From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Aug 1 12:04:36 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 12:04:36 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Sanctions and the danger of war Message-ID: * Print * Leaflet * Feedback * Share » The US sanctions drive and the danger of war 1 August 2017 Moscow’s expulsion of 750 American diplomats and contractors after the US Congress passed a bill imposing economic sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea marks a historical watershed. The neo-colonial wars launched by the United States and its imperialist allies in the last quarter century are producing a generalized breakdown of international trade and diplomatic relations, posing the danger of war between the major nuclear-armed powers. The overwhelming passage of the Russian sanctions bill, with which the US Congress committed Trump to blocking Russian trade with Europe, staggered the Kremlin. Hoping for improved relations under Trump, Russia did not retaliate for Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats last year, after Washington issued unfounded declarations that Russia “hacked” the US elections. In the half year since Trump's inauguration, however, the faction of the US ruling class demanding a confrontation with Russia has emerged as dominant in the media and state apparatus. The bill, passed over protests from Germany and France, will also escalate tensions between Washington and its supposed NATO allies in Europe. Yesterday, US officials confirmed that the Pentagon is reviving plans, abandoned in 2015, to arm the far-right Ukrainian regime that emerged from the fascist-led coup in 2014. The aid would include anti-tank missiles and other lethal weaponry. As a result, Moscow is planning for an extended armed stand-off with Washington, placing the military situation in Europe on a hair trigger. “We waited quite a long time for something to maybe change,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address this weekend. “But all things considered, if it changes, it won’t be anytime soon.” As it threatens Russia, Washington is simultaneously escalating its campaign against China. After Friday’s missile test by North Korea, which potentially put US cities including Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago in range of North Korean nuclear weapons, US officials confirmed that they are considering economic sanctions on China. “I am very disappointed in China. Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet they do NOTHING for us with North Korea,” Trump wrote in two Twitter posts. “We will no longer allow this to continue.” After last week’s statement in Australia by US Admiral Scott Swift that he would follow orders from Trump to launch nuclear strikes on China, the Wall Street Journal posted a comment titled “The Regime Change Solution in North Korea,” advocating a pro-US military coup in Pyongyang. There is a political logic to this relentless intensification of commercial, diplomatic and military tensions between the major powers. It cannot continue very long without exploding into war. The media is attempting to downplay the danger in the face of growing popular concern. “Sanctions are often controversial,” the New York Times wrote of the Russia sanctions on July 27. “But they are a nonviolent tool—and in this case a timely and appropriate one—for making clear when another country’s behavior has crossed a line and for applying pressure that could make its leaders reconsider course.” Who does the Times think it is kidding? In the last quarter century since the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union, sanctions were directed at countries—often allied to Russia or China—like Iraq, Yugoslavia, Iran and North Korea, each of which Washington or the entire NATO alliance targeted for war or regime-change. Today, however, sanctions are being directly aimed at major, nuclear-armed powers central to the world capitalist economy. The last time Washington sought to arm the far-right Kiev regime, in 2015, Berlin and Paris cut across the US initiative and negotiated a peace deal between Moscow and Kiev. Before the talks, then-French President François Hollande warned of the danger of “total war,” that is, of nuclear war, between NATO and Russia. As Washington prepares a new escalation, all-out war is doubtless again being actively discussed in chancelleries, foreign offices and military headquarters worldwide, behind the backs of the world’s people. The election of Trump was not the cause, but a symptom of a broad collapse of the imperialist system that threatens the world with catastrophe. The US sanctions bill against Russia has overwhelming bipartisan support, led by the Democratic Party. Great-power rivalries, including between the United States and its European imperialist allies, are rooted in objective conflicts lodged in the structure of world capitalism that twice in the previous century erupted into world war. As the major powers fight over strategic positions and trillions of dollars in trade, it is ever clearer that the contradictions of capitalism identified by the great Marxists of the 20th century as the causes of war and social revolution—the contradiction between global economy and the nation-state system, and between socialized production and private appropriation of profit—are still operative today. The key political question is the formation of a mass, anti-war and socialist movement of the international working class. A situation in which workers allow themselves to be swept behind the contending capitalist factions can lead only to disaster. While US imperialism’s attempts to assert its rapidly-collapsing global hegemony most immediately raise the threat of war, its European imperialist rivals and the reactionary post-Soviet capitalist oligarchies in Russia and China are no less bankrupt. Washington’s policy against Russia and China will doubtless accelerate ongoing moves by the European powers, led by Germany, to pour tens of billions of euros into their military forces and set up military machines “independent from,” that is, potentially hostile to, Washington. This imperialist policy, carried out in the profit interests of the European banks and corporations and financed by attacks on European workers, goes hand-in-hand with the rise of nationalistic and far-right political forces across the continent. As for the Russian and Chinese oligarchies, they oscillate between attempts to work out a deal with the imperialist powers and to confront them militarily. This was graphically revealed by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s appearance on Sunday at a massive military parade at Zhurihe. “The world is not all at peace, and peace must be safeguarded,” Xi said, telling Chinese troops: “Always obey and follow the party. Go and fight wherever the party points.” Should the Chinese Stalinist regime, or the Kremlin, opt for a military confrontation with Washington, this could very rapidly lead the world to a nuclear conflagration. The most urgent task is to mobilize the sentiment against war and social inequality that is growing among the working class all over the world. As the International Committee of the Fourth International explained in its statement, “Socialism and the Fight Against War:” * The struggle against war must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive elements in the population. * The new anti-war movement must be anti-capitalist and socialist, since there can be no serious struggle against war except in the fight to end the dictatorship of finance capital and put an end to the economic system that is the fundamental cause of militarism and war. * The new anti-war movement must therefore, of necessity, be completely and unequivocally independent of, and hostile to, all political parties and organizations of the capitalist class. * The new anti-war movement must, above all, be international, mobilizing the vast power of the working class in a unified global struggle against imperialism. Alex Lantier wsws.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Aug 1 14:09:33 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 09:09:33 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Sanctions and the danger of war In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: "The election of Trump was not the cause, but a symptom of a broad collapse of the imperialist system that threatens the world with catastrophe. The US sanctions bill against Russia has overwhelming bipartisan support, led by the Democratic Party..." > On Aug 1, 2017, at 7:04 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The US sanctions drive and the danger of war > 1 August 2017 > Moscow’s expulsion of 750 American diplomats and contractors after the US Congress passed a bill imposing economic sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea marks a historical watershed. The neo-colonial wars launched by the United States and its imperialist allies in the last quarter century are producing a generalized breakdown of international trade and diplomatic relations, posing the danger of war between the major nuclear-armed powers. > The overwhelming passage of the Russian sanctions bill, with which the US Congress committed Trump to blocking Russian trade with Europe, staggered the Kremlin. Hoping for improved relations under Trump, Russia did not retaliate for Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats last year, after Washington issued unfounded declarations that Russia “hacked” the US elections. In the half year since Trump's inauguration, however, the faction of the US ruling class demanding a confrontation with Russia has emerged as dominant in the media and state apparatus. > The bill, passed over protests from Germany and France, will also escalate tensions between Washington and its supposed NATO allies in Europe. Yesterday, US officials confirmed that the Pentagon is reviving plans, abandoned in 2015, to arm the far-right Ukrainian regime that emerged from the fascist-led coup in 2014. The aid would include anti-tank missiles and other lethal weaponry. > As a result, Moscow is planning for an extended armed stand-off with Washington, placing the military situation in Europe on a hair trigger. “We waited quite a long time for something to maybe change,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address this weekend. “But all things considered, if it changes, it won’t be anytime soon.” > As it threatens Russia, Washington is simultaneously escalating its campaign against China. After Friday’s missile test by North Korea, which potentially put US cities including Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago in range of North Korean nuclear weapons, US officials confirmed that they are considering economic sanctions on China. “I am very disappointed in China. Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet they do NOTHING for us with North Korea,” Trump wrote in two Twitter posts. “We will no longer allow this to continue.” > After last week’s statement in Australia by US Admiral Scott Swift that he would follow orders from Trump to launch nuclear strikes on China, the Wall Street Journal posted a comment titled “The Regime Change Solution in North Korea,” advocating a pro-US military coup in Pyongyang. > There is a political logic to this relentless intensification of commercial, diplomatic and military tensions between the major powers. It cannot continue very long without exploding into war. > The media is attempting to downplay the danger in the face of growing popular concern. “Sanctions are often controversial,” the New York Times wrote of the Russia sanctions on July 27. “But they are a nonviolent tool—and in this case a timely and appropriate one—for making clear when another country’s behavior has crossed a line and for applying pressure that could make its leaders reconsider course.” > Who does the Times think it is kidding? In the last quarter century since the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union, sanctions were directed at countries—often allied to Russia or China—like Iraq, Yugoslavia, Iran and North Korea, each of which Washington or the entire NATO alliance targeted for war or regime-change. Today, however, sanctions are being directly aimed at major, nuclear-armed powers central to the world capitalist economy. > The last time Washington sought to arm the far-right Kiev regime, in 2015, Berlin and Paris cut across the US initiative and negotiated a peace deal between Moscow and Kiev. Before the talks, then-French President François Hollande warned of the danger of “total war,” that is, of nuclear war, between NATO and Russia. As Washington prepares a new escalation, all-out war is doubtless again being actively discussed in chancelleries, foreign offices and military headquarters worldwide, behind the backs of the world’s people... From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Aug 1 14:23:43 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 14:23:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] It's about time, from Kevin Zeese and Dr. Margaret Flowers Message-ID: We need to add to this, “stop the killing and” The Coalition Against Foreign Military Bases is a new campaign focused on closing all US military bases abroad. This campaign strikes at the foundation of US empire, confronting its militarism, corporatism and imperialism. We urge you to endorse this campaign. On the occasion of its announcement, the coalition issued a unity statement, which describes its intent as “raising public awareness and organizing non-violent mass resistance against U.S. foreign military bases.” It further explains that US foreign military bases are “the principal instruments of imperial global domination and environmental damage through wars of aggression and occupation, and that the closure of U.S. foreign military bases is one of the first necessary steps toward a just, peaceful and sustainable world.” While the US sought to be an imperial force beginning just after the US Civil War and then escalated those efforts at the turn of the 20th Century, it became the dominant empire globally after World War II. This was during the time of de-colonization, when many traditional empires were forced to let their colonies become independent nations. So, while the US is the largest empire in world history, it is not a traditional empire in which nations are described as colonies of the US empire. Nations remain independent, at least in name, while allowing US bases on their soil and serving as a client state of the United States. They are controlled through the economic power of the US, World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The US has used regime change tactics, including assassination and military force, to keep its empire intact. Commentators have described the United States as an “empire of bases.” Chalmers Johnson wrote in 2004: As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize — or do not want to recognize — that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire — an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can’t begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order. Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage — Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another. We do not know the exact number of US military bases and outposts throughout the world. The Unity Statement says “the United States maintains the highest number of military bases outside its territory, estimated at almost 1000 (95% of all foreign military bases in the world). . . . In addition, the United States has 19 Naval air carriers (and 15 more planned), each as part of a Carrier Strike Group, composed of roughly 7,500 personnel, and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircraft — each of which can be considered a floating military base.” The annual Department of Defense (DoD) Base Structure Report says the DoD manages a massive “global real property portfolio that consists of nearly 562,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures), located on over 4,800 sites worldwide and covering over 24.9 million acres.” They value DoD property located in 42 nations at over $585 billion. It is difficult to tell from this report the number of bases and military outposts, which has led analysts like Tom Engelhardt to describe US empire as an “invisible” empire of bases. He points out the US military bases are rarely discussed in the media. It usually takes an incident, like US soldiers being attacked or a US aircraft being shot down, for them to get any mention in the media. Many of the bases remain from previous wars, especially World War II and the Korean War: According to official information provided by the Department of Defense (DoD) and its Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) there are still about 40,000 US troops, and 179 US bases in Germany, over 50,000 troops in Japan (and 109 bases), and tens of thousands of troops, with hundreds of bases, all over Europe. Over 28,000 US troops are present in 85 bases in South Korea, and have been since 1957. The number of bases is always changing as the US seeks to continuously expand its empire of bases. Just this week the US is opening a military base in South Korea, which is described as a city of 25,000 people. The Washington Post reports: “We built an entire city from scratch,” said Col. Scott W. Mueller, garrison commander of Camp Humphreys, one of the U.S. military’s largest overseas construction projects. If it were laid across Washington, the 3,454-acre base would stretch from Key Bridge to Nationals Park, from Arlington National Cemetery to the Capitol. * * * Now, the $11 billion base is beginning to look like the garrison that military planners envisaged decades ago. The Eighth Army moved its headquarters here this month and there are about 25,000 people based here, including family members and contractors. There are apartment buildings, sports fields, playgrounds and a water park, and an 18- hole golf course with the generals’ houses overlooking the greens. There is a “warrior zone” with Xboxes and Playstations, pool tables and dart boards, and a tavern for those old enough to drink. Starting this August, there will be two elementary schools, a middle school and a high school. A new, 68-bed military hospital to replace the one at Yongsan is close to completion. Also this week, it was reported that the United States has created ten new military bases in Syria. This was done without permission of the Syrian government and was exposed by Turkey in protest against the United States. There is a cost to these bases, not only the $156 billion in annual funds spent on them, but also the conflicts they create between the United States and people around the world. There have been protests against the presence or development of US bases in Okinawa, Italy, Jeju Island Korea, Diego Garcia, Cyprus, Greece, and Germany. Some of the bases are illegal, as the unity statement points out, “The base that the U.S. has illegally occupied the longest, for over a century, is Guantánamo Bay, whose existence constitutes an imposition of the empire and a violation of International Law.” Cuba has called for the return of Guantánamo since 1959. David Vine, the author of Base Nation, describes how these bases, which seek to project US power around the globe, create political tensions, are a source for military attacks and create alliances with dictators. They breed sexual violence, displace indigenous peoples, and destroy the environment. The unity statement of the Coalition Against Foreign Military Bases concludes by urging all of us to unite to close US bases around the world because: U.S. foreign military bases are NOT in defense of U.S. national, or global security. They are the military expression of U.S. intrusion in the lives of sovereign countries on behalf of the dominant financial, political, and military interests of the ruling elite. Whether invited in or not by domestic interests that have agreed to be junior partners, no country, no peoples, no government, can claim to be able to make decisions totally in the interest of their people, with foreign troops on their soil representing interests antagonistic to the national purpose. Please endorse the statement and join the campaign to remove US military bases from foreign soil. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Aug 1 15:55:15 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 15:55:15 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Newspeak Times: David Brooks on "Manliness"--Barf! And Barf Again! Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2017 10:52 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Newspeak Times: David Brooks on "Manliness"--Barf! And Barf Again! Brooks is a Zionist Neo-Con who was behind me at the University of Chicago. His promotion of UChicago Bloom's Neo-Con Rant to national prominence by means of the Harvard Zionist Neo-Con Billie Krystol should tell you everything you need to know about Brooks. Bloom admitted he wrote his Rant at the suggestion of his Neo-Con Friends in order to excavate himself out of mountain of debt. Billie Krystol studied at Harvard with Harvard's Leading Straussian Neo-Con Harvey Mansfield, who wrote an entire book on "Manliness." It was well known in the Harvard Gov Department that Harvey dumped his wife and his kids in order to shack up with one of his Grad Students, leaving his wife to raise their kids. That's Neo-Con "Manliness" for you. Fab. In 1986, Brooks was hired by the Wall Street Journal, where he worked first as an editor of the book review section, enlisting William Kristol to review Allan Bloom's famous The Closing of the American Mind, which helped raise the book to national prominence. Copyright 2010 Newstex LLC All Rights Reserved Newstex Web Blogs Copyright 2010 Atlantic Free Press Atlantic Free Press April 3, 2010 Saturday 9:07 AM EST LENGTH: 1826 words HEADLINE: Neo-Cons, Fundies, Feddies & Con-Artists: Bush to Obama BYLINE: Francis A Boyle BODY: Apr. 3, 2010 (Atlantic Free Press delivered by Newstex) -- by Francis A. Boyle Ph.D. It is now a matter of public record that immediately after the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld and his pro-Israeli Neo-Conservative Deputy Paul Wolfowitz began to plot, plan, scheme and conspire to wage a war of aggression against Iraq by manipulating the tragic events of September 11th in order to provide a pretext for doing so. Of course Iraq had nothing at all to do with September 11th or supporting Al-Qaeda. But that made no difference to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their Undersecretary of War Douglas Feith, and the numerous other pro-Israeli Neo-Cons inhabiting the Bush Jr. administration. These pro-Israeli Neo-Cons had been schooled in the Machiavellian/Hobbist/Nietzschean theories of Professor Leo Strauss who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago in its Department of Political Science for many years. The best exposé of Strauss's pernicious theories on law, politics, government, for elitism, and against democracy can be found in two scholarly books by the Canadian Professor of Political Philosophy Shadia B. Drury: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988); Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999). I entered the University of Chicago in September of 1968 shortly after Strauss had retired. But I was trained in Chicago's Political Science Department by Strauss's foremost protégé, co-author, and later literary executor Joseph Cropsey. Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago's Political Science Department (A.B., 1971, in Political Science), I concur (NASDAQ:CNQR) completely with Professor Drury's devastating critique of Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process that has been inflicted by Chicago's Straussian Neo-Con cabal. Strauss was a protégé of Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt, who justified every hideous atrocity that Hitler and the Nazis inflicted on anyone, including the Jews. Chicagos Neo-Cons are Neo-Nazis. The University of Chicago routinely trained me and innumerable other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-Con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. Years later, the University of Chicago became the "brains" behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the Neo-Con University of Chicago Law School in 1967. Many of his lawyers at the Bush Jr. Department of Injustice were members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, elitist, war-mongering, and totalitarian Federalist Society (A.K.A.:"Feddies"), which originated in part at the Neo-Con University of Chicago Law School. There Barack Obama would teach constitutional law. Feddies wrote the USA Patriot Act (USAPA) I and the draft for USAPA II, which constitute the blueprints for establishing an American Police State. Meanwhile, the Department of Injustice's own F.B.I. is still covering up the U.S. governmental origins of the post 11 September 2001 anthrax attacks on Washington D.C. that enabled Ashcroft and his Feddies to stampede the U.S. Congress into passing USAPA I into law. Integrally related to and overlapping with the Feddies are members of the University of Chicago Law School Movement of oeLaw-and-Kick-Them-in-the-Groin-Economics, which in turn was founded upon the Market Fundamentalism of Milton Friedman, now retired but long-time Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" have raped, robbed, looted, plundered, and pillaged economies and their respective peoples all over the developing world, especially People of Color, and now here in the United States. This Chicago gang of academic con-artists and charlatans are proponents of the Nazi Doctrine of "useless eaters" that was condemned by the Nuremberg Judgment (1946). Pursuant to Friedman's philosophy of Market Fundamentalism, the "privatization" of Iraq and its Oil Industry are already underway for the primary benefit of the U.S. energy companies (e.g., Halliburton (NYSE:HAL) , formerly under Bush Jr.s Vice President Dick Cheney) that had already interpenetrated the Bush Jr. administration as well as the Bush Family itself. Enron. Although miseducated at Yale and Harvard Business School, the "Ivies" proved to be too liberal for Bush Jr. and his fundamentalist Christian supporters, whose pointman and spearcarrier in the Bush Jr. administration was Ashcroft, a Fundie himself. The Neo-Cons and the Fundies contracted an "unholy alliance" in support of Bush Jr. For their own different reasons, both gangs also worked hand-in-hand to support Israel's genocidal Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an internationally acknowledged war criminal. According to his own public estimate and boast in a 26 February 2003 speech before the American Enterprise Institute (another front-organization for Straussian Neo-Cons), President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration, intentionally taking offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians. Most of the Straussian Neo-Cons in the Bush Jr. administration and elsewhere were and still are Israel-firsters: What is "good" for Israel is by definition "good" for the United States. Dual loyalties indeed. These same principles hold true for the not-so-closet Neo-Cons in the Obama administration: e.g., Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Elena Kagan, Dennis Ross, Cass Sunstein, etc. In addition, it was the Chicago Straussian cabal of pro-Israeli Neo-Cons who set up a special "intelligence" unit within the Pentagon that was responsible for manufacturing many of the bald-faced lies, deceptions, half-truths, and sheer propaganda that the Bush Jr. administration then disseminated to the lap-dog U.S. news media in order to generate public support for a war of aggression against Iraq for the benefit of Israel and in order to steal Iraq's oil. To paraphrase advice Machiavelli once rendered to his Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book: Those who want to deceive will always find those willing to be deceived. As I can attest from my personal experience as an alumnus of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, the Bible of Chicago's Neo-Con Straussian cabal is Machiavelli's The Prince. We students had to know our Machiavelli by heart and rote at the University of Chicago. As for the University of Chicago overall, its New Testament is Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Of course Bloom was another protégé of Strauss (and thus the intellectual grandson of Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt), as well as a mentor to Wolfowitz. In his Bloom-biographical novel Ravelstein (2000) Saul Bellow, longtime member of the University of Chicago Faculty, outed his self-styled friend Bloom as a hedonist, pederast, and most promiscuous homosexual who died of AIDS. All this was common knowledge at the University of Chicago, where Bloom was and is still worshiped on a pedestal and his elitist screed against democratic education in America still revered as gospel truth. In Ravelstein Wolfowitz appeared as Bloom's protégé Philip Gorman, leaking national security secrets to his mentor during the Bush Sr. war against Iraq. Strauss hovered around the novel as Bloom's mentor and guru Professor Davarr. Strauss/Davarr is really the eminence grise of Ravelstein. With friends like Bellow, Bloom did not need enemies. On the basis of Ravelstein alone, Wolfowitz warranted criminal investigation by the F.B.I. Immediately after the Bush Jr. administrations wanton aggression against Iraq, the University of Chicago chose the occasion to officially celebrate its Straussian Neo-Con cabal responsible therefore, highlighting Wolfowitz Ph.D. '72, Ahmad Chalabi, Ph.D. '69 (the CIA's Iraqi puppet), Abram Shulsky, A.M. '68, Ph.D. '72 (head of the Pentagon's special "intelligence" unit), Zalmay Khalilzad, Ph.D. '79 (Bush Jr.'s roving pro-consul for Afghanistan and then Iraq), as well as faculty members Bellow, X '39, and Bloom, A.B. '49, A.M. '53, Ph.D. '55, together with Strauss. According to the June 2003 University of Chicago Magazine, Bloom's rant "helped popularize Straussian ideals of democracy." It is correct to assert that Bloom's book helped to popularize Straussian "ideas," but they were blatantly anti-democratic, Machiavellian, Hobbist, Nietzschean, and elitist to begin with. Only the University of Chicago would have the unmitigated Orwellian gall to publicly assert that Strauss and Bloom cared one whit about democracy, let alone comprehended the "ideals of democracy." Does anyone seriously believe that a pro-Israeli Chicago/Strauss/Bloom product such as Wolfowitz could care less about democracy in the United States let alone in Iraq? Or for that matter anyone in the Bush Jr. administration? After they stole the 2000 presidential election from the American People in Florida and before the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, some of whom were/are Feddies? Justice Clarence Thomas is a Straussian to boot. For eight years the Neo-Cons, Fundies, Feddies, and Con-Artists of the Bush Jr. administration did everything humanly possible to build an American Police State. So far University of Chicago Constitutional Law Teacher President Barack Obama has failed and refused to deconstruct and dismantle their totalitarian handiwork. To the contrary, the Obama administration has defended and justified in court almost every hideous atrocity that the Bush Jr. administration perpetrated on international law, human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. At the behest of its Straussian Neo-Con Political Science Department, in 1979 the entire University of Chicago went out of its way to grant the "first Albert Pick Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Understanding" to Robert McNamara, who was personally responsible for exterminating 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 men of my generation. In other words, the University of Chicago itself maliciously strove to rehabilitate one of the greatest international war criminals in the post-World War II era. History shall always record that the University of Chicago gratuitously honored Bob oeHalf-an-Eichmann McNamara. Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz and totalitarians like Ashcroft! The University of Chicago is an intellectual and moral cesspool. As J.D. Rockefeller, the Original Robber Baron and Funder of the University of Chicago once commented about his progeny: oeIts the best investment I ever made. Still is. Newstex ID: ATFR-0001-43485955 _______________________________________________ AALSMIN-L mailing list AALSMIN-L at lists.ubalt.edu http://lists.ubalt.edu/mailman/listinfo/aalsmin-l This email was sent using the University of Baltimore mailing list system. Messages sent via a University of Baltimore mailing do not necessarily represent the opinion of the University. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Aug 1 15:55:15 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 15:55:15 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Newspeak Times: David Brooks on "Manliness"--Barf! And Barf Again! Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2017 10:52 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Newspeak Times: David Brooks on "Manliness"--Barf! And Barf Again! Brooks is a Zionist Neo-Con who was behind me at the University of Chicago. His promotion of UChicago Bloom's Neo-Con Rant to national prominence by means of the Harvard Zionist Neo-Con Billie Krystol should tell you everything you need to know about Brooks. Bloom admitted he wrote his Rant at the suggestion of his Neo-Con Friends in order to excavate himself out of mountain of debt. Billie Krystol studied at Harvard with Harvard's Leading Straussian Neo-Con Harvey Mansfield, who wrote an entire book on "Manliness." It was well known in the Harvard Gov Department that Harvey dumped his wife and his kids in order to shack up with one of his Grad Students, leaving his wife to raise their kids. That's Neo-Con "Manliness" for you. Fab. In 1986, Brooks was hired by the Wall Street Journal, where he worked first as an editor of the book review section, enlisting William Kristol to review Allan Bloom's famous The Closing of the American Mind, which helped raise the book to national prominence. Copyright 2010 Newstex LLC All Rights Reserved Newstex Web Blogs Copyright 2010 Atlantic Free Press Atlantic Free Press April 3, 2010 Saturday 9:07 AM EST LENGTH: 1826 words HEADLINE: Neo-Cons, Fundies, Feddies & Con-Artists: Bush to Obama BYLINE: Francis A Boyle BODY: Apr. 3, 2010 (Atlantic Free Press delivered by Newstex) -- by Francis A. Boyle Ph.D. It is now a matter of public record that immediately after the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld and his pro-Israeli Neo-Conservative Deputy Paul Wolfowitz began to plot, plan, scheme and conspire to wage a war of aggression against Iraq by manipulating the tragic events of September 11th in order to provide a pretext for doing so. Of course Iraq had nothing at all to do with September 11th or supporting Al-Qaeda. But that made no difference to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their Undersecretary of War Douglas Feith, and the numerous other pro-Israeli Neo-Cons inhabiting the Bush Jr. administration. These pro-Israeli Neo-Cons had been schooled in the Machiavellian/Hobbist/Nietzschean theories of Professor Leo Strauss who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago in its Department of Political Science for many years. The best exposé of Strauss's pernicious theories on law, politics, government, for elitism, and against democracy can be found in two scholarly books by the Canadian Professor of Political Philosophy Shadia B. Drury: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988); Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999). I entered the University of Chicago in September of 1968 shortly after Strauss had retired. But I was trained in Chicago's Political Science Department by Strauss's foremost protégé, co-author, and later literary executor Joseph Cropsey. Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago's Political Science Department (A.B., 1971, in Political Science), I concur (NASDAQ:CNQR) completely with Professor Drury's devastating critique of Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process that has been inflicted by Chicago's Straussian Neo-Con cabal. Strauss was a protégé of Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt, who justified every hideous atrocity that Hitler and the Nazis inflicted on anyone, including the Jews. Chicagos Neo-Cons are Neo-Nazis. The University of Chicago routinely trained me and innumerable other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-Con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. Years later, the University of Chicago became the "brains" behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the Neo-Con University of Chicago Law School in 1967. Many of his lawyers at the Bush Jr. Department of Injustice were members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, elitist, war-mongering, and totalitarian Federalist Society (A.K.A.:"Feddies"), which originated in part at the Neo-Con University of Chicago Law School. There Barack Obama would teach constitutional law. Feddies wrote the USA Patriot Act (USAPA) I and the draft for USAPA II, which constitute the blueprints for establishing an American Police State. Meanwhile, the Department of Injustice's own F.B.I. is still covering up the U.S. governmental origins of the post 11 September 2001 anthrax attacks on Washington D.C. that enabled Ashcroft and his Feddies to stampede the U.S. Congress into passing USAPA I into law. Integrally related to and overlapping with the Feddies are members of the University of Chicago Law School Movement of oeLaw-and-Kick-Them-in-the-Groin-Economics, which in turn was founded upon the Market Fundamentalism of Milton Friedman, now retired but long-time Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" have raped, robbed, looted, plundered, and pillaged economies and their respective peoples all over the developing world, especially People of Color, and now here in the United States. This Chicago gang of academic con-artists and charlatans are proponents of the Nazi Doctrine of "useless eaters" that was condemned by the Nuremberg Judgment (1946). Pursuant to Friedman's philosophy of Market Fundamentalism, the "privatization" of Iraq and its Oil Industry are already underway for the primary benefit of the U.S. energy companies (e.g., Halliburton (NYSE:HAL) , formerly under Bush Jr.s Vice President Dick Cheney) that had already interpenetrated the Bush Jr. administration as well as the Bush Family itself. Enron. Although miseducated at Yale and Harvard Business School, the "Ivies" proved to be too liberal for Bush Jr. and his fundamentalist Christian supporters, whose pointman and spearcarrier in the Bush Jr. administration was Ashcroft, a Fundie himself. The Neo-Cons and the Fundies contracted an "unholy alliance" in support of Bush Jr. For their own different reasons, both gangs also worked hand-in-hand to support Israel's genocidal Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an internationally acknowledged war criminal. According to his own public estimate and boast in a 26 February 2003 speech before the American Enterprise Institute (another front-organization for Straussian Neo-Cons), President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration, intentionally taking offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians. Most of the Straussian Neo-Cons in the Bush Jr. administration and elsewhere were and still are Israel-firsters: What is "good" for Israel is by definition "good" for the United States. Dual loyalties indeed. These same principles hold true for the not-so-closet Neo-Cons in the Obama administration: e.g., Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Elena Kagan, Dennis Ross, Cass Sunstein, etc. In addition, it was the Chicago Straussian cabal of pro-Israeli Neo-Cons who set up a special "intelligence" unit within the Pentagon that was responsible for manufacturing many of the bald-faced lies, deceptions, half-truths, and sheer propaganda that the Bush Jr. administration then disseminated to the lap-dog U.S. news media in order to generate public support for a war of aggression against Iraq for the benefit of Israel and in order to steal Iraq's oil. To paraphrase advice Machiavelli once rendered to his Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book: Those who want to deceive will always find those willing to be deceived. As I can attest from my personal experience as an alumnus of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, the Bible of Chicago's Neo-Con Straussian cabal is Machiavelli's The Prince. We students had to know our Machiavelli by heart and rote at the University of Chicago. As for the University of Chicago overall, its New Testament is Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Of course Bloom was another protégé of Strauss (and thus the intellectual grandson of Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt), as well as a mentor to Wolfowitz. In his Bloom-biographical novel Ravelstein (2000) Saul Bellow, longtime member of the University of Chicago Faculty, outed his self-styled friend Bloom as a hedonist, pederast, and most promiscuous homosexual who died of AIDS. All this was common knowledge at the University of Chicago, where Bloom was and is still worshiped on a pedestal and his elitist screed against democratic education in America still revered as gospel truth. In Ravelstein Wolfowitz appeared as Bloom's protégé Philip Gorman, leaking national security secrets to his mentor during the Bush Sr. war against Iraq. Strauss hovered around the novel as Bloom's mentor and guru Professor Davarr. Strauss/Davarr is really the eminence grise of Ravelstein. With friends like Bellow, Bloom did not need enemies. On the basis of Ravelstein alone, Wolfowitz warranted criminal investigation by the F.B.I. Immediately after the Bush Jr. administrations wanton aggression against Iraq, the University of Chicago chose the occasion to officially celebrate its Straussian Neo-Con cabal responsible therefore, highlighting Wolfowitz Ph.D. '72, Ahmad Chalabi, Ph.D. '69 (the CIA's Iraqi puppet), Abram Shulsky, A.M. '68, Ph.D. '72 (head of the Pentagon's special "intelligence" unit), Zalmay Khalilzad, Ph.D. '79 (Bush Jr.'s roving pro-consul for Afghanistan and then Iraq), as well as faculty members Bellow, X '39, and Bloom, A.B. '49, A.M. '53, Ph.D. '55, together with Strauss. According to the June 2003 University of Chicago Magazine, Bloom's rant "helped popularize Straussian ideals of democracy." It is correct to assert that Bloom's book helped to popularize Straussian "ideas," but they were blatantly anti-democratic, Machiavellian, Hobbist, Nietzschean, and elitist to begin with. Only the University of Chicago would have the unmitigated Orwellian gall to publicly assert that Strauss and Bloom cared one whit about democracy, let alone comprehended the "ideals of democracy." Does anyone seriously believe that a pro-Israeli Chicago/Strauss/Bloom product such as Wolfowitz could care less about democracy in the United States let alone in Iraq? Or for that matter anyone in the Bush Jr. administration? After they stole the 2000 presidential election from the American People in Florida and before the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, some of whom were/are Feddies? Justice Clarence Thomas is a Straussian to boot. For eight years the Neo-Cons, Fundies, Feddies, and Con-Artists of the Bush Jr. administration did everything humanly possible to build an American Police State. So far University of Chicago Constitutional Law Teacher President Barack Obama has failed and refused to deconstruct and dismantle their totalitarian handiwork. To the contrary, the Obama administration has defended and justified in court almost every hideous atrocity that the Bush Jr. administration perpetrated on international law, human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. At the behest of its Straussian Neo-Con Political Science Department, in 1979 the entire University of Chicago went out of its way to grant the "first Albert Pick Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Understanding" to Robert McNamara, who was personally responsible for exterminating 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 men of my generation. In other words, the University of Chicago itself maliciously strove to rehabilitate one of the greatest international war criminals in the post-World War II era. History shall always record that the University of Chicago gratuitously honored Bob oeHalf-an-Eichmann McNamara. Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz and totalitarians like Ashcroft! The University of Chicago is an intellectual and moral cesspool. As J.D. Rockefeller, the Original Robber Baron and Funder of the University of Chicago once commented about his progeny: oeIts the best investment I ever made. Still is. Newstex ID: ATFR-0001-43485955 _______________________________________________ AALSMIN-L mailing list AALSMIN-L at lists.ubalt.edu http://lists.ubalt.edu/mailman/listinfo/aalsmin-l This email was sent using the University of Baltimore mailing list system. Messages sent via a University of Baltimore mailing do not necessarily represent the opinion of the University. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Aug 1 16:01:02 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 16:01:02 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Newspeak Times: David Brooks on "Manliness"--Barf! And Barf Again! Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2017 10:52 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Newspeak Times: David Brooks on "Manliness"--Barf! And Barf Again! Brooks is a Zionist Neo-Con who was behind me at the University of Chicago. His promotion of UChicago Bloom's Neo-Con Rant to national prominence by means of the Harvard Zionist Neo-Con Billie Krystol should tell you everything you need to know about Brooks. Bloom admitted he wrote his Rant at the suggestion of his Neo-Con Friends in order to excavate himself out of mountain of debt. Billie Krystol studied at Harvard with Harvard's Leading Straussian Neo-Con Harvey Mansfield, who wrote an entire book on "Manliness." It was well known in the Harvard Gov Department that Harvey dumped his wife and his kids in order to shack up with one of his Grad Students, leaving his wife to raise their kids. That's Neo-Con "Manliness" for you. Fab. In 1986, Brooks was hired by the Wall Street Journal, where he worked first as an editor of the book review section, enlisting William Kristol to review Allan Bloom's famous The Closing of the American Mind, which helped raise the book to national prominence. Copyright 2010 Newstex LLC All Rights Reserved Newstex Web Blogs Copyright 2010 Atlantic Free Press Atlantic Free Press April 3, 2010 Saturday 9:07 AM EST LENGTH: 1826 words HEADLINE: Neo-Cons, Fundies, Feddies & Con-Artists: Bush to Obama BYLINE: Francis A Boyle BODY: Apr. 3, 2010 (Atlantic Free Press delivered by Newstex) -- by Francis A. Boyle Ph.D. It is now a matter of public record that immediately after the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld and his pro-Israeli Neo-Conservative Deputy Paul Wolfowitz began to plot, plan, scheme and conspire to wage a war of aggression against Iraq by manipulating the tragic events of September 11th in order to provide a pretext for doing so. Of course Iraq had nothing at all to do with September 11th or supporting Al-Qaeda. But that made no difference to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their Undersecretary of War Douglas Feith, and the numerous other pro-Israeli Neo-Cons inhabiting the Bush Jr. administration. These pro-Israeli Neo-Cons had been schooled in the Machiavellian/Hobbist/Nietzschean theories of Professor Leo Strauss who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago in its Department of Political Science for many years. The best exposé of Strauss's pernicious theories on law, politics, government, for elitism, and against democracy can be found in two scholarly books by the Canadian Professor of Political Philosophy Shadia B. Drury: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988); Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999). I entered the University of Chicago in September of 1968 shortly after Strauss had retired. But I was trained in Chicago's Political Science Department by Strauss's foremost protégé, co-author, and later literary executor Joseph Cropsey. Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago's Political Science Department (A.B., 1971, in Political Science), I concur (NASDAQ:CNQR) completely with Professor Drury's devastating critique of Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process that has been inflicted by Chicago's Straussian Neo-Con cabal. Strauss was a protégé of Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt, who justified every hideous atrocity that Hitler and the Nazis inflicted on anyone, including the Jews. Chicagos Neo-Cons are Neo-Nazis. The University of Chicago routinely trained me and innumerable other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-Con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. Years later, the University of Chicago became the "brains" behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the Neo-Con University of Chicago Law School in 1967. Many of his lawyers at the Bush Jr. Department of Injustice were members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, elitist, war-mongering, and totalitarian Federalist Society (A.K.A.:"Feddies"), which originated in part at the Neo-Con University of Chicago Law School. There Barack Obama would teach constitutional law. Feddies wrote the USA Patriot Act (USAPA) I and the draft for USAPA II, which constitute the blueprints for establishing an American Police State. Meanwhile, the Department of Injustice's own F.B.I. is still covering up the U.S. governmental origins of the post 11 September 2001 anthrax attacks on Washington D.C. that enabled Ashcroft and his Feddies to stampede the U.S. Congress into passing USAPA I into law. Integrally related to and overlapping with the Feddies are members of the University of Chicago Law School Movement of oeLaw-and-Kick-Them-in-the-Groin-Economics, which in turn was founded upon the Market Fundamentalism of Milton Friedman, now retired but long-time Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" have raped, robbed, looted, plundered, and pillaged economies and their respective peoples all over the developing world, especially People of Color, and now here in the United States. This Chicago gang of academic con-artists and charlatans are proponents of the Nazi Doctrine of "useless eaters" that was condemned by the Nuremberg Judgment (1946). Pursuant to Friedman's philosophy of Market Fundamentalism, the "privatization" of Iraq and its Oil Industry are already underway for the primary benefit of the U.S. energy companies (e.g., Halliburton (NYSE:HAL) , formerly under Bush Jr.s Vice President Dick Cheney) that had already interpenetrated the Bush Jr. administration as well as the Bush Family itself. Enron. Although miseducated at Yale and Harvard Business School, the "Ivies" proved to be too liberal for Bush Jr. and his fundamentalist Christian supporters, whose pointman and spearcarrier in the Bush Jr. administration was Ashcroft, a Fundie himself. The Neo-Cons and the Fundies contracted an "unholy alliance" in support of Bush Jr. For their own different reasons, both gangs also worked hand-in-hand to support Israel's genocidal Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an internationally acknowledged war criminal. According to his own public estimate and boast in a 26 February 2003 speech before the American Enterprise Institute (another front-organization for Straussian Neo-Cons), President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration, intentionally taking offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians. Most of the Straussian Neo-Cons in the Bush Jr. administration and elsewhere were and still are Israel-firsters: What is "good" for Israel is by definition "good" for the United States. Dual loyalties indeed. These same principles hold true for the not-so-closet Neo-Cons in the Obama administration: e.g., Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Elena Kagan, Dennis Ross, Cass Sunstein, etc. In addition, it was the Chicago Straussian cabal of pro-Israeli Neo-Cons who set up a special "intelligence" unit within the Pentagon that was responsible for manufacturing many of the bald-faced lies, deceptions, half-truths, and sheer propaganda that the Bush Jr. administration then disseminated to the lap-dog U.S. news media in order to generate public support for a war of aggression against Iraq for the benefit of Israel and in order to steal Iraq's oil. To paraphrase advice Machiavelli once rendered to his Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book: Those who want to deceive will always find those willing to be deceived. As I can attest from my personal experience as an alumnus of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, the Bible of Chicago's Neo-Con Straussian cabal is Machiavelli's The Prince. We students had to know our Machiavelli by heart and rote at the University of Chicago. As for the University of Chicago overall, its New Testament is Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Of course Bloom was another protégé of Strauss (and thus the intellectual grandson of Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt), as well as a mentor to Wolfowitz. In his Bloom-biographical novel Ravelstein (2000) Saul Bellow, longtime member of the University of Chicago Faculty, outed his self-styled friend Bloom as a hedonist, pederast, and most promiscuous homosexual who died of AIDS. All this was common knowledge at the University of Chicago, where Bloom was and is still worshiped on a pedestal and his elitist screed against democratic education in America still revered as gospel truth. In Ravelstein Wolfowitz appeared as Bloom's protégé Philip Gorman, leaking national security secrets to his mentor during the Bush Sr. war against Iraq. Strauss hovered around the novel as Bloom's mentor and guru Professor Davarr. Strauss/Davarr is really the eminence grise of Ravelstein. With friends like Bellow, Bloom did not need enemies. On the basis of Ravelstein alone, Wolfowitz warranted criminal investigation by the F.B.I. Immediately after the Bush Jr. administrations wanton aggression against Iraq, the University of Chicago chose the occasion to officially celebrate its Straussian Neo-Con cabal responsible therefore, highlighting Wolfowitz Ph.D. '72, Ahmad Chalabi, Ph.D. '69 (the CIA's Iraqi puppet), Abram Shulsky, A.M. '68, Ph.D. '72 (head of the Pentagon's special "intelligence" unit), Zalmay Khalilzad, Ph.D. '79 (Bush Jr.'s roving pro-consul for Afghanistan and then Iraq), as well as faculty members Bellow, X '39, and Bloom, A.B. '49, A.M. '53, Ph.D. '55, together with Strauss. According to the June 2003 University of Chicago Magazine, Bloom's rant "helped popularize Straussian ideals of democracy." It is correct to assert that Bloom's book helped to popularize Straussian "ideas," but they were blatantly anti-democratic, Machiavellian, Hobbist, Nietzschean, and elitist to begin with. Only the University of Chicago would have the unmitigated Orwellian gall to publicly assert that Strauss and Bloom cared one whit about democracy, let alone comprehended the "ideals of democracy." Does anyone seriously believe that a pro-Israeli Chicago/Strauss/Bloom product such as Wolfowitz could care less about democracy in the United States let alone in Iraq? Or for that matter anyone in the Bush Jr. administration? After they stole the 2000 presidential election from the American People in Florida and before the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, some of whom were/are Feddies? Justice Clarence Thomas is a Straussian to boot. For eight years the Neo-Cons, Fundies, Feddies, and Con-Artists of the Bush Jr. administration did everything humanly possible to build an American Police State. So far University of Chicago Constitutional Law Teacher President Barack Obama has failed and refused to deconstruct and dismantle their totalitarian handiwork. To the contrary, the Obama administration has defended and justified in court almost every hideous atrocity that the Bush Jr. administration perpetrated on international law, human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. At the behest of its Straussian Neo-Con Political Science Department, in 1979 the entire University of Chicago went out of its way to grant the "first Albert Pick Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Understanding" to Robert McNamara, who was personally responsible for exterminating 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 men of my generation. In other words, the University of Chicago itself maliciously strove to rehabilitate one of the greatest international war criminals in the post-World War II era. History shall always record that the University of Chicago gratuitously honored Bob oeHalf-an-Eichmann McNamara. Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz and totalitarians like Ashcroft! The University of Chicago is an intellectual and moral cesspool. As J.D. Rockefeller, the Original Robber Baron and Funder of the University of Chicago once commented about his progeny: oeIts the best investment I ever made. Still is. Newstex ID: ATFR-0001-43485955 _______________________________________________ AALSMIN-L mailing list AALSMIN-L at lists.ubalt.edu http://lists.ubalt.edu/mailman/listinfo/aalsmin-l This email was sent using the University of Baltimore mailing list system. Messages sent via a University of Baltimore mailing do not necessarily represent the opinion of the University. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Tue Aug 1 19:30:52 2017 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 14:30:52 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Illinois unions note: Pritzkers opposed hotel workers organizing Hyatt. Labor Beat video from 2011 In-Reply-To: <4774461C-7CD7-4548-85D4-EDFE3BF9993C@comcast.net> References: <4774461C-7CD7-4548-85D4-EDFE3BF9993C@comcast.net> Message-ID: <008d01d30afc$b22b39d0$1681ad70$@comcast.net> From: Larry Duncan [mailto:larryd63 at comcast.net] Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2017 12:48 PM To: Larry Duncan Subject: Illinois unions note: Pritzkers opposed hotel workers organizing Hyatt. Labor Beat video from 2011 Illinois unions note: Pritzkers opposed hotel workers organizing Hyatt Labor Beat video from 2011 Apparently Illinois Republicans are exploiting the fact that the Pritzkers attacked union organizing efforts at their Hyatt hotel chain. Rauner and the Republicans are using this to undermine Democrat J. B. Pritzker’s campaign for governor, now endorsed by the Illinois Federation of Labor. And the allegation is true. What a fiasco for the Democrats and the Illinois Federation of Labor, who are supporting J. B. for governor! Illinois unions should demand that the IFL immediately withdraw its endorsement for a member of this union-busting billionaire family. How outraged they would have been at this protest back in 2011 (see video below) if it had been announced at the end of the march and rally that their state federation of labor in 2017 would be campaigning for the billionaire J. B. Pritzker to represent them in Springfield. (And how much money from union dues was spent on the recent, expensive Pritzker campaign video?) Here’s Labor Beat’s video from 2011 on the Hyatt vs the hotel workers. -Larry Duncan Labor Beat: We Are One - Illinois https://youtu.be/dOntwNsWHac As part of the national We Are One actions in early April, a number of rallies took place around Illinois and culminating in Chicago on April 9, 2011. We begin first at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on the banks of the Chicago River as teacher unions teamed up with the hotel workers. They shared a common foe: the super-rich Pritzkers, who own the Hyatt and also play the same role in Illinois as the Koch family plays in Wisconsin, bankrolling legislators to attack public sector unions. Afterwards, the action moved down to Daley Plaza where some 10,000 unionist heard speeches comparing what is happening in Illinois to Wisconsin. Includes scenes from downstate rallies in Decatur and Springfield. Speakers and interviews: George Schmidt, Substancenews.net; Jackson Potter, CTU staff coordinator; Sandra Miranda, Hyatt housekeeper; Dan Montgomery, President of Ill. Fed. of Teachers; Ken Swanson, President of Ill. Education Association; Bill Lucy, President of Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; Jen Johnson, Chicago public school teacher; Mahlon Mitchell, President of Wis. Fire Fighters Union. Length - 12:54 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Wed Aug 2 03:09:49 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 22:09:49 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The war party wants war Message-ID: <80937EE4-E4BA-4B0E-8944-A37EF184D710@illinois.edu> “...U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia are insufficient to satiate our War Party. Now it wants us to lead the Sunnis of the Middle East in taking down the Shiites, who are dominant in Iran, Iraq, Syria and South Lebanon, and are a majority in Bahrain and the oil-producing regions of Saudi Arabia... "Among the reasons Trump routed his Republican rivals in 2016 is that he seemed to share an American desire to look homeward. "Yet, today, our relations with China and Russia are as bad as they have been in decades, while there is open talk of war with Iran and North Korea. "Was this what America voted for, or is this what America voted against?" ==================================================================== "Shall We Fight Them All?" | A Commentary By Patrick J. Buchanan | Tuesday 1 August 2017 Saturday, Kim Jong Un tested an ICBM of sufficient range to hit the U.S. mainland. He is now working on its accuracy, and a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop that missile that can survive re-entry. Unless we believe Kim is a suicidal madman, his goal seems clear. He wants what every nuclear power wants -- the ability to strike his enemy's homeland with horrific impact, in order to deter that enemy. Kim wants his regime recognized and respected, and the U.S., which carpet-bombed the North from 1950-1953, out of Korea. Where does this leave us? Says Cliff Kupchan of the Eurasia Group, "The U.S. is on the verge of a binary choice: either accept North Korea into the nuclear club or conduct a military strike that would entail enormous civilian casualties." A time for truth. U.S. sanctions on North Korea, like those voted for by Congress last week, are not going to stop Kim from acquiring ICBMs. He is too close to the goal line. And any pre-emptive strike on the North could trigger a counterattack on Seoul by massed artillery on the DMZ, leaving tens of thousands of South Koreans dead, alongside U.S. soldiers and their dependents. We could be in an all-out war to the finish with the North, a war the American people do not want to fight. Saturday, President Trump tweeted out his frustration over China's failure to pull our chestnuts out of the fire: "They do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue. China could easily solve this problem." Sunday, U.S. B-1B bombers flew over Korea and the Pacific air commander Gen. Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy warned his units were ready to hit North Korea with "rapid, lethal, and overwhelming force." Yet, also Sunday, Xi Jinping reviewed a huge parade of tanks, planes, troops and missiles as Chinese officials mocked Trump as a "greenhorn President" and "spoiled child" who is running a bluff against North Korea. Is he? We shall soon see. According to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump vowed Monday he would take "all necessary measures" to protect U.S. allies. And U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley bristled, "The time for talk is over." Are we headed for a military showdown and war with the North? The markets, hitting records again Monday, don't seem to think so. But North Korea is not the only potential adversary with whom our relations are rapidly deteriorating. After Congress voted overwhelmingly for new sanctions on Russia last week and Trump agreed to sign the bill that strips him of authority to lift the sanctions without Hill approval, Russia abandoned its hopes for a rapprochement with Trump's America. Sunday, Putin ordered U.S. embassy and consulate staff cut by 755 positions. The Second Cold War, begun when we moved NATO to Russia's borders and helped dump over a pro-Russian regime in Kiev, is getting colder. Expect Moscow to reciprocate Congress' hostility when we ask for her assistance in Syria and with North Korea. Last week's sanctions bill also hit Iran after it tested a rocket to put a satellite in orbit, though the nuclear deal forbids only the testing of ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. Defiant, Iranians say their missile tests will continue. Recent days have also seen U.S. warships and Iranian patrol boats in close proximity, with the U.S. ships firing flares and warning shots. Our planes and ships have also, with increasingly frequency, come to close quarters with Russian and Chinese ships and planes in the Baltic and South China seas. While wary of a war with North Korea, Washington seems to be salivating for a war with Iran. Indeed, Trump's threat to declare Iran in violation of the nuclear arms deal suggests a confrontation is coming. One wonders: If Congress is hell-bent on confronting the evil that is Iran, why does it not cancel Iran's purchases and options to buy the 140 planes the mullahs have ordered from Boeing? Why are we selling U.S. airliners to the "world's greatest state sponsor of terror"? Let Airbus take the blood money. Apparently, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia are insufficient to satiate our War Party. Now it wants us to lead the Sunnis of the Middle East in taking down the Shiites, who are dominant in Iran, Iraq, Syria and South Lebanon, and are a majority in Bahrain and the oil-producing regions of Saudi Arabia. The U.S. military has its work cut out for it. President Trump may need those transgender troops. Among the reasons Trump routed his Republican rivals in 2016 is that he seemed to share an American desire to look homeward. Yet, today, our relations with China and Russia are as bad as they have been in decades, while there is open talk of war with Iran and North Korea. Was this what America voted for, or is this what America voted against? From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Aug 2 11:27:34 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2017 06:27:34 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Prairiegreens] The war party wants war In-Reply-To: <3143ff3c-5185-8fbf-cfe3-65ed6d82ddfe@pigs.ag> References: <80937EE4-E4BA-4B0E-8944-A37EF184D710@illinois.edu> <3143ff3c-5185-8fbf-cfe3-65ed6d82ddfe@pigs.ag> Message-ID: <741DFACC-9220-4A71-AE65-686861DFDB7F@gmail.com> Quite agree. Unfortunately the whole War Party (whom Trump attacked) have got the bit in their teeth as they see more than two generations of their parents’ world predominance slipping way, relatively. To change animals in the middle of a fb stream, rats don’t like to be trapped: they’re capable of nasty and even self-destructive attacks. "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whisker…." —CGE > On Aug 2, 2017, at 5:36 AM, E. Wayne johnson wrote: > > China doesn''t exactly want the US of A as a backyard fenceline neighbor. > > Most sensible countries with any control of their geography do not. > > Would you rather have Kim Jung-IL, master of his own destiny, and a few bottle rockets, or would you rather have the US-quasi-colony of S. Korea and a gaggle of neocons. > > Right now China is a trading partner with N. Korea, and Mr. Master of His Own Destiny may be a bit spoiled and eccentric but it is amusing to see his taunting, if one is amused by such. > > I am not sure that good case can be made that Kim is less nutso than McCain, Graham, Bolton, Killary, et al. > > On 08/02/2017 10:09 AM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote: >> “...U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia are insufficient to satiate our War Party. Now it wants us to lead the Sunnis of the Middle East in taking down the Shiites, who are dominant in Iran, Iraq, Syria and South Lebanon, and are a majority in Bahrain and the oil-producing regions of Saudi Arabia... >> >> "Among the reasons Trump routed his Republican rivals in 2016 is that he seemed to share an American desire to look homeward. >> >> "Yet, today, our relations with China and Russia are as bad as they have been in decades, while there is open talk of war with Iran and North Korea. >> >> "Was this what America voted for, or is this what America voted against?" >> >> ==================================================================== >> "Shall We Fight Them All?" | A Commentary By Patrick J. Buchanan | Tuesday 1 August 2017 >> >> Saturday, Kim Jong Un tested an ICBM of sufficient range to hit the U.S. mainland. He is now working on its accuracy, and a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop that missile that can survive re-entry. >> >> Unless we believe Kim is a suicidal madman, his goal seems clear. He wants what every nuclear power wants -- the ability to strike his enemy's homeland with horrific impact, in order to deter that enemy. >> >> Kim wants his regime recognized and respected, and the U.S., which carpet-bombed the North from 1950-1953, out of Korea. >> >> Where does this leave us? Says Cliff Kupchan of the Eurasia Group, "The U.S. is on the verge of a binary choice: either accept North Korea into the nuclear club or conduct a military strike that would entail enormous civilian casualties." >> >> A time for truth. U.S. sanctions on North Korea, like those voted for by Congress last week, are not going to stop Kim from acquiring ICBMs. He is too close to the goal line. >> >> And any pre-emptive strike on the North could trigger a counterattack on Seoul by massed artillery on the DMZ, leaving tens of thousands of South Koreans dead, alongside U.S. soldiers and their dependents. >> >> We could be in an all-out war to the finish with the North, a war the American people do not want to fight. >> >> Saturday, President Trump tweeted out his frustration over China's failure to pull our chestnuts out of the fire: "They do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue. China could easily solve this problem." >> >> Sunday, U.S. B-1B bombers flew over Korea and the Pacific air commander Gen. Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy warned his units were ready to hit North Korea with "rapid, lethal, and overwhelming force." >> >> Yet, also Sunday, Xi Jinping reviewed a huge parade of tanks, planes, troops and missiles as Chinese officials mocked Trump as a "greenhorn President" and "spoiled child" who is running a bluff against North Korea. Is he? We shall soon see. >> >> According to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump vowed Monday he would take "all necessary measures" to protect U.S. allies. And U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley bristled, "The time for talk is over." >> >> Are we headed for a military showdown and war with the North? The markets, hitting records again Monday, don't seem to think so. >> >> But North Korea is not the only potential adversary with whom our relations are rapidly deteriorating. >> >> After Congress voted overwhelmingly for new sanctions on Russia last week and Trump agreed to sign the bill that strips him of authority to lift the sanctions without Hill approval, Russia abandoned its hopes for a rapprochement with Trump's America. Sunday, Putin ordered U.S. embassy and consulate staff cut by 755 positions. >> >> The Second Cold War, begun when we moved NATO to Russia's borders and helped dump over a pro-Russian regime in Kiev, is getting colder. Expect Moscow to reciprocate Congress' hostility when we ask for her assistance in Syria and with North Korea. >> >> Last week's sanctions bill also hit Iran after it tested a rocket to put a satellite in orbit, though the nuclear deal forbids only the testing of ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. Defiant, Iranians say their missile tests will continue. >> >> Recent days have also seen U.S. warships and Iranian patrol boats in close proximity, with the U.S. ships firing flares and warning shots. Our planes and ships have also, with increasingly frequency, come to close quarters with Russian and Chinese ships and planes in the Baltic and South China seas. >> >> While wary of a war with North Korea, Washington seems to be salivating for a war with Iran. Indeed, Trump's threat to declare Iran in violation of the nuclear arms deal suggests a confrontation is coming. >> >> One wonders: If Congress is hell-bent on confronting the evil that is Iran, why does it not cancel Iran's purchases and options to buy the 140 planes the mullahs have ordered from Boeing? >> >> Why are we selling U.S. airliners to the "world's greatest state sponsor of terror"? Let Airbus take the blood money. >> >> Apparently, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia are insufficient to satiate our War Party. Now it wants us to lead the Sunnis of the Middle East in taking down the Shiites, who are dominant in Iran, Iraq, Syria and South Lebanon, and are a majority in Bahrain and the oil-producing regions of Saudi Arabia. >> >> The U.S. military has its work cut out for it. President Trump may need those transgender troops. >> >> Among the reasons Trump routed his Republican rivals in 2016 is that he seemed to share an American desire to look homeward. >> >> Yet, today, our relations with China and Russia are as bad as they have been in decades, while there is open talk of war with Iran and North Korea. >> >> Was this what America voted for, or is this what America voted against? >> _______________________________________________ >> Prairiegreens mailing list >> Prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net >> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/prairiegreens >> http://www.prairienet.org/greens/ > > _______________________________________________ > Prairiegreens mailing list > Prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/prairiegreens > http://www.prairienet.org/greens/ From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 2 12:59:03 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2017 12:59:03 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: US New Stage of Arms to Kiev Seeks to Balance Conflict, Endangers Minsk Accords - Sputnik International Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2017 7:57 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: US New Stage of Arms to Kiev Seeks to Balance Conflict, Endangers Minsk Accords - Sputnik International https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201708021056097873-usa-kiev-arms-endanger-minsk-deal/ UNDERMINING MINSK University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik that the consequences of sending such weapons to Ukraine would be highly negative. "Lethal weapons are lethal weapons whether you call them offensive or defensive. In the context of Ukraine the distinction is meaningless," he said. Boyle also warned that such a decision could derail moves by Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to deescalate the Ukraine crisis. "Obviously [US policymakers] understand that the provision of these lethal weapons could very well sabotage the new Trump-Putin Initiative to resolve the Ukrainian Civil War on the basis Minsk Agreements, which is the only realistic way to resolve it," he noted. The Minsk Agreements remained the essential and irreplaceable legal and diplomatic framework for restoring peace to Ukraine since the existing state had been toppled in a US-backed coup against legal incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, Boyle pointed out. "Technically Ukraine disintegrated as a state as a direct result of the CIA-sponsored coup against the democratically elected Yanukovych government. Minsk is the only road map to put the Ukrainian Humpty-Dumpty back together again," he explained According to the newspaper, US officials want to make the weapons delivery continent on them being deployed away from the front line in the war-torn Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 2 12:59:03 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2017 12:59:03 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: US New Stage of Arms to Kiev Seeks to Balance Conflict, Endangers Minsk Accords - Sputnik International Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2017 7:57 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: US New Stage of Arms to Kiev Seeks to Balance Conflict, Endangers Minsk Accords - Sputnik International https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201708021056097873-usa-kiev-arms-endanger-minsk-deal/ UNDERMINING MINSK University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik that the consequences of sending such weapons to Ukraine would be highly negative. "Lethal weapons are lethal weapons whether you call them offensive or defensive. In the context of Ukraine the distinction is meaningless," he said. Boyle also warned that such a decision could derail moves by Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to deescalate the Ukraine crisis. "Obviously [US policymakers] understand that the provision of these lethal weapons could very well sabotage the new Trump-Putin Initiative to resolve the Ukrainian Civil War on the basis Minsk Agreements, which is the only realistic way to resolve it," he noted. The Minsk Agreements remained the essential and irreplaceable legal and diplomatic framework for restoring peace to Ukraine since the existing state had been toppled in a US-backed coup against legal incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, Boyle pointed out. "Technically Ukraine disintegrated as a state as a direct result of the CIA-sponsored coup against the democratically elected Yanukovych government. Minsk is the only road map to put the Ukrainian Humpty-Dumpty back together again," he explained According to the newspaper, US officials want to make the weapons delivery continent on them being deployed away from the front line in the war-torn Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. From ewj at pigs.ag Wed Aug 2 10:36:26 2017 From: ewj at pigs.ag (E. Wayne johnson) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2017 17:36:26 +0700 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Prairiegreens] The war party wants war In-Reply-To: <80937EE4-E4BA-4B0E-8944-A37EF184D710@illinois.edu> References: <80937EE4-E4BA-4B0E-8944-A37EF184D710@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <3143ff3c-5185-8fbf-cfe3-65ed6d82ddfe@pigs.ag> China doesn''t exactly want the US of A as a backyard fenceline neighbor. Most sensible countries with any control of their geography do not. Would you rather have Kim Jung-IL, master of his own destiny, and a few bottle rockets, or would you rather have the US-quasi-colony of S. Korea and a gaggle of neocons. Right now China is a trading partner with N. Korea, and Mr. Master of His Own Destiny may be a bit spoiled and eccentric but it is amusing to see his taunting, if one is amused by such. I am not sure that good case can be made that Kim is less nutso than McCain, Graham, Bolton, Killary, et al. On 08/02/2017 10:09 AM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote: > “...U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia are insufficient to satiate our War Party. Now it wants us to lead the Sunnis of the Middle East in taking down the Shiites, who are dominant in Iran, Iraq, Syria and South Lebanon, and are a majority in Bahrain and the oil-producing regions of Saudi Arabia... > > "Among the reasons Trump routed his Republican rivals in 2016 is that he seemed to share an American desire to look homeward. > > "Yet, today, our relations with China and Russia are as bad as they have been in decades, while there is open talk of war with Iran and North Korea. > > "Was this what America voted for, or is this what America voted against?" > > ==================================================================== > "Shall We Fight Them All?" | A Commentary By Patrick J. Buchanan | Tuesday 1 August 2017 > > Saturday, Kim Jong Un tested an ICBM of sufficient range to hit the U.S. mainland. He is now working on its accuracy, and a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop that missile that can survive re-entry. > > Unless we believe Kim is a suicidal madman, his goal seems clear. He wants what every nuclear power wants -- the ability to strike his enemy's homeland with horrific impact, in order to deter that enemy. > > Kim wants his regime recognized and respected, and the U.S., which carpet-bombed the North from 1950-1953, out of Korea. > > Where does this leave us? Says Cliff Kupchan of the Eurasia Group, "The U.S. is on the verge of a binary choice: either accept North Korea into the nuclear club or conduct a military strike that would entail enormous civilian casualties." > > A time for truth. U.S. sanctions on North Korea, like those voted for by Congress last week, are not going to stop Kim from acquiring ICBMs. He is too close to the goal line. > > And any pre-emptive strike on the North could trigger a counterattack on Seoul by massed artillery on the DMZ, leaving tens of thousands of South Koreans dead, alongside U.S. soldiers and their dependents. > > We could be in an all-out war to the finish with the North, a war the American people do not want to fight. > > Saturday, President Trump tweeted out his frustration over China's failure to pull our chestnuts out of the fire: "They do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue. China could easily solve this problem." > > Sunday, U.S. B-1B bombers flew over Korea and the Pacific air commander Gen. Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy warned his units were ready to hit North Korea with "rapid, lethal, and overwhelming force." > > Yet, also Sunday, Xi Jinping reviewed a huge parade of tanks, planes, troops and missiles as Chinese officials mocked Trump as a "greenhorn President" and "spoiled child" who is running a bluff against North Korea. Is he? We shall soon see. > > According to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump vowed Monday he would take "all necessary measures" to protect U.S. allies. And U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley bristled, "The time for talk is over." > > Are we headed for a military showdown and war with the North? The markets, hitting records again Monday, don't seem to think so. > > But North Korea is not the only potential adversary with whom our relations are rapidly deteriorating. > > After Congress voted overwhelmingly for new sanctions on Russia last week and Trump agreed to sign the bill that strips him of authority to lift the sanctions without Hill approval, Russia abandoned its hopes for a rapprochement with Trump's America. Sunday, Putin ordered U.S. embassy and consulate staff cut by 755 positions. > > The Second Cold War, begun when we moved NATO to Russia's borders and helped dump over a pro-Russian regime in Kiev, is getting colder. Expect Moscow to reciprocate Congress' hostility when we ask for her assistance in Syria and with North Korea. > > Last week's sanctions bill also hit Iran after it tested a rocket to put a satellite in orbit, though the nuclear deal forbids only the testing of ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. Defiant, Iranians say their missile tests will continue. > > Recent days have also seen U.S. warships and Iranian patrol boats in close proximity, with the U.S. ships firing flares and warning shots. Our planes and ships have also, with increasingly frequency, come to close quarters with Russian and Chinese ships and planes in the Baltic and South China seas. > > While wary of a war with North Korea, Washington seems to be salivating for a war with Iran. Indeed, Trump's threat to declare Iran in violation of the nuclear arms deal suggests a confrontation is coming. > > One wonders: If Congress is hell-bent on confronting the evil that is Iran, why does it not cancel Iran's purchases and options to buy the 140 planes the mullahs have ordered from Boeing? > > Why are we selling U.S. airliners to the "world's greatest state sponsor of terror"? Let Airbus take the blood money. > > Apparently, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia are insufficient to satiate our War Party. Now it wants us to lead the Sunnis of the Middle East in taking down the Shiites, who are dominant in Iran, Iraq, Syria and South Lebanon, and are a majority in Bahrain and the oil-producing regions of Saudi Arabia. > > The U.S. military has its work cut out for it. President Trump may need those transgender troops. > > Among the reasons Trump routed his Republican rivals in 2016 is that he seemed to share an American desire to look homeward. > > Yet, today, our relations with China and Russia are as bad as they have been in decades, while there is open talk of war with Iran and North Korea. > > Was this what America voted for, or is this what America voted against? > _______________________________________________ > Prairiegreens mailing list > Prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/prairiegreens > http://www.prairienet.org/greens/ From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 2 15:24:16 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2017 15:24:16 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] US New Stage of Arms to Kiev Seeks to Balance Conflict, Endangers Minsk Accords - Sputnik International In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > > https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201708021056097873-usa-kiev-arms-endanger-minsk-deal/ > UNDERMINING MINSK > > University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik that the consequences of sending such weapons to Ukraine would be highly negative. > > "Lethal weapons are lethal weapons whether you call them offensive or defensive. In the context of Ukraine the distinction is meaningless," he said. > > Boyle also warned that such a decision could derail moves by Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to deescalate the Ukraine crisis. > > "Obviously [US policymakers] understand that the provision of these lethal weapons could very well sabotage the new Trump-Putin Initiative to resolve the Ukrainian Civil War on the basis Minsk Agreements, which is the only realistic way to resolve it," he noted. > > The Minsk Agreements remained the essential and irreplaceable legal and diplomatic framework for restoring peace to Ukraine since the existing state had been toppled in a US-backed coup against legal incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, Boyle pointed out. > > "Technically Ukraine disintegrated as a state as a direct result of the CIA-sponsored coup against the democratically elected Yanukovych government. Minsk is the only road map to put the Ukrainian Humpty-Dumpty back together again," he explained > > According to the newspaper, US officials want to make the weapons delivery continent on them being deployed away from the front line in the war-torn Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. > > > From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 2 15:42:18 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2017 15:42:18 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Chris Hedges on Contact Interview related to corporate crime Message-ID: Who owns who and what……https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/397802-corporate-crime-money-us/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Aug 2 22:54:58 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2017 17:54:58 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump is right, Pelosi wrong, about vicious and dangerous sanctions bill Message-ID: https://www.rt.com/usa/398346-trump-russia-sanctions-flawed/ From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 3 12:59:06 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 12:59:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Message-ID: The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. * Print * Leaflet * Feedback * Share » The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By Tom Hall 3 August 2017 The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobinare discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. Radical democracy vs. socialism The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. The DSA’s anticommunist politics The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 3 13:14:04 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 13:14:04 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Attacks on Academics over personal statements on FB or otherwise, if truth, are metastasizing. Message-ID: San Diego State University professor attacked over Facebook post criticizing Senator John McCain By Jill Lux 3 August 2017 In an attack on free speech and democratic rights, Jonathan Graubart, a Professor in Political Science at San Diego State University (SDSU), has been targeted by a media campaign following a Facebook post he made on July 21. Responding to the torrent of hagiographical news stories surrounding Republican Senator John McCain in recent days Graubart posted a short comment on his personal Facebook page, which was followed by a media campaign that not only misrepresented his views but also used empty moralistic cancer sympathy to glorify the war monger McCain while inspiring violent threats against the professor. The expression of goodwill for McCain, Graubart stated, seemed to him to be a reflection of a society that valued elite lives over ordinary ones. To build on this theme, he quoted Hannah Arendt’s line on the German cultural elite that bemoaned the fact that the Nazis sent Albert Einstein into exile, “without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.” McCain, Graubart pointed out, was no Albert Einstein, and not just in terms of brain power. Unlike Einstein, who had “very appealing humanist instincts, as a socialist, antiwar, anti-imperialist, and anti-statist Zionist,” McCain was “a risible public figure,” a “war criminal,” who in his political career had “championed horrific actions,” and undermined “state commitment to public health.” Graubart concluded the post by stating that he would rather see an outpouring of good wishes for “random contemporary Hans Cohns than politicians.” The more or less innocuous post on a personal Facebook page, was picked up initially by Channel 10 in San Diego, and then drew the attention of national right-wing media outlets including Fox News and the Washington Times, leading to Graubart becoming the target of a torrent of hate mail, with some threatening outright violence. Graubart’s post, which remains on his profile page, contradicting the Washington Times’ claim that is was deleted, was followed by over 200 comments. Many of the comments were supportive in defense of free speech, calling on the university to fight back “by denouncing the threats to free-speech and the vicious attacks against Dr. G(raubart),” as well as highlighting the one-sided media campaign slandering the professor. However, this post and the University’s official statement addressing this issue have also been barraged with hateful comments. Facebook comments were accompanied by angry email and voicemail messages with numerous threats of violence, calling him a “hook-nosed f-ing Jew,” and attacks on his late mother. Graubart told WSWS reporters that the voicemails have been especially chilling, since almost half have warned of violence and one even pointed out his home address. Some of the student organizations on the SDSU campus, particularly those directly linked to the Democrats and Republicans, were quick to jump on board the smear campaign. Brandon Jones, the president of the SDSU College Republicans, declared piously, “[it] is one thing to disagree with a politician, or anyone, for that matter, based on differences in ideology.. [but] to wish bad health upon them because of those differences is outrageous...I hope next time you try and find some more compassion within yourself.” More ominously, Jones went on to say, “If you don’t want to stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them, professor.” The official statement of the SDSU College Republicans claimed that Graubart’s post “set a discriminatory environment towards conservatives on our campus,” and would not be tolerated by their organization. The statement did not quite explain how this lack of tolerance would be expressed. The SDSU College Democrats were not far behind. While claiming to support Graubart’s right to free speech, Michael Cline, the president of the organization condemned the “nasty and inappropriate” personal attacks. Neither organization seemed to have actually paid attention to the content of Graubart’s post. While the campus public safety officers have advised Graubart to stay away from his university office (putatively for his own safety), the reaction of the SDSU administration has been characteristically spineless. The administration quite consciously distanced itself from Graubart, taking pains to reiterate its “respect and appreciation” for “Senator John McCain’s service to our country during both his military and public service careers.” With no real expression of support from the institution he has served for over a decade and half, Graubart continues to be the target of right-wing groups on and off-campus, with many sending ominous anti-Semitic death threats. This incident should be taken very seriously for it is reflective of some of the dangerous trends visible in contemporary politics, the most obvious being the erosion of basic democratic rights. The right to free speech, once the cornerstone of bourgeois democracy, is being systematically attacked on all fronts, particularly in educational institutions where the ruling class has always tended to react swiftly to any signs of opposition, real or imagined. While a right-wing professor, Jörg Baberowski, has been able to freely use his position at the Humboldt University in Berlin and can rely on a network of contacts among politicians and the media to spread his extremist positions, and a conformist academic community to protect him, left-leaning academics have faced witch hunts or firing for defending basic democratic rights. Baberowski, it should be noted, has not only declared his support for Ernst Nolte, the most well-known Nazi apologist among German historians of the post-war era, but also stated in a Der Spiegel article from early 2014 “Hitler was no psychopath, he was not vicious. He did not want the extermination of the Jews to be discussed at his table.” In recent months, Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington has become the site of a reactionary, racialist campaign against biology Professor Bret Weinstein, after he spoke out against a college-sponsored event that called for all white students and faculty to leave the school grounds for a day. In another attack on academic freedom, Trinity College suspended Professor Johnny Eric Williams earlier this year following Facebook posts he made regarding race relations in the United States. In 2015, protests focused on allegations of racial insensitivity and racism on the part of college administrations, occurred at the University of Missouri, later spreading to Yale University, Ithaca College, and Amherst College. The protests at Yale called for the resignation of professor Erika Christakis, a lecturer in early childhood development, after she questioned a memo sent by the university on “culturally unaware and insensitive” Halloween costumes. Ultimately, Christakis decided not to continue teaching courses at the university. Professor Graubart’s post was a short comment on a personal Facebook page, and as he himself noted, it was an account that had less than a hundred “friends.” Yet, this short post became a news story that highlighted not just its supposedly treasonous sentiments, but also the putatively bigger problem of “left wing” professors running rampant in universities, poisoning young minds. The way in which this was done is also revealing of a particular tactic used by the ruling class and its acolytes to attack anyone who might smack of not toeing the line or of tapping into genuine oppositional sentiments amongst the broader population. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality at SDSU extends its unequivocal support to Professor Graubart and condemns the campaign against him. We call on the students and faculty of SDSU and other universities across the United States and internationally to join us in the fight to preserve free speech and democratic rights. With the acceleration of the attack on core democratic principles under the Trump administration, this fight has become even more pressing. wsws.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 13:23:46 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 13:23:46 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Attacks on Academics over personal statements on FB or otherwise, if truth, are metastasizing. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: HEADLINE: O'Reilly and the Law of the Jungle BYLINE: Francis A Boyle BODY: by Francis Boyle On the morning of 13 September 2001, that is 48 hours after the terrible tragedies in New York and Washington, D.C. on September 11th, I received telephone call from a producer at Fox Television Network News in New York City. He asked me to go onto The O'Reilly Factor TV program live that evening in order to debate Bill O'Reilly on the question of war versus peace. O'Reilly would argue for the United States going to war in reaction to the terrorist attacks on 11 September, and I would argue for a peaceful resolution of this matter. Up until then I had deliberately declined numerous requests for interviews about the terrible events of September 11 and what should be done about them because it was not clear to me precisely what was going on. But unfortunately The O'Reilly Factor had the Number One ranking in TV viewership for any news media talk program in America. I felt very strongly as a matter of principle that at least one person from the American Peace Movement had to go onto that program and argue the case directly to the American people that the United States of America must not go to war despite the terrible tragedy that had been inflicted upon us all. I had debated O'Reilly before so I was fully aware of the type of abuse to expect from him. So for the next few hours I negotiated with O'Reilly through his producer as to the terms and conditions of my appearance and our debate, which they agreed to. At the time I did not realize that O'Reilly was setting me up to be fired as he would next successfully do to Professor Sami Al-Arian soon after debating me. After our debate had concluded, I returned from the campus television studio to my office in order to shut the computer down, and then go home for what little remained of the evening. When I arrived in my office, I found that my voice mail message system had been flooded with mean, nasty, vicious complaints and threats. The same was true for my e-mail in-box. I deleted all these messages as best I could, and then finally went home to watch the rest of O'Reilly's 9/11 coverage that evening on Fox with my wife. By then he was replaying selected segments of our debate and asking for hostile commentaries from Newt Gingrich and Jeane Kirkpatrick. We turned off the TV in disgust when O'Reilly publicly accused me of being an Al Qaeda supporter. My understanding was that Fox then continued to rebroadcast a tape of this outright character assassination upon me for the rest of the night. When I returned to my office the next day, so many complaints had been filed and accumulated with numerous university officials that the then Dean of my law school issued a public statement repudiating me and then placing it on the law school's web-site. Obviously the then Dean of my law school believed that a Law Professor should advocate the Law of the Jungle instead of the Rule of Law. He is now "deaning" elsewhere, just like a previous Dean who had tried to get rid of me because of my fervid belief in the Rule of Law and public activities in support thereof. On the positive side, however, my besting of O'Reilly in the debate led to my being inundated by requests for interviews from mainstream and progressive news media sources all over the world. This plethora of interviews have continued apace until today during the course of all the terrible events that have transpired in the world since September 11: the war against Afghanistan; the global war on terrorism; massive assaults on international law, human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and the United States Constitution; the war against Iraq; Guantanamo; kangaroo courts; the Bush Jr. torture scandal, etc. I have done the best I can to oppose this Bush Jr. juggernaut of nihilism--now continued and expanded by Obama. Ultimately it will be up to the American people to decide the future direction of the United States of America and thus indirectly, because of America's preponderant power, unfairly for the rest of the world. The present danger still remains Machiavellian power politics. The only known antidote is international law, international organizations, human rights, and the United States Constitution. In our thermonuclear age, humankind's existential choice is that stark, ominous, and compelling. As Americans, we must not hesitate to apply this imperative regimen immediately before it becomes too late for the continuation of our human species itself. The Rush to War SHOW: THE O'REILLY FACTOR (20:29) September 13, 2001 Thursday Transcript # 091303cb.256 SECTION: News; Domestic LENGTH: 3973 words HEADLINE: America Unites: How Should the U.S. Bring Terrorists to Justice? GUESTS: Sam Huessini, Francis Boyle BYLINE: Bill O'Reilly O'REILLY: While most Americans are united in their support of President Bush and the desire to bring Osama bin Laden and other terrorists to justice, there are some differing voices. Joining us now from Washington is Sam Husseini, the former spokesman for the Arab Anti -- American Anti-Discrimination Committee, and from Urbana, Illinois, is Francis Boyle, an international law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[...] O'REILLY: Cut his mike. All right, now, Mr. Boyle, Professor Boyle, let's have a little bit more of a rational discussion here. That was absurd. The United States now has to take action against certain segments in this world who we know have been harbouring people like Osama bin Laden. That's going to happen. How will you react to that? FRANCIS BOYLE, LAW PROFESSOR: Well, first I think you have to look at the law involved. Clearly what we have here, under United States domestic law and statutes, is an act of international terrorism that should be treated as such. It is not yet elevated to an act of war. For an act of war, we need proof that a foreign state actually ordered or launched an attack upon the United States of America. So far, we do not yet have that evidence. We could... O'REILLY: All right, now why are you, why are you, why are you taking this position when you know forces have attacked the United States. Now, maybe they don't have a country, but they are forces. They have attacked the United States, all right? Without warning, without provocation. Civilian targets. They've done everything that an act of war does. So, I'm saying that because we live in a different world now, where borders don't really matter, where terrorism is the weapon of choice, that you would declare war -- if I were President Bush, I would declare war on any hostile forces, notice those words, professor, hostile forces to the United States. I would have a blanket declaration of war so I could go in and kill those people. Would I be wrong? BOYLE: Well, Bill, so far you'll note Congress has been unwilling to declare war. And indeed, this matter is being debated right now. Right now, it appears that what they are seeking is not a full declaration of war, but only what we law professors call an imperfect declaration, which means a limited use of military force under the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Precisely for the problem that we don't know if any state was involved and we still do not know who was responsible for this undoubted terrorist attack upon the United States of America. O'REILLY: All right, but we have the secretary of state saying that Osama bin Laden now has been linked into and, you know, we don't have all the intelligence information, as President Bush said today. He's not going to give us, and he shouldn't, the people of America all the information that they have. But when the secretary of state gets up and says, look, we know this guy was involved to some extent, I believe him. And he's a wanted man, professor. He's been wanted for eight years. The Clinton administration didn't have the heart to get him and in the first few months the Bush administration didn't either. We now know, and you just heard the FBI agent say that Afghanistan has been involved for years harbouring and training these kinds of people. Certainly, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, Iraq, those five countries, certainly have been hostile to the United States and given safe harbour to these terrorists. That's a fact. BOYLE: Well, let me point out, the secretary of state was very careful in the words he used. He said Osama bin Laden was a suspect. He did not accuse him. And, again, under these circumstances... O'REILLY: No, he didn't use the word suspect. He used another word. BOYLE: The account I read in, just off the wire service, said suspect. But let me continue my point. Under these circumstances, where we have 5,000 Americans dead and we could have many more Americans killed in a conflict, we have to be very careful, Congress and the American people and the president, in not to over-escalate the rhetoric, here. We have to look at this very rationally. This is a democracy. We have a right to see what the evidence is and proceed in a very slow and deliberate manner. O'REILLY: No, we don't. We do not, as a republic, we don't have the right to see what the evidence is if the evidence is of a national security situation, as you know. Now, I'm trusting my government to do the right thing, here. I am trusting. But I think it's beyond a doubt right now, beyond a reasonable doubt, which is, as you know, a court of law standard, that there are at least five, North Korea you could put in to, six states in the world that have harboured continually these terrorists. Now, we know that this was a well-coordinated effort. Our initial intelligence shows that some of the people that have been arrested have ties to Osama bin Laden. We know, as you just heard the FBI agent say, that the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was tied in to a guy who knew bin Laden. So, bin Laden -- I agree with you, that you don't want to be a hothead. You don't want to overreact. You don't want to lob a missile at the pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, which was terrible, and that was the one good point, or fair point, that Mr. Husseini made, you don't want to do that. But, on the other hand, professor, I think Americans are rightful, are right, to demand action against states that we know in the past have harboured these individuals and there's a warrant out for Osama bin Laden's arrest. So, if he is in Afghanistan, I would give that government a couple of days to hand him over, and if they did not, I'd go in. BOYLE: Well, again. The American people are right. We need to see the evidence. I remember people saying a generation ago, during the Vietnam war, I trusted my government. And I think people of my generation found out that that was wrong. We needed more evidence. O'REILLY: All right. Professor, let me stop you there, though. This is another point that Mr. Husseini tried to make. Just because the United States of America has made mistakes in the past, does not mean that we cannot defend ourselves now. This is a unique situation in history. We have now been attacked by forces without borders, OK? We've been attacked. And it hasn't been a military attack, it's been an attack on civilians. The reason, the sole reason a federal government exists is to protect the people of the United States. And as I said in my "Talking Points" memo, they haven't really done the job, for political reasons. But now's the time to correct those things. So, there's going to be a reckoning, Professor. You know it's going to happen. I know it's going to happen. And it's going to come down on Osama bin Laden first and maybe some of these rouge states later. Will you support that action? BOYLE: Before I support a war that will jeopardize the lives of tens of thousands of our servicemen and women, I want to see the evidence that we are relying on to justify this. So far, I do not see it. I see allegations. I see innuendo. I see winks and I see nods, but I do not see the evidence that you need under international law and the United States constitution so far to go to war. Maybe that evidence will be there, but it is not there now. My recommendation to Congress is to slow down, let's see what develops and let's see what this evidence is before we knowingly go out and not only kill large numbers of people, perhaps in Afghanistan and other countries, but undoubtedly in our own armed forces. 58,000 men of my generation will killed in Vietnam because of irresponsible behavior by the Johnson administration rushing that Tonkin Gulf resolution through Congress, exactly what we're seeing now. And we need to pull back and stop and think and ask the hard questions and demand to see the evidence first, before we march off to war. O'REILLY: All right, so it's not enough that people arrested in the bombings of the embassies in Africa testified in court that Osama bin Laden was behind and financed and coordinated those bombings. That evidence is not enough for you? BOYLE: Well, Africa is a very is a very different story than what happened in the World Trade Center. O'REILLY: No, it's not. He's wanted, he's wanted in the United States for the bombings of those two embassies. Is that evidence enough for you, professor, for the United States to go in and get this man? Is it enough? BOYLE: That, that matter was treated and handled as an act of international terrorism in accordance with the normal laws and procedures of the United States of America as a question of domestic and international law enforcement. And I am suggesting that is the way we need to proceed here... O'REILLY: Well, wait. You're dodging the question professor. BOYLE: ... unless we have evidence that... O'REILLY: Wait, professor. Professor. This is a no spin zone. Hold it. Hold it. Even out in Urbana Champagne, the no spin zone rules. You're dodging the question. There is an absolutely rock solid arrest warrant out for this man. Evidence in court, testimony by people who did the bombings that this man was behind it. Is that enough evidence for you to have the United States go in and get him now? Is it enough? BOYLE: The United States has been attempting to secure his extradition from Afghanistan. I support... O'REILLY: Yeah, that's long enough. BOYLE: I support that approach as international... O'REILLY: Come on already, I mean, eight years, we've been attempting to extradite this guy. Now's the time to tell the Afghans you've got 48 hours or 72 hours to turn him over. You don't turn him over, we're coming in and getting him. You try to stop us, and you're toast. Enough is enough, professor. BOYLE: That's vigilantism. It is not what the United States of America is supposed to stand for. We are supposed to stand... O'REILLY: No, what that is is protecting the country from terrorists who kill civilians. BOYLE: ... for rule of law. O'REILLY: It's not vigilantism. BOYLE: We are supposed to stand for rule of law, and that is clearly vigilantism. There is a Security Council, there is Congress, there are procedures and there are laws, and they are there to protect all of us here in the United States as well as... O'REILLY: So, you're telling me... BOYLE: ... as well as our servicemen and women. Look, Bill, if we allegedly, as you put it, go in, you are not going in, I am not going in. It's going to be young men and women serving in our armed forces... O'REILLY: And that's their job. To protect us. But, professor, let me, you know, what you're saying is, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. B0YLE: ... with the constitution and the laws of the United States. O'REILLY: We're not violating any laws here, professor. No one is going to violate the law. There is going to be a state of war induced against states, states, terroristic states, who have attacked us. And what you're saying is, though, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're saying that even though there is a legitimate warrant out for Osama bin Laden's arrest, and even though most civilized nations would honor that warrant and turn him over to us, extradite him to us, the vast majority of nations on earth would do that, you still are opposed for the United States to demand that the Taliban government arrest this man and turn him over? You are opposed to that? BOYLE: During the Gulf War, President Bush father, who has far more experience that the current president Bush, got a Security Council resolution authorizing the United States of America to use force to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Second, President Bush father got a War Powers Authorization Resolution from Congress that gave him the constitutional authority to use military force to enforce that Security Council resolution. What I'm calling for here is the same adherence to international law and the United States constitution that the first President Bush adhered to in dealing with Iraq. O'REILLY: Well, you'll get that, professor. That's just a formality. There -- nobody on Capitol Hill right now, they're not going to -- there's no profile of courages up there anyway, usually. They're going to give President Bush what he wants. If he wants a War Powers Act, they're going to give it to him. He wants a declaration, they're going to give it to him. BOYLE: Actually, they're arguing about it right now... O'REILLY: They're going to give it to him. But I'm not interested in that, because it's going to happen. It's going to happen. BOYLE: The reports -- no, the reports I read was that this President Bush initially asked for a blank check, and Congress balked because they had been suckered once before... O'REILLY: All right, I'm not -- speculation is not what I'm in -- all right, professor. I don't want to speculate. I'm just going to say in my opinion he's going to have the authority to go in and get Osama bin Laden and his pals, wherever they are. He will get that authority, whether it takes a day or a week, he'll get it. And once he gets it, now, that's what I want to talk about here. Once he gets it, are you and others like you going to say, oh, no, we shouldn't do this, even though we have proof of the man's -- masterminded the bombings in Africa and the Cole,testimony in Yemen, are you going to still say, even after the authority is granted by Congress, which it will be, no, don't do it, let Afghanistan handle him? Are you going to still do that, professor? BOYLE: Second, like his father, his father also got authorization from the United States, the United Nations Security Council under chapter seven of the United Nations charter... O'REILLY: Oh, you want to go to U.N. now? You want the U.N. involved now. BOYLE: Is exactly what his father did... O'REILLY: So what? BOYLE: And that's exactly right. O'REILLY: His father made a huge mistake by not taking out Sadam Hussein when he could of. BOYLE: His father adhered to the required procedures under the United States constitution and the United Nations charter that is a treaty and the supreme law of our land. I expect the current President Bush to do exactly what his father did before he starts engaging in a massive military campaign in Iraq or against other countries... O'REILLY: All right, I don't know whether he's going to go -- I know he's not going to let the U.N. dictate. He might go for a consensus. He's already got it with Putin and all of our NATO allies, he's already go that. Whether he goes -- I think it would be a mistake to let -- empowering the U.N. in this situation. BOYLE: Then why did his father do this? O'REILLY: I'm going -- we're going to wrap this up with this. I'm going to give my last summation and then you can give yours, I'll give you the last word on it. This is a fugitive we're dealing with here. He has now been tied in by U.S. intelligence agencies, according to Attorney General Ashcroft and the secretary of state, tied into this horrendous bombing here in New York. The United States must make a response to this, and I am agreeing with you in a sense, it can't be a knee-jerk. It's got to be done in a methodical way. Congress will go along, they may debate it or whatever, but they will go along in either a War Powers, special War Powers Act or a declaration of war against forces hostile to the United States. Then they will go in and they will take him. This man you're looking at on the TV screen is a dead man. He should be a dead man. You don't do what he did and be allowed to walk around this earth. Now, I'm distressed, professor, by your reliance, reliance on the strict letter of propriety, when we've got 10,000 people laying in the street about 22 miles from me right now. I want deliberation. I want methodical discipline, but I also want action. We know who this guy is. We know the governments that are protecting him. We know the other rouge states that have terrorist camps there. They all have to be dealt with, in my opinion. I'll give you the last word. BOYLE: Sure, I agree with you, Bill. He is a fugitive from justice and this should be handled as a matter as other fugitives from justice of international law enforcement. If indeed there is evidence that a foreign state orchestrated and ordered an attack against the United States then clearly that is an act of war that should be dealt with as such... O'REILLY: What about harbouring? BOYLE: Right now... O'REILLY: Is harbouring an act of war? BOYLE: In my opinion, no. And under the current circumstances, I don't see it. O'REILLY: All right, professor. BOYLE: I think there is a distinction here. O'REILLY: OK, all right, wrap it up, if you would. BOYLE: I agree -- I agree that the -- if we go to war in a hasty manner here, we could see thousands of U.S. military personnel being killed without proper authorization by Congress or by the United Nations Security Council. O'REILLY: OK. BOYLE: Our founding fathers decided that the most awesome decision we would ever make would be to go to war, and we have to be very careful in making that decision. O'REILLY: All right, professor, I appreciate it very much. Thank you for your point of view. BOYLE: Thank you, Bill. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:14 AM To: peace-discuss ; peace Subject: [Peace] Attacks on Academics over personal statements on FB or otherwise, if truth, are metastasizing. San Diego State University professor attacked over Facebook post criticizing Senator John McCain By Jill Lux 3 August 2017 In an attack on free speech and democratic rights, Jonathan Graubart, a Professor in Political Science at San Diego State University (SDSU), has been targeted by a media campaign following a Facebook post he made on July 21. Responding to the torrent of hagiographical news stories surrounding Republican Senator John McCain in recent days Graubart posted a short comment on his personal Facebook page, which was followed by a media campaign that not only misrepresented his views but also used empty moralistic cancer sympathy to glorify the war monger McCain while inspiring violent threats against the professor. The expression of goodwill for McCain, Graubart stated, seemed to him to be a reflection of a society that valued elite lives over ordinary ones. To build on this theme, he quoted Hannah Arendt’s line on the German cultural elite that bemoaned the fact that the Nazis sent Albert Einstein into exile, “without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.” McCain, Graubart pointed out, was no Albert Einstein, and not just in terms of brain power. Unlike Einstein, who had “very appealing humanist instincts, as a socialist, antiwar, anti-imperialist, and anti-statist Zionist,” McCain was “a risible public figure,” a “war criminal,” who in his political career had “championed horrific actions,” and undermined “state commitment to public health.” Graubart concluded the post by stating that he would rather see an outpouring of good wishes for “random contemporary Hans Cohns than politicians.” The more or less innocuous post on a personal Facebook page, was picked up initially by Channel 10 in San Diego, and then drew the attention of national right-wing media outlets including Fox News and the Washington Times, leading to Graubart becoming the target of a torrent of hate mail, with some threatening outright violence. Graubart’s post, which remains on his profile page, contradicting the Washington Times’ claim that is was deleted, was followed by over 200 comments. Many of the comments were supportive in defense of free speech, calling on the university to fight back “by denouncing the threats to free-speech and the vicious attacks against Dr. G(raubart),” as well as highlighting the one-sided media campaign slandering the professor. However, this post and the University’s official statement addressing this issue have also been barraged with hateful comments. Facebook comments were accompanied by angry email and voicemail messages with numerous threats of violence, calling him a “hook-nosed f-ing Jew,” and attacks on his late mother. Graubart told WSWS reporters that the voicemails have been especially chilling, since almost half have warned of violence and one even pointed out his home address. Some of the student organizations on the SDSU campus, particularly those directly linked to the Democrats and Republicans, were quick to jump on board the smear campaign. Brandon Jones, the president of the SDSU College Republicans, declared piously, “[it] is one thing to disagree with a politician, or anyone, for that matter, based on differences in ideology.. [but] to wish bad health upon them because of those differences is outrageous...I hope next time you try and find some more compassion within yourself.” More ominously, Jones went on to say, “If you don’t want to stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them, professor.” The official statement of the SDSU College Republicans claimed that Graubart’s post “set a discriminatory environment towards conservatives on our campus,” and would not be tolerated by their organization. The statement did not quite explain how this lack of tolerance would be expressed. The SDSU College Democrats were not far behind. While claiming to support Graubart’s right to free speech, Michael Cline, the president of the organization condemned the “nasty and inappropriate” personal attacks. Neither organization seemed to have actually paid attention to the content of Graubart’s post. While the campus public safety officers have advised Graubart to stay away from his university office (putatively for his own safety), the reaction of the SDSU administration has been characteristically spineless. The administration quite consciously distanced itself from Graubart, taking pains to reiterate its “respect and appreciation” for “Senator John McCain’s service to our country during both his military and public service careers.” With no real expression of support from the institution he has served for over a decade and half, Graubart continues to be the target of right-wing groups on and off-campus, with many sending ominous anti-Semitic death threats. This incident should be taken very seriously for it is reflective of some of the dangerous trends visible in contemporary politics, the most obvious being the erosion of basic democratic rights. The right to free speech, once the cornerstone of bourgeois democracy, is being systematically attacked on all fronts, particularly in educational institutions where the ruling class has always tended to react swiftly to any signs of opposition, real or imagined. While a right-wing professor, Jörg Baberowski, has been able to freely use his position at the Humboldt University in Berlin and can rely on a network of contacts among politicians and the media to spread his extremist positions, and a conformist academic community to protect him, left-leaning academics have faced witch hunts or firing for defending basic democratic rights. Baberowski, it should be noted, has not only declared his support for Ernst Nolte, the most well-known Nazi apologist among German historians of the post-war era, but also stated in a Der Spiegel article from early 2014 “Hitler was no psychopath, he was not vicious. He did not want the extermination of the Jews to be discussed at his table.” In recent months, Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington has become the site of a reactionary, racialist campaign against biology Professor Bret Weinstein, after he spoke out against a college-sponsored event that called for all white students and faculty to leave the school grounds for a day. In another attack on academic freedom, Trinity College suspended Professor Johnny Eric Williams earlier this year following Facebook posts he made regarding race relations in the United States. In 2015, protests focused on allegations of racial insensitivity and racism on the part of college administrations, occurred at the University of Missouri, later spreading to Yale University, Ithaca College, and Amherst College. The protests at Yale called for the resignation of professor Erika Christakis, a lecturer in early childhood development, after she questioned a memo sent by the university on “culturally unaware and insensitive” Halloween costumes. Ultimately, Christakis decided not to continue teaching courses at the university. Professor Graubart’s post was a short comment on a personal Facebook page, and as he himself noted, it was an account that had less than a hundred “friends.” Yet, this short post became a news story that highlighted not just its supposedly treasonous sentiments, but also the putatively bigger problem of “left wing” professors running rampant in universities, poisoning young minds. The way in which this was done is also revealing of a particular tactic used by the ruling class and its acolytes to attack anyone who might smack of not toeing the line or of tapping into genuine oppositional sentiments amongst the broader population. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality at SDSU extends its unequivocal support to Professor Graubart and condemns the campaign against him. We call on the students and faculty of SDSU and other universities across the United States and internationally to join us in the fight to preserve free speech and democratic rights. With the acceleration of the attack on core democratic principles under the Trump administration, this fight has become even more pressing. wsws.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Aug 3 13:46:45 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 08:46:45 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE > On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. > The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America > By Tom Hall > 3 August 2017 > The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. > The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. > The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. > Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. > The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. > Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. > Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. > Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. > In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. > Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. > The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. > The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. > By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. > From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. > The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. > The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. > Radical democracy vs. socialism > The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” > It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” > From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” > “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” > The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” > The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. > Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. > If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. > The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. > The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” > Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” > In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. > The DSA’s anticommunist politics > The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. > The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. > The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. > Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. > Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” > His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. > Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. > The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. > The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” > The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. > The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. > The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” > The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. > A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. > Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. > The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 14:00:29 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 14:00:29 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yeah. And:Remember that list of so-called Left/Socialist Warmongers who were calling upon Obama to bomb Syria over the bogus chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta that I was in the process of debunking at the time--later definitively debunked by Sy Hersh. You can find their names on Counterpunch. May they live in Infamy and never be trusted again! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:47 AM To: Karen Aram Cc: peace ; peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE > On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. > The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By > Tom Hall > 3 August 2017 > The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. > The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. > The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. > Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. > The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. > Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. > Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. > Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. > In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. > Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. > The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. > The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. > By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. > From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. > The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. > The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. > Radical democracy vs. socialism > The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” > It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” > From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” > “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” > The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” > The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. > Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. > If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. > The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. > The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” > Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” > In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. > The DSA’s anticommunist politics > The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. > The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. > The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. > Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. > Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” > His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. > Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. > The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. > The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” > The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. > The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. > The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” > The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. > A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. > Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. > The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 3 14:00:44 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 14:00:44 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Max Blumenthal and Aron Mate nail it......see The Real News Message-ID: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19670:Debate%3A-As-Trump-Drops-Rebels%2C-What-Next-for-Syria%3F -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 14:09:05 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 14:09:05 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" References: Message-ID: Here we were doing everything humanly possible to oppose Obama bombing Syria, and these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers call for him to bomb Syria, which he did not do in part because of our opposition. Needless to say, Trump did bomb Syria over bogus chemical weapons charges, later also debunked by Sy Hersh. So we should call these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers "Trump's Bombers." Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:00 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Yeah. And:Remember that list of so-called Left/Socialist Warmongers who were calling upon Obama to bomb Syria over the bogus chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta that I was in the process of debunking at the time--later definitively debunked by Sy Hersh. You can find their names on Counterpunch. May they live in Infamy and never be trusted again! