“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Quote by President Eisenhower
"...Having Israel's back does not mean supporting preventive war that the entire national security establishment says would be a disaster for everyone involved and could guarantee an Iranian nuclear weapon. Having Israel's back does not mean goading them into making stupid decisions and pledging to bail them out unconditionally. The Senate should not be handing out promises to enable foreign leaders to decide whether and when the U.S. goes to war. This would not be a mutual defense pact -- it would be a suicide pact"New Senate Push to Pledge Unconditional Support for Israeli "Preventive" War on Iran by Jamal Abdi October 13, 2012 "Information Clearing House"
...Drones are the weapon of choice in the current administration’s wars of aggression, but it was the B-2s from Whiteman that first violated Afghan airspace eleven years ago this week and began killing the people of Afghanistan. The crimes against humanity that began in October, 2001, with B-2 airstrikes on a defenseless civilian population continue today with drones operated from that very same base. The B-2 Bomber, blasphemously nicknamed the “Spirit Bomber,” is also ready at a moment’s notice to commit the ultimate and unthinkable war crime of delivering the first nuclear payload to any place on earth. A cold war boondoggle, the B-2’s stealth capability shields it from radar the Soviets never got around to developing before their own tragic empire finally imploded.Quote from: Comparing Our Fighting Men to Nazis Drone Wars Protester Sentenced to Federal Prison By David Swanson October 12, 2012 "Information Clearing House"
First up is a bizarre story about Russia giving medals to British soldiers and personnel who took part in the North Atlantic convoys to deliver supplies to the Soviet Union during WWII. This action by Russia though belated is in fact commendable and is being done in good faith but the British authorities are not so gracious and so their reaction has been to throw it back into their faces. Shame on the narrow minded British leaders or bureaucrats for their stupidity and their lack of diplomacy in refusing to just take the medals at face value and bloody well say thank you and get off your high horse.
The British government I presume has forgotten what these brave men haven't that the Soviet Union was an ally in WWII after being invaded by Hitler's army. Some 25 million Russians died in that war and by keeping the Eastern front a going concern against the NAZIS it helped tip the war in the allies favor since Hitler had to commit more troops and weapons to the Eastern front.
Valour Expired? UK bans WW2 vets from receiving Russian award Published on Oct 13, 2012 London has denied Moscow permission to honor UK veterans of the WWII Arctic Convoys by presenting them with the prestigious Ushakov Medal. Between 1941 and 1945, the convoys formed a crucial supply route from the UK and North America to the northern Soviet ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. Merchant vessels were escorted by British Royal Naval ships and aircraft carriers. Under UK law, citizens are allowed to receive foreign medals and awards only if the British government gives them permission, and only if the award relates to the recipient's activities within past five years.
Israeli forces raid injures Palestinian prisoners PressTVGlobalNews Published on Oct 13, 2012 According to the Palestinian Prisoners Society, the Israeli Prison Services in addition to special units of the Israeli police raided the Shatta Prison, located in the North of the occupied 1948 territories.
Paul Craig Roberts criticizes the US government for ignoring the basic rights of American citizens. While in some countries the USA encourages wide spread protests and even armed rebellion it hypocritically ignores human rights violations in its more friendly states such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Israel etc.
The US government under Bush or Obama has allowed the state as such and local municipal police to burtally crack down on even the most peaceful protesters. The police are at times using unnecessary excessive force in a somewhat haphazard manner and so will pepper spray or maze protesters or use tear gas, stun grenades , tactics such as "kettling" and beating protesters with batons indiscriminately. Thousands have been arrested since the start of the Occupy movement .
The president and the government now have extraordinary powers they did not have before . For example the president or the gov't can have any US citizen arrested and detained for years without a trial or proper hearing. They would be denied their basic rights as we have seen in the case of Bradley Manning. President Obama has shown little to no concern over the violations of average American citizens when involved in protest or walking down a street according to the police looking suspicious especially if the individual is not white or wears a hoodie or baggy pants.
