide appropriate physical and psychological care to veterans.

While no broad poll of troops has been conducted recently, a Zogby poll in February 2006 found that 72% of soldiers in Iraq felt the occupation should be ended within a year. My interviews with those recently back from Iraq indicate that levels of despair and disappointment are once again on the rise among troops who are beginning to realize, months after the Obama administration was ushered in, that hopes of an early withdrawal have evaporated.

With the Afghan War heating up and the Iraq War still far from over, even if fighting there is at far lower levels than at its sectarian heights in 2006 and 2007, with stress and strain on the military still on the rise, dissent and resistance are unlikely to abate. In addition to small numbers of outright public refusals to deploy or redeploy, troops are going absent without official leave (AWOL) between deployments, and actual desertions may once again be on the rise. Certainly, there's one strong indication that despair is indeed growing: the unprecedented numbers of soldiers who are committing suicide; the Army's official suicide count rose to 133 in 2008, up from 115 in 2007, itself a record since the Pentagon began keeping suicide statistics in 1980. At least 82 confirmed or suspected suicides have been reported thus far in 2009, a pace that indicates another grim record will be set; and suicide, though seldom thought of in that context, is also a form of refusal, an extreme, individual way of saying no, or simply no more.

According to Sergeant Simpson, here's how a feeling of discontent and opposition creeps up on you while you're on duty: The part of the war you're involved in, interrogating Iraqis in his case, "doesn't make any sense. You realize that the whole system is flawed and if that is flawed, then obviously the whole war is flawed. If the basic premise of the war is flawed, definitely the intelligence system that is supposed to lead us to victory is flawed. What that implies is that victory is not even a possibility."

After finishing his tour in Iraq, Simpson joined the Reserves because he believed it would grant him a two-year deferment from being called up, but he was called up anyway. In his own case, he says, "I thought to myself, I can't do this anymore. First of all, it's bad for me mentally because I'm doing something I loathe. Second, I'm participating in an organization that I wish to resist in every way I can.

"So," he says, "I just stopped showing up for drill, didn't call my unit, didn't give them any reason for it. I changed my telephone number and they did not have my address." Eventually, he reached the end date of his contract and managed to graduate from Evergreen State University in Washington. "I don't know if technically I'm still in the reserves," he told me. "I don't know what my situation is, but I don't really care either. If I go to jail, I go to jail. I'd rather go to jail than go to Iraq."

Unready and Unwilling Reserves

Sergeant Travis Bishop, who served 14 months in Baghdad with the 57th Expeditionary Signal Battalion – the same battalion as Agosto, who served north of the Iraqi capital -- recently went AWOL from his station at Fort Hood, Texas, when his unit deployed to Afghanistan. He insists that it would be unethical for him to deploy to support an occupation he opposes on moral grounds.

Singer/soldier Travis Bishop, who is in the same Ft. Hood unit as Victor Agosto, has joined him in refusing deployment. Photo from Dallas Dreamer.
On his blog, he puts his position this way:

"I love my country, but I believe that this particular war is unjust, unconstitutional and a total abuse of our nation's power and influence. And so, in the next few days, I will be speaking with my lawyer, and taking actions that will more than likely result in my discharge from the military, and possible jail time... and I am prepared to live with that.... My father said, 'Do only what you can live with, because every morning you have to look at your face in the mirror when you shave. Ten years from now, you'll still be shaving the same face.' If I had deployed to Afghanistan, I don't think I would have been able to look into another mirror again."

I spoke with him briefly after he turned himself in at his base in early June. He said he'd chosen to follow Specialist Agosto's example of refusal, which had inspired him, and wanted to be present at his post to accept the consequences of his actions. He, too, hoped others might follow his lead. (He and Agosto, now in similar situations, have become friends.)

Agosto, whose hope has been to set an example of resistance for other soldiers, sees Bishop's refusal to deploy to Afghanistan as a personal success and says, "I already feel vindicated for what I'm doing by his actions. It's nice to see some immediate results."

His actions, he's convinced, have affected the way his fellow soldiers are now looking at the war in Afghanistan. "The topic has come up a lot in conversation, with soldiers on base now asking, 'What are we doing in Afghanistan? Why are we there?' People feel compelled to bring this up when I'm around. Even the ones that disagree with me say it's great what I'm doing, and that I'm doing what a lot of them don't have the courage to do. If anything, the people I work with have now been treating me better than ever."

On May 27th, rejecting an Article 15 -- a nonjudicial punishment imposed by a commanding officer who believes a member of his command has committed an offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice -- Agosto demanded to be court-martialed.

According to Agosto, the Army has now begun the court martial process, but has not yet set a trial date. Bishop, too, awaits a possible court martial.

On June 1st, a day when four U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, Agosto told me in a phone call from Fort Hood, "I haven't had to disobey any orders lately. A sergeant asked me if it'd be okay if I had to follow orders, and I said no, and they didn't force it."

Agosto and Bishop are hardly alone. In November 2007, the Pentagon revealed that between 2003 and 2007 there had been an 80% increase in overall desertion rates in the Army (desertion refers to soldiers who go AWOL and never intend to return to service), and Army AWOL rates from 2003 to 2006 were the highest since 1980. Between 2000 and 2006, more than 40,000 troops from all branches of the military deserted, more than half from the Army. Army desertion rates jumped by 42% from 2006 to 2007 alone.

U.S. Army Specialist André Shepherd joined the Army on January 27, 2004. He was trained in Apache helicopter repair and sent first to Germany, then was stationed in Iraq from November 2004 to February 2005, before being based again in Germany. Shepherd went AWOL in southern Germany in April 2007 and lived underground until applying for asylum there in November 2008, making him the first Iraq veteran to apply for refugee status in Europe.

He, too, has refused further military service because he feels morally opposed to the occupation of Iraq. While he awaits word from the German government and is still technically AWOL, Shepherd is being supported by Courage to Resist, a group based in Oakland, California, which actively assists soldiers who refuse to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan.

A counselor and administrative associate at that organization, Adam Szyper-Seibert, points out that "in recent months there has been a dramatic rise of nearly 200% in the number of soldiers that have contacted Courage to Resist." Szyper-Seibert suspects this may reflect the decision of the Obama administration to dramatically increase efforts, troop strength, and resources in Afghanistan. "We are actively supporting over 50 military resisters like Victor Agosto," Szyper-Seibert says. "They are all over the world, including André Shepherd in Germany and several people in Canada. We are getting five or six calls a week just about the IRR [Individual Ready Reserve] recall alone."

