[Peace-discuss] [OccupyCU] on demonstrating on questions that the two parties are not addressing -- Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On

Mon Sep 3 20:25:13 UTC 2012

"Vets [and others] prepare for pro-Bradley Manning actions at Obama 2012 offices nationwide Sept. 6"
<http://warisacrime.org/content/vets-prepare-pro-bradley-manning-actions-obama-2012-offices-nationwide-sept-6>
<http://www.occupyboston.org/2012/08/31/support-bradley-manning/>

Attached please find the flyer distributed at the regular monthly AWARE demonstration on Sept. 1. 

It will also be distributed at the local Sept. 6 demonstration for Bradley Manning, 5-6pm in downtown Urbana.

The text is as follows:
================
(recto)

The Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana (AWARE)

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S WAR ON THE TRUTH ABOUT ITS WARS

Obama's Accomplishments
President Obama keeps a list of "nominees" for murder [by drone strike] and holds meetings on Tuesdays to pick the winners. We should ask him who got the nod this week. The list includes adults and children, men and women, boys and girls, Americans and non-Americans. (See New York Times, May 29, 2012.)

President Obama has enlarged the U.S. military three years in a row, deployed it to more nations, engaged it in more secret wars, and invented a new form of warfare using drones. The drone wars are killing large numbers of people and creating vastly greater numbers of refugees. Their illegality is not a concern, following Obama's war in Libya conducted despite the opposition of Congress, and the current U.S. role in a civil war in Syria unilaterally announced by the White House. These are on top of a war in Afghanistan that Obama tripled in size and intends to continue for two-and-a-half more years before continuing at an unspecified smaller scale for 10 more years after that, despite 70% public opposition now.

In fact, legality has been removed from all discussion, as President Obama has publicly instructed the Attorney General of the United States not to prosecute any members of the CIA for torture. President Obama, together with Congress, has "legalized" imprisonment without trial for Americans or non-Americans (something Obama's Justice Department is currently struggling to uphold in court), as well as rendition, and torture (now a policy choice rather than a crime).

The Obama administration has engaged in an unprecedented assault on whistleblowers, charging more than all previous administrations combined under the Espionage Act, creating a climate of secrecy and fear, torturing Bradley Manning, and maneuvering in an extensive effort to gain custody of Julian Assange - to try and punish him for journalism.

This unprecedented militarism was the inevitable result of our failure to hold Bush and Cheney responsible for their crimes. It carries with it the inevitable trade-off on the domestic side. Over half of federal discretionary spending (and rising) now goes to war preparation. Obama's major complaint with the U.S. media is that, "He particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security" (New York Times, Aug. 7, 2012). The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few has advanced faster under Obama than under Bush. Corporate trade agreements have been created at a faster pace. The destruction of the earth's atmosphere has continued at a faster pace.

The Horrible Romney Alternative
Of course you should not vote for Romney. But civil rights were not gained by avoiding the responsibilities of citizenship in order to pretend that every day is election day. Today is not election day. Today is an opportunity to communicate a message to the holder of an office that has been given unprecedented power (again, by allowing Bush to walk free). Women did not vote themselves the right to vote. The labor movement was not built by the current strategy of funding a corporate political party with working people's hard-earned pay. In that moment of voting, vote as you see fit. But censoring your criticism of your government, cheering as a spectator for one half of a corrupt government, treating government of the people as a spectator sport is working against what has always done the good you are intending to do here. We don't need well-meaning props in electoral commercials so much as we need activists, organizers, mobilizers, educators. If we reject any cuts to our Social Security and Medicare, if we insist on an end to all the killing, we will move the culture of the country and with it all the politicians. That's what's worked for centuries. Avoiding ugly facts has never gotten us anywhere. [Adapted from David Swanson <http://warisacrime.org/blog/1568>.]

**********************
Obama's war on WikiLeaks
To get a grip on what is actually going on, rewind to WikiLeaks' explosive release of secret US military reports and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables two years ago. They disgorged devastating evidence of US war crimes and collusion with death squads in Iraq on an industrial scale, the machinations and lies of America's wars and allies, its illegal US spying on UN officials – as well as a compendium of official corruption and deceit across the world.

WikiLeaks provided fuel for the Arab uprisings. It didn't just deliver information for citizens to hold governments everywhere to account, but crucially opened up the exercise of US global power to democratic scrutiny. Not surprisingly, the US government made clear it regarded WikiLeaks as a serious threat to its interests from the start, denouncing the release of confidential US cables as a "criminal act".

(verso) 

Vice-president Joe Biden has compared Assange to a "hi-tech terrorist". Shock jocks and neocons have called for him to be hunted down and killed. Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old soldier accused of passing the largest trove of US documents to WikiLeaks, who has been held in conditions described as "cruel and inhuman" by the UN special rapporteur on torture, faces up to 52 years in prison.

The US interest in deterring others from following the WikiLeaks path is obvious. And it would be bizarre to expect a state which over the past decade has kidnapped, tortured and illegally incarcerated its enemies, real or imagined, on a global scale – and continues to do so under President Barack Obama – to walk away from what Hillary Clinton described as an "attack on the international community". In the meantime, the US authorities are presumably banking on seeing Assange further discredited in Sweden.