Maybe protesters as an experiment should show up dressed in suits or dress pants and shirt and women in similar gear as worn in an office setting-would there be less persecution less violence . Imagine thousands of office workers and /or bureaucrats leaving their comfort zone and taking part in a peaceful demostration would they too be beaten and gassed or would their employers fire them on mass. In other nations such as Pakistan , Egypt etc. those who are part of the professional classes fearing that they too may be next for the chopping block or have their salaries reduced as they watch their benefits and pensions dwindle to a pittance because they did not take a stand.
Protests As A Weapon: The US is Now a Gestapo Police State: Paul Craig Roberts After 911 Civil Rights have been eroded. The government can even assassinate its own citizens. via Information
New Senate Push to Pledge Unconditional Support for Israeli "Preventive" War on Iran by Jamal Abdi October 13, 2012 "Information Clearing House"
- - Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is planning to press the Senate next month to pledge U.S. troops, money, and political support to Israel should Bibi Netanyahu launch a preventive war on Iran. Graham claims his effort would merely make explicit that the U.S. has Israel's back. But when your friend is drunk, you don't hand them the keys. If Graham has his way, he will hand Bibi the keys and lend him our car, while the rest of us ride shotgun. Graham's planned measure would outsource the decision about whether the U.S. goes to war to the Israeli prime minister, pledging that if Bibi decides to act -- regardless of the consequences and our own calculations -- the U.S. will provide money, troops, and political leverage (presumably at the UN and IAEA where there will be a push to shred the sanctions and the Non-Proliferation Treaty).
...As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey pointedly said just weeks ago about potential Israeli strikes on Iran, "I don't want to be complicit if they decide to do it." Graham's resolution is about as clear a signal of complicity as you can get. Graham's mendacity (definition: lying, fabrications,misleading statements ,misleading arguments and interpretations, prevaricarting, snow job )on Iran policy should by now be notorious. His most recent victory was to convince Congress to endorse Netanayhu's redline for war with Iran instead of the redline laid out by the president. The trick was that, in pushing that measure, Graham disingenuously claimed that Obama's redline was nuclear weapons "capability." And Congress bought it.
In reality, the president very clearly rejected that redline and said the U.S redline was to prevent Iran from actually getting the bomb, not getting an amorphous "capability."
...Having Israel's back does not mean supporting preventive war that the entire national security establishment says would be a disaster for everyone involved and could guarantee an Iranian nuclear weapon. Having Israel's back does not mean goading them into making stupid decisions and pledging to bail them out unconditionally. The Senate should not be handing out promises to enable foreign leaders to decide whether and when the U.S. goes to war. This would not be a mutual defense pact -- it would be a suicide pactObama administration and US courts now treat even peaceful protesters as being terrorists and traitors who are a direct threat to to America and to the Pentagon and the profit driven Military ,surveillance ,intelligence conglomerate and so are denied thei basic rights. When they or their legal representatives refer to the Bill of Rights or to International Law they are attacked for daring to question a judge or the courts or the US government. The court's decision to prosecute and then sentence these activist just adds to the activists point that America is moving towards a police state .
Comparing Our Fighting Men to Nazis Drone Wars Protester Sentenced to Federal Prison By David Swanson October 12, 2012 "Information Clearing House"
- Catholic Worker Brian Terrell of Maloy, Iowa has been sentenced to serves 6 months in a federal prison for his witness against the use of drone warfare. Below is a message from Brian and his statement before the court.
"Friends, We are just out of court. I have been ordered to surrender to a federal prison not yet designated on November 30 to serve a six months in lock up, co-defendant Ron Faust was sentenced to five years on probation. Below is the statement I made to the court. Judge Whitworth took great offense at my reference to Air Force security personnel as "goosestepping riot police." Comparing our fighting men to Nazis (the judge's word, not mine) was reprehensible, he said. He is not offended, apparently, by goosestepping US military police intimidating nonviolent protestors, nor by Air Force drones committing crimes against humanity and murdering children. Mentioning these embarrassing facts, however, is an affront to good manners..."Brian Terrell’s statement at sentencing, US District Court, Jefferson City, Missouri, October 11, 2012:
Mark Twain called free speech the "privilege of the grave," a privilege never afforded the living save as an empty formality, not to be regarded seriously as an actual possession. "As an active privilege, it ranks with the privilege of committing murder: we may exercise it if we are willing to take the consequences. Murder is forbidden both in form and in fact; free speech is granted in form but forbidden in fact….Murder is sometimes punished, free speech always."Punishing free speech and letting murder off the hook is the order of the day in this courtroom.