The IRR is composed of troops who have finished their active duty service but still have time remaining on their contracts. The typical military contract mandates four years of active duty followed by four years in the IRR, though variations on this pattern exist. Ready Reserve members live civilian lives and are not paid by the military, but they are required to show up for periodic musters. Many have moved on from military life and are enrolled in college, working civilian jobs, and building families.

At any point, however, a member of the Ready Reserve can be recalled to active duty. This policy has led to the involuntary reactivation of tens of thousands of troops to fight the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lieutenant General Jack C. Stultz, the Chief of the U.S. Army Reserve and Commanding General of the U.S. Army Reserve Command, told Congress on March 3rd that, since September 11, 2001, the Army has mobilized about 28,000 from the Reserves. There have been 3,724 Marines involuntarily recalled and mobilized during that same period, according to Major Steven O'Connor, a Marine Corps spokesman. (According to Major O'Connor, as of May 2009, the Marines are no longer recalling individuals from the IRR.)

Ironically, under a new commander-in-chief whom many voters believed to be anti-war, the Army is continuing its Individual Ready Reserve recalls. "The IRR recall has not seen any change since Obama became president," Sarah Lazare, the project coordinator for Courage to Resist, says. "It's difficult to predict what the Obama administration's policy will be in the future regarding the IRR, but definitely they haven't made any moves to stop this practice."

Needing boots on the ground, according to Lazare, the military continues to fall back on the Ready Reserve system to fill the gaps: "Since these are experienced troops, many of them have already served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan." Lazare adds, "When Obama announced his Afghanistan surge, we got a huge wave of calls from soldiers saying they didn't want to be reactivated and to please help them not go."

The Future of Military Dissent

Right now, acts of dissent, refusal, and resistance in the all-volunteer military remain small-scale and scattered. Ranging from the extreme private act of suicide to avoidance of duty to actual refusal of duty, they continue to consist largely of individual acts. Present-day G.I. resistance to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan cannot begin to be compared with the extensive resistance movement that helped end the Vietnam War and brought an army of draftees to the point of near mutiny in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the ongoing dissent that does exist in the U.S. military, however fragmented and overlooked at the moment, should not be discounted.

The Iraq War boils on at still dangerous levels of violence, while the war in Afghanistan (and across the border in Pakistan) only grows, as does the U.S. commitment to both. It's already clear that even an all-volunteer military isn't immune to dissent. If violence in either or both occupations escalates, if the Pentagon struggles to add more boots on the ground, if the stresses and strains on the military, involving endless redeployments to combat zones, increase rather than lessen, then the acts of Agosto, Bishop, and Shepherd may turn out to be pathbreaking ones in a world of dissent yet to be experienced and explored. Add in dissatisfaction and discontent at home if, in the coming years, American treasure continues to be poured into an Afghan quagmire, and real support for a G.I. resistance movement may surface. If so, then the early pioneers in methods of dissent within the military will have laid the groundwork for a movement.

"If we want soldiers to choose the right but difficult path, they must know beyond any shadow of a doubt that they will be supported by Americans." So said First Lieutenant Ehren Watada of the U.S. Army, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse a combat deployment to Iraq. (He finally had the military charges against him dropped by the Justice Department.) The future of any such movement in the military is now unknowable, but keep your eyes open. History, even military history, holds its own surprises.

[Dahr Jamail, a Houston native, has reported from Iraq and writes for Inter Press Service, Le Monde Diplomatique, TomDispatch and other outlets. He is the author of
Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq and the forthcoming book he Will To Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan His website is Dahr Jamail's Mideast Dispatches. Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute

Copyright 2009 Dahr Jamail

Source / TomDispatch

Also on The Rag Blog:

• Victor Agosto: The Price of Conscience by Alice Embree / June 19, 2009
• Ft. Hood GI Travis Bishop : Why I Won't Go by Travis Bishop / May 21, 2009
• GI Victor Agosto: 'There is No Way I Will Deploy to Afghanistan' by Alice Embree / May 7, 2009
• Anti-War Memorial Day at Texas' Fort Hood by Alice Embree / May 26, 2009
• Randy Rowland: Lindy's Great Escape by Randy Rowland / April 21, 2009
• Austin: Eyewitness Accounts from Winter Soldiers for Peace By Greg Moses / March 14
• GI Coffehouse : Checking 'Under the Hood' in Killeen, Texas By Susan Van Haitsma / March 4, 2009
• Austin: Iraq Veterans Speak Out Against the War by Susan Van Haitsma / Nov. 13, 2008.

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Israeli Government Suppressing Dissent; Hundreds Jailed

Israeli anarchists demonstrate in Jaffa on Jan. 13, 2009.
Israeli police officers arrest a Palestinian man during a protest against Israel's military operation in the Gaza Strip, outside Jerusalem's Old City, Friday, Jan. 16, 2009. Photo by Atta Awisat / AP.
'According to Israeli police reports, at least 763 Israeli citizens, the majority of them Palestinian and 244 under 18 years old, have been arrested, imprisoned or detained for participating in demonstrations.'

By Nora Barrows-Friedman / January 19, 2009

JERUSALEM -- The Israeli government is stepping up efforts to suppress dissent and crush resistance in the streets. Police have been videotaping the demonstrations and subsequently arresting protesters in large numbers.

According to Israeli police reports, at least 763 Israeli citizens, the majority of them Palestinian and 244 under 18 years old, have been arrested, imprisoned or detained for participating in such demonstrations. Most have been held and then released, but at least 30 of those arrested over the past three weeks are still being held in prison.

Ameer Makhoul, director of Ittijah, the Union of Arab Community-Based Associations in Haifa, tells IPS that these demonstrations "are part of the uprising here inside the Green Line, to share responsibility and to share the challenge with the people in the Gaza strip."

As an organiser of many of these solidarity demonstrations inside Israel, Makhoul himself was arrested by the Shin Bet (the Israeli secret service). "They called me, came to my home and held me for four hours," he tells IPS. "They accused me of being a terrorist and supporting terror. They said that they are watching me and monitoring me." Israel, he said, "has become a terror state."

The Shin Bet has accused Makhoul and the hundreds of others arrested of "being a rebel, threatening the security of the State of Israel during war time."

Makhoul believes that such threats are being implemented by Israel's security forces "(in order to) break our will and the spirit of our people. But I think our spirit is much, much stronger here in Haifa and in Gaza than the Israeli oppression."

On Jan. 15, a Haaretz-Dialog public opinion poll taken in Israel found that 82 percent of the Israeli population believes that Israel did not go too far in its three-week operation in Gaza, "despite pictures from Gaza depicting massive destruction and a large number of wounded and killed, including women and children," reports Haaretz.