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:47 AM To: Karen Aram Cc: peace ; peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE > On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. > The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By > Tom Hall > 3 August 2017 > The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. > The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. > The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. > Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. > The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. > Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. > Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. > Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. > In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. > Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. > The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. > The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. > By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. > From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. > The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. > The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. > Radical democracy vs. socialism > The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” > It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” > From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” > “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” > The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” > The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. > Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. > If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. > The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. > The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” > Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” > In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. > The DSA’s anticommunist politics > The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. > The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. > The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. > Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. > Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” > His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. > Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. > The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. > The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” > The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. > The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. > The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” > The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. > A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. > Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. > The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Aug 3 14:09:33 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 09:09:33 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump is a boor, but he's correct In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <79D6EC93-D21B-4AA1-8A48-95E8A6F7BC9C@gmail.com> https://www.rt.com/usa/398436-trump-russia-relations-congress/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/08/02/statement-president-donald-j-trump-signing-hr-3364 > On Aug 2, 2017, at 5:54 PM, C G Estabrook wrote: > > https://www.rt.com/usa/398346-trump-russia-sanctions-flawed/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 3 14:13:26 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 14:13:26 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Exactly, and the analysis that the wsws.org article provides is spot on when it comes to the sudden rise of “socialists organizations” across the country, since the election of Trump. While it maybe something to celebrate, that is people awakening to the problems presented by neoliberalism and capitalism, and originally provided by Bernie, if cloaked in support for Democrats it is a false narrative. Bernie betrayed those he enlightened by supporting Clinton, and he and these organizations are betraying their followers if they think any support for the Democrat Party is going to bring progress or change. The focus on IP is always a clue, as it prevents acknowledgement of our shadow government and the needless focus on electoral politics. The elephant in the room, that needs to be removed is support for war, militarism, and our ever growing poverty as a result of neoliberalism and capitalism. > On Aug 3, 2017, at 07:00, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Yeah. And:Remember that list of so-called Left/Socialist Warmongers who were calling upon Obama to bomb Syria over the bogus chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta that I was in the process of debunking at the time--later definitively debunked by Sy Hersh. You can find their names on Counterpunch. May they live in Infamy and never be trusted again! Fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace > Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:47 AM > To: Karen Aram > Cc: peace ; peace-discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" > > "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. > > "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” > > I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. > > Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. > > Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE > > >> On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. > >> The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By >> Tom Hall >> 3 August 2017 >> The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. >> The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. >> The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. >> Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. >> The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. >> Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. >> Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. >> Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. >> In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. >> Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. >> The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. >> The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. >> By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. >> From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. >> The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. >> The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. >> Radical democracy vs. socialism >> The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” >> It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” >> From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” >> “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” >> The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” >> The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. >> Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. >> If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. >> The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. >> The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” >> Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” >> In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. >> The DSA’s anticommunist politics >> The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. >> The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. >> The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. >> Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. >> Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” >> His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. >> Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. >> The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. >> The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” >> The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. >> The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. >> The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” >> The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. >> A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. >> Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. >> The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > _______________________________________________ > Peace mailing list > Peace at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 14:26:32 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 14:26:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" References: Message-ID: At the time I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent Obama from bombing Syria. Then these Left/Socialist Whore Warmongers publicly called for Obama to bomb Syria. They finally got their Dream Come True from Trump. They did the same thing on Libya. fab. From: public at lists.accuracy.org [mailto:public at lists.accuracy.org] On Behalf Of Institute for Public Accuracy Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 7:51 AM To: Institute for Public Accuracy Subject: * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment Institute for Public Accuracy 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org _______________________________________________________ Monday, September 9, 2013 * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment PAUL FINDLEY, findley1 at frontier.com Available for a limited number of interviews, Findley served as a member of United States House of Representatives for 22 years. He was a key author of the War Powers Act and a leader in securing its enactment by overriding the veto of President Richard Nixon. He is also the author of six books. The federal building in Springfield, Ill. is named for him. He just wrote the piece "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria," which states: "Despite his own recent statements to the contrary, President Barack Obama has no legal authority to assault the government of Syria even as “a warning shot.” Neither the United States Constitution, nor the War Powers Act of 1973 gives him such authority in the absence of an emergency that allows Congress no time to react. Obama cannot cite the present situation as such an emergency, given his public statement that members of Congress need not act until the completion of their scheduled vacation. He has said that his proposal is 'not time sensitive.' If Congress fails to approve a resolution approving acts of war against Syria, he cannot order any military assault into Syria. "On several recent occasions the President and administration officials have mentioned a “sixty day” period during which he has authority to act without approval of Congress. Such authority does not exist. It is a misreading of a provision of the War Powers Act that provides only Congress with oversight constraints on executive actions. ..." Findley also recently wrote the piece "Syria — a War We Should Reject." FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of Tackling America’s Toughest Questions. Boyle drafted articles of impeachment that were introduced by the late Rep. Henry Gonzalez against President George H. W. Bush in 1991. Boyle said today: "Impeachment is the remedy for a president taking extra-constitutional action. Obama claims he has the authority to attack Syria when -- under the Constitution -- he does not." See: "Cornel West: It’s 'Grounds For Impeachment' If Obama Bombs Syria Without Congressional Approval." For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:09 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Here we were doing everything humanly possible to oppose Obama bombing Syria, and these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers call for him to bomb Syria, which he did not do in part because of our opposition. Needless to say, Trump did bomb Syria over bogus chemical weapons charges, later also debunked by Sy Hersh. So we should call these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers "Trump's Bombers." Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:00 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Yeah. And:Remember that list of so-called Left/Socialist Warmongers who were calling upon Obama to bomb Syria over the bogus chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta that I was in the process of debunking at the time--later definitively debunked by Sy Hersh. You can find their names on Counterpunch. May they live in Infamy and never be trusted again! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:47 AM To: Karen Aram Cc: peace ; peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE > On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. > The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By > Tom Hall > 3 August 2017 > The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. > The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. > The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. > Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. > The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. > Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. > Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. > Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. > In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. > Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. > The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. > The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. > By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. > From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. > The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. > The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. > Radical democracy vs. socialism > The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” > It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” > From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” > “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” > The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” > The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. > Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. > If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. > The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. > The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” > Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” > In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. > The DSA’s anticommunist politics > The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. > The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. > The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. > Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. > Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” > His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. > Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. > The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. > The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” > The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. > The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. > The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” > The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. > A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. > Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. > The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Aug 3 14:29:46 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 09:29:46 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Hersh on Seth Rich In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <10CF81A5-91B0-4B9A-9A8C-75BAA217CAD6@gmail.com> https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/seymour-hersh-owes-the-world-an-explanation-for-his-seth-rich-comments-f9b2756123d3 From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 14:44:00 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 14:44:00 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Hersh on Seth Rich In-Reply-To: <10CF81A5-91B0-4B9A-9A8C-75BAA217CAD6@gmail.com> References: <10CF81A5-91B0-4B9A-9A8C-75BAA217CAD6@gmail.com> Message-ID: I twice debunked the chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta by Obama and later by Trump at the time they were made as part of my opposition to both bombings. Hersh only later confirmed my original debunkings. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:30 AM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Karen Aram ; peace-discuss Subject: Hersh on Seth Rich https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/seymour-hersh-owes-the-world-an-explanation-for-his-seth-rich-comments-f9b2756123d3 From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 14:55:12 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 14:55:12 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" References: Message-ID: On my Ghouta debunking you can google an article by Stephen Lendman setting it forth. On the Trump debunking, obviously this was not sarin--everyone would have been dead. The bottom line is that these allegations were so prima facie bogus that these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers must have known it too and did not care. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:27 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" At the time I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent Obama from bombing Syria. Then these Left/Socialist Whore Warmongers publicly called for Obama to bomb Syria. They finally got their Dream Come True from Trump. They did the same thing on Libya. fab. From: public at lists.accuracy.org [mailto:public at lists.accuracy.org] On Behalf Of Institute for Public Accuracy Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 7:51 AM To: Institute for Public Accuracy Subject: * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment Institute for Public Accuracy 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org _______________________________________________________ Monday, September 9, 2013 * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment PAUL FINDLEY, findley1 at frontier.com Available for a limited number of interviews, Findley served as a member of United States House of Representatives for 22 years. He was a key author of the War Powers Act and a leader in securing its enactment by overriding the veto of President Richard Nixon. He is also the author of six books. The federal building in Springfield, Ill. is named for him. He just wrote the piece "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria," which states: "Despite his own recent statements to the contrary, President Barack Obama has no legal authority to assault the government of Syria even as “a warning shot.” Neither the United States Constitution, nor the War Powers Act of 1973 gives him such authority in the absence of an emergency that allows Congress no time to react. Obama cannot cite the present situation as such an emergency, given his public statement that members of Congress need not act until the completion of their scheduled vacation. He has said that his proposal is 'not time sensitive.' If Congress fails to approve a resolution approving acts of war against Syria, he cannot order any military assault into Syria. "On several recent occasions the President and administration officials have mentioned a “sixty day” period during which he has authority to act without approval of Congress. Such authority does not exist. It is a misreading of a provision of the War Powers Act that provides only Congress with oversight constraints on executive actions. ..." Findley also recently wrote the piece "Syria — a War We Should Reject." FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of Tackling America’s Toughest Questions. Boyle drafted articles of impeachment that were introduced by the late Rep. Henry Gonzalez against President George H. W. Bush in 1991. Boyle said today: "Impeachment is the remedy for a president taking extra-constitutional action. Obama claims he has the authority to attack Syria when -- under the Constitution -- he does not." See: "Cornel West: It’s 'Grounds For Impeachment' If Obama Bombs Syria Without Congressional Approval." For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:09 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Here we were doing everything humanly possible to oppose Obama bombing Syria, and these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers call for him to bomb Syria, which he did not do in part because of our opposition. Needless to say, Trump did bomb Syria over bogus chemical weapons charges, later also debunked by Sy Hersh. So we should call these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers "Trump's Bombers." Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:00 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Yeah. And:Remember that list of so-called Left/Socialist Warmongers who were calling upon Obama to bomb Syria over the bogus chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta that I was in the process of debunking at the time--later definitively debunked by Sy Hersh. You can find their names on Counterpunch. May they live in Infamy and never be trusted again! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:47 AM To: Karen Aram Cc: peace ; peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE > On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. > The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By > Tom Hall > 3 August 2017 > The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. > The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. > The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. > Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. > The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. > Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. > Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. > Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. > In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. > Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. > The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. > The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. > By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. > From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. > The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. > The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. > Radical democracy vs. socialism > The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” > It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” > From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” > “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” > The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” > The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. > Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. > If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. > The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. > The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” > Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” > In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. > The DSA’s anticommunist politics > The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. > The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. > The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. > Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. > Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” > His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. > Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. > The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. > The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” > The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. > The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. > The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” > The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. > A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. > Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. > The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 14:58:04 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 14:58:04 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" References: Message-ID: Also, Ted Postol of MIT was debunking both sets of chemical weapons allegations at the time they were made--long before Hersh definitively debunked both of them. Hersh only confirmed what Postol and I were saying at the time. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:55 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" On my Ghouta debunking you can google an article by Stephen Lendman setting it forth. On the Trump debunking, obviously this was not sarin--everyone would have been dead. The bottom line is that these allegations were so prima facie bogus that these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers must have known it too and did not care. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:27 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" At the time I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent Obama from bombing Syria. Then these Left/Socialist Whore Warmongers publicly called for Obama to bomb Syria. They finally got their Dream Come True from Trump. They did the same thing on Libya. fab. From: public at lists.accuracy.org [mailto:public at lists.accuracy.org] On Behalf Of Institute for Public Accuracy Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 7:51 AM To: Institute for Public Accuracy Subject: * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment Institute for Public Accuracy 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org _______________________________________________________ Monday, September 9, 2013 * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment PAUL FINDLEY, findley1 at frontier.com Available for a limited number of interviews, Findley served as a member of United States House of Representatives for 22 years. He was a key author of the War Powers Act and a leader in securing its enactment by overriding the veto of President Richard Nixon. He is also the author of six books. The federal building in Springfield, Ill. is named for him. He just wrote the piece "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria," which states: "Despite his own recent statements to the contrary, President Barack Obama has no legal authority to assault the government of Syria even as “a warning shot.” Neither the United States Constitution, nor the War Powers Act of 1973 gives him such authority in the absence of an emergency that allows Congress no time to react. Obama cannot cite the present situation as such an emergency, given his public statement that members of Congress need not act until the completion of their scheduled vacation. He has said that his proposal is 'not time sensitive.' If Congress fails to approve a resolution approving acts of war against Syria, he cannot order any military assault into Syria. "On several recent occasions the President and administration officials have mentioned a “sixty day” period during which he has authority to act without approval of Congress. Such authority does not exist. It is a misreading of a provision of the War Powers Act that provides only Congress with oversight constraints on executive actions. ..." Findley also recently wrote the piece "Syria — a War We Should Reject." FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of Tackling America’s Toughest Questions. Boyle drafted articles of impeachment that were introduced by the late Rep. Henry Gonzalez against President George H. W. Bush in 1991. Boyle said today: "Impeachment is the remedy for a president taking extra-constitutional action. Obama claims he has the authority to attack Syria when -- under the Constitution -- he does not." See: "Cornel West: It’s 'Grounds For Impeachment' If Obama Bombs Syria Without Congressional Approval." For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:09 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Here we were doing everything humanly possible to oppose Obama bombing Syria, and these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers call for him to bomb Syria, which he did not do in part because of our opposition. Needless to say, Trump did bomb Syria over bogus chemical weapons charges, later also debunked by Sy Hersh. So we should call these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers "Trump's Bombers." Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:00 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Yeah. And:Remember that list of so-called Left/Socialist Warmongers who were calling upon Obama to bomb Syria over the bogus chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta that I was in the process of debunking at the time--later definitively debunked by Sy Hersh. You can find their names on Counterpunch. May they live in Infamy and never be trusted again! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:47 AM To: Karen Aram Cc: peace ; peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE > On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. > The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By > Tom Hall > 3 August 2017 > The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. > The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. > The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. > Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. > The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. > Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. > Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. > Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. > In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. > Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. > The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. > The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. > By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. > From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. > The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. > The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. > Radical democracy vs. socialism > The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” > It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” > From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” > “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” > The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” > The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. > Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. > If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. > The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. > The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” > Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” > In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. > The DSA’s anticommunist politics > The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. > The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. > The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. > Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. > Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” > His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. > Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. > The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. > The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” > The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. > The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. > The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” > The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. > A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. > Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. > The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 15:01:22 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 15:01:22 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: So again, there was no excuse for these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers to call for the bombings of Syria and later of Libya. They have all come out of the American Imperial Warmongering Closet. A pox upon their house! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:58 AM To: C G Estabrook ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Also, Ted Postol of MIT was debunking both sets of chemical weapons allegations at the time they were made--long before Hersh definitively debunked both of them. Hersh only confirmed what Postol and I were saying at the time. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:55 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" On my Ghouta debunking you can google an article by Stephen Lendman setting it forth. On the Trump debunking, obviously this was not sarin--everyone would have been dead. The bottom line is that these allegations were so prima facie bogus that these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers must have known it too and did not care. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:27 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" At the time I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent Obama from bombing Syria. Then these Left/Socialist Whore Warmongers publicly called for Obama to bomb Syria. They finally got their Dream Come True from Trump. They did the same thing on Libya. fab. From: public at lists.accuracy.org [mailto:public at lists.accuracy.org] On Behalf Of Institute for Public Accuracy Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 7:51 AM To: Institute for Public Accuracy Subject: * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment Institute for Public Accuracy 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org _______________________________________________________ Monday, September 9, 2013 * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment PAUL FINDLEY, findley1 at frontier.com Available for a limited number of interviews, Findley served as a member of United States House of Representatives for 22 years. He was a key author of the War Powers Act and a leader in securing its enactment by overriding the veto of President Richard Nixon. He is also the author of six books. The federal building in Springfield, Ill. is named for him. He just wrote the piece "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria," which states: "Despite his own recent statements to the contrary, President Barack Obama has no legal authority to assault the government of Syria even as “a warning shot.” Neither the United States Constitution, nor the War Powers Act of 1973 gives him such authority in the absence of an emergency that allows Congress no time to react. Obama cannot cite the present situation as such an emergency, given his public statement that members of Congress need not act until the completion of their scheduled vacation. He has said that his proposal is 'not time sensitive.' If Congress fails to approve a resolution approving acts of war against Syria, he cannot order any military assault into Syria. "On several recent occasions the President and administration officials have mentioned a “sixty day” period during which he has authority to act without approval of Congress. Such authority does not exist. It is a misreading of a provision of the War Powers Act that provides only Congress with oversight constraints on executive actions. ..." Findley also recently wrote the piece "Syria — a War We Should Reject." FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of Tackling America’s Toughest Questions. Boyle drafted articles of impeachment that were introduced by the late Rep. Henry Gonzalez against President George H. W. Bush in 1991. Boyle said today: "Impeachment is the remedy for a president taking extra-constitutional action. Obama claims he has the authority to attack Syria when -- under the Constitution -- he does not." See: "Cornel West: It’s 'Grounds For Impeachment' If Obama Bombs Syria Without Congressional Approval." For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:09 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Here we were doing everything humanly possible to oppose Obama bombing Syria, and these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers call for him to bomb Syria, which he did not do in part because of our opposition. Needless to say, Trump did bomb Syria over bogus chemical weapons charges, later also debunked by Sy Hersh. So we should call these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers "Trump's Bombers." Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:00 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Yeah. And:Remember that list of so-called Left/Socialist Warmongers who were calling upon Obama to bomb Syria over the bogus chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta that I was in the process of debunking at the time--later definitively debunked by Sy Hersh. You can find their names on Counterpunch. May they live in Infamy and never be trusted again! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:47 AM To: Karen Aram Cc: peace ; peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE > On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. > The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By > Tom Hall > 3 August 2017 > The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. > The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. > The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. > Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. > The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. > Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. > Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. > Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. > In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. > Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. > The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. > The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. > By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. > From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. > The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. > The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. > Radical democracy vs. socialism > The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” > It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” > From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” > “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” > The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” > The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. > Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. > If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. > The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. > The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” > Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” > In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. > The DSA’s anticommunist politics > The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. > The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. > The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. > Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. > Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” > His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. > Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. > The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. > The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” > The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. > The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. > The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” > The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. > A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. > Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. > The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 15:03:11 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 15:03:11 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: And remember: According to the Ramparts Expose, so much of the American Left deliberately went onto the CIA Payroll like Steinhem. Once CIA, always CIA. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 10:01 AM To: C G Estabrook ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" So again, there was no excuse for these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers to call for the bombings of Syria and later of Libya. They have all come out of the American Imperial Warmongering Closet. A pox upon their house! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:58 AM To: C G Estabrook ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Also, Ted Postol of MIT was debunking both sets of chemical weapons allegations at the time they were made--long before Hersh definitively debunked both of them. Hersh only confirmed what Postol and I were saying at the time. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:55 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" On my Ghouta debunking you can google an article by Stephen Lendman setting it forth. On the Trump debunking, obviously this was not sarin--everyone would have been dead. The bottom line is that these allegations were so prima facie bogus that these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers must have known it too and did not care. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:27 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" At the time I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent Obama from bombing Syria. Then these Left/Socialist Whore Warmongers publicly called for Obama to bomb Syria. They finally got their Dream Come True from Trump. They did the same thing on Libya. fab. From: public at lists.accuracy.org [mailto:public at lists.accuracy.org] On Behalf Of Institute for Public Accuracy Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 7:51 AM To: Institute for Public Accuracy Subject: * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment Institute for Public Accuracy 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org _______________________________________________________ Monday, September 9, 2013 * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment PAUL FINDLEY, findley1 at frontier.com Available for a limited number of interviews, Findley served as a member of United States House of Representatives for 22 years. He was a key author of the War Powers Act and a leader in securing its enactment by overriding the veto of President Richard Nixon. He is also the author of six books. The federal building in Springfield, Ill. is named for him. He just wrote the piece "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria," which states: "Despite his own recent statements to the contrary, President Barack Obama has no legal authority to assault the government of Syria even as “a warning shot.” Neither the United States Constitution, nor the War Powers Act of 1973 gives him such authority in the absence of an emergency that allows Congress no time to react. Obama cannot cite the present situation as such an emergency, given his public statement that members of Congress need not act until the completion of their scheduled vacation. He has said that his proposal is 'not time sensitive.' If Congress fails to approve a resolution approving acts of war against Syria, he cannot order any military assault into Syria. "On several recent occasions the President and administration officials have mentioned a “sixty day” period during which he has authority to act without approval of Congress. Such authority does not exist. It is a misreading of a provision of the War Powers Act that provides only Congress with oversight constraints on executive actions. ..." Findley also recently wrote the piece "Syria — a War We Should Reject." FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of Tackling America’s Toughest Questions. Boyle drafted articles of impeachment that were introduced by the late Rep. Henry Gonzalez against President George H. W. Bush in 1991. Boyle said today: "Impeachment is the remedy for a president taking extra-constitutional action. Obama claims he has the authority to attack Syria when -- under the Constitution -- he does not." See: "Cornel West: It’s 'Grounds For Impeachment' If Obama Bombs Syria Without Congressional Approval." For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:09 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Here we were doing everything humanly possible to oppose Obama bombing Syria, and these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers call for him to bomb Syria, which he did not do in part because of our opposition. Needless to say, Trump did bomb Syria over bogus chemical weapons charges, later also debunked by Sy Hersh. So we should call these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers "Trump's Bombers." Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:00 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Yeah. And:Remember that list of so-called Left/Socialist Warmongers who were calling upon Obama to bomb Syria over the bogus chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta that I was in the process of debunking at the time--later definitively debunked by Sy Hersh. You can find their names on Counterpunch. May they live in Infamy and never be trusted again! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:47 AM To: Karen Aram Cc: peace ; peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE > On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. > The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By > Tom Hall > 3 August 2017 > The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. > The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. > The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. > Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. > The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. > Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. > Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. > Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. > In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. > Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. > The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. > The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. > By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. > From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. > The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. > The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. > Radical democracy vs. socialism > The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” > It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” > From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” > “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” > The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” > The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. > Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. > If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. > The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. > The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” > Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” > In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. > The DSA’s anticommunist politics > The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. > The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. > The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. > Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. > Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” > His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. > Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. > The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. > The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” > The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. > The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. > The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” > The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. > A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. > Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. > The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 15:07:48 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 15:07:48 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Which directly raises the question: How many of these warmongering "Left Socialists" are really CIA Assets? Going all the way back to the mid 1950s when The Ford Foundation and John McCloy decided to put most of the American Left on the CIA payroll and they knowingly accepted the money. Once CIA, always CIA. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 10:03 AM To: C G Estabrook ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" And remember: According to the Ramparts Expose, so much of the American Left deliberately went onto the CIA Payroll like Steinhem. Once CIA, always CIA. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 10:01 AM To: C G Estabrook ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" So again, there was no excuse for these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers to call for the bombings of Syria and later of Libya. They have all come out of the American Imperial Warmongering Closet. A pox upon their house! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:58 AM To: C G Estabrook ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Also, Ted Postol of MIT was debunking both sets of chemical weapons allegations at the time they were made--long before Hersh definitively debunked both of them. Hersh only confirmed what Postol and I were saying at the time. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:55 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" On my Ghouta debunking you can google an article by Stephen Lendman setting it forth. On the Trump debunking, obviously this was not sarin--everyone would have been dead. The bottom line is that these allegations were so prima facie bogus that these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers must have known it too and did not care. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:27 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" At the time I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent Obama from bombing Syria. Then these Left/Socialist Whore Warmongers publicly called for Obama to bomb Syria. They finally got their Dream Come True from Trump. They did the same thing on Libya. fab. From: public at lists.accuracy.org [mailto:public at lists.accuracy.org] On Behalf Of Institute for Public Accuracy Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 7:51 AM To: Institute for Public Accuracy Subject: * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment Institute for Public Accuracy 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org _______________________________________________________ Monday, September 9, 2013 * Key Author of War Powers Act: "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria" * Impeachment PAUL FINDLEY, findley1 at frontier.com Available for a limited number of interviews, Findley served as a member of United States House of Representatives for 22 years. He was a key author of the War Powers Act and a leader in securing its enactment by overriding the veto of President Richard Nixon. He is also the author of six books. The federal building in Springfield, Ill. is named for him. He just wrote the piece "Obama has no Authority to Attack Syria," which states: "Despite his own recent statements to the contrary, President Barack Obama has no legal authority to assault the government of Syria even as “a warning shot.” Neither the United States Constitution, nor the War Powers Act of 1973 gives him such authority in the absence of an emergency that allows Congress no time to react. Obama cannot cite the present situation as such an emergency, given his public statement that members of Congress need not act until the completion of their scheduled vacation. He has said that his proposal is 'not time sensitive.' If Congress fails to approve a resolution approving acts of war against Syria, he cannot order any military assault into Syria. "On several recent occasions the President and administration officials have mentioned a “sixty day” period during which he has authority to act without approval of Congress. Such authority does not exist. It is a misreading of a provision of the War Powers Act that provides only Congress with oversight constraints on executive actions. ..." Findley also recently wrote the piece "Syria — a War We Should Reject." FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of Tackling America’s Toughest Questions. Boyle drafted articles of impeachment that were introduced by the late Rep. Henry Gonzalez against President George H. W. Bush in 1991. Boyle said today: "Impeachment is the remedy for a president taking extra-constitutional action. Obama claims he has the authority to attack Syria when -- under the Constitution -- he does not." See: "Cornel West: It’s 'Grounds For Impeachment' If Obama Bombs Syria Without Congressional Approval." For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:09 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'peace-discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Here we were doing everything humanly possible to oppose Obama bombing Syria, and these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers call for him to bomb Syria, which he did not do in part because of our opposition. Needless to say, Trump did bomb Syria over bogus chemical weapons charges, later also debunked by Sy Hersh. So we should call these WHORE Left/Socialist Warmongers "Trump's Bombers." Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 9:00 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; Karen Aram Cc: peace-discuss Subject: RE: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" Yeah. And:Remember that list of so-called Left/Socialist Warmongers who were calling upon Obama to bomb Syria over the bogus chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta that I was in the process of debunking at the time--later definitively debunked by Sy Hersh. You can find their names on Counterpunch. May they live in Infamy and never be trusted again! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:47 AM To: Karen Aram Cc: peace ; peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE > On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. > The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By > Tom Hall > 3 August 2017 > The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. > The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. > The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. > Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. > The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. > Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. > Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. > Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. > In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. > Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. > The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. > The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. > By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. > From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. > The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. > The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. > Radical democracy vs. socialism > The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” > It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” > From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” > “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” > The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” > The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. > Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. > If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. > The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. > The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” > Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” > In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. > The DSA’s anticommunist politics > The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. > The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. > The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. > Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. > Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” > His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. > Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. > The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. > The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” > The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. > The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. > The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” > The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. > A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. > Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. > The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Aug 3 16:31:52 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 11:31:52 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] US war on Syria In-Reply-To: <79D6EC93-D21B-4AA1-8A48-95E8A6F7BC9C@gmail.com> References: <79D6EC93-D21B-4AA1-8A48-95E8A6F7BC9C@gmail.com> Message-ID: <98C069A4-6E78-4FAD-B804-901266384C54@gmail.com> https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/03/did-trump-really-end-the-cias-secret-war-in-syria/ I’m not sure this article is quite right, but the following is surely correct: "The demand for the immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria and the Middle East must stand at the center of the U.S. antiwar movement’s efforts today.” —CGE From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 3 16:41:34 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 16:41:34 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] US war on Syria In-Reply-To: <98C069A4-6E78-4FAD-B804-901266384C54@gmail.com> References: <79D6EC93-D21B-4AA1-8A48-95E8A6F7BC9C@gmail.com> <98C069A4-6E78-4FAD-B804-901266384C54@gmail.com> Message-ID: The demand for the immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria and the Middle East must stand at the center of the U.S. antiwar movement’s efforts today.” For sure! fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 11:32 AM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net Cc: peace Subject: [Peace] US war on Syria https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/03/did-trump-really-end-the-cias-secret-war-in-syria/ I’m not sure this article is quite right, but the following is surely correct: "The demand for the immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria and the Middle East must stand at the center of the U.S. antiwar movement’s efforts today.” —CGE _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 3 18:06:41 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 18:06:41 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" In-Reply-To: <0D866A90-DB4F-455D-BC06-39174D259AF3@hotmail.com> References: <0D866A90-DB4F-455D-BC06-39174D259AF3@hotmail.com> Message-ID: First paragraph, last sentence, I meant to say "false premise.” > On Aug 3, 2017, at 07:13, Karen Aram wrote: > > Exactly, and the analysis that the wsws.org article provides is spot on when it comes to the sudden rise of “socialists organizations” across the country, since the election of Trump. While it maybe something to celebrate, that is people awakening to the problems presented by neoliberalism and capitalism, and originally provided by Bernie, if cloaked in support for Democrats it is a false narrative. > > Bernie betrayed those he enlightened by supporting Clinton, and he and these organizations are betraying their followers if they think any support for the Democrat Party is going to bring progress or change. > > The focus on IP is always a clue, as it prevents acknowledgement of our shadow government and the needless focus on electoral politics. The elephant in the room, that needs to be removed is support for war, militarism, and our ever growing poverty as a result of neoliberalism and capitalism. > > >> On Aug 3, 2017, at 07:00, Boyle, Francis A wrote: >> >> Yeah. And:Remember that list of so-called Left/Socialist Warmongers who were calling upon Obama to bomb Syria over the bogus chemical weapons allegations at Ghouta that I was in the process of debunking at the time--later definitively debunked by Sy Hersh. You can find their names on Counterpunch. May they live in Infamy and never be trusted again! Fab. >> >> Francis A. Boyle >> Law Building >> 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. >> Champaign IL 61820 USA >> 217-333-7954 (phone) >> 217-244-1478 (fax) >> (personal comments only) >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace >> Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 8:47 AM >> To: Karen Aram >> Cc: peace ; peace-discuss >> Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] If you consider yourself a "leftist" a "Socialist" "anti-capitalist" this is a "must read analysis" >> >> "Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. >> >> "The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May.” >> >> I knew Michael Harrington slightly and am glad to see the DSA at least raise the question of the democratization of the economy as well as the polity, inadequate as their answers may be. >> >> Meanwhile the Democrats hope to restore their fortunes by their consciously mendacious and dangerous campaign to continue the Obama-Calinotn war provocations against Russia and China. >> >> Those in the Trump administration opposed to that must be supported. —CGE >> >> >>> On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:59 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> The wsws.org does often criticize other socialist organizations, this criticism of the DSA is spot on, which likely includes other organizations as well. >> >>> The anti-socialist politics of the Democratic Socialists of America By >>> Tom Hall >>> 3 August 2017 >>> The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will open its national convention today in Chicago. Despite the populist and left-sounding rhetoric that will be on display in the various speeches, roundtables, workshops and resolutions, the DSA is a pro-capitalist organization steeped in a tradition of anti-communism and bitterly opposed to the political independence of the working class. >>> The meeting is taking place as the various ostensibly “left” organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party attempt to grapple with the deep disgust with that big business party among workers and young people, which was strikingly revealed in the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle. >>> The political radicalization and growth of anti-capitalist sentiment found an initial expression during the Democratic Party primary contest in mass support for the self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed to be leading a “political revolution” while actually working to channel opposition back behind the Democrats and their eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. >>> Clinton ran a pro-war campaign and evinced indifference to the questions of poverty and social inequality that dominated popular sentiment during the Democratic primary campaign. With Clinton widely despised in the working class as a personification of the corrupt political status quo, her candidacy produced a sharp drop in turnout among traditional Democratic voters and, in economically devastated former industrial states, a shift to Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment alternative, by a section of low-income workers who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Studies have shown that anti-war sentiment in these regions and hostility to Clinton’s anti-Russia agitation also played a major role. >>> The alienation from the Democrats has only deepened since the election, with the Democratic Party basing its opposition to the new administration not on Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more broadly, his assault on social programs, or his appointment of fascists and Wall Street billionaires to top White House and cabinet posts, but rather on his reluctance to continue the confrontational policy against Russia initiated under Obama. Approval ratings for the Democrats have actually fallen at a faster rate than for the Republicans, according to a Gallup poll released in May. >>> Nothing is more frightening to the pseudo-left than the discrediting of the Democratic Party, which raises the specter of a break with bourgeois politics by the working class and the formation of a new, socialist working class movement. Organizations and publications such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative and Jacobin are discussing some kind of political regroupment, either within the Democratic Party or nominally independent of it, to achieve their shared goal of shoring up and refurbishing the political credibility of that party and of capitalist politics overall. Toward this end, they continue to promote Sanders, who claims to be leading a “political revolution” to reform the Democratic Party. >>> Within this reactionary political milieu, the DSA’s star is rising. It is seen as an organization that could play a central role in these plans. Thus, the ISO had DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine co-sponsor its annual conference for the first time this summer, with DSA vice-chairman and Jacobin editor-in-chief Bhaskar Sunkara appearing as a featured speaker. >>> Socialist Alternative, which openly functioned as a faction of the Sanders campaign last year, is now prostrating itself before the DSA. It is calling on it to form a new “broad-left” political formation into which Socialist Alternative would liquidate itself. Socialist Alternative justifies this line by claiming that the DSA has shifted from its anti-communist, social democratic foundations since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the entry of the group around Sunkara into the organization. >>> In fact, few pseudo-left organizations, with the possible exception of Socialist Alternative itself, are as closely integrated into and function so openly as a faction of the Democratic Party as the DSA. The DSA’s top leadership includes Democratic Party luminaries, among them union bureaucrats such as Dolores Huerta (who supported Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries) and celebrity intellectuals such as academic Cornel West and feminist writer and former CIA collaborator Gloria Steinem. The DSA endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election in all but name, attempting to camouflage its position by calling for a “social movement” to defeat Trump in key swing states. After the election, it endorsed Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. >>> Through its membership in the Socialist International, the DSA is affiliated with such organizations as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, all of which have carried out savage attacks on the working class and participated in neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and Africa while in government. >>> The DSA of today cannot be separated from its history. The predecessor organization of the DSA, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), emerged out of a split within the Socialist Party of America in 1972. The latter organization expelled the American supporters of the Russian Revolution from its ranks in 1919. >>> The founders of the DSOC, Michael Harrington in particular, had entered the Socialist Party more than a decade before 1972 as part of the tendency led by Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. The Shachtmanites, bending to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, refused to uphold the defense of the Soviet Union. By 1950, this group was defending American imperialism in the Korean War and by 1961 Shachtman was publicly supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Such was Harrington’s anti-communist pedigree. >>> By 1972, Shachtman had essentially captured the rump of the nearly moribund Socialist Party. Harrington now criticized his mentor from the left. He drew close to the liberal wing of the anti-communist trade union bureaucracy, the Reutherite officialdom of the United Auto Workers, in particular. >>> From the beginning, DSOC’s orientation, in the DSA’s own words, was toward “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.” Its fusion in 1982 with an organizational remnant of the 1960s generation of student protesters to form the DSA was a reflection of the latter’s shift to the right and abandonment of its former radical pretenses, which made the anti-communist foundations of the DSA attractive. >>> The rejection by the DSA of principled politics is such that it does not have a program or platform upon which its political activity is, at least nominally, based. However, a review of the DSA’s “national strategy document,” published last June but re-posted on the DSA website in advance of this week’s convention, demonstrates the anti-communist and nationalist orientation of this middle-class organization. >>> The title of the document, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” is itself significant. The use of the term “political revolution” reflects the DSA’s promotion of Bernie Sanders and the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed into a “people’s party” through popular pressure. Lest there be any doubt on this, the banner linking to the statement on the DSA’s website features a photo of a Sanders rally. The DSA’s support for the term used by Sanders above all signifies its opposition to social revolution, to a genuine social transformation that would bring the working class to power. Instead, like Sanders, it seeks to “purify” capitalism. >>> Radical democracy vs. socialism >>> The DSA statement is suffused with identity politics. One sub-heading calls for “Building Multiracial, Intentionally Intersectional Coalitions.” At several points, the DSA engages in self-flagellation for being “dominated by white activists.” >>> It promotes the reactionary Democratic Party narrative that Trump’s Electoral College victory was the result of the racism of the white working class. It states that “appeals to racism and fear will continue to gain traction among economically and socially insecure white voters--particularly men, who face the erosion of traditional gender prominence due to the gains of the feminist movement.” >>> From a theoretical standpoint, the most significant element of the DSA’s document is its rejection of the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and its substitution in its stead of a nebulous, non-class notion of socialism as “radical democracy.” >>> “[The] DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible,” the document states. “Our vision entails nothing less than the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. This simply means that democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.” >>> The DSA’s “radical democracy” would also include changes to the method of electing members of Congress, the abolition of the Senate and the establishment of vague “local participatory institutions.” >>> The DSA’s use of the term “democracy” is a non-class abstraction. Its call for “industrial democracy” leaves out precisely who will be participating in this “democracy” and in what capacity, not to mention who will actually own the means of production. In fact, the DSA’s conception of “radical democracy” means little more than the establishment of joint union-management boards, co-ops nominally owned by the workers, and other such initiatives that serve only to bind the workers hand-and-foot to the bosses. >>> Since the emergence of scientific socialism as first elaborated by Marx and Engels, socialists have explained that the state is an instrument of class rule. This is no less true for democratic governments than for authoritarian ones. In fact, socialists have always understood the bourgeois democratic state to be the form of government that best suits the needs of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is why, as a general historical rule, the oldest and most established capitalist countries developed some form of democratic parliamentary system. >>> If, nevertheless, the ruling class in all of the old capitalist democracies is turning toward more openly authoritarian methods, this is the product of the massive concentration of wealth, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The rule of the bourgeoisie is increasingly incompatible with the maintenance of past social reforms, and the crisis of capitalism is assuming revolutionary dimensions. As Lenin explained, a revolutionary situation requires not only that the masses cannot continue to live in the old way, but also that the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. >>> The class character of the state, even the most “democratic,” explains why socialists since the time of Marx have insisted that the working class cannot “capture” the existing state machinery through elections, but must smash it and replace it with a state of its own, established on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in the Marxist sense of “dictatorship” as the political domination of a particular class. The working class, which by virtue of its relationship to the means of production is the antithesis of private property, takes power by establishing genuinely democratic forms of rule. The broad masses of people are for the first time actively involved in the management of social life, and economic policy is determined by social need, not private profit. >>> The DSA explicitly states that its vision of a “democratic socialist society” does not include the disappearance of class antagonisms. “It should always be remembered, however, that like every other form of society, a democratic socialist society cannot produce total social harmony,” the statement declares. “Such a society will always have to navigate among the competing claims of different groups and democratic political institutions will always be needed to arbitrate and mediate such conflict. Democratic socialism, that is, will not be the utopia that many socialists of old imagined.” >>> Instead of the alleged “utopia” of an end to class exploitation, achieved through a revolutionary movement led by a Marxist party, the DSA promotes the reactionary utopia of “democratic socialism” enacted through the Democratic Party and the reform of capitalism. “The nature of our electoral activism will vary based on local and political conditions,” the DSA writes. “But it will include supporting progressive and socialist candidates running for office, usually in Democratic primaries or as Democrats in general elections, but also in support of independent socialist and other third-party campaigns outside of the Democratic Party (emphasis added).” >>> In other words, the DSA will throw its support either behind Democratic Party candidates or the campaigns of third-party appendages of the Democrats such as the Green Party. >>> The DSA’s anticommunist politics >>> The slogan of “radical democracy” is consistent with the anti-communism that forms the bedrock of the DSA’s politics. The justification for the DSA’s opposition to the Russian Revolution is that it destroyed “democracy” by overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government, which jailed and shot revolutionaries and continued Russia’s involvement in the slaughter of the First World War. >>> The DSA equates the October Revolution, the most genuinely democratic revolution in history, in which the masses themselves took control of their own destiny, with totalitarianism and the crimes of Stalin, whose bureaucracy usurped power and destroyed workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this counterrevolutionary task, Stalin murdered the entire generation of old Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, concentrating the full wrath of his police apparatus on Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who represented the conscious Marxist and internationalist opposition to the Stalin regime. >>> The DSA’s hostility to the Russian Revolution and its rejection of the Marxist assertion that the class struggle of the working class leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a practical political as well as a theoretical question. It is at the very core of the DSA’s opposition to the fight for socialist politics within the working class and its character as a counter-revolutionary organization. >>> Social democracy, of which the DSA is part, has upheld and defended the capitalist dictatorship over the working class for more than a century. This was definitively established with the support given by all of the major social democratic parties to their own national bourgeoisies in the first imperialist world war that began in 1914. Since the suppression of the 1918 German Revolution and the murder of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the German Social Democracy, social democratic parties in power have not hesitated to use state violence to crush workers’ uprisings and rescue the capitalist class. If the DSA is given the opportunity, it will not hesitate to do the same in the United States. >>> Bhaskar Sunkara, in a column published in the New York Timestwo months ago, expressed the hostility of the DSA to the legacy of the Russian Revolution when he claimed that Lenin, once he returned to Russia in April of 1917, “set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags.” To return socialism to “radical democracy,” Sunkara argued, it was necessary to return to the “early days of the Second International.” >>> His reference to the “early days” of the Second International, as opposed to its collapse as a socialist organization at the beginning of World War I, cannot conceal the fact that Sunkara is promoting the very aspects that led to its betrayal of socialism, including the domination of its day-to-day political activity by campaigns for reform, rather than Social Democracy’s positive contribution to the promotion and development of Marxism, which was carried forward after 1914 by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and put into practice in the October Revolution. >>> Sunkara’s article, it should be noted, met with enthusiastic support from the ISO on its Socialist Worker website. >>> The DSA’s embrace of the “democratic” imperialist state is consistent with the complete silence of its strategy statement on American imperialism and the danger of war. The DSA is not merely indifferent to this question, however. Along with virtually all of the other pseudo-left organizations, it supports and identifies with the criminal wars waged by American imperialism. >>> The DSA has posted only two statements on its website in 2017 about foreign policy. While they are meant to appear as criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, they make clear the DSA’s actual support for the US war for regime-change in Syria, which has displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. After formally condemning the Trump administration’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base in a statement published in April, the DSA hastens to add that “[t]he DSA has also supported from spring 2011 onwards the massive and democratic Syrian uprising against the brutal Assad regime.” >>> The statement treats as good coin the putative justification for the attack--exposed as a lie by journalist Seymour Hersh--that the Syrian government carried out gas attacks against civilians. (An article published in Jacobin denounced Hersh’s article.) The DSA attempts to provide its pro-imperialist line with an anti-imperialist gloss by absurdly claiming that the US has “in effect” sided with the Assad regime and the Russian military. It does not attempt to reconcile the obvious contradiction between supposed US support for Assad and the cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase. >>> The DSA statement places chief responsibility for the Syrian civil war on Russia and Iran, calling on the US to “engage in the necessary diplomacy to press Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to cease their military aid to the Assad dictatorship, as well as end United States and Gulf State funding of internal Syrian combatants.” This advice to the State Department is a clear signal to the American bourgeoisie of its support for US imperialism’s war drive and the escalating campaign against Russia, which raises the specter of nuclear war. >>> The DSA argues that the “democratic” imperialist powers in Western Europe are more progressive than the workers’ government established by the October Revolution. Thus, it claims that the reformist regimes in postwar Europe and America, not the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, “represents the high-water mark of working class strength” and “significant progress toward a democratic socialist transition.” >>> The DSA’s nostalgic tribute to the postwar welfare state underscores the delusionary and utopian character of its entire perspective. It promotes the idea that the reformist programs of that period can be revived, under conditions where, for forty years, the bourgeoisie throughout the world, and above all the United States, has been clawing back every social concession won by workers through more than a century of struggle. >>> A return to previous conditions is impossible because the driving force behind this social counterrevolution is not bad “neoliberal” policy, as the DSA claims, but the objective crisis of the capitalist system. What the DSA is really mourning is the longstanding decline of American capitalism, whose untrammeled dominance provided the foundation for the temporary restabilization of world capitalism after the Second World War and the ability of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries to dispense modest reforms and engage in a policy of relative class compromise. >>> Such blindness to the objective roots of this historic decline and lack of any objective analysis of the crisis of American and world capitalism are characteristic of the politics of the DSA and the pseudo-left as a whole. >>> The DSA’s promotion of the postwar era as a model demonstrates precisely what it means when it refers, at the beginning of its document, to the “game changing” opportunities it sees for “leftists and progressives.” It is not referring to the growing shift to the left within the working class and the increasing alignment of workers’ experiences with the perspective of socialist revolution. Rather, with the crisis of capitalism having discredited all of the traditional institutions of the existing system, it sees itself and the pseudo-left as a whole as playing a more prominent and active role in diverting and smothering social opposition, including in positions of state power. Like Syriza in Greece, whose rise to power it cites as an example of the “left’s” re-emergence, it envisions the American pseudo-left being called upon to carry out historic betrayals. >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace mailing list >> Peace at lists.chambana.net >> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace > From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Aug 3 20:36:48 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 15:36:48 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Prospects if the war party has its way In-Reply-To: <98C069A4-6E78-4FAD-B804-901266384C54@gmail.com> References: <79D6EC93-D21B-4AA1-8A48-95E8A6F7BC9C@gmail.com> <98C069A4-6E78-4FAD-B804-901266384C54@gmail.com> Message-ID: <2374CA17-481E-46AC-B544-3F6924DBA107@gmail.com> [fredoneverything.org ] Milk-Bar Clausewitzes, Bean Curd Napoleons: In the Reign of Kaiser Don Why do those inadequate little men in Washington and New York dream of new wars? Because the empire is near a tipping point. Washington must either either start a war in Korea, or gets faced down by the North, its carriers ignored, its bombers “sending signals” and making “shows of force” without result. For the empire this is a loss of face and credibility, and an example to others that America can be challenged. Iran has not caved to Washington’s threats and sanctions and clearly isn’t going to. Another strategic loss, a big one, unless–the hawks seem to think–remedied by a war. Iran wants to trade with Europe and Europe likes the idea. Worse, Iran is becoming a vital part of China’s aim to integrate Europe and Asia economically. To the empire this smelñls of death. The frightened grow desperate. China shows no signs of backing down in the South China Sea. For Washington, it is either war now, when thinks it might win, or be overshadowed as China grows. Russia has irrevocably gotten the Crimea, is quietly absorbing part of the Ukraine, and looks as if its side is going to win in Syria. Three humiliating setbacks for the empire. Loss of control of the Mideast would be a strategic disaster for Washington. Continued control of Europe is absolutely vital. European governments have groveled but now even they grow restless with Washington’s sanction against Russia, and European businessmen want more trade eastward. Growing trade with Asia threatens to loosen Europe’s shackles. Washington cannot allow this. When you have militarily stupid politicians listening to pathologically confident soldiers, trouble is likely. All of these people might reflect how seldom wars turn out as those starting them expect. Wars are always going to be quick and easy. Generals not infrequently advise against a war but, once it begins, they bark in unison. They seldom know what they are getting into. Note: The American Civil War was expected to be over in an afternoon at First Manassas. Wrong, by four years and some 650,000 dead. Germans thought that World War I would be be a quick war of movement, over in a few weeks. Wrong by four years and fantastic slaughter, and was an entirely unexpected trench war of attrition ending in unconditional surrender. Not in the Powerpoint presentation. When the Japanese Army urged attacking Pearl Harbor, their war aims did not include two cities in radioactive rubble and GIs in the bars of Tokyo. That is what they got. When the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, having GIs and the Red Army in Berlin must have been an undocumented feature. Very undocumented. When the French re-invaded Vietnam after WWII, they did not expect les jaunes to crush them at Dien Bien Phu, end of war. Les Jaunes did. When the Americans invaded Vietnam, having seen what had happened to the French, the thought did not occur that it might happen to them too. It did. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, having seen what happened to the US in a war against peasants, they did not expect to lose. They did. When the Americans attacked Afghanistan, having seen what happened to the Soviets there, they did not expect to be fought to a slowly losing draw. They were. When the Americans attacked Iraq, they did not expect to be bogged down in an interminable conflagration in the whole region. They are. Is there a pattern here? From the foregoing one might conclude that when grrr-bowwow-woofs start wars, they seldom foresee the nature of the war or its outcome. This is particularly true of military men, who seem to have little grasp of their profession. Whether anyone else could better predict does not matter. The generals do not. Why? One reason is that war by its nature is not very predictable. Often the other side proves uncooperative, imaginative, and resourceful. Another reason is that militaries inculcate unreasonable confidence in their own powers. Troops cannot be told that they are mediocre soldiers, and may lose, that their publics may not support the war, that the other side may prove superior. Consequently they are told, and tell themselves, that they are the best trained, best armed, most lethal force imaginable. They tell themselves that they have great fighting spirit–cran, bushido, oorah. If this is so, they think, how can they not win? Just now, the usual damned fools in Washington and New York contemplate wars against Russia in Syria, China in the South China Sea, North Korea, Russia in the Ukraine, and Iran. All of these offer superb chances for disastrous and unexpected consequences. An attack on North Korea will be called a “surgical strike.” “Surgical” is a PR phrase implying that no civilians will be killed, that the war will be quick and cheap. You know, like Iraq, a cakewalk. This idea has little relation to military reality. The assumptions will be that American intelligence actually knows where the North’s missiles and nukes are, that North Korea is too stupid to put them deep underground, that Kim Jong Un won’t respond with a massive attack on the South, that he doesn’t have aircraft that can carry a nuke for a short distance–to Seoul, say, or a carrier-battle group, or to the barracks of the 28,000 GIs in South Korea, that the North Korean infantry could not get into Seoul, thirty-five miles away, forcing the US to bomb the South Korean capital into rubble. Them is a lot of assumptions. Similarly, we hear that the US military could devastate Iran. Today, “US military” means airplanes. American ground forces are small, not rapidly deployable and–if I may lapse into rural accuracy–pussified, obsessed with homosexuality, girls in combat, trans this and trans that, and racial and sexual quotas in the officer corps. The Pentagon has trouble finding recruits physically fit enough for combat arms. {Illustration. Pregnant-and-girl simulator, forced on American troops by feminists. The intention obviously is to humiliate, and they have succeeded. The problem is, first, that we have troops willing to put up with this and second, and far worse, is that the generals, who know perfectly well the effects of this sort of thing, have let the military become the playground of feminists, homosexuals, transvestites, transgenders, single mothers, and so on. They value their careers over the military.} Iranians are Muslims, not pansies and not afraid to die. They might not–I would say definitely will not–cave in to bombing. They might close the Straits of Hormuz (“Damn, sir! I was sure we could blow up all those missiles they have on pickup trucks.”) They might launch dispersed infantry attacks into various surrounding countries. Getting them out would be a hell of lot harder than letting them in. In all of these contemplated wars, there is the belief in the Last Move: that is, that after the US defeats the Russian Air Force over Syria, which it could, Russia would throw up its hands, go home and do nothing–instead of, say, occupying the Caucasus, which it could. Always, always, the assumption is that the other side will behave as the bow-wow-woofs think it will. People tend to think of countries as suprahuman entities with rational minds. We say, “Russia did this” or The US decided that….” Countries don’t decide anything. Men (usually) do. You know, McCain, Hillary, generals, delusional Neocons, and Trump, who is eerily similar to Kaiser Wilhelm, another stochastic military naif with a codpiece need. These massive egos are not well suited to backing down or conceding that they have made a mistake. This egotism is important. Washington’s vanities could not accept being humiliated, not allow any country to show that resistance to America is possible. Suppose that the Navy fired on a Chinese ship in the South China Sea, expecting Beijing to roll over as it would have thirty years ago–but it didn’t, instead leaving a carrier in flaming ruin. This is far from impossible. Carriers can be surprisingly fragile, and China has has focused resources specifically of defeating the American Navy in what it regards as its home waters. The American fleet has not fought a war since 1945. It doesn’t really know how well its weapons will work against their weapons. {Illustration. The carrier Forrestal, 1967. A single Zuni ground-attack missile was fired accidentally, hitting a plane. A huge fire ensued, bombs cooked off, 134 men were killed, and the ship was devastated, out of service for a very long time. One five-inch missile.} Times have changed. Carriers today are useful only for bombing defenseless countries. Against serious opposition–Russia and China for example–they serve only as trip wires. The carrier itself does not amount to much, but if you cripple one, you are at war with the US. This is less scary than it used to be, which is dangerous in itself, but still not something one undertakes casually. The following news story is worth reflection: Surprise! Boo! “The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced” “American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk – a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board. “By the time it surfaced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine is understood to have sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier. According to senior Nato officials the incident caused consternation in the U.S. Navy. The story clearly was not written by a student of submarines or carriers, but the incident occurred, ten years ago–and Chinese submarines are getting rapidly better. Emotionally unable to walk away from a local defeat, Washington would have to double down, likely by bombing China. The consequences would be disastrous, unpredictable, perhaps nuclear. Things soldiers do not think about: revolution when the United States, already deeply divided with the middle and lower classes pushed to the wall financially, suffer the depression that would follow on ending commerce with America’s largest trading partner–China. The lower middle class, already pushed to the wall, having no savings, finds prices going way up at Walmart. Apple stores have no iPhones. Boeing loses Chinese orders, laying off thousands. This list could go on for many pages. The elderly will remember the civil unrest during Vietnam. If the war remained conventional, the outcome might boil down to which population could best survive privation–the Chinese, only a generation or so removed from living hard, or America’s squealing millennials, looking for safe spaces. If the Pentagon destroyed the Three Gorges Dam, and killed several million people, China might go nuclear. Note that if a few well-placed nuclear bombs shut down food distribution in the US for even a month, people in the cities would be fighting for food on the third day, and eating each other on the fifth. This, those absurd vanities and overgrown children in New York are playing with. ### -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From naiman at justforeignpolicy.org Thu Aug 3 20:40:54 2017 From: naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (Robert Naiman) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 15:40:54 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Jonathan Marshall: How US Policy Helps Al Qaeda in Yemen Message-ID: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/08/01/how-us-policy-helps-al-qaeda-in-yemen/ How US Policy Helps Al Qaeda in Yemen August 1, 2017 *Exclusive:* President Trump – like President Obama – is working at cross purposes in supposedly fighting Al Qaeda in Yemen while helping Saudi Arabia kill Al Qaeda’s chief Yemeni enemies, as Jonathan Marshall explains. By Jonathan Marshall In a world of bad actors, one of the “baddest” of all is the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which the CIA once branded “the most dangerous regional node in the global jihad.” It masterminded the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000; nearly blew up a U.S. passenger jet flying into Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009; brought down a UPS cargo plane in 2010; and sponsored the 2015 attack on the offices of *Charlie Hebdo* magazine in Paris, killing 11 and wounding another 11. All of which raises an embarrassing question: Why is the United States supporting AQAP’s main ally in Yemen, Saudi Arabia? The respected news publication *Middle East Eye reports * that Abdulmajid al-Zindani, a Yemeni cleric, “veteran al-Qaeda supporter,” and “former spiritual adviser to Osama bin Laden,” has been operating freely in Saudi Arabia, even posting YouTube videos lauding the Saudi war in his home country. Apparently no one in Riyadh cares that he’s been on the U.S. Treasury’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist List since 2004, identified as a recruiter for terrorist training camps and a key purchaser of weapons for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups. Indeed, Zindani “has been warmly received by senior clerics and officials,” including one adviser to the Royal Court, according to *Middle East Eye*. The publication’s sources further allege that “at least five Yemenis designated as terrorists by the U.S. Treasury have advised and coordinated Saudi operations in Yemen with allied forces on the ground.” One senior al-Qaeda supporter in Yemen, Nayif al-Qaysi, has been repeatedly interviewed in Saudi Arabia by fawning television stations. He served as governor of the Yemeni city of Bayda until late July. Most bizarre of all, one notorious al-Qaeda fundraiser, who has lived in Saudi Arabia for nearly three years, turned up on a list of terrorists whom Saudi Arabia accused Qatar of harboring. Saudi Arabia and four other Arab states broke diplomatic and economic ties with Qatar in early June, in part over allegations that Doha supports extremists. *The Devastation of Yemen* Since March 2015 , Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and other Arab allies have been laying waste to Yemen with logistic support from the United States. They are fighting to wrest control of the country from Houthi militants and their ally, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Riyadh aims to reinstate Saleh’s rival, President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, whose legal mandate ended in January 2015. Tens of thousands of Yemenis have died from the fighting, historic cities have been pulverized by criminal Saudi bombing raids, and more than 400,000 people have contracted deadly cholera . Almost two million children and millions more adults suffer from malnutrition owing to war-related disruptions of food supplies and a Saudi blockade of Yemen’s ports. Suffering and chaos provide ideal breeding grounds for AQAP , which took control of a provincial capital and one of Yemen’s largest ports for many months. A special report last year by Reuters concluded that “the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen, . . . backed by the United States, has helped Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to become stronger than at any time since it first emerged almost 20 years ago.” Even the UAE newspaper *The National* conceded last month: “In the absence of a political resolution that addresses local grievances and builds and empowers a central state that can provide jobs and services, Al Qaeda has filled vacuums and its fighters have found a role, while a sectarian narrative that is promoted by the group has increasing traction.” This matters not only because of AQAP’s potential threat to U.S. security, but because the only possible legal rationale for continued U.S. military involvement in Yemen is the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, which approves operations *against* al-Qaeda, not in support of its allies. Members of Congress are growing restive about such legal issues as U.S. tax dollars fund the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, with no end in sight. *Getting Stronger* *AQAP has gained traction by taking advantage of growing local resentment toward U.S. and UAE counterterrorism operations that result in the murder or torture of suspects.* In a weird twist, typical of the war’s endlessly shifting alliances, AQAP has also joined pro-Saudi forces in bloody offensives to retake the southern city of Taiz from Houthi rebels. “We fight along all Muslims in Yemen, together with different Islamic groups,” against the Houthis, said Qasim al-Rimi, the senior military commander of AQAP, this spring. Although the United States put a $5 million price on al-Rimi’s head, Associated Press reported that his forces “regularly receive funds and weapons from the U.S.-backed Saudi led coalition.” Ironically, just hours before U.S. commandos killed another prominent AQAP-linked tribal leader in late January (along with several children), that leader had arranged for the Saudi-backed coalition of President Hadi to pay his tribal fighters $60,000 to join in the fight against Houthi rebels. No wonder the International Crisis Group recently reported that “The Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda is stronger than it has ever been,” and that AQAP “is thriving in an environment of state collapse, growing sectarianism, shifting alliances, security vacuums and a burgeoning war economy.” AQAP, it added, has “emerged arguably as the biggest winners of the failed political transition and civil war that followed.” Targeting Islamist tribal leaders with more bombs, drones, and military raids — as the Trump administration seems inclined to do — will simply aggravate civilian suffering and strengthen AQAP’s political base. There’s only one way to dry up its support: the international community must demand a cease-fire, send foreign armies packing, promote a political settlement among all Yemeni stakeholders, and send food and medical aid to alleviate the population’s extraordinary suffering. *Jonathan Marshall is a regular contributor to Consortiumnews.com.* === Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 <(202)%20448-2898> Force Vote on Saudi-Yemen War to Save a Million Kids from Cholera https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Aug 4 01:29:43 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2017 01:29:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: [New post] Brasilia on the Chao Phraya: Same Same but Different References: <11050395.2972.0@wordpress.com> Message-ID: An interesting article from Thailand, comparing their government with that of Brazil. A bit dated but……. Respond to this post by replying above this line New post on Smoke and Mirrors [http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/71c401cdd13b08a361e28195c5cae882?s=32&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs0.wp.com%2Fi%2Femails%2Fblavatar.png] [http://2.gravatar.com/avatar/5af2cf3964f6ce7ef87f07a4f8c6bf0e?s=50&d=identicon&r=G] Brasilia on the Chao Phraya: Same Same but Different by mjw51 [http://2.gravatar.com/avatar/5af2cf3964f6ce7ef87f07a4f8c6bf0e?s=32&d=identicon&r=G] Reblogged from Smoke and Mirrors: As has become apparent to all but the most dedicated right-wing neoliberals, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil is in all essentials a coup. In a nation whose political system is rife with corruption from bottom to top, there is something almost amusing about a po-faced left-wing bureaucrat like Rousseff, who is quite possibly one of the few incorrupt actors in the farce, being removed from office for corruption by the votes of corrupt senators and deputies on the recommendation of corrupt judges. Read more… 801 more words Just in case we begin to mistake all those sad-eyed innocent pics of Yingluck for democratic mourning... mjw51 | August 1, 2017 at 2:44 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/pKmIb-LW Comment See all comments Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Smoke and Mirrors. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://mjw51.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/brasilia-on-the-chao-phraya-same-same-but-different-2/ Thanks for flying with [https://s0.wp.com/i/emails/blavatar-default.png] WordPress.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Fri Aug 4 16:03:18 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2017 11:03:18 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Is Trump's Russia Policy Being Hijacked? In-Reply-To: <1796730284.7438413.1501861126958@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1796730284.7438413.1501861126958.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <1796730284.7438413.1501861126958@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <28BB813D-F900-46F6-A97A-B5DCF2D3CFFD@gmail.com> [The criminal and dangerous policy the War Party is trying to force on the administration. - and apparently succeeding.] ...crafting the platform in Cleveland on which Donald Trump would run ... inflicted a major defeat on the War Party. The platform committee rejected a plank to pull us deeper into Ukraine, by successfully opposing new U.S. arms transfers to Kiev. Improved relations with Russia were what candidate Trump had promised, and what Americans would vote for in November. Yet, this week, The Wall Street Journal reports: "The U.S. Pentagon and State Department have devised plans to supply Ukraine with antitank missiles and other weaponry and are seeking White House approval ... as Kiev battles Russia-backed separatists ... Defense Secretary Mattis has endorsed the plan." As pro-Russia rebels in East Ukraine have armored vehicles, Kiev wants U.S. tank-killing Javelin missiles, as well as antiaircraft weapons. State and Defense want Trump to send the lethal weapons. This is a formula for a renewed war, with far higher casualties in Ukraine than the 10,000 dead already suffered on both sides. And it is a war Vladimir Putin will not likely allow Kiev to win. If Ukraine's army, bolstered by U.S. weaponry, re-engages in the east, it could face a Moscow-backed counterattack and be routed, and the Russian army could take permanent control of the Donbass. Indeed, if Trump approves this State-Defense escalation plan, we could be looking at a rerun of the Russia-Georgia war of August 2008. Then, to recapture its lost province of South Ossetia, which had seceded in 1992, after Georgia seceded from Russia, Georgia invaded. Putin sent his army in, threw the Georgians out, and recognized South Ossetia, as John McCain impotently declaimed, "We are all Georgians now!" Wisely, George W. Bush ignored McCain and did nothing. But about this new arms deal questions arise. As the rebels have no aircraft, whose planes are the U.S. antiaircraft missiles to shoot down? And if the Russian army just over the border can enter and crush the Ukrainian army, why would we want to restart a civil war, the only certain result of which is more dead Ukrainians on both sides? The Journal's answer: Our goal is to bleed Russia. "The point of lethal aid is to raise the price Mr. Putin pays for his imperialism until he withdraws or agrees to peace. ... The Russians don't want dead soldiers arriving home before next year's presidential election." Also going neocon is Mike Pence. In Georgia this week, noting that Russian tanks are still in South Ossetia, the vice president not only declared, "We stand with you," he told Georgians the U.S. stands by its 2008 commitment to bring them into NATO. This would mean, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, that in a future Russia-Georgia clash the U.S. could find itself in a shooting war with Russia in the South Caucasus. Russia's security interests there seem clear. What are ours? Along with Trump's signing of the new sanctions bill imposed by Congress, which strips him of his authority to lift those sanctions without Hill approval, these developments raise larger questions. Is President Trump losing control of Russia policy? Has he capitulated to the neocons? These are not academic questions. For consider the architect of the new arms package, Kurt Volker, the new U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations. A former CIA agent, member of the National Security Counsel, and envoy to NATO, Volker believes Russian troops in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk are all there illegally -- and U.S. policy should be to push them out. A former staffer of Sen. McCain, Volker was, until July, executive director of the neocon McCain Institute. He has called for the imposition of personal sanctions on Putin and his family and European travel restrictions on the Russian president. In the Journal this week, "officials" described his strategy: "Volker believes ... that a change in Ukraine can be brought only by raising the costs for Moscow for continued intervention in Ukraine. In public comments, he has played down the notion that supplying weapons to Ukraine would escalate the conflict with Russia." In short, Volker believes giving antitank and antiaircraft missiles to Ukraine will bring Putin to the negotiating table, as he fears the prospect of dead Russian soldiers coming home in caskets before his 2018 election. As for concerns that Putin might send his army into Ukraine, such worries are unwarranted. Volker envisions a deepening U.S. involvement in a Ukrainian civil war that can bleed and break Russia's Ukrainian allies and convince Putin to back down and accept what we regard as a just settlement. Does Trump believe this? Does Trump believe that confronting Putin with rising casualties among his army and allies in Ukraine is the way to force the Russian president to back down and withdraw from Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, as Nikita Khrushchev did from Cuba in 1962? What if Putin refuses to back down, and chooses to confront? > On Aug 4, 2017, at 10:38 AM, Dianna Visek via Peace wrote: > > Is Trump's Russia Policy Being Hijacked? > > Is Trump's Russia Policy Being Hijacked? > Rasmussen Reports > In crafting the platform in Cleveland on which Donald Trump would run, America Firsters inflicted a major defeat... > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace mailing list > Peace at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 4 20:14:10 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2017 20:14:10 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 3:09 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School The fact that the Berkeley Law Faculty gave their most prestigious Chair to that torturer and felon John Yoo shall always be Emblematic of Berkeley Law School. Erwin Chemerinsky shall never be able to whitewash the blood of all those Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color off of their blood-stained hands. Fab. Ode to My Colleague and Friend Frank Newman Way to go Berkeley Law! Deeming Yourselves above The Law Your Dean Frank Newman now crying in Heaven Berkeley Law can go to Hell! Accessories After The Fact to torture, murder and war crimes Law Prof Carl Schmitt would be proud of You All The Nazis had Their Law Schools too Replete with John Yoo Killer Koh's poo RIP Berkeley Law Into the Ashcan of History You All go Good Riddance to Cal's Nazi scheisse! The Nazis Had Their Law Professors Too American Law Professors What have we become? American Law Professors for torture! American Law Professors for Gitmo Kangaroo Courts! American Law Professors for indefinite detention! American Law Professors for spying! American Law Professors for drone strikes! American Law Professors for murder! American Law Professors for assassinations! American Law Professors for war crimes! American Law Professors for crimes against humanity! American Law Professors for genocide! American Law Professors for wars of aggression! American Law Professors for murdering U.S. citizens! American Law Professors for murder courts! American Law Professors for trashing the U.S. Constitution! American Law Professors for trashing the Bill of Rights! American Law Professors for trashing International Law! American Law Professors for trashing Human Rights! How much lower can American Law Professors sink Into this criminal scheisse Of Nazi Legal Nihilism? The Nazis had their Law Professors too The worst of the bunch was Carl Schmitt Now we have: American Law Professors For Carl Schmitt! Arabs and Muslims Have become American Law Professors' New Jews Their untermensh Now at Berkeley Law too With Chaired John Yoo Killer Koh's poo Mise En Scene at Boalt Hall: Doctor: What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands. Gentlewoman: It is an accustom'd action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour. Lady Macbeth: Yet here's a spot. Doctor: Hark, she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. Lady Macbeth: Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!-One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't.-Hell is murky.-Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow'r to accompt?-Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? Macbeth Act 5, scene 1, 26- Francis A. Boyle Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 4 20:14:10 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2017 20:14:10 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 3:09 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School The fact that the Berkeley Law Faculty gave their most prestigious Chair to that torturer and felon John Yoo shall always be Emblematic of Berkeley Law School. Erwin Chemerinsky shall never be able to whitewash the blood of all those Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color off of their blood-stained hands. Fab. Ode to My Colleague and Friend Frank Newman Way to go Berkeley Law! Deeming Yourselves above The Law Your Dean Frank Newman now crying in Heaven Berkeley Law can go to Hell! Accessories After The Fact to torture, murder and war crimes Law Prof Carl Schmitt would be proud of You All The Nazis had Their Law Schools too Replete with John Yoo Killer Koh's poo RIP Berkeley Law Into the Ashcan of History You All go Good Riddance to Cal's Nazi scheisse! The Nazis Had Their Law Professors Too American Law Professors What have we become? American Law Professors for torture! American Law Professors for Gitmo Kangaroo Courts! American Law Professors for indefinite detention! American Law Professors for spying! American Law Professors for drone strikes! American Law Professors for murder! American Law Professors for assassinations! American Law Professors for war crimes! American Law Professors for crimes against humanity! American Law Professors for genocide! American Law Professors for wars of aggression! American Law Professors for murdering U.S. citizens! American Law Professors for murder courts! American Law Professors for trashing the U.S. Constitution! American Law Professors for trashing the Bill of Rights! American Law Professors for trashing International Law! American Law Professors for trashing Human Rights! How much lower can American Law Professors sink Into this criminal scheisse Of Nazi Legal Nihilism? The Nazis had their Law Professors too The worst of the bunch was Carl Schmitt Now we have: American Law Professors For Carl Schmitt! Arabs and Muslims Have become American Law Professors' New Jews Their untermensh Now at Berkeley Law too With Chaired John Yoo Killer Koh's poo Mise En Scene at Boalt Hall: Doctor: What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands. Gentlewoman: It is an accustom'd action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour. Lady Macbeth: Yet here's a spot. Doctor: Hark, she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. Lady Macbeth: Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!-One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't.-Hell is murky.-Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow'r to accompt?-Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? Macbeth Act 5, scene 1, 26- Francis A. Boyle Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 4 21:42:27 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2017 21:42:27 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] John Yoo's Berkeley Law School Message-ID: So notice: Killer Koh produced John Yoo. And that is the acute danger of these Nazi Law Professors and Nazi Law Schools. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 3:14 PM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: FW: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 3:09 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School The fact that the Berkeley Law Faculty gave their most prestigious Chair to that torturer and felon John Yoo shall always be Emblematic of Berkeley Law School. Erwin Chemerinsky shall never be able to whitewash the blood of all those Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color off of their blood-stained hands. Fab. Ode to My Colleague and Friend Frank Newman Way to go Berkeley Law! Deeming Yourselves above The Law Your Dean Frank Newman now crying in Heaven Berkeley Law can go to Hell! Accessories After The Fact to torture, murder and war crimes Law Prof Carl Schmitt would be proud of You All The Nazis had Their Law Schools too Replete with John Yoo Killer Koh's poo RIP Berkeley Law Into the Ashcan of History You All go Good Riddance to Cal's Nazi scheisse! The Nazis Had Their Law Professors Too American Law Professors What have we become? American Law Professors for torture! American Law Professors for Gitmo Kangaroo Courts! American Law Professors for indefinite detention! American Law Professors for spying! American Law Professors for drone strikes! American Law Professors for murder! American Law Professors for assassinations! American Law Professors for war crimes! American Law Professors for crimes against humanity! American Law Professors for genocide! American Law Professors for wars of aggression! American Law Professors for murdering U.S. citizens! American Law Professors for murder courts! American Law Professors for trashing the U.S. Constitution! American Law Professors for trashing the Bill of Rights! American Law Professors for trashing International Law! American Law Professors for trashing Human Rights! How much lower can American Law Professors sink Into this criminal scheisse Of Nazi Legal Nihilism? The Nazis had their Law Professors too The worst of the bunch was Carl Schmitt Now we have: American Law Professors For Carl Schmitt! Arabs and Muslims Have become American Law Professors' New Jews Their untermensh Now at Berkeley Law too With Chaired John Yoo Killer Koh's poo Mise En Scene at Boalt Hall: Doctor: What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands. Gentlewoman: It is an accustom'd action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour. Lady Macbeth: Yet here's a spot. Doctor: Hark, she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. Lady Macbeth: Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!-One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't.-Hell is murky.-Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow'r to accompt?-Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? Macbeth Act 5, scene 1, 26- Francis A. Boyle Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 4 21:42:27 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2017 21:42:27 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] John Yoo's Berkeley Law School Message-ID: So notice: Killer Koh produced John Yoo. And that is the acute danger of these Nazi Law Professors and Nazi Law Schools. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 3:14 PM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: FW: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 3:09 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School The fact that the Berkeley Law Faculty gave their most prestigious Chair to that torturer and felon John Yoo shall always be Emblematic of Berkeley Law School. Erwin Chemerinsky shall never be able to whitewash the blood of all those Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color off of their blood-stained hands. Fab. Ode to My Colleague and Friend Frank Newman Way to go Berkeley Law! Deeming Yourselves above The Law Your Dean Frank Newman now crying in Heaven Berkeley Law can go to Hell! Accessories After The Fact to torture, murder and war crimes Law Prof Carl Schmitt would be proud of You All The Nazis had Their Law Schools too Replete with John Yoo Killer Koh's poo RIP Berkeley Law Into the Ashcan of History You All go Good Riddance to Cal's Nazi scheisse! The Nazis Had Their Law Professors Too American Law Professors What have we become? American Law Professors for torture! American Law Professors for Gitmo Kangaroo Courts! American Law Professors for indefinite detention! American Law Professors for spying! American Law Professors for drone strikes! American Law Professors for murder! American Law Professors for assassinations! American Law Professors for war crimes! American Law Professors for crimes against humanity! American Law Professors for genocide! American Law Professors for wars of aggression! American Law Professors for murdering U.S. citizens! American Law Professors for murder courts! American Law Professors for trashing the U.S. Constitution! American Law Professors for trashing the Bill of Rights! American Law Professors for trashing International Law! American Law Professors for trashing Human Rights! How much lower can American Law Professors sink Into this criminal scheisse Of Nazi Legal Nihilism? The Nazis had their Law Professors too The worst of the bunch was Carl Schmitt Now we have: American Law Professors For Carl Schmitt! Arabs and Muslims Have become American Law Professors' New Jews Their untermensh Now at Berkeley Law too With Chaired John Yoo Killer Koh's poo Mise En Scene at Boalt Hall: Doctor: What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands. Gentlewoman: It is an accustom'd action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour. Lady Macbeth: Yet here's a spot. Doctor: Hark, she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. Lady Macbeth: Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!-One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't.-Hell is murky.-Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow'r to accompt?-Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? Macbeth Act 5, scene 1, 26- Francis A. Boyle Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 4 22:49:09 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2017 22:49:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] John Yoo's Berkeley Law School In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: And remember: Killer Koh was Reagan's John Yoo from 1983-1985. Fab. Ben Linder Instead of Me Down to Nicaragua in 1985 With my Friends and Comrades-in-Arms Ramsey Clark and Len Weinglass (R.I.P.) To stop Reagan's contra terrorist mercenary bands Tormenting, torturing, murdering, raping, robbing, pillaging, devastating Nicaragua's long-suffering people Under a contra death threat for all Americans Subjected to CIA biowarfare by Hemorrhagic Dengue Fever For which there is no cure The three of us marched on our way anyway Instead of us lawyers Reagan and his contras murdered Ben Linder A Noble Engineer Bringing fresh water to the poor campesinos in the countryside Ripping Ben from his Family's arms Ben was a Martyr for Peace! Reagan and his contras murdered Ben Linder instead of me I have led a full life But not so he Struck down in his young manhood By a gang of American criminals and their terrorists So I write this poem in Honor of Ben May Ben's Name live forever! I know his Soul already does R.I.P.: Ben Linder Instead of me Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 4:42 PM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School So notice: Killer Koh produced John Yoo. And that is the acute danger of these Nazi Law Professors and Nazi Law Schools. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 3:14 PM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: FW: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 3:09 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School The fact that the Berkeley Law Faculty gave their most prestigious Chair to that torturer and felon John Yoo shall always be Emblematic of Berkeley Law School. Erwin Chemerinsky shall never be able to whitewash the blood of all those Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color off of their blood-stained hands. Fab. Ode to My Colleague and Friend Frank Newman Way to go Berkeley Law! Deeming Yourselves above The Law Your Dean Frank Newman now crying in Heaven Berkeley Law can go to Hell! Accessories After The Fact to torture, murder and war crimes Law Prof Carl Schmitt would be proud of You All The Nazis had Their Law Schools too Replete with John Yoo Killer Koh's poo RIP Berkeley Law Into the Ashcan of History You All go Good Riddance to Cal's Nazi scheisse! The Nazis Had Their Law Professors Too American Law Professors What have we become? American Law Professors for torture! American Law Professors for Gitmo Kangaroo Courts! American Law Professors for indefinite detention! American Law Professors for spying! American Law Professors for drone strikes! American Law Professors for murder! American Law Professors for assassinations! American Law Professors for war crimes! American Law Professors for crimes against humanity! American Law Professors for genocide! American Law Professors for wars of aggression! American Law Professors for murdering U.S. citizens! American Law Professors for murder courts! American Law Professors for trashing the U.S. Constitution! American Law Professors for trashing the Bill of Rights! American Law Professors for trashing International Law! American Law Professors for trashing Human Rights! How much lower can American Law Professors sink Into this criminal scheisse Of Nazi Legal Nihilism? The Nazis had their Law Professors too The worst of the bunch was Carl Schmitt Now we have: American Law Professors For Carl Schmitt! Arabs and Muslims Have become American Law Professors' New Jews Their untermensh Now at Berkeley Law too With Chaired John Yoo Killer Koh's poo Mise En Scene at Boalt Hall: Doctor: What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands. Gentlewoman: It is an accustom'd action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour. Lady Macbeth: Yet here's a spot. Doctor: Hark, she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. Lady Macbeth: Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!-One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't.-Hell is murky.-Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow'r to accompt?-Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? Macbeth Act 5, scene 1, 26- Francis A. Boyle Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 4 22:49:09 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2017 22:49:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] John Yoo's Berkeley Law School In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: And remember: Killer Koh was Reagan's John Yoo from 1983-1985. Fab. Ben Linder Instead of Me Down to Nicaragua in 1985 With my Friends and Comrades-in-Arms Ramsey Clark and Len Weinglass (R.I.P.) To stop Reagan's contra terrorist mercenary bands Tormenting, torturing, murdering, raping, robbing, pillaging, devastating Nicaragua's long-suffering people Under a contra death threat for all Americans Subjected to CIA biowarfare by Hemorrhagic Dengue Fever For which there is no cure The three of us marched on our way anyway Instead of us lawyers Reagan and his contras murdered Ben Linder A Noble Engineer Bringing fresh water to the poor campesinos in the countryside Ripping Ben from his Family's arms Ben was a Martyr for Peace! Reagan and his contras murdered Ben Linder instead of me I have led a full life But not so he Struck down in his young manhood By a gang of American criminals and their terrorists So I write this poem in Honor of Ben May Ben's Name live forever! I know his Soul already does R.I.P.: Ben Linder Instead of me Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 4:42 PM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School So notice: Killer Koh produced John Yoo. And that is the acute danger of these Nazi Law Professors and Nazi Law Schools. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 3:14 PM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: FW: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 3:09 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: John Yoo's Berkeley Law School The fact that the Berkeley Law Faculty gave their most prestigious Chair to that torturer and felon John Yoo shall always be Emblematic of Berkeley Law School. Erwin Chemerinsky shall never be able to whitewash the blood of all those Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color off of their blood-stained hands. Fab. Ode to My Colleague and Friend Frank Newman Way to go Berkeley Law! Deeming Yourselves above The Law Your Dean Frank Newman now crying in Heaven Berkeley Law can go to Hell! Accessories After The Fact to torture, murder and war crimes Law Prof Carl Schmitt would be proud of You All The Nazis had Their Law Schools too Replete with John Yoo Killer Koh's poo RIP Berkeley Law Into the Ashcan of History You All go Good Riddance to Cal's Nazi scheisse! The Nazis Had Their Law Professors Too American Law Professors What have we become? American Law Professors for torture! American Law Professors for Gitmo Kangaroo Courts! American Law Professors for indefinite detention! American Law Professors for spying! American Law Professors for drone strikes! American Law Professors for murder! American Law Professors for assassinations! American Law Professors for war crimes! American Law Professors for crimes against humanity! American Law Professors for genocide! American Law Professors for wars of aggression! American Law Professors for murdering U.S. citizens! American Law Professors for murder courts! American Law Professors for trashing the U.S. Constitution! American Law Professors for trashing the Bill of Rights! American Law Professors for trashing International Law! American Law Professors for trashing Human Rights! How much lower can American Law Professors sink Into this criminal scheisse Of Nazi Legal Nihilism? The Nazis had their Law Professors too The worst of the bunch was Carl Schmitt Now we have: American Law Professors For Carl Schmitt! Arabs and Muslims Have become American Law Professors' New Jews Their untermensh Now at Berkeley Law too With Chaired John Yoo Killer Koh's poo Mise En Scene at Boalt Hall: Doctor: What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands. Gentlewoman: It is an accustom'd action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour. Lady Macbeth: Yet here's a spot. Doctor: Hark, she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. Lady Macbeth: Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!-One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't.-Hell is murky.-Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow'r to accompt?-Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? Macbeth Act 5, scene 1, 26- Francis A. Boyle Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Aug 5 11:39:44 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2017 11:39:44 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] So much for health care Message-ID: * Print * Leaflet * Feedback * Share » Democrats offer pro-corporate health care “compromise” 5 August 2017 Following the failure of Senate Republicans to pass legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives has drafted a plan to prop up the insurance companies in the name of “fixing” Obamacare. The authors of the proposal call themselves the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of some 40 House members divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The collapse of the effort to deliver on President Trump’s pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare came against the backdrop of broad popular opposition to the proposal passed by the House in May and the equally reactionary plan advanced by Senate Republicans, which would have cut taxes for the wealthy, raised premiums and reduced services for millions of Americans, and made anywhere from 22 million to 32 million more people uninsured. It would have, as well, marked the beginning of the end of the Medicaid program for the poor and disabled as a guaranteed social benefit. The response of the Democratic Party to the debacle for Trump and the Republicans was to offer their services in implementing the demands of the insurance giants for “repairing” Obamacare so as to better ensure reduced costs and fatter profits. The last thing the Democrats wanted was for the mass opposition to the Republican plans to take the form of an organized movement to expand health coverage to the 28 million people totally abandoned by Obamacare and replace that corporate-dominated, anti-working class scheme with guaranteed, good quality health care for all. The Democratic mantra was the need to “stabilize the insurance markets,” i.e., meet the demands of the companies for changes in the ACA to further limit coverage for working people and more securely underwrite profits. Hence the Problems Solvers’ five-point plan: • Point one: Guarantee a continuation of the government cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments to the insurance firms that Trump has threatened to cut off. The $8 billion in CSR funds provide a tax-payer subsidy to private insurers to lower co-pays and deductibles for very low-income people on Obamacare plans. The insurance firms have been blackmailing the government—threatening to pull out of the Obamacare insurance exchanges if they are not assured that the CSR subsidies will continue. • Point two: Create a “dedicated stability fund,” alternately referred to as a “reinsurance program,” to compensate insurance firms for the cost of covering people with high-cost medical conditions that eat into profits. • Point three: Change the ACA mandate requiring companies to provide insurance to full-time employees to apply to firms with more than 500 workers instead of 50 workers, eliminating employer-sponsored coverage for millions of workers. • Point four: Repeal the tax on medical device makers, saving corporations billions of dollars. • Point five: “Provide technical changes and clear guidelines” to allow insurers to sell policies across state lines, encouraging a further monopolization of the health insurance market. The pro-corporate character of the Problem Solvers’ plan serves as a warning that the bipartisan assault on health care has not been jettisoned with the Republican defeat. At most, it has been handed a temporary setback. Within the confines of Congress and at the direction of the two big business parties, forces are regrouping. Nothing is off the table, particularly the drive to end Medicaid, which currently serves 77 million poor, elderly and disabled people, as an entitlement program based on need. Despite the defeat of the Senate legislation, a stealth attack on Medicaid is accelerating. A number of states—including Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine and Wisconsin—are seeking federal waivers for changes at the state level, including imposing work requirements, drug testing and time limits for benefits, as well as locking people out of the program for failure to pay monthly premiums. It was Obamacare that laid the basis for the Republicans’ offensive against health care. By establishing the mechanism of partially subsidizing the purchase of insurance from private companies by means of government vouchers it set a precedent for privatizing Medicaid, Medicare and, ultimately, Social Security. Taking any measure of the nation’s health—the opioid epidemic, the soaring rate of teen suicide, rising mortality among middle-aged men succumbing to “deaths of despair,” growing infant and maternal mortality, declining overall life expectancy—America faces a health care crisis of monumental proportions. But the fight to secure one of the most basic human and social rights, the right to accessible, high-quality health care, cannot be waged based on a perspective of pressuring the Democrats. Decent health care for working people is incompatible with a system based on private ownership of the corporations and production for profit—that is, on capitalism. The working class must advance its own class strategy, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, who are beholden to the private insurers, the pharmaceuticals and the giant hospital chains that profit off the misery, ill health and premature death of ordinary Americans. The health care industry must be taken out of private hands and the health care system organized as a public utility under the democratic control of the working class, based on socialized medicine. Kate Randall -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Sun Aug 6 16:19:02 2017 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2017 16:19:02 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Higher Ground & anti-war, etc. References: <1453545775.717656.1502036342937.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1453545775.717656.1502036342937@mail.yahoo.com> Yesterday the Ammons's discussed (former?) NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other issues on their morning WEFT program Higher Ground. The gist of their presentation was defending the support of former NFL player/current commentator Shannon Sharpe in his criticism of the effective ban on Kaepernick by NFL owners. Nevertheless, Sharpe accepted the notion that our military "fights for our freedom" (in so many words), while pointing our that blacks still have a long way to go in order to achieve equality. Apparently, Kaepernick agrees with those sentiments, as Dave Zirin noted a year or so ago when this controversy erupted: "In fact, Kaepernick stood and clapped on the sidelines when members of the military were recognized on the field. Kaepernick has said explicitly, “I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this country. This country isn’t holding up their end of the bargain… men and women that have been in the military have come back and been treated unjustly, and have been murdered by the country they fought for, on our land. That’s not right.” " Neither of the Ammons's questioned the underlying logic; their focus, as it almost always is, was on racial issues at home in the context of the long Civil Rights Movement. While I support Kaepernick's protest in relation to the BLM movement, it seems to me that if he does that in the context of all the overt militarism that goes into pre-game ceremonies, then the issue of global hegemony has to be addressed in a more forthright manner. This analysis, or lack thereof, was also reflected in Aaron's comments at the end of the show regarding Sundiata Cha-Jua and the criticism he has received for his columns in the News-Gazette--not from me and Carl in relation to the notion of "white rage," but from those who simply want the paper to drop his column for the usual "conservative" reasons. Surely if Aaron has read those letters, he must have read the ones from me and Carl. But instead of promoting a needed discussion of class and race (and identity politics), he was more interested in just circling the wagons, so to speak, and proposed that Cha-Jua speak on a future program to do so. In addition, there were vehement comments by the Ammons's regarding Trump's thuggish comments regarding police treatment of suspects, with the Ammons's calling for the three local police chiefs (CU + U of I) to denounce them (while admitting that perhaps they had already done so). OK fine, but where was substantive criticism of Obama and his DOJ policies during the 8 years that included all the events that led to BLM? Anti-Trumpism is being used as a methodology to avoid confronting the fundamental issues of our era, by those who claim to represent the interests of the "least" among us. DG -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Sun Aug 6 16:31:57 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2017 11:31:57 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Higher Ground & anti-war, etc. In-Reply-To: <1453545775.717656.1502036342937@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1453545775.717656.1502036342937.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <1453545775.717656.1502036342937@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > On Aug 6, 2017, at 11:19 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > ...Anti-Trumpism is being used as a methodology to avoid confronting the fundamental issues of our era, by those who claim to represent the interests of the "least" among us. > Yes, but with notable exceptions, like the percipient Glen Ford: >. —CGE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Sun Aug 6 16:52:12 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2017 11:52:12 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Higher Ground & anti-war, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <1453545775.717656.1502036342937.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <1453545775.717656.1502036342937@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6FD29E12-F3E7-4D18-9C35-8C13EDCF230E@illinois.edu> "The crazed, racist, stupid, boorish man in the White House this summer defied the War Party and its corporate media mouthpieces, negotiating a cease-fire with the Russians in several regions of Syria, and possibly ending the CIA’s not-so-covert role as Grandmaster of Islamic Jihad. Which makes him less dangerous to the human species than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.” —Glen Ford > On Aug 6, 2017, at 11:31 AM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: > > >> On Aug 6, 2017, at 11:19 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: >> >> ...Anti-Trumpism is being used as a methodology to avoid confronting the fundamental issues of our era, by those who claim to represent the interests of the "least" among us. >> > > Yes, but with notable exceptions, like the percipient Glen Ford: >. > > —CGE > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Sun Aug 6 23:12:20 2017 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2017 23:12:20 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] White rage / rape culture / identity politics References: <154023392.878189.1502061140892.