[Peace-discuss] Draft flyer for AWARE May 4 demo

Sat May 4 03:49:05 UTC 2013

[Below please find the text of a flyer for the AWARE demonstration on May 4 (2-4pm in downtown Champaign). Thanks to Karen Evans-Levy, Noam Chomsky, Rohn Koester, Ralph Nader, Jeremy Scahill, David Swanson, Ron Szoke and others, whose material I've used freely and without attribution. Comments are suggestions are welcomed. --CGE]

WHY WE'RE STILL DEMONSTRATING AGAINST THE WAR

AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana, has been demonstrating against the U.S. government's criminal wars since shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001 - when it became clear that our government would use those crimes as an excuse to expand its Mideast wars.

We have held anti-war demonstrations almost every month for almost a dozen years, while two administrations, one Republican and one Democrat, have committed what the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, following World War II, called "the supreme international crime [i.e., worse than terrorism], differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" - the waging of aggressive war. AWARE is made up of local residents who believe that if Americans knew what the government was doing in their name, they would be appalled.

In his Inaugural Address in January, President Obama said, “A decade of war is now ending,” but that's not true, and of course he knows that it's not true. There is in fact no plan to end U.S. combat, even in Afghanistan - only an announced goal to lower troop levels in that country within twelve months. But even then - if the announced timetable is met - there will be more U.S. troops in Afghanistan than were there when Obama became president.

Obama's war is by not limited to AFPAK, the American war theatre that includes Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jeremy Scahill's just-published Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battleground describes in chilling detail the effects on the ground of U.S. military operations, terror strikes from the air (drones), and the exploits of the secret army of the executive branch, the Joint Special Operations Command, which rapidly expanded under President George W. Bush, then became a weapon of choice for President Obama. The Obama administration has now even deployed troops to thirty-five African countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger.

Today the U.S. government is threatening, invading, and occupying countries in a vast circle with a 2500-mile radius around the Persian Gulf, from north Africa to the borders of India and China, a region sometimes called the "Greater Middle East." (The U.S. military calls it "Central Command.") This region has the world's greatest concentration of oil and natural gas, and our government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars, month after month, to control it. Control and not just access to these energy resources is what our government demands. We in fact import little of our own oil supplies from the Mideast - most of it comes from the western hemisphere, notably Canada and Venezuela - but control of world energy supplies gives the U.S. an unparalleled advantage over our economic rivals in Europe and Asia.

The U.S. government spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined - and the bulk of it is spent on controlling oil transportation routes in oil-rich regions - some $7.3 trillion over the last three decades. In other words, President Obama is killing men, women and children in Asia and Africa in our name - because China and other countries need oil, and our government intends to have control over where they get it. Our government says that we are conducting these vastly expensive wars to stop terrorism and protect civilians - but we can see that, instead, we're killing civilians and creating terrorists. These wars are not in Americans' interest, because it's the 1% who profit from them, through armaments and oil.

The Obama administration’s innovation in these American wars is to add world-wide assassinations - by drone or JSOC death squad. The Joint Special Operations Command is now - amazingly - active in 120 countries, according to the Command's spokesman, and the U.S. has some 800 military bases in 150 countries around the world. Obama's global assassination program creates hatred of the United States and threats to its citizens more rapidly than it kills people who are suspected of posing a possible danger to us someday.

President Obama has killed between 3,000 and 5,000 people - including at least 200 children - with drone attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen - countries with which we are not at war (and some of which are supposed to be 'allies.') Obama recently said, "There’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders" - but he was speaking of Israel, and of course that's exactly what he is doing, including killing American citizens.

President Bush - in addition to launching a lying invasion of Iraq ten years ago - kidnapped people around the world and tortured them in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo: Obama simply murders them and hopes Americans won't notice. His problem is the American people, who - in spite of the media's silence about the ongoing war, or cheerleading for it - do not want more war. Therefore he wants to find an effective way to lie to them that the war is 'winding down,' even as he expands it.

Furthermore, President Obama is doing what he can to suppress knowledge of his war-making. He is persecuting those who reveal the war crimes that the U.S. has committed, including Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. His administration has employed the 1917 Espionage Act - which has nothing to do with spying but rather with with suppressing criticism of U.S. wars - more than all previous administrations put together. And he has insisted that his drone war is "secret" and therefore out of the reach of U.S. courts.

President Bush established a U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to keep it out of the reach of U.S. courts. The scandal of torture and illegal imprisonment there led Obama to promise to close that prison, but he hasn't done so, even though he is empowered to end Guantanamo Bay’s affront to due process by releasing from imprisonment the 86 inmates who have been found to be neither enemy combatants nor war criminals. Of the remaining 80 prisoners, he should either charge and prosecute them for alleged war crimes or release them. He must terminate forthwith Guantanamo Bay’s blot on the character of this nation that provokes enmity and retaliation.

Finally, the cost of the war is stupendous. A recent study from Harvard's Kennedy School makes the case for $4-6 trillion as the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. And this estimate includes the long-term benefits and compensation for the many victims of the war, certainly not a sure thing. But it doesn't include war reparations, which would make the final figure even larger. Proportional to population, that would be over $200 billion for residents of Illinois. Imagine what that money could do for the more than 13% of Illinois residents who live in poverty, the more than 12% who are "food insecure," and the more than 14,000 homeless in the state.

If you object to the Obama administration's conducting
illegal and unjustified war - and lying about the reasons for it -
call Senators Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk and Representative Rodney Davis.
Their Washington offices can be reached at 202-224-3121.

For updates on the war, see the cable TV program "AWARE on the Air" each Tuesday at 10pm
on Urbana Public Television - channels 6 & 99 and online at <http://urbanapublictelevision.org>.

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