At a demonstration last week in front of Kishon prison north-east of Haifa, where some of the Palestinian demonstrators are being held, Israeli anarchist and professor of mathematics Kobi Snitz tells IPS that this figure is indicative of the current social climate inside the state.

"People are made to be afraid. Virtually all Israelis, particularly Israeli Jews, are convinced that Hamas was the one that violated the ceasefire. This just isn't true...(But) you won't find this in the Israeli media. There is no understanding of the level of violence used on Gaza by the Israeli military. And the police operate under the assumption and guidelines that every political expression now is to be repressed and prevented."

IPS asked Snitz to describe the momentum of these daily protests across the country. "These demonstrations happened virtually by themselves," he says. "At this point, anybody who is not severely indoctrinated or ignorant just feels compelled to do something every day. It's unbearable to sit at home and not do anything."

Last Saturday night in the coastal town of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, several thousand demonstrators - including Palestinians, various peace groups, Israeli anarchists and teenaged Israeli refusniks fresh from jail for refusing to serve in the mandatory military - marched through the main street in the old city with flags, banners, and vociferous determination to keep up the fight inside Israeli society against their government's lethal operations in Gaza. Israeli security forces, carrying weapons and video cameras, heavily flanked the protesters.

But activists say it is crucial to expand the discussion from this current struggle for Palestinians inside the Gaza strip outward into the larger context. "I'm here to take a stand for Gaza," Mahmood Jreri of the acclaimed Palestinian hip-hop group DAM, based in Lydd (east of Tel Aviv), tells IPS during the march.

"The main reason (I'm here) is to say that we are not part of what the Israeli government is doing. The Palestinian people are fighting for their freedom and fighting against the occupation. When Palestinians have their freedom, then there will be peace here."

Source / IPS News

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Look Out Denver

"How can we make ourselves less frightening? We aren't this scary image that protesters often get painted as." - Zoe Williams, CodePink. Photo by Joe Amon, The Denver Post.
New generation plans dissent
at Democratic Convention
By Colleen O'Connor / June 22, 2008

A nude-in with bare bodies arranged to spell "PEACE," traffic-stopping bike blockades, music with a message. Civil disobedience, direct confrontation, radical cheerleading.

That funky fusion of protest, performance and pompoms.

The new generation of activists, and the daisy-in-the-rifle protesters who birthed them, is busy with creative ferment, organizing public dissent for the Democratic National Convention here in August. They are motivated by the desire to create social change with people power, not political power, frustrated by a mounting list of problems, from the housing crisis to soaring prices for gas and food.

"There will be a lot of people at this convention who are progressive and who are angry at the Democrats," says Virginia Trabulsi, who has worked for years with the anti-war group United for Peace and Justice.

"They're saying, 'Why have we not impeached Bush? Why is Homeland Security out of control?'"

Tens of thousands of activists are expected, homegrown and imported. Some plan to drive FEMA trailers up from Mississippi for a media-savvy statement about continuing Hurricane Katrina struggles. Others are coming from Seattle, like the Backbone Campaign, which will haul 70-foot-tall political puppets called The Chain Gang: prison-suited images of Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Socialists have formed an alliance with military veterans who are against the Iraq war.

Guerilla gardening

Anarchists will give workshops on guerilla gardening, or political gardening, a style of nonviolent action that takes on issues like land ownership by occupying abandoned lots — sometimes in the dead of night — and transforming them into urban gardens.

And then there are the pacifists, groups like the historic American Friends Service Committee founded by Quakers in 1917, which plans to host an exhibition called "The Costs of War," detailing how the $720 million spent each day on the war could be spent on education and housing.

These different factions speak of just one common goal: stopping the Iraq war immediately.

Beyond that, beliefs differ. So do strategies.

Some protesters espouse the right to active self-defense if they are treated too harshly. On the other side are those who say that violence, verbal or physical, is never an acceptable tool on the path toward peace.

In America, this debate is as old as the war between the North and the South.

"It goes back to the abolitionist movement during the Civil War," says Ira Chernus, professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

"Some were committed to strict nonviolence, and some felt that because the system of slavery, and the military force used to maintain it, was so violent that the only way to break the system of slavery was by using violence."

As Chernus points out in his recent book, "American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea," nonviolence is an integral thread in the fabric of U.S. history.

Significant role

"From the 1820s to the 1950s, scarcely a decade went by that a nonviolent movement did not play some significant role in the practical outcome of political, social and economic events," he says.

From the Civil War to the civil-rights movement, from the labor movement to the environmental movement — and now, in Denver, activists young and old, the progressives and the radicals, will enact the next chapter of the nonviolent movement in America, addressing everything from the Iraq war to global warming.

"If I called my granddad an environmentalist," says Adam Jung, "he'd smack me, but those are his values." Tent State workshops will train activists in nonviolent direct action. (Joe Amon, The Denver Post)activists young and old, the progressives and the radicals, will enact the next chapter of the nonviolent movement in America, addressing everything from the Iraq war to global warming.

CodePink, a national anti-war organization, plans a Restore Democracy Parade, an extravaganza of dissent: floats, political theater, musicians, stilt performers, radical cheerleaders, puppets, drummers and bands.

The local spokeswoman for CodePink is Zoe Williams, a 22-year-old platinum blond with spiky hair, rectangular glasses and a penchant for black-and-white polka-dot canvas shoes.

She's part of the new face of activism, a youth-driven alliance that includes Students for Peace and Justice, Students for a Democratic Society, and Tent State

"We were putting in all this work" for the convention, Jojo Pease says, and thought, "What's going to happen afterward?" The answer: a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, reborn two years ago. (Joe Amon, The Denver Post )University. Her goal is to help restore the image of activists everywhere.

"That's something our progressive movement is now seriously considering," she says. "How can we make ourselves less frightening? How can we make ourselves look open?

"One of the big things about the colorful, creative protests is to show that we are a very interesting, artistic, positive group of people. We aren't this scary image that protesters often get painted as."

She works closely with guys like Adam Jung, a farm boy from Missouri who now studies at the University of Denver and spends his free time organizing Tent State University, mobilizing students to confront the Democrats and end the war.

"I'm definitely not right-wing or conservative, but I do identify with rural values," Jung says. "If I called my granddad an environmentalist, he'd smack me, but those are his values."

Grassroots movement

The base camp he envisions for Tent State University will include thousands of tents staked in City Park, with a music festival featuring political hip-hoppers The Coup and Wayne Kramer, who played with his old group the Motor City 5 during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Tent State workshops will train activists in nonviolent direct action,and focus on building a grassroots movement.

And from this idea sprang the newly minted Denver chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society.