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <154023392.878189.1502061140892@mail.yahoo.com> In relation to two issues that I've commented on, the NYT has recently run an op-ed on each, just to affirm the liberal conventional wisdom. Some pushback from commenters on the first issue; more interestingly, almost universal pushback from hundreds of commenters on the second issue. The 2nd article co-written by the well-known Krakauer. Opinion | The Policies of White Resentment | | | | | | | | | | | Opinion | The Policies of White Resentment Carol Anderson Trump won on the politics of racial backlash. Now he’s following through with an agenda meant to stoke it further. | | | Opinion | Don’t Weaken Title IX Campus Sex Assault Policies | | | | | | | | | | | Opinion | Don’t Weaken Title IX Campus Sex Assault Policies Jon Krakauer and Laura L. Dunn The Education Department may make colleges safer. For rapists. | | | -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Mon Aug 7 13:12:47 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2017 13:12:47 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: ON THE BEACH 2017. THE BECKONING OF NUCLEAR WAR. References: <81e01f026144a7a39810a239b.6beeae6966.20170807120826.11497f4f62.c5d8b609@mail197.atl121.mcsv.net> Message-ID: From: John Pilger > Subject: ON THE BEACH 2017. THE BECKONING OF NUCLEAR WAR. Date: August 7, 2017 at 05:09:15 PDT ON THE BEACH 2017. THE BECKONING OF NUCLEAR WAR. [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/81e01f026144a7a39810a239b/images/07abcc97-de9a-4e71-83f3-8fe878159d43.jpg] 4 August 2017 John Pilger writes - The US submarine captain says, "We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming. Well, now we do know and there's nothing to be done about it." He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest. The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and lifeless now. A curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and New Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last cities, towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most buildings will remain untouched, some illuminated by the last flickers of electric light. This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper These lines from T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men appear at the beginning of Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, which left me close to tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same. Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent. Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the living world. I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as the US Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world's second most lethal nuclear power. There was no justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder. The "sanctions" are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas. Their main aim seems to be war - real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is what the United States does to others. The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste whole societies - the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called "a noble cause" and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an "exceptional people"He was not referring to the Vietnamese. Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young teenagers. "Listen up," he said. "We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom." At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders took their own lives. Listen up, indeed. A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls "an eternal present". Harold Pinter described this as "manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously "the left" are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today revert to one name: Trump. Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for "liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics", wrote Luciana Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man - not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system - beckons great danger for all of us. While they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardian suppress the essence of the most important political story of our time as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime. On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a "Soviet agent"), the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the United States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war on Russia. Unlike every other Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a caveat from Trump himself that it was "clearly unconstitutional". A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia. This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the "national security" managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther King called them "the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today". They have encircled Russia and China with missiles and a nuclear arsenal. They have used neo-Nazis to instal an unstable, aggressive regime on Russia's "borderland" - the way through which Hitler invaded, causing the deaths of 27 million people. Their goal is to dismember the modern Russian Federation. In response, "partnership" is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin - anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon. Their history tells them to get ready. The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea, through which pass China's economic lifelines. The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, "if required", he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute's fiction. None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits, dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding clichés. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated. The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on China, John Bordne, a member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based in Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 - during the Cuban missile crisis - he and his colleagues were "told to launch all the missiles" from their silos. Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded - but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not "stand down". At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United States was such that US officials who were on official business in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 - the year Shute wrote On the Beach - no official in the State Department could speak the language of the world's most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed, aimed at Russia. The bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. The terms "left" and "right" are meaningless. Most of America's modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats. When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America's longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings - murder - by drones. In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study, Obama, the "reluctant liberal warrior", dropped 26,171 bombs - three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Having pledged to help "rid the world" of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War. Trump is a wimp by comparison. It was Obama - with his secretary of state Hillary Clinton at his side - who destroyed Libya as a modern state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration groups knew him as the "deporter-in-chief". One of Obama's last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a record $618billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has endorsed this. Buried in the detail was the establishment of a "Center for Information Analysis and Response". This is a ministry of truth. It is tasked with providing an "official narrative of facts" that will prepare us for the real possibility of nuclear war - if we allow it. [Twitter] [Facebook] [Website] Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Mon Aug 7 16:38:51 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2017 11:38:51 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE ON THE AIR format In-Reply-To: <98C069A4-6E78-4FAD-B804-901266384C54@gmail.com> References: <79D6EC93-D21B-4AA1-8A48-95E8A6F7BC9C@gmail.com> <98C069A4-6E78-4FAD-B804-901266384C54@gmail.com> Message-ID: <73B789D8-4983-4529-91FC-52CC1508DC6E@gmail.com> AWARE ON THE AIR is a weekly discussion of US war-making, presented on Urbana Public Television and YouTube by the ANTI-WAR ANTI-RACISM EFFORT of Champaign-Urbana. Members & friends of AWARE are invited to participate in this unrehearsed program, which is recorded from noon to 1pm on Tuesdays in the studios of UPTV, 400 South Vine Street, Urbana. The format of the show is that the participants take turns presenting “nuggets” of war news - often ignored by mainstream media - for discussion by the other participants. ### From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Tue Aug 8 12:27:15 2017 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 07:27:15 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] 60% Of House Democrats Vote For A Defense Budget Even Bigger Than Trump's Message-ID: <001801d31041$ade4d490$09ae7db0$@comcast.net> 60% Of House Democrats Vote For A Defense Budget Even Bigger Than Trump's Description: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/files/2014/07/Erik-Sherman_avatar_1404938510- 62x62.jpg Erik Sherman, Contributor Jul 14, 2017 5:38 PM 10,892 Description: http://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/c381c9c2d1cf4c149a2ab836ec14 25a7/960x0.jpg?fit=scaleWednesday, March 8, 2017. Romanian and U.S troops staged [+] When income inequality combines with systemic and systematic redistribution of virtually all income growth to the wealthiest while their taxes are reduced, you've got a budget problem. People increasingly need help as the median household income remains flat, even as costs rise. Either you can literally write off the lives of poorer people, as the healthcare "reform" bills from the House and Senate effectively do, or you need to find ways to reduce other spending. The single biggest section of the discretionary portion of the budget is military spending. For years the Pentagon has been incapable of fiscal responsibility. This is the body that, according to news reports last fall, tried to hide $125 billion in wasted spending over a five year program. It's the only agency in the entire federal government still unable to pass a financial audit. And it's handed the largest check even as the Cold War is long over, no other country has our military power, and major new weapons systems have been outright disasters and money sinks. But big companies that make billions and billions of dollars a year shovel contributions at congressional representatives because it's a great investment. All that income only required $11 million in 2016 donations, with 38% going to Democrats and 62% to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets.org. For the 2017 fiscal year that ends on September 30, the Obama budget called for $582.7 billion, which included a base budget of $523.9 billion and the "overseas contingency operations (OCO) budget" of $58.8 billion. The Trump administration wanted to add about $54 billion. As the Defense Department's own budget numbers showed, it requested $574.5 billion in base budget and $64.6 billion in OCO for a total of $639.1 billion. Ah, the pikers. Today, the House passed a $696.5 billion defense bill that makes Trump's look positively reasonable in comparison. There have been indications the House would insist on more spending than the White House did. The final vote by party is - or maybe it's should be - surprising. A huge number of Democrats voted for the measure. There are currently 240 Republicans and 194 Democrats in the body, with 1 vacancy. Out of the Republicans, 227 voted in favor and 8 voted against this bill, making 230, with 10 apparently missing in action. Of the 194 Democrats, 117 voted for the bill and 73 voted against, with 4 not voting. In other words, of the party that supposedly opposes rampant military spending and the Trump administration, 60% voted for this bill. There are things the country cannot afford. One is a defense budget that embraces 18.7% year-over-year growth, particularly when pressure on safety net spending increases with a growing population and increasing income inequality while tax receipts are up between 2016 and 2017 by only 5.9%. It seems crazy that the GOP, which fancies itself a champion of fiscal responsibility, agrees to this and the party in opposition, which has a glamorous self-image as some sort of resistance group, marches in step. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 1622 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 78594 bytes Desc: not available URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Tue Aug 8 14:44:56 2017 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 14:44:56 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fw: Why is a civil rights org running a deadly police exchange? In-Reply-To: <4045011908.-972533867@org.orgDB.reply.salsalabs.com> References: <4045011908.-972533867@org.orgDB.reply.salsalabs.com> Message-ID: <598811594.2201983.1502203496661@mail.yahoo.com> The Anti-Defamation League (associated with the Jewish fraternal organization B'nai B'rith) was once a somewhat respectable liberal organization in the era up to the 1960s, when anti-Semitism was significant, prior to full Jewish assimilation into the American establishment . Since then, it has become integrated into the Jewish/Zionist establishment that has become identified with the American establishment. Nevertheless, I was surprised (perhaps naively) to find that they are sponsoring police exchange programs with Israel. My only caveat to the statement below is that I do not believe that anti-Semitism has become a problem again in the Trump era; that's the JVP, which I generally identify with, overplaying its hand in relation to anti-Trumpism. ----- Forwarded Message -----From: Stefanie Fox, Jewish Voice for Peace To: "davegreen84 at yahoo.com" Sent: ‎Tuesday‎, ‎August‎ ‎8‎, ‎2017‎ ‎09‎:‎11‎:‎51‎ ‎AMSubject: Why is a civil rights org running a deadly police exchange?   Dear David, Why did the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a self-described civil rights organization with a mission “to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” issue a scathing attack against JVP and our Deadly Exchange campaign— which aims to do exactly that? Our campaign challenges police exchange programs that have facilitated trainings for thousands of high-ranking police, FBI, ICE, and border officials, and Israeli police and military over the last 20 years, reinforcing both governments’ oppressive tactics and ideologies. And the ADL is one of the primary leaders of these exchange programs. Sign our petition: Tell the ADL to end their deadly exchange programs. The ADL markets their police exchange programs as a chance for U.S. law enforcement to learn from Israeli expertise on counter-terrorism. “Expertise” here is a synonym for Israel’s decades of enforcing a brutal military occupation, policing Palestinian communities as enemy combatants. The trip features visits to Israeli checkpoints, airports, prisons, illegal settlements, and secret service offices— all sites with long records of Israeli human rights abuses. We want to end Israeli oppression of Palestinians, not valorize it. The lessons that U.S. officials bring back from these trips are part of a larger trend in policing since 9/11.  The importation of counter-terrorism tactics and technologies into domestic policing and immigration policy is evident in many dangerous developments: from the growth of an unprecedented deportation machine premised on the linking of immigration and homeland security policies, to the pervasive surveillance Muslim communities face on the basis of their religion, to the military tactics police and private security use to violently repress Indigenous-led movements like the water protectors at Standing Rock. The frame of counter-terrorism allows police to further criminalize entire communities solely on the basis of race, religion, political activism or immigration status. At the same time, Israeli police have started adopting a “broken windows” approach from U.S. law enforcement. The idea— which has been thoroughly debunked by activists, lawyers, and advocates— is that constant policing of low-level disorder, through the targeting of communities of color, with constant police surveillance, harassment, and arrest, will somehow deter serious criminal activity. This adds yet another dimension of discriminatory policing and detention to the arsenal of paramilitary and spying practices that Israel has always used against Palestinians. These programs facilitate an exchange of dangerous worst practices. Join us in asking the ADL to stop supporting this exchange. No one is surprised that such programs are run by right-wing organizations like AIPAC or JINSA, a hawkish pro-war lobby with ties to the defense industry and the Islamophobia network. But it is particularly upsetting to find in their ranks an organization whose stated mission is promoting civil rights. In this frightening time of increased antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism, many people are turning to the ADL for leadership. At the same time, the organization is dispatching high ranking police, ICE and FBI agents to exchange ideas with Israeli police and soldiers. Far from protecting civil rights, these programs endanger already marginalized communities in Israel/Palestine and the U.S. As a Jewish organization, we feel a special obligation to call specifically upon the organizations in our communities who run and fund these programs. Join us in asking the ADL to stop leading deadly exchange programs. These programs are not the root of police violence or occupation, but they are clearly branches, supporting and exacerbating the dangerous policies of both governments.  We believe in a world where all people have safety and freedom, and reject the notion that the safety of some communities requires the oppression of others. And we believe Jewish institutions who claim to fight for civil rights must stand for the rights of everyone. If you agree, join us. Onward, Stefanie Stefanie Fox Deputy Director Jewish Voice for Peace is a national membership organization inspired by Jewish tradition to work for the freedom, equality, and dignity of all the people of Israel and Palestine. Become a JVP Member today. - Donate - Facebook - Twitter - Forward to a friend www.Jewishvoiceforpeace.org 1611 Telegraph Ave. Suite 1020 Oakland, CA 94612 (510) 465 1777 This email was sent to davegreen84 at yahoo.com We use email to build our grassroots power - don't hesitate to share your feedback and campaign suggestions. You can update your subscription options or unsubscribe anytime. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Aug 8 14:57:05 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 14:57:05 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fw: Why is a civil rights org running a deadly police exchange? In-Reply-To: <598811594.2201983.1502203496661@mail.yahoo.com> References: <4045011908.-972533867@org.orgDB.reply.salsalabs.com> <598811594.2201983.1502203496661@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: The exchange as referred to, or training of US police by the Israeli military, which is what it is, is not a Trump Administration initiative. It was happening during the Obama Administration, specifically in relation to NYC police. I don’t know when it began, or if it is occurring in every city across the nation, but I can assure you the militarization of US police is not just a Trump phenomena. On Aug 8, 2017, at 07:44, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Anti-Defamation League (associated with the Jewish fraternal organization B'nai B'rith) was once a somewhat respectable liberal organization in the era up to the 1960s, when anti-Semitism was significant, prior to full Jewish assimilation into the American establishment . Since then, it has become integrated into the Jewish/Zionist establishment that has become identified with the American establishment. Nevertheless, I was surprised (perhaps naively) to find that they are sponsoring police exchange programs with Israel. My only caveat to the statement below is that I do not believe that anti-Semitism has become a problem again in the Trump era; that's the JVP, which I generally identify with, overplaying its hand in relation to anti-Trumpism. ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: Stefanie Fox, Jewish Voice for Peace > To: "davegreen84 at yahoo.com" > Sent: ‎Tuesday‎, ‎August‎ ‎8‎, ‎2017‎ ‎09‎:‎11‎:‎51‎ ‎AM Subject: Why is a civil rights org running a deadly police exchange? [https://org.salsalabs.com/o/301/images/2015horizontallogo.png] Dear David, Why did the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a self-described civil rights organization with a mission “to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” issue a scathing attack against JVP and our Deadly Exchange campaign— which aims to do exactly that? Our campaign challenges police exchange programs that have facilitated trainings for thousands of high-ranking police, FBI, ICE, and border officials, and Israeli police and military over the last 20 years, reinforcing both governments’ oppressive tactics and ideologies. And the ADL is one of the primary leaders of these exchange programs. Sign our petition: Tell the ADL to end their deadly exchange programs. The ADL markets their police exchange programs as a chance for U.S. law enforcement to learn from Israeli expertise on counter-terrorism. “Expertise” here is a synonym for Israel’s decades of enforcing a brutal military occupation, policing Palestinian communities as enemy combatants. The trip features visits to Israeli checkpoints, airports, prisons, illegal settlements, and secret service offices— all sites with long records of Israeli human rights abuses. We want to end Israeli oppression of Palestinians, not valorize it. The lessons that U.S. officials bring back from these trips are part of a larger trend in policing since 9/11. The importation of counter-terrorism tactics and technologies into domestic policing and immigration policy is evident in many dangerous developments: from the growth of an unprecedented deportation machine premised on the linking of immigration and homeland security policies, to the pervasive surveillance Muslim communities face on the basis of their religion, to the military tactics police and private security use to violently repress Indigenous-led movements like the water protectors at Standing Rock. The frame of counter-terrorism allows police to further criminalize entire communities solely on the basis of race, religion, political activism or immigration status. At the same time, Israeli police have started adopting a “broken windows” approach from U.S. law enforcement. The idea— which has been thoroughly debunked by activists, lawyers, and advocates— is that constant policing of low-level disorder, through the targeting of communities of color, with constant police surveillance, harassment, and arrest, will somehow deter serious criminal activity. This adds yet another dimension of discriminatory policing and detention to the arsenal of paramilitary and spying practices that Israel has always used against Palestinians. These programs facilitate an exchange of dangerous worst practices. Join us in asking the ADL to stop supporting this exchange. No one is surprised that such programs are run by right-wing organizations like AIPAC or JINSA, a hawkish pro-war lobby with ties to the defense industry and the Islamophobia network. But it is particularly upsetting to find in their ranks an organization whose stated mission is promoting civil rights. In this frightening time of increased antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism, many people are turning to the ADL for leadership. At the same time, the organization is dispatching high ranking police, ICE and FBI agents to exchange ideas with Israeli police and soldiers. Far from protecting civil rights, these programs endanger already marginalized communities in Israel/Palestine and the U.S. As a Jewish organization, we feel a special obligation to call specifically upon the organizations in our communities who run and fund these programs. Join us in asking the ADL to stop leading deadly exchange programs. These programs are not the root of police violence or occupation, but they are clearly branches, supporting and exacerbating the dangerous policies of both governments. We believe in a world where all people have safety and freedom, and reject the notion that the safety of some communities requires the oppression of others. And we believe Jewish institutions who claim to fight for civil rights must stand for the rights of everyone. If you agree, join us. Onward, Stefanie [http://org.salsalabs.com/o/301/images/HEADSHOTS/Stefanie-Fox-half-smile.jpg] Stefanie Fox Deputy Director Jewish Voice for Peace is a national membership organization inspired by Jewish tradition to work for the freedom, equality, and dignity of all the people of Israel and Palestine. Become a JVP Member today. * Donate * Facebook * Twitter * Forward to a friend www.Jewishvoiceforpeace.org 1611 Telegraph Ave. Suite 1020 Oakland, CA 94612 (510) 465 1777 This email was sent to davegreen84 at yahoo.com We use email to build our grassroots power - don't hesitate to share your feedback and campaign suggestions. You can update your subscription options or unsubscribe anytime. [empowered by Salsa] _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Aug 8 22:17:43 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 22:17:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: DPRK Warmongering Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 5:15 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' Subject: DPRK Warmongering For what it is worth, McMaster has publicly threatened "preventive war" against DPRK, which was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Lawyers for the Nazis tried to use this doctrine to justify their invasion of Norway. Furthermore, in its Advisory Opinion on the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat to use force stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Therefore, McMaster has made an illegal and criminal threat against DPRK. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Aug 8 22:17:43 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 22:17:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: DPRK Warmongering Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 5:15 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' Subject: DPRK Warmongering For what it is worth, McMaster has publicly threatened "preventive war" against DPRK, which was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Lawyers for the Nazis tried to use this doctrine to justify their invasion of Norway. Furthermore, in its Advisory Opinion on the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat to use force stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Therefore, McMaster has made an illegal and criminal threat against DPRK. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From futureup2us at gmail.com Tue Aug 8 22:34:12 2017 From: futureup2us at gmail.com (Jay) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 17:34:12 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] DPRK Warmongering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Scary stuff coming from the orange fascist with his finger on the nuclear trigger! If you have a link to or reference for that McMaster’s threat, please share. Here’s an interview with Bruce Cumings, "What 'Everybody Knows' About North Korea - And the Real History of U.S. Aggression ,” but be warned: It’s from Revolution newspaper! Jay > On Aug 8, 2017, at 17:17, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 5:15 PM > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com ' > > Subject: DPRK Warmongering > > For what it is worth, McMaster has publicly threatened “preventive war” against DPRK, which was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Lawyers for the Nazis tried to use this doctrine to justify their invasion of Norway. Furthermore, in its Advisory Opinion on the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat to use force stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Therefore, McMaster has made an illegal and criminal threat against DPRK. Fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From futureup2us at gmail.com Tue Aug 8 22:34:12 2017 From: futureup2us at gmail.com (Jay) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 17:34:12 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] DPRK Warmongering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Scary stuff coming from the orange fascist with his finger on the nuclear trigger! If you have a link to or reference for that McMaster’s threat, please share. Here’s an interview with Bruce Cumings, "What 'Everybody Knows' About North Korea - And the Real History of U.S. Aggression ,” but be warned: It’s from Revolution newspaper! Jay > On Aug 8, 2017, at 17:17, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 5:15 PM > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com ' > > Subject: DPRK Warmongering > > For what it is worth, McMaster has publicly threatened “preventive war” against DPRK, which was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Lawyers for the Nazis tried to use this doctrine to justify their invasion of Norway. Furthermore, in its Advisory Opinion on the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat to use force stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Therefore, McMaster has made an illegal and criminal threat against DPRK. Fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Aug 8 22:44:09 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 22:44:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] =?windows-1252?q?FW=3A_U=2ES=2E_Prepared_to_Launc?= =?windows-1252?q?h_=91Preventive_War=92_Against_North_Korea=2C_Says_H=2ER?= =?windows-1252?q?=2E_McMaster?= Message-ID: Subject: U.S. Prepared to Launch ‘Preventive War’ Against North Korea, Says H.R. McMaster http://www.newsweek.com/us-north-korea-war-mcmaster-646942 --------------- OK. There it is. He says this depends upon the legal justification,which condemns the threat of preventive war. Just War Theory is all Propaganda that they teach at West Point to brainwash officers into believing that all US Wars are just despite international law to the contrary. They use Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust War at West Point. Walzer is a die-hard bigot, racist and warmonger against Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims of Color who has been repeatedly savaged by Chomsky. I studied political philosophy at Harvard with Walzer and have lectured at West Point. I agree with Chomsky against Walzer. Chomsky on the Outside and me on the Inside. We both can't be wrong. Fab From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Aug 8 22:44:09 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 22:44:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] =?windows-1252?q?FW=3A_U=2ES=2E_Prepared_to_Launc?= =?windows-1252?q?h_=91Preventive_War=92_Against_North_Korea=2C_Says_H=2ER?= =?windows-1252?q?=2E_McMaster?= Message-ID: Subject: U.S. Prepared to Launch ‘Preventive War’ Against North Korea, Says H.R. McMaster http://www.newsweek.com/us-north-korea-war-mcmaster-646942 --------------- OK. There it is. He says this depends upon the legal justification,which condemns the threat of preventive war. Just War Theory is all Propaganda that they teach at West Point to brainwash officers into believing that all US Wars are just despite international law to the contrary. They use Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust War at West Point. Walzer is a die-hard bigot, racist and warmonger against Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims of Color who has been repeatedly savaged by Chomsky. I studied political philosophy at Harvard with Walzer and have lectured at West Point. I agree with Chomsky against Walzer. Chomsky on the Outside and me on the Inside. We both can't be wrong. Fab From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 9 03:46:54 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 03:46:54 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] DPRK Warmongering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Good article, spot on. On Aug 8, 2017, at 15:34, Jay > wrote: Scary stuff coming from the orange fascist with his finger on the nuclear trigger! If you have a link to or reference for that McMaster’s threat, please share. Here’s an interview with Bruce Cumings, "What 'Everybody Knows' About North Korea - And the Real History of U.S. Aggression,” but be warned: It’s from Revolution newspaper! Jay On Aug 8, 2017, at 17:17, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 5:15 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: DPRK Warmongering For what it is worth, McMaster has publicly threatened “preventive war” against DPRK, which was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Lawyers for the Nazis tried to use this doctrine to justify their invasion of Norway. Furthermore, in its Advisory Opinion on the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat to use force stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Therefore, McMaster has made an illegal and criminal threat against DPRK. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 9 03:46:54 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 03:46:54 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] DPRK Warmongering In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Good article, spot on. On Aug 8, 2017, at 15:34, Jay > wrote: Scary stuff coming from the orange fascist with his finger on the nuclear trigger! If you have a link to or reference for that McMaster’s threat, please share. Here’s an interview with Bruce Cumings, "What 'Everybody Knows' About North Korea - And the Real History of U.S. Aggression,” but be warned: It’s from Revolution newspaper! Jay On Aug 8, 2017, at 17:17, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 5:15 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: DPRK Warmongering For what it is worth, McMaster has publicly threatened “preventive war” against DPRK, which was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Lawyers for the Nazis tried to use this doctrine to justify their invasion of Norway. Furthermore, in its Advisory Opinion on the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat to use force stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Therefore, McMaster has made an illegal and criminal threat against DPRK. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 9 11:28:34 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 11:28:34 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Lawsuit Against CIA Torture Masterminds Opens Way to Prosecute Bush Officials Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 6:25 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: FW: Lawsuit Against CIA Torture Masterminds Opens Way to Prosecute Bush Officials WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Monday, a US federal court struck down a motion to dismiss a lawsuit against two psychologists, James Mitchel and John "Bruce" Jessen, who devised the methods and helped convince the CIA to torture prisoners while making $81 million in the process, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a press release. The ACLU filed the lawsuit against the psychologists on behalf of Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud and the family of Gul Rahman, who froze to death in a secret CIA prison. The torture methods used on Salim Soud and Rahman included slamming them into walls, stuffing them into coffin-like boxes, exposing them to extreme temperatures, starving them, inflicting various kinds of water torture, and chaining them in stress positions designed to inflict pain and keep them awake for days on end, the ACLU said. BREAKING THROUGH LEGAL WALLS According to the ACLU, the lawsuit has now cleared the final legal hurdle before a scheduled trial, set for September 5, which would be the first for a case involving CIA torture. "Yes, this is a major development in breaking through the wall of impunity that has so far surrounded the CIA torture program set up under the Bush Jr. administration," University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik on Tuesday. Boyle said human rights attorneys were determined to still bring senior officials in the Bush administration and the "torture lawyers" to justice, Boyle added. Boyle acknowledged that human rights activists would face many obstacles in their efforts to expose to public gaze the crimes and excesses of the CIA’s secret, worldwide program of torturing suspects. "There will be many obstacles thrown up in front of it by the United States government that has so far covered up the CIA torture program under the Bush Jr., Obama and now [President Donald] Trump administrations in gross violation of the Convention against Torture," Boyle said. However, Boyle insisted that the judge’s decision to allow the case against Mitchel and Jessen would mark a historic breakthrough or turning point in the efforts to bring the torturers to justice. MASTERMIND VULNERABLILITY Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 1:50 PM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: Lawsuit Against CIA Torture Masterminds Opens Way to Prosecute Bush Officials "Yes, this is a major development in breaking through the wall of impunity that has so far surrounded the CIA torture program set up under the Bush Jr. administration," University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik on ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 9 11:28:34 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 11:28:34 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Lawsuit Against CIA Torture Masterminds Opens Way to Prosecute Bush Officials Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 6:25 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: FW: Lawsuit Against CIA Torture Masterminds Opens Way to Prosecute Bush Officials WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Monday, a US federal court struck down a motion to dismiss a lawsuit against two psychologists, James Mitchel and John "Bruce" Jessen, who devised the methods and helped convince the CIA to torture prisoners while making $81 million in the process, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a press release. The ACLU filed the lawsuit against the psychologists on behalf of Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud and the family of Gul Rahman, who froze to death in a secret CIA prison. The torture methods used on Salim Soud and Rahman included slamming them into walls, stuffing them into coffin-like boxes, exposing them to extreme temperatures, starving them, inflicting various kinds of water torture, and chaining them in stress positions designed to inflict pain and keep them awake for days on end, the ACLU said. BREAKING THROUGH LEGAL WALLS According to the ACLU, the lawsuit has now cleared the final legal hurdle before a scheduled trial, set for September 5, which would be the first for a case involving CIA torture. "Yes, this is a major development in breaking through the wall of impunity that has so far surrounded the CIA torture program set up under the Bush Jr. administration," University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik on Tuesday. Boyle said human rights attorneys were determined to still bring senior officials in the Bush administration and the "torture lawyers" to justice, Boyle added. Boyle acknowledged that human rights activists would face many obstacles in their efforts to expose to public gaze the crimes and excesses of the CIA’s secret, worldwide program of torturing suspects. "There will be many obstacles thrown up in front of it by the United States government that has so far covered up the CIA torture program under the Bush Jr., Obama and now [President Donald] Trump administrations in gross violation of the Convention against Torture," Boyle said. However, Boyle insisted that the judge’s decision to allow the case against Mitchel and Jessen would mark a historic breakthrough or turning point in the efforts to bring the torturers to justice. MASTERMIND VULNERABLILITY Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 1:50 PM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: Lawsuit Against CIA Torture Masterminds Opens Way to Prosecute Bush Officials "Yes, this is a major development in breaking through the wall of impunity that has so far surrounded the CIA torture program set up under the Bush Jr. administration," University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik on ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 9 11:44:46 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 11:44:46 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: DPRK Warmongering, International Law & The Nazi Like Defense That Was Refused References: <25577400.22782.1502247906121@elwamui-karabash.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 6:35 AM To: 'Bill Smirnow' ; Abolition-Caucus ; Nuclearnews Group ; downwinders at yahoogroups.com; Lists Nukenet ; rachel at msnbc.com Subject: RE: DPRK Warmongering, International Law & The Nazi Like Defense That Was Refused Thanks Bill! Francis. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Bill Smirnow [mailto:smirnowb at ix.netcom.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 10:05 PM To: Abolition-Caucus >; Nuclearnews Group >; downwinders at yahoogroups.com; Lists Nukenet >; rachel at msnbc.com Subject: DPRK Warmongering, International Law & The Nazi Like Defense That Was Refused Call your House members and Senators, all available at any of the following at: 1-202-224-3121, 1-202-225-3121, 1-877-762-8762 and read Prof. Francis Boyle's quote and ask them to call Boyle at the phone# listed in the post below at the U. of Illinois/Champaign/Urbana. Then pass this along to interested parties. And remember to tell them that N JKorea's Kim Jong Un threatened early this year or late last year to bomb nuclear power plants in western Japan which would be the end of Japan, the end of the world's third largest economy and and it would cause a global economic extreme depression. Not to mention the release of astonishing amounts of radiation into the atmosphere/environment. N Korea also has 25 commercial nuclear reactors to bomb in S Korea if they feel they have nothing to lose. Please call first thing tomorrow morning! Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 5:15 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: DPRK Warmongering For what it is worth, McMaster has publicly threatened “preventive war” against DPRK, which was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Lawyers for the Nazis tried to use this doctrine to justify their invasion of Norway. Furthermore, in its Advisory Opinion on the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat to use force stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Therefore, McMaster has made an illegal and criminal threat against DPRK. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 9 11:44:46 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 11:44:46 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: DPRK Warmongering, International Law & The Nazi Like Defense That Was Refused References: <25577400.22782.1502247906121@elwamui-karabash.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 6:35 AM To: 'Bill Smirnow' ; Abolition-Caucus ; Nuclearnews Group ; downwinders at yahoogroups.com; Lists Nukenet ; rachel at msnbc.com Subject: RE: DPRK Warmongering, International Law & The Nazi Like Defense That Was Refused Thanks Bill! Francis. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Bill Smirnow [mailto:smirnowb at ix.netcom.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 10:05 PM To: Abolition-Caucus >; Nuclearnews Group >; downwinders at yahoogroups.com; Lists Nukenet >; rachel at msnbc.com Subject: DPRK Warmongering, International Law & The Nazi Like Defense That Was Refused Call your House members and Senators, all available at any of the following at: 1-202-224-3121, 1-202-225-3121, 1-877-762-8762 and read Prof. Francis Boyle's quote and ask them to call Boyle at the phone# listed in the post below at the U. of Illinois/Champaign/Urbana. Then pass this along to interested parties. And remember to tell them that N JKorea's Kim Jong Un threatened early this year or late last year to bomb nuclear power plants in western Japan which would be the end of Japan, the end of the world's third largest economy and and it would cause a global economic extreme depression. Not to mention the release of astonishing amounts of radiation into the atmosphere/environment. N Korea also has 25 commercial nuclear reactors to bomb in S Korea if they feel they have nothing to lose. Please call first thing tomorrow morning! Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 5:15 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: DPRK Warmongering For what it is worth, McMaster has publicly threatened “preventive war” against DPRK, which was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Lawyers for the Nazis tried to use this doctrine to justify their invasion of Norway. Furthermore, in its Advisory Opinion on the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat to use force stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Therefore, McMaster has made an illegal and criminal threat against DPRK. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 9 12:50:03 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 12:50:03 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Greens call for Peace Action Committee Message-ID: [https://scontent.ford1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-1/p80x80/20155613_10154490893476394_4901231235633439312_n.jpg?oh=9a541ef6efadb3f41fdff51f60699ee2&oe=59F96A67] Rich Whitney 1 hr Dear Friends, please share to other Green pages and list-serves: Call to Re-Constitute Green Peace Action Committee We the undersigned seek to re-constitute the Green Peace Action Committee, a former standing committee of the Green Party of the United States that has been inactive for several years. At a time when our nation is committing brazenly illegal, immoral and indefensible acts of war in Syria, Yemen, elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa and engaging in dangerous acts of brinksmanship with Russia, China and North Korea, it is essential that the Green Party play a strong role in building a more effective peace movement and stand tall as a clear and uncompromising voice against war, the military-industrial complex and the institutional causes of war. We call upon other concerned Greens to volunteer to join our Committee, so that it can be activated and recognized by the GP-US and begin to engage in this vital task. Please note that you will need to seek appointment or approval by your state party before you can join this Committee in an official capacity. If interested in being a part of this important work, please contact Interim Co-Chairs Deanna Dee Taylor at deedeelivesgreen at greenpartyutah.com and Rich Whitney at richwhitney at frontier.com. Please note that our next conference call is set for Wednesday, August 16th, at 5pm Eastern Time. Please contact the Interim Co-Chairs if you are willing and able to participate in the call. Signed, Deanna Dee Taylor, Utah Kim Murphy, Utah Rich Whitney, Illinois Wes Gaige, Texas Jacqui Deveneau, Maine Logan Martinez, Ohio Mike DeRosa, Connecticut Amy Vas Nunes, Connecticut Eugene Woloszyn, Connecticut -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 9 12:53:09 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 12:53:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: DPRK Warmongering, International Law & The Nazi Like Defense That Was Refused References: <25577400.22782.1502247906121@elwamui-karabash.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 6:35 AM To: 'Bill Smirnow' ; Abolition-Caucus ; Nuclearnews Group ; downwinders at yahoogroups.com; Lists Nukenet ; rachel at msnbc.com Subject: RE: DPRK Warmongering, International Law & The Nazi Like Defense That Was Refused Thanks Bill! Francis. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Bill Smirnow [mailto:smirnowb at ix.netcom.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 10:05 PM To: Abolition-Caucus >; Nuclearnews Group >; downwinders at yahoogroups.com; Lists Nukenet >; rachel at msnbc.com Subject: DPRK Warmongering, International Law & The Nazi Like Defense That Was Refused Call your House members and Senators, all available at any of the following at: 1-202-224-3121, 1-202-225-3121, 1-877-762-8762 and read Prof. Francis Boyle's quote and ask them to call Boyle at the phone# listed in the post below at the U. of Illinois/Champaign/Urbana. Then pass this along to interested parties. And remember to tell them that N JKorea's Kim Jong Un threatened early this year or late last year to bomb nuclear power plants in western Japan which would be the end of Japan, the end of the world's third largest economy and and it would cause a global economic extreme depression. Not to mention the release of astonishing amounts of radiation into the atmosphere/environment. N Korea also has 25 commercial nuclear reactors to bomb in S Korea if they feel they have nothing to lose. Please call first thing tomorrow morning! Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2017 5:15 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: DPRK Warmongering For what it is worth, McMaster has publicly threatened “preventive war” against DPRK, which was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal when Lawyers for the Nazis tried to use this doctrine to justify their invasion of Norway. Furthermore, in its Advisory Opinion on the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat to use force stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Therefore, McMaster has made an illegal and criminal threat against DPRK. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 9 19:27:41 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 19:27:41 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 2:24 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' Subject: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide ...and the destruction of its people. So notice US Secretary of War Mad Dog Mattis is publicly threatening DPRK with outright genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: U.S. Department of Defense [mailto:govdelivery at subscriptions.dod.mil] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 1:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Subject: SecDef: North Korea Must Join International Community, End Pursuit of Nukes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 9 19:27:41 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 19:27:41 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 2:24 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' Subject: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide ...and the destruction of its people. So notice US Secretary of War Mad Dog Mattis is publicly threatening DPRK with outright genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: U.S. Department of Defense [mailto:govdelivery at subscriptions.dod.mil] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 1:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Subject: SecDef: North Korea Must Join International Community, End Pursuit of Nukes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 9 19:42:14 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 19:42:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: News Alert: New warning to North Korea References: <1984768994.341.1502303336473.JavaMail.nobody@prd-10-60-165-99.nodes.56m.dmtio.net> Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 2:40 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' Subject: FW: News Alert: New warning to North Korea Also earlier in the day, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sought to allay fears of a military confrontation -- defending Trump's comments but telling reporters there was no sign that the threat level from North Korea had changed and that Americans should "sleep well at night." Sure, unless of course you are the 28,000+ US Troops in ROK and their Dependents who are within artillery range of DPRK. But of course they do not count. They are expendable. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: CNN Breaking News [mailto:CNNBreakingNews at mail.cnn.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 1:29 PM To: no-reply at siteservices.cnn.com Subject: News Alert: New warning to North Korea US Defense Secretary James Mattis issued a dramatic warning to North Korea to "cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and destruction of its people" -- just one day after President Trump warned that the US could unleash "fire and fury" on Pyongyang. "The DPRK must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons," Mattis said in a written statement. Mattis has consistently said that he prefers to resolve issues over North Korea's missile and nuclear programs through diplomacy -- noting military action could yield catastrophic consequences. Meanwhile, President Trump touted US nuclear capabilities in a morning tweet, potentially escalating further the growing standoff with Pyongyang. "My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before," Trump wrote, in an apparent reference to a review of US nuclear weapons that began earlier this year. "Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!" Also earlier in the day, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sought to allay fears of a military confrontation -- defending Trump's comments but telling reporters there was no sign that the threat level from North Korea had changed and that Americans should "sleep well at night." ---------------------------------------------- Get complete coverage of breaking news on CNN TV, CNN.com and CNN Mobile. Watch CNN live or On Demand from your computer or mobile device using CNNgo. ---------------------------------------------- You have opted-in to receive this e-mail from CNN.com. To unsubscribe from Breaking News e-mail alerts, go to: One CNN Center Atlanta, GA 30303 (c) & (r) 2017 Cable News Network -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 9 19:42:14 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 19:42:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: News Alert: New warning to North Korea References: <1984768994.341.1502303336473.JavaMail.nobody@prd-10-60-165-99.nodes.56m.dmtio.net> Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 2:40 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' Subject: FW: News Alert: New warning to North Korea Also earlier in the day, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sought to allay fears of a military confrontation -- defending Trump's comments but telling reporters there was no sign that the threat level from North Korea had changed and that Americans should "sleep well at night." Sure, unless of course you are the 28,000+ US Troops in ROK and their Dependents who are within artillery range of DPRK. But of course they do not count. They are expendable. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: CNN Breaking News [mailto:CNNBreakingNews at mail.cnn.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 1:29 PM To: no-reply at siteservices.cnn.com Subject: News Alert: New warning to North Korea US Defense Secretary James Mattis issued a dramatic warning to North Korea to "cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and destruction of its people" -- just one day after President Trump warned that the US could unleash "fire and fury" on Pyongyang. "The DPRK must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons," Mattis said in a written statement. Mattis has consistently said that he prefers to resolve issues over North Korea's missile and nuclear programs through diplomacy -- noting military action could yield catastrophic consequences. Meanwhile, President Trump touted US nuclear capabilities in a morning tweet, potentially escalating further the growing standoff with Pyongyang. "My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before," Trump wrote, in an apparent reference to a review of US nuclear weapons that began earlier this year. "Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!" Also earlier in the day, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sought to allay fears of a military confrontation -- defending Trump's comments but telling reporters there was no sign that the threat level from North Korea had changed and that Americans should "sleep well at night." ---------------------------------------------- Get complete coverage of breaking news on CNN TV, CNN.com and CNN Mobile. Watch CNN live or On Demand from your computer or mobile device using CNNgo. ---------------------------------------------- You have opted-in to receive this e-mail from CNN.com. To unsubscribe from Breaking News e-mail alerts, go to: One CNN Center Atlanta, GA 30303 (c) & (r) 2017 Cable News Network -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com Wed Aug 9 18:26:34 2017 From: davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com (David McReynolds) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 14:26:34 -0400 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action Committee Message-ID: *I'm happy - delighted, in fact - to send this on to the handful of Green contacts I have. I hope you also post to Facebook.* *You won't mind, I know, if a socialist joins in support of this most urgent action - even if I wouldn't be doing it within the Greens, but within the socialist groups.* *The current situation underlines how urgent it is to confront the danger of the corporate military state - headed now by someone as irresponsible as Trump.* *Peace and solidarity,* *David McReynolds* On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 8:50 AM, Karen Aram wrote: > > > Rich Whitney > > 1 hr > > > Dear Friends, please share to other Green pages and list-serves: > > Call to Re-Constitute Green Peace Action Committee > > We the undersigned seek to re-constitute the Green Peace Action Committee, > a former standing committee of the Green Party of the United States that > has been inactive for several years. > > At a time when our nation is committing brazenly illegal, immoral and > indefensible acts of war in Syria, Yemen, elsewhere in the Middle East and > Africa and engaging in dangerous acts of brinksmanship with Russia, China > and North Korea, it is essential that the Green Party play a strong role in > building a more effective peace movement and stand tall as a clear and > uncompromising voice against war, the military-industrial complex and the > institutional causes of war. > > We call upon other concerned Greens to volunteer to join our Committee, so > that it can be activated and recognized by the GP-US and begin to engage in > this vital task. Please note that you will need to seek appointment or > approval by your state party before you can join this Committee in an > official capacity. > > If interested in being a part of this important work, please contact > Interim Co-Chairs Deanna Dee Taylor at deedeelivesgreen at greenpartyutah.com > and Rich Whitney at richwhitney at frontier.com. > > Please note that our next conference call is set for Wednesday, August > 16th, at 5pm Eastern Time. Please contact the Interim Co-Chairs if you are > willing and able to participate in the call. > > Signed, > > Deanna Dee Taylor, Utah > Kim Murphy, Utah > Rich Whitney, Illinois > Wes Gaige, Texas > Jacqui Deveneau, Maine > Logan Martinez, Ohio > Mike DeRosa, Connecticut > Amy Vas Nunes, Connecticut > Eugene Woloszyn, Connecticut > > > > _______________________________________________ > ufpj-activist mailing list > > Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org > List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist > > To Unsubscribe > Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org > Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/ > mailman/options/ufpj-activist/davidmcreynolds7%40gmail.com > > You are subscribed as: davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scottmclarty at yahoo.com Wed Aug 9 20:35:14 2017 From: scottmclarty at yahoo.com (Scott McLarty) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2017 20:35:14 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action Committee In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1777433321.821393.1502310914027@mail.yahoo.com> Good news. The Peace Action Committee (which we called GPAX) from about 10 years ago was essentially shut down by a person or persons obsessed with bylaws and procedure. Let's hope that doesn't happen again. GPAX was very helpful when the Green Party's Media Committee issued public statements on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and related topics. Scott From: David McReynolds To: Karen Aram Cc: Peace-discuss List ; peace ; ufpj-activist ; Whitney Rich Sent: Wednesday, August 9, 2017 2:26 PM Subject: Re: [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action Committee I'm happy - delighted, in fact - to send this on to the handful of Green contacts I have. I hope you also post to Facebook. You won't mind, I know, if a socialist joins in support of this most urgent action - even if I wouldn't be doing it within the Greens, but within the socialist groups. The current situation underlines how urgent it is to confront the danger of the corporate military state - headed now by someone as irresponsible as Trump. Peace and solidarity, David McReynolds On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 8:50 AM, Karen Aram wrote: Rich Whitney 1 hrDear Friends, please share to other Green pages and list-serves:Call to Re-Constitute Green Peace Action CommitteeWe the undersigned seek to re-constitute the Green Peace Action Committee, a former standing committee of the Green Party of the United States that has been inactive for several years.At a time when our nation is committing brazenly illegal, immoral and indefensible acts of war in Syria, Yemen, elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa and engaging in dangerous acts of brinksmanship with Russia, China and North Korea, it is essential that the Green Party play a strong role in building a more effective peace movement and stand tall as a clear and uncompromising voice against war, the military-industrial complex and the institutional causes of war.We call upon other concerned Greens to volunteer to join our Committee, so that it can be activated and recognized by the GP-US and begin to engage in this vital task. Please note that you will need to seek appointment or approval by your state party before you can join this Committee in an official capacity.If interested in being a part of this important work, please contact Interim Co-Chairs Deanna Dee Taylor atdeedeelivesgreen@ greenpartyutah.com and Rich Whitney atrichwhitney at frontier.com.Please note that our next conference call is set for Wednesday, August 16th, at 5pm Eastern Time. Please contact the Interim Co-Chairs if you are willing and able to participate in the call.Signed,Deanna Dee Taylor, Utah Kim Murphy, Utah Rich Whitney, Illinois Wes Gaige, Texas Jacqui Deveneau, Maine Logan Martinez, Ohio Mike DeRosa, Connecticut Amy Vas Nunes, Connecticut Eugene Woloszyn, Connecticut ______________________________ _________________ ufpj-activist mailing list Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst. org List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/ mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist To Unsubscribe         Send email to:  ufpj-activist-unsubscribe@ lists.mayfirst.org         Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/ mailman/options/ufpj-activist/ davidmcreynolds7%40gmail.com You are subscribed as: davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com | | Virus-free. www.avast.com | -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 10 11:40:14 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 11:40:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] More war Message-ID: * Print * Leaflet * Feedback * Share » US to launch drone bombing campaign in the Philippines By Joseph Santolan 10 August 2017 The Pentagon is planning to launch drone air strikes on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, NBC News revealed Monday citing two unnamed US defense officials. The story was published as US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in Manila in the wake of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum held there over the weekend. The island of Mindanao, with a population of over 22 million, has been under martial law for nearly three months as the Philippine military has carried out a bombing campaign, with the direct support and guidance of US military forces, on alleged Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) elements in the city of Marawi. What has been done to the people of Marawi is a war crime. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and over 400,000 driven from their homes, turned into internally displaced refugees. They are scattered across Mindanao and the Visayas in search of shelter in the midst of the typhoon season, often malnourished and some even starving. Martial law serves the interests of US imperialism. The US military was involved in the initial attack by Philippine forces that led to the declaration of martial law, special forces operatives have participated in assaults carried out throughout the city, and US surveillance planes have directed the daily bombing barrages. Since his election a year ago, Duterte sought to rebalance Philippine diplomatic and economic ties toward Beijing and, to a certain extent, Moscow, and proved intractable to Washington’s interests. Over the course of his predecessor’s term in office, US imperialism had through legal and military means sharply escalated its war drive against China, using Manila as it leading proxy in the region. When the volatile and fascistic Duterte took office, Washington funded his murderous “war on drugs,” but, when he began to distance himself from US dictates, the US State Department found that they were concerned with “human rights.” The pressure of this campaign only opened up a far wider gulf between Manila and Washington, as Duterte lashed back denouncing US crimes during the Philippine American War. Clearly, alternative and more drastic means to either control or eliminate Duterte were needed. Washington built the military of its former colony, and the top brass were all trained in and loyal to the US. As Duterte flew to Moscow to meet with Putin to negotiate a potential military agreement, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, working with Washington and behind the back of the Philippine president, launched an attack on the private army of a ruling class family in Marawi which they claimed had pledged loyalty to ISIS. The attack allowed Lorenzana to declare martial law and compel the president to return to the Philippines. Washington began calling the shots in Marawi and effectively throughout the country. Duterte disappeared from public life for two weeks. Lorenzana, using the authority of martial law, restored joint maritime exercises with US forces which Duterte had scrapped as they clearly targeted against China. The US Embassy in Manila began directly interacting with the military brass, circumventing the presidential palace of Malacanang entirely. Duterte reemerged to the limelight as a man disciplined by Washington. The message was clear, if he wished to remain in power he had to toe the US line. Washington had no problems with his war on drugs, which has killed over 12,000 people in the past year, provided he served US interests. Tillerson declared that he would not be raising issues of human rights in his meeting with Duterte. In a press conference with Tillerson, Duterte groveled. “We are friends. We are allies,” he declared. “I am your humble friend in Southeast Asia.” Washington is not content with securing Duterte’s loyalty, however. In essence they are looking to effectively re-colonize the Philippines, establishing military bases throughout the country, and directly dictating the course of its politics. Already Washington has begun operating with the hubris of the colonial master. The plan for the US to launch a campaign of drone bombing in Mindanao is in an advanced stage of readiness, yet by their own admission, neither the civilian government, nor the Philippine military brass have been informed of the plan. In July, General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Washington intended to give a name to its mission in the Philippines, a move which would secure greater funding for the US operations in the country. Selva stated, “Particularly in the fragile areas of the southern Philippines, I think it’s worth considering whether or not we reinstate a named operation, not only to provide for the resources that are required, but to give the Pacific Command commander and the field commanders in the Philippines the kinds of authorities they need to work with indigenous Philippine forces to actually help them be successful in that battle space.” Washington already has “boots on the ground”—special forces participating in the battles in Marawi, and its surveillance planes determining targets in the bombing campaigns. An escalation beyond this to additional “kinds of authorities” would involve the direct US bombing of the city. The Duterte administration attempted weakly to fend off the US encroachment on Philippine sovereignty, responding to the reports that US would begin a bombing campaign in the country by declaring that the combatants in Marawi were “ISIS inspired.” The US-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) of 1951 only allows US combat operations in the country if it is directly attacked by a foreign power. Herein lies the significance of the labeling of what is essentially the private army of a ruling class family as ISIS. Under the terms of the MDT, Washington can argue that the forces in Marawi are a foreign invasion force. The fiery anti-imperialist posturing of Duterte is gone, and his press secretary is weakly attempting to preserve national sovereignty by claiming that the enemy combatants—largely children and young men recruited and armed by a section of the Mindanao elite—are only “inspired” by ISIS. The Armed Forces of the Philippines meanwhile put out a press statement, saying, “we appreciate Pentagon’s reported desire to help the Philippines,” but added that “we have not yet received formal notice” of the offer. The ultimate target of Washington’s drive to re-colonize the Philippines is China. On August 4, U.S. Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Michael Klecheski opened a Joint Maritime Law Enforcement Training Center (JMLETC) on the island of Palawan, which is the closest to the disputed South China Sea. At the facility US forces will be working with and training the Philippine military in order to enhance the country’s “maritime domain awareness capabilities” and to “stop large-scale weapons from transiting through or near Philippine territorial waters,” including by means of the “use of force.” “Large-scale weapons” “near Philippine territorial waters” is a clear reference to the stationing by the Chinese of materiel on the disputed Spratly Islands. The events of the past three months in the Philippines reveal yet again that US imperialism will go to any lengths to achieve its ends. US forces manufactured the threat of ISIS out of a private army largely comprised of child soldiers, oversaw the bombing of a beautiful city killing hundreds of civilians and turning four hundred thousand more into poverty-stricken refugees—all to orchestrate the declaration of martial law and set the stage for military dictatorship. wsws.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 10 12:50:11 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 12:50:11 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:47 AM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' Subject: RE: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide It is Emblematic of the gross degradation of American Political Culture that Mattis publicly threatens to commit outright genocide against the DPRK People, and so far I have not seen any negative commentary in the mainstream news media about this threatened Criminality issued in the name of the United States government. In its Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons, the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Mattis's threat was a Criminal Act. Fab. [Boylebookemail.JPG] Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 2:24 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide ...and the destruction of its people. So notice US Secretary of War Mad Dog Mattis is publicly threatening DPRK with outright genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: U.S. Department of Defense [mailto:govdelivery at subscriptions.dod.mil] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 1:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Subject: SecDef: North Korea Must Join International Community, End Pursuit of Nukes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 20855 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 10 12:50:11 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 12:50:11 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:47 AM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' Subject: RE: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide It is Emblematic of the gross degradation of American Political Culture that Mattis publicly threatens to commit outright genocide against the DPRK People, and so far I have not seen any negative commentary in the mainstream news media about this threatened Criminality issued in the name of the United States government. In its Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons, the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Mattis's threat was a Criminal Act. Fab. [Boylebookemail.JPG] Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 2:24 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide ...and the destruction of its people. So notice US Secretary of War Mad Dog Mattis is publicly threatening DPRK with outright genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: U.S. Department of Defense [mailto:govdelivery at subscriptions.dod.mil] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 1:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Subject: SecDef: North Korea Must Join International Community, End Pursuit of Nukes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 20855 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 10 12:54:34 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 12:54:34 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Message-ID: Never again!-Unless we do it! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:50 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: FW: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:47 AM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: RE: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide It is Emblematic of the gross degradation of American Political Culture that Mattis publicly threatens to commit outright genocide against the DPRK People, and so far I have not seen any negative commentary in the mainstream news media about this threatened Criminality issued in the name of the United States government. In its Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons, the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Mattis's threat was a Criminal Act. Fab. [Boylebookemail.JPG] Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 2:24 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide ...and the destruction of its people. So notice US Secretary of War Mad Dog Mattis is publicly threatening DPRK with outright genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: U.S. Department of Defense [mailto:govdelivery at subscriptions.dod.mil] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 1:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Subject: SecDef: North Korea Must Join International Community, End Pursuit of Nukes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 20855 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 10 12:54:34 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 12:54:34 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Message-ID: Never again!-Unless we do it! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:50 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: FW: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:47 AM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: RE: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide It is Emblematic of the gross degradation of American Political Culture that Mattis publicly threatens to commit outright genocide against the DPRK People, and so far I have not seen any negative commentary in the mainstream news media about this threatened Criminality issued in the name of the United States government. In its Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons, the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Mattis's threat was a Criminal Act. Fab. [Boylebookemail.JPG] Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 2:24 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide ...and the destruction of its people. So notice US Secretary of War Mad Dog Mattis is publicly threatening DPRK with outright genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: U.S. Department of Defense [mailto:govdelivery at subscriptions.dod.mil] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 1:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Subject: SecDef: North Korea Must Join International Community, End Pursuit of Nukes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 20855 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 10 14:47:43 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 14:47:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action Committee In-Reply-To: <15dcc51c0d6-3767-d496@webprd-m92.mail.aol.com> References: <15dcc51c0d6-3767-d496@webprd-m92.mail.aol.com> Message-ID: Yes, David if you are a socialist as you claim, you should be pleased to see anyone starting up or reviving an “anti-war organization or group.” A socialist is always first and foremost opposed to his government/ nation imperialist interventions and war. Speaking out against “war", the greatest evil perpetrated by man, is what everyone, socialist or otherwise, should be doing. On Aug 10, 2017, at 06:24, Mildred O'brien > wrote: What "socialist" groups are you talking about--adjuncts of the Democratic Party, which collaborates with the Deep State/Military and recent President has been as "irresponsible as Trump" only a little more discrete? M. O'Brien -----Original Message----- From: David McReynolds via Peace-discuss > To: Karen Aram > Cc: peace >; Peace-discuss List >; ufpj-activist >; Whitney Rich > Sent: Wed, Aug 9, 2017 5:18 pm Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action Committee I'm happy - delighted, in fact - to send this on to the handful of Green contacts I have. I hope you also post to Facebook. You won't mind, I know, if a socialist joins in support of this most urgent action - even if I wouldn't be doing it within the Greens, but within the socialist groups. The current situation underlines how urgent it is to confront the danger of the corporate military state - headed now by someone as irresponsible as Trump. Peace and solidarity, David McReynolds On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 8:50 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: [https://scontent.ford1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-1/p80x80/20155613_10154490893476394_4901231235633439312_n.jpg?oh=9a541ef6efadb3f41fdff51f60699ee2&oe=59F96A67] Rich Whitney 1 hr Dear Friends, please share to other Green pages and list-serves: Call to Re-Constitute Green Peace Action Committee We the undersigned seek to re-constitute the Green Peace Action Committee, a former standing committee of the Green Party of the United States that has been inactive for several years. At a time when our nation is committing brazenly illegal, immoral and indefensible acts of war in Syria, Yemen, elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa and engaging in dangerous acts of brinksmanship with Russia, China and North Korea, it is essential that the Green Party play a strong role in building a more effective peace movement and stand tall as a clear and uncompromising voice against war, the military-industrial complex and the institutional causes of war. We call upon other concerned Greens to volunteer to join our Committee, so that it can be activated and recognized by the GP-US and begin to engage in this vital task. Please note that you will need to seek appointment or approval by your state party before you can join this Committee in an official capacity. If interested in being a part of this important work, please contact Interim Co-Chairs Deanna Dee Taylor at deedeelivesgreen at greenpartyutah.com and Rich Whitney at richwhitney at frontier.com. Please note that our next conference call is set for Wednesday, August 16th, at 5pm Eastern Time. Please contact the Interim Co-Chairs if you are willing and able to participate in the call. Signed, Deanna Dee Taylor, Utah Kim Murphy, Utah Rich Whitney, Illinois Wes Gaige, Texas Jacqui Deveneau, Maine Logan Martinez, Ohio Mike DeRosa, Connecticut Amy Vas Nunes, Connecticut Eugene Woloszyn, Connecticut _______________________________________________ ufpj-activist mailing list Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist To Unsubscribe Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/ufpj-activist/davidmcreynolds7%40gmail.com You are subscribed as: davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 10 15:39:09 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 15:39:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Message-ID: Also, I don't believe this Baloney that Trump's comments about "fire and fury" were unscripted. This was all very carefully stage-managed. He did it on August 8, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and one day before the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and he mimicked the language of the Potsdam Ultimatum that Truman issued before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course on August 8 the United States signed the Nuremberg Charter for the prosecution of the Nazi War Criminals, defining a war crime to be in relevant part the Wanton Devastation of Cities, Towns and Villages. Truman et al condemned themselves with their own words. See my book The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:55 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Never again!-Unless we do it! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:50 AM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: FW: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:47 AM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: RE: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide It is Emblematic of the gross degradation of American Political Culture that Mattis publicly threatens to commit outright genocide against the DPRK People, and so far I have not seen any negative commentary in the mainstream news media about this threatened Criminality issued in the name of the United States government. In its Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons, the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Mattis's threat was a Criminal Act. Fab. [Boylebookemail.JPG] Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 2:24 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide ...and the destruction of its people. So notice US Secretary of War Mad Dog Mattis is publicly threatening DPRK with outright genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: U.S. Department of Defense [mailto:govdelivery at subscriptions.dod.mil] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 1:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Subject: SecDef: North Korea Must Join International Community, End Pursuit of Nukes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 20855 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 10 15:39:09 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 15:39:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Message-ID: Also, I don't believe this Baloney that Trump's comments about "fire and fury" were unscripted. This was all very carefully stage-managed. He did it on August 8, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and one day before the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and he mimicked the language of the Potsdam Ultimatum that Truman issued before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course on August 8 the United States signed the Nuremberg Charter for the prosecution of the Nazi War Criminals, defining a war crime to be in relevant part the Wanton Devastation of Cities, Towns and Villages. Truman et al condemned themselves with their own words. See my book The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:55 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Never again!-Unless we do it! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:50 AM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: FW: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:47 AM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: RE: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide It is Emblematic of the gross degradation of American Political Culture that Mattis publicly threatens to commit outright genocide against the DPRK People, and so far I have not seen any negative commentary in the mainstream news media about this threatened Criminality issued in the name of the United States government. In its Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat and Use of Nuclear Weapons, the International Court of Justice held that the legality vel non of a threat stands or falls on the same legal footing as if the threat itself were carried out. Mattis's threat was a Criminal Act. Fab. [Boylebookemail.JPG] Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 2:24 PM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: US SecWar Threatens DPRK with Genocide ...and the destruction of its people. So notice US Secretary of War Mad Dog Mattis is publicly threatening DPRK with outright genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: U.S. Department of Defense [mailto:govdelivery at subscriptions.dod.mil] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2017 1:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Subject: SecDef: North Korea Must Join International Community, End Pursuit of Nukes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 20855 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: From divisek at yahoo.com Thu Aug 10 16:28:44 2017 From: divisek at yahoo.com (Dianna Visek) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 16:28:44 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] What Trump Needs to Know About North Korea's History References: <343927174.1501548.1502382524768.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <343927174.1501548.1502382524768@mail.yahoo.com> What Trump Needs to Know About North Korea's History | | | | | | | | | | | What Trump Needs to Know About North Korea's History The peninsula has a long record of risky games with great powers. | | | -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com Thu Aug 10 16:46:18 2017 From: davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com (David McReynolds) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 12:46:18 -0400 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action Committee Message-ID: *Karen,* *Not sure why you write "if you are a socialist as you claim". I burned my draft card in 1965 to oppose the Vietnam War, ran for President in 1980 and 2000 on the Socialist Party ticket, and ran for the US Senate as a Green in 2004 with the main emphasis on opposing the Iraq war.* *I could not agree more that socialists, in the tradition of Debs, are anti-war. Perhaps we are in more agreement than you realize?* *David* On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 10:47 AM, Karen Aram wrote: > Yes, David if you are a socialist as you claim, you should be pleased to > see anyone starting up or reviving an “anti-war organization or group.” A > socialist is always first and foremost opposed to his government/ nation > imperialist interventions and war. > > Speaking out against “war", the greatest evil perpetrated by man, is what > everyone, socialist or otherwise, should be doing. > > > On Aug 10, 2017, at 06:24, Mildred O'brien wrote: > > > > *What "socialist" groups are you talking about--adjuncts of the Democratic > Party, which collaborates with the Deep State/Military and recent President > has been as "irresponsible as Trump" only a little more discrete? M. > O'Brien* > > > -----Original Message----- > From: David McReynolds via Peace-discuss > > To: Karen Aram > Cc: peace ; Peace-discuss List < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>; ufpj-activist < > ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>; Whitney Rich > Sent: Wed, Aug 9, 2017 5:18 pm > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action > Committee > > > > *I'm happy - delighted, in fact - to send this on to the handful of Green > contacts I have. I hope you also post to Facebook. * > > > *You won't mind, I know, if a socialist joins in support of this most > urgent action - even if I wouldn't be doing it within the Greens, but > within the socialist groups. * > > > *The current situation underlines how urgent it is to confront the danger > of the corporate military state - headed now by someone as irresponsible as > Trump. * > > *Peace and solidarity, * > > *David McReynolds * > > On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 8:50 AM, Karen Aram wrote: > > > > Rich Whitney > > 1 hr > > > Dear Friends, please share to other Green pages and list-serves: > > Call to Re-Constitute Green Peace Action Committee > > We the undersigned seek to re-constitute the Green Peace Action Committee, > a former standing committee of the Green Party of the United States that > has been inactive for several years. > > At a time when our nation is committing brazenly illegal, immoral and > indefensible acts of war in Syria, Yemen, elsewhere in the Middle East and > Africa and engaging in dangerous acts of brinksmanship with Russia, China > and North Korea, it is essential that the Green Party play a strong role in > building a more effective peace movement and stand tall as a clear and > uncompromising voice against war, the military-industrial complex and the > institutional causes of war. > > We call upon other concerned Greens to volunteer to join our Committee, so > that it can be activated and recognized by the GP-US and begin to engage in > this vital task. Please note that you will need to seek appointment or > approval by your state party before you can join this Committee in an > official capacity. > > If interested in being a part of this important work, please contact > Interim Co-Chairs Deanna Dee Taylor at deedeelivesgreen at greenpartyutah.com > and Rich Whitney at richwhitney at frontier.com. > > Please note that our next conference call is set for Wednesday, August > 16th, at 5pm Eastern Time. Please contact the Interim Co-Chairs if you are > willing and able to participate in the call. > > Signed, > > Deanna Dee Taylor, Utah > Kim Murphy, Utah > Rich Whitney, Illinois > Wes Gaige, Texas > Jacqui Deveneau, Maine > Logan Martinez, Ohio > Mike DeRosa, Connecticut > Amy Vas Nunes, Connecticut > Eugene Woloszyn, Connecticut > > > > _______________________________________________ > ufpj-activist mailing list > > Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org > List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist > > To Unsubscribe > Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org > Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mai > lman/options/ufpj-activist/davidmcreynolds7%40gmail.com > > You are subscribed as: davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com > > > _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing > list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/ > mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 10 17:40:35 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 17:40:35 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action Committee In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: David great then please do join and support us Sent on my Virgin Mobile Phone. ------ Original message------ From: David McReynolds Date: Thu, Aug 10, 2017 11:46 AM To: Karen Aram; Cc: Mildred O'brien;Peace-discuss List;Whitney Rich;Boyle, Francis A;Brussel, Morton K; Subject:Re: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action Committee Karen, Not sure why you write "if you are a socialist as you claim". I burned my draft card in 1965 to oppose the Vietnam War, ran for President in 1980 and 2000 on the Socialist Party ticket, and ran for the US Senate as a Green in 2004 with the main emphasis on opposing the Iraq war. I could not agree more that socialists, in the tradition of Debs, are anti-war. Perhaps we are in more agreement than you realize? David On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 10:47 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: Yes, David if you are a socialist as you claim, you should be pleased to see anyone starting up or reviving an “anti-war organization or group.” A socialist is always first and foremost opposed to his government/ nation imperialist interventions and war. Speaking out against “war", the greatest evil perpetrated by man, is what everyone, socialist or otherwise, should be doing. On Aug 10, 2017, at 06:24, Mildred O'brien > wrote: What "socialist" groups are you talking about--adjuncts of the Democratic Party, which collaborates with the Deep State/Military and recent President has been as "irresponsible as Trump" only a little more discrete? M. O'Brien -----Original Message----- From: David McReynolds via Peace-discuss > To: Karen Aram > Cc: peace >; Peace-discuss List >; ufpj-activist >; Whitney Rich > Sent: Wed, Aug 9, 2017 5:18 pm Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action Committee I'm happy - delighted, in fact - to send this on to the handful of Green contacts I have. I hope you also post to Facebook. You won't mind, I know, if a socialist joins in support of this most urgent action - even if I wouldn't be doing it within the Greens, but within the socialist groups. The current situation underlines how urgent it is to confront the danger of the corporate military state - headed now by someone as irresponsible as Trump. Peace and solidarity, David McReynolds On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 8:50 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: [https://scontent.ford1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-1/p80x80/20155613_10154490893476394_4901231235633439312_n.jpg?oh=9a541ef6efadb3f41fdff51f60699ee2&oe=59F96A67] Rich Whitney 1 hr Dear Friends, please share to other Green pages and list-serves: Call to Re-Constitute Green Peace Action Committee We the undersigned seek to re-constitute the Green Peace Action Committee, a former standing committee of the Green Party of the United States that has been inactive for several years. At a time when our nation is committing brazenly illegal, immoral and indefensible acts of war in Syria, Yemen, elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa and engaging in dangerous acts of brinksmanship with Russia, China and North Korea, it is essential that the Green Party play a strong role in building a more effective peace movement and stand tall as a clear and uncompromising voice against war, the military-industrial complex and the institutional causes of war. We call upon other concerned Greens to volunteer to join our Committee, so that it can be activated and recognized by the GP-US and begin to engage in this vital task. Please note that you will need to seek appointment or approval by your state party before you can join this Committee in an official capacity. If interested in being a part of this important work, please contact Interim Co-Chairs Deanna Dee Taylor at deedeelivesgreen at greenpartyutah.com and Rich Whitney at richwhitney at frontier.com. Please note that our next conference call is set for Wednesday, August 16th, at 5pm Eastern Time. Please contact the Interim Co-Chairs if you are willing and able to participate in the call. Signed, Deanna Dee Taylor, Utah Kim Murphy, Utah Rich Whitney, Illinois Wes Gaige, Texas Jacqui Deveneau, Maine Logan Martinez, Ohio Mike DeRosa, Connecticut Amy Vas Nunes, Connecticut Eugene Woloszyn, Connecticut _______________________________________________ ufpj-activist mailing list Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist To Unsubscribe Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/ufpj-activist/davidmcreynolds7%40gmail.com You are subscribed as: davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com Thu Aug 10 17:53:34 2017 From: davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com (David McReynolds) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 13:53:34 -0400 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action Committee In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: *Karen,* *Join what? I've been active all my life in the War Resisters League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the socialist movement. I joined, long ago.* *David* On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 1:40 PM, Karen Aram wrote: > David great then please do join and support us > > > Sent on my Virgin Mobile Phone. > > > ------ Original message------ > > *From: *David McReynolds > > *Date: *Thu, Aug 10, 2017 11:46 AM > > *To: *Karen Aram; > > *Cc: *Mildred O'brien;Peace-discuss List;Whitney Rich;Boyle, Francis > A;Brussel, Morton K; > > *Subject:*Re: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace > Action Committee > > > > *Karen, * > > *Not sure why you write "if you are a socialist as you claim". I burned > my draft card in 1965 to oppose the Vietnam War, ran for President in 1980 > and 2000 on the Socialist Party ticket, and ran for the US Senate as a > Green in 2004 with the main emphasis on opposing the Iraq war. * > > *I could not agree more that socialists, in the tradition of Debs, are > anti-war. Perhaps we are in more agreement than you realize? * > > *David * > > On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 10:47 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: > >> Yes, David if you are a socialist as you claim, you should be pleased to >> see anyone starting up or reviving an “anti-war organization or group.” A >> socialist is always first and foremost opposed to his government/ nation >> imperialist interventions and war. >> >> Speaking out against “war", the greatest evil perpetrated by man, is what >> everyone, socialist or otherwise, should be doing. >> >> >> On Aug 10, 2017, at 06:24, Mildred O'brien wrote: >> >> >> >> *What "socialist" groups are you talking about--adjuncts of the >> Democratic Party, which collaborates with the Deep State/Military and >> recent President has been as "irresponsible as Trump" only a little more >> discrete? M. O'Brien* >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: David McReynolds via Peace-discuss > net> >> To: Karen Aram >> Cc: peace ; Peace-discuss List < >> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>; ufpj-activist < >> ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>; Whitney Rich > > >> Sent: Wed, Aug 9, 2017 5:18 pm >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Greens call for Peace Action >> Committee >> >> >> >> *I'm happy - delighted, in fact - to send this on to the handful of Green >> contacts I have. I hope you also post to Facebook. * >> >> >> *You won't mind, I know, if a socialist joins in support of this most >> urgent action - even if I wouldn't be doing it within the Greens, but >> within the socialist groups. * >> >> >> *The current situation underlines how urgent it is to confront the danger >> of the corporate military state - headed now by someone as irresponsible as >> Trump. * >> >> *Peace and solidarity, * >> >> *David McReynolds * >> >> On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 8:50 AM, Karen Aram wrote: >> >> >> >> Rich Whitney >> >> 1 hr >> >> >> Dear Friends, please share to other Green pages and list-serves: >> >> Call to Re-Constitute Green Peace Action Committee >> >> We the undersigned seek to re-constitute the Green Peace Action >> Committee, a former standing committee of the Green Party of the United >> States that has been inactive for several years. >> >> At a time when our nation is committing brazenly illegal, immoral and >> indefensible acts of war in Syria, Yemen, elsewhere in the Middle East and >> Africa and engaging in dangerous acts of brinksmanship with Russia, China >> and North Korea, it is essential that the Green Party play a strong role in >> building a more effective peace movement and stand tall as a clear and >> uncompromising voice against war, the military-industrial complex and the >> institutional causes of war. >> >> We call upon other concerned Greens to volunteer to join our Committee, >> so that it can be activated and recognized by the GP-US and begin to engage >> in this vital task. Please note that you will need to seek appointment or >> approval by your state party before you can join this Committee in an >> official capacity. >> >> If interested in being a part of this important work, please contact >> Interim Co-Chairs Deanna Dee Taylor at deedeelivesgreen at greenpartyuta >> h.com and Rich Whitney at richwhitney at frontier.com. >> >> Please note that our next conference call is set for Wednesday, August >> 16th, at 5pm Eastern Time. Please contact the Interim Co-Chairs if you are >> willing and able to participate in the call. >> >> Signed, >> >> Deanna Dee Taylor, Utah >> Kim Murphy, Utah >> Rich Whitney, Illinois >> Wes Gaige, Texas >> Jacqui Deveneau, Maine >> Logan Martinez, Ohio >> Mike DeRosa, Connecticut >> Amy Vas Nunes, Connecticut >> Eugene Woloszyn, Connecticut >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> ufpj-activist mailing list >> >> Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org >> List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist >> >> To Unsubscribe >> Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org >> Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mai >> lman/options/ufpj-activist/davidmcreynolds7%40gmail.com >> >> You are subscribed as: davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com >> >> >> _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing >> list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mai >> lman/listinfo/peace-discuss >> >> >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Fri Aug 11 00:02:04 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 19:02:04 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Nuclear Threats a US Tradition, the Indecent Black Misleadership Class, UAW Defeat at Nissan: BA Report for August 9, 2017 References: Message-ID: <0469EC25-0AC4-4F76-9F89-5B6FE45E7F51@gmail.com> > Begin forwarded message: > > From: "Black Agenda Report" > Subject: Nuclear Threats a US Tradition, the Indecent Black Misleadership Class, UAW Defeat at Nissan: BA Report for August 9, 2017 > Date: August 10, 2017 at 7:00:10 PM CDT > To: "Cgestabrook" > Reply-To: publisher at blackagendareport.com > > > You received this email either because you are subscribed to Black Agenda Report's weekly email notification of new content at www.blackagendareport.com or because someone forwarded it to you. > Every US President Makes Unilateral Nuclear Threats. It's an American Tradition. > Bruce A. Dixon , BAR managing editor > Every US president since Harry Truman has menaced humanity with unilateral nuclear destruction. When Trump balls up his little fists and bleats about raining death and destruction he's following in the footsteps of the last dozen presidents. He's making America great again. And again. > > > The Indecency of the Black Misleadership Class > by BAR executive editor Glen Ford > If Rep, Barbara Lee (D-CA) is among the best of the black political class we're in deep trouble. Our cohort of black politicians are self-serving cowards, utterly unfit to lead anything, least of all 40 million African Americans. > > > Freedom Rider: UAW Loses Election at Mississippi Nissan Plant > by BAR Senior Columnist Margaret Kimberley > There should and there will be a lot of searching analysis to determine how and why the UAW failed to win its union election at Nissan's Canton Mississippi plant. Maybe they relied too much on rallying outside support, and not enough on slow and patient organizing on the shop floor. Maybe it was something else. In any case, the struggle will continue. > > > 5.4 Million Dead Since 1998 in Congo Genocide: An Interview with Sylvester Mido > by BAR contributor Ann Garrison > In 1998 the US puppet armies of Rwanda and Uganda invaded neighboring Congo, followed by armed forces from five other African nations. Millions of Congolese perished, as their nation's wealth plundered to enrich African warlords and sustain the industrial engines of Western Europe, the US and China. The killing goes on to this day. > > Barbara Lee and Tulsi Gabbard Join the War Party > The Democrats’ two leading congressional dissidents have finally > surrendered, now that the party has “taken the lead in the project of endless war.” U.S. imperialism demands unanimous support from its servants in Congress. > > > “Reparations is Dead” Authors Seek to Spark Public Discussion of New Legal Strategy > Dr. Jahi Issa , Reggie A. Mabry , Patrick Delices > The authors elaborate on their contention that activists have bungled the legal battle for reparations. They are willing to debate N’Cobra, December 12th Movement, Dr. Ron Daniels, Assemblyman Charles Barron, Dr. > Claude Anderson, Randall Robinson, Ta Nehisi Coates and others. > > Black Agenda Radio, week of August 7, 2017 > This week BA Radio talks to Dr. Gerald Horne about the latest predicaments caused by the US drive for world domination, > to UNAC's Sara Flounders about the 1,000 overseas military bases maintained by the US, and to the Sentencing Project's Marc Mauer on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who blames an alleged rise in crime on Trump's predecessor President Obama. > Click the link for the whole show, or any of the next three links for those individual segments. > > > Anti-War Coalition: Shut Down U.S. Global Empire of Bases > “Any campaign which is really talking about U.S. wars and U.S. intervention has to address the role of the foreign military bases and aircraft carriers, which are huge floating military bases,” said Sara Flounders, of the United National Anti-War Coalition. UNAC has been joined by other peace organizations in demanding closure of the approximately 1,000 overseas U.S. bases. This “infrastructure of U.S. imperialism,” said Flounders, “exercises total control over the economies and social and political life of countries all over the world,” and “completely distorts life here in the United States.” > > > U.S. Aims to Claim Venezuelan Oil > U.S. efforts to topple the socialist government in Venezuela are largely driven by Washington’s quest to control the global energy market. “The energy question hovers above all others,” said Dr. Gerald Horne, the prolific author and professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Houston. “It is felt among rightwing Texas oil men that if the United States can get a stranglehold over Venezuelan oil, then Texas and the U.S. will be in position to dominate what remains of the oil industry” in the future, said Horne. “Washington feels it is on a roll” with the rise of rightwing governments in Brazil and Argentina, said Horne. > > > Sessions Blames Obama for Crime > Attorney General Jeff Sessions claims crime has gone up in some U.S. cities because the Obama administration was too lenient in sentencing offenders. But the facts don’t back him up, according to Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, in Washington. “It’s discouraging that, in the 21st century, we’re making policy decisions based on sound bites and gut instincts rather than evidence,” said Mauer. “There is no lack of evidence to show that mass incarceration has been counter-productive to public safety and devastating for low-income communities of color.” > > > Richard B. Moore: “Dogs and Slaves are Named by Their Masters; Free Men Name Themselves!" > by Norman Otis Richmond aka Jalal’ > Not so very long ago, most Black Americans answered to the term “Negro.” But, not Richard B. Moore, a “race man” who was also a socialist and a member of the African Blood Brotherhood, the Black Panthers of the 1920s. Moore later “joined the Communist Party and stayed until he was expelled in 1942 for being an African-American Nationalist.” > > > “Nissan, You Made Us Mad”: Union Promises to Fight Mississippi Defeat > by Mike Elk > A coalition of community groups, students, clergy and environmentalists joined with labor to attempt to unionize the Nissan auto plant in Canton, Mississippi. “Despite having only a narrow majority of Nissan workers signing cards, the union decided it was time to call an election.” But Nissan won this time with more than 60 percent of the vote. > > The Latest Challenges to the South's Felony Disenfranchisement Laws > by Olivia Paschal > Florida accounts for almost half of the 6.1 million Americans that cannot vote because of a felony conviction. Every state in the South disenfranchised felons after the Civil War, “for the specific purpose of disenfranchising as many emancipated slaves as possible.” Today’s laws have the same effect on their descendants. > > Tillerson Threatens Regime Change in Venezuela > TeleSur > President Trump’s Secretary of State hhttps://blackagendareport.com/felony-disenfrachisement-in-the-south as made it explicitly clear that the U.S. wants regime change in Venezuela. The country is under “imperialist attack,” said President Nicolás Maduro, whose personal assets have been targeted. “I feel proud to be sanctioned, Mister Imperialist Donald Trump,” said Maduro. > > Cuba Trains Medical Students From the US and Around the World Free > Cuba News Agency > Under Fidel Castro’s direction, Cuban became a “medical superpower,” setting new standards for global solidarity in the interests of human health. Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) has been training students from the United States to be doctors since 1999, and “has graduated more than 28,500 doctors from 103 countries, free of charge > > > > An Anatomy of the Black South African “Middle Class” > by Henning Melber > The question of who is “middle class” is as perplexing in Black South Africa as it is in Black America. A study of residents of Soweto showed “two-thirds of the respondents classified themselves as middle class” -- far more than called themselves “working class.” The term is largely aspirational, but to what do they aspire? > 190 Pemberton Ave, Plainfield, NJ 07060, United States > You may unsubscribe or change your contact details at any time. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From r-szoke at illinois.edu Fri Aug 11 02:58:11 2017 From: r-szoke at illinois.edu (Szoke, Ron) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2017 02:58:11 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Postpone the 2020 Election? Many GOP Voters Say Yes | Politics | US News | US News References: Message-ID: <2EFBFE3E-E188-4B8E-BE1D-F9CC22DFBB4A@illinois.edu> Confirmation bias rides again (whether you believe in it or not). This can be highly inconvenient for some people. From: "Szoke, Ron" > Subject: Postpone the 2020 Election? Many GOP Voters Say Yes | Politics | US News | US News Date: August 10, 2017 at 9:48:56 PM CDT 52 percent of Republican voters think Donald Trump should be able to put the next presidential election on hold if voter fraud is an issue, new research finds. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-08-10/postpone-the-2020-election-many-gop-voters-say-yes -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gwoodiii3 at gmail.com Fri Aug 11 18:21:27 2017 From: gwoodiii3 at gmail.com (Gus Wood) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2017 13:21:27 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: [campus_labor] GEO Rally for Fair Contract. Next week! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Natalie Nagel" Date: Aug 10, 2017 1:19 PM Subject: [campus_labor] GEO Rally for Fair Contract. Next week! To: Cc: Hi all, > Here is the info on GEO's rally next week. The actual rally will be on > the quad from 12-1 on Wednesday 8/16. We will still have our Weekly > Wednesday Work-In from 11-11:45 in the Courtyard Cafe. > > Facebook event link > > ------------------------------ > > On August 15th, the GEO's contract with the UIUC administration expires. > Since March, the GEO has been bargaining for a new, more equitable contract > centered around the four pillars voted by our membership: Tuition Waivers > and Fees, Wages, Healthcare, and Access and Equality. And although we have > already won a major victory by expanding our non-discrimination clause, due > to stalling on the part of the administration we have yet to make progress > in many key areas--and we haven't even started discussing some of the more > contentious issues such as healthcare and wages. > > On August 16th, the day after our contract expires, join us as we rally on > the quad to demonstrate our unity and power and send a clear message to the > administration: they need to work with us on creating a fair contract for > all graduate employees. From 11-11:45, GEO members will be in the Courtyard > Cafe of the Illini Union with materials to make signs and posters, and the > rally will begin at noon. Our friends in AFSCME Local 3700 also have a > contract about to expire, so we stand in solidarity with them as well! > > Speakers: TBA > Exact Location on Quad: TBA > > -- > Natalie Nagel, PhD > Staff Organizer > Graduate Employees' Organization > IFT/AFT 6300, AFL-CIO > 317-652-7298 <(317)%20652-7298> > > -- > Campus Labor List > Graduate Employees’ Organization > 809 S. 5th St., Geneva Room > Champaign, IL 61820 > Phone: 217-344-8283 <(217)%20344-8283> > Email: geo at uigeo.org > Website: https://www.uigeo.org > Twitter: @geo_uiuc > Facebook: @uigeo @geosolcomm > Instagram: @geo_uiuc > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Campus Labor List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to campuslaborlist+unsubscribe at uigeo.org. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/a/uigeo.org/group/ > campuslaborlist/. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/a/uigeo.org/d/optout. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Fri Aug 11 23:06:41 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2017 18:06:41 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News from Neptune for August 11 Message-ID: <85B98C05-1166-4CA9-8F80-AC582C5C2844@gmail.com> David Green and I discuss the news of the week and its coverage by the media on a (what else?) NUCLEAR WARS edition: >. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Sat Aug 12 00:37:45 2017 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2017 19:37:45 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND, THE HIDDEN COSTS OF WAR Message-ID: <00b201d31303$38f31240$aad936c0$@comcast.net> My soon to be published article in the Public I. David Johnson World Labor Hour Radio OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND, THE HIDDEN COSTS OF WAR War is a racket ! This was a famous quote from retired U.S. Marine Corp General Smedley Butler in 1934. Butler stated that ; " I spent 33 years in the Marine Corp, most of my time being a high class muscle man for big business, Wall Street, and the bankers". " In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism". Butler was also quoted as saying that ; " War only profits the few and costs the majority dearly". According to a 2016 Brown University study, as of 2001, the U.S. Government has spent $ 4.8 TRILLION dollars so far in Afghanistan and Iraq. Total Dept. of Defense spending for this same period of time is over $ 10 TRILLION dollars. Total annual military spending budgeted for 2017 is equal to $ 582 BILLION dollars and was expected to increase to $ 639 BILLION in 2018. But a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday Aug. 7th increased the military budget to $ 696 BILLION. Almost $ 60 BILLION MORE than what President Trump requested. 60 % of House Democrats voted for this increase. The Dept. of Defense budget consumes 80 % of individual federal income tax revenue, which in reality is a war tax equal to $ 3,200.00 per year for every adult in America. A large percentage of this war spending goes to various corporations that sell ; weapons and other goods and services like spying on American citizens. The exact amount spent is unknown because the Dept. of Defense has refused to submit to an audit for the last 16 years, and none of the contracted corporations that received tax payer money have ever been audited. From the information that has been disclosed, the top five Dept. of Defense vendor contractors ( Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, United Technologies ) received about $ 75 BILLION DOLLARS in 2012 alone. OTHER HIDDEN COSTS OF WAR The other hidden costs of war are even more obscure than the lack of transparency in the Dept. of Defense's budget spending and are more long term. In addition to long term care for wounded and psychologically traumatized veterans, there is the neglect of deteriorating infrastructure in the U.S., both physical and human. A study by the Urban Land Institute in 2011 estimated that $ 2 TRILLION dollars is needed NOW, to upgrade existing physical infrastructure in the U.S. That is rapidly deteriorating from years of neglect. Roads, bridges, dams, levees, water systems, sewer facilities, railroads and airports. Another Flint water crisis is already beginning to happen in East Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, as well as smaller cities and rural areas. The study also states that if federal tax money is not allocated to upgrade this existing deteriorating infrastructure that the federal gas tax will need to be increased, local and state governments will need to create more toll roads on existing highways, water and sewer bills will increase, property and sales taxes will increase, and corporations will obtain ownership of more public spaces, services and projects - leading to less quality services and higher costs that always result with privatization. The $ 2 TRILLION dollars needed is just for existing infrastructure upgrades. So even more money would be required to bring the U.S. Into the 21st century with the building of high speed rail networks as well as the improvement and expansion of ; solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies that Western Europe and China already have. Besides physical infrastructure there is human and environmental infrastructure that desperately needs to be upgraded and expanded, like ; environmental clean-up and pollution prevention equipment, full funding of public K-12 schools, making post high school technical and higher education free for all, a guaranteed minimum income, secure and expanded social security and public sector pensions, and the start-up costs for an expanded and improved Medicare for all single payer health care system. For every $ 1 Billion dollars spent on the military 12,000 jobs are created. But with the same billion dollars spent 16,000 clean energy jobs, 18,000 health care jobs, and 27,000 education jobs could be created. Not to mention the vast number of jobs that would be created for the upgrade of current infrastructure and the creation of 21st century infrastructure. WHAT HAS MILITARY SPENDING ACCOMPLISHED ? Apologists for the massive amounts of tax money spent on the military attempt to argue that it is needed to protect the American people and protect the world from terrorism. But according to a 2013 WIN / Gallup international poll conducted in 65 countries which asked the question ; " Which country poses the greatest threat to world peace ", the United States was voted the biggest threat with Pakistan a distant 2nd place in the opinion of 8 % of those polled. Obviously the rest of the world doesn't think that the U.S. Government is conducting wars around the world to protect them from terrorism. In fact it appears that the perception among world inhabitants is that the U.S. Government is the cause of terrorist acts and is conducting wars of aggression. If this perception is correct, why is the U.S. Government conducting wars abroad and for whose benefit ? Could it be the same special interests that Marine Corp General Smedley Butler identified - large corporations, Wall Street investors, and the banking industry ? Perhaps the oil and energy companies as well ? So called " defense " industry ( war profiteers ) increased profits and stock performance over the last 16 years seems to indicate that. If General Smedley Butler's other statements are true, that he was a racketeer for capitalism and that wars only profit the few and cost the many dearly, then it appears that the so called " War on Terror " that has been conducted the last 16 years is really something else. Like the attempt to control ; energy resources, Geo-political territory, low wage sweat shop labor costs, and to increase the profits of the war profiteer industry ( aka. " defense " contractors ). In other words, protecting and expanding the wealth, privilege, and power of the 1 % billionaire class ( the few ), which is costing us ( the many ) dearly in the loss of life and limb of U.S. Soldiers, our tax dollars, and the physical and human infrastructure we depend upon to live. This insanity must stop ! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Sat Aug 12 03:22:13 2017 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2017 22:22:13 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND, THE HIDDEN COSTS OF WAR In-Reply-To: References: <00b201d31303$38f31240$aad936c0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: <00c201d3131a$314131f0$93c395d0$@comcast.net> The reason that many people quote Smedley Butler is because what he experienced and said is as true today ( if not more true ) as it was 80 + years ago. It’s still the same evil people controlling things for profit at our expense and using our young men as cannon fodder. David J. From: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Friday, August 11, 2017 9:20 PM To: David Johnson Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND, THE HIDDEN COSTS OF WAR Why does everyone keep quoting Smedley Butler - he is not that typical! Do you still believe Douglas Lind Rokke of Rantoul, too. He has now publicly claimed to be a disabled veteran, disabled due to his exposure to depleted uranium; he knows that no one can ever get his medical or VA records, so his claim goes unchallenged. Smedley Butler fought his wars in Central America and they most certainly were motivated by what's right for the banana companies, but most of the claims citing him are no where near as soundly based. No, I do not support Trump and as someone who actually knows something about fallout from nuclear war, I am horrified by his taunting of the dictator of North Korea. I expect that General Mattis his Secretary of Defense is also quite concerned, but it too diplomatic to say so in public. Roger On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 5:37 PM, David Johnson via Peace-discuss wrote: My soon to be published article in the Public I. David Johnson World Labor Hour Radio OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND, THE HIDDEN COSTS OF WAR War is a racket ! This was a famous quote from retired U.S. Marine Corp General Smedley Butler in 1934. Butler stated that ; “ I spent 33 years in the Marine Corp, most of my time being a high class muscle man for big business, Wall Street, and the bankers”. “ In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism”. Butler was also quoted as saying that ; “ War only profits the few and costs the majority dearly”. According to a 2016 Brown University study, as of 2001, the U.S. Government has spent $ 4.8 TRILLION dollars so far in Afghanistan and Iraq. Total Dept. of Defense spending for this same period of time is over $ 10 TRILLION dollars. Total annual military spending budgeted for 2017 is equal to $ 582 BILLION dollars and was expected to increase to $ 639 BILLION in 2018. But a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday Aug. 7th increased the military budget to $ 696 BILLION. Almost $ 60 BILLION MORE than what President Trump requested. 60 % of House Democrats voted for this increase. The Dept. of Defense budget consumes 80 % of individual federal income tax revenue, which in reality is a war tax equal to $ 3,200.00 per year for every adult in America. A large percentage of this war spending goes to various corporations that sell ; weapons and other goods and services like spying on American citizens. The exact amount spent is unknown because the Dept. of Defense has refused to submit to an audit for the last 16 years, and none of the contracted corporations that received tax payer money have ever been audited. From the information that has been disclosed, the top five Dept. of Defense vendor contractors ( Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, United Technologies ) received about $ 75 BILLION DOLLARS in 2012 alone. OTHER HIDDEN COSTS OF WAR The other hidden costs of war are even more obscure than the lack of transparency in the Dept. of Defense's budget spending and are more long term. In addition to long term care for wounded and psychologically traumatized veterans, there is the neglect of deteriorating infrastructure in the U.S., both physical and human. A study by the Urban Land Institute in 2011 estimated that $ 2 TRILLION dollars is needed NOW, to upgrade existing physical infrastructure in the U.S. That is rapidly deteriorating from years of neglect. Roads, bridges, dams, levees, water systems, sewer facilities, railroads and airports. Another Flint water crisis is already beginning to happen in East Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, as well as smaller cities and rural areas. The study also states that if federal tax money is not allocated to upgrade this existing deteriorating infrastructure that the federal gas tax will need to be increased, local and state governments will need to create more toll roads on existing highways, water and sewer bills will increase, property and sales taxes will increase, and corporations will obtain ownership of more public spaces, services and projects – leading to less quality services and higher costs that always result with privatization. The $ 2 TRILLION dollars needed is just for existing infrastructure upgrades. So even more money would be required to bring the U.S. Into the 21st century with the building of high speed rail networks as well as the improvement and expansion of ; solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies that Western Europe and China already have. Besides physical infrastructure there is human and environmental infrastructure that desperately needs to be upgraded and expanded, like ; environmental clean-up and pollution prevention equipment, full funding of public K-12 schools, making post high school technical and higher education free for all, a guaranteed minimum income, secure and expanded social security and public sector pensions, and the start-up costs for an expanded and improved Medicare for all single payer health care system. For every $ 1 Billion dollars spent on the military 12,000 jobs are created. But with the same billion dollars spent 16,000 clean energy jobs, 18,000 health care jobs, and 27,000 education jobs could be created. Not to mention the vast number of jobs that would be created for the upgrade of current infrastructure and the creation of 21st century infrastructure. WHAT HAS MILITARY SPENDING ACCOMPLISHED ? Apologists for the massive amounts of tax money spent on the military attempt to argue that it is needed to protect the American people and protect the world from terrorism. But according to a 2013 WIN / Gallup international poll conducted in 65 countries which asked the question ; “ Which country poses the greatest threat to world peace “, the United States was voted the biggest threat with Pakistan a distant 2nd place in the opinion of 8 % of those polled. Obviously the rest of the world doesn't think that the U.S. Government is conducting wars around the world to protect them from terrorism. In fact it appears that the perception among world inhabitants is that the U.S. Government is the cause of terrorist acts and is conducting wars of aggression. If this perception is correct, why is the U.S. Government conducting wars abroad and for whose benefit ? Could it be the same special interests that Marine Corp General Smedley Butler identified – large corporations, Wall Street investors, and the banking industry ? Perhaps the oil and energy companies as well ? So called “ defense “ industry ( war profiteers ) increased profits and stock performance over the last 16 years seems to indicate that. If General Smedley Butler's other statements are true, that he was a racketeer for capitalism and that wars only profit the few and cost the many dearly, then it appears that the so called “ War on Terror “ that has been conducted the last 16 years is really something else. Like the attempt to control ; energy resources, Geo-political territory, low wage sweat shop labor costs, and to increase the profits of the war profiteer industry ( aka. “ defense “ contractors ). In other words, protecting and expanding the wealth, privilege, and power of the 1 % billionaire class ( the few ), which is costing us ( the many ) dearly in the loss of life and limb of U.S. Soldiers, our tax dollars, and the physical and human infrastructure we depend upon to live. This insanity must stop ! _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Aug 12 11:36:25 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2017 11:36:25 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The world on the brink Message-ID: The world on the brink 12 August 2017 The world is daily and hourly edging closer to the brink of nuclear war, as US President Donald Trump maintains a constant stream of extraordinarily inflammatory and reckless threats against North Korea. Such bellicose language coming from the man in charge of the most powerful military force on the planet is generating increasing shock and fear that war with nuclear weapons could break out at any moment. Having tweeted yesterday morning that the military option is now “locked and loaded should North Korea act unwisely,” Trump followed up with images of B-1 strategic bombers and a message from US Pacific Command that these warplanes were ready to fulfill their “Fight Tonight” mission in Korea. Just hours later, Trump rebuked German Chancellor Angela Merkel for criticising the “escalation of rhetoric,” declaring, “I hope they understand the gravity of the situation of what I said, and what I said is what I mean.” The US president again menaced North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, warning that if he utters one more overt threat, “he will truly regret it.” With the danger of war looming with ever greater menace over the world’s population, it is natural to think, or at least hope, that what is involved is just a war of words, and that somehow a means will be found to pull back from the precipice. It is necessary, however, to look reality in the face. Comparisons are being made to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—the closest the world has come to nuclear war. But that tense and precarious confrontation was finally resolved and nuclear arsenals stood down because neither the American nor the Russian leader wanted to unleash a nuclear exchange. The same cannot be said today. At least one side, the Trump administration, is primed and prepared to engulf the other side in “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Moreover, whether intentionally or not, Trump is recklessly goading North Korea into making a desperate military move. Trump has said absolutely nothing to reassure North Korean leader Kim that the US wants a negotiated settlement or anything short of complete and abject capitulation. And as the prospect of conflict increasingly seems inevitable, military logic increasingly takes over. If the highly unstable Pyongyang regime believes that a massive US attack is imminent, it could decide to launch its own pre-emptive strike rather than have its capacity to retaliate completely destroyed. In its recklessness, the Trump administration is proceeding with indifference and disregard for what would be unleashed by a war against North Korea. Unlike the Korean War of 1950–53, which cost the lives of millions on both sides of north-south border, a new conflict would be unlikely to be confined to the Korean Peninsula. The threat of nuclear war is not simply the product of a fascistic madman in the White House, but arises out of immense geo-political tensions fueled by the deep economic crisis of American and global capitalism. Trump has the backing of powerful sections of the military and political elites in Washington who have been pressing for the US to challenge and if necessary go to war with China, regarded as the chief obstacle to American global dominance. The present crisis is the outcome of the political climate prepared by a quarter-century of continuous wars by US imperialism in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, as Washington sought to use its military might to overcome its historic economic decline. It has become a virtual article of faith in American ruling circles that all of their problems on the international arena can be resolved through military action. The ground was prepared for war against North Korea by the Obama administration, which, as part of its “pivot to Asia” against China, authorised a huge military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific. The US military has now stationed its most advanced weaponry in Asia, along with 60 percent of its air and naval forces, and secured new basing agreements throughout the region. The Pentagon could immediately call on more than 28,000 Air Force, naval, Marine and Special Operations personnel based in South Korea as well as many more forces from its bases in Japan and Guam. Moreover, in the event of a war with North Korea, the US would assume operational control of the South Korean military, with its 625,000 personnel and 3,100,000 reservists. Any war on the Korean Peninsula poses great dangers not only for China, but also for Russia, as both countries share borders with North Korea. The criminal irresponsibility of the Trump administration is underscored by the fact that it is prepared to initiate a war in what has been a dangerous flashpoint throughout the past century. It cannot be assumed that China or Russia will simply sit by while the US starts a firestorm in their backyard that will grossly undermine their own security. Having just voted in the UN Security Council for harsh new sanctions on North Korea, Beijing and Moscow can only regard Trump’s warmongering this week as a betrayal. China intervened in the first Korean War as American troops approached its border, and it could do so again. An editorial in the state-owned Global Times, reflecting the more militarist sections of the Chinese regime, insisted that Beijing had to “respond with a firm hand” to defend its interests. While urging that China remain neutral if North Korea launches a first strike, it warned: “If the US and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime… China will prevent them from doing so.” It cannot be ruled out that a way will be devised to defuse the immediate crisis on the Korean Peninsula, at least temporarily. However, the Rubicon has been crossed. The US has made clear that it is no longer constrained by previous understandings on the use of nuclear weapons and is willing to wage nuclear war—in this case against an impoverished, backward and poorly armed enemy. Around the world, rivals and allies alike will be compelled to alter their strategic and military planning accordingly to ensure they can defend their vital interests. The greatest danger in this situation is the lack of political understanding and preparation on the part of the working class in the US, Asia and internationally for the crisis that now confronts humanity. While the monstrous threats emanating from Trump have evoked a great deal of anxiety, fear and hostility, workers lack their own political strategy and party to end the danger of war. What is required now is the building of an international anti-war movement of the working class based on socialist principles and the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections as the mass revolutionary parties needed to lead it. The World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Sat Aug 12 17:52:24 2017 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2017 17:52:24 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Farmers Market References: <1735047643.571111.1502560344483.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1735047643.571111.1502560344483@mail.yahoo.com> A good morning at the Farmers Market, aided of course by the great weather; thanks to Stuart, Carl, Nick, Grant, and Matt for helping out. DG -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Sat Aug 12 18:45:02 2017 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2017 18:45:02 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Harry Truman in retirement References: <1895370661.622104.1502563502976.