None of that should detract from the seriousness of the rape allegations made against Assange, for which he should clearly answer and, if charges are brought, stand trial. The question is how to achieve justice for the women involved while protecting Assange (and other whistleblowers) from punitive extradition to a legal system that could potentially land him in a US prison cell for decades.

The politicization of the Swedish case was clear from the initial leak of the allegations to the prosecutor's decision to seek Assange's extradition for questioning – described by a former Stockholm prosecutor as "unreasonable, unfair and disproportionate" – when the authorities have been happy to interview suspects abroad in more serious cases. [From Seamus Milne <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/21/why-us-is-out-to-get-assange>]

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, but he remains essentially imprisoned in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. If he leaves the compound, he will be arrested and extradited to Sweden, where he faces allegations of sexual assault. Assange denies the allegations and claims they are part of an effort to get him to the United States to face more serious charges related to his work for WikiLeaks. High-profile defenders like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone have recently published editorials in support of Assange. Here Noam Chomsky argues that Julian Assange deserves applause rather than denunciation and punishment:

Julian Assange faces serious accusations from two women in Sweden, yet you’ve said that any decent country should grant him asylum. Why? 
	The accusations should be taken quite seriously, just as all such accusations should. Independent of that, no decent country would permit a person to be sent to a country where the chances of his receiving a fair trial are very limited. The apparent conflict can be easily resolved. Sweden claims only that they want to interrogate Assange. They have been invited to do that in England, or in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. They refuse. They could also issue a statement that they will not extradite Assange to the United States. They refuse.
	Suppose that Assange had leaked Russian, rather than American, documents, and the circumstances were otherwise the same. Then Sweden would not hesitate for a moment to question Assange in the United Kingdom and to guarantee that he would not be extradited to Russia. Those who think that this analogy is unfair have something to learn about contemporary history. They can, for example, look at the brutal and criminal treatment of Bradley Manning, to take one of many examples.
It is worth adding that Sweden is quite willing to follow Washington’s orders in even worse circumstances than this – for example, when the United States wanted Sweden to send someone to Mubarak’s Egypt to be tortured.

According to documents published by WikiLeaks, the Ecuadorian government doesn’t support freedom of the press domestically. Is it hypocritical for Assange to accept asylum from such a country?
	Of course not, no more than it is hypocritical for him to stay in London, which has a shameful record of violation of freedom of press – of course, targeting weak and defenseless journals, so that it passes without comment. As for the charges against Ecuador, they should be evaluated seriously, just like those against England, France, and others. But it is irrelevant here.

What’s at stake here?
	At stake is the question of whether the citizens of a country have a right to know what their elected officials are doing. Those who have a lingering affection for an odd notion called “democracy” believe that this is important. To be sure, a state has the right to keep some matters secret. I haven’t read all the WikiLeaks exposures, but I have read quite a few, and I have not seen an example of anything that could legitimately be kept secret, nor, to my knowledge, have the horde of angry critics presented an example. I should say that this is not unusual. Anyone who has spent time studying declassified documents is well aware that overwhelmingly, they are kept secret to protect elected officials from the scrutiny of citizens, not for defense or some other legitimate purpose.
	Someone who courageously carries out actions in defense of democratic rights deserves applause, not hysterical denunciation and punishment. We understand that very well with regard to official enemies. Since you bring up the matter of “hypocrisy,” it is the extreme of hypocrisy to refuse to apply the same standards to ourselves. [http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/?p=675]

###

On Sep 3, 2012, at 12:51 PM, Stuart Levy <stuartnlevy at gmail.com> wrote:

> Comments ...
> 
> Ya'aqov Ziso wrote:
>> to perhaps sway Obama voters  -- to whom? to what?
> As far as *voting* is concerned, I think we'd hope to sway potential Obama voters to say to him and to the Dem. party, Remember, you need our support.  Listen to us!  The fact that your opponents are out of their minds does not guarantee that you can give up any prospect of social equity, accept any corporate dictate, promote any war, without concern for us.  Certainly that's what unions should be saying - they may be greatly reduced but their mobilization can still be important in close races, and there are lots of those.
> 
> Further -
> 
> Remember what started this thread: a proposal for a demonstration.  The goal of that demonstration was *not* to say, Vote Against Obama nor Vote for Romney.  It was to tell Obama (and everyone) that Bradley Manning's (accused) whistleblowing and (actual) official mistreatment are important issues.  Better, that whistleblowing to expose war crimes - undermining the bureaucracy of war - should be admired, not prosecuted.
> 
> (If we're talking about prosecution, we'd do better to compare the aggressive prosecution of Manning with the non-prosecution of many in the US administration, or to take Archbishop Tutu's position, that those who should be prosecuted now were those at the highest level who misled their countries into a war that killed, at least hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions, and destroyed a country.  Though that would seem to distract from the questions of Bradley Manning and of Wikileaks.   (By coincidence, as I'm typing this, BBC radio is having a live discussion of the ICC, Archbishop Tutu's call for prosecutions, and the criminality of the Iraq war.)...

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