"We were talking a lot about Tent State, which is not actually an organization but more a technique or strategy," says 25-year-old Jojo Pease. "I was feeling a little disappointed. We were putting in all this work, but I thought, 'What's going to happen afterward?' "

To capture the momentum created at the DNC, they decided to start a Denver chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.

Back in the 1960s, the SDS was the most influential group of radical student activists in the country. It died out in 1969 but was re-created two years ago and is now one of the fast-growing groups of young activists, with more than 300 chapters on college and high school campuses. The goal is to create a society free from poverty, war, racism and sexism.

"SDS is starting to become cool again," says Jung.

Whether rooted in the '60s or the '00s, activists are driven by the same fuel.

"We are passionate people who really spend way too much time thinking about all the awful stuff in the world that's so urgent," says Sarah Gill, program director for the Denver office of the American Friends Service Committee. "We just want to do the right thing, and it matters if we do it the right way, because people's lives depend on it."

Six months ago, with his eye on the convention, longtime activist Ron Forthofer created a group called The People Call for Change.

Their action plan for the convention calls not for a protest, nor a demonstration, but a series of events to be held in churches and community centers — educational evenings that will dangle a hopeful vision of how a grassroots movement might lead the country in a new direction. Topics include health care, consumerism, the environment and civil liberties.

"The thing that is driving all of us is that we want to reclaim our country, to restore it and make it be a government and a country by and for the people," he says.

"There's a lot of alienation out there today, a feeling that both parties have abandoned their responsibilities to the people."

Source. / Denver Post

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Food For Thought

Turning Your Lawn into a Victory Garden
Won't Save You -- Fighting the Corporations Will
By Stan Cox / June 23, 2008

The corporate agriculture industry would like nothing better than to see us spend all of our free time in our gardens and not in political dissent.

I didn't mean to lead anyone down the garden path. Adding my small voice to those urging Americans to replace their lawns with food plants wasn't, in itself, a bad idea. But now that food shortages and high costs are in the headlines, too many people are getting the idea that the solution to America's and the world's food problems is for all of us in cities and suburbia to grow our own. It's not.

Don't get me wrong: Growing food just outside your front or back door is an extraordinarily good idea, and if it's done without soil erosion or toxic chemicals, I can think of no downside. Edible landscaping can look good, and it saves money on groceries; it's a direct provocation to the toxic lawn culture; gardening is quieter and less polluting than running a power mower or other contraption; the harvest provides a substitute for industrially grown produce raised and picked by underpaid, oversprayed workers; and tending a garden takes a lot of time, time that might otherwise be spent in a supermarket or shopping mall.

So it was in 2005 that our family volunteered our front lawn to be converted into the first in a now-expanding chain of "Edible Estates," the brainchild of Los Angeles architect/artist Fritz Haeg. We already had a backyard garden, but growing food in the front yard (which, as Haeg himself points out, is a reincarnation of a very old idea) has been a wholly different, equally positive experience.

Our perennials and annuals are thriving, we've gotten a lot of publicity, and I've been talking about the project for almost three years. Yet neither of our gardens, front or back, can stand up to the looming agricultural crisis. Good food's most well-read advocate, Michael Pollan, has written that growing a garden is worth doing even though it can make only a tiny contribution to curbing carbon-dioxide emissions. He might have added that growing food is worth it even if it does very little to revive the nation's food system.

World cropland: the pie is mostly crust

The edible-landscaping trend is catching on across the country, and with food prices rising, it has taking sadly predictable turns. A Boulder, Colo. entrepreneur, for example, has tilled up his and several of his neighbors' yards and started an erosion-prone, for-profit vegetable-farming operation. It will supplement his income, but it won't make a nick in the food crisis.

That's because the mainstays of home gardening -- vegetables and fruits -- are not the foundation of the human diet or of world agriculture. Each of those two food types occupies only about 4 percent of global agricultural land (and a smaller percentage in this country), compared with 75 percent of world cropland devoted to grains and oilseeds. Their respective portions of the human diet are similar.

Suppose that half of the land on every one-acre-or-smaller urban/suburban home lot in the entire nation were devoted to food-growing. That would amount to a little over 5 million acres (pdf) sown to food plants, covering most of the space on each lot that's not already covered by the house, a deck, a patio, or a driveway. (And in many places it couldn't be done without cutting down shade trees and planting on unsuitably steep slopes).

That theoretical 5 million acres of potential home cropland compares with about 7 million acres of America's commercial cropland currently in vegetables, fruits, and nuts, and 350 to 400 million acres of total farmland. The urban and suburban area to be brought into production would not approach the number of healthy acres of native grasses and other plants that are slated to be plowed up to make way for yet more corn, wheat, soybeans, and other grains under the newly passed federal Farm Bill.

A nationwide grow-your-own wave would send good vibes through society, ripples that could be greatly amplified by community and apartment-block gardening. But front- and backyard food, even if everyone grew it, would not cover the country's produce needs, much less displace our huge volume of fresh-food imports.

We could, instead, plant every yard to wheat, corn, or soybeans, which would account only for a little over two percent of the US land sown to those crops. Other policies, like dispensing with grain-fed meat and fuel ethanol, would free up far more grain-belt land than that.

Not even a poke in the eye

I've played a part in the promotion of domestic food-growing, and I now I seem to hear daily from people who believe that it's the best alternative to industrial agriculture (as in, "I'll show Monsanto and Wal-Mart that I don't need their food!"). Even though most prominent home-lot food efforts, like the "100-Foot Diet Challenge," also try to draw attention to bigger issues, the wider message can get lost in the excitement. Whatever its benefits, replacing your lawn with food plants will not give Big Agribusiness the big poke in the eye that it needs, nor will it save the agricultural landscapes of the nation or world.

To do that, the big-commodity market must be not just modified but overthrown. Until then, most of that two-thirds or more of the human calorie and protein intake that comes from grains and oilseeds (directly in most of the world or among Western vegetarians, largely via animal products for others in this country) will continue to be served up by a dirty, cruel, unfair, broken system.

Essential for providing vitamins, minerals, and other compounds, a highly varied diet is important, and home gardens around the world help provide such a diet. But with a world population now approaching seven billion people and most good cropland already in use, only rice, wheat, corn, beans, and other grain crops are productive and durable enough to provide the dietary foundation of calories and protein.

Grains made up about the same portion of the ancient Greek diet as they do of ours. We've been stuck with grains for 10,000 years, and our dependence won't be broken any time soon.

The United States emulate Argentina and a handful of other countries by raising cattle that are totally grass-fed instead of grain-fed and thereby consuming less corn and soybean meal. But most of the world is utterly dependent on grains. The desperate people we saw on the evening news earlier this year, filling the streets in dozens of countries, were calling for bread or rice, not cucumbers and pomegranates.