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1895370661.622104.1502563502976@mail.yahoo.com> "The Truman sipping bourbon in his study or reading Douglas Southall Freeman’s three volumes of Lee’s Lieutenants by the fireplace is easy to like and admire. But Museum Truman, buying into the assumptions of perennial conflict with the Soviet Union, has the air of Gen. ‘Buck’ Turgidson (played by George C. Scott) in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, who said: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”" https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/11/a-trumpworld-homecoming-from-kansas-city-and-city-to-new-York/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From deb.pdamerica at gmail.com Tue Aug 15 22:21:10 2017 From: deb.pdamerica at gmail.com (Debra Schrishuhn) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2017 17:21:10 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] please help spread our petition to oppose pardon of racist Arpaio Message-ID: Please sign and spread on social media. Deadline for signatures is Monday. Thanks Deb Join Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) in sending a message to Donald Trump and his alt-right, confederate, neo-Nazi supporters. No pardons for white supremacy. Trump grudgingly distanced himself from White supremacist violence and racist terrorism (before he defended them again this afternoon). He is now preparing to pardon former sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminally and flagrantly disregarding a federal judge’s order to halt immigration round-ups that led to abuse of minorities in Maricopa County, Arizona. Sign the Petition: NO Pardons for White Supremacy! Tell Trump You Oppose Him Pardoning Joe Arpaio: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/no-pardon-for-white-supremacy/ From jbn at forestfield.org Wed Aug 16 00:02:42 2017 From: jbn at forestfield.org (J.B. Nicholson) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2017 19:02:42 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Migrating AWARE's electronic resources to different hosting? Message-ID: <365d95e1-fb39-50f0-8be7-e3b4f2506569@forestfield.org> Hi peace-discuss readers, I notice that from time to time people post the same article twice to the peace-discuss mailing list by sending posts to both: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net peace-discuss at anti-war.net instead of just one address. Relatedly, I don't know what AWARE's current hosting is. I recall that AWARE used to host with the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center (UCIMC) and (many years ago) I was told by someone working at the UCIMC that the UCIMC server was not faring well: that server was set up to send out periodic mailing list password reminders, for instance, and this large amount of outbound email put a considerable strain on their server. If AWARE is still hosting with UCIMC, and UCIMC's server is still not really set up to handle things well (with off-site backups, server redundancy, uninterruptible power supply set up and working, etc.) it seems to me that AWARE could fix this double-posting problem and the hosting for AWARE can be improved at the same time by migrating to different hosting. On a new host set up to handle mailing lists at one domain, the AWARE mailing lists would have a single definitive address at anti-war.net (or whatever domain AWARE obtains). I've hosted domain names, mailing lists, and websites with DreamHost.com for over a decade and received good results. This isn't an ad for DreamHost.com; I don't work for DreamHost.com and I make nothing by recommending them. I'm a satisfied user of their services and thought it would be worth recommending them to AWARE. If AWARE is interested in migrating the following: - anti-war.net domain - peace-announce mailing list - peace-discuss mailing list - AWARE's website - any mailboxes or forwarding addresses hosted for AWARE on AWARE's domain to DreamHost.com's commercial hosting, I offer my assistance to do a one-time migration and document the resulting setup for AWARE's IT admins. I'm a professional IT admin at the University of Illinois and I'm familiar with what DreamHost.com has to offer. My offer of assistance has absolutely nothing to do with the University of Illinois and is in no way connected to the University of Illinois; no part of my assistance involves hosting with the University of Illinois. Is there any interest in migrating AWARE's electronic resources to DreamHost.com? Please let me know. Thanks. -J.B. Nicholson From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Aug 16 15:38:01 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2017 10:38:01 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Articles of interest In-Reply-To: References: <2119482983.3996107.1499917734183.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <2119482983.3996107.1499917734183@mail.yahoo.com> <5627084E-F6A2-49EC-81E0-9345D130D91C@illinois.edu> <496B988E-2290-464B-AFB4-E536AFF32A9A@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <38C290B7-6275-4115-A182-D5128373704A@gmail.com> I’ve just sent Jeffrey a note saying that I think this is beyond the pale: "As I've said repeatedly, Johnstone is a fascist collaborator ... Her actual conduct reveals that she is what I've always said she is...a fascist collaborator working with the far right to pollute left discourse.” —Eric Draitser —CGE > On Jul 14, 2017, at 9:04 AM, Karen Aram wrote: > > Thanks, I agree with you all, in respect to David Cobb, based upon what I’ve read. Though he did support resurrecting the Green Party anti-war movement recently. Probably for political reasons rather than justice. > > Jeffrey should read some of Eric’s FB postings from early this year, that left Eric’s credibility in question. > >> On Jul 14, 2017, at 05:25, C G Estabrook > wrote: >> >> There’s not a dispute between Jeffrey & Eric. They agree on David Cobb, & I think they're right. >> >> They also agree in condemning Caitlin Johnstone for "high-decibel conspiratorialism,” & I think they’re wrong. >> >> —CGE >> >>> On Jul 14, 2017, at 7:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>> >>> Carl >>> >>> Where can I find info. relating to the dispute between Jeffrey and Eric. I liked Eric’s podcast interviews at one time, but after reading some of his statements on FB quit. >>> >>>> On Jul 13, 2017, at 18:53, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>>> >>>> Mort— >>>> >>>> There’s a real and surprising dispute involving some serious left journalists, notably Jefferey St. Clair of CounterPunch. (And his colleague Eric Draitser.) >>>> >>>> I agree with you about Assange, whatever his flaws. (And Poitras.) >>>> >>>> A recent exchange w/ St. Clair re Johnstone - Caitlin (b. 1975?), not Diana (b. 1934): >>>> >>>> ================== >>>> [1] On Jul 12, 2017, at 1:42 PM, Carl G. Estabrook > wrote: >>>> Jeffrey— >>>> You know I was once (long ago) a Green party candidate for Congress here on the prairie, and I voted for Jill Stein, who's been our house guest... >>>> But I’ve never been a fan of David Cobb and his kowtowing to the Democrats, in 2004 or 2016. >>>> Nevertheless I think Cobb is right about Caitlin Johnstone, and Yoav Litvin is wrong… >>>> >>>> [2] On Jul 12, 2017, at 3:53 PM, Jeffrey St Clair > wrote: >>>> I can’t read Johnstone’s stuff. It’s everything I hate about Left polemics—humorless, high-decibel conspiratorialism. It’s so lacking in curiosity I don't even think Sputnik would run it. The Green Party died for the 3rd time when Stein brought Cobb back in the fold in September. And they haven’t been resurrected once, but they sure did raise a lot of money. He’s good at that…. >>>> J >>>> >>>> [3] On Jul 12, 2017, at 4:33 PM, Carl G. Estabrook > wrote: >>>> I agree entirely about Stein/Cobb, but not about Johnstone. >>>> For one thing, she’s quite funny - far from humorless - in a rude, (I hesitate to say) millennial way. (Cf. my daughter’s TV show, 'Casual,’ on Hulu.) >>>> And on the 'red-brown alliance’ talk, the sooner we abandon the floating signifiers (sorry) of ‘left' and 'right', the better. >>>> Strangely, they’re being kept alive by an alliance of M-L remnants, from tankies to Trots, with media village explainers... >>>> As descriptors in the neoliberal era, even ‘economic nationalist’ vs. 'corporate globalist’ is better. —CGE >>>> ==================== >>>> >>>> Regards, CGE >>>> >>>> >>>>> On Jul 13, 2017, at 8:22 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Why are you advertising these articles? They seem to have little “meat” and many unconvincing slurs. But yes, it is sort of a policing of the ideological boundaries. >>>>> >>>>> Assange still gets my sympathy and respect. Poitras less so. >>>>> I’m not sure what Johnstone wants to promote, and is it all to be condemned? >>>>> >>>>> >>>>>> On Jul 12, 2017, at 10:48 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> Policing the boundaries of "left" and "right": >>>>>> >>>>>> https://louisproyect.org/2017/07/10/risk/#comment-334525 >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/11/the-green-party-marks-in-a-media-con-job/ >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>>>>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>>>>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss >>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>>>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>>>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Wed Aug 16 16:02:34 2017 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:02:34 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Articles of interest In-Reply-To: <38C290B7-6275-4115-A182-D5128373704A@gmail.com> References: <2119482983.3996107.1499917734183.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <2119482983.3996107.1499917734183@mail.yahoo.com> <5627084E-F6A2-49EC-81E0-9345D130D91C@illinois.edu> <496B988E-2290-464B-AFB4-E536AFF32A9A@illinois.edu> <38C290B7-6275-4115-A182-D5128373704A@gmail.com> Message-ID: <1155547808.3459686.1502899354195@mail.yahoo.com> I tried listening to Draitser's interview with Anthony DiMaggio from a few weeks ago regarding the ideology of Trump supporters. I made it about halfway through. He increasingly comes off as a self-absorbed one-note gasbag, and he uses the CP podcast not so much to reveal the views of his guests (as does Doug Henwood for example) as to endlessly pontificate his own increasingly untenable views regarding "white identity." And nothing about Charlottesville changes my critique of this approach. DG On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎August‎ ‎16‎, ‎2017‎ ‎10‎:‎38‎:‎31‎ ‎AM, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: I’ve just sent Jeffrey a note saying that I think this is beyond the pale: "As I've said repeatedly, Johnstone is a fascist collaborator ... Her actual conduct reveals that she is what I've always said she is...a fascist collaborator working with the far right to pollute left discourse.” —Eric Draitser —CGE On Jul 14, 2017, at 9:04 AM, Karen Aram wrote: Thanks, I agree with you all, in respect to David Cobb, based upon what I’ve read. Though he did support resurrecting the Green Party anti-war movement recently. Probably for political reasons rather than justice. Jeffrey should read some of Eric’s FB postings from early this year, that left Eric’s credibility in question. On Jul 14, 2017, at 05:25, C G Estabrook wrote: There’s not a dispute between Jeffrey & Eric. They agree on David Cobb, & I think they're right. They also agree in condemning Caitlin Johnstone for "high-decibel conspiratorialism,” & I think they’re wrong. —CGE  On Jul 14, 2017, at 7:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: Carl Where can I find info. relating to the dispute between Jeffrey and Eric. I liked Eric’s podcast interviews at one time, but after reading some of his statements on FB quit.   On Jul 13, 2017, at 18:53, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: Mort—  There’s a real and surprising dispute involving some serious left journalists, notably Jefferey St. Clair of CounterPunch. (And his colleague Eric Draitser.)  I agree with you about Assange, whatever his flaws. (And Poitras.) A recent exchange w/ St. Clair re Johnstone - Caitlin (b. 1975?), not Diana (b. 1934): ================== [1] On Jul 12, 2017, at 1:42 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote: Jeffrey— You know I was once (long ago) a Green party candidate for Congress here on the prairie, and I voted for Jill Stein, who's been our house guest... But I’ve never been a fan of David Cobb and his kowtowing to the Democrats, in 2004 or 2016. Nevertheless I think Cobb is right about Caitlin Johnstone, and Yoav Litvin is wrong… [2] On Jul 12, 2017, at 3:53 PM, Jeffrey St Clair wrote: I can’t read Johnstone’s stuff. It’s everything I hate about Left polemics—humorless, high-decibel conspiratorialism. It’s so  lacking in curiosity I don't even think Sputnik would run it. The Green Party died for the 3rd time when Stein brought Cobb back in the fold in September. And they haven’t been resurrected once, but they sure did raise a lot of money. He’s good at that…. J  [3] On Jul 12, 2017, at 4:33 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:I agree entirely about Stein/Cobb, but not about Johnstone.For one thing, she’s quite funny - far from humorless - in a rude, (I hesitate to say) millennial way. (Cf. my daughter’s TV show, 'Casual,’ on Hulu.) And on the 'red-brown alliance’ talk, the sooner we abandon the floating signifiers (sorry) of ‘left' and 'right', the better. Strangely, they’re being kept alive by an alliance of M-L remnants, from tankies to Trots, with media village explainers... As descriptors in the neoliberal era, even ‘economic nationalist’ vs. 'corporate globalist’ is better. —CGE ==================== Regards, CGE On Jul 13, 2017, at 8:22 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss wrote: Why are you advertising these articles? They seem to have little “meat” and many unconvincing slurs. But yes, it is sort of a policing of the ideological boundaries. Assange still gets my sympathy and respect. Poitras less so. I’m not sure what Johnstone wants to promote, and is it all to be condemned? On Jul 12, 2017, at 10:48 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: Policing the boundaries of "left" and "right": https://louisproyect.org/2017/07/10/risk/#comment-334525 https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/11/the-green-party-marks-in-a-media-con-job/ _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 16 16:08:25 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:08:25 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Charlottesville Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 11:07 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Charlottesville Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) The Right of African Americans to Self-Determination* By Francis A. Boyle Before the IHRAAM Conference on Civil Rights, Human Rights, & Self-Determination East-West University, Chicago Illinois April 20, 2012 *Check against oral delivery. (c)2012 by Francis A. Boyle. All rights reserved. In order to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus's invasion of the Americas, in early 1992 I was asked by the Organizers of the International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nations in the U.S.A. to serve as Special Prosecutor of the United States of America for committing international crimes against Indigenous Peoples, People of Color, and Oppressed Nationalities, including and especially African Americans. For the purposes of these proceedings, the Organizers asked me to call African Americans the New Afrikan People. The Tribunal was initiated by the American Indian Movement (AIM) with the support of representatives of the Puerto Rican People, the New Afrikan People, the Mexicano People, and "progressive White North Americans." Of course, I do not consider myself to be a "White North American." I was born Irish. During the past 840 years of resisting one of the most brutal and cruel colonial occupations in the history of humankind, we Irish know what the denial of self-determination, genocide, and gross violations of our most fundamental human rights are all about in our beloved Ireland and abroad, which atrocities still continue as of today. In my capacity as Special Prosecutor of the United States Federal Government, I drew up an Indictment under international law that was served upon the Attorney General of the United States and the United States Attorney in San Francisco prior to the convening of the Tribunal in that city just before "Columbus Day" on October 2-4, 1992 with a demand that they appear to defend the United States government from the charges. I take it they saw no point in trying to defend the indefensible because no one showed up to defend the United States government, though they did publicly acknowledge receipt of our service of process. I will not go through all 37 charges of my Indictment here. But the proceedings of this pathbreaking International Tribunal have been recorded in a formal Verdict by the Tribunal; in a Video of the Tribunal; and in a Book on the Tribunal--all under the title U.S.A. On Trial: The International Tribunal on Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nations in the United States. Six months after the conclusion of these San Francisco Tribunal proceedings, I was the Lawyer and Ambassador for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina arguing its case for genocide against Yugoslavia before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the World Court of the United Nations System. There I would singlehandedly win two World Court Orders overwhelmingly in favor of Bosnia against Yugoslavia to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Bosnians on 8 April 1993 and 13 September 1993. I treated the San Francisco Tribunal proceedings with as much care, attention, dignity, respect, and professionalism as I did the World Court proceedings for Bosnia. And the results were the same: massive, overwhelming, crushing victories for my clients in both the World Court and the San Francisco Tribunal! For the purpose of this Conference, I want to briefly discuss the nine charges that I filed against the United States government for committing international crimes against African Americans. I believe that these nine charges succinctly state the fundamental principles of international law and human rights concerning African Americans. Obviously, these nine charges of my Indictment cannot answer all the questions African Americans might have with respect to their rights under international law and human rights law. But I do submit that these nine charges provide a solid foundation for providing guidance to African Americans as to their basic rights under international law that can be used in the future in order to navigate problems and issues as they arise to confront them today. The Distinguished Judges composing this International Tribunal consisted of seven independent Experts on human rights drawn from all over the world. In their Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order of 4 October 1992, the Indigenous Peoples' Tribunal did not accept all of the 37 charges that I filed in my Indictment against the United States government for perpetrating international crimes against Indigenous Peoples, People of Color, and Oppressed Nations. But in their own words, the exact findings of this Tribunal on African Americans were as follows: New Afrikans 7. With respect to the charges brought by the New Afrikan People, the Defendant, the Federal Government of the United States of America is, by unanimous vote, guilty as charged in: The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Slavery upon the New Afrikan People as recognized in part by the 1926 Slavery Convention and the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. The Defendant has perpetrated innumerable Crimes Against Humanity against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Genocide against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1973 Apartheid Convention. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the 1965 Racism Convention against the New Afrikan People. The Defendant is the paradigmatic example of an irremediably racist state in international relations today. (my emphasis added) The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of the New Afrikan People to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter, the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966, customary international law, and jus cogens. [Let me repeat that: By unanimous vote, Ibid.] The Defendant has illegally refused to accord full-scope protections as Prisoners-of-War to captured New Afrikan independence fighters in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I thereto of 1977. The Defendant's treatment of captured New Afrikan independence fighters as "common criminals" and "terrorists" constitutes a "grave breach" of the Geneva Accords and thus a serious war crime. ADDITIONAL FINDINGS 11. In light of the foregoing findings, this Tribunal also, by unanimous vote, finds the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 37, which, as amended, reads: In light of the foregoing international crimes, the Defendant constitutes a Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization in accordance with the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles and the other sources of public international law specified above, and the Federal Government of the United States of America is similar to the Nazi government of World War II Germany. [This powerful Finding speaks for itself and requires no explanation by me.] .... 13. With respect to the following charges brought by the New African People: a. four members of the Tribunal find the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 11, which, as amended, reads: The Defendant has illegally refused to pay reparations to the New Afrikan People for the commission of the International Crime of Slavery against Them in violation of basic norms of customary international law requiring such reparations to be paid. Three members of the Tribunal reserve the right to consider the documentary evidence further before making a final determination. [In all honesty, I do not know what more evidence these three members of the Tribunal wanted to see before they were willing to order that the United States government must pay reparations for slavery to African Americans -- with all due respect to these three Judges. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time ever that any Lawyer had argued in favor of reparations for slavery for African Americans before an International Tribunal. A 4 in favor to 0 against to 3 abstentions Verdict was not a bad outcome for the first time through, though it was disappointing to me personally-it should have been unanimous. I and others lawyers will have to learn from this experience in order to do a better job the next time around on this critical issue of obtaining Reparations for Slavery to African Americans. But in retrospect, however, I should have argued to the San Francisco Trubunal that African Americans today suffer from intergenerational post-traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.) in order to drive home to the Judges the direct and immediate deleterious and debilitating effects that Slavery still now afflicts upon African Americans personally and as a People with a right of self-determination. ] b. Three members of the Tribunal find the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 18, which reads: The Defendant has illegally refused to apply the United Nations Decolonization Resolution of 1960 to the New Afrikan People and to the Territories that they principally inhabit. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize New Afrikan Territories immediately and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the New Afrikan People. Four members of the Tribunal reserve the right to consider the documentary evidence further before making a final determination. Obviously, I lost this Land "Reparations" argument by 3 in favor to 0 against to 4 abstaining. The Organizers of the San Francisco Tribunal had requested me to argue for this Land "Reparations" form of relief for African Americans, and I did that to the best of my ability. I suspect it appeared to be too "radical" a proposition for a majority of Judges on the Tribunal to endorse. But I take some consolation from the fact that at least three Judges agreed with me and none dissented. The Tribunal concluded its Verdict with the following Order to the United States government: "Now therefore, it is ordered, adjudged and decreed that the Defendant cease and desist from the commission of the crimes it has been found guilty of herein." Pursuant thereto, I then filed a copy of this San Francisco Verdict with its Cease and Desist Order upon the Attorney General of the United States of America in Washington, D.C. In return, I later received a 5 February 1993 Letter from the U.S. Department of Justice that acknowledged the receipt of the San Francisco Tribunal Verdict and its Cease and Desist Order against the United States government. This U.S. D.O.J Letter then advised me: "If you, or the Tribunal, have any evidence of the violation of federal criminal law, we ask that you provide that information to your local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." As I saw it at the time, and still see it as of today, historically this would be analogous to the Nazi Ministry of "Justice" advising a German lawyer representing the Jews to file his Complaint of criminal law violations by the Nazi government against the Jews with the Gestapo. The F.B.I is and has always been the American Gestapo -- especially for all Peoples of Color living within its imperial domain, and in particular against African Americans.[1] I also make that statement on the basis of first-hand personal experience. In the summer of 2004 the F.B.I. and the C.I.A/F.B.I Joint Terrorist Task Force in Springfield, Illinois put me on all of the U.S. government's so-called "terrorist watch lists" because I refused to become an informant for them against my Arab and Muslim Clients, which would have violated their Constitutional Rights and my Ethical Obligation as an attorney. That is what the U.S. government's "war on terrorism" is really all about: It is a War by the White Racist Judeo-Christian Financial Power Elite of America against Arabs and Muslims--many of whom are African Americans--both in this country and abroad. The Crusades all over again! As Special Prosecutor for the San Francisco Tribunal, it came as no surprise to me that the Judges unanimously endorsed most of my charges against the United States government with respect to African Americans. This is because the principles of international law with respect to African Americans are incontestable, and thus so glaringly obvious for the entire world to see. I most respectfully submit that African Americans should use the Tribunal's Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order in order to support, promote, and defend their basic rights under international law, including and especially African Americans' right to self-determination as found unanimously by the San Francisco Tribunal in 1992. In this regard, the Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order of this San Francisco Tribunal qualify as a "judicial decision" within the meaning of Article 38(1)(d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Pursuant thereto, this Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order constitute "subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law" for international law and practice. Furthermore, the Statute of the International Court of Justice is an "integral part" of the United Nations Charter under Article 92 thereof. Hence the San Francisco Tribunal's Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order can be relied upon by the International Court of Justice itself, by the International Criminal Court, by some other International Tribunal, or by any other Court in the world today, as well as by any People or State of the World Community -- including and especially by African Americans. The Verdict of the San Francisco Tribunal still serves as adequate notice to the appropriate officials in the United States Federal Government that they bear personal criminal responsibility under international law and the domestic legal systems of all Peoples and States in the World Community for designing and implementing these illegal, criminal and reprehensible policies and practices against Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America, including and especially against African Americans. Obviously, in my brief presentation here today, I do not have the time to go through each and every one of these nine charges; to discuss all of the factual evidence that supported these nine charges; or to provide you with an analysis of the international legal bases for each one of these nine charges. For that type of information, I refer you to the Video and the Book on the San Francisco Tribunal as well as to its Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order itself. But in the discussions that follow tonight and tomorrow, I will be happy to respond to any questions you might have. Thank you. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (voice) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ [1] See M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose (1995). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 16 16:08:25 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:08:25 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Charlottesville Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 11:07 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Charlottesville Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) The Right of African Americans to Self-Determination* By Francis A. Boyle Before the IHRAAM Conference on Civil Rights, Human Rights, & Self-Determination East-West University, Chicago Illinois April 20, 2012 *Check against oral delivery. (c)2012 by Francis A. Boyle. All rights reserved. In order to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus's invasion of the Americas, in early 1992 I was asked by the Organizers of the International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nations in the U.S.A. to serve as Special Prosecutor of the United States of America for committing international crimes against Indigenous Peoples, People of Color, and Oppressed Nationalities, including and especially African Americans. For the purposes of these proceedings, the Organizers asked me to call African Americans the New Afrikan People. The Tribunal was initiated by the American Indian Movement (AIM) with the support of representatives of the Puerto Rican People, the New Afrikan People, the Mexicano People, and "progressive White North Americans." Of course, I do not consider myself to be a "White North American." I was born Irish. During the past 840 years of resisting one of the most brutal and cruel colonial occupations in the history of humankind, we Irish know what the denial of self-determination, genocide, and gross violations of our most fundamental human rights are all about in our beloved Ireland and abroad, which atrocities still continue as of today. In my capacity as Special Prosecutor of the United States Federal Government, I drew up an Indictment under international law that was served upon the Attorney General of the United States and the United States Attorney in San Francisco prior to the convening of the Tribunal in that city just before "Columbus Day" on October 2-4, 1992 with a demand that they appear to defend the United States government from the charges. I take it they saw no point in trying to defend the indefensible because no one showed up to defend the United States government, though they did publicly acknowledge receipt of our service of process. I will not go through all 37 charges of my Indictment here. But the proceedings of this pathbreaking International Tribunal have been recorded in a formal Verdict by the Tribunal; in a Video of the Tribunal; and in a Book on the Tribunal--all under the title U.S.A. On Trial: The International Tribunal on Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nations in the United States. Six months after the conclusion of these San Francisco Tribunal proceedings, I was the Lawyer and Ambassador for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina arguing its case for genocide against Yugoslavia before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the World Court of the United Nations System. There I would singlehandedly win two World Court Orders overwhelmingly in favor of Bosnia against Yugoslavia to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Bosnians on 8 April 1993 and 13 September 1993. I treated the San Francisco Tribunal proceedings with as much care, attention, dignity, respect, and professionalism as I did the World Court proceedings for Bosnia. And the results were the same: massive, overwhelming, crushing victories for my clients in both the World Court and the San Francisco Tribunal! For the purpose of this Conference, I want to briefly discuss the nine charges that I filed against the United States government for committing international crimes against African Americans. I believe that these nine charges succinctly state the fundamental principles of international law and human rights concerning African Americans. Obviously, these nine charges of my Indictment cannot answer all the questions African Americans might have with respect to their rights under international law and human rights law. But I do submit that these nine charges provide a solid foundation for providing guidance to African Americans as to their basic rights under international law that can be used in the future in order to navigate problems and issues as they arise to confront them today. The Distinguished Judges composing this International Tribunal consisted of seven independent Experts on human rights drawn from all over the world. In their Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order of 4 October 1992, the Indigenous Peoples' Tribunal did not accept all of the 37 charges that I filed in my Indictment against the United States government for perpetrating international crimes against Indigenous Peoples, People of Color, and Oppressed Nations. But in their own words, the exact findings of this Tribunal on African Americans were as follows: New Afrikans 7. With respect to the charges brought by the New Afrikan People, the Defendant, the Federal Government of the United States of America is, by unanimous vote, guilty as charged in: The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Slavery upon the New Afrikan People as recognized in part by the 1926 Slavery Convention and the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. The Defendant has perpetrated innumerable Crimes Against Humanity against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Genocide against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1973 Apartheid Convention. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the 1965 Racism Convention against the New Afrikan People. The Defendant is the paradigmatic example of an irremediably racist state in international relations today. (my emphasis added) The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of the New Afrikan People to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter, the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966, customary international law, and jus cogens. [Let me repeat that: By unanimous vote, Ibid.] The Defendant has illegally refused to accord full-scope protections as Prisoners-of-War to captured New Afrikan independence fighters in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I thereto of 1977. The Defendant's treatment of captured New Afrikan independence fighters as "common criminals" and "terrorists" constitutes a "grave breach" of the Geneva Accords and thus a serious war crime. ADDITIONAL FINDINGS 11. In light of the foregoing findings, this Tribunal also, by unanimous vote, finds the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 37, which, as amended, reads: In light of the foregoing international crimes, the Defendant constitutes a Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization in accordance with the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles and the other sources of public international law specified above, and the Federal Government of the United States of America is similar to the Nazi government of World War II Germany. [This powerful Finding speaks for itself and requires no explanation by me.] .... 13. With respect to the following charges brought by the New African People: a. four members of the Tribunal find the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 11, which, as amended, reads: The Defendant has illegally refused to pay reparations to the New Afrikan People for the commission of the International Crime of Slavery against Them in violation of basic norms of customary international law requiring such reparations to be paid. Three members of the Tribunal reserve the right to consider the documentary evidence further before making a final determination. [In all honesty, I do not know what more evidence these three members of the Tribunal wanted to see before they were willing to order that the United States government must pay reparations for slavery to African Americans -- with all due respect to these three Judges. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time ever that any Lawyer had argued in favor of reparations for slavery for African Americans before an International Tribunal. A 4 in favor to 0 against to 3 abstentions Verdict was not a bad outcome for the first time through, though it was disappointing to me personally-it should have been unanimous. I and others lawyers will have to learn from this experience in order to do a better job the next time around on this critical issue of obtaining Reparations for Slavery to African Americans. But in retrospect, however, I should have argued to the San Francisco Trubunal that African Americans today suffer from intergenerational post-traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.) in order to drive home to the Judges the direct and immediate deleterious and debilitating effects that Slavery still now afflicts upon African Americans personally and as a People with a right of self-determination. ] b. Three members of the Tribunal find the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 18, which reads: The Defendant has illegally refused to apply the United Nations Decolonization Resolution of 1960 to the New Afrikan People and to the Territories that they principally inhabit. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize New Afrikan Territories immediately and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the New Afrikan People. Four members of the Tribunal reserve the right to consider the documentary evidence further before making a final determination. Obviously, I lost this Land "Reparations" argument by 3 in favor to 0 against to 4 abstaining. The Organizers of the San Francisco Tribunal had requested me to argue for this Land "Reparations" form of relief for African Americans, and I did that to the best of my ability. I suspect it appeared to be too "radical" a proposition for a majority of Judges on the Tribunal to endorse. But I take some consolation from the fact that at least three Judges agreed with me and none dissented. The Tribunal concluded its Verdict with the following Order to the United States government: "Now therefore, it is ordered, adjudged and decreed that the Defendant cease and desist from the commission of the crimes it has been found guilty of herein." Pursuant thereto, I then filed a copy of this San Francisco Verdict with its Cease and Desist Order upon the Attorney General of the United States of America in Washington, D.C. In return, I later received a 5 February 1993 Letter from the U.S. Department of Justice that acknowledged the receipt of the San Francisco Tribunal Verdict and its Cease and Desist Order against the United States government. This U.S. D.O.J Letter then advised me: "If you, or the Tribunal, have any evidence of the violation of federal criminal law, we ask that you provide that information to your local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." As I saw it at the time, and still see it as of today, historically this would be analogous to the Nazi Ministry of "Justice" advising a German lawyer representing the Jews to file his Complaint of criminal law violations by the Nazi government against the Jews with the Gestapo. The F.B.I is and has always been the American Gestapo -- especially for all Peoples of Color living within its imperial domain, and in particular against African Americans.[1] I also make that statement on the basis of first-hand personal experience. In the summer of 2004 the F.B.I. and the C.I.A/F.B.I Joint Terrorist Task Force in Springfield, Illinois put me on all of the U.S. government's so-called "terrorist watch lists" because I refused to become an informant for them against my Arab and Muslim Clients, which would have violated their Constitutional Rights and my Ethical Obligation as an attorney. That is what the U.S. government's "war on terrorism" is really all about: It is a War by the White Racist Judeo-Christian Financial Power Elite of America against Arabs and Muslims--many of whom are African Americans--both in this country and abroad. The Crusades all over again! As Special Prosecutor for the San Francisco Tribunal, it came as no surprise to me that the Judges unanimously endorsed most of my charges against the United States government with respect to African Americans. This is because the principles of international law with respect to African Americans are incontestable, and thus so glaringly obvious for the entire world to see. I most respectfully submit that African Americans should use the Tribunal's Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order in order to support, promote, and defend their basic rights under international law, including and especially African Americans' right to self-determination as found unanimously by the San Francisco Tribunal in 1992. In this regard, the Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order of this San Francisco Tribunal qualify as a "judicial decision" within the meaning of Article 38(1)(d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Pursuant thereto, this Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order constitute "subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law" for international law and practice. Furthermore, the Statute of the International Court of Justice is an "integral part" of the United Nations Charter under Article 92 thereof. Hence the San Francisco Tribunal's Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order can be relied upon by the International Court of Justice itself, by the International Criminal Court, by some other International Tribunal, or by any other Court in the world today, as well as by any People or State of the World Community -- including and especially by African Americans. The Verdict of the San Francisco Tribunal still serves as adequate notice to the appropriate officials in the United States Federal Government that they bear personal criminal responsibility under international law and the domestic legal systems of all Peoples and States in the World Community for designing and implementing these illegal, criminal and reprehensible policies and practices against Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America, including and especially against African Americans. Obviously, in my brief presentation here today, I do not have the time to go through each and every one of these nine charges; to discuss all of the factual evidence that supported these nine charges; or to provide you with an analysis of the international legal bases for each one of these nine charges. For that type of information, I refer you to the Video and the Book on the San Francisco Tribunal as well as to its Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order itself. But in the discussions that follow tonight and tomorrow, I will be happy to respond to any questions you might have. Thank you. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (voice) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ [1] See M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose (1995). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Aug 16 16:48:34 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2017 11:48:34 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Articles of interest In-Reply-To: <1155547808.3459686.1502899354195@mail.yahoo.com> References: <2119482983.3996107.1499917734183.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <2119482983.3996107.1499917734183@mail.yahoo.com> <5627084E-F6A2-49EC-81E0-9345D130D91C@illinois.edu> <496B988E-2290-464B-AFB4-E536AFF32A9A@illinois.edu> <38C290B7-6275-4115-A182-D5128373704A@gmail.com> <1155547808.3459686.1502899354195@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <739B2794-73BC-4C61-98F2-611C1BAF8D9E@gmail.com> A pall cast over some of the important work of CounterPunch by idpol… Eric, opposing the "pollution of left discourse,” sounds like Base Commander Jack D. Ripper: "I can no longer sit back and allow ... conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids”… —CGE > On Aug 16, 2017, at 11:02 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I tried listening to Draitser's interview with Anthony DiMaggio from a few weeks ago regarding the ideology of Trump supporters. I made it about halfway through. He increasingly comes off as a self-absorbed one-note gasbag, and he uses the CP podcast not so much to reveal the views of his guests (as does Doug Henwood for example) as to endlessly pontificate his own increasingly untenable views regarding "white identity." And nothing about Charlottesville changes my critique of this approach. > > DG > > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎August‎ ‎16‎, ‎2017‎ ‎10‎:‎38‎:‎31‎ ‎AM, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > I’ve just sent Jeffrey a note saying that I think this is beyond the pale: > > "As I've said repeatedly, Johnstone is a fascist collaborator ... Her actual conduct reveals that she is what I've always said she is...a fascist collaborator working with the far right to pollute left discourse.” —Eric Draitser > > —CGE > > >> On Jul 14, 2017, at 9:04 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: >> >> Thanks, I agree with you all, in respect to David Cobb, based upon what I’ve read. Though he did support resurrecting the Green Party anti-war movement recently. Probably for political reasons rather than justice. >> >> Jeffrey should read some of Eric’s FB postings from early this year, that left Eric’s credibility in question. >> >>> On Jul 14, 2017, at 05:25, C G Estabrook > wrote: >>> >>> There’s not a dispute between Jeffrey & Eric. They agree on David Cobb, & I think they're right. >>> >>> They also agree in condemning Caitlin Johnstone for "high-decibel conspiratorialism,” & I think they’re wrong. >>> >>> —CGE >>> >>>> On Jul 14, 2017, at 7:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>>> >>>> Carl >>>> >>>> Where can I find info. relating to the dispute between Jeffrey and Eric. I liked Eric’s podcast interviews at one time, but after reading some of his statements on FB quit. >>>> >>>>> On Jul 13, 2017, at 18:53, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Mort— >>>>> >>>>> There’s a real and surprising dispute involving some serious left journalists, notably Jefferey St. Clair of CounterPunch. (And his colleague Eric Draitser.) >>>>> >>>>> I agree with you about Assange, whatever his flaws. (And Poitras.) >>>>> >>>>> A recent exchange w/ St. Clair re Johnstone - Caitlin (b. 1975?), not Diana (b. 1934): >>>>> >>>>> ================== >>>>> On Jul 12, 2017, at 4:33 PM, Carl G. Estabrook > wrote: >>>>> I agree entirely about Stein/Cobb, but not about Johnstone. >>>>> For one thing, she’s quite funny - far from humorless - in a rude, (I hesitate to say) millennial way. (Cf. my daughter’s TV show, 'Casual,’ on Hulu.) >>>>> And on the 'red-brown alliance’ talk, the sooner we abandon the floating signifiers (sorry) of ‘left' and 'right', the better. >>>>> Strangely, they’re being kept alive by an alliance of M-L remnants, from tankies to Trots, with media village explainers... >>>>> As descriptors in the neoliberal era, even ‘economic nationalist’ vs. 'corporate globalist’ is better. —CGE >>>>> ==================== >>>>> >>>>> Regards, CGE >>>>> >>>>> >>>>>> On Jul 13, 2017, at 8:22 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> Why are you advertising these articles? They seem to have little “meat” and many unconvincing slurs. But yes, it is sort of a policing of the ideological boundaries. >>>>>> >>>>>> Assange still gets my sympathy and respect. Poitras less so. >>>>>> I’m not sure what Johnstone wants to promote, and is it all to be condemned? >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>>> On Jul 12, 2017, at 10:48 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> Policing the boundaries of "left" and "right": >>>>>>> >>>>>>> https://louisproyect.org/2017/07/10/risk/#comment-334525 >>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>> https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/11/the-green-party-marks-in-a-media-con-job/ >>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Aug 16 21:52:20 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:52:20 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The US war in Afghanistan In-Reply-To: <85B98C05-1166-4CA9-8F80-AC582C5C2844@gmail.com> References: <85B98C05-1166-4CA9-8F80-AC582C5C2844@gmail.com> Message-ID: <98ACC34A-3EA8-4772-BFD0-BEEE10D971C4@gmail.com> > "...a meeting, chaired by Vice President Pence, was held at the beginning of August, and three principals were tasked to come up with ‘creative' options for Trump to consider: [National Security Adviser] McMaster, CIA chief Mike Pompeo, and [Attorney General] Sessions. "McMaster initially came up with a plan for inserting 50,000 more troops into Afghanistan, but scaled it back after realizing Trump would never go for it. Both Bannon and Pompeo want to lighten the US footprint, with the former coming up with a problematic scheme to ‘privatize' the military campaign, and the latter wanting to basically farm it out to the CIA and Special Operations units. As for Sessions, he’s the most radical of the anti-interventionists... "Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” —CGE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 16 22:01:49 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2017 22:01:49 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] The US war in Afghanistan In-Reply-To: <98ACC34A-3EA8-4772-BFD0-BEEE10D971C4@gmail.com> References: <85B98C05-1166-4CA9-8F80-AC582C5C2844@gmail.com> <98ACC34A-3EA8-4772-BFD0-BEEE10D971C4@gmail.com> Message-ID: From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 7, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END Notes Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (voice) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 4:52 PM To: Peace-discuss List Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace Subject: [Peace] The US war in Afghanistan > "...a meeting, chaired by Vice President Pence, was held at the beginning of August, and three principals were tasked to come up with ‘creative' options for Trump to consider: [National Security Adviser] McMaster, CIA chief Mike Pompeo, and [Attorney General] Sessions. "McMaster initially came up with a plan for inserting 50,000 more troops into Afghanistan, but scaled it back after realizing Trump would never go for it. Both Bannon and Pompeo want to lighten the US footprint, with the former coming up with a problematic scheme to ‘privatize' the military campaign, and the latter wanting to basically farm it out to the CIA and Special Operations units. As for Sessions, he’s the most radical of the anti-interventionists... "Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” —CGE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 17 00:09:11 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:09:11 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Zizek on brains linked to computers Message-ID: HomeNews ‘Brains linked to computers will kill our inner freedom’ - Zizek to RT on biohacking & identity loss Published time: 15 Aug, 2017 06:24Edited time: 15 Aug, 2017 06:39 Get short URL [‘Brains linked to computers will kill our inner freedom’ - Zizek to RT on biohacking & identity loss] Slavoj Zizek © Chinafotopress / Global Look Press 2.1K38 Humans are losing their freedoms, self-identity and free will, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has told RT, noting that a recent biohacking experiment by a team from the University of Washington is just another sign of the dawn of a post human era. A team of scientists from the University of Washington successfully managed to hack into a computer using custom synthesized strands of DNA. In their study, which is to be presented at 2017 USENIX Security Symposium Thursday, researchers said that it is potentially possible for a molecular code to take over machinery by exploiting weaknesses of gene sequencing software. “We designed and created a synthetic DNA strand that contained malicious computer code encoded in the bases of the DNA strand,” researchers from the Paul G Allen school of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington said ahead of their presentation. Follow [https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/850439784975572992/__sehVel_normal.jpg]USENIX Security @USENIXSecurity More coverage of Ney et al.'s paper, which'll be presented on Thur afternoon at #usesec17. http://bit.ly/2uKZvgK https://twitter.com/rosmith11/status/897132286692528128 … 9:41 AM - Aug 14, 2017 * Replies * Retweets * likes Twitter Ads info and privacy “When this physical strand was sequenced and processed by the vulnerable program it gave remote control of the computer doing the processing. That is, we were able to remotely exploit and gain full control over a computer using adversarial synthetic DNA.” While the researchers led by Tadayoshi Kohno and Luis Ceze admit that at this point, the threat is only theoretical, Zizek noted the sinister side of this experiment. “The fact that is what possible to break into, to hack a computer through a DNA, means that our identity, determined by DNA is nothing more than just another computer formula,” Zizek said. Read more [© Christoph Schmidt]‘Who will control merged human-AI digital space?’ Slavoj Zizek on Musk’s brain implant venture “Our life, human life, our identity is reduced to a series of formulas. So we are effectively entering some kind of post human universe where everything, our inner most identity can be reduced to a formula.” “I would not be afraid of this [particular experiment], that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Zizek said, emphasizing that there are a lot of much more disturbing scientific achievements “What I'm afraid of is a possibility of a direct contact-link between our brain, what we are thinking, and a computer network, because there we lose our autonomy.” He warned that soon computers will be able to control the human mind, misleading the individual to believe they are still in control of their thoughts and reality. Under this arrangement, Zizek argues, humans will lose their autonomy and will become indistinguishable from the machines. “What is much more dangerous is... if our brains will be directly linked to computers so we will lose our inner freedom. Even in the worst of Nazism… those in power could not control what you are thinking. You can have your inner thoughts... Now with a direct link between our brain and the digital network, we lose our inner freedom,” the philosopher said. In order to avoid machines potentially taking over the human identity, Zizek argues that all research into artificial intelligence has to be made public so that people can decide on the discourse of machine learning. “Make all these procedures, and what is going on, these results as public as possible. No agency which is not transpiring to the public, neither state nor a public corporation should do this outside public knowledge and public control,” Zizek told RT. Corbyn’s paradoxical victory over May’s politics of scaremongering gives hope – Slavoj Zizek to RT Overall, the philosopher argues that humankind has entered an era of technological domination. “Biology as science is totally integrated into a project of technological domination, manipulation and so on. And this technological use is inscribed into how biology functions today... life itself becomes just a technological process,” Zizek said. But there is still a deeper philosophic problem, which nowadays has growing practical implications, Zizek said. “Is our identity fully determined by DNA? Or are we are not just biological automats? Do we have some spiritual freedom and so on?” “I think if we are just our DNA. If the interaction of our DNA with environment determines us completely, then yes we should worry. But in a way, we just discovered that we never were free. We were automats [machines] also now but we did not know it. Our freedom was an illusion… So are we automats which just can be controlled or is there hope for our freedom?” -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 17 00:09:51 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:09:51 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians Message-ID: . The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Unless it is against Palestinians and American Indians. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: President Tim Killeen [mailto:presidentkilleen at uillinois.edu] Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 5:47 PM Subject: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate [https://illinois.edu/skinDesigner/files/22622/ua_massmail750d.png] Dear colleagues, students and friends: The lens of history gives us many reminders of the massive human toll taken when hatred and bigotry rear their ugly heads and go unchallenged, or – through wicked intimidation – infect and persist within society. The same history, however, also gives us many examples of heroic and principled efforts to build and sustain human progress – achieved through the inspiring bravery and resolve of many in generations before. A recent visit to the American cemetery near Omaha Beach brought this home to one of us very recently. Over the weekend, hate-fueled violence initiated and carried out by modern-day representatives of groups associated with the evil ideas of white supremacy, KKK, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism led to the horrible events that we witnessed. It compounded the shock that these events were deliberately staged on and near a beautiful peer university campus in Charlottesville, Virginia – one devoted, as we are here, to diversity, inclusion, learning and scholarship. It is precisely because we have the wonderful privilege of freedom of expression in this country that we need to speak out in complete unanimity and in utter condemnation of this hatred and bigotry. These ideologies are absolutely contrary to what the University of Illinois System is and what it represents. In particular, we want to let our new students, our returning students and all members of the university family know that you are ALL welcome and embraced here. The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. Our universities stand with campuses and communities across the country that are stepping up in real time to help lead the way – condemning this awful behavior in any form. They and we also jointly reaffirm those bedrock values that promote a culture of understanding and respect for all – no matter what color, race, ancestry, age, interests, sexual orientation, LGBTQ status, religion, disability status, national origin, immigration status or gender. On behalf of the U of I System, our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Charlottesville and our friends at the University of Virginia. Sincerely, Tim Killeen President Michael Amiridis Chancellor, University of Illinois at Chicago Robert J. Jones Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Susan J. Koch Chancellor, University of Illinois at Springfield This mailing approved by: Office of the President sent to: Everyone Massmail Archive . Massmail powered by WebTools -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 17 00:09:51 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:09:51 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians Message-ID: . The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Unless it is against Palestinians and American Indians. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: President Tim Killeen [mailto:presidentkilleen at uillinois.edu] Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 5:47 PM Subject: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate [https://illinois.edu/skinDesigner/files/22622/ua_massmail750d.png] Dear colleagues, students and friends: The lens of history gives us many reminders of the massive human toll taken when hatred and bigotry rear their ugly heads and go unchallenged, or – through wicked intimidation – infect and persist within society. The same history, however, also gives us many examples of heroic and principled efforts to build and sustain human progress – achieved through the inspiring bravery and resolve of many in generations before. A recent visit to the American cemetery near Omaha Beach brought this home to one of us very recently. Over the weekend, hate-fueled violence initiated and carried out by modern-day representatives of groups associated with the evil ideas of white supremacy, KKK, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism led to the horrible events that we witnessed. It compounded the shock that these events were deliberately staged on and near a beautiful peer university campus in Charlottesville, Virginia – one devoted, as we are here, to diversity, inclusion, learning and scholarship. It is precisely because we have the wonderful privilege of freedom of expression in this country that we need to speak out in complete unanimity and in utter condemnation of this hatred and bigotry. These ideologies are absolutely contrary to what the University of Illinois System is and what it represents. In particular, we want to let our new students, our returning students and all members of the university family know that you are ALL welcome and embraced here. The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. Our universities stand with campuses and communities across the country that are stepping up in real time to help lead the way – condemning this awful behavior in any form. They and we also jointly reaffirm those bedrock values that promote a culture of understanding and respect for all – no matter what color, race, ancestry, age, interests, sexual orientation, LGBTQ status, religion, disability status, national origin, immigration status or gender. On behalf of the U of I System, our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Charlottesville and our friends at the University of Virginia. Sincerely, Tim Killeen President Michael Amiridis Chancellor, University of Illinois at Chicago Robert J. Jones Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Susan J. Koch Chancellor, University of Illinois at Springfield This mailing approved by: Office of the President sent to: Everyone Massmail Archive . Massmail powered by WebTools -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 17 02:18:06 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 02:18:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Wise {sic!}: “The Principles on Which We Stand” At the Zionized University of Illiniwaks Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 7:10 PM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Cc: Wise, Phyllis M Subject: FW: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians . The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Unless it is against Palestinians and American Indians. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: President Tim Killeen [mailto:presidentkilleen at uillinois.edu] Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 5:47 PM Subject: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate [https://illinois.edu/skinDesigner/files/22622/ua_massmail750d.png] Dear colleagues, students and friends: The lens of history gives us many reminders of the massive human toll taken when hatred and bigotry rear their ugly heads and go unchallenged, or – through wicked intimidation – infect and persist within society. The same history, however, also gives us many examples of heroic and principled efforts to build and sustain human progress – achieved through the inspiring bravery and resolve of many in generations before. A recent visit to the American cemetery near Omaha Beach brought this home to one of us very recently. Over the weekend, hate-fueled violence initiated and carried out by modern-day representatives of groups associated with the evil ideas of white supremacy, KKK, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism led to the horrible events that we witnessed. It compounded the shock that these events were deliberately staged on and near a beautiful peer university campus in Charlottesville, Virginia – one devoted, as we are here, to diversity, inclusion, learning and scholarship. It is precisely because we have the wonderful privilege of freedom of expression in this country that we need to speak out in complete unanimity and in utter condemnation of this hatred and bigotry. These ideologies are absolutely contrary to what the University of Illinois System is and what it represents. In particular, we want to let our new students, our returning students and all members of the university family know that you are ALL welcome and embraced here. The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. Our universities stand with campuses and communities across the country that are stepping up in real time to help lead the way – condemning this awful behavior in any form. They and we also jointly reaffirm those bedrock values that promote a culture of understanding and respect for all – no matter what color, race, ancestry, age, interests, sexual orientation, LGBTQ status, religion, disability status, national origin, immigration status or gender. On behalf of the U of I System, our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Charlottesville and our friends at the University of Virginia. Sincerely, Tim Killeen President Michael Amiridis Chancellor, University of Illinois at Chicago Robert J. Jones Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Susan J. Koch Chancellor, University of Illinois at Springfield This mailing approved by: Office of the President sent to: Everyone Massmail Archive . Massmail powered by WebTools -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 17 02:18:06 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 02:18:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Wise {sic!}: “The Principles on Which We Stand” At the Zionized University of Illiniwaks Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 7:10 PM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Cc: Wise, Phyllis M Subject: FW: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians . The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Unless it is against Palestinians and American Indians. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: President Tim Killeen [mailto:presidentkilleen at uillinois.edu] Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 5:47 PM Subject: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate [https://illinois.edu/skinDesigner/files/22622/ua_massmail750d.png] Dear colleagues, students and friends: The lens of history gives us many reminders of the massive human toll taken when hatred and bigotry rear their ugly heads and go unchallenged, or – through wicked intimidation – infect and persist within society. The same history, however, also gives us many examples of heroic and principled efforts to build and sustain human progress – achieved through the inspiring bravery and resolve of many in generations before. A recent visit to the American cemetery near Omaha Beach brought this home to one of us very recently. Over the weekend, hate-fueled violence initiated and carried out by modern-day representatives of groups associated with the evil ideas of white supremacy, KKK, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism led to the horrible events that we witnessed. It compounded the shock that these events were deliberately staged on and near a beautiful peer university campus in Charlottesville, Virginia – one devoted, as we are here, to diversity, inclusion, learning and scholarship. It is precisely because we have the wonderful privilege of freedom of expression in this country that we need to speak out in complete unanimity and in utter condemnation of this hatred and bigotry. These ideologies are absolutely contrary to what the University of Illinois System is and what it represents. In particular, we want to let our new students, our returning students and all members of the university family know that you are ALL welcome and embraced here. The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. Our universities stand with campuses and communities across the country that are stepping up in real time to help lead the way – condemning this awful behavior in any form. They and we also jointly reaffirm those bedrock values that promote a culture of understanding and respect for all – no matter what color, race, ancestry, age, interests, sexual orientation, LGBTQ status, religion, disability status, national origin, immigration status or gender. On behalf of the U of I System, our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Charlottesville and our friends at the University of Virginia. Sincerely, Tim Killeen President Michael Amiridis Chancellor, University of Illinois at Chicago Robert J. Jones Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Susan J. Koch Chancellor, University of Illinois at Springfield This mailing approved by: Office of the President sent to: Everyone Massmail Archive . Massmail powered by WebTools -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 17 12:00:15 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 12:00:15 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News from Neptune References: <94eb2c0c7894a65f050556e8b3f7@google.com> Message-ID: [http://s.ytimg.com/yt/img/email/digest/email_header.png] aramkaren64 at gmail.com has shared a video with you on YouTube [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/z2O3CZGZg5U/mqdefault.jpg] News From Neptune - Episode #347 by UPTV6 Discussion of the news of the week and its coverage by the media for Friday, August 11th, 2017. Hosted by Carl Estabrook. Help center • Report spam ©2017 YouTube, LLC 901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA 94066, USA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 17 12:54:37 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 12:54:37 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I have been teaching full time at the Zionized University of Illiniwaks since August of 1978. It has always been rampant with overt bigotry and racism against Palestinians and American Indians and Other People of Color. Do these University of Illiniwak Bureaucrats really expect us to take their Palaver seriously? LOL! Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 9:18 PM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Cc: Wise, Phyllis M Subject: RE: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians Wise {sic!}: “The Principles on Which We Stand” At the Zionized University of Illiniwaks Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 7:10 PM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: Wise, Phyllis M > Subject: FW: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians . The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Unless it is against Palestinians and American Indians. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: President Tim Killeen [mailto:presidentkilleen at uillinois.edu] Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 5:47 PM Subject: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate [https://illinois.edu/skinDesigner/files/22622/ua_massmail750d.png] Dear colleagues, students and friends: The lens of history gives us many reminders of the massive human toll taken when hatred and bigotry rear their ugly heads and go unchallenged, or – through wicked intimidation – infect and persist within society. The same history, however, also gives us many examples of heroic and principled efforts to build and sustain human progress – achieved through the inspiring bravery and resolve of many in generations before. A recent visit to the American cemetery near Omaha Beach brought this home to one of us very recently. Over the weekend, hate-fueled violence initiated and carried out by modern-day representatives of groups associated with the evil ideas of white supremacy, KKK, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism led to the horrible events that we witnessed. It compounded the shock that these events were deliberately staged on and near a beautiful peer university campus in Charlottesville, Virginia – one devoted, as we are here, to diversity, inclusion, learning and scholarship. It is precisely because we have the wonderful privilege of freedom of expression in this country that we need to speak out in complete unanimity and in utter condemnation of this hatred and bigotry. These ideologies are absolutely contrary to what the University of Illinois System is and what it represents. In particular, we want to let our new students, our returning students and all members of the university family know that you are ALL welcome and embraced here. The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. Our universities stand with campuses and communities across the country that are stepping up in real time to help lead the way – condemning this awful behavior in any form. They and we also jointly reaffirm those bedrock values that promote a culture of understanding and respect for all – no matter what color, race, ancestry, age, interests, sexual orientation, LGBTQ status, religion, disability status, national origin, immigration status or gender. On behalf of the U of I System, our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Charlottesville and our friends at the University of Virginia. Sincerely, Tim Killeen President Michael Amiridis Chancellor, University of Illinois at Chicago Robert J. Jones Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Susan J. Koch Chancellor, University of Illinois at Springfield This mailing approved by: Office of the President sent to: Everyone Massmail Archive . Massmail powered by WebTools -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 17 12:54:37 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 12:54:37 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I have been teaching full time at the Zionized University of Illiniwaks since August of 1978. It has always been rampant with overt bigotry and racism against Palestinians and American Indians and Other People of Color. Do these University of Illiniwak Bureaucrats really expect us to take their Palaver seriously? LOL! Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 9:18 PM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Cc: Wise, Phyllis M Subject: RE: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians Wise {sic!}: “The Principles on Which We Stand” At the Zionized University of Illiniwaks Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 7:10 PM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: Wise, Phyllis M > Subject: FW: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate Except Against Palestinians and American Indians . The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Unless it is against Palestinians and American Indians. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: President Tim Killeen [mailto:presidentkilleen at uillinois.edu] Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2017 5:47 PM Subject: MASSMAIL - Condemnation of Bigotry and Hate [https://illinois.edu/skinDesigner/files/22622/ua_massmail750d.png] Dear colleagues, students and friends: The lens of history gives us many reminders of the massive human toll taken when hatred and bigotry rear their ugly heads and go unchallenged, or – through wicked intimidation – infect and persist within society. The same history, however, also gives us many examples of heroic and principled efforts to build and sustain human progress – achieved through the inspiring bravery and resolve of many in generations before. A recent visit to the American cemetery near Omaha Beach brought this home to one of us very recently. Over the weekend, hate-fueled violence initiated and carried out by modern-day representatives of groups associated with the evil ideas of white supremacy, KKK, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism led to the horrible events that we witnessed. It compounded the shock that these events were deliberately staged on and near a beautiful peer university campus in Charlottesville, Virginia – one devoted, as we are here, to diversity, inclusion, learning and scholarship. It is precisely because we have the wonderful privilege of freedom of expression in this country that we need to speak out in complete unanimity and in utter condemnation of this hatred and bigotry. These ideologies are absolutely contrary to what the University of Illinois System is and what it represents. In particular, we want to let our new students, our returning students and all members of the university family know that you are ALL welcome and embraced here. The U of I System cannot and will not tolerate actions and ideologies of discrimination, bigotry and hate. Our universities stand with campuses and communities across the country that are stepping up in real time to help lead the way – condemning this awful behavior in any form. They and we also jointly reaffirm those bedrock values that promote a culture of understanding and respect for all – no matter what color, race, ancestry, age, interests, sexual orientation, LGBTQ status, religion, disability status, national origin, immigration status or gender. On behalf of the U of I System, our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Charlottesville and our friends at the University of Virginia. Sincerely, Tim Killeen President Michael Amiridis Chancellor, University of Illinois at Chicago Robert J. Jones Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Susan J. Koch Chancellor, University of Illinois at Springfield This mailing approved by: Office of the President sent to: Everyone Massmail Archive . Massmail powered by WebTools -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 17 14:59:27 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 14:59:27 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: MASSMAIL - Illinois Stands Against Hatred Except Against Palestinians and American Indians Message-ID: Intolerance, racism and violence are destructive to any democratic society, and they will never be condoned here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unless they are directed against Palestinians and American Indians. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Chancellor Robert J. Jones [mailto:chancellor at illinois.edu] Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 9:50 AM Subject: MASSMAIL - Illinois Stands Against Hatred [https://illinois.edu/skinDesigner/files/23365/massmail_blocki-book.png] Dear members of the University community, The week before we welcome our faculty, staff and students back for a new academic year should be a time of anticipation and optimism here at Illinois, but that enthusiasm is tempered by the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, that began with anger and ended in death. Episodes like these remind us of the real human costs of hate, racial bigotry and violence masquerading as civil discourse. Nighttime, torch-bearing parades and displays of Nazi flags and paraphernalia can only be meant to intimidate, threaten and antagonize. These are the same symbols used just a few generations ago by a movement that murdered millions of people based on their race, sexual orientation, religion and ideology. The First Amendment assures the right of free speech. But some speech must be condemned as an affront to our values. We cannot afford to ignore the violence such speech produces nor the damage it does to individuals and communities. We adamantly reject the idea of racial supremacy, and we extend our deep sympathy and wishes for healing to the community of Charlottesville. At the same time, we must take this opportunity to commit ourselves as members of the Illinois community to finding peaceful and effective ways to debate, discuss and argue about divisive issues here at home. We will be defined as a university and a community by how we conduct ourselves in moments like this. Intolerance, racism and violence are destructive to any democratic society, and they will never be condoned here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Robert J. Jones Chancellor John P. Wilkin Interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Danita Brown-Young Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Assata Zerai Associate Chancellor for Diversity This mailing approved by: Office of the Chancellor sent to: Everyone Massmail Archive . Massmail powered by WebTools -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 17 14:59:27 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 14:59:27 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: MASSMAIL - Illinois Stands Against Hatred Except Against Palestinians and American Indians Message-ID: Intolerance, racism and violence are destructive to any democratic society, and they will never be condoned here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unless they are directed against Palestinians and American Indians. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Chancellor Robert J. Jones [mailto:chancellor at illinois.edu] Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 9:50 AM Subject: MASSMAIL - Illinois Stands Against Hatred [https://illinois.edu/skinDesigner/files/23365/massmail_blocki-book.png] Dear members of the University community, The week before we welcome our faculty, staff and students back for a new academic year should be a time of anticipation and optimism here at Illinois, but that enthusiasm is tempered by the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, that began with anger and ended in death. Episodes like these remind us of the real human costs of hate, racial bigotry and violence masquerading as civil discourse. Nighttime, torch-bearing parades and displays of Nazi flags and paraphernalia can only be meant to intimidate, threaten and antagonize. These are the same symbols used just a few generations ago by a movement that murdered millions of people based on their race, sexual orientation, religion and ideology. The First Amendment assures the right of free speech. But some speech must be condemned as an affront to our values. We cannot afford to ignore the violence such speech produces nor the damage it does to individuals and communities. We adamantly reject the idea of racial supremacy, and we extend our deep sympathy and wishes for healing to the community of Charlottesville. At the same time, we must take this opportunity to commit ourselves as members of the Illinois community to finding peaceful and effective ways to debate, discuss and argue about divisive issues here at home. We will be defined as a university and a community by how we conduct ourselves in moments like this. Intolerance, racism and violence are destructive to any democratic society, and they will never be condoned here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Robert J. Jones Chancellor John P. Wilkin Interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Danita Brown-Young Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Assata Zerai Associate Chancellor for Diversity This mailing approved by: Office of the Chancellor sent to: Everyone Massmail Archive . Massmail powered by WebTools -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 17 21:42:16 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 21:42:16 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville Message-ID: “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky “This episode {Charlottesville} and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice {sic!}.” UI Law School Dean The UI Law School Dean and Faculty fully support the USA Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color by Killer Koh, Clinton, Obama-- and now continued by Trump. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Long, Cheryl Lyn On Behalf Of Amar, Vikram D Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 3:54 PM To: Law * College of Law Community Subject: Reflections on Charlottesville Good afternoon, As we turn our thoughts to an exciting new academic year, we cannot help but reflect on the sad events that took place at and near the University of Virginia – a school that has an academic tradition of excellence not unlike our own – in Charlottesville over the last week. This episode and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice. Below are links to messages offered by our University President, Timothy Killeen, and our Chancellor, Robert Jones, underscoring their commitment to keep the University of Illinois a place that is safe, welcoming and intellectually vibrant for all students, faculty and staff. I associate myself fully with each of these statements. Unfortunately, short statements – even ones as laudable as these – cannot take the place of the thorough, robust discussions and suggestions for improvement concerning these issues that are needed. I look forward to the return of students, staff and faculty to the College of Law in the next few weeks so that we, as a community, can engage each other in precisely those kinds of dialogues. To that end, we invite you join us for a panel discussion featuring various College of Law faculty members, Legal Perspectives on Charlottesville, on Friday, September 15 at noon in the Max L. Rowe Auditorium. Additional event details will be posted on the College’s website in the coming days. Message from Timothy L. Killeen, President Message from Robert J. Jones, Chancellor Vikram David Amar Dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law University of Illinois College of Law -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 17 21:42:16 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 21:42:16 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville Message-ID: “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky “This episode {Charlottesville} and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice {sic!}.” UI Law School Dean The UI Law School Dean and Faculty fully support the USA Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color by Killer Koh, Clinton, Obama-- and now continued by Trump. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Long, Cheryl Lyn On Behalf Of Amar, Vikram D Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 3:54 PM To: Law * College of Law Community Subject: Reflections on Charlottesville Good afternoon, As we turn our thoughts to an exciting new academic year, we cannot help but reflect on the sad events that took place at and near the University of Virginia – a school that has an academic tradition of excellence not unlike our own – in Charlottesville over the last week. This episode and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice. Below are links to messages offered by our University President, Timothy Killeen, and our Chancellor, Robert Jones, underscoring their commitment to keep the University of Illinois a place that is safe, welcoming and intellectually vibrant for all students, faculty and staff. I associate myself fully with each of these statements. Unfortunately, short statements – even ones as laudable as these – cannot take the place of the thorough, robust discussions and suggestions for improvement concerning these issues that are needed. I look forward to the return of students, staff and faculty to the College of Law in the next few weeks so that we, as a community, can engage each other in precisely those kinds of dialogues. To that end, we invite you join us for a panel discussion featuring various College of Law faculty members, Legal Perspectives on Charlottesville, on Friday, September 15 at noon in the Max L. Rowe Auditorium. Additional event details will be posted on the College’s website in the coming days. Message from Timothy L. Killeen, President Message from Robert J. Jones, Chancellor Vikram David Amar Dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law University of Illinois College of Law -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 18 12:35:18 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 12:35:18 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky Just remember: Not even one member of the entire College of Law Faculty supported us against Killer Koh and his Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color. They are all Gang of die-hard Bigots and Racists and Warmongers. Caveat emptor! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 4:42 PM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky “This episode {Charlottesville} and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice {sic!}.” UI Law School Dean The UI Law School Dean and Faculty fully support the USA Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color by Killer Koh, Clinton, Obama-- and now continued by Trump. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Long, Cheryl Lyn On Behalf Of Amar, Vikram D Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 3:54 PM To: Law * College of Law Community > Subject: Reflections on Charlottesville Good afternoon, As we turn our thoughts to an exciting new academic year, we cannot help but reflect on the sad events that took place at and near the University of Virginia – a school that has an academic tradition of excellence not unlike our own – in Charlottesville over the last week. This episode and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice. Below are links to messages offered by our University President, Timothy Killeen, and our Chancellor, Robert Jones, underscoring their commitment to keep the University of Illinois a place that is safe, welcoming and intellectually vibrant for all students, faculty and staff. I associate myself fully with each of these statements. Unfortunately, short statements – even ones as laudable as these – cannot take the place of the thorough, robust discussions and suggestions for improvement concerning these issues that are needed. I look forward to the return of students, staff and faculty to the College of Law in the next few weeks so that we, as a community, can engage each other in precisely those kinds of dialogues. To that end, we invite you join us for a panel discussion featuring various College of Law faculty members, Legal Perspectives on Charlottesville, on Friday, September 15 at noon in the Max L. Rowe Auditorium. Additional event details will be posted on the College’s website in the coming days. Message from Timothy L. Killeen, President Message from Robert J. Jones, Chancellor Vikram David Amar Dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law University of Illinois College of Law -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 18 12:35:18 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 12:35:18 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky Just remember: Not even one member of the entire College of Law Faculty supported us against Killer Koh and his Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color. They are all Gang of die-hard Bigots and Racists and Warmongers. Caveat emptor! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 4:42 PM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky “This episode {Charlottesville} and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice {sic!}.” UI Law School Dean The UI Law School Dean and Faculty fully support the USA Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color by Killer Koh, Clinton, Obama-- and now continued by Trump. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Long, Cheryl Lyn On Behalf Of Amar, Vikram D Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 3:54 PM To: Law * College of Law Community > Subject: Reflections on Charlottesville Good afternoon, As we turn our thoughts to an exciting new academic year, we cannot help but reflect on the sad events that took place at and near the University of Virginia – a school that has an academic tradition of excellence not unlike our own – in Charlottesville over the last week. This episode and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice. Below are links to messages offered by our University President, Timothy Killeen, and our Chancellor, Robert Jones, underscoring their commitment to keep the University of Illinois a place that is safe, welcoming and intellectually vibrant for all students, faculty and staff. I associate myself fully with each of these statements. Unfortunately, short statements – even ones as laudable as these – cannot take the place of the thorough, robust discussions and suggestions for improvement concerning these issues that are needed. I look forward to the return of students, staff and faculty to the College of Law in the next few weeks so that we, as a community, can engage each other in precisely those kinds of dialogues. To that end, we invite you join us for a panel discussion featuring various College of Law faculty members, Legal Perspectives on Charlottesville, on Friday, September 15 at noon in the Max L. Rowe Auditorium. Additional event details will be posted on the College’s website in the coming days. Message from Timothy L. Killeen, President Message from Robert J. Jones, Chancellor Vikram David Amar Dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law University of Illinois College of Law -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 18 13:14:01 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 13:14:01 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: The fourth branch Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Friday, August 18, 2017 12:28 AM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: The fourth branch I still subscribe to law professor Francis Boyle’s view; nuclear weapons and related materiel are not property–property rights attach to legitimate things, not to criminal instrumentalia that have no use but criminal annihilation. I’ve argued all ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 18 13:14:01 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 13:14:01 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: The fourth branch Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Friday, August 18, 2017 12:28 AM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: The fourth branch I still subscribe to law professor Francis Boyle’s view; nuclear weapons and related materiel are not property–property rights attach to legitimate things, not to criminal instrumentalia that have no use but criminal annihilation. I’ve argued all ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 18 13:15:26 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 13:15:26 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The fourth branch Message-ID: As you can see, the Assistant US Attorney was so stunned by my argument that he failed to cross-examine me. Whereupon we got a Directed Verdict of Acquittal. Fab. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS ------------------------------- UNITED STATES OF AMERICA : : v. : CRIMINAL NO. 87-284-ALEX : MARGARET MARY BRODHEAD and : THOMAS P. LEWIS : ------------------------------- U.S. Post Office & Courthouse Boston, Massachusetts Friday, March 4, 1988 VOLUME I BEFORE: HON. JOYCE LONDON ALEXANDER, U.S. MAGISTRATE APPEARANCES: OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, (By Martin F. Murphy, Esq.), 1107 Post Office Building, Boston, Massachusetts 02109, on behalf of the Government. GOLDSTEIN & PATCHEN, (By Lee D. Goldstein, Esq.), 678 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, on behalf of Defendant Thomas Lewis. MARGARET MARY BRODHEAD, Pro Se. THE CLERK: The Court is now in session. THE COURT: Defendants may call their next witness. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'd like to call Professor Francis Boyle, please. WHEREUPON, FRANCIS BOYLE, having been first duly sworn, was examined and testified as follows: DIRECT EXAMINATION Q. Now, Professor Boyle, I'm going to show you a copy of the indictment in this case. And you notice in the indictment that it charges that the defendants are guilty of entering the air base for a purpose prohibited by law, and that the purpose was that they were going to willfully injure or commit depredation against property. Do you see that on the indictment? A. Yes, I do. Q. You're aware of the testimony that occurred prior today on the nature of the P-3 Orion? A. Yes, I have heard the testimony of Dr. Walker. Q. And you're also aware of the testimony regarding the Seasprite helicopter? A. Yes. And I have also read about both systems in my own studies, as well. Q. Now based on the hearing of the testimony and based on what you've read, do you have an opinion as to whether or not the Seasprite and the Orion are property entitled to legal protection? MR. MURPHY: Your Honor, objection as to a question in that form. I think it ought to be if he has an opinion as to whether they are property of the United States or a department thereof under 18 U.S.C. 1361. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'll withdraw. I'll ask the question suggested by the U.S. Attorney. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Do you have an opinion as to whether or not the Seasprite and the P-3 Orion are property of the United States Government entitled to protection under Title 18, Section 1361? A. Well, based on my knowledge of the Orion and Seasprite, as part of a first strike scenario, they would not be entitled to any protection at all under United States law, defined to include international law. They would constitute an instrumentality of crime to the extent that they are to be used as part of a first strike system. And for that reason, they would not be entitled to any protection as property as that concept is defined. Q. Now you talked about your opinion is based on particular parts of United States law; is that correct? A. Well, that's right. International law is also part of United States law. It is part of the federal common law that's binding on this Court. It is also part of, for example, the law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And so any concept or notion such as property -- "a bundle of rights entitled to be protected by law" is the black letter rule -- has to take into account considerations of international law. Q. And are you aware if the armed force of the United States has published any particular document which specifies whether or not this property would be protected? A. Well, the leading case dealing with this arises out of the prosecution of German industrialists after the Second World War called the Zyklon B case. The Zyklon B case was prosecuted by an agreement between the United States and the other victors of the Second World War. It dealt with the question of whether or not two German industrialists were entitled to sell Zyklon B, prussic acid, to the S.S. with good grounds to believe that it would be used for the purpose of exterminating human beings. It had been the case that this corporation in Germany had sold the prussic acid to the S.S. to be used for delousing or exterminating vermin. At some point in time, pursuant to the Final Solution as it were of the Nazi era, the S.S. decided to use the Zyklon B gas to exterminate millions of people. Particularly, at Auschwitz, the Zyklon B gas was used for the purpose of exterminating approximately two million people. After the war, the owner of the company and the operating manager of this company were put on trial. And they argued that the Zyklon B gas was just an article, a commodity that, in theory, could be used for a lawful purpose and could be sold in commerce just as any other type of commodity would be sold. The tribunal ruled that, as a matter of fact, that was not the case. That this commodity was being put to a criminal purpose, and that was exterminating human beings, which, in turn, was a war crime within the meaning of the Hague Regulations. And, therefore, these two German industrialists had no right to be selling this particular commodity to the S.S., and hence could be found guilty of being accomplices to the commission of war crimes by virtue of the fact that they were selling the commodity. They were both sentenced to death, and they were both hanged. So certainly the Zyklon B case stands for the proposition that some instruments, commodities, call it what you want, are not entitled to be treated as property within the meaning of international law. I should also point out that it might have been perhaps consistent with Nazi law at the time for them to have sold prussic acid to the S.S. to be used for the purpose of exterminating two million people. But that did not sway the tribunal under the rules that they were operating under. They had been charged with the task of not paying attention to any Nazi law, internal law that was inconsistent with international law. And so on the basis of that operating procedure which they did have, they did find these two defendants guilty and they were hanged. Q. Now is that particular decision, in the Zyklon B case, is that a part of United States law? A. The Zyklon B prosecution occurred as a result of an agreement entered into between the major allied powers after the Second World War, including the United States, for the trial and prosecution of the leading Nazi war criminals in Europe. And so there was a formal agreement between the U.S., France, Great Britain, and Russia that called for the prosecution of these people. Now this formal prosecution itself was -- pursuant to the terms of this agreement -- carried out by a British tribunal. But their jurisdiction to try was based on an agreement with U.S. permission. And so, they were acting as an agency or instrumentality of the United States Government, the British Government, the Russian Government, and the French Government. Q. How are any of the rules taken from some of those trials after World War II incorporated in any document that had been adopted by the armed forces of the United States? A. Yes. Before the Second World War the United States Government had a manual for the conduct of armed hostilities that was issued to all its troops in the field. It was based primarily on the Hague Regulations of 1907, which served as the basis for the convictions of these two industrialists, and, of course, their subsequent hanging. As a result of the Nazi depredations in the Second World War, the U.S. Government decided that it was going to have to revise its internal rules and also the rules of international law with respect to the conduct of hostility. This then resulted in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Genocide Convention of 1948, and also an attempt to distill the essence of these various trials that were set up after the Second World War, both in Europe and in Japan, for trying the leading war criminals of that time. All of these rules then were set forth in two new manuals that took the place of the older War Department Manual. Q. And these are United States manuals. A. These are U.S. manuals, yes. In 1955, the Navy issued a manual on the conduct of naval warfare to all officers in the field, describing precisely what were the rules on international law with respect to the conduct of hostilities. And again, in 1956, the U.S. Army issued a field manual to all its officers in the field, called "The Law of Land Warfare," that attempted to encapsulate all the rules based on the Hague Regulations, the Geneva Conventions, the trials of the major war criminals, and other rules that had been distilled from these various judgments after the Second World War. Q. And those manuals are in existence today; is that right? A. Yes. The manual for the Navy, as I said, was published in 1955. It is still binding as law and is still issued to all naval officers when they get sent into the field and naval officers are trained in it. Likewise, for the Army, the U.S. Army Field Manual published in 1956, that is still binding law, as far as the United States Government is concerned. And, indeed, if you read the introductions to these manuals, it states specifically that as far as the United States Government is concerned, these manuals contain the rules of international law with respect to the conduct of hostilities that it believes binds United States citizens and soldiers and sailors and also will bind the citizens, soldiers, and sailors of foreign states that might be in conflict with the United States Government. Q. And I take it you're familiar with the contents; is that right? A. Yes, I am. Q. Now you said it has a binding effect on current military personnel of the United States? A. Yes, it does. And I should also point out civilian officials, too. To the extent that civilians, for example, in the Pentagon are directly involved in the conduct of hostilities, they, too, are bound by these rules. And that, again, is made quite clear. It goes back to the World War II precedents where some of the German civilian officials argued that we weren't really responsible for what was going on. For example, in the case of the German industrialists, they said, "Well, we were just businessmen selling gas." And the various tribunals said no, that civilians and officials and even private businessmen can be found responsible for violations of laws and customs of war. Q. What particularly does it say with respect to the laws of warfare as it would affect this definition of property we've been talking about? A. The key point that came in as a result of the World War II experience was two new types of crimes that were recognized that had not existed before the Second World War. The first was known as a crime against peace. That was planning, preparation, conspiracy, waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties or agreements. That type of crime had not really been considered to exist before the Second World War. The second type of crime that came into existence and, as I said, is still recognized in both these field manuals, is what is known as a crime against humanity. And there, the archetypal case was Hitler's attempt to exterminate Jews, Russians, Gypsies, Slavs, and others. That is, killing people because of their racial, ethnic, religious characteristics, or things of that nature. And in this definition of crime against humanity, it specifically states that, for example, the wanton destruction of a city is a crime against humanity. Q. And would this include particular property which is an instrumentality of these crimes? A. Within these field manuals, there is a provision dealing with, as you know, what lawyers call inchoate crimes: planning, preparation, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and complicity. And it is determined in these field manuals that these inchoate crimes are international crimes in their own right. As Mr. Justice Jackson said when he was prosecuting the Nazi war criminals, it simply was not enough to go after individuals who had already committed substantive offenses, because that will not do you much good. What you want to do also is to prevent the substantive offenses in the first place. And so, there was recognized also personal criminal responsibility for committing inchoate offenses. So, again, to the extent that a weapon system is used for the purpose of planning, preparing, conspiring, aiding and abetting, or complicity in the commission of a crime against peace or a crime against humanity or a traditional war crime, then that would render the individual himself responsible for violation of international law, very similar to what happened in the Zyklon B case with the German industrialists supplying Zyklon B, knowing that it could be used for the purpose of exterminating human beings. Q. And the answer that you've given is really an important basis upon which you're testifying that the P-3 Orion and the Seasprite are not entitled to protection as property, as defined under the United States Code. A. Well, to the extent that they are part of a first strike system, they are instrumentalities of criminal activity. A first strike system or scenario is planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit a crime against peace, a crime against humanity, and a war crime. Q. I see. And, again, these particular proscriptions: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, are contained in the Navy field manual; is that correct? A. That's correct. And a war crime, too. Q. Now as to these particular crimes, would it be a defense to these crimes that the act was not made illegal under domestic law? A. No. Q. And upon what is that based? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor, as to his point. That's a decision for you and not for an expert. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Again, I ask about specific sources upon which he's based the conclusions that this particular property was not entitled to protection. To the extent that there may be any other exceptions or exclusions in terms of how one might characterize as property, I would argue that the question is entirely relevant. Again, it's going directly to any defense that well, this really is property; this is entitled to protection. MR. MURPHY: All right. I don't quite understand still the point about whether this property is entitled to protection. It seems to me the question is -- if this is a defense and not an attempt to inject a necessity defense into the case, but is a defense to the charge in the indictment that this property is not entitled to protection, the question ought to be, "Is this property, the property of the government within the meaning of the relevant decisions under 18 U.S.C. Section 1361?" And I think we're getting very far afield from that area of inquiry. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Now, Professor Boyle, I believe you also mentioned that a particular Genocide Convention was incorporated in these particular field manuals; is that right? A. Well, this concept of crime against humanity, particularly with reference to the Jewish people, was fully approved by the United States Government. And various individuals after the Second World War were sentenced to death and executed for committing a combination of a crime against humanity and a traditional war crime or a crime against peace. It was thought, however, by the United States Government at that time, that this was such a particularly heinous crime to exterminate people because of their racial, national, religious, or ethnic characteristic that a special treaty should be drafted. And that was the Genocide Convention of 1948, which the United States Senate has given its advice and consent to in 1986. I think today the leading case in point for the applicability of the Genocide Convention would be what the white minority racist regime in South Africa is doing to its Black population there. So that this treaty is still on point and is still in the process of being used and relied on by the United States Government today. Q. And how would this particular convention -- again, as incorporated in the army field manual and the navy field manual -- A. Well, I should be precise and say the convention was not incorporated by name into these two field manuals; the concept of crime against humanity was, and that served as the basis for the Genocide Convention. The reason they did not specifically name the Genocide Convention was that although the U.S. Government signed it in 1948, the Senate did not ratify it until 1986. And the reason why was that conservative southern senators were afraid that if we ratified this treaty, American Blacks would be able to use the Genocide Convention to state a cause of action in a federal court. And so they held up the ratification, the formal technical ratification of the treaty and its advice and consent by the Senate until 1986. So that's why they don't mention per se the Genocide Convention. Q. I see. But there is particular ratification by the U.S. Senate of that convention. A. The U.S. Senate just recently in 1986 gave its advice and consent to the ratification of that treaty, yes. Q. Now is that particular act of the Senate applicable to either the use or planned use of the P-3 Orion and of the Seasprite helicopter? A. Clearly, the convention states that planning, preparation, or conspiracy to commit genocide is a crime in its own right. So to the extent that any weapon systems that the U.S. Government has that could be used for the purpose of genocide, would be prohibited by that convention. Q. And do you have any knowledge of how any particular use of these aircraft might be involved in a violation of that convention? A. Yes. MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor. Again, I don't think that this is relevant. THE COURT: Sustained. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Again, I would offer to prove, Judge, that I think there's a proper foundation that we're not talking about some kind of foreign law. We're talking about law which was ratified by the Senate, just like any other law of the House or Congress. So I'm not talking about foreign law. I'm talking about a particular source of United States law which would be relevant to the issue of whether or not these particular aircraft were property and entitled to protection. THE COURT: Why don't you ask the witness that as opposed to drawing out and seemingly going far afield. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Okay. Again, I was trying to lay a proper foundation. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. But I ask you again, Professor Boyle, the Genocide Convention is part of United States law; is that correct? A. That's correct. Q. Do you have an opinion as to how the Genocide Convention affects the definition of property in the U.S. Code, more particularly, these two aircraft which are the basis of the trial today? A. I do have an opinion, yes. Q. And could you tell the Court that opinion? A. Well, the opinion is that to the extent these particular weapon systems would be used for the purpose of planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit genocide, they would violate the terms of the Genocide Convention and, therefore, constitute an instrumentality of criminal activity. Q. And how particularly might this be a criminal activity, based on what you've studied? A. This goes to what Dr. Walker testified on Presidential Directive 59. Within that presidential directive, there is an actual plan for the use of nuclear weapons against people because of their racial, ethnic composition, almost identical to what the Nazi regime had in store for Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, or whatever. And, indeed, there has been a considerable amount of writing in the professional literature pointing out that this particular component of Presidential Directive 59 constitutes planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit genocide, and is inconsistent with the terms of the Genocide Convention, and should be removed and eliminated. To the best of my knowledge, that has not been done. Q. Now is this also a violation in peace time, as well as in wartime? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor. THE COURT: Sustained. MR. GOLDSTEIN: But, Judge, there's been testimony I believe by Petty Officer McCoy that he believed that the particular use of the weapons and the P-3 Orion and Seasprite were only applicable in times of war. And given that that's been in evidence, I think it's a fair question to ask. I think I have the right to adduce some evidence to rebut that by one who I believe is qualified to know. THE COURT: If -- and the Court is not convinced that he said just in wartime, but if that is counsel's recollection, the Court will allow you to answer the question: yes or no. THE WITNESS: The Genocide Convention clearly states that it applies in times of peace and in times of war. THE COURT: Okay. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Professor Boyle, just let me ask you, so that it's entirely clear: based on your testimony thus far, based on your training, based on your experience, do you believe that the Seasprite and the Orion were property entitled to protection, as defined under Section 1361 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor, as to the "entitled to protection" phrase. That is injecting Professor Boyle's personal opinion about what ought to be protected into this proceeding. Is it property of the United States, under the statutes? That ought to be the question. THE COURT: Sustained as to form. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'll withdraw the question and ask again. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Based on your professional opinion, based on your training and experience, are the Seasprite helicopter and the P-3 Orion property within the meaning of 1361 of the U.S. Criminal Code? A. Again, 1361 has to be interpreted by reference to international law, which is a part of United States domestic law. And to the extent that these weapon systems are to be used for the purpose of planning, preparing, or conspiring to commit crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide, they are instrumentalities of crime and of criminal activity. They are not property defined as "a bundle of rights, entitled to be protected by law." They would be outlawed, prohibited, and proscribed by law. MR. GOLDSTEIN: No further questions. THE COURT: Mr. Murphy, any cross-examination? MR. MURPHY: No cross-examination. e:\wpwin52\usvbrodh.2 Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 8:14 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: FW: The fourth branch Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Friday, August 18, 2017 12:28 AM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: The fourth branch I still subscribe to law professor Francis Boyle’s view; nuclear weapons and related materiel are not property–property rights attach to legitimate things, not to criminal instrumentalia that have no use but criminal annihilation. I’ve argued all ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 18 13:15:26 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 13:15:26 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The fourth branch Message-ID: As you can see, the Assistant US Attorney was so stunned by my argument that he failed to cross-examine me. Whereupon we got a Directed Verdict of Acquittal. Fab. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS ------------------------------- UNITED STATES OF AMERICA : : v. : CRIMINAL NO. 87-284-ALEX : MARGARET MARY BRODHEAD and : THOMAS P. LEWIS : ------------------------------- U.S. Post Office & Courthouse Boston, Massachusetts Friday, March 4, 1988 VOLUME I BEFORE: HON. JOYCE LONDON ALEXANDER, U.S. MAGISTRATE APPEARANCES: OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, (By Martin F. Murphy, Esq.), 1107 Post Office Building, Boston, Massachusetts 02109, on behalf of the Government. GOLDSTEIN & PATCHEN, (By Lee D. Goldstein, Esq.), 678 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, on behalf of Defendant Thomas Lewis. MARGARET MARY BRODHEAD, Pro Se. THE CLERK: The Court is now in session. THE COURT: Defendants may call their next witness. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'd like to call Professor Francis Boyle, please. WHEREUPON, FRANCIS BOYLE, having been first duly sworn, was examined and testified as follows: DIRECT EXAMINATION Q. Now, Professor Boyle, I'm going to show you a copy of the indictment in this case. And you notice in the indictment that it charges that the defendants are guilty of entering the air base for a purpose prohibited by law, and that the purpose was that they were going to willfully injure or commit depredation against property. Do you see that on the indictment? A. Yes, I do. Q. You're aware of the testimony that occurred prior today on the nature of the P-3 Orion? A. Yes, I have heard the testimony of Dr. Walker. Q. And you're also aware of the testimony regarding the Seasprite helicopter? A. Yes. And I have also read about both systems in my own studies, as well. Q. Now based on the hearing of the testimony and based on what you've read, do you have an opinion as to whether or not the Seasprite and the Orion are property entitled to legal protection? MR. MURPHY: Your Honor, objection as to a question in that form. I think it ought to be if he has an opinion as to whether they are property of the United States or a department thereof under 18 U.S.C. 1361. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'll withdraw. I'll ask the question suggested by the U.S. Attorney. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Do you have an opinion as to whether or not the Seasprite and the P-3 Orion are property of the United States Government entitled to protection under Title 18, Section 1361? A. Well, based on my knowledge of the Orion and Seasprite, as part of a first strike scenario, they would not be entitled to any protection at all under United States law, defined to include international law. They would constitute an instrumentality of crime to the extent that they are to be used as part of a first strike system. And for that reason, they would not be entitled to any protection as property as that concept is defined. Q. Now you talked about your opinion is based on particular parts of United States law; is that correct? A. Well, that's right. International law is also part of United States law. It is part of the federal common law that's binding on this Court. It is also part of, for example, the law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And so any concept or notion such as property -- "a bundle of rights entitled to be protected by law" is the black letter rule -- has to take into account considerations of international law. Q. And are you aware if the armed force of the United States has published any particular document which specifies whether or not this property would be protected? A. Well, the leading case dealing with this arises out of the prosecution of German industrialists after the Second World War called the Zyklon B case. The Zyklon B case was prosecuted by an agreement between the United States and the other victors of the Second World War. It dealt with the question of whether or not two German industrialists were entitled to sell Zyklon B, prussic acid, to the S.S. with good grounds to believe that it would be used for the purpose of exterminating human beings. It had been the case that this corporation in Germany had sold the prussic acid to the S.S. to be used for delousing or exterminating vermin. At some point in time, pursuant to the Final Solution as it were of the Nazi era, the S.S. decided to use the Zyklon B gas to exterminate millions of people. Particularly, at Auschwitz, the Zyklon B gas was used for the purpose of exterminating approximately two million people. After the war, the owner of the company and the operating manager of this company were put on trial. And they argued that the Zyklon B gas was just an article, a commodity that, in theory, could be used for a lawful purpose and could be sold in commerce just as any other type of commodity would be sold. The tribunal ruled that, as a matter of fact, that was not the case. That this commodity was being put to a criminal purpose, and that was exterminating human beings, which, in turn, was a war crime within the meaning of the Hague Regulations. And, therefore, these two German industrialists had no right to be selling this particular commodity to the S.S., and hence could be found guilty of being accomplices to the commission of war crimes by virtue of the fact that they were selling the commodity. They were both sentenced to death, and they were both hanged. So certainly the Zyklon B case stands for the proposition that some instruments, commodities, call it what you want, are not entitled to be treated as property within the meaning of international law. I should also point out that it might have been perhaps consistent with Nazi law at the time for them to have sold prussic acid to the S.S. to be used for the purpose of exterminating two million people. But that did not sway the tribunal under the rules that they were operating under. They had been charged with the task of not paying attention to any Nazi law, internal law that was inconsistent with international law. And so on the basis of that operating procedure which they did have, they did find these two defendants guilty and they were hanged. Q. Now is that particular decision, in the Zyklon B case, is that a part of United States law? A. The Zyklon B prosecution occurred as a result of an agreement entered into between the major allied powers after the Second World War, including the United States, for the trial and prosecution of the leading Nazi war criminals in Europe. And so there was a formal agreement between the U.S., France, Great Britain, and Russia that called for the prosecution of these people. Now this formal prosecution itself was -- pursuant to the terms of this agreement -- carried out by a British tribunal. But their jurisdiction to try was based on an agreement with U.S. permission. And so, they were acting as an agency or instrumentality of the United States Government, the British Government, the Russian Government, and the French Government. Q. How are any of the rules taken from some of those trials after World War II incorporated in any document that had been adopted by the armed forces of the United States? A. Yes. Before the Second World War the United States Government had a manual for the conduct of armed hostilities that was issued to all its troops in the field. It was based primarily on the Hague Regulations of 1907, which served as the basis for the convictions of these two industrialists, and, of course, their subsequent hanging. As a result of the Nazi depredations in the Second World War, the U.S. Government decided that it was going to have to revise its internal rules and also the rules of international law with respect to the conduct of hostility. This then resulted in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Genocide Convention of 1948, and also an attempt to distill the essence of these various trials that were set up after the Second World War, both in Europe and in Japan, for trying the leading war criminals of that time. All of these rules then were set forth in two new manuals that took the place of the older War Department Manual. Q. And these are United States manuals. A. These are U.S. manuals, yes. In 1955, the Navy issued a manual on the conduct of naval warfare to all officers in the field, describing precisely what were the rules on international law with respect to the conduct of hostilities. And again, in 1956, the U.S. Army issued a field manual to all its officers in the field, called "The Law of Land Warfare," that attempted to encapsulate all the rules based on the Hague Regulations, the Geneva Conventions, the trials of the major war criminals, and other rules that had been distilled from these various judgments after the Second World War. Q. And those manuals are in existence today; is that right? A. Yes. The manual for the Navy, as I said, was published in 1955. It is still binding as law and is still issued to all naval officers when they get sent into the field and naval officers are trained in it. Likewise, for the Army, the U.S. Army Field Manual published in 1956, that is still binding law, as far as the United States Government is concerned. And, indeed, if you read the introductions to these manuals, it states specifically that as far as the United States Government is concerned, these manuals contain the rules of international law with respect to the conduct of hostilities that it believes binds United States citizens and soldiers and sailors and also will bind the citizens, soldiers, and sailors of foreign states that might be in conflict with the United States Government. Q. And I take it you're familiar with the contents; is that right? A. Yes, I am. Q. Now you said it has a binding effect on current military personnel of the United States? A. Yes, it does. And I should also point out civilian officials, too. To the extent that civilians, for example, in the Pentagon are directly involved in the conduct of hostilities, they, too, are bound by these rules. And that, again, is made quite clear. It goes back to the World War II precedents where some of the German civilian officials argued that we weren't really responsible for what was going on. For example, in the case of the German industrialists, they said, "Well, we were just businessmen selling gas." And the various tribunals said no, that civilians and officials and even private businessmen can be found responsible for violations of laws and customs of war. Q. What particularly does it say with respect to the laws of warfare as it would affect this definition of property we've been talking about? A. The key point that came in as a result of the World War II experience was two new types of crimes that were recognized that had not existed before the Second World War. The first was known as a crime against peace. That was planning, preparation, conspiracy, waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties or agreements. That type of crime had not really been considered to exist before the Second World War. The second type of crime that came into existence and, as I said, is still recognized in both these field manuals, is what is known as a crime against humanity. And there, the archetypal case was Hitler's attempt to exterminate Jews, Russians, Gypsies, Slavs, and others. That is, killing people because of their racial, ethnic, religious characteristics, or things of that nature. And in this definition of crime against humanity, it specifically states that, for example, the wanton destruction of a city is a crime against humanity. Q. And would this include particular property which is an instrumentality of these crimes? A. Within these field manuals, there is a provision dealing with, as you know, what lawyers call inchoate crimes: planning, preparation, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and complicity. And it is determined in these field manuals that these inchoate crimes are international crimes in their own right. As Mr. Justice Jackson said when he was prosecuting the Nazi war criminals, it simply was not enough to go after individuals who had already committed substantive offenses, because that will not do you much good. What you want to do also is to prevent the substantive offenses in the first place. And so, there was recognized also personal criminal responsibility for committing inchoate offenses. So, again, to the extent that a weapon system is used for the purpose of planning, preparing, conspiring, aiding and abetting, or complicity in the commission of a crime against peace or a crime against humanity or a traditional war crime, then that would render the individual himself responsible for violation of international law, very similar to what happened in the Zyklon B case with the German industrialists supplying Zyklon B, knowing that it could be used for the purpose of exterminating human beings. Q. And the answer that you've given is really an important basis upon which you're testifying that the P-3 Orion and the Seasprite are not entitled to protection as property, as defined under the United States Code. A. Well, to the extent that they are part of a first strike system, they are instrumentalities of criminal activity. A first strike system or scenario is planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit a crime against peace, a crime against humanity, and a war crime. Q. I see. And, again, these particular proscriptions: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, are contained in the Navy field manual; is that correct? A. That's correct. And a war crime, too. Q. Now as to these particular crimes, would it be a defense to these crimes that the act was not made illegal under domestic law? A. No. Q. And upon what is that based? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor, as to his point. That's a decision for you and not for an expert. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Again, I ask about specific sources upon which he's based the conclusions that this particular property was not entitled to protection. To the extent that there may be any other exceptions or exclusions in terms of how one might characterize as property, I would argue that the question is entirely relevant. Again, it's going directly to any defense that well, this really is property; this is entitled to protection. MR. MURPHY: All right. I don't quite understand still the point about whether this property is entitled to protection. It seems to me the question is -- if this is a defense and not an attempt to inject a necessity defense into the case, but is a defense to the charge in the indictment that this property is not entitled to protection, the question ought to be, "Is this property, the property of the government within the meaning of the relevant decisions under 18 U.S.C. Section 1361?" And I think we're getting very far afield from that area of inquiry. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Now, Professor Boyle, I believe you also mentioned that a particular Genocide Convention was incorporated in these particular field manuals; is that right? A. Well, this concept of crime against humanity, particularly with reference to the Jewish people, was fully approved by the United States Government. And various individuals after the Second World War were sentenced to death and executed for committing a combination of a crime against humanity and a traditional war crime or a crime against peace. It was thought, however, by the United States Government at that time, that this was such a particularly heinous crime to exterminate people because of their racial, national, religious, or ethnic characteristic that a special treaty should be drafted. And that was the Genocide Convention of 1948, which the United States Senate has given its advice and consent to in 1986. I think today the leading case in point for the applicability of the Genocide Convention would be what the white minority racist regime in South Africa is doing to its Black population there. So that this treaty is still on point and is still in the process of being used and relied on by the United States Government today. Q. And how would this particular convention -- again, as incorporated in the army field manual and the navy field manual -- A. Well, I should be precise and say the convention was not incorporated by name into these two field manuals; the concept of crime against humanity was, and that served as the basis for the Genocide Convention. The reason they did not specifically name the Genocide Convention was that although the U.S. Government signed it in 1948, the Senate did not ratify it until 1986. And the reason why was that conservative southern senators were afraid that if we ratified this treaty, American Blacks would be able to use the Genocide Convention to state a cause of action in a federal court. And so they held up the ratification, the formal technical ratification of the treaty and its advice and consent by the Senate until 1986. So that's why they don't mention per se the Genocide Convention. Q. I see. But there is particular ratification by the U.S. Senate of that convention. A. The U.S. Senate just recently in 1986 gave its advice and consent to the ratification of that treaty, yes. Q. Now is that particular act of the Senate applicable to either the use or planned use of the P-3 Orion and of the Seasprite helicopter? A. Clearly, the convention states that planning, preparation, or conspiracy to commit genocide is a crime in its own right. So to the extent that any weapon systems that the U.S. Government has that could be used for the purpose of genocide, would be prohibited by that convention. Q. And do you have any knowledge of how any particular use of these aircraft might be involved in a violation of that convention? A. Yes. MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor. Again, I don't think that this is relevant. THE COURT: Sustained. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Again, I would offer to prove, Judge, that I think there's a proper foundation that we're not talking about some kind of foreign law. We're talking about law which was ratified by the Senate, just like any other law of the House or Congress. So I'm not talking about foreign law. I'm talking about a particular source of United States law which would be relevant to the issue of whether or not these particular aircraft were property and entitled to protection. THE COURT: Why don't you ask the witness that as opposed to drawing out and seemingly going far afield. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Okay. Again, I was trying to lay a proper foundation. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. But I ask you again, Professor Boyle, the Genocide Convention is part of United States law; is that correct? A. That's correct. Q. Do you have an opinion as to how the Genocide Convention affects the definition of property in the U.S. Code, more particularly, these two aircraft which are the basis of the trial today? A. I do have an opinion, yes. Q. And could you tell the Court that opinion? A. Well, the opinion is that to the extent these particular weapon systems would be used for the purpose of planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit genocide, they would violate the terms of the Genocide Convention and, therefore, constitute an instrumentality of criminal activity. Q. And how particularly might this be a criminal activity, based on what you've studied? A. This goes to what Dr. Walker testified on Presidential Directive 59. Within that presidential directive, there is an actual plan for the use of nuclear weapons against people because of their racial, ethnic composition, almost identical to what the Nazi regime had in store for Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, or whatever. And, indeed, there has been a considerable amount of writing in the professional literature pointing out that this particular component of Presidential Directive 59 constitutes planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit genocide, and is inconsistent with the terms of the Genocide Convention, and should be removed and eliminated. To the best of my knowledge, that has not been done. Q. Now is this also a violation in peace time, as well as in wartime? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor. THE COURT: Sustained. MR. GOLDSTEIN: But, Judge, there's been testimony I believe by Petty Officer McCoy that he believed that the particular use of the weapons and the P-3 Orion and Seasprite were only applicable in times of war. And given that that's been in evidence, I think it's a fair question to ask. I think I have the right to adduce some evidence to rebut that by one who I believe is qualified to know. THE COURT: If -- and the Court is not convinced that he said just in wartime, but if that is counsel's recollection, the Court will allow you to answer the question: yes or no. THE WITNESS: The Genocide Convention clearly states that it applies in times of peace and in times of war. THE COURT: Okay. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Professor Boyle, just let me ask you, so that it's entirely clear: based on your testimony thus far, based on your training, based on your experience, do you believe that the Seasprite and the Orion were property entitled to protection, as defined under Section 1361 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor, as to the "entitled to protection" phrase. That is injecting Professor Boyle's personal opinion about what ought to be protected into this proceeding. Is it property of the United States, under the statutes? That ought to be the question. THE COURT: Sustained as to form. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'll withdraw the question and ask again. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Based on your professional opinion, based on your training and experience, are the Seasprite helicopter and the P-3 Orion property within the meaning of 1361 of the U.S. Criminal Code? A. Again, 1361 has to be interpreted by reference to international law, which is a part of United States domestic law. And to the extent that these weapon systems are to be used for the purpose of planning, preparing, or conspiring to commit crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide, they are instrumentalities of crime and of criminal activity. They are not property defined as "a bundle of rights, entitled to be protected by law." They would be outlawed, prohibited, and proscribed by law. MR. GOLDSTEIN: No further questions. THE COURT: Mr. Murphy, any cross-examination? MR. MURPHY: No cross-examination. e:\wpwin52\usvbrodh.2 Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 8:14 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: FW: The fourth branch Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Friday, August 18, 2017 12:28 AM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: The fourth branch I still subscribe to law professor Francis Boyle’s view; nuclear weapons and related materiel are not property–property rights attach to legitimate things, not to criminal instrumentalia that have no use but criminal annihilation. I’ve argued all ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 18 13:17:18 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 13:17:18 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The fourth branch Message-ID: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD 4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 LITTLEFIELD (800) 462-6420 www.RowmanLittlefield.com PROTESTING POWER WAR, RESISTANCE, AND LAW By Francis A. Boyle “If you believe Dante may be right, that “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of moral crisis, remain neutral,” you need this book…If you are concerned that our country lives by its Constitution and laws, its often-proclaimed principles . . . you too should read this book. . . If you cherish freedom, here is your chance to learn how much you have. A person ignorant of her rights has little advantage over those who have none.”—Ramsey Clark, Former U.S. Attorney General “Francis Boyle, who has distinguished himself again and again as a fierce and brilliant defender of international law and human rights, now takes his mission one step further. He lays out a comprehensive argument in defense of citizens who commit civil resistance to protest illegal governmental aggressions and war crimes. He does so with impeccable research, stylistic elegance, and devastating evidence. This is an invaluable and powerful handbook for citizens who dare to challenge our war-makers.” —Howard Zinn “In this expert and lucid manual, international lawyer Francis Boyle focuses his attention on civil resistance, a category that he distinguishes sharply from civil disobedience. Civil resistance, he persuasively argues, is a ‘basic right’ of American citizens under international and domestic law, as ‘it is the civil-resisters who are the sheriffs, and the U.S. government officials committing state crimes are the outlaws.’ The historical and legal analysis provides information and understanding of inestimable value to all citizens who care about their country.” —Noam Chomsky “Francis Boyle has, once again, given us a valuable lesson in current history and invaluable insight into the role that lawyers must now play in defending human rights. He reminds us also that the significant cases are not ‘about the lawyers.’ We lawyers are called upon to give voice to the struggles and aspirations of others. This book will help us learn to play that role.” —Michael F. Tigar, Washington College of Law and Chair, ABA Section of Litigation, 1989-1990 In this indispensable book, distinguished activist lawyer Francis Boyle sounds an impassioned clarion call to citizen action against Bush administration policies, both domestic and international. Especially since the Reagan Administration, hundreds of thousands of Americans have used non-violent civil resistance to protest against elements of U.S. policy that violate basic principles of international law, the United States Constitution, and human rights. Such citizen protests have led to an unprecedented number of arrests and prosecutions by federal, state, and local governments around the country. Boyle, who has spent his career advising and defending civil resisters, explores how international law can be used to question the legality of specific U.S. government foreign and domestic policies. He focuses especially on the aftermath of 9/11 and the implications of the war on Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, the war on Iraq, the doctrine of preventive warfare, and the domestic abridgement of civil rights. Written for concerned citizens, activists, NGOs, civil resisters, their supporters, and their lawyers, Protesting Power provides the best legal and constitutional arguments to support and defend civil resistance activities. Including a number of compelling excerpts from his own trial appearances as an expert witness and as counsel, the author offers inspirational and practical advice for protesters who find themselves in court. This invaluable book stands alone as the only guide available on how to use international law, constitutional law, and the laws of war to defend peaceful non-violent protesters against governmental policies that are illegal and criminal. About the Author Francis Boyle is professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A Harvard law graduate, for the past twenty years he has been involved as lawyer and/or witness in the major cases challenging U.S. defense policy, notably nuclear issues, and, in recent years, preemptive wars. He speaks and writes regularly on civil resistance and antiwar issues. War and Peace Library series November 2007, 256 pages ISBN 0-7425-3892-3 / 978-0-7425-3892-4 $24.95 paper ISBN 0-7425-3891-5 / 978-0-7425-3891-7 $75.00 cloth Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 7:47 AM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: FW: The Fourth Branch Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 8:15 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: The fourth branch As you can see, the Assistant US Attorney was so stunned by my argument that he failed to cross-examine me. Whereupon we got a Directed Verdict of Acquittal. Fab. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS ------------------------------- UNITED STATES OF AMERICA : : v. : CRIMINAL NO. 87-284-ALEX : MARGARET MARY BRODHEAD and : THOMAS P. LEWIS : ------------------------------- U.S. Post Office & Courthouse Boston, Massachusetts Friday, March 4, 1988 VOLUME I BEFORE: HON. JOYCE LONDON ALEXANDER, U.S. MAGISTRATE APPEARANCES: OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, (By Martin F. Murphy, Esq.), 1107 Post Office Building, Boston, Massachusetts 02109, on behalf of the Government. GOLDSTEIN & PATCHEN, (By Lee D. Goldstein, Esq.), 678 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, on behalf of Defendant Thomas Lewis. MARGARET MARY BRODHEAD, Pro Se. THE CLERK: The Court is now in session. THE COURT: Defendants may call their next witness. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'd like to call Professor Francis Boyle, please. WHEREUPON, FRANCIS BOYLE, having been first duly sworn, was examined and testified as follows: DIRECT EXAMINATION Q. Now, Professor Boyle, I'm going to show you a copy of the indictment in this case. And you notice in the indictment that it charges that the defendants are guilty of entering the air base for a purpose prohibited by law, and that the purpose was that they were going to willfully injure or commit depredation against property. Do you see that on the indictment? A. Yes, I do. Q. You're aware of the testimony that occurred prior today on the nature of the P-3 Orion? A. Yes, I have heard the testimony of Dr. Walker. Q. And you're also aware of the testimony regarding the Seasprite helicopter? A. Yes. And I have also read about both systems in my own studies, as well. Q. Now based on the hearing of the testimony and based on what you've read, do you have an opinion as to whether or not the Seasprite and the Orion are property entitled to legal protection? MR. MURPHY: Your Honor, objection as to a question in that form. I think it ought to be if he has an opinion as to whether they are property of the United States or a department thereof under 18 U.S.C. 1361. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'll withdraw. I'll ask the question suggested by the U.S. Attorney. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Do you have an opinion as to whether or not the Seasprite and the P-3 Orion are property of the United States Government entitled to protection under Title 18, Section 1361? A. Well, based on my knowledge of the Orion and Seasprite, as part of a first strike scenario, they would not be entitled to any protection at all under United States law, defined to include international law. They would constitute an instrumentality of crime to the extent that they are to be used as part of a first strike system. And for that reason, they would not be entitled to any protection as property as that concept is defined. Q. Now you talked about your opinion is based on particular parts of United States law; is that correct? A. Well, that's right. International law is also part of United States law. It is part of the federal common law that's binding on this Court. It is also part of, for example, the law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And so any concept or notion such as property -- "a bundle of rights entitled to be protected by law" is the black letter rule -- has to take into account considerations of international law. Q. And are you aware if the armed force of the United States has published any particular document which specifies whether or not this property would be protected? A. Well, the leading case dealing with this arises out of the prosecution of German industrialists after the Second World War called the Zyklon B case. The Zyklon B case was prosecuted by an agreement between the United States and the other victors of the Second World War. It dealt with the question of whether or not two German industrialists were entitled to sell Zyklon B, prussic acid, to the S.S. with good grounds to believe that it would be used for the purpose of exterminating human beings. It had been the case that this corporation in Germany had sold the prussic acid to the S.S. to be used for delousing or exterminating vermin. At some point in time, pursuant to the Final Solution as it were of the Nazi era, the S.S. decided to use the Zyklon B gas to exterminate millions of people. Particularly, at Auschwitz, the Zyklon B gas was used for the purpose of exterminating approximately two million people. After the war, the owner of the company and the operating manager of this company were put on trial. And they argued that the Zyklon B gas was just an article, a commodity that, in theory, could be used for a lawful purpose and could be sold in commerce just as any other type of commodity would be sold. The tribunal ruled that, as a matter of fact, that was not the case. That this commodity was being put to a criminal purpose, and that was exterminating human beings, which, in turn, was a war crime within the meaning of the Hague Regulations. And, therefore, these two German industrialists had no right to be selling this particular commodity to the S.S., and hence could be found guilty of being accomplices to the commission of war crimes by virtue of the fact that they were selling the commodity. They were both sentenced to death, and they were both hanged. So certainly the Zyklon B case stands for the proposition that some instruments, commodities, call it what you want, are not entitled to be treated as property within the meaning of international law. I should also point out that it might have been perhaps consistent with Nazi law at the time for them to have sold prussic acid to the S.S. to be used for the purpose of exterminating two million people. But that did not sway the tribunal under the rules that they were operating under. They had been charged with the task of not paying attention to any Nazi law, internal law that was inconsistent with international law. And so on the basis of that operating procedure which they did have, they did find these two defendants guilty and they were hanged. Q. Now is that particular decision, in the Zyklon B case, is that a part of United States law? A. The Zyklon B prosecution occurred as a result of an agreement entered into between the major allied powers after the Second World War, including the United States, for the trial and prosecution of the leading Nazi war criminals in Europe. And so there was a formal agreement between the U.S., France, Great Britain, and Russia that called for the prosecution of these people. Now this formal prosecution itself was -- pursuant to the terms of this agreement -- carried out by a British tribunal. But their jurisdiction to try was based on an agreement with U.S. permission. And so, they were acting as an agency or instrumentality of the United States Government, the British Government, the Russian Government, and the French Government. Q. How are any of the rules taken from some of those trials after World War II incorporated in any document that had been adopted by the armed forces of the United States? A. Yes. Before the Second World War the United States Government had a manual for the conduct of armed hostilities that was issued to all its troops in the field. It was based primarily on the Hague Regulations of 1907, which served as the basis for the convictions of these two industrialists, and, of course, their subsequent hanging. As a result of the Nazi depredations in the Second World War, the U.S. Government decided that it was going to have to revise its internal rules and also the rules of international law with respect to the conduct of hostility. This then resulted in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Genocide Convention of 1948, and also an attempt to distill the essence of these various trials that were set up after the Second World War, both in Europe and in Japan, for trying the leading war criminals of that time. All of these rules then were set forth in two new manuals that took the place of the older War Department Manual. Q. And these are United States manuals. A. These are U.S. manuals, yes. In 1955, the Navy issued a manual on the conduct of naval warfare to all officers in the field, describing precisely what were the rules on international law with respect to the conduct of hostilities. And again, in 1956, the U.S. Army issued a field manual to all its officers in the field, called "The Law of Land Warfare," that attempted to encapsulate all the rules based on the Hague Regulations, the Geneva Conventions, the trials of the major war criminals, and other rules that had been distilled from these various judgments after the Second World War. Q. And those manuals are in existence today; is that right? A. Yes. The manual for the Navy, as I said, was published in 1955. It is still binding as law and is still issued to all naval officers when they get sent into the field and naval officers are trained in it. Likewise, for the Army, the U.S. Army Field Manual published in 1956, that is still binding law, as far as the United States Government is concerned. And, indeed, if you read the introductions to these manuals, it states specifically that as far as the United States Government is concerned, these manuals contain the rules of international law with respect to the conduct of hostilities that it believes binds United States citizens and soldiers and sailors and also will bind the citizens, soldiers, and sailors of foreign states that might be in conflict with the United States Government. Q. And I take it you're familiar with the contents; is that right? A. Yes, I am. Q. Now you said it has a binding effect on current military personnel of the United States? A. Yes, it does. And I should also point out civilian officials, too. To the extent that civilians, for example, in the Pentagon are directly involved in the conduct of hostilities, they, too, are bound by these rules. And that, again, is made quite clear. It goes back to the World War II precedents where some of the German civilian officials argued that we weren't really responsible for what was going on. For example, in the case of the German industrialists, they said, "Well, we were just businessmen selling gas." And the various tribunals said no, that civilians and officials and even private businessmen can be found responsible for violations of laws and customs of war. Q. What particularly does it say with respect to the laws of warfare as it would affect this definition of property we've been talking about? A. The key point that came in as a result of the World War II experience was two new types of crimes that were recognized that had not existed before the Second World War. The first was known as a crime against peace. That was planning, preparation, conspiracy, waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties or agreements. That type of crime had not really been considered to exist before the Second World War. The second type of crime that came into existence and, as I said, is still recognized in both these field manuals, is what is known as a crime against humanity. And there, the archetypal case was Hitler's attempt to exterminate Jews, Russians, Gypsies, Slavs, and others. That is, killing people because of their racial, ethnic, religious characteristics, or things of that nature. And in this definition of crime against humanity, it specifically states that, for example, the wanton destruction of a city is a crime against humanity. Q. And would this include particular property which is an instrumentality of these crimes? A. Within these field manuals, there is a provision dealing with, as you know, what lawyers call inchoate crimes: planning, preparation, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and complicity. And it is determined in these field manuals that these inchoate crimes are international crimes in their own right. As Mr. Justice Jackson said when he was prosecuting the Nazi war criminals, it simply was not enough to go after individuals who had already committed substantive offenses, because that will not do you much good. What you want to do also is to prevent the substantive offenses in the first place. And so, there was recognized also personal criminal responsibility for committing inchoate offenses. So, again, to the extent that a weapon system is used for the purpose of planning, preparing, conspiring, aiding and abetting, or complicity in the commission of a crime against peace or a crime against humanity or a traditional war crime, then that would render the individual himself responsible for violation of international law, very similar to what happened in the Zyklon B case with the German industrialists supplying Zyklon B, knowing that it could be used for the purpose of exterminating human beings. Q. And the answer that you've given is really an important basis upon which you're testifying that the P-3 Orion and the Seasprite are not entitled to protection as property, as defined under the United States Code. A. Well, to the extent that they are part of a first strike system, they are instrumentalities of criminal activity. A first strike system or scenario is planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit a crime against peace, a crime against humanity, and a war crime. Q. I see. And, again, these particular proscriptions: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, are contained in the Navy field manual; is that correct? A. That's correct. And a war crime, too. Q. Now as to these particular crimes, would it be a defense to these crimes that the act was not made illegal under domestic law? A. No. Q. And upon what is that based? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor, as to his point. That's a decision for you and not for an expert. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Again, I ask about specific sources upon which he's based the conclusions that this particular property was not entitled to protection. To the extent that there may be any other exceptions or exclusions in terms of how one might characterize as property, I would argue that the question is entirely relevant. Again, it's going directly to any defense that well, this really is property; this is entitled to protection. MR. MURPHY: All right. I don't quite understand still the point about whether this property is entitled to protection. It seems to me the question is -- if this is a defense and not an attempt to inject a necessity defense into the case, but is a defense to the charge in the indictment that this property is not entitled to protection, the question ought to be, "Is this property, the property of the government within the meaning of the relevant decisions under 18 U.S.C. Section 1361?" And I think we're getting very far afield from that area of inquiry. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Now, Professor Boyle, I believe you also mentioned that a particular Genocide Convention was incorporated in these particular field manuals; is that right? A. Well, this concept of crime against humanity, particularly with reference to the Jewish people, was fully approved by the United States Government. And various individuals after the Second World War were sentenced to death and executed for committing a combination of a crime against humanity and a traditional war crime or a crime against peace. It was thought, however, by the United States Government at that time, that this was such a particularly heinous crime to exterminate people because of their racial, national, religious, or ethnic characteristic that a special treaty should be drafted. And that was the Genocide Convention of 1948, which the United States Senate has given its advice and consent to in 1986. I think today the leading case in point for the applicability of the Genocide Convention would be what the white minority racist regime in South Africa is doing to its Black population there. So that this treaty is still on point and is still in the process of being used and relied on by the United States Government today. Q. And how would this particular convention -- again, as incorporated in the army field manual and the navy field manual -- A. Well, I should be precise and say the convention was not incorporated by name into these two field manuals; the concept of crime against humanity was, and that served as the basis for the Genocide Convention. The reason they did not specifically name the Genocide Convention was that although the U.S. Government signed it in 1948, the Senate did not ratify it until 1986. And the reason why was that conservative southern senators were afraid that if we ratified this treaty, American Blacks would be able to use the Genocide Convention to state a cause of action in a federal court. And so they held up the ratification, the formal technical ratification of the treaty and its advice and consent by the Senate until 1986. So that's why they don't mention per se the Genocide Convention. Q. I see. But there is particular ratification by the U.S. Senate of that convention. A. The U.S. Senate just recently in 1986 gave its advice and consent to the ratification of that treaty, yes. Q. Now is that particular act of the Senate applicable to either the use or planned use of the P-3 Orion and of the Seasprite helicopter? A. Clearly, the convention states that planning, preparation, or conspiracy to commit genocide is a crime in its own right. So to the extent that any weapon systems that the U.S. Government has that could be used for the purpose of genocide, would be prohibited by that convention. Q. And do you have any knowledge of how any particular use of these aircraft might be involved in a violation of that convention? A. Yes. MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor. Again, I don't think that this is relevant. THE COURT: Sustained. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Again, I would offer to prove, Judge, that I think there's a proper foundation that we're not talking about some kind of foreign law. We're talking about law which was ratified by the Senate, just like any other law of the House or Congress. So I'm not talking about foreign law. I'm talking about a particular source of United States law which would be relevant to the issue of whether or not these particular aircraft were property and entitled to protection. THE COURT: Why don't you ask the witness that as opposed to drawing out and seemingly going far afield. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Okay. Again, I was trying to lay a proper foundation. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. But I ask you again, Professor Boyle, the Genocide Convention is part of United States law; is that correct? A. That's correct. Q. Do you have an opinion as to how the Genocide Convention affects the definition of property in the U.S. Code, more particularly, these two aircraft which are the basis of the trial today? A. I do have an opinion, yes. Q. And could you tell the Court that opinion? A. Well, the opinion is that to the extent these particular weapon systems would be used for the purpose of planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit genocide, they would violate the terms of the Genocide Convention and, therefore, constitute an instrumentality of criminal activity. Q. And how particularly might this be a criminal activity, based on what you've studied? A. This goes to what Dr. Walker testified on Presidential Directive 59. Within that presidential directive, there is an actual plan for the use of nuclear weapons against people because of their racial, ethnic composition, almost identical to what the Nazi regime had in store for Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, or whatever. And, indeed, there has been a considerable amount of writing in the professional literature pointing out that this particular component of Presidential Directive 59 constitutes planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit genocide, and is inconsistent with the terms of the Genocide Convention, and should be removed and eliminated. To the best of my knowledge, that has not been done. Q. Now is this also a violation in peace time, as well as in wartime? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor. THE COURT: Sustained. MR. GOLDSTEIN: But, Judge, there's been testimony I believe by Petty Officer McCoy that he believed that the particular use of the weapons and the P-3 Orion and Seasprite were only applicable in times of war. And given that that's been in evidence, I think it's a fair question to ask. I think I have the right to adduce some evidence to rebut that by one who I believe is qualified to know. THE COURT: If -- and the Court is not convinced that he said just in wartime, but if that is counsel's recollection, the Court will allow you to answer the question: yes or no. THE WITNESS: The Genocide Convention clearly states that it applies in times of peace and in times of war. THE COURT: Okay. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Professor Boyle, just let me ask you, so that it's entirely clear: based on your testimony thus far, based on your training, based on your experience, do you believe that the Seasprite and the Orion were property entitled to protection, as defined under Section 1361 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor, as to the "entitled to protection" phrase. That is injecting Professor Boyle's personal opinion about what ought to be protected into this proceeding. Is it property of the United States, under the statutes? That ought to be the question. THE COURT: Sustained as to form. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'll withdraw the question and ask again. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Based on your professional opinion, based on your training and experience, are the Seasprite helicopter and the P-3 Orion property within the meaning of 1361 of the U.S. Criminal Code? A. Again, 1361 has to be interpreted by reference to international law, which is a part of United States domestic law. And to the extent that these weapon systems are to be used for the purpose of planning, preparing, or conspiring to commit crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide, they are instrumentalities of crime and of criminal activity. They are not property defined as "a bundle of rights, entitled to be protected by law." They would be outlawed, prohibited, and proscribed by law. MR. GOLDSTEIN: No further questions. THE COURT: Mr. Murphy, any cross-examination? MR. MURPHY: No cross-examination. e:\wpwin52\usvbrodh.2 Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 8:14 AM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: FW: The fourth branch Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Friday, August 18, 2017 12:28 AM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: The fourth branch I still subscribe to law professor Francis Boyle’s view; nuclear weapons and related materiel are not property–property rights attach to legitimate things, not to criminal instrumentalia that have no use but criminal annihilation. I’ve argued all ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 18 13:17:18 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 13:17:18 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The fourth branch Message-ID: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD 4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 LITTLEFIELD (800) 462-6420 www.RowmanLittlefield.com PROTESTING POWER WAR, RESISTANCE, AND LAW By Francis A. Boyle “If you believe Dante may be right, that “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of moral crisis, remain neutral,” you need this book…If you are concerned that our country lives by its Constitution and laws, its often-proclaimed principles . . . you too should read this book. . . If you cherish freedom, here is your chance to learn how much you have. A person ignorant of her rights has little advantage over those who have none.”—Ramsey Clark, Former U.S. Attorney General “Francis Boyle, who has distinguished himself again and again as a fierce and brilliant defender of international law and human rights, now takes his mission one step further. He lays out a comprehensive argument in defense of citizens who commit civil resistance to protest illegal governmental aggressions and war crimes. He does so with impeccable research, stylistic elegance, and devastating evidence. This is an invaluable and powerful handbook for citizens who dare to challenge our war-makers.” —Howard Zinn “In this expert and lucid manual, international lawyer Francis Boyle focuses his attention on civil resistance, a category that he distinguishes sharply from civil disobedience. Civil resistance, he persuasively argues, is a ‘basic right’ of American citizens under international and domestic law, as ‘it is the civil-resisters who are the sheriffs, and the U.S. government officials committing state crimes are the outlaws.’ The historical and legal analysis provides information and understanding of inestimable value to all citizens who care about their country.” —Noam Chomsky “Francis Boyle has, once again, given us a valuable lesson in current history and invaluable insight into the role that lawyers must now play in defending human rights. He reminds us also that the significant cases are not ‘about the lawyers.’ We lawyers are called upon to give voice to the struggles and aspirations of others. This book will help us learn to play that role.” —Michael F. Tigar, Washington College of Law and Chair, ABA Section of Litigation, 1989-1990 In this indispensable book, distinguished activist lawyer Francis Boyle sounds an impassioned clarion call to citizen action against Bush administration policies, both domestic and international. Especially since the Reagan Administration, hundreds of thousands of Americans have used non-violent civil resistance to protest against elements of U.S. policy that violate basic principles of international law, the United States Constitution, and human rights. Such citizen protests have led to an unprecedented number of arrests and prosecutions by federal, state, and local governments around the country. Boyle, who has spent his career advising and defending civil resisters, explores how international law can be used to question the legality of specific U.S. government foreign and domestic policies. He focuses especially on the aftermath of 9/11 and the implications of the war on Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, the war on Iraq, the doctrine of preventive warfare, and the domestic abridgement of civil rights. Written for concerned citizens, activists, NGOs, civil resisters, their supporters, and their lawyers, Protesting Power provides the best legal and constitutional arguments to support and defend civil resistance activities. Including a number of compelling excerpts from his own trial appearances as an expert witness and as counsel, the author offers inspirational and practical advice for protesters who find themselves in court. This invaluable book stands alone as the only guide available on how to use international law, constitutional law, and the laws of war to defend peaceful non-violent protesters against governmental policies that are illegal and criminal. About the Author Francis Boyle is professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A Harvard law graduate, for the past twenty years he has been involved as lawyer and/or witness in the major cases challenging U.S. defense policy, notably nuclear issues, and, in recent years, preemptive wars. He speaks and writes regularly on civil resistance and antiwar issues. War and Peace Library series November 2007, 256 pages ISBN 0-7425-3892-3 / 978-0-7425-3892-4 $24.95 paper ISBN 0-7425-3891-5 / 978-0-7425-3891-7 $75.00 cloth Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 7:47 AM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: FW: The Fourth Branch Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 8:15 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: The fourth branch As you can see, the Assistant US Attorney was so stunned by my argument that he failed to cross-examine me. Whereupon we got a Directed Verdict of Acquittal. Fab. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS ------------------------------- UNITED STATES OF AMERICA : : v. : CRIMINAL NO. 87-284-ALEX : MARGARET MARY BRODHEAD and : THOMAS P. LEWIS : ------------------------------- U.S. Post Office & Courthouse Boston, Massachusetts Friday, March 4, 1988 VOLUME I BEFORE: HON. JOYCE LONDON ALEXANDER, U.S. MAGISTRATE APPEARANCES: OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, (By Martin F. Murphy, Esq.), 1107 Post Office Building, Boston, Massachusetts 02109, on behalf of the Government. GOLDSTEIN & PATCHEN, (By Lee D. Goldstein, Esq.), 678 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, on behalf of Defendant Thomas Lewis. MARGARET MARY BRODHEAD, Pro Se. THE CLERK: The Court is now in session. THE COURT: Defendants may call their next witness. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'd like to call Professor Francis Boyle, please. WHEREUPON, FRANCIS BOYLE, having been first duly sworn, was examined and testified as follows: DIRECT EXAMINATION Q. Now, Professor Boyle, I'm going to show you a copy of the indictment in this case. And you notice in the indictment that it charges that the defendants are guilty of entering the air base for a purpose prohibited by law, and that the purpose was that they were going to willfully injure or commit depredation against property. Do you see that on the indictment? A. Yes, I do. Q. You're aware of the testimony that occurred prior today on the nature of the P-3 Orion? A. Yes, I have heard the testimony of Dr. Walker. Q. And you're also aware of the testimony regarding the Seasprite helicopter? A. Yes. And I have also read about both systems in my own studies, as well. Q. Now based on the hearing of the testimony and based on what you've read, do you have an opinion as to whether or not the Seasprite and the Orion are property entitled to legal protection? MR. MURPHY: Your Honor, objection as to a question in that form. I think it ought to be if he has an opinion as to whether they are property of the United States or a department thereof under 18 U.S.C. 1361. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'll withdraw. I'll ask the question suggested by the U.S. Attorney. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Do you have an opinion as to whether or not the Seasprite and the P-3 Orion are property of the United States Government entitled to protection under Title 18, Section 1361? A. Well, based on my knowledge of the Orion and Seasprite, as part of a first strike scenario, they would not be entitled to any protection at all under United States law, defined to include international law. They would constitute an instrumentality of crime to the extent that they are to be used as part of a first strike system. And for that reason, they would not be entitled to any protection as property as that concept is defined. Q. Now you talked about your opinion is based on particular parts of United States law; is that correct? A. Well, that's right. International law is also part of United States law. It is part of the federal common law that's binding on this Court. It is also part of, for example, the law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And so any concept or notion such as property -- "a bundle of rights entitled to be protected by law" is the black letter rule -- has to take into account considerations of international law. Q. And are you aware if the armed force of the United States has published any particular document which specifies whether or not this property would be protected? A. Well, the leading case dealing with this arises out of the prosecution of German industrialists after the Second World War called the Zyklon B case. The Zyklon B case was prosecuted by an agreement between the United States and the other victors of the Second World War. It dealt with the question of whether or not two German industrialists were entitled to sell Zyklon B, prussic acid, to the S.S. with good grounds to believe that it would be used for the purpose of exterminating human beings. It had been the case that this corporation in Germany had sold the prussic acid to the S.S. to be used for delousing or exterminating vermin. At some point in time, pursuant to the Final Solution as it were of the Nazi era, the S.S. decided to use the Zyklon B gas to exterminate millions of people. Particularly, at Auschwitz, the Zyklon B gas was used for the purpose of exterminating approximately two million people. After the war, the owner of the company and the operating manager of this company were put on trial. And they argued that the Zyklon B gas was just an article, a commodity that, in theory, could be used for a lawful purpose and could be sold in commerce just as any other type of commodity would be sold. The tribunal ruled that, as a matter of fact, that was not the case. That this commodity was being put to a criminal purpose, and that was exterminating human beings, which, in turn, was a war crime within the meaning of the Hague Regulations. And, therefore, these two German industrialists had no right to be selling this particular commodity to the S.S., and hence could be found guilty of being accomplices to the commission of war crimes by virtue of the fact that they were selling the commodity. They were both sentenced to death, and they were both hanged. So certainly the Zyklon B case stands for the proposition that some instruments, commodities, call it what you want, are not entitled to be treated as property within the meaning of international law. I should also point out that it might have been perhaps consistent with Nazi law at the time for them to have sold prussic acid to the S.S. to be used for the purpose of exterminating two million people. But that did not sway the tribunal under the rules that they were operating under. They had been charged with the task of not paying attention to any Nazi law, internal law that was inconsistent with international law. And so on the basis of that operating procedure which they did have, they did find these two defendants guilty and they were hanged. Q. Now is that particular decision, in the Zyklon B case, is that a part of United States law? A. The Zyklon B prosecution occurred as a result of an agreement entered into between the major allied powers after the Second World War, including the United States, for the trial and prosecution of the leading Nazi war criminals in Europe. And so there was a formal agreement between the U.S., France, Great Britain, and Russia that called for the prosecution of these people. Now this formal prosecution itself was -- pursuant to the terms of this agreement -- carried out by a British tribunal. But their jurisdiction to try was based on an agreement with U.S. permission. And so, they were acting as an agency or instrumentality of the United States Government, the British Government, the Russian Government, and the French Government. Q. How are any of the rules taken from some of those trials after World War II incorporated in any document that had been adopted by the armed forces of the United States? A. Yes. Before the Second World War the United States Government had a manual for the conduct of armed hostilities that was issued to all its troops in the field. It was based primarily on the Hague Regulations of 1907, which served as the basis for the convictions of these two industrialists, and, of course, their subsequent hanging. As a result of the Nazi depredations in the Second World War, the U.S. Government decided that it was going to have to revise its internal rules and also the rules of international law with respect to the conduct of hostility. This then resulted in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Genocide Convention of 1948, and also an attempt to distill the essence of these various trials that were set up after the Second World War, both in Europe and in Japan, for trying the leading war criminals of that time. All of these rules then were set forth in two new manuals that took the place of the older War Department Manual. Q. And these are United States manuals. A. These are U.S. manuals, yes. In 1955, the Navy issued a manual on the conduct of naval warfare to all officers in the field, describing precisely what were the rules on international law with respect to the conduct of hostilities. And again, in 1956, the U.S. Army issued a field manual to all its officers in the field, called "The Law of Land Warfare," that attempted to encapsulate all the rules based on the Hague Regulations, the Geneva Conventions, the trials of the major war criminals, and other rules that had been distilled from these various judgments after the Second World War. Q. And those manuals are in existence today; is that right? A. Yes. The manual for the Navy, as I said, was published in 1955. It is still binding as law and is still issued to all naval officers when they get sent into the field and naval officers are trained in it. Likewise, for the Army, the U.S. Army Field Manual published in 1956, that is still binding law, as far as the United States Government is concerned. And, indeed, if you read the introductions to these manuals, it states specifically that as far as the United States Government is concerned, these manuals contain the rules of international law with respect to the conduct of hostilities that it believes binds United States citizens and soldiers and sailors and also will bind the citizens, soldiers, and sailors of foreign states that might be in conflict with the United States Government. Q. And I take it you're familiar with the contents; is that right? A. Yes, I am. Q. Now you said it has a binding effect on current military personnel of the United States? A. Yes, it does. And I should also point out civilian officials, too. To the extent that civilians, for example, in the Pentagon are directly involved in the conduct of hostilities, they, too, are bound by these rules. And that, again, is made quite clear. It goes back to the World War II precedents where some of the German civilian officials argued that we weren't really responsible for what was going on. For example, in the case of the German industrialists, they said, "Well, we were just businessmen selling gas." And the various tribunals said no, that civilians and officials and even private businessmen can be found responsible for violations of laws and customs of war. Q. What particularly does it say with respect to the laws of warfare as it would affect this definition of property we've been talking about? A. The key point that came in as a result of the World War II experience was two new types of crimes that were recognized that had not existed before the Second World War. The first was known as a crime against peace. That was planning, preparation, conspiracy, waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties or agreements. That type of crime had not really been considered to exist before the Second World War. The second type of crime that came into existence and, as I said, is still recognized in both these field manuals, is what is known as a crime against humanity. And there, the archetypal case was Hitler's attempt to exterminate Jews, Russians, Gypsies, Slavs, and others. That is, killing people because of their racial, ethnic, religious characteristics, or things of that nature. And in this definition of crime against humanity, it specifically states that, for example, the wanton destruction of a city is a crime against humanity. Q. And would this include particular property which is an instrumentality of these crimes? A. Within these field manuals, there is a provision dealing with, as you know, what lawyers call inchoate crimes: planning, preparation, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and complicity. And it is determined in these field manuals that these inchoate crimes are international crimes in their own right. As Mr. Justice Jackson said when he was prosecuting the Nazi war criminals, it simply was not enough to go after individuals who had already committed substantive offenses, because that will not do you much good. What you want to do also is to prevent the substantive offenses in the first place. And so, there was recognized also personal criminal responsibility for committing inchoate offenses. So, again, to the extent that a weapon system is used for the purpose of planning, preparing, conspiring, aiding and abetting, or complicity in the commission of a crime against peace or a crime against humanity or a traditional war crime, then that would render the individual himself responsible for violation of international law, very similar to what happened in the Zyklon B case with the German industrialists supplying Zyklon B, knowing that it could be used for the purpose of exterminating human beings. Q. And the answer that you've given is really an important basis upon which you're testifying that the P-3 Orion and the Seasprite are not entitled to protection as property, as defined under the United States Code. A. Well, to the extent that they are part of a first strike system, they are instrumentalities of criminal activity. A first strike system or scenario is planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit a crime against peace, a crime against humanity, and a war crime. Q. I see. And, again, these particular proscriptions: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, are contained in the Navy field manual; is that correct? A. That's correct. And a war crime, too. Q. Now as to these particular crimes, would it be a defense to these crimes that the act was not made illegal under domestic law? A. No. Q. And upon what is that based? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor, as to his point. That's a decision for you and not for an expert. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Again, I ask about specific sources upon which he's based the conclusions that this particular property was not entitled to protection. To the extent that there may be any other exceptions or exclusions in terms of how one might characterize as property, I would argue that the question is entirely relevant. Again, it's going directly to any defense that well, this really is property; this is entitled to protection. MR. MURPHY: All right. I don't quite understand still the point about whether this property is entitled to protection. It seems to me the question is -- if this is a defense and not an attempt to inject a necessity defense into the case, but is a defense to the charge in the indictment that this property is not entitled to protection, the question ought to be, "Is this property, the property of the government within the meaning of the relevant decisions under 18 U.S.C. Section 1361?" And I think we're getting very far afield from that area of inquiry. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Now, Professor Boyle, I believe you also mentioned that a particular Genocide Convention was incorporated in these particular field manuals; is that right? A. Well, this concept of crime against humanity, particularly with reference to the Jewish people, was fully approved by the United States Government. And various individuals after the Second World War were sentenced to death and executed for committing a combination of a crime against humanity and a traditional war crime or a crime against peace. It was thought, however, by the United States Government at that time, that this was such a particularly heinous crime to exterminate people because of their racial, national, religious, or ethnic characteristic that a special treaty should be drafted. And that was the Genocide Convention of 1948, which the United States Senate has given its advice and consent to in 1986. I think today the leading case in point for the applicability of the Genocide Convention would be what the white minority racist regime in South Africa is doing to its Black population there. So that this treaty is still on point and is still in the process of being used and relied on by the United States Government today. Q. And how would this particular convention -- again, as incorporated in the army field manual and the navy field manual -- A. Well, I should be precise and say the convention was not incorporated by name into these two field manuals; the concept of crime against humanity was, and that served as the basis for the Genocide Convention. The reason they did not specifically name the Genocide Convention was that although the U.S. Government signed it in 1948, the Senate did not ratify it until 1986. And the reason why was that conservative southern senators were afraid that if we ratified this treaty, American Blacks would be able to use the Genocide Convention to state a cause of action in a federal court. And so they held up the ratification, the formal technical ratification of the treaty and its advice and consent by the Senate until 1986. So that's why they don't mention per se the Genocide Convention. Q. I see. But there is particular ratification by the U.S. Senate of that convention. A. The U.S. Senate just recently in 1986 gave its advice and consent to the ratification of that treaty, yes. Q. Now is that particular act of the Senate applicable to either the use or planned use of the P-3 Orion and of the Seasprite helicopter? A. Clearly, the convention states that planning, preparation, or conspiracy to commit genocide is a crime in its own right. So to the extent that any weapon systems that the U.S. Government has that could be used for the purpose of genocide, would be prohibited by that convention. Q. And do you have any knowledge of how any particular use of these aircraft might be involved in a violation of that convention? A. Yes. MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor. Again, I don't think that this is relevant. THE COURT: Sustained. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Again, I would offer to prove, Judge, that I think there's a proper foundation that we're not talking about some kind of foreign law. We're talking about law which was ratified by the Senate, just like any other law of the House or Congress. So I'm not talking about foreign law. I'm talking about a particular source of United States law which would be relevant to the issue of whether or not these particular aircraft were property and entitled to protection. THE COURT: Why don't you ask the witness that as opposed to drawing out and seemingly going far afield. MR. GOLDSTEIN: Okay. Again, I was trying to lay a proper foundation. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. But I ask you again, Professor Boyle, the Genocide Convention is part of United States law; is that correct? A. That's correct. Q. Do you have an opinion as to how the Genocide Convention affects the definition of property in the U.S. Code, more particularly, these two aircraft which are the basis of the trial today? A. I do have an opinion, yes. Q. And could you tell the Court that opinion? A. Well, the opinion is that to the extent these particular weapon systems would be used for the purpose of planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit genocide, they would violate the terms of the Genocide Convention and, therefore, constitute an instrumentality of criminal activity. Q. And how particularly might this be a criminal activity, based on what you've studied? A. This goes to what Dr. Walker testified on Presidential Directive 59. Within that presidential directive, there is an actual plan for the use of nuclear weapons against people because of their racial, ethnic composition, almost identical to what the Nazi regime had in store for Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, or whatever. And, indeed, there has been a considerable amount of writing in the professional literature pointing out that this particular component of Presidential Directive 59 constitutes planning, preparation, and conspiracy to commit genocide, and is inconsistent with the terms of the Genocide Convention, and should be removed and eliminated. To the best of my knowledge, that has not been done. Q. Now is this also a violation in peace time, as well as in wartime? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor. THE COURT: Sustained. MR. GOLDSTEIN: But, Judge, there's been testimony I believe by Petty Officer McCoy that he believed that the particular use of the weapons and the P-3 Orion and Seasprite were only applicable in times of war. And given that that's been in evidence, I think it's a fair question to ask. I think I have the right to adduce some evidence to rebut that by one who I believe is qualified to know. THE COURT: If -- and the Court is not convinced that he said just in wartime, but if that is counsel's recollection, the Court will allow you to answer the question: yes or no. THE WITNESS: The Genocide Convention clearly states that it applies in times of peace and in times of war. THE COURT: Okay. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Professor Boyle, just let me ask you, so that it's entirely clear: based on your testimony thus far, based on your training, based on your experience, do you believe that the Seasprite and the Orion were property entitled to protection, as defined under Section 1361 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code? MR. MURPHY: Objection, Your Honor, as to the "entitled to protection" phrase. That is injecting Professor Boyle's personal opinion about what ought to be protected into this proceeding. Is it property of the United States, under the statutes? That ought to be the question. THE COURT: Sustained as to form. MR. GOLDSTEIN: I'll withdraw the question and ask again. BY MR. GOLDSTEIN: Q. Based on your professional opinion, based on your training and experience, are the Seasprite helicopter and the P-3 Orion property within the meaning of 1361 of the U.S. Criminal Code? A. Again, 1361 has to be interpreted by reference to international law, which is a part of United States domestic law. And to the extent that these weapon systems are to be used for the purpose of planning, preparing, or conspiring to commit crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide, they are instrumentalities of crime and of criminal activity. They are not property defined as "a bundle of rights, entitled to be protected by law." They would be outlawed, prohibited, and proscribed by law. MR. GOLDSTEIN: No further questions. THE COURT: Mr. Murphy, any cross-examination? MR. MURPHY: No cross-examination. e:\wpwin52\usvbrodh.2 Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 8:14 AM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: FW: The fourth branch Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Friday, August 18, 2017 12:28 AM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: The fourth branch I still subscribe to law professor Francis Boyle’s view; nuclear weapons and related materiel are not property–property rights attach to legitimate things, not to criminal instrumentalia that have no use but criminal annihilation. I’ve argued all ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Aug 18 14:20:02 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 14:20:02 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day Message-ID: I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over "racism" or rather the politically incorrect things that people say, like they fight over their "teams" the home team vs. the visiting team. This is "right vs. left, Dems vs. Repubs., or fascists vs. democracy supporters. You know, the simple good guys vs. bad guys. In the meantime the US continues to kill and destroy, overseas, where we don’t have to see, if we don't wish. Reality, we're not going to end racist policies by simply covering up with politically correct speech or by fighting amongst ourselves. This is a tried and true tactic, used over and over again, pitting one against another so they don't notice the abuses by those in power -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Fri Aug 18 15:35:42 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (=?utf-8?Q?C.=20G.=20Estabrook?=) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 15:35:42 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] C. G. Estabrook is forwarding an email to you Message-ID: <9656357.20170818153542.5997094e50b892.90268048@mail2.mcsignup.com> The Duran Newsletter = = Hi AWARE, C. G. Estabrook thought you'd be interested in this: http://us13.forward-to-friend.com/forward/show?u=3a63c9fc90debaab0b552af47&id=58b0b14e56 C. G. Estabrook also included this personal message to you: News from Neptune Did you find the link interesting? You can forward it on to your friends, too: http://us13.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3a63c9fc90debaab0b552af47&id=58b0b14e56 You can subscribe for more emails at: http://theduran.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3a63c9fc90debaab0b552af47&id=ddd5d38c0f * Note: if any of the URLs above are not clickable, you can copy/paste them into your web browser. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From divisek at yahoo.com Fri Aug 18 17:32:11 2017 From: divisek at yahoo.com (Dianna Visek) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 17:32:11 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1330520052.555230.1503077531084@mail.yahoo.com> I agree.  And the American people are now inwardly focused, on the latest non-PC utterances or Trump's latest tweet, missing what's going on in the rest of the world. Dianna On Friday, August 18, 2017, 9:20:22 AM CDT, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over "racism" or rather the politically incorrect things that people say, like they fight over their "teams" the home team vs. the visiting team. This is "right vs. left, Dems vs. Repubs., or fascists vs. democracy supporters. You know, the simple good guys vs. bad guys.  In the meantime the US continues to kill and destroy, overseas, where we don’t have to see, if we don't wish.  Reality, we're not going to end racist policies by simply covering up with politically correct speech or by fighting amongst ourselves. This is a tried and true tactic, used over and over again, pitting one against another so they don't notice the abuses by those in power_______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From naiman at justforeignpolicy.org Fri Aug 18 18:05:09 2017 From: naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (Robert Naiman) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 13:05:09 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day In-Reply-To: <1330520052.555230.1503077531084@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1330520052.555230.1503077531084@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I don't think there's any reason to despair about this, at least not yet. A very big thing just happened in the U.S. in terms of U.S. politics. A nonviolent protester was killed by a fascist at an antifascist rally, and then Trump spectacularly asserted in a press conference that white supremacists are morally equivalent to antifascists. That is a big deal, it's normal that it's taking a lot of attention from people in the U.S. - it's taking a lot of attention all over the world. Prominent voices in Israel are outraged about Netanyahu's unwillingness to denounce it - that's what a big deal it is. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/world/middleeast/netanyahu-trump-charlottesville.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/08/17/why-did-netanyahu-wait-so-long-to-condemn-anti-semitism-in-charlottesville/ http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/08/16/543913980/israels-netanyahu-faces-criticism-for-delayed-reaction-to-charlottesville-rally Congress is out of session. We don't have any really good hooks right now to sharpen contradictions over U.S. imperialism, nothing that could plausibly compete for attention with the domestic drama. But when the Congress comes back at the beginning of September, I believe that we are going to have a big fight about U.S. participation in the famine-inducing Saudi war in Yemen. Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 12:32 PM, Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > I agree. And the American people are now inwardly focused, on the latest > non-PC utterances or Trump's latest tweet, missing what's going on in the > rest of the world. > > Dianna > > > > On Friday, August 18, 2017, 9:20:22 AM CDT, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > > I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. > They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over > "racism" or rather the politically incorrect things that people say, like > they fight over their "teams" the home team vs. the visiting team. This is > "right vs. left, Dems vs. Repubs., or fascists vs. democracy supporters. > You know, the simple good guys vs. bad guys. > > In the meantime the US continues to kill and destroy, overseas, where we > don’t have to see, if we don't wish. > > Reality, we're not going to end racist policies by simply covering up with > politically correct speech or by fighting amongst ourselves. This is a > tried and true tactic, used over and over again, pitting one against > another so they don't notice the abuses by those in power > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kmedina67 at gmail.com Fri Aug 18 20:49:37 2017 From: kmedina67 at gmail.com (Karen Medina) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 15:49:37 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Karen Aram wrote: 'I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over "racism" ' To me, war with other peoples is directly related to racism and classism. -karen medina -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Aug 19 12:04:32 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 12:04:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: “Racism” is like “poverty” and “inequality” a component of “classism,” which is a result of capitalism. Fighting amongst ourselves is not a solution. War is about profit and control of other peoples resources. A solution is to target the “perpetrators” of the crime. On Aug 18, 2017, at 13:49, Karen Medina > wrote: Karen Aram wrote: 'I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over "racism" ' To me, war with other peoples is directly related to racism and classism. -karen medina -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kmedina67 at gmail.com Sat Aug 19 12:46:41 2017 From: kmedina67 at gmail.com (kmedina67) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 07:46:41 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day Message-ID: I agree that racism is institutionalized. Demanding that it end is one way to get at capitalism.  -Karen Medina -------- Original message --------From: Karen Aram Date: 8/19/17 07:04 (GMT-06:00) To: Karen Medina Cc: Peace-discuss List Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day “Racism” is like “poverty” and “inequality” a component of “classism,” which is a result of capitalism. Fighting amongst ourselves is not a solution. War is about profit and control of other peoples resources. A solution is to target the “perpetrators” of the crime.  On Aug 18, 2017, at 13:49, Karen Medina wrote: Karen Aram wrote: 'I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over "racism" ' To me, war with other peoples is directly related to racism and classism. -karen medina -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kmedina67 at gmail.com Sat Aug 19 12:50:07 2017 From: kmedina67 at gmail.com (kmedina67) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 07:50:07 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day Message-ID: Not everyone notices that classism exists. And the effects are unequally distributed. So those most affected by classism are the most desperate to end it.  -Karen Medina -------- Original message --------From: Karen Aram Date: 8/19/17 07:04 (GMT-06:00) To: Karen Medina Cc: Peace-discuss List Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day “Racism” is like “poverty” and “inequality” a component of “classism,” which is a result of capitalism. Fighting amongst ourselves is not a solution. War is about profit and control of other peoples resources. A solution is to target the “perpetrators” of the crime.  On Aug 18, 2017, at 13:49, Karen Medina wrote: Karen Aram wrote: 'I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over "racism" ' To me, war with other peoples is directly related to racism and classism. -karen medina -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 13:22:31 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 08:22:31 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: How does ‘classism’ exist? As an attitude? Or as an objective reality, whether recognized or not? Racism, in contrast, is an attitude. > On Aug 19, 2017, at 7:50 AM, kmedina67 via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Not everyone notices that classism exists. And the effects are unequally distributed. So those most affected by classism are the most desperate to end it. > > -Karen Medina > > -------- Original message -------- > From: Karen Aram > Date: 8/19/17 07:04 (GMT-06:00) > To: Karen Medina > Cc: Peace-discuss List > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day > > “Racism” is like “poverty” and “inequality” a component of “classism,” which is a result of capitalism. Fighting amongst ourselves is not a solution. War is about profit and control of other peoples resources. > > A solution is to target the “perpetrators” of the crime. > > >> On Aug 18, 2017, at 13:49, Karen Medina > wrote: >> >> Karen Aram wrote: 'I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over "racism" ' >> >> To me, war with other peoples is directly related to racism and classism. >> -karen medina > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 13:42:00 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 13:42:00 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky And remember again: The College of Law Faculty deliberately brought in Killer Koh and his Drone Murder Extermination Campaign Against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color as a Role Model for Lawyers in Government Service. They are all Sick and Demented. They have no moral authority to say anything about what happened in Charlottesville. Just a Gang of Sick Puppies. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 7:35 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky Just remember: Not even one member of the entire College of Law Faculty supported us against Killer Koh and his Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color. They are all Gang of die-hard Bigots and Racists and Warmongers. Caveat emptor! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 4:42 PM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky “This episode {Charlottesville} and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice {sic!}.” UI Law School Dean The UI Law School Dean and Faculty fully support the USA Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color by Killer Koh, Clinton, Obama-- and now continued by Trump. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Long, Cheryl Lyn On Behalf Of Amar, Vikram D Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 3:54 PM To: Law * College of Law Community > Subject: Reflections on Charlottesville Good afternoon, As we turn our thoughts to an exciting new academic year, we cannot help but reflect on the sad events that took place at and near the University of Virginia – a school that has an academic tradition of excellence not unlike our own – in Charlottesville over the last week. This episode and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice. Below are links to messages offered by our University President, Timothy Killeen, and our Chancellor, Robert Jones, underscoring their commitment to keep the University of Illinois a place that is safe, welcoming and intellectually vibrant for all students, faculty and staff. I associate myself fully with each of these statements. Unfortunately, short statements – even ones as laudable as these – cannot take the place of the thorough, robust discussions and suggestions for improvement concerning these issues that are needed. I look forward to the return of students, staff and faculty to the College of Law in the next few weeks so that we, as a community, can engage each other in precisely those kinds of dialogues. To that end, we invite you join us for a panel discussion featuring various College of Law faculty members, Legal Perspectives on Charlottesville, on Friday, September 15 at noon in the Max L. Rowe Auditorium. Additional event details will be posted on the College’s website in the coming days. Message from Timothy L. Killeen, President Message from Robert J. Jones, Chancellor Vikram David Amar Dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law University of Illinois College of Law -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 13:42:00 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 13:42:00 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky And remember again: The College of Law Faculty deliberately brought in Killer Koh and his Drone Murder Extermination Campaign Against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color as a Role Model for Lawyers in Government Service. They are all Sick and Demented. They have no moral authority to say anything about what happened in Charlottesville. Just a Gang of Sick Puppies. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 7:35 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky Just remember: Not even one member of the entire College of Law Faculty supported us against Killer Koh and his Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color. They are all Gang of die-hard Bigots and Racists and Warmongers. Caveat emptor! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 4:42 PM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky “This episode {Charlottesville} and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice {sic!}.” UI Law School Dean The UI Law School Dean and Faculty fully support the USA Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color by Killer Koh, Clinton, Obama-- and now continued by Trump. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Long, Cheryl Lyn On Behalf Of Amar, Vikram D Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 3:54 PM To: Law * College of Law Community > Subject: Reflections on Charlottesville Good afternoon, As we turn our thoughts to an exciting new academic year, we cannot help but reflect on the sad events that took place at and near the University of Virginia – a school that has an academic tradition of excellence not unlike our own – in Charlottesville over the last week. This episode and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice. Below are links to messages offered by our University President, Timothy Killeen, and our Chancellor, Robert Jones, underscoring their commitment to keep the University of Illinois a place that is safe, welcoming and intellectually vibrant for all students, faculty and staff. I associate myself fully with each of these statements. Unfortunately, short statements – even ones as laudable as these – cannot take the place of the thorough, robust discussions and suggestions for improvement concerning these issues that are needed. I look forward to the return of students, staff and faculty to the College of Law in the next few weeks so that we, as a community, can engage each other in precisely those kinds of dialogues. To that end, we invite you join us for a panel discussion featuring various College of Law faculty members, Legal Perspectives on Charlottesville, on Friday, September 15 at noon in the Max L. Rowe Auditorium. Additional event details will be posted on the College’s website in the coming days. Message from Timothy L. Killeen, President Message from Robert J. Jones, Chancellor Vikram David Amar Dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law University of Illinois College of Law -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 13:57:07 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 13:57:07 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Subscription News Letter Fair Use Disclaimer Submission Contact About Social Icons [Countercurrents] Home World» Palestine Imperialism South Asia India» Communal Harmony An Hour For India Annihilate Caste Kashmir Climate Change» Environmental Protection Resource Crisis Counter Solutions Alternative Energy Globalisation Patriarchy Human Rights Life/Philosophy» Arts/Literature Book Review There are no breaking news at the moment The Right Of African Americans To Self-Determination in Human Rights — by Professor Francis A Boyle — August 17, 2017 [slavery] A speech delivered by international law Professor Francis A. Boyle at East-West University, Chicago Illinois, April 20, 2012, before the IHRAAM Conference on Civil Rights, Human Rights, & Self-Determination In order to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s invasion of the Americas, in early 1992 I was asked by the Organizers of the International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nations in the U.S.A. to serve as Special Prosecutor of the United States of America for committing international crimes against Indigenous Peoples, People of Color, and Oppressed Nationalities, including and especially African Americans. For the purposes of these proceedings, the Organizers asked me to call African Americans the New Afrikan People. The Tribunal was initiated by the American Indian Movement (AIM) with the support of representatives of the Puerto Rican People, the New Afrikan People, the Mexicano People, and “progressive White North Americans.” Of course, I do not consider myself to be a “White North American.” I was born Irish. During the past 840 years of resisting one of the most brutal and cruel colonial occupations in the history of humankind, we Irish know what the denial of self-determination, genocide, and gross violations of our most fundamental human rights are all about in our beloved Ireland and abroad, which atrocities still continue as of today. In my capacity as Special Prosecutor of the United States Federal Government, I drew up an Indictment under international law that was served upon the Attorney General of the United States and the United States Attorney in San Francisco prior to the convening of the Tribunal in that city just before “Columbus Day” on October 2-4, 1992 with a demand that they appear to defend the United States government from the charges. I take it they saw no point in trying to defend the indefensible because no one showed up to defend the United States government, though they did publicly acknowledge receipt of our service of process. I will not go through all 37 charges of my Indictment here. But the proceedings of this pathbreaking International Tribunal have been recorded in a formal Verdict by the Tribunal; in a Video of the Tribunal; and in a Book on the Tribunal–all under the title U.S.A. On Trial: The International Tribunal on Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nations in the United States. Six months after the conclusion of these San Francisco Tribunal proceedings, I was the Lawyer and Ambassador for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina arguing its case for genocide against Yugoslavia before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the World Court of the United Nations System. There I would singlehandedly win two World Court Orders overwhelmingly in favor of Bosnia against Yugoslavia to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Bosnians on 8 April 1993 and 13 September 1993. I treated the San Francisco Tribunal proceedings with as much care, attention, dignity, respect, and professionalism as I did the World Court proceedings for Bosnia. And the results were the same: massive, overwhelming, crushing victories for my clients in both the World Court and the San Francisco Tribunal! For the purpose of this Conference, I want to briefly discuss the nine charges that I filed against the United States government for committing international crimes against African Americans. I believe that these nine charges succinctly state the fundamental principles of international law and human rights concerning African Americans. Obviously, these nine charges of my Indictment cannot answer all the questions African Americans might have with respect to their rights under international law and human rights law. But I do submit that these nine charges provide a solid foundation for providing guidance to African Americans as to their basic rights under international law that can be used in the future in order to navigate problems and issues as they arise to confront them today. The Distinguished Judges composing this International Tribunal consisted of seven independent Experts on human rights drawn from all over the world. In their Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order of 4 October 1992, the Indigenous Peoples’ Tribunal did not accept all of the 37 charges that I filed in my Indictment against the United States government for perpetrating international crimes against Indigenous Peoples, People of Color, and Oppressed Nations. But in their own words, the exact findings of this Tribunal on African Americans were as follows: New Afrikans 7. With respect to the charges brought by the New Afrikan People, the Defendant, the Federal Government of the United States of America is, by unanimous vote, guilty as charged in: The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Slavery upon the New Afrikan People as recognized in part by the 1926 Slavery Convention and the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. The Defendant has perpetrated innumerable Crimes Against Humanity against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Genocide against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1973 Apartheid Convention. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the 1965 Racism Convention against the New Afrikan People. The Defendant is the paradigmatic example of an irremediably racist state in international relations today. (my emphasis added) The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of the New Afrikan People to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter, the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966, customary international law, and jus cogens. [Let me repeat that: By unanimous vote, Ibid.] The Defendant has illegally refused to accord full-scope protections as Prisoners-of-War to captured New Afrikan independence fighters in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I thereto of 1977. The Defendant’s treatment of captured New Afrikan independence fighters as “common criminals” and “terrorists” constitutes a “grave breach” of the Geneva Accords and thus a serious war crime. ADDITIONAL FINDINGS In light of the foregoing findings, this Tribunal also, by unanimous vote, finds the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 37, which, as amended, reads: In light of the foregoing international crimes, the Defendant constitutes a Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization in accordance with the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles and the other sources of public international law specified above, and the Federal Government of the United States of America is similar to the Nazi government of World War II Germany. [This powerful Finding speaks for itself and requires no explanation by me.] …. With respect to the following charges brought by the New African People: a. four members of the Tribunal find the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 11, which, as amended, reads: The Defendant has illegally refused to pay reparations to the New Afrikan People for the commission of the International Crime of Slavery against Them in violation of basic norms of customary international law requiring such reparations to be paid. Three members of the Tribunal reserve the right to consider the documentary evidence further before making a final determination. [In all honesty, I do not know what more evidence these three members of the Tribunal wanted to see before they were willing to order that the United States government must pay reparations for slavery to African Americans — with all due respect to these three Judges. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time ever that any Lawyer had argued in favor of reparations for slavery for African Americans before an International Tribunal. A 4 in favor to 0 against to 3 abstentions Verdict was not a bad outcome for the first time through, though it was disappointing to me personally—it should have been unanimous. I and others lawyers will have to learn from this experience in order to do a better job the next time around on this critical issue of obtaining Reparations for Slavery to African Americans. But in retrospect, however, I should have argued to the San Francisco Trubunal that African Americans today suffer from intergenerational post-traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.) in order to drive home to the Judges the direct and immediate deleterious and debilitating effects that Slavery still now afflicts upon African Americans personally and as a People with a right of self-determination. ] b. Three members of the Tribunal find the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 18, which reads: The Defendant has illegally refused to apply the United Nations Decolonization Resolution of 1960 to the New Afrikan People and to the Territories that they principally inhabit. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize New Afrikan Territories immediately and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the New Afrikan People. Four members of the Tribunal reserve the right to consider the documentary evidence further before making a final determination. Obviously, I lost this Land “Reparations” argument by 3 in favor to 0 against to 4 abstaining. The Organizers of the San Francisco Tribunal had requested me to argue for this Land “Reparations” form of relief for African Americans, and I did that to the best of my ability. I suspect it appeared to be too “radical” a proposition for a majority of Judges on the Tribunal to endorse. But I take some consolation from the fact that at least three Judges agreed with me and none dissented. The Tribunal concluded its Verdict with the following Order to the United States government: “Now therefore, it is ordered, adjudged and decreed that the Defendant cease and desist from the commission of the crimes it has been found guilty of herein.” Pursuant thereto, I then filed a copy of this San Francisco Verdict with its Cease and Desist Order upon the Attorney General of the United States of America in Washington, D.C. In return, I later received a 5 February 1993 Letter from the U.S. Department of Justice that acknowledged the receipt of the San Francisco Tribunal Verdict and its Cease and Desist Order against the United States government. This U.S. D.O.J Letter then advised me: “If you, or the Tribunal, have any evidence of the violation of federal criminal law, we ask that you provide that information to your local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” As I saw it at the time, and still see it as of today, historically this would be analogous to the Nazi Ministry of “Justice” advising a German lawyer representing the Jews to file his Complaint of criminal law violations by the Nazi government against the Jews with the Gestapo. The F.B.I is and has always been the American Gestapo — especially for all Peoples of Color living within its imperial domain, and in particular against African Americans.[1] I also make that statement on the basis of first-hand personal experience. In the summer of 2004 the F.B.I. and the C.I.A/F.B.I Joint Terrorist Task Force in Springfield, Illinois put me on all of the U.S. government’s so-called “terrorist watch lists” because I refused to become an informant for them against my Arab and Muslim Clients, which would have violated their Constitutional Rights and my Ethical Obligation as an attorney. That is what the U.S. government’s “war on terrorism” is really all about: It is a War by the White Racist Judeo-Christian Financial Power Elite of America against Arabs and Muslims–many of whom are African Americans–both in this country and abroad. The Crusades all over again! As Special Prosecutor for the San Francisco Tribunal, it came as no surprise to me that the Judges unanimously endorsed most of my charges against the United States government with respect to African Americans. This is because the principles of international law with respect to African Americans are incontestable, and thus so glaringly obvious for the entire world to see. I most respectfully submit that African Americans should use the Tribunal’s Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order in order to support, promote, and defend their basic rights under international law, including and especially African Americans’ right to self-determination as found unanimously by the San Francisco Tribunal in 1992. In this regard, the Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order of this San Francisco Tribunal qualify as a “judicial decision” within the meaning of Article 38(1)(d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Pursuant thereto, this Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order constitute “subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law” for international law and practice. Furthermore, the Statute of the International Court of Justice is an “integral part” of the United Nations Charter under Article 92 thereof. Hence the San Francisco Tribunal’s Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order can be relied upon by the International Court of Justice itself, by the International Criminal Court, by some other International Tribunal, or by any other Court in the world today, as well as by any People or State of the World Community — including and especially by African Americans. The Verdict of the San Francisco Tribunal still serves as adequate notice to the appropriate officials in the United States Federal Government that they bear personal criminal responsibility under international law and the domestic legal systems of all Peoples and States in the World Community for designing and implementing these illegal, criminal and reprehensible policies and practices against Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America, including and especially against African Americans. Obviously, in my brief presentation here today, I do not have the time to go through each and every one of these nine charges; to discuss all of the factual evidence that supported these nine charges; or to provide you with an analysis of the international legal bases for each one of these nine charges. For that type of information, I refer you to the Video and the Book on the San Francisco Tribunal as well as to its Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order itself. But in the discussions that follow tonight and tomorrow, I will be happy to respond to any questions you might have. Thank you. *Check against oral delivery. Professor Francis A. Boyle is an international law expert and served as Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, as well as to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, where he drafted the Palestinian counter-offer to the now defunct Oslo Agreement. His books include “ Palestine, Palestinians and International Law” (2003), and “ The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law” (2010). ©2012 by Francis A. Boyle. All rights reserved. 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In spite of their huge number-equaling half of the combined population of Europe– they are often victims of discrimination and denial of their rights.… August 9, 2017 In "World" Related Tags: African Americans, Slavery One Comment [http://2.gravatar.com/avatar/5ca1c5e724b5da8e211316653033ba3b?s=360&r=g]K SHESHU BABU says: August 18, 2017 at 4:26 pm The African Americans have been suppressed politically and economically for a long time. 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Share It, Don’t Spill It” Campaign Springs Up Across India by Binu Mathew — 1 comment Archives August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 [Older Archive] The Political Economy Of Beef Ban [The Political Economy Of Beef Ban] Countercurrents Anthology-Vol 1 [Countercurrents Anthology-Vol 1] Countercurrents Youtube Channel [Countercurrents Youtube Channel] Annual Subscription If you like what you are reading please join our annual subscription programme. Countercurrents.org is a 100% reader supported website. We believe independent journalism will function properly only if it is economically independent. We do not accept advertising by our policy. We would rather die than accept advertisements from corporate giants. A small annual subscription sustains us. Get an annual subscription HERE Join Our News Letter Keep Uptodate With The World!!! Join Our News Letter Today !! We tell you what the mainstream media fails to tell you, or hides from you. These are the things that really matter. The things which may determine the fate of planet earth! The future of our children! In a word, the survival of the species! To receive our daily news digest please click HERE Submission Guidelines Countercurrents.org welcomes articles from writers, activists, journalists and also from our readers who have no prior experience in writing, on topics that we deal with regularly or on topics that you think need a wider circulation. Kindly use the word "SUBMISSION" in the subject line You can submit your articles to editor at countercurrents.org. More Submission guidelines are HERE Popular Tags American Imperialism Annihilate Caste Bangladesh Beef Ban Beef Ban Lynching Brexit Burhan Wani Cartoons Climate Change Counter Solutions Dakota Access Pipeline Demonetisation Donald Trump Education Global Warming GMO Health Hillary Clinton Hindutva Human Rights India-Pakistan Peace Initiative India Now Iraq ISIS Israel Kashmir K P Sasi Cartoons Narmada Bachao Andolan Nuclear War Palestine Patriarchy Peak Oil Poetry Refugee Crisis Resource Crisis RSS Russia Standing Rock Sioux Protest Syria The Commons Turkey US Elections 2016 US Travel Ban We Need Their Voices Today Yemen Annual Subscription [subscription-flame] CLOSE Top of Form Send to Email Address Your Name Your Email Address [loading] Cancel Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Email check failed, please try again Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Bottom of Form Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 8:42 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky And remember again: The College of Law Faculty deliberately brought in Killer Koh and his Drone Murder Extermination Campaign Against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color as a Role Model for Lawyers in Government Service. They are all Sick and Demented. They have no moral authority to say anything about what happened in Charlottesville. Just a Gang of Sick Puppies. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 7:35 AM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky Just remember: Not even one member of the entire College of Law Faculty supported us against Killer Koh and his Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color. They are all Gang of die-hard Bigots and Racists and Warmongers. Caveat emptor! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 4:42 PM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky “This episode {Charlottesville} and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice {sic!}.” UI Law School Dean The UI Law School Dean and Faculty fully support the USA Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color by Killer Koh, Clinton, Obama-- and now continued by Trump. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Long, Cheryl Lyn On Behalf Of Amar, Vikram D Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 3:54 PM To: Law * College of Law Community > Subject: Reflections on Charlottesville Good afternoon, As we turn our thoughts to an exciting new academic year, we cannot help but reflect on the sad events that took place at and near the University of Virginia – a school that has an academic tradition of excellence not unlike our own – in Charlottesville over the last week. This episode and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice. Below are links to messages offered by our University President, Timothy Killeen, and our Chancellor, Robert Jones, underscoring their commitment to keep the University of Illinois a place that is safe, welcoming and intellectually vibrant for all students, faculty and staff. I associate myself fully with each of these statements. Unfortunately, short statements – even ones as laudable as these – cannot take the place of the thorough, robust discussions and suggestions for improvement concerning these issues that are needed. I look forward to the return of students, staff and faculty to the College of Law in the next few weeks so that we, as a community, can engage each other in precisely those kinds of dialogues. To that end, we invite you join us for a panel discussion featuring various College of Law faculty members, Legal Perspectives on Charlottesville, on Friday, September 15 at noon in the Max L. Rowe Auditorium. Additional event details will be posted on the College’s website in the coming days. Message from Timothy L. Killeen, President Message from Robert J. Jones, Chancellor Vikram David Amar Dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law University of Illinois College of Law -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 35519 bytes Desc: image001.png URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image012.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 5959 bytes Desc: image012.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image013.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 1965 bytes Desc: image013.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: image054.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 4393 bytes Desc: image054.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 13:57:07 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 13:57:07 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Subscription News Letter Fair Use Disclaimer Submission Contact About Social Icons [Countercurrents] Home World» Palestine Imperialism South Asia India» Communal Harmony An Hour For India Annihilate Caste Kashmir Climate Change» Environmental Protection Resource Crisis Counter Solutions Alternative Energy Globalisation Patriarchy Human Rights Life/Philosophy» Arts/Literature Book Review There are no breaking news at the moment The Right Of African Americans To Self-Determination in Human Rights — by Professor Francis A Boyle — August 17, 2017 [slavery] A speech delivered by international law Professor Francis A. Boyle at East-West University, Chicago Illinois, April 20, 2012, before the IHRAAM Conference on Civil Rights, Human Rights, & Self-Determination In order to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s invasion of the Americas, in early 1992 I was asked by the Organizers of the International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nations in the U.S.A. to serve as Special Prosecutor of the United States of America for committing international crimes against Indigenous Peoples, People of Color, and Oppressed Nationalities, including and especially African Americans. For the purposes of these proceedings, the Organizers asked me to call African Americans the New Afrikan People. The Tribunal was initiated by the American Indian Movement (AIM) with the support of representatives of the Puerto Rican People, the New Afrikan People, the Mexicano People, and “progressive White North Americans.” Of course, I do not consider myself to be a “White North American.” I was born Irish. During the past 840 years of resisting one of the most brutal and cruel colonial occupations in the history of humankind, we Irish know what the denial of self-determination, genocide, and gross violations of our most fundamental human rights are all about in our beloved Ireland and abroad, which atrocities still continue as of today. In my capacity as Special Prosecutor of the United States Federal Government, I drew up an Indictment under international law that was served upon the Attorney General of the United States and the United States Attorney in San Francisco prior to the convening of the Tribunal in that city just before “Columbus Day” on October 2-4, 1992 with a demand that they appear to defend the United States government from the charges. I take it they saw no point in trying to defend the indefensible because no one showed up to defend the United States government, though they did publicly acknowledge receipt of our service of process. I will not go through all 37 charges of my Indictment here. But the proceedings of this pathbreaking International Tribunal have been recorded in a formal Verdict by the Tribunal; in a Video of the Tribunal; and in a Book on the Tribunal–all under the title U.S.A. On Trial: The International Tribunal on Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nations in the United States. Six months after the conclusion of these San Francisco Tribunal proceedings, I was the Lawyer and Ambassador for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina arguing its case for genocide against Yugoslavia before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the World Court of the United Nations System. There I would singlehandedly win two World Court Orders overwhelmingly in favor of Bosnia against Yugoslavia to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Bosnians on 8 April 1993 and 13 September 1993. I treated the San Francisco Tribunal proceedings with as much care, attention, dignity, respect, and professionalism as I did the World Court proceedings for Bosnia. And the results were the same: massive, overwhelming, crushing victories for my clients in both the World Court and the San Francisco Tribunal! For the purpose of this Conference, I want to briefly discuss the nine charges that I filed against the United States government for committing international crimes against African Americans. I believe that these nine charges succinctly state the fundamental principles of international law and human rights concerning African Americans. Obviously, these nine charges of my Indictment cannot answer all the questions African Americans might have with respect to their rights under international law and human rights law. But I do submit that these nine charges provide a solid foundation for providing guidance to African Americans as to their basic rights under international law that can be used in the future in order to navigate problems and issues as they arise to confront them today. The Distinguished Judges composing this International Tribunal consisted of seven independent Experts on human rights drawn from all over the world. In their Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order of 4 October 1992, the Indigenous Peoples’ Tribunal did not accept all of the 37 charges that I filed in my Indictment against the United States government for perpetrating international crimes against Indigenous Peoples, People of Color, and Oppressed Nations. But in their own words, the exact findings of this Tribunal on African Americans were as follows: New Afrikans 7. With respect to the charges brought by the New Afrikan People, the Defendant, the Federal Government of the United States of America is, by unanimous vote, guilty as charged in: The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Slavery upon the New Afrikan People as recognized in part by the 1926 Slavery Convention and the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. The Defendant has perpetrated innumerable Crimes Against Humanity against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Genocide against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1973 Apartheid Convention. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the 1965 Racism Convention against the New Afrikan People. The Defendant is the paradigmatic example of an irremediably racist state in international relations today. (my emphasis added) The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of the New Afrikan People to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter, the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966, customary international law, and jus cogens. [Let me repeat that: By unanimous vote, Ibid.] The Defendant has illegally refused to accord full-scope protections as Prisoners-of-War to captured New Afrikan independence fighters in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I thereto of 1977. The Defendant’s treatment of captured New Afrikan independence fighters as “common criminals” and “terrorists” constitutes a “grave breach” of the Geneva Accords and thus a serious war crime. ADDITIONAL FINDINGS In light of the foregoing findings, this Tribunal also, by unanimous vote, finds the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 37, which, as amended, reads: In light of the foregoing international crimes, the Defendant constitutes a Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization in accordance with the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles and the other sources of public international law specified above, and the Federal Government of the United States of America is similar to the Nazi government of World War II Germany. [This powerful Finding speaks for itself and requires no explanation by me.] …. With respect to the following charges brought by the New African People: a. four members of the Tribunal find the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 11, which, as amended, reads: The Defendant has illegally refused to pay reparations to the New Afrikan People for the commission of the International Crime of Slavery against Them in violation of basic norms of customary international law requiring such reparations to be paid. Three members of the Tribunal reserve the right to consider the documentary evidence further before making a final determination. [In all honesty, I do not know what more evidence these three members of the Tribunal wanted to see before they were willing to order that the United States government must pay reparations for slavery to African Americans — with all due respect to these three Judges. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time ever that any Lawyer had argued in favor of reparations for slavery for African Americans before an International Tribunal. A 4 in favor to 0 against to 3 abstentions Verdict was not a bad outcome for the first time through, though it was disappointing to me personally—it should have been unanimous. I and others lawyers will have to learn from this experience in order to do a better job the next time around on this critical issue of obtaining Reparations for Slavery to African Americans. But in retrospect, however, I should have argued to the San Francisco Trubunal that African Americans today suffer from intergenerational post-traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.) in order to drive home to the Judges the direct and immediate deleterious and debilitating effects that Slavery still now afflicts upon African Americans personally and as a People with a right of self-determination. ] b. Three members of the Tribunal find the Defendant guilty as charged in paragraph 18, which reads: The Defendant has illegally refused to apply the United Nations Decolonization Resolution of 1960 to the New Afrikan People and to the Territories that they principally inhabit. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize New Afrikan Territories immediately and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the New Afrikan People. Four members of the Tribunal reserve the right to consider the documentary evidence further before making a final determination. Obviously, I lost this Land “Reparations” argument by 3 in favor to 0 against to 4 abstaining. The Organizers of the San Francisco Tribunal had requested me to argue for this Land “Reparations” form of relief for African Americans, and I did that to the best of my ability. I suspect it appeared to be too “radical” a proposition for a majority of Judges on the Tribunal to endorse. But I take some consolation from the fact that at least three Judges agreed with me and none dissented. The Tribunal concluded its Verdict with the following Order to the United States government: “Now therefore, it is ordered, adjudged and decreed that the Defendant cease and desist from the commission of the crimes it has been found guilty of herein.” Pursuant thereto, I then filed a copy of this San Francisco Verdict with its Cease and Desist Order upon the Attorney General of the United States of America in Washington, D.C. In return, I later received a 5 February 1993 Letter from the U.S. Department of Justice that acknowledged the receipt of the San Francisco Tribunal Verdict and its Cease and Desist Order against the United States government. This U.S. D.O.J Letter then advised me: “If you, or the Tribunal, have any evidence of the violation of federal criminal law, we ask that you provide that information to your local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” As I saw it at the time, and still see it as of today, historically this would be analogous to the Nazi Ministry of “Justice” advising a German lawyer representing the Jews to file his Complaint of criminal law violations by the Nazi government against the Jews with the Gestapo. The F.B.I is and has always been the American Gestapo — especially for all Peoples of Color living within its imperial domain, and in particular against African Americans.[1] I also make that statement on the basis of first-hand personal experience. In the summer of 2004 the F.B.I. and the C.I.A/F.B.I Joint Terrorist Task Force in Springfield, Illinois put me on all of the U.S. government’s so-called “terrorist watch lists” because I refused to become an informant for them against my Arab and Muslim Clients, which would have violated their Constitutional Rights and my Ethical Obligation as an attorney. That is what the U.S. government’s “war on terrorism” is really all about: It is a War by the White Racist Judeo-Christian Financial Power Elite of America against Arabs and Muslims–many of whom are African Americans–both in this country and abroad. The Crusades all over again! As Special Prosecutor for the San Francisco Tribunal, it came as no surprise to me that the Judges unanimously endorsed most of my charges against the United States government with respect to African Americans. This is because the principles of international law with respect to African Americans are incontestable, and thus so glaringly obvious for the entire world to see. I most respectfully submit that African Americans should use the Tribunal’s Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order in order to support, promote, and defend their basic rights under international law, including and especially African Americans’ right to self-determination as found unanimously by the San Francisco Tribunal in 1992. In this regard, the Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order of this San Francisco Tribunal qualify as a “judicial decision” within the meaning of Article 38(1)(d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Pursuant thereto, this Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order constitute “subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law” for international law and practice. Furthermore, the Statute of the International Court of Justice is an “integral part” of the United Nations Charter under Article 92 thereof. Hence the San Francisco Tribunal’s Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order can be relied upon by the International Court of Justice itself, by the International Criminal Court, by some other International Tribunal, or by any other Court in the world today, as well as by any People or State of the World Community — including and especially by African Americans. The Verdict of the San Francisco Tribunal still serves as adequate notice to the appropriate officials in the United States Federal Government that they bear personal criminal responsibility under international law and the domestic legal systems of all Peoples and States in the World Community for designing and implementing these illegal, criminal and reprehensible policies and practices against Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America, including and especially against African Americans. Obviously, in my brief presentation here today, I do not have the time to go through each and every one of these nine charges; to discuss all of the factual evidence that supported these nine charges; or to provide you with an analysis of the international legal bases for each one of these nine charges. For that type of information, I refer you to the Video and the Book on the San Francisco Tribunal as well as to its Verdict, Preliminary Findings, and Order itself. But in the discussions that follow tonight and tomorrow, I will be happy to respond to any questions you might have. Thank you. *Check against oral delivery. Professor Francis A. Boyle is an international law expert and served as Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, as well as to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, where he drafted the Palestinian counter-offer to the now defunct Oslo Agreement. His books include “ Palestine, Palestinians and International Law” (2003), and “ The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law” (2010). ©2012 by Francis A. Boyle. All rights reserved. Share this: 20Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)20 Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window) Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Share on Skype (Opens in new window) Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window) Click to print (Opens in new window) Related [The Big Difference At Standing Rock Is Native Leadership All Around] The Big Difference At Standing Rock Is Native Leadership All Around This year’s massive buildup of resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline follows closely on the heels of the victory over Keystone XL pipeline, something often credited to feverish organizing by 350.org. But years before 350’s involvement, there was the Indigenous Environmental Network, which launched that movement and its “Keep It… September 13, 2016 In "Environmental Protection" [Question Deleted] Question Deleted For some time now, the discourse on Israel has been shifting from a place where Israeli “hasbara” disinformation had the upper hand no matter where one turned, to a place where Israeli criminal policies are more frankly discussed and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), which is now… June 3, 2017 In "Palestine" [260 Million Indigenous Peoples Marginalised, Discriminated] 260 Million Indigenous Peoples Marginalised, Discriminated Asia is home to the largest number of indigenous peoples on Earth, with an estimated 260 million of a total of 370 million original inhabitants worldwide. In spite of their huge number-equaling half of the combined population of Europe– they are often victims of discrimination and denial of their rights.… August 9, 2017 In "World" Related Tags: African Americans, Slavery One Comment [http://2.gravatar.com/avatar/5ca1c5e724b5da8e211316653033ba3b?s=360&r=g]K SHESHU BABU says: August 18, 2017 at 4:26 pm The African Americans have been suppressed politically and economically for a long time. As expressed in this speech, there are valid reasons for struggle in order to liberate from US rulers Reply Leave a Reply Cancel reply Top of Form Bottom of Form Site Search Top of Form Bottom of Form [Annual Subscription] Join Our News Letter Top of Form Name: E-mail: Bottom of Form Latest Popular Comments Tags Latest [http://www.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/UP-Madarsa-Independence-Day-75x50.jpg]Everyday Agnipariksha Of UP Madrasaas To Prove Patriotism: Hindutva Attack Must Be Faced Innovatively - Shamsul Islam [http://www.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Kim-Jong-Un-attack-Trump-US-world-war-north-korea-75x50.jpg]Is Donald Trump Promoting Kim Jong-un’s “Erratic Behaviour”? - Taj Hashmi [http://www.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/pauline-hanson-burqa-75x50.jpg]Burqa Stunt Failed To Stir Anti-Muslim Sentiments In Australian Senate - Abdus Sattar Ghazali [http://www.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/StopHateSpeech-75x50.jpg]Hate Speech, Fear And The Primitive Human Brain - Dr Nayvin Gordon [http://www.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/metro-75x50.jpg]High Speed Freedom - K P Sasi [http://www.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/narmada-protest-75x50.jpeg]An Account Of My Abduction By The Police - Bilal Khan [http://www.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/unite-the-right-rally-75x50.jpg]When Will The United States Transcend White Supremacy? 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TM Krishna Notebandi Takes The Sauce Out Of Nashik’s Tomatoes Farmers Continue To Suffer Pains Of Demonetisation 1 2 3 Previous Next Editor’s Picks [Jeff Bezos, Global Elites And Revolution] Jeff Bezos, Global Elites And Revolution by Binu Mathew — 5 comments The morning papers bring me the news that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world. Actually he overtook Bill Gates for a few hours on Thursday as the richest person on earth as the Amazon share prices rose. Bill Gates regained his position as the richest person later in the day. So what the[Read More…] Share this: 227Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)227 Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window) Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Share on Skype (Opens in new window) Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window) Click to print (Opens in new window) [Indian Fascism: Radicalization or Entropy? The Choice Is Ours!] Indian Fascism: Radicalization or Entropy? The Choice Is Ours! by Binu Mathew — 3 comments [“India United By Blood! Share It, Don’t Spill It” Campaign Springs Up Across India] “India United By Blood! Share It, Don’t Spill It” Campaign Springs Up Across India by Binu Mathew — 1 comment Archives August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 [Older Archive] The Political Economy Of Beef Ban [The Political Economy Of Beef Ban] Countercurrents Anthology-Vol 1 [Countercurrents Anthology-Vol 1] Countercurrents Youtube Channel [Countercurrents Youtube Channel] Annual Subscription If you like what you are reading please join our annual subscription programme. Countercurrents.org is a 100% reader supported website. We believe independent journalism will function properly only if it is economically independent. We do not accept advertising by our policy. We would rather die than accept advertisements from corporate giants. A small annual subscription sustains us. Get an annual subscription HERE Join Our News Letter Keep Uptodate With The World!!! Join Our News Letter Today !! We tell you what the mainstream media fails to tell you, or hides from you. These are the things that really matter. The things which may determine the fate of planet earth! The future of our children! In a word, the survival of the species! To receive our daily news digest please click HERE Submission Guidelines Countercurrents.org welcomes articles from writers, activists, journalists and also from our readers who have no prior experience in writing, on topics that we deal with regularly or on topics that you think need a wider circulation. Kindly use the word "SUBMISSION" in the subject line You can submit your articles to editor at countercurrents.org. More Submission guidelines are HERE Popular Tags American Imperialism Annihilate Caste Bangladesh Beef Ban Beef Ban Lynching Brexit Burhan Wani Cartoons Climate Change Counter Solutions Dakota Access Pipeline Demonetisation Donald Trump Education Global Warming GMO Health Hillary Clinton Hindutva Human Rights India-Pakistan Peace Initiative India Now Iraq ISIS Israel Kashmir K P Sasi Cartoons Narmada Bachao Andolan Nuclear War Palestine Patriarchy Peak Oil Poetry Refugee Crisis Resource Crisis RSS Russia Standing Rock Sioux Protest Syria The Commons Turkey US Elections 2016 US Travel Ban We Need Their Voices Today Yemen Annual Subscription [subscription-flame] CLOSE Top of Form Send to Email Address Your Name Your Email Address [loading] Cancel Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Email check failed, please try again Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Bottom of Form Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 8:42 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky And remember again: The College of Law Faculty deliberately brought in Killer Koh and his Drone Murder Extermination Campaign Against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color as a Role Model for Lawyers in Government Service. They are all Sick and Demented. They have no moral authority to say anything about what happened in Charlottesville. Just a Gang of Sick Puppies. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 7:35 AM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky Just remember: Not even one member of the entire College of Law Faculty supported us against Killer Koh and his Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color. They are all Gang of die-hard Bigots and Racists and Warmongers. Caveat emptor! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 4:42 PM To: 'David Green' >; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' >; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' >; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' >; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' >; Hoffman, Valerie J >; 'Joe Lauria' >; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' >; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' >; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; 'Arlene Hickory' >; 'David Swanson' >; 'Karen Aram' >; 'abass10 at gmail.com' >; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' >; 'Lina Thorne' >; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' >; 'Jay' >; 'David Johnson' >; 'Mildred O'brien' >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: UI Law School Sheds Crocodile Tears Over Charlottesville “…particularly to the drone assassinations, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” - which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children.” Chomsky “This episode {Charlottesville} and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice {sic!}.” UI Law School Dean The UI Law School Dean and Faculty fully support the USA Drone Murder Extermination Campaign against Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color by Killer Koh, Clinton, Obama-- and now continued by Trump. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Long, Cheryl Lyn On Behalf Of Amar, Vikram D Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 3:54 PM To: Law * College of Law Community > Subject: Reflections on Charlottesville Good afternoon, As we turn our thoughts to an exciting new academic year, we cannot help but reflect on the sad events that took place at and near the University of Virginia – a school that has an academic tradition of excellence not unlike our own – in Charlottesville over the last week. This episode and its unfolding aftermath have made deep impressions on all of us and, I hope, will cause us to be more committed than ever to rejecting and publicly condemning views of racial and religious supremacy and prejudice. Below are links to messages offered by our University President, Timothy Killeen, and our Chancellor, Robert Jones, underscoring their commitment to keep the University of Illinois a place that is safe, welcoming and intellectually vibrant for all students, faculty and staff. I associate myself fully with each of these statements. Unfortunately, short statements – even ones as laudable as these – cannot take the place of the thorough, robust discussions and suggestions for improvement concerning these issues that are needed. I look forward to the return of students, staff and faculty to the College of Law in the next few weeks so that we, as a community, can engage each other in precisely those kinds of dialogues. To that end, we invite you join us for a panel discussion featuring various College of Law faculty members, Legal Perspectives on Charlottesville, on Friday, September 15 at noon in the Max L. Rowe Auditorium. Additional event details will be posted on the College’s website in the coming days. Message from Timothy L. Killeen, President Message from Robert J. Jones, Chancellor Vikram David Amar Dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law University of Illinois College of Law -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 35519 bytes Desc: image001.png URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image012.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 5959 bytes Desc: image012.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image013.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 1965 bytes Desc: image013.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: image054.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 4393 bytes Desc: image054.jpg URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Sat Aug 19 14:15:01 2017 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 14:15:01 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] U.S. economic system oppresses the poor References: <1684229272.1050951.1503152101349.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1684229272.1050951.1503152101349@mail.yahoo.com> That was the title given to my letter to the editor this morning: In “Money can’t buy everything” (August 14th), News-Gazette editors assert that “society can't even give each child a family structure that lays the groundwork for a happy, healthy, successful life.” Thus, educational spending is limited in its effects on achievement and economic outcomes. If money can’t buy everything, one wonders why the top 10% need 50% of the income, the top 1% need 40% of the wealth, and the top .1% need more wealth than the bottom 90%--all of these constituting spectacular and arbitrary increases in inequality over the past half-century. But since money can’t buy everything, it makes sense that the bottom 50% in income haven’t had a significant raise over the past 50 years, in spite of the near-doubling of real per capita GDP. What good would it do if, as the editors claim, “The family structure is at death's door”? In reality, money in our rich and developed society could buy all families a decent and affordable system of housing, healthcare, social and cultural supports, and some combination of universal basic income and guaranteed employment at a living wage. This would do wonders for family structure, and leave educators as co-facilitators (with parents) of child and adolescent intellectual development, rather than co-oppressors (with “job creators”) of a future low-wage labor force. For students in the bottom 50%, neither condescension regarding “family structure” nor fantasies of “equal opportunity” will resonate with their valid perceptions of a system that dramatically favors the inter-generational perpetuation of the privileged classes. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 14:21:19 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 14:21:19 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Romney v. Trump--Pot Calling Kettle Black Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 9:19 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: NYT:Romney v. Trump--Pot Calling Kettle Black Romney got elected Governor of Massachusetts as a RINO, which is the only way a Republican can get elected governor there. He then immediately veered to the extreme right in order to lick the boots of the Neolithic right of the Republican Party in order to win their presidential primary. I won't go through all of Romney's Gross Hypocrisy here. But the worst of the bunch was his public campaign to re-establish the Death Penalty in Massachusetts. This was SICK AND DEMENTED. And especially after Romney and I had studied Criminal Law with Lloyd Weinreb (an excellent teacher and casebook that I have used myself) who had spent time on the lynching of Sacco and Vanzetti by Massachusetts. Romney knew all about it and campaigned for the restoration of the DP in Mass anyway. That should give you a pretty good picture of his total lack of integrity, principles and character. Romney once said that if you lose the Presidential Election you become "a loser for life." Let that be Romney's Epitaph--Loser for Life. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: public at lists.accuracy.org [mailto:public at lists.accuracy.org] On Behalf Of Institute for Public Accuracy Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2012 3:05 PM To: Institute for Public Accuracy Subject: Romney's Bishophood and Mormonism Institute for Public Accuracy 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org __________________________________________________________ Thursday, August 30, 2011 Romney's Bishophood and Mormonism The Financial Times reports: "For months, Mitt Romney has been speaking about his Mormon faith only when pressed. On Thursday night, when he accepts the Republican party’s nomination for president, his religion will be celebrated in prime time like never before." http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c5a7badc-f1c1-11e1-bda3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz253dbR6Oo JOANNA BROOKS, jmbrooks at mail.sdsu.edu, http://joannabrooks.org, http://www.religiondispatches.org/contributors/joannabrooks Brooks is author of "The Book of Mormon Girl." She writes regularly for ReligionDispatches.org and her recent pieces include "Romney Lets his Inner Mormon Out Just in Time for Tampa," "Is the Ryan VP Pick Good for Mormonism?" and "Reuters Probes LDS Church Wealth." FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at law.uiuc.edu Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of "Tackling America’s Toughest Questions." He said today: "The Mormon Bishop who succeeded Romney in Boston, Grant Bennett, will be speaking. Usually Bishops and Cardinals only lead prayers at Conventions. They don’t give speeches. Romney’s official positions in the hierarchy of the Mormon Church raise serious questions under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Romney must come clean and fully explain his official positions in the Mormon Church hierarchy and the extent to which he takes orders from their Prophet and Apostles. So far the mainstream news media have all given Romney a pass on this threat to the First Amendment." "Romney is/was a Mormon Bishop and Archbishop. They take orders from the Mormon Prophet, roughly the Mormon equivalent of the Roman Catholic Pope. Constitutionally speaking under the First Amendment, Romney is not equivalent to either John Kennedy (a lay Catholic) or Joe Lieiberman (a lay orthodox Jew) or Jimmy Carter (a lay Baptist Sunday school teacher)." "Critically, Kennedy said he would resign if there was a conflict and Romney conspicuously did not." Boyle is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Harvard Law School where he was section-mates with Willard Mitt Romney, now known as Mitt, as first year law students (1Ls) during the 1971-1972 academic year. They took all their first-year law courses together. He teaches courses on the Constitutional Law of U.S. Foreign Affairs, and Jurisprudence, among others. Kennedy's address from 1960: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16920600 Romney addressed the issue of religion and public office in 2007: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16969460 See "Who is the Mormon Prophet Today?" http://mormon.org/faq/present-day-prophet For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 _________________________________________________________________ You received this message as a subscriber on the list: public at lists.accuracy.org For all list information and functions, including changing your subscription mode and options, visit the Web page: http://lists.accuracy.org/lists/info/public From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 14:21:19 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 14:21:19 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Romney v. Trump--Pot Calling Kettle Black Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 9:19 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: NYT:Romney v. Trump--Pot Calling Kettle Black Romney got elected Governor of Massachusetts as a RINO, which is the only way a Republican can get elected governor there. He then immediately veered to the extreme right in order to lick the boots of the Neolithic right of the Republican Party in order to win their presidential primary. I won't go through all of Romney's Gross Hypocrisy here. But the worst of the bunch was his public campaign to re-establish the Death Penalty in Massachusetts. This was SICK AND DEMENTED. And especially after Romney and I had studied Criminal Law with Lloyd Weinreb (an excellent teacher and casebook that I have used myself) who had spent time on the lynching of Sacco and Vanzetti by Massachusetts. Romney knew all about it and campaigned for the restoration of the DP in Mass anyway. That should give you a pretty good picture of his total lack of integrity, principles and character. Romney once said that if you lose the Presidential Election you become "a loser for life." Let that be Romney's Epitaph--Loser for Life. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: public at lists.accuracy.org [mailto:public at lists.accuracy.org] On Behalf Of Institute for Public Accuracy Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2012 3:05 PM To: Institute for Public Accuracy Subject: Romney's Bishophood and Mormonism Institute for Public Accuracy 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org __________________________________________________________ Thursday, August 30, 2011 Romney's Bishophood and Mormonism The Financial Times reports: "For months, Mitt Romney has been speaking about his Mormon faith only when pressed. On Thursday night, when he accepts the Republican party’s nomination for president, his religion will be celebrated in prime time like never before." http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c5a7badc-f1c1-11e1-bda3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz253dbR6Oo JOANNA BROOKS, jmbrooks at mail.sdsu.edu, http://joannabrooks.org, http://www.religiondispatches.org/contributors/joannabrooks Brooks is author of "The Book of Mormon Girl." She writes regularly for ReligionDispatches.org and her recent pieces include "Romney Lets his Inner Mormon Out Just in Time for Tampa," "Is the Ryan VP Pick Good for Mormonism?" and "Reuters Probes LDS Church Wealth." FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at law.uiuc.edu Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of "Tackling America’s Toughest Questions." He said today: "The Mormon Bishop who succeeded Romney in Boston, Grant Bennett, will be speaking. Usually Bishops and Cardinals only lead prayers at Conventions. They don’t give speeches. Romney’s official positions in the hierarchy of the Mormon Church raise serious questions under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Romney must come clean and fully explain his official positions in the Mormon Church hierarchy and the extent to which he takes orders from their Prophet and Apostles. So far the mainstream news media have all given Romney a pass on this threat to the First Amendment." "Romney is/was a Mormon Bishop and Archbishop. They take orders from the Mormon Prophet, roughly the Mormon equivalent of the Roman Catholic Pope. Constitutionally speaking under the First Amendment, Romney is not equivalent to either John Kennedy (a lay Catholic) or Joe Lieiberman (a lay orthodox Jew) or Jimmy Carter (a lay Baptist Sunday school teacher)." "Critically, Kennedy said he would resign if there was a conflict and Romney conspicuously did not." Boyle is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Harvard Law School where he was section-mates with Willard Mitt Romney, now known as Mitt, as first year law students (1Ls) during the 1971-1972 academic year. They took all their first-year law courses together. He teaches courses on the Constitutional Law of U.S. Foreign Affairs, and Jurisprudence, among others. Kennedy's address from 1960: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16920600 Romney addressed the issue of religion and public office in 2007: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16969460 See "Who is the Mormon Prophet Today?" http://mormon.org/faq/present-day-prophet For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 _________________________________________________________________ You received this message as a subscriber on the list: public at lists.accuracy.org For all list information and functions, including changing your subscription mode and options, visit the Web page: http://lists.accuracy.org/lists/info/public From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Aug 19 14:23:14 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 14:23:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yes, and that is why it’s important that people be educated to recognize “classism” and its “material base.” Fighting racism, which is an attitude, is like fixing the doors and windows, when the house is crumbling due to a poorly built foundation. One must “fix” the foundation, or the doors and windows will continue to crack and fall apart. On Aug 19, 2017, at 05:50, kmedina67 > wrote: Not everyone notices that classism exists. And the effects are unequally distributed. So those most affected by classism are the most desperate to end it. -Karen Medina -------- Original message -------- From: Karen Aram > Date: 8/19/17 07:04 (GMT-06:00) To: Karen Medina > Cc: Peace-discuss List > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day “Racism” is like “poverty” and “inequality” a component of “classism,” which is a result of capitalism. Fighting amongst ourselves is not a solution. War is about profit and control of other peoples resources. A solution is to target the “perpetrators” of the crime. On Aug 18, 2017, at 13:49, Karen Medina > wrote: Karen Aram wrote: 'I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over "racism" ' To me, war with other peoples is directly related to racism and classism. -karen medina -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 16:47:06 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 11:47:06 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <542733E3-FC61-497F-9FC7-C173B60B7A3C@illinois.edu> Interesting image. Helpful to distinguish class as an objective situation (recognized or not) from an attitude of superiority/inferiority. > On Aug 19, 2017, at 9:23 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Yes, and that is why it’s important that people be educated to recognize “classism” and its “material base.” Fighting racism, which is an attitude, is like fixing the doors and windows, when the house is crumbling due to a poorly built foundation. One must “fix” the foundation, or the doors and windows will continue to crack and fall apart. > >> On Aug 19, 2017, at 05:50, kmedina67 > wrote: >> >> Not everyone notices that classism exists. And the effects are unequally distributed. So those most affected by classism are the most desperate to end it. >> >> -Karen Medina >> >> -------- Original message -------- >> From: Karen Aram > >> Date: 8/19/17 07:04 (GMT-06:00) >> To: Karen Medina > >> Cc: Peace-discuss List > >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day >> >> “Racism” is like “poverty” and “inequality” a component of “classism,” which is a result of capitalism. Fighting amongst ourselves is not a solution. War is about profit and control of other peoples resources. >> >> A solution is to target the “perpetrators” of the crime. >> >> >>> On Aug 18, 2017, at 13:49, Karen Medina > wrote: >>> >>> Karen Aram wrote: 'I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over "racism" ' >>> >>> To me, war with other peoples is directly related to racism and classism. >>> -karen medina >> > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 16:51:28 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 16:51:28 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 11:49 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke For Robin Kirk, a co-director of Duke University's Human Rights Center {sic!