...Each of the government’s witnesses, all of them Air Force police personnel, testified that participants in this protest were nonviolent, respectful and peaceable in assembling at Whiteman Air Force Base, a government installation, to petition that government for redress of a grievance, demanding that the remote control killing carried out daily from Whiteman cease. They testified that at no time, before or during our protest, did they perceive us as a threat.
Our expert witnesses testified that our behavior was consistent with the activities that the drafters of the First Amendment intended to be protected, not persecuted, by the government. The order and security of the base would not have been compromised had the security police allowed us to proceed to the headquarters to deliver our petition. No testimony to the contrary was offered this court. Instead of planning to accommodate a constitutionally protected peaceable assembly, however, the Air Force chose intimidation and conspired to deprive us of the rights they are sworn to protect. We learned from government witnesses that the phalanx of goose stepping riot police is a “Confrontation Management Team,” deployed only in the case of preannounced events.
Whiteman security did not call out the Team to defend the base but to intimidate citizens engaged in lawful activities. The court was mistaken a month ago when it said that our group was “allowed” to assemble on the highway right of way by the Air Force and that this space provided for us met free speech requirements of reasonable time and place. This place in question is not only outside the base’s jurisdiction, it is outside the sight and hearing of anyone on the base. The court’s decision is part of a widening disintegration of civil liberties, where speech is tolerated only in designated and remote “free speech zones” where it cannot be heard by the government, and criminalized in any place where that speech might actually have a chance to be understood. Intended or not, the court’s message is a chilling one- that a citizens’ constitutional right to assemble to petition the government extends only to places outside government facilities and where the government does not have to hear it.
The court’s easy dismissal of international law as not “trumping” domestic law has precedents, but is all the more disturbing for this fact. Last fall, I was on trial for a drone protest in a New York State where, in contrast to this court, former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark was permitted to testify on international law. Judge Gideon, after listening to Ramsey Clark speak of the Nuremburg Principles at length, leaned over the bench and asked him, “This is all interesting, but what is the enforcement mechanism? Who is responsible for enforcing international law?” “They are,” responded Mr. Clark, pointing to us defendants, “and so,” he said to Judge Gideon, “are you!” Every citizen is responsible under international law and every judge more so.
...Drones are the weapon of choice in the current administration’s wars of aggression, but it was the B-2s from Whiteman that first violated Afghan airspace eleven years ago this week and began killing the people of Afghanistan. The crimes against humanity that began in October, 2001, with B-2 airstrikes on a defenseless civilian population continue today with drones operated from that very same base. The B-2 Bomber, blasphemously nicknamed the “Spirit Bomber,” is also ready at a moment’s notice to commit the ultimate and unthinkable war crime of delivering the first nuclear payload to any place on earth. A cold war boondoggle, the B-2’s stealth capability shields it from radar the Soviets never got around to developing before their own tragic empire finally imploded. It is a prime illustration of President Eisenhower’s admonition,And at other protests:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Third Northwest activist jailed for staying silent by natasha Lennard Oct. 11, 2012
Leah-Lynn Plante was remanded into federal custody for refusing to speak to a grand jury Writing for Truth-Out in August about the Northwest grand juries and those resisting cooperation, I noted that grand juries “are among the blackest boxes in the federal judiciary system.”
The closed-door procedures are rare instances in which an individual loses the right to remain silent. As was the case with the Northwest grand juries resistors, the grand jury can grant a subpoenaed individual personal immunity; Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination are therefore protected, but silence is not. In these instances, refusal to speak can be considered civil contempt.
Non-cooperators can be jailed for the 18-month length of the grand jury. “The arbitrary issuing of subpoenas to activists and pressuring them to divulge information about others in secret proceedings extends to arresting them when they decide to resist,” NLG’s Boghosian told me Thursday, commenting that the grand jury subpoena process has a “star chamber quality.” Lawyers, scholars and activists alike have long complained about the use of federal grand juries as tools for political repression. The case of the Northwest grand jury resistors is now well-known in activist and anarchist circles around the country.
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