Capitalism: It doesn't go well with food

Humanity's attachment to cereals, grain legumes, and oilseeds has acquired a much harder edge in the industrial era, but as a base for political and economic power, the staple grains have always been unsurpassed. Because they hold calories and nutrients in a dense package that can be easily stored for long periods and transported, the more fortunate members of ancient societies could accumulate surpluses. Those surpluses are recognized by the majority of scholars as necessary to the birth of market economies, which allowed the prosperous to exercise control over society's have-nots. Eventually, states used control over grains to exert political power over entire populations.

Few foods could have filled that role. Noting that before grain agriculture came along, ancient Egyptians might have gathered a surplus of various foods from nature, most of them highly perishable, economic historian Robert Allen once wrote, "If all a tax collector could get from foragers was a load of waterlilies that would wilt by next morning, what was the point of having them?" The Pharaohs managed to exert control over the area's population only after people started farming wheat and barley.

The even bigger problem with grains -- which are short-lived annual plants, grown largely in monoculture -- is that they supplanted the diverse, perennial plant ecosystems that covered the earth before the dawn of agriculture. We've been living with the resulting soil erosion and water pollution ever since.

Then, when grains became fully commodified a couple of centuries ago, things really started to go downhill. In discussing his new book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Raj Patel cited India as an example: "The social safety nets that existed in India under feudal society had been knocked away by the British. If people couldn't afford food, they didn't get to eat, and if they couldn't buy food, they starved. As a result of the imposition of markets in food, 13 million people across the world died in the 19th century. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism. Those are the origins of markets in food."

Indeed, if capitalism were a wine, it would be a wine that doesn't go well with any type of food.

Most food today is produced not as an end in itself but as a by-product of a global economy with the singular goal of turning maximum profit. That is a dysfunctional arrangement, as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founder of ecological economics explained almost 40 years ago in his book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process: "So vital is the dependence of terrestrial life on the energy received from the sun that the cyclic rhythm in which this energy reaches each region on the earth has gradually built itself through natural selection into the reproductive pattern of almost every species, vegetal or animal ... Yet the general tenor among economists has been to deny any substantial difference between the structures of agricultural and industrial productive activities."

Industrial or commercial output can be increased by building more capacity, stepping up the consumption of inputs, taking on more workers, and pushing workers harder and for longer hours. Farming, by contrast, is inevitably bound by the calendar -- by month-to-month variation in the capacity of soil and sunlight to support the growth of plants. It depends fundamentally on the productivity and the habits of non-human biological organisms over which humans can exert control only up to a point.

That clearly isn't the ideal pattern for efficient wealth generation, so the past century has seen relentless efforts to mold agriculture into the factory model as closely as possible and, where that can't be done, to graft more easily regimented industries -- farm machinery, fertilizers, chemicals, food processing, the restaurant industry, packaging, advertising -- onto an agricultural rootstock. In the US, the dollar outputs of those dependent industries are growing at two to four times the rate of agriculture's own dollar output, putting ever-greater demands on the soil.

With a wholesale shift toward mechanization of US agriculture, 75 percent of economic output now comes from fewer than 7 percent of farms; furthermore, there has been a steep rise in the proportion of farms owned by investors living in distant cities (some of them perhaps avid urban gardeners).

Because, as Georgescu-Roegen showed, there's a fundamental difference between the farm and the factory, the well-used term "factory farming" represents more an aspiration than an accomplished fact. Nevertheless, agribusiness's attempts to defy natural rhythms and achieve industrial efficiency have been ecologically devastating. The biofuel craze, encouraged by subsidies that continue in the new Farm Bill, compounds the problem.

"We must cultivate our garden," and ...

To repair the broken system that supplies the bulk of the nation's diet will require Americans to step out of the garden and into the public arena. Beyond working to get a better Farm Bill passed five years from now, we have to work together to break the political choke-hold that agribusiness has on federal and state governments.

With land and wealth being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (and with more prisoners than farmers in today's America) we have actually reached a point at which land reform is as necessary here as it is in any nation of Latin America or Asia. Only when we get more people back on the land, working to feed people and not Monsanto, will the system have a chance to work. Most home gardeners know that the root of the problem is political, but the agricultural establishment would like nothing better than to see us spend all of our free time in our gardens and not in political dissent.

Ironically, it's that great troublemaker Voltaire who has too often been trotted out (and too often misquoted) as an advocate of withdrawing from the tumult of society, into tending one's own property. Voltaire was indeed a gardener, and he did end his most famous novel by having Candide, after surviving so many far-flung hazards, utter those famous words to his fellow wanderer Dr. Pangloss: "We must cultivate our garden."

However, with the publication of Candide in 1759, Voltaire entered the most politically active part of his life, as he "went on to a series of confrontations with the consequences of human cruelty that, two hundred-odd years later, remain stirring in their courage and perseverance," in the words of Adam Gopnik.

If Voltaire could find the time for both gardening and radical political action, then all of us can do it.

[Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. His book, Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, was just published by Pluto Press.]

Source. / AlterNet

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A Litany for George Carlin in Seven Words

George Carlin, who died of heart failure Sunday at 71, leaves behind not only a series of memorable routines, but a legal legacy: His most celebrated monologue, a frantic, informed riff on those infamous seven words, led to a Supreme Court decision on broadcasting offensive language. -- Associated Press / June 24, 2008

The Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV
by George Carlin

I love words. I thank you for hearing my words.

I want to tell you something about words that I think is important.

They're my work, they're my play, they're my passion.

Words are all we have, really. We have thoughts but thoughts are fluid.

Then we assign a word to a thought and we're stuck with that word for that thought, so be careful with words. I like to think that the same words that hurt can heal, it is a matter of how you pick them.

There are some people that are not into all the words.

There are some that would have you not use certain words.

There are 400,000 words in the English language and there are seven of them you can't say on television. What a ratio that is.

399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous to be seperated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven, Bad Words. That's what they told us they were, remember?

"That's a bad word!" No bad words. Bad thoughts, bad intentions... and words. You know the seven, don't you, that you can't say on television?

"Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, CockSucker, MotherFucker, and Tits"

Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war.

"Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, CockSucker, MotherFucker, and Tits" Wow! ...and Tits doesn't even belong on the list. That is such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname, right? "Hey, Tits, come here, man. Hey Tits, meet Toots. Toots, Tits. Tits, Toots." It sounds like a snack, doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is a snack. I don't mean your sexist snack. I mean new Nabisco Tits!, and new Cheese Tits, Corn Tits, Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits, Onion Tits, Tater Tits. "Betcha Can't Eat Just One."

That's true. I usually switch off. But I mean, that word does not belong on the list. Actually none of the words belong on the list, but you can understand why some of them are there. I'm not completely insensetive to people's feelings. I can understand why some of those words got on the list, like CockSucker and MotherFucker. Those are heavyweight words. There is a lot going on there. Besides the literal translation and the emotional feeling.

I mean, they're just busy words. There's a lot of syllables to contend with. And those Ks, those are agressive sounds. They just jump out at you like "coCKsuCKer, motherfuCKer. coCKsuCKer, motherfuCKer."

It's like an assualt on you. We mentioned Shit earlier, and two of the other 4-letter Anglo-Saxon words are Piss and Cunt, which go together of course. A little accidental humor there. The reason that Piss and Cunt are on the list is because a long time ago, there were certain ladies that said "Those are the two I am not going to say. I don't mind Fuck and Shit but 'P' and 'C' are out.", which led to such
stupid sentences as "Okay you fuckers, I'm going to tinkle now."

And, of course, the word Fuck. I don't really, well that's more accidental humor, I don't wanna get into that now because I think it takes to long. But I do mean that. I think the word Fuck is a very imprortant word. It is the beginning of life, yet it is a word we use to hurt one another quite often. People much wiser than I am said,
"I'd rather have my son watch a film with two people making love than two people trying to kill one another. I, of course, can agree. It is a great sentence. I wish I knew who said it first. I agree with that but I like to take it a step further.

I'd like to substitute the word Fuck for the word Kill in all of those movie cliches we grew up with. "Okay, Sherrif, we're gonna Fuck you now, but we're gonna Fuck you slow."

So maybe next year I'll have a whole fuckin' ramp on the N word. I hope so. Those are the seven you can never say on television, under any circumstanses. You just cannot say them ever ever ever. Not even clinically. You cannot weave them in on the panel with Doc, and Ed, and Johnny. I mean, it is just impossible. Forget tHose seven. They're out.

But there are some two-way words, those double-meaning words.

Remember the ones you giggled at in sixth grade? "...And the cock CROWED three times" "Hey, tha cock CROWED three times. Ha ha ha ha. Hey, it's in the bible. Ha ha ha ha. There are some two-way words, like it is okay for Curt Gowdy to say "Roberto Clemente has two balls on him.", but he can't say "I think he hurt his balls on that play, Tony. Don't you? He's holding them. He must've hurt them, by God." and the other two-way word that goes with that one is Prick. It's okay if it happens to your finger. You can prick your finger but don't finger your prick. No,no.

Source. / LyricsBox

Quite a wordsmith, he was. A scholar of the language. I note that he and I are the same age...I had the pleasure of his company one evening in about 1973. He was playing at the Marin Civic Center, around the corner from where I lived.

The Sons of Champlin opened the show. They rented a space across the court from my space and rehearsed, hung out there. We were all good friends. When George approached one of them about perhaps scoring some cocaine, they called me. I happened to have some and proceeded quickly over to the Center not knowing who my customer was. I was ushered in to his dressing room which was cleared of all company as we went through the score procedure. He immediately went to work on the new purchase and the two of us had a short time together, flying in the zone of the leaf.

He got so ready that he went out on stage before the roadies were finished, found a live mike and started his show. No introduction, just started rapping. Needless to say he was hilarious and did a great show. I really enjoyed being around him and became a lifelong fan. He was a genuine wizard.

Gerry / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2008

George Carlin, 71, Irreverent Standup Comedian, Is Dead / by Mel Watkins / New York Times / March 24, 2008

George Carlin Reads More Blogs Than You Do / Interview by Rachel Sklar / March 1, 2008 / The Huffington Post

Religion is Bullshit Video / The Rag Blog

Video highlights from George Carlin's Career / The Huffington Post

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Iraq Moratorium #10 - June 20th

They'll be flipping pancakes for peace Friday, June 20, at the Midwest Renewable Energy Expo in Wisconsin.

They'll hold a teach-in on torture on the train to San Jose, where a picket and vigil will target a Boeing subsidiary accused of providing logistics for those "extraordinary rendition" flights.

Church bells will ring in Massachusetts. Activists will leaflet commuters in San Francisco Bay area, Brooklyn, and Takoma Park MD. Street corner vigils are planned in dozens of communities across the country, large and small.

It's all part of the Iraq Moratorium, a monthly event that asks people to break their daily routines and do something to show that they want to Iraq war and occupation to end.

Nearly 100 events in 82 communities are listed on the Moratorium website, bringing the total to more than 1000 since the Moratorium began last September.

The Iraq Moratorium does not believe that one size fits all. It asks people to act, but in whatever way they choose.

The whole idea is to do something -- anything -- to show opposition to the war, whether it's wearing an armband or writing members of Congress or donating to a peace group working to end the war and occupation.

The group's website includes tools for organizing and ideas about how individuals can observe the Moratorium.

Bill Christofferson
For the Iraq Moratorium
http://www.IraqMoratorium.org/

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Acting Against the Agents of War Crimes

War Criminals Must Fear Punishment: That's why I went for John Bolton
By George Monbiot / June 3, 2008

As long as the greatest crime of the 21st century remains unprosecuted, we all have a duty to keep the truth alive

I realise now that I didn't have a hope. I had almost reached the stage when two of the biggest gorillas I have ever seen swept me up and carried me out of the tent. It was humiliating, but it could have been worse. The guard on the other side of the stage, half hidden in the curtains, had spent the lecture touching something under his left armpit. Perhaps he had bubos.

I had no intention of arresting John Bolton, the former under-secretary of state at the US state department, when I arrived at the Hay festival. But during a panel discussion about the Iraq war, I remarked that the greatest crime of the 21st century had become so normalised that one of its authors was due to visit the festival to promote his book. I proposed that someone should attempt a citizens' arrest, in the hope of instilling a fear of punishment among those who plan illegal wars. After the session I realised that I couldn't call on other people to do something I wasn't prepared to do myself.

I knew that I was more likely to be arrested and charged than Mr Bolton. I had no intention of harming him, or of acting in any way that could be interpreted as aggressive, but had I sought only to steer him gently towards the police I might have faced a range of exotic charges, from false imprisonment to aggravated assault. I was prepared to take this risk. It is not enough to demand that other people act, knowing that they will not. If the police, the courts and the state fail to prosecute what the Nuremberg tribunal described as "the supreme international crime", I believe we have a duty to seek to advance the process.

The Nuremberg principles, which arose from the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, define as an international crime the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances". Bolton appears to have "participated in a common plan" to prepare for the war (also defined by the principles as a crime) by inserting the false claim that Iraq was seeking to procure uranium from Niger into a state department factsheet. He also organised the sacking of José Bustani, the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, accusing him of bad management. Bustani had tried to broker a peaceful resolution of the dispute over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Some of the most pungent criticisms of my feeble attempt to bring this man to justice have come from other writers for the Guardian. Michael White took a position of extraordinary generosity towards the instigators of the war. There are "arguments on both sides", he contended on the Guardian politics blog. Bustani might have received compensation after his sacking by Bolton, "but Bolton says that does not mean much". In fact, Bustani was not only compensated at his tribunal, he was completely exonerated of Bolton's accusations and his employers were obliged to pay special damages.

White suggested that Iraq might indeed have been seeking uranium from Niger, on the grounds of a conversation he once had with an MI6 officer. Alongside the British government's 45-minute claim, this must be the best-documented of all the false justifications for the war with Iraq. In 2002, the United States government sent three senior officials to Niger to investigate the claim. All reported that it was without foundation. The International Atomic Energy Agency discovered that it was based on crude forgeries. This assessment was confirmed by the state department's official Greg Thielmann, who reported directly to John Bolton. No evidence beyond the forged documents has been provided by either the US or the UK governments to support their allegation.

White also gives credence to Bolton's claims that the war in 2003 was justified by two UN resolutions - 678 and 687 - which were approved in 1990 and 1991, and that it was permitted by article 51 of the UN charter. The attempt to revive resolutions 678 and 687 was the last, desperate throw of the dice by the Blair government when all else had failed. When it became clear that it could not obtain a new UN resolution authorising force against Iraq, the government dusted down the old ones, which had been drafted in response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

This revival formed the basis of Lord Goldsmith's published advice on March 17 2003. It was described as "risible" and "scrap[ing] the bottom of the legal barrel" by Lord Alexander, a senior law lord. After the first Gulf war, Colin Powell, General Sir Peter de la Billiere and John Major all stated that the UN's resolutions permitted them only to expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait, and not to overthrow the Iraqi government. Lord Goldsmith himself, in the summer of 2002, advised Tony Blair that resolutions 678 and 687 could not be used to justify a new war with Iraq.

Article 51 of the UN charter is comprehensible to anyone but the lawyers employed by the Bush administration. States have a right to self-defence "if an armed attack occurs against" them, and then only until the UN security council can intervene. On what occasion did Iraq attack the United States? Is there any claim made by the Blair and Bush governments that Michael White is not prepared to believe?

Conor Foley, writing on Comment is free, suggested that my action "completely trivialises the serious case" against the Iraq war and claimed that I was seeking to "imprison ... people because of their political opinions", as if Bolton were simply a commentator on the war, and not an agent. Does he really believe that the former under-secretary did not "participate in a common plan" to initiate the war with Iraq? What other conceivable purpose might the state department's misleading factsheet have served? And what more serious action can someone who is neither a law lord nor a legislator take? Bolton himself maintains that my attempt to bring him to justice reflects a "move towards lawlessness and fascism". This is an interesting commentary on an attempt to uphold a law which arose from the prosecution of fascists.

But there is one charge I do accept: that my chances of success were very slight. Apart from the 300-pound gorillas, the main obstacle I faced was that although the crime of aggression, as defined by the Nuremberg principles, has been incorporated into the legislation of many countries, it has not been assimilated into the laws of England and Wales. This does not lessen the crime but it means that it cannot yet be tried here. This merely highlights another injustice: while the British state is prepared to punish petty misdemeanours with vindictive ferocity, it will not legislate against the greatest crime of all, lest it expose itself to prosecution.

But demonstration has two meanings. Non-violent direct action is both a protest and an exposition. It seeks to demonstrate truths which have been overlooked or forgotten. I sought to remind people that the greatest crime of the 21st century remains unprosecuted, and remains a great crime. If you have read this far, I have succeeded.

monbiot.com

Source / Information Clearing House / Guardian

The Rag Blog

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Revolting Repression Runs Rampant with Sheeple

Here is a blatant, repellent example of censorship in the wolf-suit of patriotism. The call to participate in the Ferndale, MI Memorial Day parade called for no political signs. The respondent to this announcement is Peter Werbe, an activist and radio announcer in Michigan, who rejects the original writer's admonition regarding signs and insists that Constitutional rights be exercised without censorship.

Stop the kow-towing to the propaganda. Stop the censorship of the media and the people. Eat the state! Up the revolution!

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Re: MEMORIAL DAY IN FERNDALE @ 9:30 a.m. Werbe
Peter Werbe pwerbe@yahoo.com Sun, May 25, 2008 at 4:02 PM Reply-To: pwerbe@yahoo.com To: Mel4hwpeace@aol.com Cc: Peter Werbe pwerbe@yahoo.com

Playing into patriotism only strengthens the empire. You're making a colossal political error in encouraging this type of participation. I was in the Ferndale parade along with any number of us three years ago carrying anti-war and anti-Bush signs and we received standing ovations from parade viewers. Now, everyone agrees with us, why shouldn't we have POLITICAL SIGNS? In fact, I'm sending this to all of my friends urging them not to pay any attention to such censorship.

One final thing: Someone carried out Bush's orders, followed them, in destroying Iraq and bears responsibility for millions of dead, wounded, and displaced Iraqi citizens. You're asking us to carry signs "recognizing" the men who carried out these orders. We should be carrying signs recognizing those millions who are the victims of our government, not its perpetrators.

I'm sending this to about 150 people asking them to show up with POLITICAL SIGNS. Speak your mind, people! NO WAR! TROOPS HOME NOW! BUSH LIED; PEOPLE DIED!

Peace,
Peter

--- On Sun, 5/25/08, Mel4hwpeace@aol.com Mel4hwpeace@aol.com wrote:
From: Mel4hwpeace@aol.com Mel4hwpeace@aol.com Subject: MEMORIAL DAY IN FERNDALE @ 9:30 a.m. To: hwpeace@googlegroups.com, dapjn@yahoogroups.com Date: Sunday, May 25, 2008, 4:31 PM

PARTICIPATE IN FERNDALE'S 90th MEMORAL DAY PARADE 9:30 am MONDAY

The Human Cost of War" - recognizing service men/women from MI who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. 200 posters have been made recognizing military personnel who have been killed. Wear RED WHITE OR BLUE tops, NO POLITICAL SIGNS. For more information call 248-548-3920 or report at 9:30am at Livernois near W. Maplehurst. Parade starts at 10am.

Many thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

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Iraq War Moratorium Number 9, Number 9, Num ...

The Raging Grannies, backed by San Mateo Peace Action, demonstrated at the San Mateo, CA post office on "tax day," as part of Iraq Moratorium 8.
The Iraq Moratorium is a national, grassroots effort uniting individuals and groups who want to end the war and occupation. It encourages people to take some action, individually or with a group, on the third Friday of every month to call for an end to the war.

More than 900 vigils, marches, rallies, speakers, films, and other actions have been listed on the Iraq Moratorium website, www.IraqMoratorium.org , since the monthly events began in September. Already about 60 are listed for May 16, with more coming in daily. The website also posts reports, photos and videos of past actions around the country.

Individual action is also encouraged on Moratorium days, ranging from wearing a button or armband to work or school to writing letters to the editor, calling Congressional representatives, and more.

"Two-thirds of the American people want this war to end," said Paul Krehbiel, a Pasadena, CA Moratorium organizer. "The Moratorium's goal is to get those people mobilized and encourage them to speak up and do something. The Silent Majority wants our troops home. We want them to quit being silent and put some pressure on the politicians to listen to the people."

The Iraq Moratorium is endorsed by more than 80 organizations, including: Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, U.S. Labor Against the War, and United for Peace and Justice, the nation's largest peace coalition of some 1,400 groups.

The Rag Blog / May 6, 2008

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We Are a Nation at War with Ourselves

The Pentagon vs. America
by Scott Ritter / May 5, 2008

I recently heard from an anti-war student I met while I was speaking at a college in northern Vermont. The e-mail included the following query:

“I told you about how I wanted to build a career around social activism and making a difference. You told me that one of the most important things was to make myself reputable and give people a reason to listen to you. I think this is some of the best advice I’ve received. My issue however is that you mentioned joining the military as a way to do this and mentioned how that is how you fell into it. … We talked extensively about all of our criticisms of the military currently and our foreign policy. … What I don’t understand is, how can you [advise] someone who wants to make a difference with the flawed system, to join that flawed system?”

The question is a valid one. Throughout my travels in the United States, where I interact with people from progressive anti-war groups, I am often confronted with the seeming contradiction of my position. I rail against the war in Iraq (and the potential of war with Iran) and yet embrace, at times enthusiastically, the notion of military service. It gets even more difficult to absorb, at least on the surface, when I simultaneously advocate counter-recruitment as well as support for those who seek to join the armed services.

The notion that the military and citizens of conscience should be at odds is a critical problem for our nation. That confrontation only exacerbates the problems of the soldier and the citizen, and must be properly understood if it is to be defeated. Let us start by constructing a framework in which my positions can be better assessed.

First and foremost, I do not view military service as an obligation of citizenship. I do view military service as an act of good citizenship, but it can under no circumstance be used as a litmus test for patriotism. There are many ways in which one can serve his or her nation; the military is but one. I am a big believer in the all-volunteer military. For one thing, the professional fighting force is far more effective and efficient than any conscript force could ever be.

There are those who argue that a draft would level the playing field, spreading the burdens and responsibilities associated with a standing military force more evenly among the population. Those citizens whose lives would be impacted through war (namely those of draft age and their immediate relatives) would presumably be less inclined to support war.

Conversely, the argument goes, with an all-volunteer professional force, the burden of sacrifice is limited to that segment of society which is engaged in the fighting, real or potential. Two points emerge: First, the majority of society not immediately impacted by the sacrifices of conflict will remain distant from the reality of war. Second, even when the costs of conflict become discernable to the withdrawn population, the fact that the sacrifice is being absorbed by those who willingly volunteered somehow lessens any moral outcry.

I will submit that these are valid observations, and indeed have been borne out in America’s response to the Iraq war tragedy. However, simply because something exists doesn’t make it right. The collective response to the Iraq war on the part of the American people is not a result of there not being a draft, but rather poor citizenship. An engaged citizenry would not only find sufficient qualified volunteers to fill the ranks of our military, but would also personally identify with all those who served so that the loss of one was felt by all. The fact that many Americans today view the all-volunteer force not so much as an extension of themselves, but more along the lines of a “legion” of professionals removed from society, illustrates the yawning gap that exists between we the people and those we ask to defend us.

Narrowing this gap is not something that can be accomplished simply through legislation. Reinstating the draft is illusory in this regard. There is a more fundamental obstacle to the reunion of our society and those who take an oath in the military to uphold and defend the Constitution. Void of this bond, the inherent differences of civilian and military life will serve to drive a wedge between the two, regardless of whether the military force is drafted or volunteer.

Lacking a common understanding of the foundational principles upon which the nation was built, a citizenry will grow to view military service as an imposition, as opposed to an obligation. Simply put, one cannot willingly defend that which one does not know and understand. The fundamental ignorance that exists in America today about the Constitution creates the conditions which foster the divide between citizen and soldier that permeates society today. America must take ownership of its military, not simply by footing the bill, but by assuming a moral responsibility for every aspect of military service. The vehicle for doing this has been well established through the Constitution: the legislative branch of government, the Congress, which serves to represent the will of the people.

Congress, especially the House of Representatives, was never conceived of as separate and distinct from the people, but rather as one with the people, directly derived from their collective will via the electoral process. Unfortunately today, few Americans identify with Congress. An “us versus them” mentality pervades. This mentality creates the crack in the moral and social contract which exists regarding a citizenry and its military. Congress is responsible for maintaining the military. Congress is the branch of government mandated with the responsibility for declaring war. When the bond is strained between the people and Congress, the bond between citizen and soldier is broken. Congress, left to its own devices, will begin to view the military not as an extension of its constituents, but rather as a commodity to be traded and used in a highly politicized fashion.

This is the reality we find ourselves in today (and indeed which has existed for some time). The 2006 midterm elections highlight this reality, where a strong anti-war sentiment upon the part of the voters resulted in a Democratic majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Having assumed the mantle of legislative power, however, those who were elected on the coattails of anti-war sentiment were able to shun their anti-war constituents. They did so by taking full advantage of the reality that the anti-war movement was in fact not a movement at all, but rather a concept pushed forward by a disparate mass without much political viability.

Where anti-war sentiment did in fact cross over from the ranks of the progressive left and into the mainstream of American society, it was quickly quashed through the dishonest logic that if one truly supported the troops (as most red-blooded Americans swear they do), then one must by extension support the mission. This flawed connectivity empowered Congress to sidestep the issue of withdrawing American forces from Iraq, and enabled it to continue rubber-stamping funding for a war which long ago lost any connection, perceived or otherwise, to the general security of the American people.

Read all of it here. / TruthDig / Common Dreams

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