}, the rapid expunging of the {Confederate} statues currently underway needs to be "slower and more deliberative." Oh sure, the Confederate War of Rebellion against the United States of America in order to preserve slavery only ended in 1865. We need to deliberate about these matters for another 152 years or so. What's the difference between the Confederate Flag and the Nazi Swastika? About six decades. But what else do you expect from a "university" founded upon tobacco that pollutes, poisons and murders our Children in the Confederate State of North Carolina where the Slaves were forced to harvest the tobacco. fab Fab Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 16:51:28 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 16:51:28 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 11:49 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke For Robin Kirk, a co-director of Duke University's Human Rights Center {sic!}, the rapid expunging of the {Confederate} statues currently underway needs to be "slower and more deliberative." Oh sure, the Confederate War of Rebellion against the United States of America in order to preserve slavery only ended in 1865. We need to deliberate about these matters for another 152 years or so. What's the difference between the Confederate Flag and the Nazi Swastika? About six decades. But what else do you expect from a "university" founded upon tobacco that pollutes, poisons and murders our Children in the Confederate State of North Carolina where the Slaves were forced to harvest the tobacco. fab Fab Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 17:34:20 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 12:34:20 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The best account I’ve seen of the matter: . —CGE [PS - I’ve always thought of myself as a Southerner: reared in Virginia (my father would say, “…crops are raised, children are reared…”), fond of New Orleans (a western end of the Venetian cultural diaspora), composed a college application essay on Pickett’s Charge (ordered by R. E. Lee), studied briefly at Duke (favorite college of my classmates at Washington-Lee [sic] High School), I was Quentin Compson (from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury) when I moved to Boston - but, like l'abbé Sieyès, "J'ai vécu”…] > On Aug 19, 2017, at 11:51 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 11:49 AM > To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org > Subject: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke > > For Robin Kirk, a co-director of Duke University’s Human Rights Center {sic!}, the rapid expunging of the {Confederate} statues currently underway needs to be “slower and more deliberative.” > Oh sure, the Confederate War of Rebellion against the United States of America in order to preserve slavery only ended in 1865. We need to deliberate about these matters for another 152 years or so. What’s the difference between the Confederate Flag and the Nazi Swastika? About six decades. But what else do you expect from a “university” founded upon tobacco that pollutes, poisons and murders our Children in the Confederate State of North Carolina where the Slaves were forced to harvest the tobacco. > fab > > Fab > Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92) > From galliher at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 17:34:20 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 12:34:20 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The best account I’ve seen of the matter: . —CGE [PS - I’ve always thought of myself as a Southerner: reared in Virginia (my father would say, “…crops are raised, children are reared…”), fond of New Orleans (a western end of the Venetian cultural diaspora), composed a college application essay on Pickett’s Charge (ordered by R. E. Lee), studied briefly at Duke (favorite college of my classmates at Washington-Lee [sic] High School), I was Quentin Compson (from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury) when I moved to Boston - but, like l'abbé Sieyès, "J'ai vécu”…] > On Aug 19, 2017, at 11:51 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 11:49 AM > To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org > Subject: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke > > For Robin Kirk, a co-director of Duke University’s Human Rights Center {sic!}, the rapid expunging of the {Confederate} statues currently underway needs to be “slower and more deliberative.” > Oh sure, the Confederate War of Rebellion against the United States of America in order to preserve slavery only ended in 1865. We need to deliberate about these matters for another 152 years or so. What’s the difference between the Confederate Flag and the Nazi Swastika? About six decades. But what else do you expect from a “university” founded upon tobacco that pollutes, poisons and murders our Children in the Confederate State of North Carolina where the Slaves were forced to harvest the tobacco. > fab > > Fab > Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92) > From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 17:54:43 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 17:54:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Our Illinois Boys “Oh, I wish I was in Dixie…” But not if I were Black Native Chicagoan Born, raised, living, and teaching in Illinois The Land of Lincoln Who freed the slaves The air is a lot cleaner up here! North of the Mason-Dixon Line You can shove your Robert E. Lee Right up where the Sun Don’t Shine! Stars and Bars too Johnny Reb 3 They should all fit together Into your Big Confederate Arse And whistle Dixie while you fart U.S. Grant from Galena Illinois Our Illinois Boys Lincoln and Grant Sure Smashed the Confederacy to Hell! But with Lincoln’s Murder By a “Southern Gentleman” They could not put a stake Through the Heart of that White Racist Vampire Known as the American South The Confederacy lives on today Their Legal Lynching of Black Men By Lethal Injection Their shoot to kill policy against Black Boys In Ferguson Missouri, St. Louis, Florida Today’s Confederate States of America Don’t tell me about the “New South” I tried to save the lives of 2 Black Men From being tortured to death By Jebbie Bush in Florida Amos King and Johnny Robinson And Brian Baldwin fried to death by Alabama All Three R.I.P. You can stick your “New” South up Where the Sun Don’t Shine! Ditto for you Southern Gentlemen The same for you Southern Belles You can all fit together Into your Big Confederate Arse Go right ahead and have your Confederate Ball Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy While Whistling Dixie All This fart’s for you! How many times do we have to watch That Racist Garbage Gone with the Wind on TV Makes me want to puke every time it’s shown Barf! And barf again! And PBS/ Ken Burns version of the Civil War Letting that racist Shelby Foote do his best To justify the South’s Great Noble Cause Of warring for slavery Barf! And barf again! But our Illinois Boys Lincoln and Grant Sure Smashed the Confederacy to Hell! Otherwise, they would still have Slavery Down South there today Thank heavens for our Illinois Boys! Lincoln and Grant Came to rescue our Humanity! But now 9 African Americans Murdered Praying in Church to God In South Carolina Where the Stars and Bars Proudly Fly And elsewhere throughout the Southern Confederate States Way to go Johnny and Janie Rebs! Loyal Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy What’s the difference between the Confederate Flag? And the Nazi Swastika? About Six Decades!   70. Sandra Bland1 Sandra Bland Our Beautiful Daughter From Chicago Metro State of Illinois The Land of Lincoln Who Freed the Slaves Murdered! By Southern Bastards! By Southern Goons! By Southern Thugs! When will it end? When will it end? When will it end? Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 12:34 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke The best account I’ve seen of the matter: . —CGE [PS - I’ve always thought of myself as a Southerner: reared in Virginia (my father would say, “…crops are raised, children are reared…”), fond of New Orleans (a western end of the Venetian cultural diaspora), composed a college application essay on Pickett’s Charge (ordered by R. E. Lee), studied briefly at Duke (favorite college of my classmates at Washington-Lee [sic] High School), I was Quentin Compson (from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury) when I moved to Boston - but, like l'abbé Sieyès, "J'ai vécu”…] > On Aug 19, 2017, at 11:51 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 11:49 AM > To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org > Subject: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke > > For Robin Kirk, a co-director of Duke University’s Human Rights Center {sic!}, the rapid expunging of the {Confederate} statues currently underway needs to be “slower and more deliberative.” > Oh sure, the Confederate War of Rebellion against the United States of America in order to preserve slavery only ended in 1865. We need to deliberate about these matters for another 152 years or so. What’s the difference between the Confederate Flag and the Nazi Swastika? About six decades. But what else do you expect from a “university” founded upon tobacco that pollutes, poisons and murders our Children in the Confederate State of North Carolina where the Slaves were forced to harvest the tobacco. > fab > > Fab > Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92) > From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 17:54:43 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 17:54:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Our Illinois Boys “Oh, I wish I was in Dixie…” But not if I were Black Native Chicagoan Born, raised, living, and teaching in Illinois The Land of Lincoln Who freed the slaves The air is a lot cleaner up here! North of the Mason-Dixon Line You can shove your Robert E. Lee Right up where the Sun Don’t Shine! Stars and Bars too Johnny Reb 3 They should all fit together Into your Big Confederate Arse And whistle Dixie while you fart U.S. Grant from Galena Illinois Our Illinois Boys Lincoln and Grant Sure Smashed the Confederacy to Hell! But with Lincoln’s Murder By a “Southern Gentleman” They could not put a stake Through the Heart of that White Racist Vampire Known as the American South The Confederacy lives on today Their Legal Lynching of Black Men By Lethal Injection Their shoot to kill policy against Black Boys In Ferguson Missouri, St. Louis, Florida Today’s Confederate States of America Don’t tell me about the “New South” I tried to save the lives of 2 Black Men From being tortured to death By Jebbie Bush in Florida Amos King and Johnny Robinson And Brian Baldwin fried to death by Alabama All Three R.I.P. You can stick your “New” South up Where the Sun Don’t Shine! Ditto for you Southern Gentlemen The same for you Southern Belles You can all fit together Into your Big Confederate Arse Go right ahead and have your Confederate Ball Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy While Whistling Dixie All This fart’s for you! How many times do we have to watch That Racist Garbage Gone with the Wind on TV Makes me want to puke every time it’s shown Barf! And barf again! And PBS/ Ken Burns version of the Civil War Letting that racist Shelby Foote do his best To justify the South’s Great Noble Cause Of warring for slavery Barf! And barf again! But our Illinois Boys Lincoln and Grant Sure Smashed the Confederacy to Hell! Otherwise, they would still have Slavery Down South there today Thank heavens for our Illinois Boys! Lincoln and Grant Came to rescue our Humanity! But now 9 African Americans Murdered Praying in Church to God In South Carolina Where the Stars and Bars Proudly Fly And elsewhere throughout the Southern Confederate States Way to go Johnny and Janie Rebs! Loyal Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy What’s the difference between the Confederate Flag? And the Nazi Swastika? About Six Decades!   70. Sandra Bland1 Sandra Bland Our Beautiful Daughter From Chicago Metro State of Illinois The Land of Lincoln Who Freed the Slaves Murdered! By Southern Bastards! By Southern Goons! By Southern Thugs! When will it end? When will it end? When will it end? Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 12:34 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke The best account I’ve seen of the matter: . —CGE [PS - I’ve always thought of myself as a Southerner: reared in Virginia (my father would say, “…crops are raised, children are reared…”), fond of New Orleans (a western end of the Venetian cultural diaspora), composed a college application essay on Pickett’s Charge (ordered by R. E. Lee), studied briefly at Duke (favorite college of my classmates at Washington-Lee [sic] High School), I was Quentin Compson (from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury) when I moved to Boston - but, like l'abbé Sieyès, "J'ai vécu”…] > On Aug 19, 2017, at 11:51 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 11:49 AM > To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org > Subject: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke > > For Robin Kirk, a co-director of Duke University’s Human Rights Center {sic!}, the rapid expunging of the {Confederate} statues currently underway needs to be “slower and more deliberative.” > Oh sure, the Confederate War of Rebellion against the United States of America in order to preserve slavery only ended in 1865. We need to deliberate about these matters for another 152 years or so. What’s the difference between the Confederate Flag and the Nazi Swastika? About six decades. But what else do you expect from a “university” founded upon tobacco that pollutes, poisons and murders our Children in the Confederate State of North Carolina where the Slaves were forced to harvest the tobacco. > fab > > Fab > Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92) > From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sat Aug 19 18:38:02 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 13:38:02 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] What does Bannon's exit mean? Message-ID: <5420A983-FAD1-4FDF-8801-2E6389B6F00B@gmail.com> https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” —CGE "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” --Caitlin Johnstone From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 20:43:47 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 20:43:47 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? In-Reply-To: <5420A983-FAD1-4FDF-8801-2E6389B6F00B@gmail.com> References: <5420A983-FAD1-4FDF-8801-2E6389B6F00B@gmail.com> Message-ID: I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” —CGE "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” --Caitlin Johnstone _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sat Aug 19 21:07:33 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 16:07:33 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? In-Reply-To: References: <5420A983-FAD1-4FDF-8801-2E6389B6F00B@gmail.com> Message-ID: Yes, it does, but they’re not without opposition, even from unlikely places. Even Sessions [!] is "resisting the US war machine…” “...Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” >. See now > —CGE > On Aug 19, 2017, at 3:43 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM > To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace > Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? > > https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ > > "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” > > —CGE > > > "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” > --Caitlin Johnstone > > _______________________________________________ > Peace mailing list > Peace at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 21:11:43 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 21:11:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? In-Reply-To: References: <5420A983-FAD1-4FDF-8801-2E6389B6F00B@gmail.com> Message-ID: Well I guess it is timely that we will have our Peace Teach-In coming up on September 23. It looks like we are going to need it—the sooner the better. Thanks for being part of it.Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:08 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Yes, it does, but they’re not without opposition, even from unlikely places. Even Sessions [!] is "resisting the US war machine…” “...Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” . See now —CGE On Aug 19, 2017, at 3:43 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace > Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” —CGE "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” --Caitlin Johnstone _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sat Aug 19 21:17:43 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 16:17:43 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? In-Reply-To: References: <5420A983-FAD1-4FDF-8801-2E6389B6F00B@gmail.com> Message-ID: Glad (in a sense) to do it. It’s been suggested that we might follow up the teach-in with films on campus - “On the Beach,” Dr. Strangelove,” etc. - with panels that apply them to the present situation. —CGE > On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Well I guess it is timely that we will have our Peace Teach-In coming up on September 23. It looks like we are going to need it—the sooner the better. Thanks for being part of it.Fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:08 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? > > Yes, it does, but they’re not without opposition, even from unlikely places. Even Sessions [!] is "resisting the US war machine…” > > “...Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” . > > See now > > —CGE > > > On Aug 19, 2017, at 3:43 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM > To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace > Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? > > https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ > > "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” > > —CGE > > > "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” > --Caitlin Johnstone > > _______________________________________________ > Peace mailing list > Peace at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 21:26:48 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 21:26:48 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? In-Reply-To: References: <5420A983-FAD1-4FDF-8801-2E6389B6F00B@gmail.com> Message-ID: Doctor Strangelove for sure: Mien Fuhrer, I can walk! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:18 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Glad (in a sense) to do it. It’s been suggested that we might follow up the teach-in with films on campus - “On the Beach,” Dr. Strangelove,” etc. - with panels that apply them to the present situation. —CGE > On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Well I guess it is timely that we will have our Peace Teach-In coming up on September 23. It looks like we are going to need it—the sooner the better. Thanks for being part of it.Fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:08 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? > > Yes, it does, but they’re not without opposition, even from unlikely places. Even Sessions [!] is "resisting the US war machine…” > > “...Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” . > > See now > > —CGE > > > On Aug 19, 2017, at 3:43 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM > To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace > Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? > > https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ > > "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” > > —CGE > > > "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” > --Caitlin Johnstone > > _______________________________________________ > Peace mailing list > Peace at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sat Aug 19 21:35:47 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 16:35:47 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? In-Reply-To: References: <5420A983-FAD1-4FDF-8801-2E6389B6F00B@gmail.com> Message-ID: <53BC62C3-F2BA-45D4-9380-942F3E7BD0EC@gmail.com> I was recently reminded of On the Beach - a fine movie & perhaps better novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film) > On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:26 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Doctor Strangelove for sure: > Mien Fuhrer, I can walk! > > Fab > > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > > -----Original Message----- > From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:18 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? > > Glad (in a sense) to do it. > > It’s been suggested that we might follow up the teach-in with films on campus - “On the Beach,” Dr. Strangelove,” etc. - with panels that apply them to the present situation. > > —CGE > >> On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: >> >> Well I guess it is timely that we will have our Peace Teach-In coming up on September 23. It looks like we are going to need it—the sooner the better. Thanks for being part of it.Fab. >> >> Francis A. Boyle >> Law Building >> 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. >> Champaign IL 61820 USA >> 217-333-7954 (phone) >> 217-244-1478 (fax) >> (personal comments only) >> >> From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] >> Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:08 PM >> To: Boyle, Francis A >> Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? >> >> Yes, it does, but they’re not without opposition, even from unlikely places. Even Sessions [!] is "resisting the US war machine…” >> >> “...Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” . >> >> See now >> >> —CGE >> >> >> On Aug 19, 2017, at 3:43 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. >> >> Francis A. Boyle >> Law Building >> 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. >> Champaign IL 61820 USA >> 217-333-7954 (phone) >> 217-244-1478 (fax) >> (personal comments only) >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace >> Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM >> To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net >> Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace >> Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? >> >> https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ >> >> "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” >> >> —CGE >> >> >> "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” >> --Caitlin Johnstone >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace mailing list >> Peace at lists.chambana.net >> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Sat Aug 19 21:51:54 2017 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 16:51:54 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Message-ID: <54qtrihi1knckspvtld7kjiv.1503179208807@email.lge.com> If Afghanistan (or anyone) offered trump oil leases tomorrow, those 8,000 soldiers would be on the way. Are you perhaps underestimating his narcissism & need for cash? Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discussDate: Sat, Aug 19, 2017 4:12 PMTo: C G Estabrook;Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net;Subject:Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Well I guess it is timely that we will have our Peace Teach-In coming up on September 23. It looks like we are going to need it—the sooner the better. Thanks for being part of it.Fab.   Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only)   From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:08 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean?   Yes, it does, but they’re not without opposition, even from unlikely places. Even Sessions [!] is "resisting the US war machine…”    “...Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” .   See now   —CGE     On Aug 19, 2017, at 3:43 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote:   I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” —CGE "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” --Caitlin Johnstone _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss   -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Sat Aug 19 21:51:54 2017 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 16:51:54 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Message-ID: <54qtrihi1knckspvtld7kjiv.1503179208807@email.lge.com> If Afghanistan (or anyone) offered trump oil leases tomorrow, those 8,000 soldiers would be on the way. Are you perhaps underestimating his narcissism & need for cash? Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discussDate: Sat, Aug 19, 2017 4:12 PMTo: C G Estabrook;Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net;Subject:Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Well I guess it is timely that we will have our Peace Teach-In coming up on September 23. It looks like we are going to need it—the sooner the better. Thanks for being part of it.Fab.   Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only)   From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:08 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean?   Yes, it does, but they’re not without opposition, even from unlikely places. Even Sessions [!] is "resisting the US war machine…”    “...Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” .   See now   —CGE     On Aug 19, 2017, at 3:43 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote:   I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” —CGE "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” --Caitlin Johnstone _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss   -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Sat Aug 19 22:03:22 2017 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 17:03:22 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke Message-ID: Just seeing this. Wonderful! Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Date: Sat, Aug 19, 2017 12:55 PMTo: Estabrook, Carl G;Cc: Karen Aram;peace-discuss at anti-war.net;C. G. ESTABROOK;Jay;a-fields at uiuc.edu;Hoffman, Valerie J;Miller, Joseph Thomas;Szoke, Ron;Joe Lauria;David Swanson;peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net;abass10 at gmail.com;sherwoodross10 at gmail.com;Arlene Hickory;Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net;mickalideh at gmail.com;Lina Thorne;chicago at worldcantwait.net;Subject:Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke Our Illinois Boys “Oh, I wish I was in Dixie…” But not if I were Black Native Chicagoan Born, raised, living, and teaching in Illinois The Land of Lincoln Who freed the slaves The air is a lot cleaner up here! North of the Mason-Dixon Line You can shove your Robert E. Lee Right up where the Sun Don’t Shine! Stars and Bars too Johnny Reb 3 They should all fit together Into your Big Confederate Arse And whistle Dixie while you fart U.S. Grant from Galena Illinois Our Illinois Boys Lincoln and Grant Sure Smashed the Confederacy to Hell! But with Lincoln’s Murder By a “Southern Gentleman” They could not put a stake Through the Heart of that White Racist Vampire Known as the American South The Confederacy lives on today Their Legal Lynching of Black Men By Lethal Injection Their shoot to kill policy against Black Boys In Ferguson Missouri, St. Louis, Florida Today’s Confederate States of America Don’t tell me about the “New South” I tried to save the lives of 2 Black Men >From being tortured to death By Jebbie Bush in Florida Amos King and Johnny Robinson And Brian Baldwin fried to death by Alabama All Three R.I.P. You can stick your “New” South up Where the Sun Don’t Shine! Ditto for you Southern Gentlemen The same for you Southern Belles You can all fit together Into your Big Confederate Arse Go right ahead and have your Confederate Ball Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy While Whistling Dixie All This fart’s for you! How many times do we have to watch That Racist Garbage Gone with the Wind on TV Makes me want to puke every time it’s shown Barf! And barf again! And PBS/ Ken Burns version of the Civil War Letting that racist Shelby Foote do his best To justify the South’s Great Noble Cause Of warring for slavery Barf! And barf again! But our Illinois Boys Lincoln and Grant Sure Smashed the Confederacy to Hell! Otherwise, they would still have Slavery Down South there today Thank heavens for our Illinois Boys! Lincoln and Grant Came to rescue our Humanity! But now 9 African Americans Murdered Praying in Church to God In South Carolina Where the Stars and Bars Proudly Fly And elsewhere throughout the Southern Confederate States Way to go Johnny and Janie Rebs! Loyal Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy What’s the difference between the Confederate Flag? And the Nazi Swastika? About Six Decades!   70. Sandra Bland1 Sandra Bland Our Beautiful Daughter >From Chicago Metro State of Illinois The Land of Lincoln Who Freed the Slaves Murdered! By Southern Bastards! By Southern Goons! By Southern Thugs! When will it end? When will it end? When will it end? Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 12:34 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: NYT: Confederate/Nazi "Rights" at Duke The best account I’ve seen of the matter: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Sat Aug 19 22:07:31 2017 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 17:07:31 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day Message-ID: It is a journey. Regrettably, a journey we seem to re-do every 100 years or so.  Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discussDate: Sat, Aug 19, 2017 11:47 AMTo: Karen Aram;Cc: Peace-discuss List;Subject:Re: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day Interesting image. Helpful to distinguish class as an objective situation (recognized or not) from an attitude of superiority/inferiority. On Aug 19, 2017, at 9:23 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: Yes, and that is why it’s important that people be educated to recognize “classism” and its “material base.” Fighting racism, which is an attitude, is like fixing the doors and windows, when the house is crumbling due to a poorly built foundation. One must “fix” the foundation, or the doors and windows will continue to crack and fall apart.  On Aug 19, 2017, at 05:50, kmedina67 wrote: Not everyone notices that classism exists. And the effects are unequally distributed. So those most affected by classism are the most desperate to end it.  -Karen Medina -------- Original message -------- From: Karen Aram Date: 8/19/17 07:04 (GMT-06:00) To: Karen Medina Cc: Peace-discuss List Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Thought for the day “Racism” is like “poverty” and “inequality” a component of “classism,” which is a result of capitalism. Fighting amongst ourselves is not a solution. War is about profit and control of other peoples resources. A solution is to target the “perpetrators” of the crime.  On Aug 18, 2017, at 13:49, Karen Medina wrote: Karen Aram wrote: 'I guess they've won. The USG and their supporters of imperialist wars. They have Americans fighting in the streets, or on social media, over "racism" ' To me, war with other peoples is directly related to racism and classism. -karen medina _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 19 23:17:25 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 23:17:25 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? In-Reply-To: <53BC62C3-F2BA-45D4-9380-942F3E7BD0EC@gmail.com> References: <5420A983-FAD1-4FDF-8801-2E6389B6F00B@gmail.com> <53BC62C3-F2BA-45D4-9380-942F3E7BD0EC@gmail.com> Message-ID: Speaking of Doctor Strangelove, I might have told you that I deliberately went through the exact same PHD Program at Harvard that produced Kissinger before me. They gave me his old office at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!—indeed. Fab. Feed: Dissident Voice Posted on: Sunday, August 17, 2014 10:01 AM Author: Francis A. Boyle Subject: Kissy and Timmy and Me “ You’re moving into Kissinger’s old office” Said Bud, the wizened old janitor And a decent guy at that “His file cabinets are in there.” Sure enough they were So it must be true “And down the hallway there Is Timothy Leary’s old office” So that must be true too Kissy and Timmy Kissing Cousins in the Vanserg Building Amazing! Did they pass in the hall? Glance at each other? Say a few words of greeting? The last probably not Did they piss in the men’s room Silently standing next to each other? Maybe so. There was only one The counterfactuals of history What if Timmy had given Kissy Acid? Timmy turn Kissy on? Maybe the world would have become A more peaceful place With Kissinger on Acid It certainly Could not have been Worse The Kissinger War Prize For Vietnam Obama got one too Those Norwegians Surely have A wicked sense of humor “Timothy Leary’s dead,’ “No! No!’ “He’s on the outside,’ “Looking in’” The Moodies Bards of My Generation View article... Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:36 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? I was recently reminded of On the Beach - a fine movie & perhaps better novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film) On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:26 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Doctor Strangelove for sure: Mien Fuhrer, I can walk! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:18 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Glad (in a sense) to do it. It’s been suggested that we might follow up the teach-in with films on campus - “On the Beach,” Dr. Strangelove,” etc. - with panels that apply them to the present situation. —CGE On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: Well I guess it is timely that we will have our Peace Teach-In coming up on September 23. It looks like we are going to need it—the sooner the better. Thanks for being part of it.Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:08 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Yes, it does, but they’re not without opposition, even from unlikely places. Even Sessions [!] is "resisting the US war machine…” “...Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” . See now —CGE On Aug 19, 2017, at 3:43 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace > Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” —CGE "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” --Caitlin Johnstone _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Sat Aug 19 23:32:47 2017 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 18:32:47 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Message-ID: Back when we had hope there would still be change in Gaza? The war mongers have outed themselves by the scale of their complete destructiveness. Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Date: Sat, Aug 19, 2017 6:17 PMTo: C G Estabrook;Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net;Subject:Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Speaking of Doctor Strangelove, I might have told you that I deliberately went through the exact same PHD Program at Harvard that produced Kissinger before me. They gave me his old office at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!—indeed. Fab. Feed: Dissident Voice Posted on: Sunday, August 17, 2014 10:01 AM Author: Francis A. Boyle Subject: Kissy and Timmy and Me   “ You’re moving into Kissinger’s old office” Said Bud, the wizened old janitor And a decent guy at that “His file cabinets are in there.” Sure enough they were So it must be true “And down the hallway there Is Timothy Leary’s old office” So that must be true too Kissy and Timmy Kissing Cousins in the Vanserg Building Amazing! Did they pass in the hall? Glance at each other? Say a few words of greeting? The last probably not Did they piss in the men’s room Silently standing next to each other? Maybe so. There was only one The counterfactuals of history What if Timmy had given Kissy Acid? Timmy turn Kissy on? Maybe the world would have become A more peaceful place With Kissinger on Acid It certainly Could not have been Worse The Kissinger War Prize For Vietnam Obama got one too Those Norwegians Surely have A wicked sense of humor “Timothy Leary’s dead,’ “No! No!’ “He’s on the outside,’ “Looking in’” The Moodies Bards of My Generation View article...     Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only)   From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:36 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean?   I was recently reminded of On the Beach - a fine movie & perhaps better novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)     On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:26 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote:   Doctor Strangelove for sure: Mien Fuhrer, I can walk! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:18 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Glad (in a sense) to do it. It’s been suggested that we might follow up the teach-in with films on campus - “On the Beach,” Dr. Strangelove,” etc. - with panels that apply them to the present situation.    —CGE On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: Well I guess it is timely that we will have our Peace Teach-In coming up on September 23. It looks like we are going to need it—the sooner the better. Thanks for being part of it.Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:08 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? Yes, it does, but they’re not without opposition, even from unlikely places. Even Sessions [!] is "resisting the US war machine…” “...Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” . See now —CGE On Aug 19, 2017, at 3:43 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” —CGE "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” --Caitlin Johnstone _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss   -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sat Aug 19 23:41:04 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 18:41:04 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? In-Reply-To: References: <5420A983-FAD1-4FDF-8801-2E6389B6F00B@gmail.com> <53BC62C3-F2BA-45D4-9380-942F3E7BD0EC@gmail.com> Message-ID: <455D02D8-2D2E-4790-917E-CE9D57659F7F@gmail.com> My late classmate Perry Bullard (who later sent me a Buddhist monk - a refugee - from Vietnam) took Kissinger’s seminar when we were undergraduates. He entertained us at dinner with stories of the phalanx of similarly dressed (dark suits, horn-rims, black attache-cases) grad students whom Henry brought with him to every class… Perry was an effective politcal radical and a man of infinite jest. I miss him. Requiescat in pace. —CGE > On Aug 19, 2017, at 6:17 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Speaking of Doctor Strangelove, I might have told you that I deliberately went through the exact same PHD Program at Harvard that produced Kissinger before me. They gave me his old office at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!—indeed. Fab. > Feed: Dissident Voice > Posted on: Sunday, August 17, 2014 10:01 AM > Author: Francis A. Boyle > Subject: Kissy and Timmy and Me > > “ You’re moving into Kissinger’s old office” > Said Bud, the wizened old janitor > And a decent guy at that > > “His file cabinets are in there.” > Sure enough they were > So it must be true > > “And down the hallway there > Is Timothy Leary’s old office” > So that must be true too > > Kissy and Timmy > Kissing Cousins in the Vanserg Building > Amazing! > > Did they pass in the hall? > Glance at each other? > Say a few words of greeting? > The last probably not > > Did they piss in the men’s room > Silently standing next to each other? > Maybe so. > There was only one > > The counterfactuals of history > What if Timmy had given Kissy Acid? > Timmy turn Kissy on? > > Maybe the world would have become > A more peaceful place > With Kissinger on Acid > > It certainly > Could not have been > Worse > > The Kissinger War Prize > For Vietnam > Obama got one too > > Those Norwegians > Surely have > A wicked sense of humor > > “Timothy Leary’s dead,’ > “No! No!’ > “He’s on the outside,’ > “Looking in’” > > The Moodies > Bards of My Generation > > > View article... > > > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:36 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? > > I was recently reminded of On the Beach - a fine movie & perhaps better novel: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film) > > > On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:26 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Doctor Strangelove for sure: > Mien Fuhrer, I can walk! > > Fab > > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > > -----Original Message----- > From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:18 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? > > Glad (in a sense) to do it. > > It’s been suggested that we might follow up the teach-in with films on campus - “On the Beach,” Dr. Strangelove,” etc. - with panels that apply them to the present situation. > > —CGE > > > On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Well I guess it is timely that we will have our Peace Teach-In coming up on September 23. It looks like we are going to need it—the sooner the better. Thanks for being part of it.Fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 4:08 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? > > Yes, it does, but they’re not without opposition, even from unlikely places. Even Sessions [!] is "resisting the US war machine…” > > “...Sessions, stalwart of the America First camp, has long been ‘the biggest skeptic in the room’ when the subject of a continued presence in Afghanistan arises in meetings of Trump’s war cabinet ... ‘The A.G. asks the same question: Is this what we were elected to do? And the answer to the question is no.’” . > > See now > > —CGE > > > On Aug 19, 2017, at 3:43 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I don’t know Carl. According to today's Newspeak Times, it looks like the warmongers are firmly in control. How do you see it? fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace > Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:38 PM > To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace > Subject: [Peace] What does Bannon's exit mean? > > https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708191056603401-steve-bannon-white-house-trump-war/ > > "Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.” > > —CGE > > > "American privilege is being able to celebrate the removal of the only figure in the administration who was resisting the US war machine because he has said offensive things.” > --Caitlin Johnstone From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 20 00:33:40 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 00:33:40 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trumps firing of Bannon...... Message-ID: * Print * Leaflet * Feedback * Share » Trump’s firing of Bannon: The military asserts control 19 August 2017 Trump’s firing of his fascistic chief political strategist Stephen Bannon marks a new stage in the bitter factional conflict within the American ruling elite. The dismissal came three days after Trump’s press conference on Tuesday, in which the president defended the Nazi and white supremacist demonstrators who rampaged through Charlottesville last weekend. Trump’s remarks triggered an unprecedented political crisis in Washington. Powerful sections of the ruling elite fear that the self-exposure of the US president as a fascist sympathizer is severely damaging the credibility of the United States internationally and creating the conditions for social explosions at home. On Thursday, the pressure on the White House from within the state and the corporate establishment reached a new pitch with a public email rebuking Trump from James Murdoch, chief executive of 21st Century Fox and son of Trump ally Rupert Murdoch. Also on Thursday, New York Republican Congressman Peter King called for the firing of Bannon, and Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, questioned Trump’s stability and competence. Wall Street, nervous over reports that Trump’s chief economic adviser, former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, was considering resigning, fired a shot across the administration’s bow with a broad stock market sell-off. The Dow fell 274 points on Thursday, its biggest one-day loss in three months. Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange cheered Friday when news broke of Bannon’s removal. The decision to fire Bannon was made by Trump’s recently appointed White House chief of staff, retired Marine General John Kelly. The forces leading the push within the administration included Kelly; National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, an active duty general; Defense Secretary James Mattis, a retired general; former Goldman executive Cohn; and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon Mobil. The direct control of the military in alliance with Wall Street over the affairs of state has, if anything, been increased. Internecine conflicts within the ruling class have raged since Trump’s inauguration, centering on differences over US imperialist foreign policy. The Democrats and a section of Republicans have lined up with dominant factions of the military and intelligence apparatus to demand that Trump take a more aggressive line against Russia and more rapidly escalate the wars in Afghanistan and Syria. The announcement of Bannon’s removal came as Trump was meeting with his top generals and intelligence officials at Camp David to discuss their proposals for an increase in US troop levels in Afghanistan. Trump, backed by Bannon, has up to now resisted the Pentagon plan. On Wednesday, the liberal American Prospect magazine published an interview with Bannon in which he boasted of his plans to purge opponents at the State and Defense departments, attacked Cohn by name for pulling back on trade war against China, and dismissed US war threats against North Korea, saying, “There’s no military solution, forget it.” The following day both Tillerson and Mattis issued statements reiterating Washington’s readiness to carry out a nuclear attack on North Korea. A significant section of Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs, many of whom have disassociated themselves from Trump’s pro-fascist remarks, see the removal of Bannon as a step toward reining in the factional warfare within the administration and between Trump and the Republican Congress. They see this as essential to carrying out Trump’s pledges to slash corporate taxes, remove business regulations and provide a profit windfall in the guise of infrastructure reform. There is nothing progressive or democratic about the concerns motivating the generals, Wall Street bankers and Democratic and Republican politicians who pushed for Bannon’s removal. All of the vying factions within the ruling class are agreed on the need to intensify the attack on the living standards and social conditions of the working class. Trump’s own efforts, in alliance with Bannon, to build up a fascistic base are fundamentally directed toward the violent suppression of working class opposition. Bannon, who immediately resumed his post as head of the fascistic Breitbart News, will continue to exercise significant political influence over the Trump administration. He told Bloomberg News that he will be “going to war for Trump against his opponents,” adding, “I’m now free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons.” As for Trump, he is doubling down on his efforts to whip up extreme right-wing elements. He is proceeding with plans to hold a rally next Tuesday in Phoenix, Arizona, at which he is expected to announce a pardon for former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who led a witch-hunt against immigrant workers and was convicted of contempt of court for defying a judge’s order to stop illegally detaining Hispanics. The danger of world war, the growth of poverty and social inequality and the destruction of democratic rights will not be halted by palace intrigues or cabinet shakeups. Neither Trump nor Bannon are the cause of political reaction and the growth of far-right forces. They themselves are noxious manifestations of the crisis and decay of American and world capitalism. There is no faction of the capitalist class that is capable of offering policies to address the urgent concerns of working people for jobs, education, pensions, health care, peace and basic rights. The Democratic Party has presided no less than the Republicans over nearly half a century of social reaction. Its main concern is to divert social anger away from a struggle against capitalism and channel it behind nationalism, trade war and expanded military aggression around the world. The only progressive basis for opposing Trump is the independent mobilization of the working class in opposition to the entire political establishment and the capitalist system it defends. Barry Grey -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 20 13:34:32 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 13:34:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Worthwhile discussion between Paul Jay & Max Blumenthal with much more than just a firing. Message-ID: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19809:Max-Blumenthal-and-Paul-Jay-on-firing-of-Steve-Bannon -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Sun Aug 20 15:15:02 2017 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 15:15:02 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Worthwhile discussion between Paul Jay & Max Blumenthal with much more than just a firing. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <614668559.1502477.1503242102277@mail.yahoo.com> Very interesting, insightful, and informative as usual, but also ending on the note that their can be no "left-right" alliances, which should still be debated regardless. DG On ‎Sunday‎, ‎August‎ ‎20‎, ‎2017‎ ‎08‎:‎34‎:‎56‎ ‎AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19809:Max-Blumenthal-and-Paul-Jay-on-firing-of-Steve-Bannon_______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Sun Aug 20 15:29:31 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 10:29:31 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Worthwhile discussion between Paul Jay & Max Blumenthal with much more than just a firing. In-Reply-To: <614668559.1502477.1503242102277@mail.yahoo.com> References: <614668559.1502477.1503242102277@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Does that mean there should be no ‘alliance’ with (does that mean ‘praise for’?) Rightists like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, who condemn US war-making? That’s nonsense. ‘Left' and ‘Right’ have become floating signifiers (as our PoMo friends used to say), used pejoratively. (“The Left/Right must be condemned for…”) Abandon those terms, and say what you mean. Use names. —CGE > On Aug 20, 2017, at 10:15 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Very interesting, insightful, and informative as usual, but also ending on the note that their can be no "left-right" alliances, which should still be debated regardless. > > DG > > > On ‎Sunday‎, ‎August‎ ‎20‎, ‎2017‎ ‎08‎:‎34‎:‎56‎ ‎AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19809:Max-Blumenthal-and-Paul-Jay-on-firing-of-Steve-Bannon _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 20 16:06:59 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 16:06:59 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Worthwhile discussion between Paul Jay & Max Blumenthal with much more than just a firing. In-Reply-To: References: <614668559.1502477.1503242102277@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: To be clear, I too was disappointed with the “ending” of the discussion. On Aug 20, 2017, at 08:29, Carl G. Estabrook > wrote: Does that mean there should be no ‘alliance’ with (does that mean ‘praise for’?) Rightists like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, who condemn US war-making? That’s nonsense. ‘Left' and ‘Right’ have become floating signifiers (as our PoMo friends used to say), used pejoratively. (“The Left/Right must be condemned for…”) Abandon those terms, and say what you mean. Use names. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 10:15 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Very interesting, insightful, and informative as usual, but also ending on the note that their can be no "left-right" alliances, which should still be debated regardless. DG On ‎Sunday‎, ‎August‎ ‎20‎, ‎2017‎ ‎08‎:‎34‎:‎56‎ ‎AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19809:Max-Blumenthal-and-Paul-Jay-on-firing-of-Steve-Bannon _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Sun Aug 20 16:19:29 2017 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 16:19:29 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Worthwhile discussion between Paul Jay & Max Blumenthal with much more than just a firing. In-Reply-To: References: <614668559.1502477.1503242102277@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <661395800.1522464.1503245969882@mail.yahoo.com> If we have alliances with (capitalist) Democrats and Republicans on the basis of some common goals, no reason not to have alliances with others. Progressives who reject such alliances end up supporting the status quo, probably not by accident. One might argue, with some credibility, that the "left" is in danger of used by the "right," that is, to become a party to intra-capitalist factions regarding trade, etc., among the various sectors--manufacturing, resource extraction, FIRE (finance insurance real estate); pertaining especially to issues of "free trade." Blumenthal and Jay debate the ins and outs of Bannon's opposition to war with Korea vs. his aggressiveness regarding the Middle East, Blumenthal remarking on the complicated relationships between Trump, Adelson, extreme Zionists, etc. But these are debates that accept the premise of American empire, whereas Paul/Buchanan do not, I don't think. On ‎Sunday‎, ‎August‎ ‎20‎, ‎2017‎ ‎11‎:‎07‎:‎02‎ ‎AM, Karen Aram wrote: To be clear, I too was disappointed with the “ending” of the discussion. On Aug 20, 2017, at 08:29, Carl G. Estabrook wrote: Does that mean there should be no ‘alliance’ with (does that mean ‘praise for’?) Rightists like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, who condemn US war-making? That’s nonsense. ‘Left' and ‘Right’ have become floating signifiers (as our PoMo friends used to say), used pejoratively. (“The Left/Right must be condemned for…”)  Abandon those terms, and say what you mean. Use names. —CGE    On Aug 20, 2017, at 10:15 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: Very interesting, insightful, and informative as usual, but also ending on the note that their can be no "left-right" alliances, which should still be debated regardless. DG On ‎Sunday‎, ‎August‎ ‎20‎, ‎2017‎ ‎08‎:‎34‎:‎56‎ ‎AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19809:Max-Blumenthal-and-Paul-Jay-on-firing-of-Steve-Bannon_______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 20 16:24:57 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 16:24:57 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Worthwhile discussion between Paul Jay & Max Blumenthal with much more than just a firing. In-Reply-To: <661395800.1522464.1503245969882@mail.yahoo.com> References: <614668559.1502477.1503242102277@mail.yahoo.com> <661395800.1522464.1503245969882@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Ron Paul has certainly spoken out against, American empire, on many occasions. I can’t comment on Buchanan. On Aug 20, 2017, at 09:19, David Green > wrote: If we have alliances with (capitalist) Democrats and Republicans on the basis of some common goals, no reason not to have alliances with others. Progressives who reject such alliances end up supporting the status quo, probably not by accident. One might argue, with some credibility, that the "left" is in danger of used by the "right," that is, to become a party to intra-capitalist factions regarding trade, etc., among the various sectors--manufacturing, resource extraction, FIRE (finance insurance real estate); pertaining especially to issues of "free trade." Blumenthal and Jay debate the ins and outs of Bannon's opposition to war with Korea vs. his aggressiveness regarding the Middle East, Blumenthal remarking on the complicated relationships between Trump, Adelson, extreme Zionists, etc. But these are debates that accept the premise of American empire, whereas Paul/Buchanan do not, I don't think. On ‎Sunday‎, ‎August‎ ‎20‎, ‎2017‎ ‎11‎:‎07‎:‎02‎ ‎AM, Karen Aram > wrote: To be clear, I too was disappointed with the “ending” of the discussion. On Aug 20, 2017, at 08:29, Carl G. Estabrook > wrote: Does that mean there should be no ‘alliance’ with (does that mean ‘praise for’?) Rightists like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, who condemn US war-making? That’s nonsense. ‘Left' and ‘Right’ have become floating signifiers (as our PoMo friends used to say), used pejoratively. (“The Left/Right must be condemned for…”) Abandon those terms, and say what you mean. Use names. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 10:15 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Very interesting, insightful, and informative as usual, but also ending on the note that their can be no "left-right" alliances, which should still be debated regardless. DG On ‎Sunday‎, ‎August‎ ‎20‎, ‎2017‎ ‎08‎:‎34‎:‎56‎ ‎AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19809:Max-Blumenthal-and-Paul-Jay-on-firing-of-Steve-Bannon _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From divisek at yahoo.com Sun Aug 20 16:53:05 2017 From: divisek at yahoo.com (Dianna Visek) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 16:53:05 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Worthwhile discussion between Paul Jay & Max Blumenthal with much more than just a firing. In-Reply-To: References: <614668559.1502477.1503242102277@mail.yahoo.com> <661395800.1522464.1503245969882@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <626651439.1562457.1503247985434@mail.yahoo.com> I can comment on Buchanan.  While I disagree with his positions on many topics, he's got it right on empire.  He even wrote a wonderful book, A Republic, Not an Empire:  Reclaiming America's Destiny, that describes all of our conflicts since our founding and argues that all attempts at empire throughout history have ended in disaster. Dianna On Sunday, August 20, 2017, 11:25:21 AM CDT, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: Ron Paul has certainly spoken out against, American empire, on many occasions. I can’t comment on Buchanan. On Aug 20, 2017, at 09:19, David Green wrote: If we have alliances with (capitalist) Democrats and Republicans on the basis of some common goals, no reason not to have alliances with others. Progressives who reject such alliances end up supporting the status quo, probably not by accident. One might argue, with some credibility, that the "left" is in danger of used by the "right," that is, to become a party to intra-capitalist factions regarding trade, etc., among the various sectors--manufacturing, resource extraction, FIRE (finance insurance real estate); pertaining especially to issues of "free trade." Blumenthal and Jay debate the ins and outs of Bannon's opposition to war with Korea vs. his aggressiveness regarding the Middle East, Blumenthal remarking on the complicated relationships between Trump, Adelson, extreme Zionists, etc. But these are debates that accept the premise of American empire, whereas Paul/Buchanan do not, I don't think. ps://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sun Aug 20 17:38:14 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 12:38:14 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Worthwhile discussion between Paul Jay & Max Blumenthal with much more than just a firing. In-Reply-To: <626651439.1562457.1503247985434@mail.yahoo.com> References: <614668559.1502477.1503242102277@mail.yahoo.com> <661395800.1522464.1503245969882@mail.yahoo.com> <626651439.1562457.1503247985434@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Yes - as I used to argue on the radio version of 'News from Neptune,’ since the First Gulf War, Buchanan’s views on war were far better than those of any US liberal political figure. [The following is from Wikipedia; the whole article is worth reading: >.] ================================================= ...Buchanan argues that the United States' ability to control its own affairs is under siege due to free trade ideology, globalism, globalization and other issues, discussed below. He once remarked, "we love the old republic, and when we hear phrases like 'new world order,' we release the safety catches on our revolvers."[93] Buchanan strongly opposes military interventionism. "Interventionism is the incubator of terrorism," he said in 2001. He approvingly quotes George Washington and Thomas Jefferson regarding the dangers of "entangling alliances" and foreign military adventures. Yet, today, America's leaders are reenacting every folly that brought these great powers [Russia, Germany, and Japan] to ruin—from arrogance and hubris, to assertions of global hegemony, to imperial overstretch, to trumpeting new 'crusades,' to handing out war guarantees to regions and countries where Americans have never fought before. We are piling up the kind of commitments that produced the greatest disasters of the twentieth century.[2][page needed] Since the end of the Cold War, Buchanan has consistently been opposed to U.S. intervention and has advocated a conservative, anti-interventionist foreign policy. For example, Buchanan once suggested that the U.S. remove the United Nations headquarters from New York City and send in the Marines to "help pack." He supports withdrawal from the Rome Treaty and most of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He also suggests that foreign aid be rolled back and that all US troops pull out of Europe.[94] In The Great Betrayal, he wrote, "Like a shipwrecked, exhausted Gulliver on the beach of Lilliput, America is to be tied down with threads, strand by strand, until it cannot move when it awakens. Piece by piece, our sovereignty is being surrendered."[95] Buchanan's entire career reflects staunch anti-communism. He called for a strong national defense during the Cold War and supported the Vietnam War, saying that communism directly threatened the safety of the United States. He does not approve of the way the Vietnam War was fought or the initial decision to wage it,[96] but believes the United States could have won the war if it had been fought correctly. Today, he expresses concern about China as a threat to United States security. In Where the Right Went Wrong, he claimed that "the Communist Chinese government has the secret loyalty of millions of 'overseas Chinese' from Singapore to San Francisco." Buchanan opposes other U.S. military actions abroad, including the Persian Gulf and Iraq Wars. Buchanan opposes neo-conservative foreign policy, and has vocally opposed every major military campaign the U.S. has engaged in since the end of the Cold War except the United States invasion of Afghanistan. On The McLaughlin Group in December 2005, he referred to the current war in Iraq as the worst foreign policy disaster of his lifetime, and on "Scarborough Country" in December 2006 he called the war "The worst mistake in American history."[97] Unlike many conservatives, he outspokenly opposed the invasion of Iraq when it was first proposed in 2002.[98] He supports the tradition of 'neutrality' or 'non-interventionism'[citation needed] which was the policy of the United States prior to the onset of the Cold War.[citation needed] He has said that "Unless American honor, vital interests or citizens were at risk or have been attacked, U.S. policy should be to stay out of war." He is credited with reviving the slogan "America First,"[citation needed] which was the name of a group that opposed American intervention in World War II. In his 1999 book A Republic, Not an Empire, he applauds that organization's efforts and calls its supporters maligned patriots.[page needed] He also argued that the committee deserves credit for the fact that Soviet casualties far outnumbered American ones on the European Front.[99] Buchanan's critics often describe him as an isolationist,[citation needed] which he denies.[citation needed] He is in favor of ending treaties that he believes do not protect the interests of the United States, such as one-way defense treaties where the US must militarily come to the defense of another country, but not vice versa. For example, he believes that the U.S. no longer has any legitimate reason to be a member of NATO ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and he strongly opposed American intervention in the Yugoslav Wars... =================================================== —CGE > On Aug 20, 2017, at 11:53 AM, Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > I can comment on Buchanan. While I disagree with his positions on many topics, he's got it right on empire. He even wrote a wonderful book, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny, that describes all of our conflicts since our founding and argues that all attempts at empire throughout history have ended in disaster. > > Dianna > > > On Sunday, August 20, 2017, 11:25:21 AM CDT, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > > Ron Paul has certainly spoken out against, American empire, on many occasions. I can’t comment on Buchanan. > > >> On Aug 20, 2017, at 09:19, David Green > wrote: >> >> If we have alliances with (capitalist) Democrats and Republicans on the basis of some common goals, no reason not to have alliances with others. Progressives who reject such alliances end up supporting the status quo, probably not by accident. >> >> One might argue, with some credibility, that the "left" is in danger of used by the "right," that is, to become a party to intra-capitalist factions regarding trade, etc., among the various sectors--manufacturing, resource extraction, FIRE (finance insurance real estate); pertaining especially to issues of "free trade." >> >> Blumenthal and Jay debate the ins and outs of Bannon's opposition to war with Korea vs. his aggressiveness regarding the Middle East, Blumenthal remarking on the complicated relationships between Trump, Adelson, extreme Zionists, etc. But these are debates that accept the premise of American empire, whereas Paul/Buchanan do not, I don't think. >> >> ps://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From naiman at justforeignpolicy.org Sun Aug 20 20:10:50 2017 From: naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (Robert Naiman) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 15:10:50 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Worthwhile discussion between Paul Jay & Max Blumenthal with much more than just a firing. In-Reply-To: References: <614668559.1502477.1503242102277@mail.yahoo.com> <661395800.1522464.1503245969882@mail.yahoo.com> <626651439.1562457.1503247985434@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: The "no left-right alliances" thing is preposterous nonsense. Everybody in Washington collaborates across party lines when it suits their purposes. If you're trying to get 218 votes for or against something, a vote is a vote is a vote. Yogi Berra said that many times. In June 2016, we narrowly lost 204-216 in the House on prohibiting the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia. The fact that the vote was so close - seven votes switched would have tipped it the other way - turned a lot of heads, convinced a lot of people that we could do something about the Saudi war in Yemen in Congress. The 204 consisted of 164 Democrats and 40 Republicans. If we had no Republicans, the vote would have been 164-256, a completely different outcome with completely different effects. If we're going to turn around the war-Empire machine, we need more anti-war, anti-Empire, war-skeptic and Empire-skeptic Republicans, very badly. Even a ten percent increase in their ranks would have a huge effect. If I knew anything to do to increase their ranks, I would do it. Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 On Sun, Aug 20, 2017 at 12:38 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > Yes - as I used to argue on the radio version of 'News from Neptune,’ > since the First Gulf War, Buchanan’s views on war were far better than > those of any US liberal political figure. > > [The following is from Wikipedia; the whole article is worth reading: < > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Pat_Buchanan#Overall > >.] > ================================================= > > ...Buchanan argues that the United States' ability to control its own > affairs is under siege due to free trade ideology, globalism, globalization and > other issues, discussed below. He once remarked, "we love the old republic, > and when we hear phrases like 'new world order,' we release the safety > catches on our revolvers."[93] > > Buchanan strongly opposes military interventionism. "Interventionism is > the incubator of terrorism," he said in 2001. He approvingly quotes George > Washington and Thomas Jefferson regarding the dangers of "entangling > alliances" and foreign military adventures. > > Yet, today, America's leaders are reenacting every folly that > brought these great powers [Russia, Germany, and Japan] to ruin—from > arrogance and hubris, to assertions of global hegemony, to imperial > overstretch, to trumpeting new 'crusades,' to handing out war guarantees to > regions and countries where Americans have never fought before. We are > piling up the kind of commitments that produced the greatest disasters of > the twentieth century.[2][page needed] > > Since the end of the Cold War, Buchanan has consistently been opposed to > U.S. intervention and has advocated a conservative, anti-interventionist > foreign policy. > > For example, Buchanan once suggested that the U.S. remove the > United Nations headquarters from New York City and send in the Marines to > "help pack." He supports withdrawal from the Rome Treaty and most of > the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He also suggests that foreign aid be > rolled back and that all US troops pull out of Europe.[94] In The Great > Betrayal, he wrote, "Like a shipwrecked, exhausted Gulliver on the beach > of Lilliput, America is to be tied down with threads, strand by > strand, until it cannot move when it awakens. Piece by piece, > our sovereignty is being surrendered."[95] > > Buchanan's entire career reflects staunch anti-communism. He called for a > strong national defense during the Cold War and supported the Vietnam War, > saying that communism directly threatened the safety of the United > States. He does not approve of the way the Vietnam War was fought or the > initial decision to wage it,[96] but believes the United States could have > won the war if it had been fought correctly. Today, he expresses concern > about China as a threat to United States security. In Where the Right Went > Wrong, he claimed that "the Communist Chinese government has the secret > loyalty of millions of 'overseas Chinese' from Singapore to San Francisco." > > Buchanan opposes other U.S. military actions abroad, including the Persian > Gulf and Iraq Wars. Buchanan opposes neo-conservative foreign policy, and > has vocally opposed every major military campaign the U.S. has engaged in > since the end of the Cold War except the United States invasion of > Afghanistan. On The McLaughlin Group in December 2005, he referred to > the current war in Iraq as the worst foreign policy disaster of his > lifetime, and on "Scarborough Country" in December 2006 he called the war > "The worst mistake in American history."[97] Unlike many conservatives, > he outspokenly opposed the invasion of Iraq when it was first proposed in > 2002.[98] He supports the tradition of 'neutrality' or > 'non-interventionism'[citation needed] which was the policy of the United > States prior to the onset of the Cold War.[citation needed] He has said > that "Unless American honor, vital interests or citizens were at risk or > have been attacked, U.S. policy should be to stay out of war." He is > credited with reviving the slogan "America First,"[citation needed] which > was the name of a group that opposed American intervention in World War > II. In his 1999 book A Republic, Not an Empire, he applauds that > organization's efforts and calls its supporters maligned patriots.[page > needed] He also argued that the committee deserves credit for the fact > that Soviet casualties far outnumbered American ones on the European > Front.[99] Buchanan's critics often describe him as > an isolationist,[citation needed] which he denies.[citation needed] > > He is in favor of ending treaties that he believes do not protect > the interests of the United States, such as one-way defense treaties > where the US must militarily come to the defense of another country, but > not vice versa. For example, he believes that the U.S. no longer has > any legitimate reason to be a member of NATO ever since the fall of > the Soviet Union and he strongly opposed American intervention in > the Yugoslav Wars... > =================================================== > > —CGE > > On Aug 20, 2017, at 11:53 AM, Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > I can comment on Buchanan. While I disagree with his positions on many > topics, he's got it right on empire. He even wrote a wonderful book, *A > Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny*, that describes > all of our conflicts since our founding and argues that all attempts at > empire throughout history have ended in disaster. > > Dianna > > > On Sunday, August 20, 2017, 11:25:21 AM CDT, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > > Ron Paul has certainly spoken out against, American empire, on many > occasions. I can’t comment on Buchanan. > > > On Aug 20, 2017, at 09:19, David Green wrote: > > If we have alliances with (capitalist) Democrats and Republicans on the > basis of some common goals, no reason not to have alliances with others. > Progressives who reject such alliances end up supporting the status quo, > probably not by accident. > > One might argue, with some credibility, that the "left" is in danger of > used by the "right," that is, to become a party to intra-capitalist > factions regarding trade, etc., among the various sectors--manufacturing, > resource extraction, FIRE (finance insurance real estate); pertaining > especially to issues of "free trade." > > Blumenthal and Jay debate the ins and outs of Bannon's opposition to war > with Korea vs. his aggressiveness regarding the Middle East, Blumenthal > remarking on the complicated relationships between Trump, Adelson, extreme > Zionists, etc. But these are debates that accept the premise of American > empire, whereas Paul/Buchanan do not, I don't think. > > ps://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 20 22:11:51 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 22:11:51 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! References: Message-ID: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): "When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. 'No,' the President yelled in the narrow conference room, 'I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.'" F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.-NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 - 28080 Madrid - Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a "white paper" documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with "white papers" from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a "white paper" produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only "statement of facts" that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration's case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: "One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing 'nothing particularly new or surprising,' adding: 'It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.'" That's someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a "white paper" from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That "white paper" is in that hallowed tradition of a "white paper," based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair's case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its "wisdom" has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism "all necessary means." But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying "that's all the authority I have." I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to "secure" the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): "When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. 'No,' the President yelled in the narrow conference room, 'I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.'" F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name "negotiation." Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan - they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian "food drop" -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will "protect" Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under "Partnership for Peace" with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia - thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our "guys" there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END Notes Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (voice) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) KOMINFORM http://www.kominform.eu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 20 22:11:51 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 22:11:51 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! References: Message-ID: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): "When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. 'No,' the President yelled in the narrow conference room, 'I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.'" F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.-NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 - 28080 Madrid - Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a "white paper" documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with "white papers" from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a "white paper" produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only "statement of facts" that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration's case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: "One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing 'nothing particularly new or surprising,' adding: 'It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.'" That's someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a "white paper" from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That "white paper" is in that hallowed tradition of a "white paper," based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair's case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its "wisdom" has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism "all necessary means." But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying "that's all the authority I have." I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to "secure" the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): "When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. 'No,' the President yelled in the narrow conference room, 'I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.'" F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name "negotiation." Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan - they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian "food drop" -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will "protect" Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under "Partnership for Peace" with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia - thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our "guys" there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END Notes Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (voice) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) KOMINFORM http://www.kominform.eu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sun Aug 20 23:27:12 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 18:27:12 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Afghanistan Message-ID: If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. —CGE From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 20 23:29:34 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 23:29:34 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Afghanistan In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END Notes Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (voice) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:27 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace Subject: [Peace] Afghanistan If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. —CGE _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From galliher at illinois.edu Sun Aug 20 23:35:14 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 18:35:14 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Sun Aug 20 23:35:14 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 18:35:14 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 20 23:55:07 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 23:55:07 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 20 23:55:07 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 23:55:07 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 20 23:59:06 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 23:59:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Phil Berrigan asked me to go in with him on calling and organizing for a One Day National General Strike for Peace. Phil was going to do the first draft of the Manifesto, then send it along to me to work on it. Then Phil was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. I saw no point carrying on without Phil. But it is still a good idea. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:55 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 20 23:59:06 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 23:59:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Phil Berrigan asked me to go in with him on calling and organizing for a One Day National General Strike for Peace. Phil was going to do the first draft of the Manifesto, then send it along to me to work on it. Then Phil was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. I saw no point carrying on without Phil. But it is still a good idea. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:55 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 00:02:15 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 19:02:15 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: I agree entirely about Obama. It was his duplicity that practically destroyed AWARE - along with a good bit of the antiwar movement - a dozen years ago. Rebuilding the antiwar movement will require people to look candidly at this administration and the last. Why is the US killing so many people around the world? Honest people can’t ignore that question. > On Aug 20, 2017, at 6:55 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu ] > Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com ; peace-discuss at anti-war.net ; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu ; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net ; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net ; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com ; mickalideh at gmail.com ; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net ; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! > > > > > If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. > > Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. > > —CGE > > > > On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: > > For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com ] > Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM > To: com-news at yahoogroups.com > Cc: Mauri Johansson > > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! > > 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM > To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org > Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! > > > > See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] > > > > No War Against Afghanistan! > > Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit > > This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. > > NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! > > Introduction > > Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of > > 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. > > I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. > > It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. > > Facts > > Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. > > What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! > > What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. > > Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. > > Law > > Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? > > Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. > > There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. > > In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. > > The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration > > just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. > > There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. > > Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. > > Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. > > An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another > > state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. > > The U.N. Security Council > > The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. > > Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got > > a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism > > “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. > > The U.S. Congress > > Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal > > was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. > > Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] > > You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. > > Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. > > This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. > > Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. > > Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. > > Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. > > NATO > > In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact > > is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw > > Pact and the Soviet Union. > > With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. > > The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military > > force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. > > Self-judging Self-defense > > Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. > > The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. > > I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the > > reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. > > So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World > > War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to > > international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. > > Aggression > > Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. > > Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. > > Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes > > armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. > > Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it > > is wrong. > > [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] > > Violent Settlement Of International Disputes > > Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. > > What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” > > Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. > > Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. > > If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. > > Humanitarian Catastrophe > > Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. > > Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. > > U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia > > So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! > > The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. > > Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. > > It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. > > What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term > > deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. > > This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. > > Stealing Oil and Gas > > Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields > > and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. > > There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. > > In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. > > Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. > > Regional War > > In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. > > The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. > > We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the > > war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. > > American Police State > > In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. > > If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. > > Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. > > And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. > > Scapegoats > > So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. > > What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like > > we have one. > > Conclusion > > Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First > > Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. > > We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a > > commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. > > Questions and Answers > > Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... > > A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. > > Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. > > So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. > > Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? > > A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. > > I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years > > telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were > > terrorists. > > Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. > > The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. > > Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. > > You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected > > government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. > > Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. > > Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. > > What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? > > As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. > > A question about Middle East policy > > A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. > > We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at > > all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. > > Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. > > What can we do to prevent another September 11? > > A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. > > END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 00:02:15 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 19:02:15 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: I agree entirely about Obama. It was his duplicity that practically destroyed AWARE - along with a good bit of the antiwar movement - a dozen years ago. Rebuilding the antiwar movement will require people to look candidly at this administration and the last. Why is the US killing so many people around the world? Honest people can’t ignore that question. > On Aug 20, 2017, at 6:55 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu ] > Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com ; peace-discuss at anti-war.net ; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu ; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net ; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net ; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com ; mickalideh at gmail.com ; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net ; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! > > > > > If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. > > Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. > > —CGE > > > > On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: > > For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. > > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com ] > Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM > To: com-news at yahoogroups.com > Cc: Mauri Johansson > > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! > > 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM > To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org > Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! > > > > See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] > > > > No War Against Afghanistan! > > Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit > > This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. > > NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! > > Introduction > > Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of > > 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. > > I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. > > It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. > > Facts > > Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. > > What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! > > What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. > > Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. > > Law > > Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? > > Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. > > There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. > > In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. > > The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration > > just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. > > There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. > > Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. > > Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. > > An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another > > state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. > > The U.N. Security Council > > The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. > > Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got > > a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism > > “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. > > The U.S. Congress > > Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal > > was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. > > Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] > > You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. > > Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. > > This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. > > Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. > > Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. > > Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. > > NATO > > In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact > > is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw > > Pact and the Soviet Union. > > With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. > > The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military > > force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. > > Self-judging Self-defense > > Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. > > The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. > > I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the > > reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. > > So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World > > War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to > > international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. > > Aggression > > Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. > > Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. > > Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes > > armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. > > Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it > > is wrong. > > [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] > > Violent Settlement Of International Disputes > > Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. > > What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” > > Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. > > Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. > > If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. > > Humanitarian Catastrophe > > Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. > > Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. > > U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia > > So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! > > The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. > > Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. > > It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. > > What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term > > deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. > > This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. > > Stealing Oil and Gas > > Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields > > and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. > > There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. > > In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. > > Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. > > Regional War > > In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. > > The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. > > We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the > > war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. > > American Police State > > In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. > > If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. > > Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. > > And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. > > Scapegoats > > So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. > > What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like > > we have one. > > Conclusion > > Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First > > Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. > > We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a > > commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. > > Questions and Answers > > Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... > > A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. > > Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. > > So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. > > Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? > > A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. > > I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years > > telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were > > terrorists. > > Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. > > The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. > > Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. > > You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected > > government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. > > Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. > > Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. > > What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? > > As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. > > A question about Middle East policy > > A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. > > We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at > > all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. > > Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. > > What can we do to prevent another September 11? > > A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. > > END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 00:11:32 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 00:11:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Obama and I had the same teacher of Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School, Roberto Unger, who founded the Critical Legal Studies Movement. As Unger repeatedly said in public, including on the BBC: “Obama is a disaster!” fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 7:02 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! I agree entirely about Obama. It was his duplicity that practically destroyed AWARE - along with a good bit of the antiwar movement - a dozen years ago. Rebuilding the antiwar movement will require people to look candidly at this administration and the last. Why is the US killing so many people around the world? Honest people can’t ignore that question. On Aug 20, 2017, at 6:55 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! > If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 00:11:32 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 00:11:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Obama and I had the same teacher of Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School, Roberto Unger, who founded the Critical Legal Studies Movement. As Unger repeatedly said in public, including on the BBC: “Obama is a disaster!” fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 7:02 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! I agree entirely about Obama. It was his duplicity that practically destroyed AWARE - along with a good bit of the antiwar movement - a dozen years ago. Rebuilding the antiwar movement will require people to look candidly at this administration and the last. Why is the US killing so many people around the world? Honest people can’t ignore that question. On Aug 20, 2017, at 6:55 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! > If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 07:52:30 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 07:52:30 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: As John Pilger established, Obama is a CIA Asset from the get-go. This was later confirmed by the investigative reporter Wayne Madsen in his book. The CIA put another one of their Stooges into the White House, then neutered the Peace Movement. So here we are. Remember the Ramparts expose where it turns out the CIA had put almost the entire America Left on the CIA payroll back in the 1950s? We will have to rebuild the Peace Movement from here on. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:59 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Phil Berrigan asked me to go in with him on calling and organizing for a One Day National General Strike for Peace. Phil was going to do the first draft of the Manifesto, then send it along to me to work on it. Then Phil was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. I saw no point carrying on without Phil. But it is still a good idea. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:55 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 07:52:30 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 07:52:30 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: As John Pilger established, Obama is a CIA Asset from the get-go. This was later confirmed by the investigative reporter Wayne Madsen in his book. The CIA put another one of their Stooges into the White House, then neutered the Peace Movement. So here we are. Remember the Ramparts expose where it turns out the CIA had put almost the entire America Left on the CIA payroll back in the 1950s? We will have to rebuild the Peace Movement from here on. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:59 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Phil Berrigan asked me to go in with him on calling and organizing for a One Day National General Strike for Peace. Phil was going to do the first draft of the Manifesto, then send it along to me to work on it. Then Phil was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. I saw no point carrying on without Phil. But it is still a good idea. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:55 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 11:27:15 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 11:27:15 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: The CIA/FBI tried to get me to become an Informant/Asset for them. The first question they asked me was : “Why are you giving these interviews all over the world.” So much for the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment, inter alia. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com [mailto:ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Sahar Aziz Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2011 8:50 AM To: undisclosed-recipients Subject: [ArabLawyer] AAN: Article on civil rights attorney on terrorist watch list http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/index.php?mod=article&cat=Community&article=4627 Prominent attorney who refused to betray Arab and Muslim clients speaks on civil liberties, life on terror watch list By Nick Meyer Sunday, 08.21.2011, 02:25am The attorney-client privilege assuring confidentiality between the two parties is one of the most cherished rights of the American law system, but according to internationally recognized lawyer, author and professor Francis A. Boyle of the the University of Illinois-Champaign, government agents violated that privilege in a jarring summer 2004 visit. Speaking to The Arab American News, Boyle confirmed recent reports that he was visited by two agents from a joint FBI-CIA anti-terrorist fusion center located about a 90-minute drive away in Springfield, Ill. in his office in Champaign, who attempted to persuade him to become an informant on his Arab American and American Muslim clients. He said he repeatedly refused their requests to violate his clients' constitutional rights, only to find himself placed on the U.S. Government's terrorist watch list. "There's five or six of them, and my lawyer informed me that I'm on all of them," Boyle said "I filed an appeal but they told me, sorry, I would stay on the watch list forever until the agencies that put me on there took me off." Boyle, who has represented several high profile Arab and Muslim clients in the past, also said the agents repeatedly questioned him about interviews he has given in various international media outlets that were critical of U.S. foreign policy towards Arab and Muslim countries. Similar reports have also come out including a recent one about agents allegedly spying on University of Michigan professor and writer Juan Cole. Boyle's visit began innocently enough as the two agents introduced themselves to Boyle's secretary, he said. They identified themselves as businessmen who wanted to speak with him about matters of international law and were wearing suits and ties, looking reputable. Boyle let them in. "They misrepresented who they are and what they're about to my secretary," Boyle said. They also gave him no indication that Boyle would be placed on the terrorist watch list after leaving what Boyle called a "nearly hour-long interrogation." Speaking of interrogations, Boyle was subjected to one an hour and a half long upon returning from a lecture in Canada at the end of the summer of 2004. The pattern has continued for Boyle, who has a Ph.D in Political Science from Harvard University specializing in International Relations and has authored books such as "Biowarfare and Terrorism," which links the U.S. biowarfare development to the October 2001 post-9/11 anthrax attack on Congress, and "The Palestinian Right to Return Under International Law," which was released in March 2011. "I was flying in from Malaysia and two armed federal agents on the jet port saw me and my passport and took me into custody; they said 'You're coming with us,' and two guys with guns you're not going to argue with," he said. "After searching me they said they were looking for someone on the watch list but not you, of course; how many Francis Anthony Boyles are there in America?" Other extensive searches of Boyle occurred in Switzerland and Chicago. He's still waiting for an explanation as to why he was placed on the terrorism watch list and concerned about the future. "I'm not supposed to talk about clients' business to anyone let alone to become an informant on them, that violates their constitutional rights and also my ethical obligations as an attorney to maintain privacy," Boyle said. "Whether you like lawyers or not, we're sort of the canaries in the mineshaft of democracy, the first line of defense." An article in Criminal Justice Magazine in Summer 2002 said that immediately following the September 11 attacks against the U.S., then-Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a controversial order that permits the government to monitor all communications between client and attorney when there is 'reasonable suspicion' to 'believe that a particular inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of violence or terrorism.' The order raises constitutional concerns under the First, Fourth Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments according to authors Paul Rice and Benjamin Saul. Boyle believes that the rights of attorneys and anti-war critics as well are under attack, as is the Constitution in general as many analysts have been saying. "They've gone after many other lawyers, and what they did to Juan Cole doesn't surprise me either," Boyle said. "We're living in a police state now and what people really need to understand, especially Arabs and Muslims, is that the police are not their friends," Boyle said. "No Arab or Muslim should talk to the FBI without a lawyer present, you have to be very careful dealing with these people." Boyle noted that about 1,200 non-citizens were rounded up immediately after the 9/11 attacks and that the only charges brought against them were actually for routine immigration violations or in some cases ordinary crimes as asserted in the 165-page report "America's Challenge" about civil liberties, domestic security and national unity after the attacks, released by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. More than one million people are currently on watch lists according to a USA Today report in 2009, but Boyle believes he's in more exclusive company on a list of about 5,000 people who were asked to be informants. Guarding against unjust tactics in the name of security is something that should drive Arab Americans and Muslims, and others, he said. "Arabs and Muslims and their supporters have to get organized and stop assuming the FBI is their friend, and to set up watch committees and inform themselves as to their rights under the law., and fight back in court," he said. "It's only going to get worse...the FBI and the CIA are completely out of anyone's control. And Arabs and Muslims are going to have to sit down and figure out how to combat this," he said. Boyle said they should band together to demand that the Department of Justice re-institute the Edward Hirsch Levy Guidelines, which terminated the FBI COINTEL spying program and were revoked after 9/11 by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. He also said the communities need more lawyers and journalists to fight on their behalf. He remains concerned about the possibility of retribution against he and others should another attack occur but plans to remain firm in his commitment to his country and its ideals of freedom. "It feels sort of like a loaded gun sitting there," he said. "But I was born here and I will stay here as a U.S. citizen, and stand and fight for the rights and future of this country." -- Sahar Aziz Associate Professor of Law Texas Wesleyan University School of Law (202) 455-0063 saziz at saharazizlaw.com www.saharazizlaw.com Follow me on Twitter: @saharazizlaw www.twitter.com/saharazizlaw http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=548232274 See my latest article: Citizens, Not Subjects: Debunking the Sectarian Narrative of the Pro-Democracy Movement in Bahrain http://www.ispu.org/detailed_publication.php?type=reports&id=640 View my research on my SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=1459001 This email message, including any attachments, may be a privileged and confidential communication. 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Groups] Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use . __, Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 2:53 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! As John Pilger established, Obama is a CIA Asset from the get-go. This was later confirmed by the investigative reporter Wayne Madsen in his book. The CIA put another one of their Stooges into the White House, then neutered the Peace Movement. So here we are. Remember the Ramparts expose where it turns out the CIA had put almost the entire America Left on the CIA payroll back in the 1950s? We will have to rebuild the Peace Movement from here on. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:59 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Phil Berrigan asked me to go in with him on calling and organizing for a One Day National General Strike for Peace. Phil was going to do the first draft of the Manifesto, then send it along to me to work on it. Then Phil was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. I saw no point carrying on without Phil. But it is still a good idea. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:55 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 11:27:15 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 11:27:15 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: The CIA/FBI tried to get me to become an Informant/Asset for them. The first question they asked me was : “Why are you giving these interviews all over the world.” So much for the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment, inter alia. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com [mailto:ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Sahar Aziz Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2011 8:50 AM To: undisclosed-recipients Subject: [ArabLawyer] AAN: Article on civil rights attorney on terrorist watch list http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/index.php?mod=article&cat=Community&article=4627 Prominent attorney who refused to betray Arab and Muslim clients speaks on civil liberties, life on terror watch list By Nick Meyer Sunday, 08.21.2011, 02:25am The attorney-client privilege assuring confidentiality between the two parties is one of the most cherished rights of the American law system, but according to internationally recognized lawyer, author and professor Francis A. Boyle of the the University of Illinois-Champaign, government agents violated that privilege in a jarring summer 2004 visit. Speaking to The Arab American News, Boyle confirmed recent reports that he was visited by two agents from a joint FBI-CIA anti-terrorist fusion center located about a 90-minute drive away in Springfield, Ill. in his office in Champaign, who attempted to persuade him to become an informant on his Arab American and American Muslim clients. He said he repeatedly refused their requests to violate his clients' constitutional rights, only to find himself placed on the U.S. Government's terrorist watch list. "There's five or six of them, and my lawyer informed me that I'm on all of them," Boyle said "I filed an appeal but they told me, sorry, I would stay on the watch list forever until the agencies that put me on there took me off." Boyle, who has represented several high profile Arab and Muslim clients in the past, also said the agents repeatedly questioned him about interviews he has given in various international media outlets that were critical of U.S. foreign policy towards Arab and Muslim countries. Similar reports have also come out including a recent one about agents allegedly spying on University of Michigan professor and writer Juan Cole. Boyle's visit began innocently enough as the two agents introduced themselves to Boyle's secretary, he said. They identified themselves as businessmen who wanted to speak with him about matters of international law and were wearing suits and ties, looking reputable. Boyle let them in. "They misrepresented who they are and what they're about to my secretary," Boyle said. They also gave him no indication that Boyle would be placed on the terrorist watch list after leaving what Boyle called a "nearly hour-long interrogation." Speaking of interrogations, Boyle was subjected to one an hour and a half long upon returning from a lecture in Canada at the end of the summer of 2004. The pattern has continued for Boyle, who has a Ph.D in Political Science from Harvard University specializing in International Relations and has authored books such as "Biowarfare and Terrorism," which links the U.S. biowarfare development to the October 2001 post-9/11 anthrax attack on Congress, and "The Palestinian Right to Return Under International Law," which was released in March 2011. "I was flying in from Malaysia and two armed federal agents on the jet port saw me and my passport and took me into custody; they said 'You're coming with us,' and two guys with guns you're not going to argue with," he said. "After searching me they said they were looking for someone on the watch list but not you, of course; how many Francis Anthony Boyles are there in America?" Other extensive searches of Boyle occurred in Switzerland and Chicago. He's still waiting for an explanation as to why he was placed on the terrorism watch list and concerned about the future. "I'm not supposed to talk about clients' business to anyone let alone to become an informant on them, that violates their constitutional rights and also my ethical obligations as an attorney to maintain privacy," Boyle said. "Whether you like lawyers or not, we're sort of the canaries in the mineshaft of democracy, the first line of defense." An article in Criminal Justice Magazine in Summer 2002 said that immediately following the September 11 attacks against the U.S., then-Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a controversial order that permits the government to monitor all communications between client and attorney when there is 'reasonable suspicion' to 'believe that a particular inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of violence or terrorism.' The order raises constitutional concerns under the First, Fourth Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments according to authors Paul Rice and Benjamin Saul. Boyle believes that the rights of attorneys and anti-war critics as well are under attack, as is the Constitution in general as many analysts have been saying. "They've gone after many other lawyers, and what they did to Juan Cole doesn't surprise me either," Boyle said. "We're living in a police state now and what people really need to understand, especially Arabs and Muslims, is that the police are not their friends," Boyle said. "No Arab or Muslim should talk to the FBI without a lawyer present, you have to be very careful dealing with these people." Boyle noted that about 1,200 non-citizens were rounded up immediately after the 9/11 attacks and that the only charges brought against them were actually for routine immigration violations or in some cases ordinary crimes as asserted in the 165-page report "America's Challenge" about civil liberties, domestic security and national unity after the attacks, released by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. More than one million people are currently on watch lists according to a USA Today report in 2009, but Boyle believes he's in more exclusive company on a list of about 5,000 people who were asked to be informants. Guarding against unjust tactics in the name of security is something that should drive Arab Americans and Muslims, and others, he said. "Arabs and Muslims and their supporters have to get organized and stop assuming the FBI is their friend, and to set up watch committees and inform themselves as to their rights under the law., and fight back in court," he said. "It's only going to get worse...the FBI and the CIA are completely out of anyone's control. And Arabs and Muslims are going to have to sit down and figure out how to combat this," he said. Boyle said they should band together to demand that the Department of Justice re-institute the Edward Hirsch Levy Guidelines, which terminated the FBI COINTEL spying program and were revoked after 9/11 by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. He also said the communities need more lawyers and journalists to fight on their behalf. He remains concerned about the possibility of retribution against he and others should another attack occur but plans to remain firm in his commitment to his country and its ideals of freedom. "It feels sort of like a loaded gun sitting there," he said. "But I was born here and I will stay here as a U.S. citizen, and stand and fight for the rights and future of this country." -- Sahar Aziz Associate Professor of Law Texas Wesleyan University School of Law (202) 455-0063 saziz at saharazizlaw.com www.saharazizlaw.com Follow me on Twitter: @saharazizlaw www.twitter.com/saharazizlaw http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=548232274 See my latest article: Citizens, Not Subjects: Debunking the Sectarian Narrative of the Pro-Democracy Movement in Bahrain http://www.ispu.org/detailed_publication.php?type=reports&id=640 View my research on my SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=1459001 This email message, including any attachments, may be a privileged and confidential communication. 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Groups] Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use . __, Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 2:53 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! As John Pilger established, Obama is a CIA Asset from the get-go. This was later confirmed by the investigative reporter Wayne Madsen in his book. The CIA put another one of their Stooges into the White House, then neutered the Peace Movement. So here we are. Remember the Ramparts expose where it turns out the CIA had put almost the entire America Left on the CIA payroll back in the 1950s? We will have to rebuild the Peace Movement from here on. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:59 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Phil Berrigan asked me to go in with him on calling and organizing for a One Day National General Strike for Peace. Phil was going to do the first draft of the Manifesto, then send it along to me to work on it. Then Phil was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. I saw no point carrying on without Phil. But it is still a good idea. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:55 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 12:34:07 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 12:34:07 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Back in the Fall Semester of 1990, I convinced the COL Faculty to Bar both the FBI and the CIA from recruiting here because they both discriminated against hiring our LGBT students. It took me five faculty meetings in a row every other week for almost the entire Fall Semester. But at the end of the day I had the votes. Sort of like St. Patrick driving the Snakes out of Ireland. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 6:27 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! The CIA/FBI tried to get me to become an Informant/Asset for them. The first question they asked me was : “Why are you giving these interviews all over the world.” So much for the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment, inter alia. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com [mailto:ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Sahar Aziz Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2011 8:50 AM To: undisclosed-recipients Subject: [ArabLawyer] AAN: Article on civil rights attorney on terrorist watch list http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/index.php?mod=article&cat=Community&article=4627 Prominent attorney who refused to betray Arab and Muslim clients speaks on civil liberties, life on terror watch list By Nick Meyer Sunday, 08.21.2011, 02:25am The attorney-client privilege assuring confidentiality between the two parties is one of the most cherished rights of the American law system, but according to internationally recognized lawyer, author and professor Francis A. Boyle of the the University of Illinois-Champaign, government agents violated that privilege in a jarring summer 2004 visit. Speaking to The Arab American News, Boyle confirmed recent reports that he was visited by two agents from a joint FBI-CIA anti-terrorist fusion center located about a 90-minute drive away in Springfield, Ill. in his office in Champaign, who attempted to persuade him to become an informant on his Arab American and American Muslim clients. He said he repeatedly refused their requests to violate his clients' constitutional rights, only to find himself placed on the U.S. Government's terrorist watch list. "There's five or six of them, and my lawyer informed me that I'm on all of them," Boyle said "I filed an appeal but they told me, sorry, I would stay on the watch list forever until the agencies that put me on there took me off." Boyle, who has represented several high profile Arab and Muslim clients in the past, also said the agents repeatedly questioned him about interviews he has given in various international media outlets that were critical of U.S. foreign policy towards Arab and Muslim countries. Similar reports have also come out including a recent one about agents allegedly spying on University of Michigan professor and writer Juan Cole. Boyle's visit began innocently enough as the two agents introduced themselves to Boyle's secretary, he said. They identified themselves as businessmen who wanted to speak with him about matters of international law and were wearing suits and ties, looking reputable. Boyle let them in. "They misrepresented who they are and what they're about to my secretary," Boyle said. They also gave him no indication that Boyle would be placed on the terrorist watch list after leaving what Boyle called a "nearly hour-long interrogation." Speaking of interrogations, Boyle was subjected to one an hour and a half long upon returning from a lecture in Canada at the end of the summer of 2004. The pattern has continued for Boyle, who has a Ph.D in Political Science from Harvard University specializing in International Relations and has authored books such as "Biowarfare and Terrorism," which links the U.S. biowarfare development to the October 2001 post-9/11 anthrax attack on Congress, and "The Palestinian Right to Return Under International Law," which was released in March 2011. "I was flying in from Malaysia and two armed federal agents on the jet port saw me and my passport and took me into custody; they said 'You're coming with us,' and two guys with guns you're not going to argue with," he said. "After searching me they said they were looking for someone on the watch list but not you, of course; how many Francis Anthony Boyles are there in America?" Other extensive searches of Boyle occurred in Switzerland and Chicago. He's still waiting for an explanation as to why he was placed on the terrorism watch list and concerned about the future. "I'm not supposed to talk about clients' business to anyone let alone to become an informant on them, that violates their constitutional rights and also my ethical obligations as an attorney to maintain privacy," Boyle said. "Whether you like lawyers or not, we're sort of the canaries in the mineshaft of democracy, the first line of defense." An article in Criminal Justice Magazine in Summer 2002 said that immediately following the September 11 attacks against the U.S., then-Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a controversial order that permits the government to monitor all communications between client and attorney when there is 'reasonable suspicion' to 'believe that a particular inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of violence or terrorism.' The order raises constitutional concerns under the First, Fourth Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments according to authors Paul Rice and Benjamin Saul. Boyle believes that the rights of attorneys and anti-war critics as well are under attack, as is the Constitution in general as many analysts have been saying. "They've gone after many other lawyers, and what they did to Juan Cole doesn't surprise me either," Boyle said. "We're living in a police state now and what people really need to understand, especially Arabs and Muslims, is that the police are not their friends," Boyle said. "No Arab or Muslim should talk to the FBI without a lawyer present, you have to be very careful dealing with these people." Boyle noted that about 1,200 non-citizens were rounded up immediately after the 9/11 attacks and that the only charges brought against them were actually for routine immigration violations or in some cases ordinary crimes as asserted in the 165-page report "America's Challenge" about civil liberties, domestic security and national unity after the attacks, released by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. More than one million people are currently on watch lists according to a USA Today report in 2009, but Boyle believes he's in more exclusive company on a list of about 5,000 people who were asked to be informants. Guarding against unjust tactics in the name of security is something that should drive Arab Americans and Muslims, and others, he said. "Arabs and Muslims and their supporters have to get organized and stop assuming the FBI is their friend, and to set up watch committees and inform themselves as to their rights under the law., and fight back in court," he said. "It's only going to get worse...the FBI and the CIA are completely out of anyone's control. And Arabs and Muslims are going to have to sit down and figure out how to combat this," he said. Boyle said they should band together to demand that the Department of Justice re-institute the Edward Hirsch Levy Guidelines, which terminated the FBI COINTEL spying program and were revoked after 9/11 by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. He also said the communities need more lawyers and journalists to fight on their behalf. He remains concerned about the possibility of retribution against he and others should another attack occur but plans to remain firm in his commitment to his country and its ideals of freedom. "It feels sort of like a loaded gun sitting there," he said. "But I was born here and I will stay here as a U.S. citizen, and stand and fight for the rights and future of this country." -- Sahar Aziz Associate Professor of Law Texas Wesleyan University School of Law (202) 455-0063 saziz at saharazizlaw.com www.saharazizlaw.com Follow me on Twitter: @saharazizlaw www.twitter.com/saharazizlaw http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=548232274 See my latest article: Citizens, Not Subjects: Debunking the Sectarian Narrative of the Pro-Democracy Movement in Bahrain http://www.ispu.org/detailed_publication.php?type=reports&id=640 View my research on my SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=1459001 This email message, including any attachments, may be a privileged and confidential communication. 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Groups] Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use . __, Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 2:53 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! As John Pilger established, Obama is a CIA Asset from the get-go. This was later confirmed by the investigative reporter Wayne Madsen in his book. The CIA put another one of their Stooges into the White House, then neutered the Peace Movement. So here we are. Remember the Ramparts expose where it turns out the CIA had put almost the entire America Left on the CIA payroll back in the 1950s? We will have to rebuild the Peace Movement from here on. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:59 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Phil Berrigan asked me to go in with him on calling and organizing for a One Day National General Strike for Peace. Phil was going to do the first draft of the Manifesto, then send it along to me to work on it. Then Phil was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. I saw no point carrying on without Phil. But it is still a good idea. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:55 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 12:34:07 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 12:34:07 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Back in the Fall Semester of 1990, I convinced the COL Faculty to Bar both the FBI and the CIA from recruiting here because they both discriminated against hiring our LGBT students. It took me five faculty meetings in a row every other week for almost the entire Fall Semester. But at the end of the day I had the votes. Sort of like St. Patrick driving the Snakes out of Ireland. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 6:27 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! The CIA/FBI tried to get me to become an Informant/Asset for them. The first question they asked me was : “Why are you giving these interviews all over the world.” So much for the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment, inter alia. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com [mailto:ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Sahar Aziz Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2011 8:50 AM To: undisclosed-recipients Subject: [ArabLawyer] AAN: Article on civil rights attorney on terrorist watch list http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/index.php?mod=article&cat=Community&article=4627 Prominent attorney who refused to betray Arab and Muslim clients speaks on civil liberties, life on terror watch list By Nick Meyer Sunday, 08.21.2011, 02:25am The attorney-client privilege assuring confidentiality between the two parties is one of the most cherished rights of the American law system, but according to internationally recognized lawyer, author and professor Francis A. Boyle of the the University of Illinois-Champaign, government agents violated that privilege in a jarring summer 2004 visit. Speaking to The Arab American News, Boyle confirmed recent reports that he was visited by two agents from a joint FBI-CIA anti-terrorist fusion center located about a 90-minute drive away in Springfield, Ill. in his office in Champaign, who attempted to persuade him to become an informant on his Arab American and American Muslim clients. He said he repeatedly refused their requests to violate his clients' constitutional rights, only to find himself placed on the U.S. Government's terrorist watch list. "There's five or six of them, and my lawyer informed me that I'm on all of them," Boyle said "I filed an appeal but they told me, sorry, I would stay on the watch list forever until the agencies that put me on there took me off." Boyle, who has represented several high profile Arab and Muslim clients in the past, also said the agents repeatedly questioned him about interviews he has given in various international media outlets that were critical of U.S. foreign policy towards Arab and Muslim countries. Similar reports have also come out including a recent one about agents allegedly spying on University of Michigan professor and writer Juan Cole. Boyle's visit began innocently enough as the two agents introduced themselves to Boyle's secretary, he said. They identified themselves as businessmen who wanted to speak with him about matters of international law and were wearing suits and ties, looking reputable. Boyle let them in. "They misrepresented who they are and what they're about to my secretary," Boyle said. They also gave him no indication that Boyle would be placed on the terrorist watch list after leaving what Boyle called a "nearly hour-long interrogation." Speaking of interrogations, Boyle was subjected to one an hour and a half long upon returning from a lecture in Canada at the end of the summer of 2004. The pattern has continued for Boyle, who has a Ph.D in Political Science from Harvard University specializing in International Relations and has authored books such as "Biowarfare and Terrorism," which links the U.S. biowarfare development to the October 2001 post-9/11 anthrax attack on Congress, and "The Palestinian Right to Return Under International Law," which was released in March 2011. "I was flying in from Malaysia and two armed federal agents on the jet port saw me and my passport and took me into custody; they said 'You're coming with us,' and two guys with guns you're not going to argue with," he said. "After searching me they said they were looking for someone on the watch list but not you, of course; how many Francis Anthony Boyles are there in America?" Other extensive searches of Boyle occurred in Switzerland and Chicago. He's still waiting for an explanation as to why he was placed on the terrorism watch list and concerned about the future. "I'm not supposed to talk about clients' business to anyone let alone to become an informant on them, that violates their constitutional rights and also my ethical obligations as an attorney to maintain privacy," Boyle said. "Whether you like lawyers or not, we're sort of the canaries in the mineshaft of democracy, the first line of defense." An article in Criminal Justice Magazine in Summer 2002 said that immediately following the September 11 attacks against the U.S., then-Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a controversial order that permits the government to monitor all communications between client and attorney when there is 'reasonable suspicion' to 'believe that a particular inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of violence or terrorism.' The order raises constitutional concerns under the First, Fourth Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments according to authors Paul Rice and Benjamin Saul. Boyle believes that the rights of attorneys and anti-war critics as well are under attack, as is the Constitution in general as many analysts have been saying. "They've gone after many other lawyers, and what they did to Juan Cole doesn't surprise me either," Boyle said. "We're living in a police state now and what people really need to understand, especially Arabs and Muslims, is that the police are not their friends," Boyle said. "No Arab or Muslim should talk to the FBI without a lawyer present, you have to be very careful dealing with these people." Boyle noted that about 1,200 non-citizens were rounded up immediately after the 9/11 attacks and that the only charges brought against them were actually for routine immigration violations or in some cases ordinary crimes as asserted in the 165-page report "America's Challenge" about civil liberties, domestic security and national unity after the attacks, released by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. More than one million people are currently on watch lists according to a USA Today report in 2009, but Boyle believes he's in more exclusive company on a list of about 5,000 people who were asked to be informants. Guarding against unjust tactics in the name of security is something that should drive Arab Americans and Muslims, and others, he said. "Arabs and Muslims and their supporters have to get organized and stop assuming the FBI is their friend, and to set up watch committees and inform themselves as to their rights under the law., and fight back in court," he said. "It's only going to get worse...the FBI and the CIA are completely out of anyone's control. And Arabs and Muslims are going to have to sit down and figure out how to combat this," he said. Boyle said they should band together to demand that the Department of Justice re-institute the Edward Hirsch Levy Guidelines, which terminated the FBI COINTEL spying program and were revoked after 9/11 by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. He also said the communities need more lawyers and journalists to fight on their behalf. He remains concerned about the possibility of retribution against he and others should another attack occur but plans to remain firm in his commitment to his country and its ideals of freedom. "It feels sort of like a loaded gun sitting there," he said. "But I was born here and I will stay here as a U.S. citizen, and stand and fight for the rights and future of this country." -- Sahar Aziz Associate Professor of Law Texas Wesleyan University School of Law (202) 455-0063 saziz at saharazizlaw.com www.saharazizlaw.com Follow me on Twitter: @saharazizlaw www.twitter.com/saharazizlaw http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=548232274 See my latest article: Citizens, Not Subjects: Debunking the Sectarian Narrative of the Pro-Democracy Movement in Bahrain http://www.ispu.org/detailed_publication.php?type=reports&id=640 View my research on my SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=1459001 This email message, including any attachments, may be a privileged and confidential communication. 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Groups] Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use . __, Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 2:53 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! As John Pilger established, Obama is a CIA Asset from the get-go. This was later confirmed by the investigative reporter Wayne Madsen in his book. The CIA put another one of their Stooges into the White House, then neutered the Peace Movement. So here we are. Remember the Ramparts expose where it turns out the CIA had put almost the entire America Left on the CIA payroll back in the 1950s? We will have to rebuild the Peace Movement from here on. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:59 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Phil Berrigan asked me to go in with him on calling and organizing for a One Day National General Strike for Peace. Phil was going to do the first draft of the Manifesto, then send it along to me to work on it. Then Phil was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. I saw no point carrying on without Phil. But it is still a good idea. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:55 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 12:46:58 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 12:46:58 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Last I heard, CIA/FBI still don’t recruit here. Good riddance to Bad Rubbish! Fab Irish American. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 7:34 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Back in the Fall Semester of 1990, I convinced the COL Faculty to Bar both the FBI and the CIA from recruiting here because they both discriminated against hiring our LGBT students. It took me five faculty meetings in a row every other week for almost the entire Fall Semester. But at the end of the day I had the votes. Sort of like St. Patrick driving the Snakes out of Ireland. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 6:27 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! The CIA/FBI tried to get me to become an Informant/Asset for them. The first question they asked me was : “Why are you giving these interviews all over the world.” So much for the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment, inter alia. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com [mailto:ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Sahar Aziz Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2011 8:50 AM To: undisclosed-recipients Subject: [ArabLawyer] AAN: Article on civil rights attorney on terrorist watch list http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/index.php?mod=article&cat=Community&article=4627 Prominent attorney who refused to betray Arab and Muslim clients speaks on civil liberties, life on terror watch list By Nick Meyer Sunday, 08.21.2011, 02:25am The attorney-client privilege assuring confidentiality between the two parties is one of the most cherished rights of the American law system, but according to internationally recognized lawyer, author and professor Francis A. Boyle of the the University of Illinois-Champaign, government agents violated that privilege in a jarring summer 2004 visit. Speaking to The Arab American News, Boyle confirmed recent reports that he was visited by two agents from a joint FBI-CIA anti-terrorist fusion center located about a 90-minute drive away in Springfield, Ill. in his office in Champaign, who attempted to persuade him to become an informant on his Arab American and American Muslim clients. He said he repeatedly refused their requests to violate his clients' constitutional rights, only to find himself placed on the U.S. Government's terrorist watch list. "There's five or six of them, and my lawyer informed me that I'm on all of them," Boyle said "I filed an appeal but they told me, sorry, I would stay on the watch list forever until the agencies that put me on there took me off." Boyle, who has represented several high profile Arab and Muslim clients in the past, also said the agents repeatedly questioned him about interviews he has given in various international media outlets that were critical of U.S. foreign policy towards Arab and Muslim countries. Similar reports have also come out including a recent one about agents allegedly spying on University of Michigan professor and writer Juan Cole. Boyle's visit began innocently enough as the two agents introduced themselves to Boyle's secretary, he said. They identified themselves as businessmen who wanted to speak with him about matters of international law and were wearing suits and ties, looking reputable. Boyle let them in. "They misrepresented who they are and what they're about to my secretary," Boyle said. They also gave him no indication that Boyle would be placed on the terrorist watch list after leaving what Boyle called a "nearly hour-long interrogation." Speaking of interrogations, Boyle was subjected to one an hour and a half long upon returning from a lecture in Canada at the end of the summer of 2004. The pattern has continued for Boyle, who has a Ph.D in Political Science from Harvard University specializing in International Relations and has authored books such as "Biowarfare and Terrorism," which links the U.S. biowarfare development to the October 2001 post-9/11 anthrax attack on Congress, and "The Palestinian Right to Return Under International Law," which was released in March 2011. "I was flying in from Malaysia and two armed federal agents on the jet port saw me and my passport and took me into custody; they said 'You're coming with us,' and two guys with guns you're not going to argue with," he said. "After searching me they said they were looking for someone on the watch list but not you, of course; how many Francis Anthony Boyles are there in America?" Other extensive searches of Boyle occurred in Switzerland and Chicago. He's still waiting for an explanation as to why he was placed on the terrorism watch list and concerned about the future. "I'm not supposed to talk about clients' business to anyone let alone to become an informant on them, that violates their constitutional rights and also my ethical obligations as an attorney to maintain privacy," Boyle said. "Whether you like lawyers or not, we're sort of the canaries in the mineshaft of democracy, the first line of defense." An article in Criminal Justice Magazine in Summer 2002 said that immediately following the September 11 attacks against the U.S., then-Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a controversial order that permits the government to monitor all communications between client and attorney when there is 'reasonable suspicion' to 'believe that a particular inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of violence or terrorism.' The order raises constitutional concerns under the First, Fourth Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments according to authors Paul Rice and Benjamin Saul. Boyle believes that the rights of attorneys and anti-war critics as well are under attack, as is the Constitution in general as many analysts have been saying. "They've gone after many other lawyers, and what they did to Juan Cole doesn't surprise me either," Boyle said. "We're living in a police state now and what people really need to understand, especially Arabs and Muslims, is that the police are not their friends," Boyle said. "No Arab or Muslim should talk to the FBI without a lawyer present, you have to be very careful dealing with these people." Boyle noted that about 1,200 non-citizens were rounded up immediately after the 9/11 attacks and that the only charges brought against them were actually for routine immigration violations or in some cases ordinary crimes as asserted in the 165-page report "America's Challenge" about civil liberties, domestic security and national unity after the attacks, released by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. More than one million people are currently on watch lists according to a USA Today report in 2009, but Boyle believes he's in more exclusive company on a list of about 5,000 people who were asked to be informants. Guarding against unjust tactics in the name of security is something that should drive Arab Americans and Muslims, and others, he said. "Arabs and Muslims and their supporters have to get organized and stop assuming the FBI is their friend, and to set up watch committees and inform themselves as to their rights under the law., and fight back in court," he said. "It's only going to get worse...the FBI and the CIA are completely out of anyone's control. And Arabs and Muslims are going to have to sit down and figure out how to combat this," he said. Boyle said they should band together to demand that the Department of Justice re-institute the Edward Hirsch Levy Guidelines, which terminated the FBI COINTEL spying program and were revoked after 9/11 by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. He also said the communities need more lawyers and journalists to fight on their behalf. He remains concerned about the possibility of retribution against he and others should another attack occur but plans to remain firm in his commitment to his country and its ideals of freedom. "It feels sort of like a loaded gun sitting there," he said. "But I was born here and I will stay here as a U.S. citizen, and stand and fight for the rights and future of this country." -- Sahar Aziz Associate Professor of Law Texas Wesleyan University School of Law (202) 455-0063 saziz at saharazizlaw.com www.saharazizlaw.com Follow me on Twitter: @saharazizlaw www.twitter.com/saharazizlaw http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=548232274 See my latest article: Citizens, Not Subjects: Debunking the Sectarian Narrative of the Pro-Democracy Movement in Bahrain http://www.ispu.org/detailed_publication.php?type=reports&id=640 View my research on my SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=1459001 This email message, including any attachments, may be a privileged and confidential communication. 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Groups] Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use . __, Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 2:53 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! As John Pilger established, Obama is a CIA Asset from the get-go. This was later confirmed by the investigative reporter Wayne Madsen in his book. The CIA put another one of their Stooges into the White House, then neutered the Peace Movement. So here we are. Remember the Ramparts expose where it turns out the CIA had put almost the entire America Left on the CIA payroll back in the 1950s? We will have to rebuild the Peace Movement from here on. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:59 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Phil Berrigan asked me to go in with him on calling and organizing for a One Day National General Strike for Peace. Phil was going to do the first draft of the Manifesto, then send it along to me to work on it. Then Phil was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. I saw no point carrying on without Phil. But it is still a good idea. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:55 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Aug 21 12:46:58 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 12:46:58 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! In-Reply-To: References: <07D50245-14EC-4C3C-844A-36D197E5F062@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Last I heard, CIA/FBI still don’t recruit here. Good riddance to Bad Rubbish! Fab Irish American. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 7:34 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G Cc: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Back in the Fall Semester of 1990, I convinced the COL Faculty to Bar both the FBI and the CIA from recruiting here because they both discriminated against hiring our LGBT students. It took me five faculty meetings in a row every other week for almost the entire Fall Semester. But at the end of the day I had the votes. Sort of like St. Patrick driving the Snakes out of Ireland. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 6:27 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! The CIA/FBI tried to get me to become an Informant/Asset for them. The first question they asked me was : “Why are you giving these interviews all over the world.” So much for the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment, inter alia. Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com [mailto:ArabLawyer at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Sahar Aziz Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2011 8:50 AM To: undisclosed-recipients Subject: [ArabLawyer] AAN: Article on civil rights attorney on terrorist watch list http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/index.php?mod=article&cat=Community&article=4627 Prominent attorney who refused to betray Arab and Muslim clients speaks on civil liberties, life on terror watch list By Nick Meyer Sunday, 08.21.2011, 02:25am The attorney-client privilege assuring confidentiality between the two parties is one of the most cherished rights of the American law system, but according to internationally recognized lawyer, author and professor Francis A. Boyle of the the University of Illinois-Champaign, government agents violated that privilege in a jarring summer 2004 visit. Speaking to The Arab American News, Boyle confirmed recent reports that he was visited by two agents from a joint FBI-CIA anti-terrorist fusion center located about a 90-minute drive away in Springfield, Ill. in his office in Champaign, who attempted to persuade him to become an informant on his Arab American and American Muslim clients. He said he repeatedly refused their requests to violate his clients' constitutional rights, only to find himself placed on the U.S. Government's terrorist watch list. "There's five or six of them, and my lawyer informed me that I'm on all of them," Boyle said "I filed an appeal but they told me, sorry, I would stay on the watch list forever until the agencies that put me on there took me off." Boyle, who has represented several high profile Arab and Muslim clients in the past, also said the agents repeatedly questioned him about interviews he has given in various international media outlets that were critical of U.S. foreign policy towards Arab and Muslim countries. Similar reports have also come out including a recent one about agents allegedly spying on University of Michigan professor and writer Juan Cole. Boyle's visit began innocently enough as the two agents introduced themselves to Boyle's secretary, he said. They identified themselves as businessmen who wanted to speak with him about matters of international law and were wearing suits and ties, looking reputable. Boyle let them in. "They misrepresented who they are and what they're about to my secretary," Boyle said. They also gave him no indication that Boyle would be placed on the terrorist watch list after leaving what Boyle called a "nearly hour-long interrogation." Speaking of interrogations, Boyle was subjected to one an hour and a half long upon returning from a lecture in Canada at the end of the summer of 2004. The pattern has continued for Boyle, who has a Ph.D in Political Science from Harvard University specializing in International Relations and has authored books such as "Biowarfare and Terrorism," which links the U.S. biowarfare development to the October 2001 post-9/11 anthrax attack on Congress, and "The Palestinian Right to Return Under International Law," which was released in March 2011. "I was flying in from Malaysia and two armed federal agents on the jet port saw me and my passport and took me into custody; they said 'You're coming with us,' and two guys with guns you're not going to argue with," he said. "After searching me they said they were looking for someone on the watch list but not you, of course; how many Francis Anthony Boyles are there in America?" Other extensive searches of Boyle occurred in Switzerland and Chicago. He's still waiting for an explanation as to why he was placed on the terrorism watch list and concerned about the future. "I'm not supposed to talk about clients' business to anyone let alone to become an informant on them, that violates their constitutional rights and also my ethical obligations as an attorney to maintain privacy," Boyle said. "Whether you like lawyers or not, we're sort of the canaries in the mineshaft of democracy, the first line of defense." An article in Criminal Justice Magazine in Summer 2002 said that immediately following the September 11 attacks against the U.S., then-Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a controversial order that permits the government to monitor all communications between client and attorney when there is 'reasonable suspicion' to 'believe that a particular inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of violence or terrorism.' The order raises constitutional concerns under the First, Fourth Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments according to authors Paul Rice and Benjamin Saul. Boyle believes that the rights of attorneys and anti-war critics as well are under attack, as is the Constitution in general as many analysts have been saying. "They've gone after many other lawyers, and what they did to Juan Cole doesn't surprise me either," Boyle said. "We're living in a police state now and what people really need to understand, especially Arabs and Muslims, is that the police are not their friends," Boyle said. "No Arab or Muslim should talk to the FBI without a lawyer present, you have to be very careful dealing with these people." Boyle noted that about 1,200 non-citizens were rounded up immediately after the 9/11 attacks and that the only charges brought against them were actually for routine immigration violations or in some cases ordinary crimes as asserted in the 165-page report "America's Challenge" about civil liberties, domestic security and national unity after the attacks, released by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. More than one million people are currently on watch lists according to a USA Today report in 2009, but Boyle believes he's in more exclusive company on a list of about 5,000 people who were asked to be informants. Guarding against unjust tactics in the name of security is something that should drive Arab Americans and Muslims, and others, he said. "Arabs and Muslims and their supporters have to get organized and stop assuming the FBI is their friend, and to set up watch committees and inform themselves as to their rights under the law., and fight back in court," he said. "It's only going to get worse...the FBI and the CIA are completely out of anyone's control. And Arabs and Muslims are going to have to sit down and figure out how to combat this," he said. Boyle said they should band together to demand that the Department of Justice re-institute the Edward Hirsch Levy Guidelines, which terminated the FBI COINTEL spying program and were revoked after 9/11 by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. He also said the communities need more lawyers and journalists to fight on their behalf. He remains concerned about the possibility of retribution against he and others should another attack occur but plans to remain firm in his commitment to his country and its ideals of freedom. "It feels sort of like a loaded gun sitting there," he said. "But I was born here and I will stay here as a U.S. citizen, and stand and fight for the rights and future of this country." -- Sahar Aziz Associate Professor of Law Texas Wesleyan University School of Law (202) 455-0063 saziz at saharazizlaw.com www.saharazizlaw.com Follow me on Twitter: @saharazizlaw www.twitter.com/saharazizlaw http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=548232274 See my latest article: Citizens, Not Subjects: Debunking the Sectarian Narrative of the Pro-Democracy Movement in Bahrain http://www.ispu.org/detailed_publication.php?type=reports&id=640 View my research on my SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=1459001 This email message, including any attachments, may be a privileged and confidential communication. 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Groups] Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use . __, Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 2:53 AM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! As John Pilger established, Obama is a CIA Asset from the get-go. This was later confirmed by the investigative reporter Wayne Madsen in his book. The CIA put another one of their Stooges into the White House, then neutered the Peace Movement. So here we are. Remember the Ramparts expose where it turns out the CIA had put almost the entire America Left on the CIA payroll back in the 1950s? We will have to rebuild the Peace Movement from here on. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:59 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Phil Berrigan asked me to go in with him on calling and organizing for a One Day National General Strike for Peace. Phil was going to do the first draft of the Manifesto, then send it along to me to work on it. Then Phil was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. I saw no point carrying on without Phil. But it is still a good idea. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:55 PM To: Estabrook, Carl G > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: RE: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! Dear Carl: You are free to disagree. With all due respect to you, Obama devastated the Peace Movement. We are going to have to rebuild it before we can get to the point you suggest here. But certainly our Peace Teach-in on Saturday, September 23 will be a good start. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:35 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien > Subject: Re: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. Trump is as weak if not so duplicitous as Obama. —CGE On Aug 20, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For Trump tomorrow night. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: com-news at yahoogroups.com [mailto:com-news at yahoogroups.com] Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 10:01 AM To: com-news at yahoogroups.com Cc: Mauri Johansson > Subject: [com-news] 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Mon Aug 21 20:33:11 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 15:33:11 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE ON THE AIR & the president's speech on Afghanistan Message-ID: <7BF697FA-DEE3-488A-B352-1382F4681763@gmail.com> AWARE’s weekly televised discussion of US war-making will be devoted this week to the president's speech tonight on the US war on Afghanistan. The unrehearsed program, AWARE ON THE AIR, will be recorded in the studios of Urbana Public Television from noon to 1pm on Tuesday 22 August. Members and friends of AWARE are invited to participate, but we’re using a small studio, so let me know if you would like to be on the panel. —CGE From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Aug 22 02:03:31 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2017 02:03:31 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Trump on Afghanistan Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 9:00 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Trump on Afghanistan 1. There will be no light at the end of this tunnel. 2. Everyone knows the war is lost. But Afghanistan will not fall on my watch. 3. So I am going to kick this can of worms down the road to the next administration. 4. Just like Obama did to me. 5. Just like JFK. LBJ and Tricky Dick did to Ford on Vietnam. 6. Let the next Sucker be left holding the Bag of History. Fab Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Aug 22 02:03:31 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2017 02:03:31 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Trump on Afghanistan Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 9:00 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Trump on Afghanistan 1. There will be no light at the end of this tunnel. 2. Everyone knows the war is lost. But Afghanistan will not fall on my watch. 3. So I am going to kick this can of worms down the road to the next administration. 4. Just like Obama did to me. 5. Just like JFK. LBJ and Tricky Dick did to Ford on Vietnam. 6. Let the next Sucker be left holding the Bag of History. Fab Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Aug 22 02:23:38 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2017 02:23:38 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Afghanistan References: Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A [mailto:support at lists.aals.org] Sent: Monday, August 21, 2017 9:00 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: [SECTNS.aals] - Trump on Afghanistan 1. There will be no light at the end of this tunnel. 2. Everyone knows the war is lost. But Afghanistan will not fall on my watch. 3. So I am going to kick this can of worms down the road to the next administration. 4. Just like Obama did to me. 5. Just like JFK. LBJ and Tricky Dick did to Ford on Vietnam. 6. Let the next Sucker be left holding the Bag of History. Fab Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:30 PM To: 'C G Estabrook' ; peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace Subject: RE: [Peace] Afghanistan From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2014 7:03 AM To: SECTNS.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: 9/11/2014: No War Against Afghanistan! See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] No War Against Afghanistan! Via Transfer News * All the News That Doesn’t Fit This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal maneuvering behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.—NY Transfer: Transcript of a speech delivered by Prof. Francis A. Boyle at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, Champaign, Illinois on October 18, 2001, copy-edited by NY Transfer News, NY Transfer News Collective, A Service of Blythe Systems since 1985 – Information for the Rest of Us, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012. Source provided by Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team, October 24, 2001. This Information is disseminated by Nizkor International Human Rights Team. Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj), Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign). PO Box 156037 – 28080 Madrid – Spain. NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN! Introduction Thank you. I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been a center for organizing for peace, justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978, and especially under its former minister, my friend Jim Holiman. I also want to thank Joe Miller and Jeff Machotta of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for inviting me to speak here this evening. People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War. They continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 58 Muslim states in the world. None of them believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Facts Now let me start first with the facts. As you recall, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a “white paper” documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well of course those of us in the peace movement are familiar with “white papers” from before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulations, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a “white paper” produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing. What did we get instead? The only “statement of facts” that we got from an official of the United States government was mentioned in the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times [a.k.a.: New York Times] that described the briefings by the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows: “One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which were oral, without slides or documents, did not report any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened. A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation characterized the briefing as containing ‘nothing particularly new or surprising,’ adding: ‘It was rather descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There was no attempt to build a legal case.’” That’s someone who was at the briefing! What we did get was a “white paper” from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No! That “white paper” is in that hallowed tradition of a “white paper,” based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc. Even the British government admitted Blair’s case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court. As a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. It appears we are never going to find out. Why? Because Congress in its “wisdom” has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power, giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government, including F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., D.I.A.. To put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury. We are not going to get that investigation. Law Now let's look at the law. Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism. For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened? Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. Clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. In my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with: international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on a formal definition of terrorism, they decided to break down terrorism into its constituent units and deal with them piece-wise: Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop. The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the U.N. Terrorist Bombing Convention that is also directly on point. Eventually the Bush administration just did say, well yes our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time, lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues. Indeed, there are a good 12 to13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism that could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected that entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor -- December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. Of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with it by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon, junk, ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state, which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001. The U.N. Security Council The next day September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed. Indeed the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, called it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state -- an act of war -- and a terrorist attack. Terrorists are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in late November of 1990. I think it is a fair comparison: Bush Jr. versus Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism “all necessary means.” But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. The U.S. Congress Having failed to do that the Bush Jr. administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal was at that time. According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Congress refused to give them that, and for a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the President a constitutional dictator.[i][1] We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just as well picked up and gone home as the House did today, which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation [in response to the anthrax attacks].[ii][2] You'll recall as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the infamous Korematsu case where Japanese American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese Americans constituted some type of security threat.[iii][3] If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing today. The Korematsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Instead Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization -- under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely by a 2/3rds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam War. Only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from Oakland, voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges -- notice his ipse dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11. In other words, Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. It was then followed up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous, this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his U.N. Security Council resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the Security Council resolution -- that was, only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did not move north to Baghdad. He stopped short south of Basra, saying “that's all the authority I have.” I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticized, with people saying that he should have marched all the way to Bagdad. But he had no authority by the U.N. Security Council to do that and he had no authority from the U.S. Congress to do that either. Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gave him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipse dixit. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. NATO In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO. Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes: (1) policing Eastern Europe, and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia by President Clinton; and (2) intervention in the Middle East to “secure” the oil fields. The NATO Council approved this proposal. The problem is that the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all. Indeed the NATO Pact would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5 then was completely bogus. The Bush Jr. administration was attempting to get some type of multilateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Council to get authorization. The Bush Jr. administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Council, but all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war, to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Council to use military force for any reason. Self-judging Self-defense Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the contra war against Nicaragua. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands. The only way Bush could get him confirmed by the Senate was that he rammed him through the Senate right after the 9/11 bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people on his hands. That's eleven times anything that happened in New York. Eleven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to get formal authority from the Security Council and now the best they could do was fall back on some alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves. Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter asked if there was any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent: That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946. There the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 [a predecessor to the U.N. Charter]; and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg they had the chutzpah to argue that the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no, what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law; and that has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves. Aggression Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis. Call it what you want, but it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed that was the official position of the United States government even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War. Then former Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow tried to get the State Department to switch their position. They refused and continued to maintain their position that retaliation is not self-defense. This is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. Indeed if you read on the internet, certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken by almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq? No! Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here? A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong. [See more recently Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies 24 (2004): “When, later in the discussion {on the evening of Sept. 11, with Bush and his crisis advisors}, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” F.A.B.] Violent Settlement Of International Disputes Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Sharia. This was before the latest incidents. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say? No negotiations! There's nothing to negotiate! Here is my ultimatum! Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter, which requires the peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name “negotiation.” Likewise that Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact I mentioned, under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg, to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties, requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Yet that's exactly what we are doing today, waging war as an instrument of national policy. Then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan – they were willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic: There'll be no negotiations! I told them what to do! They better do it! Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. If you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. Indeed, there were striking similarities with the ultimatum given by the Bush Sr. administration to Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War that was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted, which it was not. Why? The decision had already been made to go to war. Humanitarian Catastrophe Now that being said, what then really is going on here? If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? Recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water, or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere from 5 to 7 million Afghans. All the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly that the so-called humanitarian “food drop” -- as Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize organization put it -- is a military propaganda operation. which it clearly is. Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House for the Afghani children is also propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it bloodlust? No, it isn't! The people who run this country are cold, calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And now since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country, Karimov, accused of massive violations of human rights, that the United States government will “protect” Uzbekistan. Now first, the Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such an agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, U.S. Special Forces have been over there for several years training their people under “Partnership for Peace” with NATO. Now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet, that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement? It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state. We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan, it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this unconstitutional agreement between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years, saying we have to defend it against Afghanistan, where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even established the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to police this region. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay. Stealing Oil and Gas Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration -- the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, renamed the U.S. Central Command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia, reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the New Speak Times. The movers and shakers. They paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to independence of those states in 1991, you saw all sorts of articles in the Wall Street Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia have become a vital national security interest of the United States. We proceeded to establish relations with these states of Central Asia. We sent over Special Forces. We were even parachuting the 82nd Airborne into Kazakhstan. All reported in the Wall Street Journal. In addition then, since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out, how do you do that? Well one way is to send it west, but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia – thus a highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure. The easiest way to do it is construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. UNOCAL was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also about outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us. Regional War In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war, on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now, today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war. The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the leaders in August of 1914 thought too, when you read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't, and there was a world war. Ten million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan. Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries. The longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. American Police State In addition, finally comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill [a.k.a.: USA Patriot Act]. No other words to describe it. Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. If you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us, moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism. Security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media: we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties. Even so-called liberals like Alan Dershowitz: Oh, let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous! Larry Tribe, writing in the Wall Street Journal: well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on. And Bush has threatened that it will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz talked about "ending states," which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement to the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. Scapegoats So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us. As you know aliens, foreigners, their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law. Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all have in common, these foreigners? They're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for 9/11. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying that we still have our First Amendment rights despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both Houses of Congress where, interestingly enough, the so-called liberal Democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative Republicans in the House. We still have our First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those First Amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world, and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution. Thank you. Questions and Answers Many of the civil rights you say we must give up... A: I said we don't have to give them up; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights, including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens. So I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm not advocating that. Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat to entice these countries to change their practices? A: This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the Third World, and when it did exist the Socialist World (there are still a few Socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation, or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. Therefore they refused to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now note the United States government was always on the other side. And if you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980s during the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus, the Reagan administration for eight years telling us the A.N.C. and Nelson Mandela were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. Yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa. Typically we sided with white racist colonial settler regimes against the indigenous Black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence, and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with the problem of what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we have pursued in the Middle East for the last 30 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous peoples of this region. What apparently the Bush administration seems to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which, I regret to say, we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas. We could not care less about peace, democracy, or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait? Whom did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Emir and his kleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy anywhere in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf -- who overthrew a democratically elected government -- talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly brilliant? He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. Look at our “guys” there, the Northern Alliance, left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11? As I said, we should have taken the position that President Bush did originally: This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as an act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie [and the Murrah Federal Building]. That is the way it should have been handled. But a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell, to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat Article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation that we decided to go to war right away. A question about Middle East policy A: There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No! We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, or the government, is talking about it: why don't we just pick up and go home? Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed back when Bush Sr. invaded Somalia, it was reported in the international news media that, yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies. We know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney too. What can we do to prevent another September 11? A: I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do. But realistically speaking, I don't believe we're going to do them. END Notes Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (voice) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2017 6:27 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net; Peace Subject: [Peace] Afghanistan If the president doesn't announce a complete withdrawal of US (and Nato) troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan, there should be major antiwar demonstrations this week. Shut it down. —CGE _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From divisek at yahoo.com Tue Aug 22 16:57:22 2017 From: divisek at yahoo.com (Dianna Visek) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2017 16:57:22 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] War is the health of the state, but the death of empires References: <1669618440.599317.1503421042280.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1669618440.599317.1503421042280@mail.yahoo.com> Is Trump's Agenda Being Eclipsed? | | | | Is Trump's Agenda Being Eclipsed? Rasmussen Reports "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," sa... | | | -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Tue Aug 22 22:37:30 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2017 17:37:30 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] War is the health of the state, but the death of empires In-Reply-To: <1669618440.599317.1503421042280@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1669618440.599317.1503421042280.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <1669618440.599317.1503421042280@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 23 02:26:23 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 02:26:23 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] War is the health of the state, but the death of empires In-Reply-To: References: <1669618440.599317.1503421042280.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <1669618440.599317.1503421042280@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: It should be obvious to all, by now, that our elections, and our two Party system is a fraud. The Shadow Government/Industrial Military Complex, supported by an economic system of capitalism is in control with perpetual war their goal. War for other nations resources, allows us, or rather our elites to control those nations that threaten to outdo us economically. Suppressing our own people, is necessary, as is the distractions that keep us divided, all in order to continue US imperialism and hegemony. On Aug 22, 2017, at 15:37, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: Buchanan’s column is another curate’s egg (“...parts of it are excellent!”): “...the country did not vote for confrontation or war. America voted for Trump's promise to improve ties with Russia, to make Europe shoulder more of the cost of its defense, to annihilate ISIS and extricate us from Mideast wars, to stay out of future wars … Yet today we hear talk of upping and extending the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, of confronting Iran, of sending anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine to battle pro-Russia rebels in the east…" On Aug 22, 2017, at 11:57 AM, Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss > wrote: Is Trump's Agenda Being Eclipsed? Is Trump's Agenda Being Eclipsed? Rasmussen Reports "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," sa... _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 23 12:35:02 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 12:35:02 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump's speech on Afghanistan Message-ID: Trump’s speech on Afghanistan: The military in command 23 August 2017 Trump’s new policy in Afghanistan, unveiled in a nationally televised address Monday evening, is a declaration of open-ended and unrestrained military violence against a country that has suffered sixteen years of unbroken American aggression. Since the Bush administration launched the US invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001, 175,000 people have been killed, according to conservative estimates, and millions more driven from their homes. Under Bush, Obama and now Trump, the US military has carried out countless atrocities and war crimes—from the November 2001 massacre of 800 Taliban prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif, to the 2002 slaughter of 48 people at a wedding party in Kakarak, the murder of 42 medical personnel and patients at a Doctors Without Borders medical center in Kunduz in 2015, and the dropping of the Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb, the largest nonnuclear weapon in the US arsenal, in Nangarhar Province this past April. This violence will be dramatically escalated, with a carte blanche commitment by Trump to provide whatever troops and resources the US military command deems necessary. Trump declared that he will give the military “the necessary tools and rules of engagement” to defeat any resistance. All restrictions on operations “that prevented the secretary of defense and commanders in the field from fully and swiftly waging battle against the enemy” will be lifted. In other words, the carnage already inflicted on the Afghan people will pale in comparison to what is coming. Trump’s speech, however, was not simply about Afghanistan. It was, in effect, a declaration of war on the world. Trump threatened Pakistan and sided openly with India amidst mounting conflicts between the two countries and between India and China. The growing tensions between the United States and its nominal allies in Europe were reflected in Trump’s demand that NATO countries contribute more troops and resources to an expanded Afghan war. The speech was delivered as the administration debates launching a preemptive strike against North Korea. In an ominous warning of what is being planned, Trump proclaimed that under his administration “many billions of dollars more is being spent on our military, and this includes vast amounts being spent on our nuclear arsenal and missile defense.” Behind all the bombast, a combination of demoralization and fear pervaded Trump’s speech. Everywhere the American ruling class looks it sees current or potential enemies. There is a large element of derangement in the notion that American imperialism can resolve its mounting economic, social and geopolitical crises by dropping more bombs and killing more people. This very delusion, over the course of 25 years of unending war since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has produced one debacle after another for the American ruling class—across the Middle East, in North Africa and beyond. This includes Afghanistan, where successive US governments have failed to establish control through bloody violence. Increasingly, American imperialism is directing its focus on larger competitors such as Russia, China and even Germany. The ruling class is acutely aware that it confronts its greatest enemy within the United States in the form of the American working class. Trump’s speech was most significant for its assertion of what amounts to a presidential-military dictatorship. The president upheld as a principle the insistence that the American people will be told nothing about what is being planned, how many troops will be sent or how long they will remain. All decisions will be made by the military, without even the pretense of Congressional oversight or approval. Trump delivered his speech not to the American people, but to an audience of soldiers dressed in battle fatigues and subject to military discipline. The most remarkable passages in Trump’s speech came at the beginning. He delivered a paean to the military as the essential force for controlling a divided nation. The military is an instrument of “absolutely perfect cohesion,” Trump declared. “The soldier understands what we as a nation too often forget,” he said. “The young men and women we send to fight our wars abroad deserve to return to a country that is not at war with itself at home.” The events in Charlottesville were the immediate context for these statements. Trump’s declaration that the military “transcends every line of race, ethnicity, creed and color” largely adopted the pseudo-democratic comments of the top generals on the fascist rampage in Charlottesville. The military brass, concerned over the consequences of Trump’s open sympathy for the neo-Nazis, felt obliged to distance themselves, the better to prosecute wars of aggression in behalf of the US corporate elite that are invariably presented as wars for “democracy” and “freedom.” Trump’s statements have profoundly sinister implications. They portray the military as the unifier of a fractured country, a force for structure, discipline—and repression. Under conditions of mounting social and political conflicts within the United States, his speech is a declaration of the central role of the military not only in waging war abroad, but maintaining order at home. From the beginning of the Trump administration, the military has taken direct control of much of the state apparatus, in the form of retired Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense, active-duty Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security advisor and retired Gen. John Kelly, first as Department of Homeland Security secretary and now as White House chief of staff. The Trump administration, however, is not the cause but a symptom of an underlying disease. Unending war and four decades of social counterrevolution have fatally eroded the foundations of democratic forms of rule in the United States. Top generals act as kingmakers. They have developed the closest ties to the financial aristocracy and are universally praised in the media and the political establishment. Terrified of social unrest, the ruling class turns to its bodies of armed men—the military and police—backed by the intelligence agencies. Far from opposing the influence of the military, it is to Kelly, Mattis and McMaster that Trump’s critics in the Democratic Party have turned in the hope that they will stabilize the Trump administration and compel it to continue and escalate the Obama administration’s policy of confrontation with Russia. Jeh Johnson, Obama’s homeland security secretary, expressed the general sentiment when asked over the weekend if Mattis and Kelly should resign. “Absolutely not… We need people like John Kelly, Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster to right the ship.” The outcome of the political warfare in Washington, culminating in the dismissal of Trump’s fascistic chief strategist Stephen Bannon last week, has been to strengthen the direct domination of the military and Wall Street over the Trump administration. Monday’s speech was an acknowledgement on Trump’s part of this shift in political forces. In their conflict with Trump, the Democrats and their political allies have worked to bury beneath an endless series of diversionary issues—centered on a grossly distorted presentation of the United States as a country torn by irreconcilable racial divisions—the most critical issues: social inequality, poverty, war and the unprecedented growth in the power of the military-industrial-financial complex, which represents the most serious threat to the democratic and social rights of the working class. In response to Trump’s commitment to ever-greater military violence, a new antiwar movement must be built. The fight against imperialist war must be rooted in the working class, mobilized on an international basis in opposition to all the organizations and institutions of the ruling class and the capitalist system they defend Joseph Kishore -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Aug 23 13:06:09 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 08:06:09 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump's speech on Afghanistan In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <51C0D69A-927F-48AF-979E-3273FFECB5EF@gmail.com> An important comment. But the casual and inaccurate slur 'fascistic’ applied to Bannon, masks the fact that he was the principal opponent in the administration to the ‘corporate globalists’ and their military allies, who are now apparently firmly in charge. Bannon’s evocation of ‘economic nationalism’ notes the crucial element that elected Trump. The most important and dangerous aspect of the Trump administration is that it has been forced, by the Democrats’ fantastic ‘Russiagate’ and other hysterical propaganda, to abandon the social concerns that brought it to office, and embrace Obama-Bush war-making. Trump is not the problem, except to the extent he now has abandoned his announced resistance to the war party, of which the Democrats are a major part. But US war-making certainly is. —CGE > On Aug 23, 2017, at 7:35 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Trump’s speech on Afghanistan: The military in command > 23 August 2017 > Trump’s new policy in Afghanistan, unveiled in a nationally televised address Monday evening, is a declaration of open-ended and unrestrained military violence against a country that has suffered sixteen years of unbroken American aggression. > Since the Bush administration launched the US invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001, 175,000 people have been killed, according to conservative estimates, and millions more driven from their homes. Under Bush, Obama and now Trump, the US military has carried out countless atrocities and war crimes—from the November 2001 massacre of 800 Taliban prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif, to the 2002 slaughter of 48 people at a wedding party in Kakarak, the murder of 42 medical personnel and patients at a Doctors Without Borders medical center in Kunduz in 2015, and the dropping of the Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb, the largest nonnuclear weapon in the US arsenal, in Nangarhar Province this past April. > This violence will be dramatically escalated, with a carte blanche commitment by Trump to provide whatever troops and resources the US military command deems necessary. Trump declared that he will give the military “the necessary tools and rules of engagement” to defeat any resistance. All restrictions on operations “that prevented the secretary of defense and commanders in the field from fully and swiftly waging battle against the enemy” will be lifted. > In other words, the carnage already inflicted on the Afghan people will pale in comparison to what is coming. > Trump’s speech, however, was not simply about Afghanistan. It was, in effect, a declaration of war on the world. Trump threatened Pakistan and sided openly with India amidst mounting conflicts between the two countries and between India and China. The growing tensions between the United States and its nominal allies in Europe were reflected in Trump’s demand that NATO countries contribute more troops and resources to an expanded Afghan war. > The speech was delivered as the administration debates launching a preemptive strike against North Korea. In an ominous warning of what is being planned, Trump proclaimed that under his administration “many billions of dollars more is being spent on our military, and this includes vast amounts being spent on our nuclear arsenal and missile defense.” > Behind all the bombast, a combination of demoralization and fear pervaded Trump’s speech. Everywhere the American ruling class looks it sees current or potential enemies. There is a large element of derangement in the notion that American imperialism can resolve its mounting economic, social and geopolitical crises by dropping more bombs and killing more people. > This very delusion, over the course of 25 years of unending war since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has produced one debacle after another for the American ruling class—across the Middle East, in North Africa and beyond. This includes Afghanistan, where successive US governments have failed to establish control through bloody violence. Increasingly, American imperialism is directing its focus on larger competitors such as Russia, China and even Germany. > The ruling class is acutely aware that it confronts its greatest enemy within the United States in the form of the American working class. > Trump’s speech was most significant for its assertion of what amounts to a presidential-military dictatorship. The president upheld as a principle the insistence that the American people will be told nothing about what is being planned, how many troops will be sent or how long they will remain. All decisions will be made by the military, without even the pretense of Congressional oversight or approval. Trump delivered his speech not to the American people, but to an audience of soldiers dressed in battle fatigues and subject to military discipline. > The most remarkable passages in Trump’s speech came at the beginning. He delivered a paean to the military as the essential force for controlling a divided nation. The military is an instrument of “absolutely perfect cohesion,” Trump declared. “The soldier understands what we as a nation too often forget,” he said. “The young men and women we send to fight our wars abroad deserve to return to a country that is not at war with itself at home.” > The events in Charlottesville were the immediate context for these statements. Trump’s declaration that the military “transcends every line of race, ethnicity, creed and color” largely adopted the pseudo-democratic comments of the top generals on the fascist rampage in Charlottesville. The military brass, concerned over the consequences of Trump’s open sympathy for the neo-Nazis, felt obliged to distance themselves, the better to prosecute wars of aggression in behalf of the US corporate elite that are invariably presented as wars for “democracy” and “freedom.” > Trump’s statements have profoundly sinister implications. They portray the military as the unifier of a fractured country, a force for structure, discipline—and repression. Under conditions of mounting social and political conflicts within the United States, his speech is a declaration of the central role of the military not only in waging war abroad, but maintaining order at home. > From the beginning of the Trump administration, the military has taken direct control of much of the state apparatus, in the form of retired Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense, active-duty Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security advisor and retired Gen. John Kelly, first as Department of Homeland Security secretary and now as White House chief of staff. > The Trump administration, however, is not the cause but a symptom of an underlying disease. Unending war and four decades of social counterrevolution have fatally eroded the foundations of democratic forms of rule in the United States. Top generals act as kingmakers. They have developed the closest ties to the financial aristocracy and are universally praised in the media and the political establishment. Terrified of social unrest, the ruling class turns to its bodies of armed men—the military and police—backed by the intelligence agencies. > Far from opposing the influence of the military, it is to Kelly, Mattis and McMaster that Trump’s critics in the Democratic Party have turned in the hope that they will stabilize the Trump administration and compel it to continue and escalate the Obama administration’s policy of confrontation with Russia. Jeh Johnson, Obama’s homeland security secretary, expressed the general sentiment when asked over the weekend if Mattis and Kelly should resign. “Absolutely not… We need people like John Kelly, Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster to right the ship.” > The outcome of the political warfare in Washington, culminating in the dismissal of Trump’s fascistic chief strategist Stephen Bannon last week, has been to strengthen the direct domination of the military and Wall Street over the Trump administration. Monday’s speech was an acknowledgement on Trump’s part of this shift in political forces. > In their conflict with Trump, the Democrats and their political allies have worked to bury beneath an endless series of diversionary issues—centered on a grossly distorted presentation of the United States as a country torn by irreconcilable racial divisions—the most critical issues: social inequality, poverty, war and the unprecedented growth in the power of the military-industrial-financial complex, which represents the most serious threat to the democratic and social rights of the working class. > In response to Trump’s commitment to ever-greater military violence, a new antiwar movement must be built. The fight against imperialist war must be rooted in the working class, mobilized on an international basis in opposition to all the organizations and institutions of the ruling class and the capitalist system they defend > Joseph Kishore > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 23 14:55:49 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:55:49 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump's speech on Afghanistan In-Reply-To: <51C0D69A-927F-48AF-979E-3273FFECB5EF@gmail.com> References: <51C0D69A-927F-48AF-979E-3273FFECB5EF@gmail.com> Message-ID: Carl, come on, it's not just the Democrat Party running our country, promoting war or controlling the President, anymore than it's the Republican Party. Both are tools of the 1%/elites, military/industrial complex, Shadow Government or Deep State. However, we define it, it includes the Pentagon, CIA, State Dept., Contractors etc. All are the profiteers of USG foreign policy of war, which includes destruction of the working class, whether through austerity, distractions, or a "fascistic" approach to control by our militarized police. Only change in our economic system of capitalism is going to stop this rush to oblivion. On Aug 23, 2017, at 06:06, C G Estabrook > wrote: An important comment. But the casual and inaccurate slur 'fascistic’ applied to Bannon, masks the fact that he was the principal opponent in the administration to the ‘corporate globalists’ and their military allies, who are now apparently firmly in charge. Bannon’s evocation of ‘economic nationalism’ notes the crucial element that elected Trump. The most important and dangerous aspect of the Trump administration is that it has been forced, by the Democrats’ fantastic ‘Russiagate’ and other hysterical propaganda, to abandon the social concerns that brought it to office, and embrace Obama-Bush war-making. Trump is not the problem, except to the extent he now has abandoned his announced resistance to the war party, of which the Democrats are a major part. But US war-making certainly is. —CGE On Aug 23, 2017, at 7:35 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Trump’s speech on Afghanistan: The military in command 23 August 2017 Trump’s new policy in Afghanistan, unveiled in a nationally televised address Monday evening, is a declaration of open-ended and unrestrained military violence against a country that has suffered sixteen years of unbroken American aggression. Since the Bush administration launched the US invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001, 175,000 people have been killed, according to conservative estimates, and millions more driven from their homes. Under Bush, Obama and now Trump, the US military has carried out countless atrocities and war crimes—from the November 2001 massacre of 800 Taliban prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif, to the 2002 slaughter of 48 people at a wedding party in Kakarak, the murder of 42 medical personnel and patients at a Doctors Without Borders medical center in Kunduz in 2015, and the dropping of the Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb, the largest nonnuclear weapon in the US arsenal, in Nangarhar Province this past April. This violence will be dramatically escalated, with a carte blanche commitment by Trump to provide whatever troops and resources the US military command deems necessary. Trump declared that he will give the military “the necessary tools and rules of engagement” to defeat any resistance. All restrictions on operations “that prevented the secretary of defense and commanders in the field from fully and swiftly waging battle against the enemy” will be lifted. In other words, the carnage already inflicted on the Afghan people will pale in comparison to what is coming. Trump’s speech, however, was not simply about Afghanistan. It was, in effect, a declaration of war on the world. Trump threatened Pakistan and sided openly with India amidst mounting conflicts between the two countries and between India and China. The growing tensions between the United States and its nominal allies in Europe were reflected in Trump’s demand that NATO countries contribute more troops and resources to an expanded Afghan war. The speech was delivered as the administration debates launching a preemptive strike against North Korea. In an ominous warning of what is being planned, Trump proclaimed that under his administration “many billions of dollars more is being spent on our military, and this includes vast amounts being spent on our nuclear arsenal and missile defense.” Behind all the bombast, a combination of demoralization and fear pervaded Trump’s speech. Everywhere the American ruling class looks it sees current or potential enemies. There is a large element of derangement in the notion that American imperialism can resolve its mounting economic, social and geopolitical crises by dropping more bombs and killing more people. This very delusion, over the course of 25 years of unending war since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has produced one debacle after another for the American ruling class—across the Middle East, in North Africa and beyond. This includes Afghanistan, where successive US governments have failed to establish control through bloody violence. Increasingly, American imperialism is directing its focus on larger competitors such as Russia, China and even Germany. The ruling class is acutely aware that it confronts its greatest enemy within the United States in the form of the American working class. Trump’s speech was most significant for its assertion of what amounts to a presidential-military dictatorship. The president upheld as a principle the insistence that the American people will be told nothing about what is being planned, how many troops will be sent or how long they will remain. All decisions will be made by the military, without even the pretense of Congressional oversight or approval. Trump delivered his speech not to the American people, but to an audience of soldiers dressed in battle fatigues and subject to military discipline. The most remarkable passages in Trump’s speech came at the beginning. He delivered a paean to the military as the essential force for controlling a divided nation. The military is an instrument of “absolutely perfect cohesion,” Trump declared. “The soldier understands what we as a nation too often forget,” he said. “The young men and women we send to fight our wars abroad deserve to return to a country that is not at war with itself at home.” The events in Charlottesville were the immediate context for these statements. Trump’s declaration that the military “transcends every line of race, ethnicity, creed and color” largely adopted the pseudo-democratic comments of the top generals on the fascist rampage in Charlottesville. The military brass, concerned over the consequences of Trump’s open sympathy for the neo-Nazis, felt obliged to distance themselves, the better to prosecute wars of aggression in behalf of the US corporate elite that are invariably presented as wars for “democracy” and “freedom.” Trump’s statements have profoundly sinister implications. They portray the military as the unifier of a fractured country, a force for structure, discipline—and repression. Under conditions of mounting social and political conflicts within the United States, his speech is a declaration of the central role of the military not only in waging war abroad, but maintaining order at home. From the beginning of the Trump administration, the military has taken direct control of much of the state apparatus, in the form of retired Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense, active-duty Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security advisor and retired Gen. John Kelly, first as Department of Homeland Security secretary and now as White House chief of staff. The Trump administration, however, is not the cause but a symptom of an underlying disease. Unending war and four decades of social counterrevolution have fatally eroded the foundations of democratic forms of rule in the United States. Top generals act as kingmakers. They have developed the closest ties to the financial aristocracy and are universally praised in the media and the political establishment. Terrified of social unrest, the ruling class turns to its bodies of armed men—the military and police—backed by the intelligence agencies. Far from opposing the influence of the military, it is to Kelly, Mattis and McMaster that Trump’s critics in the Democratic Party have turned in the hope that they will stabilize the Trump administration and compel it to continue and escalate the Obama administration’s policy of confrontation with Russia. Jeh Johnson, Obama’s homeland security secretary, expressed the general sentiment when asked over the weekend if Mattis and Kelly should resign. “Absolutely not… We need people like John Kelly, Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster to right the ship.” The outcome of the political warfare in Washington, culminating in the dismissal of Trump’s fascistic chief strategist Stephen Bannon last week, has been to strengthen the direct domination of the military and Wall Street over the Trump administration. Monday’s speech was an acknowledgement on Trump’s part of this shift in political forces. In their conflict with Trump, the Democrats and their political allies have worked to bury beneath an endless series of diversionary issues—centered on a grossly distorted presentation of the United States as a country torn by irreconcilable racial divisions—the most critical issues: social inequality, poverty, war and the unprecedented growth in the power of the military-industrial-financial complex, which represents the most serious threat to the democratic and social rights of the working class. In response to Trump’s commitment to ever-greater military violence, a new antiwar movement must be built. The fight against imperialist war must be rooted in the working class, mobilized on an international basis in opposition to all the organizations and institutions of the ruling class and the capitalist system they defend Joseph Kishore _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Aug 23 15:03:45 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 10:03:45 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump's speech on Afghanistan In-Reply-To: References: <51C0D69A-927F-48AF-979E-3273FFECB5EF@gmail.com> Message-ID: <372E0479-D71B-4B46-9BBF-8B9C05EEA37D@gmail.com> That's why I prefer the term "political establishment" - or "political class," which is the older term for what some have been calling the 'deep state': "Political class, or political elite is a concept in comparative political science originally developed by Italian political theorist theory of Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941). It refers to the relatively small group of activists that is highly aware and active in politics, and from whom the national leadership is largely drawn. As Max Weber noted, they not only live "for politics"—like the old notables used to—but make their careers "off politics" as policy specialists and experts on specific fields of public administration. Mosca approached the study of the political class by examining the mechanisms of reproduction and renewal of the ruling class; the characteristics of politicians; and the different forms of organization developed in their wielding of power. "Elected legislatures may become dominated by subject-matter specialists, aided by permanent staffs, who become a political class..." [Wikipedia] Samuel Huntington wrote (in "The Crisis of Democracy," 1975) that "Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers," though he fears that these happy days are gone, since other groups have been "mobilized and organized" to advance their own interests, leading to a "crisis of democracy." But we seem to have taken care of that. —CGE > On Aug 23, 2017, at 9:55 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > >> Carl, >> come on, it's not just the Democrat Party running our country, promoting war or controlling the President, anymore than it's the Republican Party. Both are tools of the 1%/elites, military/industrial complex, Shadow Government or Deep State. However, we define >> it, it includes the Pentagon, CIA, State Dept., Contractors etc. All are the profiteers of USG foreign policy of war, which includes destruction of the working class, whether through austerity, distractions, or a "fascistic" approach to control by our militarized >> police. Only change in our economic system of capitalism is going to stop this rush to oblivion. >> > > >> On Aug 23, 2017, at 06:06, C G Estabrook wrote: >> >> An important comment. >> >> But the casual and inaccurate slur 'fascistic’ applied to Bannon, masks the fact that he was the principal opponent in the administration to the ‘corporate globalists’ and their military allies, who are now apparently firmly in charge. >> >> Bannon’s evocation of ‘economic nationalism’ notes the crucial element that elected Trump. The most important and dangerous aspect of the Trump administration is that it has been forced, by the Democrats’ fantastic ‘Russiagate’ and other hysterical propaganda, to abandon the social concerns that brought it to office, and embrace Obama-Bush war-making. >> >> Trump is not the problem, except to the extent he now has abandoned his announced resistance to the war party, of which the Democrats are a major part. But US war-making certainly is. >> >> —CGE >> >> >>> On Aug 23, 2017, at 7:35 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> Trump’s speech on Afghanistan: The military in command >>> 23 August 2017 >>> Trump’s new policy in Afghanistan, unveiled in a nationally televised address Monday evening, is a declaration of open-ended and unrestrained military violence against a country that has suffered sixteen years of unbroken American aggression. >>> Since the Bush administration launched the US invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001, 175,000 people have been killed, according to conservative estimates, and millions more driven from their homes. Under Bush, Obama and now Trump, the US military has carried out countless atrocities and war crimes—from the November 2001 massacre of 800 Taliban prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif, to the 2002 slaughter of 48 people at a wedding party in Kakarak, the murder of 42 medical personnel and patients at a Doctors Without Borders medical center in Kunduz in 2015, and the dropping of the Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb, the largest nonnuclear weapon in the US arsenal, in Nangarhar Province this past April. >>> This violence will be dramatically escalated, with a carte blanche commitment by Trump to provide whatever troops and resources the US military command deems necessary. Trump declared that he will give the military “the necessary tools and rules of engagement” to defeat any resistance. All restrictions on operations “that prevented the secretary of defense and commanders in the field from fully and swiftly waging battle against the enemy” will be lifted. >>> In other words, the carnage already inflicted on the Afghan people will pale in comparison to what is coming. >>> Trump’s speech, however, was not simply about Afghanistan. It was, in effect, a declaration of war on the world. Trump threatened Pakistan and sided openly with India amidst mounting conflicts between the two countries and between India and China. The growing tensions between the United States and its nominal allies in Europe were reflected in Trump’s demand that NATO countries contribute more troops and resources to an expanded Afghan war. >>> The speech was delivered as the administration debates launching a preemptive strike against North Korea. In an ominous warning of what is being planned, Trump proclaimed that under his administration “many billions of dollars more is being spent on our military, and this includes vast amounts being spent on our nuclear arsenal and missile defense.” >>> Behind all the bombast, a combination of demoralization and fear pervaded Trump’s speech. Everywhere the American ruling class looks it sees current or potential enemies. There is a large element of derangement in the notion that American imperialism can resolve its mounting economic, social and geopolitical crises by dropping more bombs and killing more people. >>> This very delusion, over the course of 25 years of unending war since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has produced one debacle after another for the American ruling class—across the Middle East, in North Africa and beyond. This includes Afghanistan, where successive US governments have failed to establish control through bloody violence. Increasingly, American imperialism is directing its focus on larger competitors such as Russia, China and even Germany. >>> The ruling class is acutely aware that it confronts its greatest enemy within the United States in the form of the American working class. >>> Trump’s speech was most significant for its assertion of what amounts to a presidential-military dictatorship. The president upheld as a principle the insistence that the American people will be told nothing about what is being planned, how many troops will be sent or how long they will remain. All decisions will be made by the military, without even the pretense of Congressional oversight or approval. Trump delivered his speech not to the American people, but to an audience of soldiers dressed in battle fatigues and subject to military discipline. >>> The most remarkable passages in Trump’s speech came at the beginning. He delivered a paean to the military as the essential force for controlling a divided nation. The military is an instrument of “absolutely perfect cohesion,” Trump declared. “The soldier understands what we as a nation too often forget,” he said. “The young men and women we send to fight our wars abroad deserve to return to a country that is not at war with itself at home.” >>> The events in Charlottesville were the immediate context for these statements. Trump’s declaration that the military “transcends every line of race, ethnicity, creed and color” largely adopted the pseudo-democratic comments of the top generals on the fascist rampage in Charlottesville. The military brass, concerned over the consequences of Trump’s open sympathy for the neo-Nazis, felt obliged to distance themselves, the better to prosecute wars of aggression in behalf of the US corporate elite that are invariably presented as wars for “democracy” and “freedom.” >>> Trump’s statements have profoundly sinister implications. They portray the military as the unifier of a fractured country, a force for structure, discipline—and repression. Under conditions of mounting social and political conflicts within the United States, his speech is a declaration of the central role of the military not only in waging war abroad, but maintaining order at home. >>> From the beginning of the Trump administration, the military has taken direct control of much of the state apparatus, in the form of retired Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense, active-duty Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security advisor and retired Gen. John Kelly, first as Department of Homeland Security secretary and now as White House chief of staff. >>> The Trump administration, however, is not the cause but a symptom of an underlying disease. Unending war and four decades of social counterrevolution have fatally eroded the foundations of democratic forms of rule in the United States. Top generals act as kingmakers. They have developed the closest ties to the financial aristocracy and are universally praised in the media and the political establishment. Terrified of social unrest, the ruling class turns to its bodies of armed men—the military and police—backed by the intelligence agencies. >>> Far from opposing the influence of the military, it is to Kelly, Mattis and McMaster that Trump’s critics in the Democratic Party have turned in the hope that they will stabilize the Trump administration and compel it to continue and escalate the Obama administration’s policy of confrontation with Russia. Jeh Johnson, Obama’s homeland security secretary, expressed the general sentiment when asked over the weekend if Mattis and Kelly should resign. “Absolutely not… We need people like John Kelly, Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster to right the ship.” >>> The outcome of the political warfare in Washington, culminating in the dismissal of Trump’s fascistic chief strategist Stephen Bannon last week, has been to strengthen the direct domination of the military and Wall Street over the Trump administration. Monday’s speech was an acknowledgement on Trump’s part of this shift in political forces. >>> In their conflict with Trump, the Democrats and their political allies have worked to bury beneath an endless series of diversionary issues—centered on a grossly distorted presentation of the United States as a country torn by irreconcilable racial divisions—the most critical issues: social inequality, poverty, war and the unprecedented growth in the power of the military-industrial-financial complex, which represents the most serious threat to the democratic and social rights of the working class. >>> In response to Trump’s commitment to ever-greater military violence, a new antiwar movement must be built. The fight against imperialist war must be rooted in the working class, mobilized on an international basis in opposition to all the organizations and institutions of the ruling class and the capitalist system they defend >>> Joseph Kishore >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss >> From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 23 15:54:16 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 15:54:16 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Worthwhile discussion References: <089e0821f7803e002705576db5a9@google.com> Message-ID: [http://s.ytimg.com/yt/img/email/digest/email_header.png] aramkaren64 at gmail.com has shared a video playlist with you on YouTube. [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oGvDgzGll2I/hqdefault.jpg] 157 videos [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8F4ypFtmK_I/mqdefault.jpg] [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/IGv5J5o_QZQ/mqdefault.jpg] [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/l8xLon7ST0U/mqdefault.jpg] AWARE on the Air PLAYLIST by UPTV6 Help center • Report spam ©2017 YouTube, LLC 901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA 94066, USA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 23 16:05:13 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 16:05:13 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump's speech on Afghanistan In-Reply-To: <372E0479-D71B-4B46-9BBF-8B9C05EEA37D@gmail.com> References: <51C0D69A-927F-48AF-979E-3273FFECB5EF@gmail.com> <372E0479-D71B-4B46-9BBF-8B9C05EEA37D@gmail.com> Message-ID: I must continue the conversation with a response from friend Paula Demsnow: "But ''political class'' implies that the control of the government comes solely from those elected and their aides. We know that the think tanks, the lobbyists and the MIC, none elected, also have enormous power over the government. I agree with the author of the article, and also Frank Zappa, who pointed out that at a certain point in history, they would throw back the curtains and stop the show of democracy. (Or, something like that)” On Aug 23, 2017, at 08:03, C G Estabrook > wrote: That's why I prefer the term "political establishment" - or "political class," which is the older term for what some have been calling the 'deep state': "Political class, or political elite is a concept in comparative political science originally developed by Italian political theorist theory of Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941). It refers to the relatively small group of activists that is highly aware and active in politics, and from whom the national leadership is largely drawn. As Max Weber noted, they not only live "for politics"—like the old notables used to—but make their careers "off politics" as policy specialists and experts on specific fields of public administration. Mosca approached the study of the political class by examining the mechanisms of reproduction and renewal of the ruling class; the characteristics of politicians; and the different forms of organization developed in their wielding of power. "Elected legislatures may become dominated by subject-matter specialists, aided by permanent staffs, who become a political class..." [Wikipedia] Samuel Huntington wrote (in "The Crisis of Democracy," 1975) that "Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers," though he fears that these happy days are gone, since other groups have been "mobilized and organized" to advance their own interests, leading to a "crisis of democracy." But we seem to have taken care of that. —CGE On Aug 23, 2017, at 9:55 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Carl, come on, it's not just the Democrat Party running our country, promoting war or controlling the President, anymore than it's the Republican Party. Both are tools of the 1%/elites, military/industrial complex, Shadow Government or Deep State. However, we define it, it includes the Pentagon, CIA, State Dept., Contractors etc. All are the profiteers of USG foreign policy of war, which includes destruction of the working class, whether through austerity, distractions, or a "fascistic" approach to control by our militarized police. Only change in our economic system of capitalism is going to stop this rush to oblivion. On Aug 23, 2017, at 06:06, C G Estabrook > wrote: An important comment. But the casual and inaccurate slur 'fascistic’ applied to Bannon, masks the fact that he was the principal opponent in the administration to the ‘corporate globalists’ and their military allies, who are now apparently firmly in charge. Bannon’s evocation of ‘economic nationalism’ notes the crucial element that elected Trump. The most important and dangerous aspect of the Trump administration is that it has been forced, by the Democrats’ fantastic ‘Russiagate’ and other hysterical propaganda, to abandon the social concerns that brought it to office, and embrace Obama-Bush war-making. Trump is not the problem, except to the extent he now has abandoned his announced resistance to the war party, of which the Democrats are a major part. But US war-making certainly is. —CGE On Aug 23, 2017, at 7:35 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Trump’s speech on Afghanistan: The military in command 23 August 2017 Trump’s new policy in Afghanistan, unveiled in a nationally televised address Monday evening, is a declaration of open-ended and unrestrained military violence against a country that has suffered sixteen years of unbroken American aggression. Since the Bush administration launched the US invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001, 175,000 people have been killed, according to conservative estimates, and millions more driven from their homes. Under Bush, Obama and now Trump, the US military has carried out countless atrocities and war crimes—from the November 2001 massacre of 800 Taliban prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif, to the 2002 slaughter of 48 people at a wedding party in Kakarak, the murder of 42 medical personnel and patients at a Doctors Without Borders medical center in Kunduz in 2015, and the dropping of the Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb, the largest nonnuclear weapon in the US arsenal, in Nangarhar Province this past April. This violence will be dramatically escalated, with a carte blanche commitment by Trump to provide whatever troops and resources the US military command deems necessary. Trump declared that he will give the military “the necessary tools and rules of engagement” to defeat any resistance. All restrictions on operations “that prevented the secretary of defense and commanders in the field from fully and swiftly waging battle against the enemy” will be lifted. In other words, the carnage already inflicted on the Afghan people will pale in comparison to what is coming. Trump’s speech, however, was not simply about Afghanistan. It was, in effect, a declaration of war on the world. Trump threatened Pakistan and sided openly with India amidst mounting conflicts between the two countries and between India and China. The growing tensions between the United States and its nominal allies in Europe were reflected in Trump’s demand that NATO countries contribute more troops and resources to an expanded Afghan war. The speech was delivered as the administration debates launching a preemptive strike against North Korea. In an ominous warning of what is being planned, Trump proclaimed that under his administration “many billions of dollars more is being spent on our military, and this includes vast amounts being spent on our nuclear arsenal and missile defense.” Behind all the bombast, a combination of demoralization and fear pervaded Trump’s speech. Everywhere the American ruling class looks it sees current or potential enemies. There is a large element of derangement in the notion that American imperialism can resolve its mounting economic, social and geopolitical crises by dropping more bombs and killing more people. This very delusion, over the course of 25 years of unending war since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has produced one debacle after another for the American ruling class—across the Middle East, in North Africa and beyond. This includes Afghanistan, where successive US governments have failed to establish control through bloody violence. Increasingly, American imperialism is directing its focus on larger competitors such as Russia, China and even Germany. The ruling class is acutely aware that it confronts its greatest enemy within the United States in the form of the American working class. Trump’s speech was most significant for its assertion of what amounts to a presidential-military dictatorship. The president upheld as a principle the insistence that the American people will be told nothing about what is being planned, how many troops will be sent or how long they will remain. All decisions will be made by the military, without even the pretense of Congressional oversight or approval. Trump delivered his speech not to the American people, but to an audience of soldiers dressed in battle fatigues and subject to military discipline. The most remarkable passages in Trump’s speech came at the beginning. He delivered a paean to the military as the essential force for controlling a divided nation. The military is an instrument of “absolutely perfect cohesion,” Trump declared. “The soldier understands what we as a nation too often forget,” he said. “The young men and women we send to fight our wars abroad deserve to return to a country that is not at war with itself at home.” The events in Charlottesville were the immediate context for these statements. Trump’s declaration that the military “transcends every line of race, ethnicity, creed and color” largely adopted the pseudo-democratic comments of the top generals on the fascist rampage in Charlottesville. The military brass, concerned over the consequences of Trump’s open sympathy for the neo-Nazis, felt obliged to distance themselves, the better to prosecute wars of aggression in behalf of the US corporate elite that are invariably presented as wars for “democracy” and “freedom.” Trump’s statements have profoundly sinister implications. They portray the military as the unifier of a fractured country, a force for structure, discipline—and repression. Under conditions of mounting social and political conflicts within the United States, his speech is a declaration of the central role of the military not only in waging war abroad, but maintaining order at home. From the beginning of the Trump administration, the military has taken direct control of much of the state apparatus, in the form of retired Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense, active-duty Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security advisor and retired Gen. John Kelly, first as Department of Homeland Security secretary and now as White House chief of staff. The Trump administration, however, is not the cause but a symptom of an underlying disease. Unending war and four decades of social counterrevolution have fatally eroded the foundations of democratic forms of rule in the United States. Top generals act as kingmakers. They have developed the closest ties to the financial aristocracy and are universally praised in the media and the political establishment. Terrified of social unrest, the ruling class turns to its bodies of armed men—the military and police—backed by the intelligence agencies. Far from opposing the influence of the military, it is to Kelly, Mattis and McMaster that Trump’s critics in the Democratic Party have turned in the hope that they will stabilize the Trump administration and compel it to continue and escalate the Obama administration’s policy of confrontation with Russia. Jeh Johnson, Obama’s homeland security secretary, expressed the general sentiment when asked over the weekend if Mattis and Kelly should resign. “Absolutely not… We need people like John Kelly, Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster to right the ship.” The outcome of the political warfare in Washington, culminating in the dismissal of Trump’s fascistic chief strategist Stephen Bannon last week, has been to strengthen the direct domination of the military and Wall Street over the Trump administration. Monday’s speech was an acknowledgement on Trump’s part of this shift in political forces. In their conflict with Trump, the Democrats and their political allies have worked to bury beneath an endless series of diversionary issues—centered on a grossly distorted presentation of the United States as a country torn by irreconcilable racial divisions—the most critical issues: social inequality, poverty, war and the unprecedented growth in the power of the military-industrial-financial complex, which represents the most serious threat to the democratic and social rights of the working class. In response to Trump’s commitment to ever-greater military violence, a new antiwar movement must be built. The fight against imperialist war must be rooted in the working class, mobilized on an international basis in opposition to all the organizations and institutions of the ruling class and the capitalist system they defend Joseph Kishore _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From r-szoke at illinois.edu Wed Aug 23 19:06:13 2017 From: r-szoke at illinois.edu (Szoke, Ron) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 19:06:13 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Big bucks ahead in war stocks References: <5B44D56D-5594-4B74-8599-95F367926596@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <7AFD0194-9F52-4E85-B84F-197485BB4675@illinois.edu> From: "Szoke, Ron" > Subject: 5 Top Defense Stocks to Buy on Trump's Afghanistan Strategy Date: August 23, 2017 5 Top Defense Stocks to Buy on Trump's Afghanistan Strategy https://finance.yahoo.com/news/5-top-defense-stocks-buy-135801168.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=ma -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Aug 23 19:32:53 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:32:53 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Draft flyer for upcoming demonstations Message-ID: <5D0E6960-2F7B-43F3-A8C8-659AD1B59A41@gmail.com> AMERICANS ARE AGAINST U.S. WAR-MAKING DEMAND AN END TO U.S. KILLING IN OUR NAME Obama and Trump were both elected as anti-war candidates In office, both sent more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to increase the killing ~ The U.S. military is today killing people in seven Mideast and African countries - Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Thousands of U.S. troops are fighting in these countries, although most Americans don’t know that. In addition, the 70,000-member U.S. ‘Special Operations Command’ is active in three-quarters of the countries of the world. Their activities include kidnapping (‘rendition’), torture, and murder. President Obama was elected as an anti-war candidate, but in office he sent thousands of additional U.S. troops into war in Afghanistan. President Trump, who promised caution and non-interventionism in foreign policy - and described Hillary Clinton as a “trigger happy warmonger” - has now done the same thing himself. What both men knew is that, in spite of intense media propaganda, most Americans don’t want U.S. troops engaged in foreign wars and don’t see the killing as justified; they had to agree, in order to get elected. But the ‘one percent’ - the U.S. economic elite - do want the wars. U.S. presidents have killed more than 20 million people in wars around the world since World War II. That war left the U.S. elite in an unprecedented position of world economic dominance. U.S. wars since then - in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and the Mideast - have had the purpose of “maintaining the disparity,” as U.S. diplomat George Kennan wrote in 1948. ~ Ordinary Americans have paid for these vicious wars, but they haven’t profited from them. Most Americans are not aware of how much of the world is appalled at what the U.S. government has done in our lifetimes. It is a triumph of the American system of propaganda and intellectual control - the most effective in history - that Americans are able to ignore it. For many years the U.S. has attempted to exercise military control over the Mideast and its energy resources. The U.S. doesn’t need oil from the Mideast, but Mideast gas and oil are needed by America’s economic competitors in Europe and Asia, and so control over them gives the U.S. a major advantage over China, Germany, and other countries - a chokehold which benefits only the American one percent. In 2003 the U.S. illegally invaded Iraq - and killed perhaps a million people - and now has thousands of troops and mercenaries throughout the Mideast. The U.S. government says that we’re fighting terrorism, but we are in fact creating terrorists in response to our invasions, bombing campaigns, and drone assassinations, which have killed more than 5,000 people, including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children. AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana, joins other anti-war groups in the United States and around the world to call upon President Trump to ~ (1) establish a foreign policy based on diplomacy, international law, and human rights; ~ (2) end U.S. wars in the Mideast and war provocations against Russia (in Eastern Europe) and China (in the South China Sea), and stop the drone assassinations; ~ (3) cut military spending by at least 50% and close the more than 700 foreign military bases (neither Russia nor China has more than twelve); bring U.S. troops (and weapons) home; ~ (4) stop U.S. support for human rights abusers, notably Israel and Saudi Arabia; and ~ (5) lead on global nuclear disarmament. ANTI-WAR ANTI-RACISM EFFORT - on Facebook at ~ U.S. troops & weapons out of the Mideast ~ Medicare for all ~ Universal basic income ~ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: flyer201709.rtfd.zip Type: application/zip Size: 3676 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 24 11:56:31 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2017 11:56:31 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chimpanzees Adapt to Challenges Better Than US Policymakers on Afghanistan Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 6:54 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: FW: Chimpanzees Adapt to Challenges Better Than US Policymakers on Afghanistan University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle agreed that victory was impossible in Afghanistan and that Trump’s new strategy could not deliver it. "Everyone knows the US War in Afghanistan is lost. Trump just does not want Kabul to fall while he is still president. So he is just treading water until he can pass off Afghanistan to his successor and let Kabul fall on his or her watch," he said. Trump is now guilty of the same abdication of responsibility that he had accurately blamed on his predecessor, President Barack Obama of, Boyle stated. "This is exactly what Obama did to Trump. [Sending] 4,000 more troops is just putting a band aid on a hemorrhaging artery and they know it," he said. The United States needs to acknowledge the political power and credibility of the Taliban and negotiate directly with it, Boyle maintained. "The only solution here is for the United States to negotiate directly with the Taliban for an orderly US withdrawal from Afghanistan that will reinstall the Taliban government in power," he advised. It was the administration of President George W. Bush that illegally ousted the Taliban government in the first place by launching a war of aggression against Afghanistan in 2001, Boyle recalled. "There will be no peace in Afghanistan until that original international crime has been rectified," he said. Trump has approved a modest increase in the number of US troops serving in Afghanistan. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Wednesday, August 23, 2017 4:00 PM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: Chimpanzees Adapt to Challenges Better Than US Policymakers on Afghanistan "Does it make any real difference? Can it work? No! No!" he said. University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle agreed that victory was impossible in Afghanistan and that Trump’s new strategy could not deliver it. "Everyone knows ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 24 11:56:31 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2017 11:56:31 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chimpanzees Adapt to Challenges Better Than US Policymakers on Afghanistan Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 6:54 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: FW: Chimpanzees Adapt to Challenges Better Than US Policymakers on Afghanistan University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle agreed that victory was impossible in Afghanistan and that Trump’s new strategy could not deliver it. "Everyone knows the US War in Afghanistan is lost. Trump just does not want Kabul to fall while he is still president. So he is just treading water until he can pass off Afghanistan to his successor and let Kabul fall on his or her watch," he said. Trump is now guilty of the same abdication of responsibility that he had accurately blamed on his predecessor, President Barack Obama of, Boyle stated. "This is exactly what Obama did to Trump. [Sending] 4,000 more troops is just putting a band aid on a hemorrhaging artery and they know it," he said. The United States needs to acknowledge the political power and credibility of the Taliban and negotiate directly with it, Boyle maintained. "The only solution here is for the United States to negotiate directly with the Taliban for an orderly US withdrawal from Afghanistan that will reinstall the Taliban government in power," he advised. It was the administration of President George W. Bush that illegally ousted the Taliban government in the first place by launching a war of aggression against Afghanistan in 2001, Boyle recalled. "There will be no peace in Afghanistan until that original international crime has been rectified," he said. Trump has approved a modest increase in the number of US troops serving in Afghanistan. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Wednesday, August 23, 2017 4:00 PM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: Chimpanzees Adapt to Challenges Better Than US Policymakers on Afghanistan "Does it make any real difference? Can it work? No! No!" he said. University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle agreed that victory was impossible in Afghanistan and that Trump’s new strategy could not deliver it. "Everyone knows ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 24 18:35:08 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2017 18:35:08 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Update: Facebook, Youtube, other tech giants launch joint, state-backed censorship programs References: <380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5.2cb7388bc9.20170824175941.1894d1f206.57c65c83@mail25.sea21.rsgsv.net> Message-ID: Please sign the petition: From: World Socialist Web Site > Subject: Update: Facebook, Youtube, other tech giants launch joint, state-backed censorship programs Date: August 24, 2017 at 11:00:10 PDT [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/3f463dd2-fd12-43f3-8738-5ab4826bcca7.png] [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/413dc025-de36-4fdc-82b8-23a364096ba2.png] Dear Karen, The WSWS today published an article on the involvement of Facebook, YouTube and other tech giants in Google-style programs for censoring content online. You can read the full report here. Please share it widely on social media. More than 2,000 people from at least 70 countries have signed the petition to oppose Google censorship. Some of the recent comments include: * “I oppose in the strongest terms Google censorship of the WSWS. The analysis provided on the WSWS is authoritative and it is the only website that tells the working class the truth." -- Kate, Australia * “Google is in cahoots with the US power elite and preserves its quasi-monopoly from government regulation by doing the deep state’s dirty work, i.e., suppressing alternative media and directing users” toward the mainstream media. -- Geoffrey, Canada * “The World Socialist Web Site is one of the few Internet resources for class-conscious, genuinely progressive commentary and analysis. For the capitalist crisis to be overcome, it’s imperative for the working class to have unrestrained access to this very kind of courageous political and theoretical insight into world affairs." -- Pedro, Brazil Read all the comments and add your name here. Please make a donation to the WSWS to help us develop and expand the struggle against Google censorship! Sincerely, The World Socialist Web Site Sign the Petition! Donate to the WSWS [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-facebook-48.png] Share [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-twitter-48.png] Tweet [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-forwardtofriend-48.png] Forward World Socialist Web Site | wsws.org Articles: Copyright © 2017 wsws.org, All rights reserved. unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Aug 24 20:21:30 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2017 15:21:30 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Letter to the News-Gazette Message-ID: <0A0C7FD1-95A2-4A50-99F1-686E041DBF25@gmail.com> There are parallels between the US wars on Afghanistan today and Vietnam so long ago. For years after President Kennedy’s invasion of South Vietnam in 1962, Americans supported it, but that changed rapidly. By 1969 about 70% of the public regarded the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” largely as a result of student protest. That mass opposition compelled the business community and then the government to stop the escalation of the war. Some have argued that the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was a ‘mistake,’ but it was in fact a crime - illegal under the UN Charter, in spite of Congress’ (constitutionally questionable) AUMF. More than 3,000 US and NATO soldiers have died there, and our government has killed between 90,000 and 350,000 people, many of them civilians. Our government claims that it’s ’stopping terrorism,’ but it is in fact creating terrorists: perpetrators of the crimes of 9/11/2001 understood themselves to be counter-attacking the source of attacks on the Mideast. The US has long attempted to exercise military control over the Mideast for its energy resources. The US doesn’t need oil from the Mideast, but Mideast gas and oil are needed by our economic competitors from Germany to China: control gives the US a chokehold, which benefits only the American one percent. We should withdraw our troops (and weapons) from Afghanistan and pay reparations to the country where successive US administrations have caused so much terror and death for so long. —CGE From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 24 21:29:10 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2017 21:29:10 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Diss-Ode to Anne-Marie Slaughtered Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 4:27 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Diss-Ode to Anne-Marie Slaughtered Diss-Ode to Ann-Marie Slaughtered Specialist in mass death and destruction Recycling herself as American Family Pontificator in Chief Once a Genocider, always a Genocider Out, damn'd spot! Out, I say! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Kids! Did you kill today! In Libya! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Moms! Did you kill today! In Libya! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Dads! Did you kill today! In Libya! Great work at Benghazi too! Ambassador Stevens dead Three Defenders to boot Your Boss Hill Clinton lying a toot Two of you never gave a hoot Clinton the Psychopath and War Criminal "We came, we saw, he died!" Mimicking Julius Caesar Laughing hysterically at Ghaddafy Sodomized with knife and beaten to death Slaughtered-Did you cackle with Killary? Nation Destroyed 50,000 Dead Thousands Refugees drowning Somalia on the Med Thanks to Slaughtered And her Sociopath War Criminal Boss White Racist Bobbsey Twin Genociders While their Ubermensch Harvard Law Obama brags How good he is at killing them all Muslims/Arabs/Asians/Africans/Families of Color That's what Harvard Law did for Obama That's what Yale Law did for Clintons That's what Harvard Law did for Slaughtered That's what Harvard Law did for Killer Koh That's what Yale Law did for Killer Koh's poo John Yoo That's what Harvard Law did for Sam Our Problem From Hell Power That's what Yale Law did for Murdering Marty Lederman That's what Harvard Law did for Killer Judge Davey Barron Etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam Learning to rape, rob, loot, plunder, pillage, murder all over world Without shame or regret or compassion Just maniacal guffaw at Ghaddafy's battered body Like Genghis Khan and the Mongols Laying waste all they see Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Pakistan The Best and the Brightest from Harvard/ Yale Laws Proud Sons and Daughters of Dem Ivy Leaguer Genociders Who Gave us Vietnam 70 years after World War II the Nazis have won O'er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave The Nazis had their Lawyers and Law Schools too American Nazis train at Harvard/Yale Laws Now coming to you Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 24 21:29:10 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2017 21:29:10 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Diss-Ode to Anne-Marie Slaughtered Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 4:27 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Diss-Ode to Anne-Marie Slaughtered Diss-Ode to Ann-Marie Slaughtered Specialist in mass death and destruction Recycling herself as American Family Pontificator in Chief Once a Genocider, always a Genocider Out, damn'd spot! Out, I say! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Kids! Did you kill today! In Libya! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Moms! Did you kill today! In Libya! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Dads! Did you kill today! In Libya! Great work at Benghazi too! Ambassador Stevens dead Three Defenders to boot Your Boss Hill Clinton lying a toot Two of you never gave a hoot Clinton the Psychopath and War Criminal "We came, we saw, he died!" Mimicking Julius Caesar Laughing hysterically at Ghaddafy Sodomized with knife and beaten to death Slaughtered-Did you cackle with Killary? Nation Destroyed 50,000 Dead Thousands Refugees drowning Somalia on the Med Thanks to Slaughtered And her Sociopath War Criminal Boss White Racist Bobbsey Twin Genociders While their Ubermensch Harvard Law Obama brags How good he is at killing them all Muslims/Arabs/Asians/Africans/Families of Color That's what Harvard Law did for Obama That's what Yale Law did for Clintons That's what Harvard Law did for Slaughtered That's what Harvard Law did for Killer Koh That's what Yale Law did for Killer Koh's poo John Yoo That's what Harvard Law did for Sam Our Problem From Hell Power That's what Yale Law did for Murdering Marty Lederman That's what Harvard Law did for Killer Judge Davey Barron Etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam Learning to rape, rob, loot, plunder, pillage, murder all over world Without shame or regret or compassion Just maniacal guffaw at Ghaddafy's battered body Like Genghis Khan and the Mongols Laying waste all they see Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Pakistan The Best and the Brightest from Harvard/ Yale Laws Proud Sons and Daughters of Dem Ivy Leaguer Genociders Who Gave us Vietnam 70 years after World War II the Nazis have won O'er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave The Nazis had their Lawyers and Law Schools too American Nazis train at Harvard/Yale Laws Now coming to you Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 25 12:53:48 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 12:53:48 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Diss-Ode to Anne-Marie Slaughtered In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: If you want to read all about Obama's Harvard/Yale Law Mafia have a look at Charlie Savage, Power Wars. The Nazis had their lawyers too. And their law schools. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 4:29 PM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: FW: Diss-Ode to Anne-Marie Slaughtered Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 4:27 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Diss-Ode to Anne-Marie Slaughtered Diss-Ode to Ann-Marie Slaughtered Specialist in mass death and destruction Recycling herself as American Family Pontificator in Chief Once a Genocider, always a Genocider Out, damn'd spot! Out, I say! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Kids! Did you kill today! In Libya! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Moms! Did you kill today! In Libya! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Dads! Did you kill today! In Libya! Great work at Benghazi too! Ambassador Stevens dead Three Defenders to boot Your Boss Hill Clinton lying a toot Two of you never gave a hoot Clinton the Psychopath and War Criminal "We came, we saw, he died!" Mimicking Julius Caesar Laughing hysterically at Ghaddafy Sodomized with knife and beaten to death Slaughtered-Did you cackle with Killary? Nation Destroyed 50,000 Dead Thousands Refugees drowning Somalia on the Med Thanks to Slaughtered And her Sociopath War Criminal Boss White Racist Bobbsey Twin Genociders While their Ubermensch Harvard Law Obama brags How good he is at killing them all Muslims/Arabs/Asians/Africans/Families of Color That's what Harvard Law did for Obama That's what Yale Law did for Clintons That's what Harvard Law did for Slaughtered That's what Harvard Law did for Killer Koh That's what Yale Law did for Killer Koh's poo John Yoo That's what Harvard Law did for Sam Our Problem From Hell Power That's what Yale Law did for Murdering Marty Lederman That's what Harvard Law did for Killer Judge Davey Barron Etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam Learning to rape, rob, loot, plunder, pillage, murder all over world Without shame or regret or compassion Just maniacal guffaw at Ghaddafy's battered body Like Genghis Khan and the Mongols Laying waste all they see Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Pakistan The Best and the Brightest from Harvard/ Yale Laws Proud Sons and Daughters of Dem Ivy Leaguer Genociders Who Gave us Vietnam 70 years after World War II the Nazis have won O'er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave The Nazis had their Lawyers and Law Schools too American Nazis train at Harvard/Yale Laws Now coming to you Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Aug 25 12:53:48 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 12:53:48 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Diss-Ode to Anne-Marie Slaughtered In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: If you want to read all about Obama's Harvard/Yale Law Mafia have a look at Charlie Savage, Power Wars. The Nazis had their lawyers too. And their law schools. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 4:29 PM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: FW: Diss-Ode to Anne-Marie Slaughtered Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 4:27 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Diss-Ode to Anne-Marie Slaughtered Diss-Ode to Ann-Marie Slaughtered Specialist in mass death and destruction Recycling herself as American Family Pontificator in Chief Once a Genocider, always a Genocider Out, damn'd spot! Out, I say! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Kids! Did you kill today! In Libya! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Moms! Did you kill today! In Libya! Hey! Hey! Slaughtered Say! How many Dads! Did you kill today! In Libya! Great work at Benghazi too! Ambassador Stevens dead Three Defenders to boot Your Boss Hill Clinton lying a toot Two of you never gave a hoot Clinton the Psychopath and War Criminal "We came, we saw, he died!" Mimicking Julius Caesar Laughing hysterically at Ghaddafy Sodomized with knife and beaten to death Slaughtered-Did you cackle with Killary? Nation Destroyed 50,000 Dead Thousands Refugees drowning Somalia on the Med Thanks to Slaughtered And her Sociopath War Criminal Boss White Racist Bobbsey Twin Genociders While their Ubermensch Harvard Law Obama brags How good he is at killing them all Muslims/Arabs/Asians/Africans/Families of Color That's what Harvard Law did for Obama That's what Yale Law did for Clintons That's what Harvard Law did for Slaughtered That's what Harvard Law did for Killer Koh That's what Yale Law did for Killer Koh's poo John Yoo That's what Harvard Law did for Sam Our Problem From Hell Power That's what Yale Law did for Murdering Marty Lederman That's what Harvard Law did for Killer Judge Davey Barron Etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam Learning to rape, rob, loot, plunder, pillage, murder all over world Without shame or regret or compassion Just maniacal guffaw at Ghaddafy's battered body Like Genghis Khan and the Mongols Laying waste all they see Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Pakistan The Best and the Brightest from Harvard/ Yale Laws Proud Sons and Daughters of Dem Ivy Leaguer Genociders Who Gave us Vietnam 70 years after World War II the Nazis have won O'er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave The Nazis had their Lawyers and Law Schools too American Nazis train at Harvard/Yale Laws Now coming to you Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Aug 25 22:23:55 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 22:23:55 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: An open letter to Google from WSWS chairperson David North References: <380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5.2cb7388bc9.20170825152931.bf83887e06.afe755a9@mail77.us4.mcsv.net> Message-ID: Begin forwarded message: From: World Socialist Web Site > Subject: An open letter to Google from WSWS chairperson David North Date: August 25, 2017 at 08:30:01 PDT [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/3f463dd2-fd12-43f3-8738-5ab4826bcca7.png] Dear Karen, Today the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter from WSWS Chairperson David North to Google demanding that it stop censoring the Internet and stop blacklisting the WSWS. The letter states: Google is manipulating its Internet searches to restrict public awareness of and access to socialist, anti-war and left-wing websites. The World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org) has been massively targeted and is the most affected by your censorship protocols. Referrals to the WSWS from Google have fallen by nearly 70 percent since April of this year. Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree. Political blacklisting is not a legitimate exercise of whatever may be Google’s prerogatives as a commercial enterprise. It is a gross abuse of monopolistic power. What you are doing is an attack on freedom of speech. Read the full letter here. Please share this letter as widely as possible on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. We need your support to get the word out and expand the fight against Internet censorship. Sincerely, The World Socialist Web Site Donate to the WSWS Contact us to get involved! [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-facebook-48.png] Share [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-twitter-48.png] Tweet [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-forwardtofriend-48.png] Forward World Socialist Web Site | wsws.org Articles: Copyright © 2017 wsws.org, All rights reserved. unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Aug 26 12:19:21 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 12:19:21 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] DreamHost ordered to hand over data on anti-Trump website: Message-ID: * Print * Leaflet * Feedback * Share » DreamHost ordered to hand over data on anti-Trump website: The criminalization of political dissent 26 August 2017 In a chilling attack on free speech, a District of Columbia Superior Court judge Thursday ordered the web hosting company DreamHost to make available to the Trump administration vast amounts of data related to a website, disruptj20.org, that organized protests against Trump’s inauguration in January. The government’s request first became known on August 14, when DreamHost revealed the content of a warrant issued in July, demanding that the company turn over all the data on disruptj20.org, including visitor logs and IP addresses from 1.3 million people who visited the site, which can be used to identify individuals. It also demanded access to emails, photos and other data of those involved in contributing to and producing the site. Following public exposure of the Department of Justice’s warrant, the government “clarified” its request, stating that it did not want IP addresses, but still demands “all records or other information, pertaining to the Account, including all files, databases, and database records stored by DreamHost in relation to that Account.” The judge, Robert Morin, a Clinton appointee, has granted the warrant, with the empty stipulation that the court will oversee the government’s methods for searching the data. DreamHost, a private company that hosts more than 1.5 million websites, has agreed to abide by the warrant and begin turning over data, claiming that the judge’s decision is in fact a “win for privacy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. As the company’s own lawyer, Raymond Aghaian, stated in court Thursday, the information that the government is demanding and will now receive is “tantamount to the membership list of an advocacy group.” The government request amounts, Aghaian noted, to a “general warrant,” that is, a demand for sweeping information not related to any specific crime or individual. Such warrants were outlawed in Britain in the 18th century. They are proscribed in the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” and requires that all warrants be based on “probable cause… particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” The government now has a legal precedent for demanding similar information from any website organizing or supporting protests and other oppositional activity, using the pretext of alleged violent actions—often the result of police provocateurs—to effectively criminalize dissent. The DC court ruling takes place in the context of coordinated efforts by the ruling class internationally to suppress and outlaw political opposition. On Friday, the German government took the extraordinary step of shutting down the German Indymedia site, claiming that it helped organize violent protests in Hamburg, Germany during the G20 protests in July. In the weeks since the G20 summit, the government’s claims of “violent demonstrators” have been thoroughly debunked. In fact, the protests were the occasion for a police riot, supported by all factions of the political establishment in Germany, which is using them to crackdown on “left extremists.” In a statement befitting an authoritarian regime, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière declared that the site had to be shut down because it was “sowing hate against different opinions and representatives of the country”—that is, it advocated political opposition to the government. In the US, the far-reaching implications of the DC court decision contrast sharply with the almost complete absence of coverage and comment in the corporate media and political establishment. No leading Democrats have issued statements opposing the decision. In one of the few commentaries on the ruling, the Washington Post published an editorial Friday under the headline, “Don’t believe the hype: The Justice Department isn’t cracking down on anti-Trump dissent.” The Post accepts the government’s argument that prosecutors are “investigating serious violations of public order” justifying the search, only mildly criticizing the broad scope of the original order. The “clarification of the government’s case” has made it “substantially stronger,” the Post argues. The editorial concludes with a call for the institutionalization of the type of search demanded by the government. “The courts and Congress should contemplate how to make [the procedures approved by the court] a clear rule of the road.” While the Trump administration represents a grave threat to the democratic rights of the working class, it is itself a product of a protracted collapse of democratic forms of rule in the United States, to the point where clear and egregious violations of the constitution do not even provoke commentary, let alone opposition. Nowhere in the official political “debate” since Trump’s election has there been any discussion of the massive growth of the intelligence apparatus, including the illegal and unconstitutional domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, exposed by Edward Snowden four years ago. The demands of the Justice Department in the DreamHost case are an expression of the central purpose of the spying apparatus supported and expanded by the Obama administration: the crackdown on domestic dissent. Throughout the seven months since Trump took office, the Democratic Party and the media have sought to cover up the real character and social basis of his administration—a government of the corporate and financial oligarchy, determined to vastly expand war abroad and social counter-revolution within the United States. Their criticism of Trump has centered on differences over foreign policy, with denunciations of Trump for coming into conflict with sections of the military and intelligence agencies. In the aftermath of the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville two weeks ago, the Democrats have supported the restructuring of the Trump administration to place it even more directly under the control of the military and financial aristocracy. Trump’s actions against political protesters, moreover, are entirely in line with the campaign of Internet companies, supported by the Democratic Party and affiliated media, to implement a far-reaching program of Internet censorship under the guise of combatting “fake news.” Most prominent are the actions of Google to manipulate search results to block and blacklist left-wing websites, above all the World Socialist Web Site . The overriding threat to the interests of the ruling elite, in the US and internationally, is the emergence of a politically-independent and organized working class, armed with a socialist program. It is to block and preempt the creation of such a movement that the repressive actions of the state are directed. Joseph Kishore -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 26 13:58:19 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 13:58:19 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! Message-ID: __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 26 13:58:19 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 13:58:19 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! Message-ID: __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 26 14:04:17 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 14:04:17 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! Message-ID: So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 26 14:04:17 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 14:04:17 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! Message-ID: So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 26 14:14:39 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 14:14:39 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! Message-ID: And of course I break out laughing and split a gut every year when I have to undergo my Mandatory "Ethics" Training. As if "ethics" ever mattered to University Administrators:e.g.illegally firing Steve Salaita and Chief Illiniwak and Admissions and the Sports Programs, etc.. They have been about as corrupt as the sports programs when I moved out here in 1978. Look at how many UI administrators have been forced out-i.e., fired, but with Golden Parachutes like ex-President Whitey. QED. But since it is the taxpayers money anyway, it does not really matter to them. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 26 14:14:39 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 14:14:39 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! Message-ID: And of course I break out laughing and split a gut every year when I have to undergo my Mandatory "Ethics" Training. As if "ethics" ever mattered to University Administrators:e.g.illegally firing Steve Salaita and Chief Illiniwak and Admissions and the Sports Programs, etc.. They have been about as corrupt as the sports programs when I moved out here in 1978. Look at how many UI administrators have been forced out-i.e., fired, but with Golden Parachutes like ex-President Whitey. QED. But since it is the taxpayers money anyway, it does not really matter to them. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: 'David Green' ; 'sherwoodross10 at gmail.com' ; 'peace-discuss at anti-war.net' ; 'C. G. ESTABROOK' ; 'a-fields at uiuc.edu' ; Hoffman, Valerie J ; 'Joe Lauria' ; 'Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net' ; 'peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net' ; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; 'Arlene Hickory' ; 'David Swanson' ; 'Karen Aram' ; 'abass10 at gmail.com' ; 'mickalideh at gmail.com' ; 'Lina Thorne' ; 'chicago at worldcantwait.net' ; 'Jay' ; 'David Johnson' ; 'Mildred O'brien' ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 26 16:38:04 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 16:38:04 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: AS I already told you, but it bears repeating. I had researched a Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuit against the University of Illiniwaks on behalf of our American Indian Students Faculty and Staff that I was going to file with the Native American Bar Association up in Chicago over Chief Illiniwak. Then Stephen Kaufman (mentioned in the article today) got the bright idea to file a Complaint with the NCAA. It got rid of the White Racist Frat Boys dancing at half times to desecrate all that American Indians hold Sacred. Obviously their Sacred Sports Programs were and still are infinitely more important to the University of Illiniwaks than the civil rights and the human rights of our American Indian Students, Faculty and Staff. And now American Indians have been basically ethnically cleansed off of this campus because our local Zionists pressured the University of Illiniwaks to fire Steven Salaita. So here we are with no fake war whoop but almost no real Indians. And the rest of Little Red SAmboism still prevails on this campus and in this community after over 10 years. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 26 16:38:04 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 16:38:04 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: AS I already told you, but it bears repeating. I had researched a Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuit against the University of Illiniwaks on behalf of our American Indian Students Faculty and Staff that I was going to file with the Native American Bar Association up in Chicago over Chief Illiniwak. Then Stephen Kaufman (mentioned in the article today) got the bright idea to file a Complaint with the NCAA. It got rid of the White Racist Frat Boys dancing at half times to desecrate all that American Indians hold Sacred. Obviously their Sacred Sports Programs were and still are infinitely more important to the University of Illiniwaks than the civil rights and the human rights of our American Indian Students, Faculty and Staff. And now American Indians have been basically ethnically cleansed off of this campus because our local Zionists pressured the University of Illiniwaks to fire Steven Salaita. So here we are with no fake war whoop but almost no real Indians. And the rest of Little Red SAmboism still prevails on this campus and in this community after over 10 years. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 26 16:45:49 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 16:45:49 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! References: Message-ID: The Racist Mascot: Why You Should Still Boo Illinois The self-styled "Fighting Illini" of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are on their way to the Jan. 1, 2008 Rose Bowl with their racist and genocidal mascot and symbol Chief Illiniwak still in tow. Although the NCAA forced the University of Illiniwaks to prevent this Little Red Sambo from desecrating at half-times everything American Indians hold dear and treasure, nevertheless Chief Illiniwak still remains the officially designated "honored symbol" of the University of Illiniwaks at Urbana-Champaign. Just recently the University of Illiniwaks resurrected Chief Illiniwak for their Fall 2007 Homecoming in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaign, thus definitively proving their craven racism. In his Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993) Noam Chomsky suggests an apt metaphor for such American Indian sports mascots and symbols that I will elaborate upon here in order to conform to our local and most peculiar rites on this campus: Suppose the Nazis had won the Second World War. Sixty years later, a prestigious German state university has a mascot for all of its sports teams and sports fans by the name of "The Rabbi." Basically what happens is that a student from the Hitler Youth League dresses up in an authentic costume for an Hasidic Rabbi, complete with the curl-locks and a beard. The University itself collectively call themselves "The Fighting Jews," and the school's band is called "The Marching Jews." The student newspaper is called "The Daily Jew." All the sports fans in town wear jackets and t-shirts with pictures of The Rabbi prominently displayed on them. And most cars have Rabbi stickers planted all over them. Three years ago the University's Board of Trustees ran out of town on a rail a courageous and principled Chancellor who had the temerity to publicly suggest that the time had now come to "retire" the Rabbi. So of course there was a heated campaign on among the students and alumni to "Save the Rabbi!" This German state university plays its soccer matches over at the Nuremberg Stadium in front of an audience of about 75,000 White Aryans, almost all of whom are wearing pro-Rabbi images and clothes. At half-time the Marching Jews take to the stadium floor and begin playing what they purport to be Jewish sounding music along the lines of Fiddler-on-the-Roof. Then all 75,000 White Aryans rise as one and shout in unison: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" gesticulating wildly and working themselves up into a feeding frenzy. One lone faculty member sits there in protest shouting "Racist Rabbi!" and everyone in the vicinity proceeds to throw garbage at him.1 Finally, the moment these ardent White Aryans have all waited for has arrived. The Rabbi runs out onto the arena floor from among the Marching Jews, proceeds to the center of the Nuremberg Stadium, and dances the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews play on and march into an intricately choreographed maneuver that they all brag about and take special pride in that culminates with the band being organized into a Swastika. So the Rabbi continues to dance the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews march themselves into a Swastika. By now all 75,000 White Aryans are hysterical, shouting, screaming, and yelling: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" This semi-religious spectacle that the Nazis are well known for staging, especially at the Nuremberg stadium, goes on for a good twenty minutes. It all concludes with everyone joining hands to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," with the Rabbi leading all 75,000 White Aryans in the song. Then the Rabbi proceeds to dance the Hava Nagila out of the stadium followed by the Marching Jews. Everyone goes wild, clapping and cheering. This Rabbi ceremony brings tears to the eyes of many drunken alumni and students who had started several hours beforehand getting inebriated on schnapps and good German beer at pre-game tailgate parties. When it is all over, a visiting law professor from another country asks his host at the soccer match what this spectacle was all about. Without missing a beat Dean Mengele of the Law School turns to his guest and says: "We are honoring the Jews." Whom the Nazis had just exterminated 60 years ago, so of course the memory of the Jews needs to be honored by this spectacle. The Illiniwek Indians were ethnically cleansed out of Illinois about a century before that. These are the real "Little Eichmans." Be sure to "Boo!" and root against the Illiniwaks. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:38 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! AS I already told you, but it bears repeating. I had researched a Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuit against the University of Illiniwaks on behalf of our American Indian Students Faculty and Staff that I was going to file with the Native American Bar Association up in Chicago over Chief Illiniwak. Then Stephen Kaufman (mentioned in the article today) got the bright idea to file a Complaint with the NCAA. It got rid of the White Racist Frat Boys dancing at half times to desecrate all that American Indians hold Sacred. Obviously their Sacred Sports Programs were and still are infinitely more important to the University of Illiniwaks than the civil rights and the human rights of our American Indian Students, Faculty and Staff. And now American Indians have been basically ethnically cleansed off of this campus because our local Zionists pressured the University of Illiniwaks to fire Steven Salaita. So here we are with no fake war whoop but almost no real Indians. And the rest of Little Red SAmboism still prevails on this campus and in this community after over 10 years. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ 1 Guess who? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Aug 26 16:45:49 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 16:45:49 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! References: Message-ID: The Racist Mascot: Why You Should Still Boo Illinois The self-styled "Fighting Illini" of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are on their way to the Jan. 1, 2008 Rose Bowl with their racist and genocidal mascot and symbol Chief Illiniwak still in tow. Although the NCAA forced the University of Illiniwaks to prevent this Little Red Sambo from desecrating at half-times everything American Indians hold dear and treasure, nevertheless Chief Illiniwak still remains the officially designated "honored symbol" of the University of Illiniwaks at Urbana-Champaign. Just recently the University of Illiniwaks resurrected Chief Illiniwak for their Fall 2007 Homecoming in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaign, thus definitively proving their craven racism. In his Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993) Noam Chomsky suggests an apt metaphor for such American Indian sports mascots and symbols that I will elaborate upon here in order to conform to our local and most peculiar rites on this campus: Suppose the Nazis had won the Second World War. Sixty years later, a prestigious German state university has a mascot for all of its sports teams and sports fans by the name of "The Rabbi." Basically what happens is that a student from the Hitler Youth League dresses up in an authentic costume for an Hasidic Rabbi, complete with the curl-locks and a beard. The University itself collectively call themselves "The Fighting Jews," and the school's band is called "The Marching Jews." The student newspaper is called "The Daily Jew." All the sports fans in town wear jackets and t-shirts with pictures of The Rabbi prominently displayed on them. And most cars have Rabbi stickers planted all over them. Three years ago the University's Board of Trustees ran out of town on a rail a courageous and principled Chancellor who had the temerity to publicly suggest that the time had now come to "retire" the Rabbi. So of course there was a heated campaign on among the students and alumni to "Save the Rabbi!" This German state university plays its soccer matches over at the Nuremberg Stadium in front of an audience of about 75,000 White Aryans, almost all of whom are wearing pro-Rabbi images and clothes. At half-time the Marching Jews take to the stadium floor and begin playing what they purport to be Jewish sounding music along the lines of Fiddler-on-the-Roof. Then all 75,000 White Aryans rise as one and shout in unison: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" gesticulating wildly and working themselves up into a feeding frenzy. One lone faculty member sits there in protest shouting "Racist Rabbi!" and everyone in the vicinity proceeds to throw garbage at him.1 Finally, the moment these ardent White Aryans have all waited for has arrived. The Rabbi runs out onto the arena floor from among the Marching Jews, proceeds to the center of the Nuremberg Stadium, and dances the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews play on and march into an intricately choreographed maneuver that they all brag about and take special pride in that culminates with the band being organized into a Swastika. So the Rabbi continues to dance the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews march themselves into a Swastika. By now all 75,000 White Aryans are hysterical, shouting, screaming, and yelling: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" This semi-religious spectacle that the Nazis are well known for staging, especially at the Nuremberg stadium, goes on for a good twenty minutes. It all concludes with everyone joining hands to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," with the Rabbi leading all 75,000 White Aryans in the song. Then the Rabbi proceeds to dance the Hava Nagila out of the stadium followed by the Marching Jews. Everyone goes wild, clapping and cheering. This Rabbi ceremony brings tears to the eyes of many drunken alumni and students who had started several hours beforehand getting inebriated on schnapps and good German beer at pre-game tailgate parties. When it is all over, a visiting law professor from another country asks his host at the soccer match what this spectacle was all about. Without missing a beat Dean Mengele of the Law School turns to his guest and says: "We are honoring the Jews." Whom the Nazis had just exterminated 60 years ago, so of course the memory of the Jews needs to be honored by this spectacle. The Illiniwek Indians were ethnically cleansed out of Illinois about a century before that. These are the real "Little Eichmans." Be sure to "Boo!" and root against the Illiniwaks. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:38 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! AS I already told you, but it bears repeating. I had researched a Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuit against the University of Illiniwaks on behalf of our American Indian Students Faculty and Staff that I was going to file with the Native American Bar Association up in Chicago over Chief Illiniwak. Then Stephen Kaufman (mentioned in the article today) got the bright idea to file a Complaint with the NCAA. It got rid of the White Racist Frat Boys dancing at half times to desecrate all that American Indians hold Sacred. Obviously their Sacred Sports Programs were and still are infinitely more important to the University of Illiniwaks than the civil rights and the human rights of our American Indian Students, Faculty and Staff. And now American Indians have been basically ethnically cleansed off of this campus because our local Zionists pressured the University of Illiniwaks to fire Steven Salaita. So here we are with no fake war whoop but almost no real Indians. And the rest of Little Red SAmboism still prevails on this campus and in this community after over 10 years. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ 1 Guess who? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Aug 26 22:07:46 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 22:07:46 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Letter from colleagues of Prof Chayan References: Message-ID: Welcome to the real Thailand, land of smiles…….. > > > http://www.newmandala.org/letter-pm-prayut-friends-prof-chayan/ From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 27 11:12:43 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 11:12:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: After the Zionists pressured the Illiniwaks to illegally fire Steven Salaita, the only American Indian "presence" we have on this Campus are the remnants of Chief Illiniwak. That is how sick and demented Illiniwak University really is. If you were an American Indian Parent would you send your Child here to deal with this Illiniwak Gang of Bigots and Racists and Ignoramuses? I certainly would not. Let the Illiniwaks Wallow in their Genocide! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:46 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! The Racist Mascot: Why You Should Still Boo Illinois The self-styled "Fighting Illini" of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are on their way to the Jan. 1, 2008 Rose Bowl with their racist and genocidal mascot and symbol Chief Illiniwak still in tow. Although the NCAA forced the University of Illiniwaks to prevent this Little Red Sambo from desecrating at half-times everything American Indians hold dear and treasure, nevertheless Chief Illiniwak still remains the officially designated "honored symbol" of the University of Illiniwaks at Urbana-Champaign. Just recently the University of Illiniwaks resurrected Chief Illiniwak for their Fall 2007 Homecoming in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaign, thus definitively proving their craven racism. In his Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993) Noam Chomsky suggests an apt metaphor for such American Indian sports mascots and symbols that I will elaborate upon here in order to conform to our local and most peculiar rites on this campus: Suppose the Nazis had won the Second World War. Sixty years later, a prestigious German state university has a mascot for all of its sports teams and sports fans by the name of "The Rabbi." Basically what happens is that a student from the Hitler Youth League dresses up in an authentic costume for an Hasidic Rabbi, complete with the curl-locks and a beard. The University itself collectively call themselves "The Fighting Jews," and the school's band is called "The Marching Jews." The student newspaper is called "The Daily Jew." All the sports fans in town wear jackets and t-shirts with pictures of The Rabbi prominently displayed on them. And most cars have Rabbi stickers planted all over them. Three years ago the University's Board of Trustees ran out of town on a rail a courageous and principled Chancellor who had the temerity to publicly suggest that the time had now come to "retire" the Rabbi. So of course there was a heated campaign on among the students and alumni to "Save the Rabbi!" This German state university plays its soccer matches over at the Nuremberg Stadium in front of an audience of about 75,000 White Aryans, almost all of whom are wearing pro-Rabbi images and clothes. At half-time the Marching Jews take to the stadium floor and begin playing what they purport to be Jewish sounding music along the lines of Fiddler-on-the-Roof. Then all 75,000 White Aryans rise as one and shout in unison: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" gesticulating wildly and working themselves up into a feeding frenzy. One lone faculty member sits there in protest shouting "Racist Rabbi!" and everyone in the vicinity proceeds to throw garbage at him.1 Finally, the moment these ardent White Aryans have all waited for has arrived. The Rabbi runs out onto the arena floor from among the Marching Jews, proceeds to the center of the Nuremberg Stadium, and dances the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews play on and march into an intricately choreographed maneuver that they all brag about and take special pride in that culminates with the band being organized into a Swastika. So the Rabbi continues to dance the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews march themselves into a Swastika. By now all 75,000 White Aryans are hysterical, shouting, screaming, and yelling: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" This semi-religious spectacle that the Nazis are well known for staging, especially at the Nuremberg stadium, goes on for a good twenty minutes. It all concludes with everyone joining hands to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," with the Rabbi leading all 75,000 White Aryans in the song. Then the Rabbi proceeds to dance the Hava Nagila out of the stadium followed by the Marching Jews. Everyone goes wild, clapping and cheering. This Rabbi ceremony brings tears to the eyes of many drunken alumni and students who had started several hours beforehand getting inebriated on schnapps and good German beer at pre-game tailgate parties. When it is all over, a visiting law professor from another country asks his host at the soccer match what this spectacle was all about. Without missing a beat Dean Mengele of the Law School turns to his guest and says: "We are honoring the Jews." Whom the Nazis had just exterminated 60 years ago, so of course the memory of the Jews needs to be honored by this spectacle. The Illiniwek Indians were ethnically cleansed out of Illinois about a century before that. These are the real "Little Eichmans." Be sure to "Boo!" and root against the Illiniwaks. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:38 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! AS I already told you, but it bears repeating. I had researched a Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuit against the University of Illiniwaks on behalf of our American Indian Students Faculty and Staff that I was going to file with the Native American Bar Association up in Chicago over Chief Illiniwak. Then Stephen Kaufman (mentioned in the article today) got the bright idea to file a Complaint with the NCAA. It got rid of the White Racist Frat Boys dancing at half times to desecrate all that American Indians hold Sacred. Obviously their Sacred Sports Programs were and still are infinitely more important to the University of Illiniwaks than the civil rights and the human rights of our American Indian Students, Faculty and Staff. And now American Indians have been basically ethnically cleansed off of this campus because our local Zionists pressured the University of Illiniwaks to fire Steven Salaita. So here we are with no fake war whoop but almost no real Indians. And the rest of Little Red SAmboism still prevails on this campus and in this community after over 10 years. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ ________________________________ 1 Guess who? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 27 11:12:43 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 11:12:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: After the Zionists pressured the Illiniwaks to illegally fire Steven Salaita, the only American Indian "presence" we have on this Campus are the remnants of Chief Illiniwak. That is how sick and demented Illiniwak University really is. If you were an American Indian Parent would you send your Child here to deal with this Illiniwak Gang of Bigots and Racists and Ignoramuses? I certainly would not. Let the Illiniwaks Wallow in their Genocide! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:46 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! The Racist Mascot: Why You Should Still Boo Illinois The self-styled "Fighting Illini" of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are on their way to the Jan. 1, 2008 Rose Bowl with their racist and genocidal mascot and symbol Chief Illiniwak still in tow. Although the NCAA forced the University of Illiniwaks to prevent this Little Red Sambo from desecrating at half-times everything American Indians hold dear and treasure, nevertheless Chief Illiniwak still remains the officially designated "honored symbol" of the University of Illiniwaks at Urbana-Champaign. Just recently the University of Illiniwaks resurrected Chief Illiniwak for their Fall 2007 Homecoming in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaign, thus definitively proving their craven racism. In his Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993) Noam Chomsky suggests an apt metaphor for such American Indian sports mascots and symbols that I will elaborate upon here in order to conform to our local and most peculiar rites on this campus: Suppose the Nazis had won the Second World War. Sixty years later, a prestigious German state university has a mascot for all of its sports teams and sports fans by the name of "The Rabbi." Basically what happens is that a student from the Hitler Youth League dresses up in an authentic costume for an Hasidic Rabbi, complete with the curl-locks and a beard. The University itself collectively call themselves "The Fighting Jews," and the school's band is called "The Marching Jews." The student newspaper is called "The Daily Jew." All the sports fans in town wear jackets and t-shirts with pictures of The Rabbi prominently displayed on them. And most cars have Rabbi stickers planted all over them. Three years ago the University's Board of Trustees ran out of town on a rail a courageous and principled Chancellor who had the temerity to publicly suggest that the time had now come to "retire" the Rabbi. So of course there was a heated campaign on among the students and alumni to "Save the Rabbi!" This German state university plays its soccer matches over at the Nuremberg Stadium in front of an audience of about 75,000 White Aryans, almost all of whom are wearing pro-Rabbi images and clothes. At half-time the Marching Jews take to the stadium floor and begin playing what they purport to be Jewish sounding music along the lines of Fiddler-on-the-Roof. Then all 75,000 White Aryans rise as one and shout in unison: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" gesticulating wildly and working themselves up into a feeding frenzy. One lone faculty member sits there in protest shouting "Racist Rabbi!" and everyone in the vicinity proceeds to throw garbage at him.1 Finally, the moment these ardent White Aryans have all waited for has arrived. The Rabbi runs out onto the arena floor from among the Marching Jews, proceeds to the center of the Nuremberg Stadium, and dances the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews play on and march into an intricately choreographed maneuver that they all brag about and take special pride in that culminates with the band being organized into a Swastika. So the Rabbi continues to dance the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews march themselves into a Swastika. By now all 75,000 White Aryans are hysterical, shouting, screaming, and yelling: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" This semi-religious spectacle that the Nazis are well known for staging, especially at the Nuremberg stadium, goes on for a good twenty minutes. It all concludes with everyone joining hands to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," with the Rabbi leading all 75,000 White Aryans in the song. Then the Rabbi proceeds to dance the Hava Nagila out of the stadium followed by the Marching Jews. Everyone goes wild, clapping and cheering. This Rabbi ceremony brings tears to the eyes of many drunken alumni and students who had started several hours beforehand getting inebriated on schnapps and good German beer at pre-game tailgate parties. When it is all over, a visiting law professor from another country asks his host at the soccer match what this spectacle was all about. Without missing a beat Dean Mengele of the Law School turns to his guest and says: "We are honoring the Jews." Whom the Nazis had just exterminated 60 years ago, so of course the memory of the Jews needs to be honored by this spectacle. The Illiniwek Indians were ethnically cleansed out of Illinois about a century before that. These are the real "Little Eichmans." Be sure to "Boo!" and root against the Illiniwaks. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:38 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! AS I already told you, but it bears repeating. I had researched a Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuit against the University of Illiniwaks on behalf of our American Indian Students Faculty and Staff that I was going to file with the Native American Bar Association up in Chicago over Chief Illiniwak. Then Stephen Kaufman (mentioned in the article today) got the bright idea to file a Complaint with the NCAA. It got rid of the White Racist Frat Boys dancing at half times to desecrate all that American Indians hold Sacred. Obviously their Sacred Sports Programs were and still are infinitely more important to the University of Illiniwaks than the civil rights and the human rights of our American Indian Students, Faculty and Staff. And now American Indians have been basically ethnically cleansed off of this campus because our local Zionists pressured the University of Illiniwaks to fire Steven Salaita. So here we are with no fake war whoop but almost no real Indians. And the rest of Little Red SAmboism still prevails on this campus and in this community after over 10 years. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ ________________________________ 1 Guess who? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 27 11:19:14 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 11:19:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: And if I were a Palestinian Parent, I would not send my Child to Iliniwak University either. Let the Illiniwaks wallow in their Zionism! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2017 6:13 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! After the Zionists pressured the Illiniwaks to illegally fire Steven Salaita, the only American Indian "presence" we have on this Campus are the remnants of Chief Illiniwak. That is how sick and demented Illiniwak University really is. If you were an American Indian Parent would you send your Child here to deal with this Illiniwak Gang of Bigots and Racists and Ignoramuses? I certainly would not. Let the Illiniwaks Wallow in their Genocide! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:46 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! The Racist Mascot: Why You Should Still Boo Illinois The self-styled "Fighting Illini" of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are on their way to the Jan. 1, 2008 Rose Bowl with their racist and genocidal mascot and symbol Chief Illiniwak still in tow. Although the NCAA forced the University of Illiniwaks to prevent this Little Red Sambo from desecrating at half-times everything American Indians hold dear and treasure, nevertheless Chief Illiniwak still remains the officially designated "honored symbol" of the University of Illiniwaks at Urbana-Champaign. Just recently the University of Illiniwaks resurrected Chief Illiniwak for their Fall 2007 Homecoming in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaign, thus definitively proving their craven racism. In his Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993) Noam Chomsky suggests an apt metaphor for such American Indian sports mascots and symbols that I will elaborate upon here in order to conform to our local and most peculiar rites on this campus: Suppose the Nazis had won the Second World War. Sixty years later, a prestigious German state university has a mascot for all of its sports teams and sports fans by the name of "The Rabbi." Basically what happens is that a student from the Hitler Youth League dresses up in an authentic costume for an Hasidic Rabbi, complete with the curl-locks and a beard. The University itself collectively call themselves "The Fighting Jews," and the school's band is called "The Marching Jews." The student newspaper is called "The Daily Jew." All the sports fans in town wear jackets and t-shirts with pictures of The Rabbi prominently displayed on them. And most cars have Rabbi stickers planted all over them. Three years ago the University's Board of Trustees ran out of town on a rail a courageous and principled Chancellor who had the temerity to publicly suggest that the time had now come to "retire" the Rabbi. So of course there was a heated campaign on among the students and alumni to "Save the Rabbi!" This German state university plays its soccer matches over at the Nuremberg Stadium in front of an audience of about 75,000 White Aryans, almost all of whom are wearing pro-Rabbi images and clothes. At half-time the Marching Jews take to the stadium floor and begin playing what they purport to be Jewish sounding music along the lines of Fiddler-on-the-Roof. Then all 75,000 White Aryans rise as one and shout in unison: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" gesticulating wildly and working themselves up into a feeding frenzy. One lone faculty member sits there in protest shouting "Racist Rabbi!" and everyone in the vicinity proceeds to throw garbage at him.1 Finally, the moment these ardent White Aryans have all waited for has arrived. The Rabbi runs out onto the arena floor from among the Marching Jews, proceeds to the center of the Nuremberg Stadium, and dances the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews play on and march into an intricately choreographed maneuver that they all brag about and take special pride in that culminates with the band being organized into a Swastika. So the Rabbi continues to dance the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews march themselves into a Swastika. By now all 75,000 White Aryans are hysterical, shouting, screaming, and yelling: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" This semi-religious spectacle that the Nazis are well known for staging, especially at the Nuremberg stadium, goes on for a good twenty minutes. It all concludes with everyone joining hands to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," with the Rabbi leading all 75,000 White Aryans in the song. Then the Rabbi proceeds to dance the Hava Nagila out of the stadium followed by the Marching Jews. Everyone goes wild, clapping and cheering. This Rabbi ceremony brings tears to the eyes of many drunken alumni and students who had started several hours beforehand getting inebriated on schnapps and good German beer at pre-game tailgate parties. When it is all over, a visiting law professor from another country asks his host at the soccer match what this spectacle was all about. Without missing a beat Dean Mengele of the Law School turns to his guest and says: "We are honoring the Jews." Whom the Nazis had just exterminated 60 years ago, so of course the memory of the Jews needs to be honored by this spectacle. The Illiniwek Indians were ethnically cleansed out of Illinois about a century before that. These are the real "Little Eichmans." Be sure to "Boo!" and root against the Illiniwaks. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:38 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! AS I already told you, but it bears repeating. I had researched a Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuit against the University of Illiniwaks on behalf of our American Indian Students Faculty and Staff that I was going to file with the Native American Bar Association up in Chicago over Chief Illiniwak. Then Stephen Kaufman (mentioned in the article today) got the bright idea to file a Complaint with the NCAA. It got rid of the White Racist Frat Boys dancing at half times to desecrate all that American Indians hold Sacred. Obviously their Sacred Sports Programs were and still are infinitely more important to the University of Illiniwaks than the civil rights and the human rights of our American Indian Students, Faculty and Staff. And now American Indians have been basically ethnically cleansed off of this campus because our local Zionists pressured the University of Illiniwaks to fire Steven Salaita. So here we are with no fake war whoop but almost no real Indians. And the rest of Little Red SAmboism still prevails on this campus and in this community after over 10 years. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ 1 Guess who? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 27 11:19:14 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 11:19:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: And if I were a Palestinian Parent, I would not send my Child to Iliniwak University either. Let the Illiniwaks wallow in their Zionism! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2017 6:13 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! After the Zionists pressured the Illiniwaks to illegally fire Steven Salaita, the only American Indian "presence" we have on this Campus are the remnants of Chief Illiniwak. That is how sick and demented Illiniwak University really is. If you were an American Indian Parent would you send your Child here to deal with this Illiniwak Gang of Bigots and Racists and Ignoramuses? I certainly would not. Let the Illiniwaks Wallow in their Genocide! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:46 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! The Racist Mascot: Why You Should Still Boo Illinois The self-styled "Fighting Illini" of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are on their way to the Jan. 1, 2008 Rose Bowl with their racist and genocidal mascot and symbol Chief Illiniwak still in tow. Although the NCAA forced the University of Illiniwaks to prevent this Little Red Sambo from desecrating at half-times everything American Indians hold dear and treasure, nevertheless Chief Illiniwak still remains the officially designated "honored symbol" of the University of Illiniwaks at Urbana-Champaign. Just recently the University of Illiniwaks resurrected Chief Illiniwak for their Fall 2007 Homecoming in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaign, thus definitively proving their craven racism. In his Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993) Noam Chomsky suggests an apt metaphor for such American Indian sports mascots and symbols that I will elaborate upon here in order to conform to our local and most peculiar rites on this campus: Suppose the Nazis had won the Second World War. Sixty years later, a prestigious German state university has a mascot for all of its sports teams and sports fans by the name of "The Rabbi." Basically what happens is that a student from the Hitler Youth League dresses up in an authentic costume for an Hasidic Rabbi, complete with the curl-locks and a beard. The University itself collectively call themselves "The Fighting Jews," and the school's band is called "The Marching Jews." The student newspaper is called "The Daily Jew." All the sports fans in town wear jackets and t-shirts with pictures of The Rabbi prominently displayed on them. And most cars have Rabbi stickers planted all over them. Three years ago the University's Board of Trustees ran out of town on a rail a courageous and principled Chancellor who had the temerity to publicly suggest that the time had now come to "retire" the Rabbi. So of course there was a heated campaign on among the students and alumni to "Save the Rabbi!" This German state university plays its soccer matches over at the Nuremberg Stadium in front of an audience of about 75,000 White Aryans, almost all of whom are wearing pro-Rabbi images and clothes. At half-time the Marching Jews take to the stadium floor and begin playing what they purport to be Jewish sounding music along the lines of Fiddler-on-the-Roof. Then all 75,000 White Aryans rise as one and shout in unison: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" gesticulating wildly and working themselves up into a feeding frenzy. One lone faculty member sits there in protest shouting "Racist Rabbi!" and everyone in the vicinity proceeds to throw garbage at him.1 Finally, the moment these ardent White Aryans have all waited for has arrived. The Rabbi runs out onto the arena floor from among the Marching Jews, proceeds to the center of the Nuremberg Stadium, and dances the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews play on and march into an intricately choreographed maneuver that they all brag about and take special pride in that culminates with the band being organized into a Swastika. So the Rabbi continues to dance the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews march themselves into a Swastika. By now all 75,000 White Aryans are hysterical, shouting, screaming, and yelling: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" This semi-religious spectacle that the Nazis are well known for staging, especially at the Nuremberg stadium, goes on for a good twenty minutes. It all concludes with everyone joining hands to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," with the Rabbi leading all 75,000 White Aryans in the song. Then the Rabbi proceeds to dance the Hava Nagila out of the stadium followed by the Marching Jews. Everyone goes wild, clapping and cheering. This Rabbi ceremony brings tears to the eyes of many drunken alumni and students who had started several hours beforehand getting inebriated on schnapps and good German beer at pre-game tailgate parties. When it is all over, a visiting law professor from another country asks his host at the soccer match what this spectacle was all about. Without missing a beat Dean Mengele of the Law School turns to his guest and says: "We are honoring the Jews." Whom the Nazis had just exterminated 60 years ago, so of course the memory of the Jews needs to be honored by this spectacle. The Illiniwek Indians were ethnically cleansed out of Illinois about a century before that. These are the real "Little Eichmans." Be sure to "Boo!" and root against the Illiniwaks. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:38 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! AS I already told you, but it bears repeating. I had researched a Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuit against the University of Illiniwaks on behalf of our American Indian Students Faculty and Staff that I was going to file with the Native American Bar Association up in Chicago over Chief Illiniwak. Then Stephen Kaufman (mentioned in the article today) got the bright idea to file a Complaint with the NCAA. It got rid of the White Racist Frat Boys dancing at half times to desecrate all that American Indians hold Sacred. Obviously their Sacred Sports Programs were and still are infinitely more important to the University of Illiniwaks than the civil rights and the human rights of our American Indian Students, Faculty and Staff. And now American Indians have been basically ethnically cleansed off of this campus because our local Zionists pressured the University of Illiniwaks to fire Steven Salaita. So here we are with no fake war whoop but almost no real Indians. And the rest of Little Red SAmboism still prevails on this campus and in this community after over 10 years. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ 1 Guess who? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 27 13:57:55 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 13:57:55 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] CNN: Saudi Arabia calls deadly strike on Yemeni civilians a 'mistake' In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yes of course, everything we do is a mistake, by “we” I include our allies with whom we collude. Our intervention in Iraq was a mistake, just as our war in Vietnam was a mistake, every time we get caught killing civilians they are labeled “collateral damage” and a mistake. You know, “oops I missed my target, oops I accidentally slaughtered a few thousand more people.” It begs the question, when are “we” the American people going to put a stop to USG “mistakes? Mistakes that are killing millions of people, over there, and impoverishing and killing people here?” On Aug 27, 2017, at 06:17, Robert Naiman > wrote: Property of: Mark Warner, Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, Bill Nelson, Joe Manchin. http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/25/middleeast/yemen-airstrike-sanaa/index.html Saudi Arabia calls deadly strike on Yemeni civilians a 'mistake' By Hakim Almasmari, Hamdi Alkhshali, and Eliza Mackintosh Updated 2:29 PM ET, Sat August 26, 2017 Sanaa, Yemen (CNN) A deadly airstrike on residential buildings in Sanaa was the result of a "technical mistake," the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen said Saturday in a statement to the state-run Saudi Press Agency. The strike killed 16 people, including seven children, Yemen's rebel-controlled health ministry said Friday. The attack, which flattened two buildings in Sanaa's southern district of Faj Attan, comes amid escalating violence in the war-torn country. A Saudi-led coalition spokesman expressed "deep sorrow for this unintentional accident and for the collateral damage among civilians." The intended target of the strike was a command-and-control center for Houthi rebels, spokesman Col. Turki al-Malki said, calling it "a legitimate military target." The facility, al-Maliki said, was intentionally set up in a residential area to turn civilians into human shields. Saudi Arabia, backed by a coalition of Arab states, launched a military operation in March 2015 against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who toppled the internationally recognized leadership in Yemen. In the last week alone, the United Nations estimates that 58 civilians have been killed in airstrikes, including 42 in Saudi-led coalition bombings. That death toll is higher than in the entire month of June, when 52 civilians were killed, and in July, which saw 57 civilian deaths. Since fighting began, the UN Human Rights Office has documented 13,829 civilian casualties, including 5,110 people killed. The numbers, based on casualties individually verified by the UN's Yemen Office, are believed to be a fraction of the overall death toll. Hotel attack Friday's attack came two days after an airstrike hit a hotel on the outskirts of Sanaa, leaving dozens dead. The United Nations has launched an investigation into that attack. Two airstrikes hit the area in close succession at around 3:30 a.m., a witness told the United Nations. The first struck a security checkpoint purportedly manned by Houthi rebels, and, several minutes later, a second strike hit the Istirahat Al Shahab hotel. Most of those killed at the hotel died in their sleep and were buried under rubble, Mohammed al-Sarhi, a farmer, told CNN. At least 33 civilians were killed and another 25 injured in the attack, the United Nations confirmed. Yemen's health ministry, which is controlled by Houthi rebels, says 51 people died. The health ministry is based in Sanaa and is not part of the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government based in the southern city of Aden. [...] === Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 _______________________________________________ ufpj-activist mailing list Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist To Unsubscribe Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/ufpj-activist/karenaram%40hotmail.com You are subscribed as: karenaram at hotmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Sun Aug 27 14:00:11 2017 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 09:00:11 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <002101d31f3c$cd0ebbb0$672c3310$@comcast.net> Very interesting article about the documented history of the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade and manipulation of the media. https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/25/the-cia-and-me-how-i-learned-not-to- love-big-brother/ The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother www.counterpunch.org In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother by ALFRED W. MCCOY * In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year. Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget. By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web’s undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops(Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen. While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security’s colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses — from the “red scare” of the 1920s through the FBI’s illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s — could we really be confident that there wasn’t a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn’t really so benign when it came to us. >From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family’s history over three generations, I’ve found out in the most personal way possible that there’s a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own “war” stories to explain how I’ve been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way. On the Heroin Trail After finishing college in the late 1960s, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Japanese history and was pleasantly surprised when Yale Graduate School admitted me with a full fellowship. But the Ivy League in those days was no ivory tower. During my first year at Yale, the Justice Department indicted Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for a local murder and the May Day protests that filled the New Haven green also shut the campus for a week. Almost simultaneously, President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and student protests closed hundreds of campuses across America for the rest of the semester. In the midst of all this tumult, the focus of my studies shifted from Japan to Southeast Asia, and from the past to the war in Vietnam. Yes, that war. So what did I do about the draft? During my first semester at Yale, on December 1, 1969, to be precise, the Selective Service cut up the calendar for a lottery. The first 100 birthdays picked were certain to be drafted, but any dates above 200 were likely exempt. My birthday, June 8th, was the very last date drawn, not number 365 but 366 (don’t forget leap year) — the only lottery I have ever won, except for a Sunbeam electric frying pan in a high school raffle. Through a convoluted moral calculus typical of the 1960s, I decided that my draft exemption, although acquired by sheer luck, demanded that I devote myself, above all else, to thinking about, writing about, and working to end the Vietnam War. During those campus protests over Cambodia in the spring of 1970, our small group of graduate students in Southeast Asian history at Yale realized that the U.S. strategic predicament in Indochina would soon require an invasion of Laos to cut the flow of enemy supplies into South Vietnam. So, while protests over Cambodia swept campuses nationwide, we were huddled inside the library, preparing for the next invasion by editing a book of essays on Laos for the publisher Harper & Row. A few months after that book appeared, one of the company’s junior editors, Elizabeth Jakab, intrigued by an account we had included about that country’s opium crop, telephoned from New York to ask if I could research and write a “quickie” paperback about the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam. I promptly started the research at my student carrel in the Gothic tower that is Yale’s Sterling Library, tracking old colonial reports about the Southeast Asian opium trade that ended suddenly in the 1950s, just as the story got interesting. So, quite tentatively at first, I stepped outside the library to do a few interviews and soon found Description: Image removed by sender.myself following an investigative trail that circled the globe. First, I traveled across America for meetings with retired CIA operatives. Then I crossed the Pacific to Hong Kong to study drug syndicates, courtesy of that colony’s police drug squad. Next, I went south to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to investigate the heroin traffic that was targeting the GIs, and on into the mountains of Laos to observe CIA alliances with opium warlords and the hill-tribe militias that grew the opium poppy. Finally, I flew from Singapore to Paris for interviews with retired French intelligence officers about their opium trafficking during the first Indochina War of the 1950s. The drug traffic that supplied heroin for the U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam was not, I discovered, exclusively the work of criminals. Once the opium left tribal poppy fields in Laos, the traffic required official complicity at every level. The helicopters of Air America, the airline the CIA then ran, carried raw opium out of the villages of its hill-tribe allies. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close American collaborator, operated the world’s largest heroin lab and was so oblivious to the implications of the traffic that he opened his opium ledgers for my inspection. Several of Saigon’s top generals were complicit in the drug’s distribution to U.S. soldiers. By 1971, this web of collusion ensured that heroin, according to a later White House survey of a thousand veterans, would be “commonly used” by 34% of American troops in South Vietnam. None of this had been covered in my college history seminars. I had no models for researching an uncharted netherworld of crime and covert operations. After stepping off the plane in Saigon, body slammed by the tropical heat, I found myself in a sprawling foreign city of four million, lost in a swarm of snarling motorcycles and a maze of nameless streets, without contacts or a clue about how to probe these secrets. Every day on the heroin trail confronted me with new challenges — where to look, what to look for, and, above all, how to ask hard questions. Reading all that history had, however, taught me something I didn’t know I knew. Instead of confronting my sources with questions about sensitive current events, I started with the French colonial past when the opium trade was still legal, gradually uncovering the underlying, unchanging logistics of drug production. As I followed this historical trail into the present, when the traffic became illegal and dangerously controversial, I began to use pieces from this past to assemble the present puzzle, until the names of contemporary dealers fell into place. In short, I had crafted a historical method that would prove, over the next 40 years of my career, surprisingly useful in analyzing a diverse array of foreign policy controversies — CIA alliances with drug lords, the agency’s propagation of psychological torture, and our spreading state surveillance. The CIA Makes Its Entrance in My Life Those months on the road, meeting gangsters and warlords in isolated places, offered only one bit of real danger. While hiking in the mountains of Laos, interviewing Hmong farmers about their opium shipments on CIA helicopters, I was descending a steep slope when a burst of bullets ripped the ground at my feet. I had walked into an ambush by agency mercenaries. While the five Hmong militia escorts whom the local village headman had prudently provided laid down a covering fire, my Australian photographer John Everingham and I flattened ourselves in the elephant grass and crawled through the mud to safety. Without those armed escorts, my research would have been at an end and so would I. After that ambush failed, a CIA paramilitary officer summoned me to a mountaintop meeting where he threatened to murder my Lao interpreter unless I ended my research. After winning assurances from the U.S. embassy that my interpreter would not be harmed, I decided to ignore that warning and keep going. Six months and 30,000 miles later, I returned to New Haven. My investigation of CIA alliances with drug lords had taught me more than I could have imagined about the covert aspects of U.S. global power. Settling into my attic apartment for an academic year of writing, I was confident that I knew more than enough for a book on this unconventional topic. But my education, it turned out, was just beginning. Within weeks, a massive, middle-aged guy in a suit interrupted my scholarly isolation. He appeared at my front door and identified himself as Tom Tripodi, senior agent for the Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). His agency, he confessed during a second visit, was worried about my writing and he had been sent to investigate. He needed something to tell his superiors. Tom was a guy you could trust. So I showed him a few draft pages of my book. He disappeared into the living room for a while and came back saying, “Pretty good stuff. You got your ducks in a row.” But there were some things, he added, that weren’t quite right, some things he could help me fix. Tom was my first reader. Later, I would hand him whole chapters and he would sit in a rocking chair, shirt sleeves rolled up, revolver in his shoulder holster, sipping coffee, scribbling corrections in the margins, and telling fabulous stories — like the time Jersey Mafia boss “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli tried to buy a thousand rifles from a local gun store to overthrow Fidel Castro. Or when some CIA covert warrior came home for a vacation and had to be escorted everywhere so he didn’t kill somebody in a supermarket aisle. Best of all, there was the one about how the Bureau of Narcotics caught French intelligence protecting the Corsican syndicates smuggling heroin into New York City. Some of his stories, usually unacknowledged, would appear in my book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. These conversations with an undercover operative, who had trained Cuban exiles for the CIA in Florida and later investigated Mafia heroin syndicates for the DEA in Sicily, were akin to an advanced seminar, a master class in covert operations. In the summer of 1972, with the book at press, I went to Washington to testify before Congress. As I was making the rounds of congressional offices on Capitol Hill, my editor rang unexpectedly and summoned me to New York for a meeting with the president and vice president of Harper & Row, my book’s publisher. Ushered into a plush suite of offices overlooking the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I listened to those executives tell me that Cord Meyer, Jr., the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, had called on their company’s president emeritus, Cass Canfield, Sr. The visit was no accident, for Canfield, according to an authoritative history, “enjoyed prolific links to the world of intelligence, both as a former psychological warfare officer and as a close personal friend of Allen Dulles,” the ex-head of the CIA. Meyer denounced my book as a threat to national security. He asked Canfield, also an old friend, to quietly suppress it. I was in serious trouble. Not only was Meyer a senior CIA official but he also had impeccable social connections and covert assets in every corner of American intellectual life. After graduating from Yale in 1942, he served with the marines in the Pacific, writing eloquent war dispatches published in the Atlantic Monthly. He later worked with the U.S. delegation drafting the U.N. charter. Personally recruited by spymaster Allen Dulles, Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and was soon running its International Organizations Division, which, in the words of that same history, “constituted the greatest single concentration of covert political and propaganda activities of the by now octopus-like CIA,” including “ Operation Mockingbird” that planted disinformation in major U.S. newspapers meant to aid agency operations. Informed sources told me that the CIA still had assets inside every major New York publisher and it already had every page of my manuscript. As the child of a wealthy New York family, Cord Meyer moved in elite social circles, meeting and marrying Mary Pinchot, the niece of Gifford Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forestry Service and a former governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot was a breathtaking beauty who later became President Kennedy’s mistress, making dozens of secret visits to the White House. When she was found shot dead along the banks of a canal in Washington in 1964, the head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, another Yale alumnus, broke into her home in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her diary. Mary’s sister Toni and her husband, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, later found the diary and gave it to Angleton for destruction by the agency. To this day, her unsolved murder remains a subject of mystery and controversy. Cord Meyer was also in the Social Register of New York’s fine families along with my publisher, Cass Canfield, which added a dash of social cachet to the pressure to suppress my book. By the time he walked into Harper & Row’s office in that summer of 1972, two decades of CIA service had changed Meyer (according to that same authoritative history) from a liberal idealist into “a relentless, implacable advocate for his own ideas,” driven by “a paranoiac distrust of everyone who didn’t agree with him” and a manner that was “histrionic and even bellicose.” An unpublished 26-year-old graduate student versus the master of CIA media manipulation. It was hardly a fair fight. I began to fear my book would never appear. To his credit, Canfield refused Meyer’s request to suppress the book. But he did allow the agency a chance to review the manuscript prior to publication. Instead of waiting quietly for the CIA’s critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh, then an investigative reporter for the New York Times. The same day the CIA courier arrived from Langley to collect my manuscript, Hersh swept through Harper & Row’s offices like a tropical storm, pelting hapless executives with incessant, unsettling questions. The next day, his exposé of the CIA’s attempt at censorship appeared on the paper’s front page. Other national media organizations followed his lead. Faced with a barrage of negative coverage, the CIA gave Harper & Row a critique full of unconvincing denials. The book was published unaltered. My Life as an Open Book for the Agency I had learned another important lesson: the Constitution’s protection of press freedom could check even the world’s most powerful espionage agency. Cord Meyer reportedly learned the same lesson. According to his obituary in the Washington Post, “It was assumed that Mr. Meyer would eventually advance” to head CIA covert operations, “but the public disclosure about the book deal apparently dampened his prospects.” He was instead exiled to London and eased into early retirement. Meyer and his colleagues were not, however, used to losing. Defeated in the public arena, the CIA retreated to the shadows and retaliated by tugging at every thread in the threadbare life of a graduate student. Over the next few months, federal officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare turned up at Yale to investigate my graduate fellowship. The Internal Revenue Service audited my poverty-level income. The FBI tapped my New Haven telephone (something I learned years later from a class-action lawsuit). In August 1972, at the height of the controversy over the book, FBI agents told the bureau’s director that they had “conducted [an] investigation concerning McCoy,” searching the files they had compiled on me for the past two years and interviewing numerous “sources whose identities are concealed [who] have furnished reliable information in the past” — thereby producing an 11-page report detailing my birth, education, and campus antiwar activities. A college classmate I hadn’t seen in four years, who served in military intelligence, magically appeared at my side in the book section of the Yale Co-op, seemingly eager to resume our relationship. The same week that a laudatory review of my book appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, an extraordinary achievement for any historian, Yale’s History Department placed me on academic probation. Unless I could somehow do a year’s worth of overdue work in a single semester, I faced dismissal. In those days, the ties between the CIA and Yale were wide and deep. The campus residential colleges screened students, including future CIA Director Porter Goss, for possible careers in espionage. Alumni like Cord Meyer and James Angleton held senior slots at the agency. Had I not had a faculty adviser visiting from Germany, the distinguished scholar Bernhard Dahm who was a stranger to this covert nexus, that probation would likely have become expulsion, ending my academic career and destroying my credibility. During those difficult days, New York Congressman Ogden Reid, a ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, telephoned to say that he was sending staff investigators to Laos to look into the opium situation. Amid this controversy, a CIA helicopter landed near the village where I had escaped that ambush and flew the Hmong headman who had helped my research to an agency airstrip. There, a CIA interrogator made it clear that he had better deny what he had said to me about the opium. Fearing, as he later told my photographer, that “they will send a helicopter to arrest me, or soldiers to shoot me,” the Hmong headman did just that. At a personal level, I was discovering just how deep the country’s intelligence agencies could reach, even in a democracy, leaving no part of my life untouched: my publisher, my university, my sources, my taxes, my phone, and even my friends. Although I had won the first battle of this war with a media blitz, the CIA was winning the longer bureaucratic struggle. By silencing my sources and denying any culpability, its officials convinced Congress that it was innocent of any direct complicity in the Indochina drug trade. During Senate hearings into CIA assassinations by the famed Church Committee three years later, Congress accepted the agency’s assurance that none of its operatives had been directly involved in heroin trafficking (an allegation I had never actually made). The committee’s report did confirm the core of my critique, however, finding that “the CIA is particularly vulnerable to criticism” over indigenous assets in Laos “of considerable importance to the Agency,” including “people who either were known to be, or were suspected of being, involved in narcotics trafficking.” But the senators did not press the CIA for any resolution or reform of what its own inspector general had called the “particular dilemma” posed by those alliances with drug lords — the key aspect, in my view, of its complicity in the traffic. During the mid-1970s, as the flow of drugs into the United States slowed and the number of addicts declined, the heroin problem receded into the inner cities and the media moved on to new sensations. Unfortunately, Congress had forfeited an opportunity to check the CIA and correct its way of waging covert wars. In less than 10 years, the problem of the CIA’s tactical alliances with drug traffickers to support its far-flung covert wars was back with a vengeance. During the 1980s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic swept America’s cities, the agency, as its own Inspector General later reported, allied itself with the largest drug smuggler in the Caribbean, using his port facilities to ship arms to the Contra guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua and protecting him from any prosecution for five years. Simultaneously on the other side of the planet in Afghanistan, mujahedeen guerrillas imposed an opium tax on farmers to fund their fight against the Soviet occupation and, with the CIA’s tacit consent, operated heroin labs along the Pakistani border to supply international markets. By the mid-1980s, Afghanistan’s opium harvest had grown 10-fold and was providing 60% of the heroin for America’s addicts and as much as 90% in New York City. Almost by accident, I had launched my academic career by doing something a bit different. Embedded within that study of drug trafficking was an analytical approach that would take me, almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations, including diplomatic alliances, CIA interventions, developing military technology, recourse to torture, and global surveillance. Step by step, topic by topic, decade after decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient understanding of the parts to try to assemble the whole. In writing my new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, I drew on this research to assess the overall character of U.S. global power and the forces that might contribute to its perpetuation or decline. In the process, I slowly came to see a striking continuity and coherence in Washington’s century-long rise to global dominion. CIA torture techniques emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic robotic aerospace technology had its first trial in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all, Washington’s reliance on surveillance first appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900 and soon became an essential though essentially illegal tool for the FBI’s repression of domestic dissent that continued through the 1970s. Surveillance Today In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, I dusted off that historical method, and used it to explore the origins and character of domestic surveillance inside the United States. After occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. Army, facing a difficult pacification campaign in a restive land, discovered the power of systematic surveillance to crush the resistance of the country’s political elite. Then, during World War I, the Army’s “father of military intelligence,” the dour General Ralph Van Deman, who had learned his trade in the Philippines, drew upon his years pacifying those islands to mobilize a legion of 1,700 soldiers and 350,000 citizen-vigilantes for an intense surveillance program against suspected enemy spies among German-Americans, including my own grandfather. In studying Military Intelligence files at the National Archives, I found “suspicious” letters purloined from my grandfather’s army locker. In fact, his mother had been writing him in her native German about such subversive subjects as knitting him socks for guard duty. In the 1950s, Hoover’s FBI agents tapped thousands of phones without warrants and kept suspected subversives under close surveillance, including my mother’s cousin Gerard Piel, an anti-nuclear activist and the publisher of Scientific American magazine. During the Vietnam War, the bureau expanded its activities with an amazing array of spiteful, often illegal, intrigues in a bid to cripple the antiwar movement with pervasive surveillance of the sort seen in my own FBI file. Memory of the FBI’s illegal surveillance programs was largely washed away after the Vietnam War thanks to Congressional reforms that required judicial warrants for all government wiretaps. The terror attacks of September 2001, however, gave the National Security Agency the leeway to launch renewed surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale. Writing for TomDispatch in 2009, I observed that coercive methods first tested in the Middle East were being repatriated and might lay the groundwork for “a domestic surveillance state.” Sophisticated biometric and cyber techniques forged in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq had made a “digital surveillance state a reality” and so were fundamentally changing the character of American democracy. Four years later, Edward Snowden’s leak of secret NSA documents revealed that, after a century-long gestation period, a U.S. digital surveillance state had finally arrived. In the age of the Internet, the NSA could monitor tens of millions of private lives worldwide, including American ones, via a few hundred computerized probes into the global grid of fiber-optic cables. And then, as if to remind me in the most personal way possible of our new reality, four years ago, I found myself the target yet again of an IRS audit, of TSA body searches at national airports, and — as I discovered when the line went dead — a tap on my office telephone at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why? Maybe it was my current writing on sensitive topics like CIA torture and NSA surveillance, or maybe my name popped up from some old database of suspected subversives left over from the 1970s. Whatever the explanation, it was a reasonable reminder that, if my own family’s experience across three generations is in any way representative, state surveillance has been an integral part of American political life far longer than we might imagine. At the cost of personal privacy, Washington’s worldwide web of surveillance has now become a weapon of exceptional power in a bid to extend U.S. global hegemony deeper into the twenty-first century. Yet it’s worth remembering that sooner or later what we do overseas always seems to come home to haunt us, just as the CIA and crew have haunted me this last half-century. When we learn to love Big Brother, the world becomes a more, not less, dangerous place. This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. It originally appeared in TomDispatch. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 876 bytes Desc: not available URL: From naiman at justforeignpolicy.org Sun Aug 27 14:10:27 2017 From: naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (Robert Naiman) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 09:10:27 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] CNN: Saudi Arabia calls deadly strike on Yemeni civilians a 'mistake' In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: This particular "mistake" could be stopped by turning four of these five Senate Democrats: Mark Warner of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Bill Nelson of Florida, Joe Manchin of West Virginia. These five Senate Democrats voted on June 13 to keep arming Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, when 43 Senate Democrats and 4 Senate Republicans voted to stop arming Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. 47 plus four equals 51. Why isn't there more interest in stopping this catastrophe, when doing so would only require turning four Senate Democrats? === Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > Yes of course, everything we do is a mistake, by “we” I include our allies > with whom we collude. > > Our intervention in Iraq was a mistake, just as our war in Vietnam was a > mistake, every time we get caught killing civilians they are labeled > “collateral damage” and a mistake. You know, “oops I missed my target, oops > I accidentally slaughtered a few thousand more people.” > > It begs the question, when are “we” the American people going to put a > stop to USG “mistakes? Mistakes that are killing millions of people, over > there, and impoverishing and killing people here?” > > On Aug 27, 2017, at 06:17, Robert Naiman > wrote: > > Property of: Mark Warner, Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, Bill Nelson, Joe > Manchin. > > http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/25/middleeast/yemen-airstrike-sanaa/index.html > > Saudi Arabia calls deadly strike on Yemeni civilians a 'mistake' > By Hakim Almasmari, Hamdi Alkhshali, and Eliza Mackintosh > Updated 2:29 PM ET, Sat August 26, 2017 > > Sanaa, Yemen (CNN) A deadly airstrike on residential buildings in Sanaa > was the result of a "technical mistake," the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen > said Saturday in a statement to the state-run Saudi Press Agency. > The strike killed 16 people, including seven children, Yemen's > rebel-controlled health ministry said Friday. > The attack, which flattened two buildings in Sanaa's southern district of > Faj Attan, comes amid escalating violence in the war-torn country. > A Saudi-led coalition spokesman expressed "deep sorrow for this > unintentional accident and for the collateral damage among civilians." > The intended target of the strike was a command-and-control center for > Houthi rebels, spokesman Col. Turki al-Malki said, calling it "a legitimate > military target." > The facility, al-Maliki said, was intentionally set up in a residential > area to turn civilians into human shields. > Saudi Arabia, backed by a coalition of Arab states, launched a military > operation in March 2015 against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who toppled > the internationally recognized leadership in Yemen. > In the last week alone, the United Nations estimates that 58 civilians > have been killed in airstrikes, including 42 in Saudi-led coalition > bombings. That death toll is higher than in the entire month of June, when > 52 civilians were killed, and in July, which saw 57 civilian deaths. > Since fighting began, the UN Human Rights Office has documented 13,829 > civilian casualties, including 5,110 people killed. The numbers, based on > casualties individually verified by the UN's Yemen Office, are believed to > be a fraction of the overall death toll. > Hotel attack > Friday's attack came two days after an airstrike hit a hotel > on > the outskirts of Sanaa, leaving dozens dead. The United Nations has > launched an investigation into that attack. > Two airstrikes hit the area in close succession at around 3:30 a.m., a > witness told the United Nations. The first struck a security checkpoint > purportedly manned by Houthi rebels, and, several minutes later, a second > strike hit the Istirahat Al Shahab hotel. > Most of those killed at the hotel died in their sleep and were buried > under rubble, Mohammed al-Sarhi, a farmer, told CNN. > At least 33 civilians were killed and another 25 injured in the attack, > the United Nations confirmed. Yemen's health ministry, which is controlled > by Houthi rebels, says 51 people died. The health ministry is based in > Sanaa and is not part of the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed > government based in the southern city of Aden. > [...] > > === > > Robert Naiman > Policy Director > Just Foreign Policy > www.justforeignpolicy.org > naiman at justforeignpolicy.org > (202) 448-2898 x1 <(202)%20448-2898> > > @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: > #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen > https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 > > House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine > https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 > > > > _______________________________________________ > ufpj-activist mailing list > > Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org > List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist > > To Unsubscribe > Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org > Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/ufpj-activist/ > karenaram%40hotmail.com > > You are subscribed as: karenaram at hotmail.com > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 27 14:10:36 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 14:10:36 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The University of Illiniwaks have been a Cosmic Injustice against American Indians right from their very get-go. Being a "land grant" institution, all of their Land was stolen from the Illiniwek Indians who were ethnically cleansed out of here. Let the Illiniwaks wallow in their genocide! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2017 6:19 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! And if I were a Palestinian Parent, I would not send my Child to Iliniwak University either. Let the Illiniwaks wallow in their Zionism! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2017 6:13 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! After the Zionists pressured the Illiniwaks to illegally fire Steven Salaita, the only American Indian "presence" we have on this Campus are the remnants of Chief Illiniwak. That is how sick and demented Illiniwak University really is. If you were an American Indian Parent would you send your Child here to deal with this Illiniwak Gang of Bigots and Racists and Ignoramuses? I certainly would not. Let the Illiniwaks Wallow in their Genocide! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:46 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! The Racist Mascot: Why You Should Still Boo Illinois The self-styled "Fighting Illini" of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are on their way to the Jan. 1, 2008 Rose Bowl with their racist and genocidal mascot and symbol Chief Illiniwak still in tow. Although the NCAA forced the University of Illiniwaks to prevent this Little Red Sambo from desecrating at half-times everything American Indians hold dear and treasure, nevertheless Chief Illiniwak still remains the officially designated "honored symbol" of the University of Illiniwaks at Urbana-Champaign. Just recently the University of Illiniwaks resurrected Chief Illiniwak for their Fall 2007 Homecoming in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaign, thus definitively proving their craven racism. In his Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993) Noam Chomsky suggests an apt metaphor for such American Indian sports mascots and symbols that I will elaborate upon here in order to conform to our local and most peculiar rites on this campus: Suppose the Nazis had won the Second World War. Sixty years later, a prestigious German state university has a mascot for all of its sports teams and sports fans by the name of "The Rabbi." Basically what happens is that a student from the Hitler Youth League dresses up in an authentic costume for an Hasidic Rabbi, complete with the curl-locks and a beard. The University itself collectively call themselves "The Fighting Jews," and the school's band is called "The Marching Jews." The student newspaper is called "The Daily Jew." All the sports fans in town wear jackets and t-shirts with pictures of The Rabbi prominently displayed on them. And most cars have Rabbi stickers planted all over them. Three years ago the University's Board of Trustees ran out of town on a rail a courageous and principled Chancellor who had the temerity to publicly suggest that the time had now come to "retire" the Rabbi. So of course there was a heated campaign on among the students and alumni to "Save the Rabbi!" This German state university plays its soccer matches over at the Nuremberg Stadium in front of an audience of about 75,000 White Aryans, almost all of whom are wearing pro-Rabbi images and clothes. At half-time the Marching Jews take to the stadium floor and begin playing what they purport to be Jewish sounding music along the lines of Fiddler-on-the-Roof. Then all 75,000 White Aryans rise as one and shout in unison: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" gesticulating wildly and working themselves up into a feeding frenzy. One lone faculty member sits there in protest shouting "Racist Rabbi!" and everyone in the vicinity proceeds to throw garbage at him.1 Finally, the moment these ardent White Aryans have all waited for has arrived. The Rabbi runs out onto the arena floor from among the Marching Jews, proceeds to the center of the Nuremberg Stadium, and dances the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews play on and march into an intricately choreographed maneuver that they all brag about and take special pride in that culminates with the band being organized into a Swastika. So the Rabbi continues to dance the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews march themselves into a Swastika. By now all 75,000 White Aryans are hysterical, shouting, screaming, and yelling: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" This semi-religious spectacle that the Nazis are well known for staging, especially at the Nuremberg stadium, goes on for a good twenty minutes. It all concludes with everyone joining hands to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," with the Rabbi leading all 75,000 White Aryans in the song. Then the Rabbi proceeds to dance the Hava Nagila out of the stadium followed by the Marching Jews. Everyone goes wild, clapping and cheering. This Rabbi ceremony brings tears to the eyes of many drunken alumni and students who had started several hours beforehand getting inebriated on schnapps and good German beer at pre-game tailgate parties. When it is all over, a visiting law professor from another country asks his host at the soccer match what this spectacle was all about. Without missing a beat Dean Mengele of the Law School turns to his guest and says: "We are honoring the Jews." Whom the Nazis had just exterminated 60 years ago, so of course the memory of the Jews needs to be honored by this spectacle. The Illiniwek Indians were ethnically cleansed out of Illinois about a century before that. These are the real "Little Eichmans." Be sure to "Boo!" and root against the Illiniwaks. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:38 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! AS I already told you, but it bears repeating. I had researched a Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuit against the University of Illiniwaks on behalf of our American Indian Students Faculty and Staff that I was going to file with the Native American Bar Association up in Chicago over Chief Illiniwak. Then Stephen Kaufman (mentioned in the article today) got the bright idea to file a Complaint with the NCAA. It got rid of the White Racist Frat Boys dancing at half times to desecrate all that American Indians hold Sacred. Obviously their Sacred Sports Programs were and still are infinitely more important to the University of Illiniwaks than the civil rights and the human rights of our American Indian Students, Faculty and Staff. And now American Indians have been basically ethnically cleansed off of this campus because our local Zionists pressured the University of Illiniwaks to fire Steven Salaita. So here we are with no fake war whoop but almost no real Indians. And the rest of Little Red SAmboism still prevails on this campus and in this community after over 10 years. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ 1 Guess who? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Aug 27 14:10:36 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 14:10:36 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The University of Illiniwaks have been a Cosmic Injustice against American Indians right from their very get-go. Being a "land grant" institution, all of their Land was stolen from the Illiniwek Indians who were ethnically cleansed out of here. Let the Illiniwaks wallow in their genocide! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2017 6:19 AM To: David Green ; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK ; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J ; Joe Lauria ; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas ; Szoke, Ron ; Arlene Hickory ; David Swanson ; Karen Aram ; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne ; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay ; David Johnson ; Mildred O'brien ; Estabrook, Carl G Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! And if I were a Palestinian Parent, I would not send my Child to Iliniwak University either. Let the Illiniwaks wallow in their Zionism! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2017 6:13 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! After the Zionists pressured the Illiniwaks to illegally fire Steven Salaita, the only American Indian "presence" we have on this Campus are the remnants of Chief Illiniwak. That is how sick and demented Illiniwak University really is. If you were an American Indian Parent would you send your Child here to deal with this Illiniwak Gang of Bigots and Racists and Ignoramuses? I certainly would not. Let the Illiniwaks Wallow in their Genocide! Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:46 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! The Racist Mascot: Why You Should Still Boo Illinois The self-styled "Fighting Illini" of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are on their way to the Jan. 1, 2008 Rose Bowl with their racist and genocidal mascot and symbol Chief Illiniwak still in tow. Although the NCAA forced the University of Illiniwaks to prevent this Little Red Sambo from desecrating at half-times everything American Indians hold dear and treasure, nevertheless Chief Illiniwak still remains the officially designated "honored symbol" of the University of Illiniwaks at Urbana-Champaign. Just recently the University of Illiniwaks resurrected Chief Illiniwak for their Fall 2007 Homecoming in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaign, thus definitively proving their craven racism. In his Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993) Noam Chomsky suggests an apt metaphor for such American Indian sports mascots and symbols that I will elaborate upon here in order to conform to our local and most peculiar rites on this campus: Suppose the Nazis had won the Second World War. Sixty years later, a prestigious German state university has a mascot for all of its sports teams and sports fans by the name of "The Rabbi." Basically what happens is that a student from the Hitler Youth League dresses up in an authentic costume for an Hasidic Rabbi, complete with the curl-locks and a beard. The University itself collectively call themselves "The Fighting Jews," and the school's band is called "The Marching Jews." The student newspaper is called "The Daily Jew." All the sports fans in town wear jackets and t-shirts with pictures of The Rabbi prominently displayed on them. And most cars have Rabbi stickers planted all over them. Three years ago the University's Board of Trustees ran out of town on a rail a courageous and principled Chancellor who had the temerity to publicly suggest that the time had now come to "retire" the Rabbi. So of course there was a heated campaign on among the students and alumni to "Save the Rabbi!" This German state university plays its soccer matches over at the Nuremberg Stadium in front of an audience of about 75,000 White Aryans, almost all of whom are wearing pro-Rabbi images and clothes. At half-time the Marching Jews take to the stadium floor and begin playing what they purport to be Jewish sounding music along the lines of Fiddler-on-the-Roof. Then all 75,000 White Aryans rise as one and shout in unison: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" gesticulating wildly and working themselves up into a feeding frenzy. One lone faculty member sits there in protest shouting "Racist Rabbi!" and everyone in the vicinity proceeds to throw garbage at him.1 Finally, the moment these ardent White Aryans have all waited for has arrived. The Rabbi runs out onto the arena floor from among the Marching Jews, proceeds to the center of the Nuremberg Stadium, and dances the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews play on and march into an intricately choreographed maneuver that they all brag about and take special pride in that culminates with the band being organized into a Swastika. So the Rabbi continues to dance the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews march themselves into a Swastika. By now all 75,000 White Aryans are hysterical, shouting, screaming, and yelling: "Rabbi! Rabbi! Rabbi!" This semi-religious spectacle that the Nazis are well known for staging, especially at the Nuremberg stadium, goes on for a good twenty minutes. It all concludes with everyone joining hands to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," with the Rabbi leading all 75,000 White Aryans in the song. Then the Rabbi proceeds to dance the Hava Nagila out of the stadium followed by the Marching Jews. Everyone goes wild, clapping and cheering. This Rabbi ceremony brings tears to the eyes of many drunken alumni and students who had started several hours beforehand getting inebriated on schnapps and good German beer at pre-game tailgate parties. When it is all over, a visiting law professor from another country asks his host at the soccer match what this spectacle was all about. Without missing a beat Dean Mengele of the Law School turns to his guest and says: "We are honoring the Jews." Whom the Nazis had just exterminated 60 years ago, so of course the memory of the Jews needs to be honored by this spectacle. The Illiniwek Indians were ethnically cleansed out of Illinois about a century before that. These are the real "Little Eichmans." Be sure to "Boo!" and root against the Illiniwaks. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:38 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! AS I already told you, but it bears repeating. I had researched a Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuit against the University of Illiniwaks on behalf of our American Indian Students Faculty and Staff that I was going to file with the Native American Bar Association up in Chicago over Chief Illiniwak. Then Stephen Kaufman (mentioned in the article today) got the bright idea to file a Complaint with the NCAA. It got rid of the White Racist Frat Boys dancing at half times to desecrate all that American Indians hold Sacred. Obviously their Sacred Sports Programs were and still are infinitely more important to the University of Illiniwaks than the civil rights and the human rights of our American Indian Students, Faculty and Staff. And now American Indians have been basically ethnically cleansed off of this campus because our local Zionists pressured the University of Illiniwaks to fire Steven Salaita. So here we are with no fake war whoop but almost no real Indians. And the rest of Little Red SAmboism still prevails on this campus and in this community after over 10 years. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:04 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: RE: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! So notice that it took them over 10 years just to get rid of the Illiniwak War Hoop. But everything else is still there. Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! These constant emails we all get promoting "diversity" and "inclusiveness" etc are all bull-twaddle and they know it. Ditto for the Palestinians. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:58 AM To: David Green >; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. ESTABROOK >; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Hoffman, Valerie J >; Joe Lauria >; Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net; Miller, Joseph Thomas >; Szoke, Ron >; Arlene Hickory >; David Swanson >; Karen Aram >; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne >; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay >; David Johnson >; Mildred O'brien >; Estabrook, Carl G > Subject: News Gazette: Adios Illiniwak War Hoop! __._,_.___ Don't believe all this bull-twaddle about everyone being out of the loop on this decision. As we found out years ago, every decision concerning Chief Illiniwak comes from the highest level of the University of Illinwaks Administration-up to and including the Board of "Trustees {sic!-not for People of Color}." Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! Fab. From: NatNews at yahoogroups.com [mailto:NatNews at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robert Schmidt Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 7:23 PM To: Native News > Subject: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Dear President White: You and the Board of Trustees must eradicate anything related to Indians from the sports program: "Fighting Illini", "Oskeewowow," the TomTom beats, the fake Indian Music from the 3 in 1 march and elsewhere in band performances , the war paint, the feathers, the tomahawks, the Illiniwak Logo, etc. In addition the University of Illinois must hold onto the Illiniwak Logo and not transfer it to the White Racists and Bigots on the so-called Council of Illiniwak Chiefs where they will continue to perpetrate this desecration of Indians forever . You must also indicate that you will vigorously prosecute anyone who violates your Trademark to Chief Illiniwak. You must terminate all licenses for Chief Illiniwak. And you must clear this racist Illiniwak garbage out of all University of Illinois Buildings. Little Red Sambo is finally gone--no thanks to you, the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, the Provost and previous Board Members, Presidents, Chancellors and Provosts--except for Nancy Kantor whom you all summarily ran out of town on a rail for doing the right thing for American Indians. But now you and the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor and the Provost must concentrate on getting rid of all elements of Little Red Samboism from this campus. Based upon prior experience, I will not hold my breath. But we will keep coming after you all until you do the right thing for American Indians. Professor Francis A. Boyle cc: University of Illinois Board of Trustees Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (Voice) 217-244-1478 (Fax) __._,_.___ Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ 1 Guess who? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From medea.benjamin at gmail.com Sun Aug 27 14:17:55 2017 From: medea.benjamin at gmail.com (Medea Benjamin) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 14:17:55 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] CNN: Saudi Arabia calls deadly strike on Yemeni civilians a 'mistake' In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yes. How should we do this? On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 7:10 AM Robert Naiman wrote: > This particular "mistake" could be stopped by turning four of these five > Senate Democrats: Mark Warner of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, > Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Bill Nelson of Florida, Joe Manchin of West > Virginia. These five Senate Democrats voted on June 13 to keep arming Saudi > Arabia's war in Yemen, when 43 Senate Democrats and 4 Senate Republicans > voted to stop arming Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. 47 plus four equals 51. > > Why isn't there more interest in stopping this catastrophe, when doing so > would only require turning four Senate Democrats? > > === > > Robert Naiman > Policy Director > Just Foreign Policy > www.justforeignpolicy.org > naiman at justforeignpolicy.org > (202) 448-2898 x1 > > @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: > #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen > https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 > > House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine > https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 > > On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > >> Yes of course, everything we do is a mistake, by “we” I include our >> allies with whom we collude. >> >> Our intervention in Iraq was a mistake, just as our war in Vietnam was a >> mistake, every time we get caught killing civilians they are labeled >> “collateral damage” and a mistake. You know, “oops I missed my target, oops >> I accidentally slaughtered a few thousand more people.” >> >> It begs the question, when are “we” the American people going to put a >> stop to USG “mistakes? Mistakes that are killing millions of people, over >> there, and impoverishing and killing people here?” >> >> On Aug 27, 2017, at 06:17, Robert Naiman >> wrote: >> >> Property of: Mark Warner, Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, Bill Nelson, >> Joe Manchin. >> >> http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/25/middleeast/yemen-airstrike-sanaa/index.html >> >> Saudi Arabia calls deadly strike on Yemeni civilians a 'mistake' >> By Hakim Almasmari, Hamdi Alkhshali, and Eliza Mackintosh >> Updated 2:29 PM ET, Sat August 26, 2017 >> >> Sanaa, Yemen (CNN) A deadly airstrike on residential buildings in Sanaa >> was the result of a "technical mistake," the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen >> said Saturday in a statement to the state-run Saudi Press Agency. >> The strike killed 16 people, including seven children, Yemen's >> rebel-controlled health ministry said Friday. >> The attack, which flattened two buildings in Sanaa's southern district of >> Faj Attan, comes amid escalating violence in the war-torn country. >> A Saudi-led coalition spokesman expressed "deep sorrow for this >> unintentional accident and for the collateral damage among civilians." >> The intended target of the strike was a command-and-control center for >> Houthi rebels, spokesman Col. Turki al-Malki said, calling it "a legitimate >> military target." >> The facility, al-Maliki said, was intentionally set up in a residential >> area to turn civilians into human shields. >> Saudi Arabia, backed by a coalition of Arab states, launched a military >> operation in March 2015 against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who toppled >> the internationally recognized leadership in Yemen. >> In the last week alone, the United Nations estimates that 58 civilians >> have been killed in airstrikes, including 42 in Saudi-led coalition >> bombings. That death toll is higher than in the entire month of June, when >> 52 civilians were killed, and in July, which saw 57 civilian deaths. >> Since fighting began, the UN Human Rights Office has documented 13,829 >> civilian casualties, including 5,110 people killed. The numbers, based on >> casualties individually verified by the UN's Yemen Office, are believed to >> be a fraction of the overall death toll. >> Hotel attack >> Friday's attack came two days after an airstrike hit a hotel >> on >> the outskirts of Sanaa, leaving dozens dead. The United Nations has >> launched an investigation into that attack. >> Two airstrikes hit the area in close succession at around 3:30 a.m., a >> witness told the United Nations. The first struck a security checkpoint >> purportedly manned by Houthi rebels, and, several minutes later, a second >> strike hit the Istirahat Al Shahab hotel. >> Most of those killed at the hotel died in their sleep and were buried >> under rubble, Mohammed al-Sarhi, a farmer, told CNN. >> At least 33 civilians were killed and another 25 injured in the attack, >> the United Nations confirmed. Yemen's health ministry, which is controlled >> by Houthi rebels, says 51 people died. The health ministry is based in >> Sanaa and is not part of the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed >> government based in the southern city of Aden. >> [...] >> >> === >> >> Robert Naiman >> Policy Director >> Just Foreign Policy >> www.justforeignpolicy.org >> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org >> (202) 448-2898 x1 <(202)%20448-2898> >> >> @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: >> #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen >> https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 >> >> House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine >> https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> ufpj-activist mailing list >> >> Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org >> List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist >> >> To Unsubscribe >> Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org >> Or visit: >> https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/ufpj-activist/karenaram%40hotmail.com >> >> You are subscribed as: karenaram at hotmail.com >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> > Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss >> >> > _______________________________________________ > ufpj-activist mailing list > > Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org > List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist > > To Unsubscribe > Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org > Or visit: > https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/ufpj-activist/medea.benjamin%40gmail.com > > You are subscribed as: medea.benjamin at gmail.com > -- *Medea Benjamin * *CODEPINK Co-founder* *(415) 235-6517 * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Sun Aug 27 14:17:48 2017 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 09:17:48 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] CNN: Saudi Arabia calls deadly strike on Yemeni civilians a 'mistake' In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <68693507-8914-4A7C-9CB2-3CAE75A535CD@illinois.edu> We begin, as you do here, by pointing out that the mistakes are not mistakes but quite rational actions - in Weber’s sense of ‘rational,’ i.e.. fitting means to ends. The ends are vicious, and not what the political establishment claims. US policy does not seek peace, freedom, and democracy but rather the profits of the US economic elite. But the world’s greatest propaganda system prevents most Americans from knowing that. That’s what we’re up against, and it won’t help to align with one faction of the political establishment. The two (partial) political victories in our lifetime - civil rights and Vietnam - came not from liberal politicians but from popular demand. —CGE > On Aug 27, 2017, at 8:57 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Yes of course, everything we do is a mistake, by “we” I include our allies with whom we collude. > > Our intervention in Iraq was a mistake, just as our war in Vietnam was a mistake, every time we get caught killing civilians they are labeled “collateral damage” and a mistake. You know, “oops I missed my target, oops I accidentally slaughtered a few thousand more people.” > > It begs the question, when are “we” the American people going to put a stop to USG “mistakes? Mistakes that are killing millions of people, over there, and impoverishing and killing people here?” > >> On Aug 27, 2017, at 06:17, Robert Naiman wrote: >> >> Property of: Mark Warner, Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, Bill Nelson, Joe Manchin. >> >> http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/25/middleeast/yemen-airstrike-sanaa/index.html >> >> Saudi Arabia calls deadly strike on Yemeni civilians a 'mistake' >> By Hakim Almasmari, Hamdi Alkhshali, and Eliza Mackintosh >> Updated 2:29 PM ET, Sat August 26, 2017 >> >> Sanaa, Yemen (CNN) A deadly airstrike on residential buildings in Sanaa was the result of a "technical mistake," the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen said Saturday in a statement to the state-run Saudi Press Agency. >> >> The strike killed 16 people, including seven children, Yemen's rebel-controlled health ministry said Friday. >> The attack, which flattened two buildings in Sanaa's southern district of Faj Attan, comes amid escalating violence in the war-torn country. >> A Saudi-led coalition spokesman expressed "deep sorrow for this unintentional accident and for the collateral damage among civilians." >> The intended target of the strike was a command-and-control center for Houthi rebels, spokesman Col. Turki al-Malki said, calling it "a legitimate military target." >> The facility, al-Maliki said, was intentionally set up in a residential area to turn civilians into human shields. >> Saudi Arabia, backed by a coalition of Arab states, launched a military operation in March 2015 against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who toppled the internationally recognized leadership in Yemen. >> In the last week alone, the United Nations estimates that 58 civilians have been killed in airstrikes, including 42 in Saudi-led coalition bombings. That death toll is higher than in the entire month of June, when 52 civilians were killed, and in July, which saw 57 civilian deaths. >> Since fighting began, the UN Human Rights Office has documented 13,829 civilian casualties, including 5,110 people killed. The numbers, based on casualties individually verified by the UN's Yemen Office, are believed to be a fraction of the overall death toll. >> Hotel attack >> Friday's attack came two days after an airstrike hit a hotel on the outskirts of Sanaa, leaving dozens dead. The United Nations has launched an investigation into that attack. >> Two airstrikes hit the area in close succession at around 3:30 a.m., a witness told the United Nations. The first struck a security checkpoint purportedly manned by Houthi rebels, and, several minutes later, a second strike hit the Istirahat Al Shahab hotel. >> Most of those killed at the hotel died in their sleep and were buried under rubble, Mohammed al-Sarhi, a farmer, told CNN. >> At least 33 civilians were killed and another 25 injured in the attack, the United Nations confirmed. Yemen's health ministry, which is controlled by Houthi rebels, says 51 people died. The health ministry is based in Sanaa and is not part of the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government based in the southern city of Aden. >> [...] >> >> === >> >> Robert Naiman >> Policy Director >> Just Foreign Policy >> www.justforeignpolicy.org >> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org >> (202) 448-2898 x1 >> >> @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen >> https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 >> >> House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine >> https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> ufpj-activist mailing list >> >> Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org >> List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist >> >> To Unsubscribe >> Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org >> Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/ufpj-activist/karenaram%40hotmail.com >> >> You are subscribed as: karenaram at hotmail.com > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From naiman at justforeignpolicy.org Sun Aug 27 14:49:55 2017 From: naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (Robert Naiman) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 09:49:55 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] CNN: Saudi Arabia calls deadly strike on Yemeni civilians a 'mistake' Message-ID: Every nonviolent thing we know how to do, we should do it to these five offices, and then do more of it: Mark Warner of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Bill Nelson of Florida, Joe Manchin of West Virginia. - Everyone should think of everyone we know in these five states and how to get them engaged, how to make hassling these five Senators on their enabling of this catastrophe a top priority. - Everyone should think about how we can mobilize people from neighboring states. Champaign-Urbana is a half hour from the Indiana border; two hours from Indianapolis. - We should track every public appearance of these five Senators and challenge them on camera to stop voting to arm Saudi Arabia's war and blockade in Yemen. - Phone calls should be pouring in to their DC and local offices. - We should occupy their offices and refuse to leave until they pledge to stop voting to arm Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. - Every email, every blog post on this topic, should mention these five Senators and equate them with the catastrophe: Mark Warner of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Bill Nelson of Florida, Joe Manchin of West Virginia. === Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 9:17 AM, Medea Benjamin wrote: > Yes. How should we do this? > > On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 7:10 AM Robert Naiman < > naiman at justforeignpolicy.org> wrote: > >> This particular "mistake" could be stopped by turning four of these five >> Senate Democrats: Mark Warner of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, >> Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Bill Nelson of Florida, Joe Manchin of West >> Virginia. These five Senate Democrats voted on June 13 to keep arming Saudi >> Arabia's war in Yemen, when 43 Senate Democrats and 4 Senate Republicans >> voted to stop arming Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. 47 plus four equals 51. >> >> Why isn't there more interest in stopping this catastrophe, when doing so >> would only require turning four Senate Democrats? >> >> === >> >> Robert Naiman >> Policy Director >> Just Foreign Policy >> www.justforeignpolicy.org >> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org >> (202) 448-2898 x1 <(202)%20448-2898> >> >> @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: >> #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen >> https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 >> >> House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine >> https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 >> >> On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < >> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: >> >>> Yes of course, everything we do is a mistake, by “we” I include our >>> allies with whom we collude. >>> >>> Our intervention in Iraq was a mistake, just as our war in Vietnam was a >>> mistake, every time we get caught killing civilians they are labeled >>> “collateral damage” and a mistake. You know, “oops I missed my target, oops >>> I accidentally slaughtered a few thousand more people.” >>> >>> It begs the question, when are “we” the American people going to put a >>> stop to USG “mistakes? Mistakes that are killing millions of people, over >>> there, and impoverishing and killing people here?” >>> >>> On Aug 27, 2017, at 06:17, Robert Naiman >>> wrote: >>> >>> Property of: Mark Warner, Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, Bill Nelson, >>> Joe Manchin. >>> >>> http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/25/middleeast/yemen-airstrike- >>> sanaa/index.html >>> >>> Saudi Arabia calls deadly strike on Yemeni civilians a 'mistake' >>> By Hakim Almasmari, Hamdi Alkhshali, and Eliza Mackintosh >>> Updated 2:29 PM ET, Sat August 26, 2017 >>> >>> Sanaa, Yemen (CNN) A deadly airstrike on residential buildings in Sanaa >>> was the result of a "technical mistake," the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen >>> said Saturday in a statement to the state-run Saudi Press Agency. >>> The strike killed 16 people, including seven children, Yemen's >>> rebel-controlled health ministry said Friday. >>> The attack, which flattened two buildings in Sanaa's southern district >>> of Faj Attan, comes amid escalating violence in the war-torn country. >>> A Saudi-led coalition spokesman expressed "deep sorrow for this >>> unintentional accident and for the collateral damage among civilians." >>> The intended target of the strike was a command-and-control center for >>> Houthi rebels, spokesman Col. Turki al-Malki said, calling it "a legitimate >>> military target." >>> The facility, al-Maliki said, was intentionally set up in a residential >>> area to turn civilians into human shields. >>> Saudi Arabia, backed by a coalition of Arab states, launched a military >>> operation in March 2015 against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who toppled >>> the internationally recognized leadership in Yemen. >>> In the last week alone, the United Nations estimates that 58 civilians >>> have been killed in airstrikes, including 42 in Saudi-led coalition >>> bombings. That death toll is higher than in the entire month of June, when >>> 52 civilians were killed, and in July, which saw 57 civilian deaths. >>> Since fighting began, the UN Human Rights Office has documented 13,829 >>> civilian casualties, including 5,110 people killed. The numbers, based on >>> casualties individually verified by the UN's Yemen Office, are believed to >>> be a fraction of the overall death toll. >>> Hotel attack >>> Friday's attack came two days after an airstrike hit a hotel >>> on >>> the outskirts of Sanaa, leaving dozens dead. The United Nations has >>> launched an investigation into that attack. >>> Two airstrikes hit the area in close succession at around 3:30 a.m., a >>> witness told the United Nations. The first struck a security checkpoint >>> purportedly manned by Houthi rebels, and, several minutes later, a second >>> strike hit the Istirahat Al Shahab hotel. >>> Most of those killed at the hotel died in their sleep and were buried >>> under rubble, Mohammed al-Sarhi, a farmer, told CNN. >>> At least 33 civilians were killed and another 25 injured in the attack, >>> the United Nations confirmed. Yemen's health ministry, which is controlled >>> by Houthi rebels, says 51 people died. The health ministry is based in >>> Sanaa and is not part of the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed >>> government based in the southern city of Aden. >>> [...] >>> >>> === >>> >>> Robert Naiman >>> Policy Director >>> Just Foreign Policy >>> www.justforeignpolicy.org >>> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org >>> (202) 448-2898 x1 <(202)%20448-2898> >>> >>> @clairecmc, @SenDonnelly, @Sen_JoeManchin, @MarkWarner, @SenBillNelson: >>> #StopArmingSaudi War Crimes in Yemen >>> https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/senate-stop-arming-saudi?r_by=1135580 >>> >>> House: Use War Powers to Save A Million Yemeni Kids from Cholera & Famine >>> https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> ufpj-activist mailing list >>> >>> Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org >>> List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist >>> >>> To Unsubscribe >>> Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org >>> Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/ >>> mailman/options/ufpj-activist/karenaram%40hotmail.com >>> >>> You are subscribed as: karenaram at hotmail.com >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> >> Peace-discuss mailing list >>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss >>> >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> ufpj-activist mailing list >> >> Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org >> List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist >> >> To Unsubscribe >> Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org >> Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/ >> mailman/options/ufpj-activist/medea.benjamin%40gmail.com >> >> You are subscribed as: medea.benjamin at gmail.com >> > -- > > > *Medea Benjamin * > > *CODEPINK Co-founder* > *(415) 235-6517 <(415)%20235-6517> * > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Sun Aug 27 15:22:46 2017 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 10:22:46 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] No Wonder US Forces In Morale Crisis Message-ID: <006901d31f48$560152b0$0203f810$@comcast.net> No Wonder US Forces In Morale Crisis Description: Screen Shot 2015-11-11 at 11.37.46 AM Educate! Crisis, US Imperialism, US military By Finian Cunningham, www.informationclearinghouse.info August 26th, 2017 Powered by Description: Google TranslateTranslate Description: Print Friendly Above Photo: From CreativeResistance.org. Eyes Wide Open: US Military Personnel Killed In Iraq. August 24, 2017 " Information Clearing House" -The spate of deadly US Navy collisions is a symptom of a wider morale crisis among American military forces. Part of the reason is that American troops are simply exhausted from being abused by political masters in Washington. "Over-stretch" is one way of putting it. American forces continue to be assigned in overseas wars and operations around the globe with no end in sight. And for no credible purpose either. This is not just a Navy problem. It affects all other branches of the US military: Army, Air Force, the Marines and National Guard. When President Donald Trump announced his brazen U-turn sending more American troops back to Afghanistan, the move had the backing of the Pentagon's top brass. No doubt stock prices for US arms manufacturers spiked. But what about ordinary American soldiers? One can imagine renewed Afghan missions are not welcome, given that the US has been fighting its longest war - 16 years - in that country known as the "Graveyard of Empires." Any army is only as good as the morale among soldiers. Morale depends on having a respected leadership and a credible just cause. In America's case, there are neither of these attributes, therefore it is no surprise that morale diminishes, as does fighting effectiveness. Look at the appalling record of US military defeats or failures. The fatal collision of a US Navy guided-missile destroyer this week with an oil tanker near Singapore - in which 10 missing American crew are feared dead - was the fourth major accident involving the Pacific 7th Fleet this year alone. The admiral of the fleet has been dismissed from his command post. Several military commentators are pointing to low morale among rank-and-file Navy members, from being forced to spend longer periods at sea on deployment, with little training and demanding work hours. As a report in military.com noted: "Operational demand around the globe. means less time at home for rest and training; crews are therefore operating with greater stress and exhaustion levels." The report quotes Congressman Rob Wittman, of the House Armed Services Committee, saying: "I believe that there are even more basic causes for this systematic operational failure of our fleet including a demanding operational tempo, limited training opportunities and inadequate funding to support basic needs." But here's the paramount issue that is not mentioned. Why are US forces being increasingly despatched to Asia-Pacific? Of course, it is to do with US imperial objectives of confronting China over its alleged expanding influence in that region. The ramped-up tensions with North Korea are also connected to the US aim of curtailing China. When we say the "US aim" we mean precisely the ruling class and their imperial designs. What ordinary Americans get out of this strategic "Asian Pivot" is far from certain. Combine dubious mission with dubious leadership, long months away from home under wearying conditions, and is it any wonder that morale of crew members sinks? The problem is much bigger than the US Navy and the Asia-Pacific. The American military must be the most internally conflicted force there is. The surge in wars ever since the September 11 terror incidents in 2001 was supposed to be about "defeating terrorism." All too often, however, that official purpose has been distorted to serve ulterior objectives, such as regime change. How must American troops, navy and air men feel when they realize that their own commanders and intelligence agencies are supporting the same terrorists that the rank-and-file soldiers are supposed to be combating? American troops no doubt know what's going down on the ground. They will know that the Pentagon and CIA are arming and training terrorist death squads in Syria, Iraq, and, yes, Afghanistan. Russia's foreign ministry reported this month that foreign jihadist fighters are being flown by "unidentified" helicopters to various parts of Afghanistan. Some Taliban units have been identified driving US Humvee military vehicles. This covert duplicity all sounds like a repeat of America's dirty wars in Syria and Iraq, where thousands of American troops were killed or maimed for life. Over the past century, American forces have been involved in dozens of wars around the world. A case can be made that the First and Second World Wars were a just cause for the Americans. But all the other conflicts have been simply wars of aggression, carried out for some ulterior nefarious purpose. The official pretexts for these wars are always shown eventually to be fraudulent, whether it was fighting Soviet expansionism as in Korea and Vietnam, or fighting terrorism as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or, the biggest fraud of all, to protect human rights as in Libya and Syria. The history of crimes and lies is catching up with American imperialism. Its never-ending need for wars around the world is no longer tenable. The US is not pursuing some noble crusade. It never has been. It is a warmongering state that is addicted to wars of conquest in order to satisfy the economic lust of its elites. It's easy for armchair generals like Donald Trump and his Joint Chiefs of Staff to threaten nuclear war against North Korea. But nobody of a sane mind could possibly accept this criminal recklessness. "Nuking another country just because it seeks to acquire nuclear weapons enjoys virtually zero support from US nuclear troops," wrote the former missile launch officer.In a recent media commentary, a former US nuclear missile launch officer, Bruce Blair, said that no-one among serving officers believes that Trump has any right to launch a pre-emptive strike on North Korea. The inference is that there is widespread distrust of the American leadership and its motives. That again leads back to the issue of morale crisis among America's military forces, across all sectors. A military force is only capable if it has the will to fight a clearly identified enemy, whom it views as a threat to their country and compatriots. For decades the American military has been abused with official lies and debased to conduct heinous crimes against humanity. But increasingly it seems the only enemy the US armed forces are up against are the rulers in Washington, with their imperialist schemes of world domination. More than 80 years ago, the most decorated American soldier, Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler (1881-1940), came to the stark conclusion that "war is a racket" - at least American wars are. Butler described his 34 years of service fighting wars in the Philippines, South America, the Caribbean, and China as being "a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." One might conjecture that this realization is dawning on more and more serving US personnel. Their operations, sacrifices and violence against others is not for any just cause. This realization inevitably leads to flagging morale among ordinary servicemen, whether they are riding in a Humvee in the Middle East, installing missile systems in NATO countries on Russia's border, or sailing ships that threaten nuclear war with North Korea and China. Sooner or later, the lousy paycheck and missing family at home no longer makes sense or morality. To hell with it, as Smedley Butler declared. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 552822 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.png Type: image/png Size: 910 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1869 bytes Desc: not available URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 27 16:12:07 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 16:12:07 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother In-Reply-To: <002101d31f3c$cd0ebbb0$672c3310$@comcast.net> References: <002101d31f3c$cd0ebbb0$672c3310$@comcast.net> Message-ID: Excellent article by a writer who can be trusted. I read McCoy’s book “The Politics of Heroin in SE Asia” some years ago. In discussion, with a couple friends in Bangkok at the time, who had “relatives” in the CIA and had read it, all agreed to its probable accuracy. The only friend who didn’t like it, and complained profusely about it, two years ago while visiting me here in Urbana, was a contractor with the DEA in Laos, as well as playing other roles in SE Asia. Needless to say, I have avoided having him as a house guest since. On Aug 27, 2017, at 07:00, David Johnson via Peace-discuss > wrote: Very interesting article about the documented history of the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade and manipulation of the media. https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/25/the-cia-and-me-how-i-learned-not-to-love-big-brother/ The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother www.counterpunch.org In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure,… The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother by ALFRED W. MCCOY * In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year. Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget. By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web’s undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops(Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen. While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security’s colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses — from the “red scare” of the 1920s through the FBI’s illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s — could we really be confident that there wasn’t a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn’t really so benign when it came to us. From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family’s history over three generations, I’ve found out in the most personal way possible that there’s a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own “war” stories to explain how I’ve been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way. On the Heroin Trail After finishing college in the late 1960s, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Japanese history and was pleasantly surprised when Yale Graduate School admitted me with a full fellowship. But the Ivy League in those days was no ivory tower. During my first year at Yale, the Justice Department indicted Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for a local murder and the May Day protests that filled the New Haven green also shut the campus for a week. Almost simultaneously, President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and student protests closed hundreds of campuses across America for the rest of the semester. In the midst of all this tumult, the focus of my studies shifted from Japan to Southeast Asia, and from the past to the war in Vietnam. Yes, that war. So what did I do about the draft? During my first semester at Yale, on December 1, 1969, to be precise, the Selective Service cut up the calendar for a lottery. The first 100 birthdays picked were certain to be drafted, but any dates above 200 were likely exempt. My birthday, June 8th, was the very last date drawn, not number 365 but 366 (don’t forget leap year) — the only lottery I have ever won, except for a Sunbeam electric frying pan in a high school raffle. Through a convoluted moral calculus typical of the 1960s, I decided that my draft exemption, although acquired by sheer luck, demanded that I devote myself, above all else, to thinking about, writing about, and working to end the Vietnam War. During those campus protests over Cambodia in the spring of 1970, our small group of graduate students in Southeast Asian history at Yale realized that the U.S. strategic predicament in Indochina would soon require an invasion of Laos to cut the flow of enemy supplies into South Vietnam. So, while protests over Cambodia swept campuses nationwide, we were huddled inside the library, preparing for the next invasion by editing a book of essays on Laos for the publisher Harper & Row. A few months after that book appeared, one of the company’s junior editors, Elizabeth Jakab, intrigued by an account we had included about that country’s opium crop, telephoned from New York to ask if I could research and write a “quickie” paperback about the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam. I promptly started the research at my student carrel in the Gothic tower that is Yale’s Sterling Library, tracking old colonial reports about the Southeast Asian opium trade that ended suddenly in the 1950s, just as the story got interesting. So, quite tentatively at first, I stepped outside the library to do a few interviews and soon found myself following an investigative trail that circled the globe. First, I traveled across America for meetings with retired CIA operatives. Then I crossed the Pacific to Hong Kong to study drug syndicates, courtesy of that colony’s police drug squad. Next, I went south to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to investigate the heroin traffic that was targeting the GIs, and on into the mountains of Laos to observe CIA alliances with opium warlords and the hill-tribe militias that grew the opium poppy. Finally, I flew from Singapore to Paris for interviews with retired French intelligence officers about their opium trafficking during the first Indochina War of the 1950s. The drug traffic that supplied heroin for the U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam was not, I discovered, exclusively the work of criminals. Once the opium left tribal poppy fields in Laos, the traffic required official complicity at every level. The helicopters of Air America, the airline the CIA then ran, carried raw opium out of the villages of its hill-tribe allies. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close American collaborator, operated the world’s largest heroin lab and was so oblivious to the implications of the traffic that he opened his opium ledgers for my inspection. Several of Saigon’s top generals were complicit in the drug’s distribution to U.S. soldiers. By 1971, this web of collusion ensured that heroin, according to a later White House survey of a thousand veterans, would be “commonly used” by 34% of American troops in South Vietnam. None of this had been covered in my college history seminars. I had no models for researching an uncharted netherworld of crime and covert operations. After stepping off the plane in Saigon, body slammed by the tropical heat, I found myself in a sprawling foreign city of four million, lost in a swarm of snarling motorcycles and a maze of nameless streets, without contacts or a clue about how to probe these secrets. Every day on the heroin trail confronted me with new challenges — where to look, what to look for, and, above all, how to ask hard questions. Reading all that history had, however, taught me something I didn’t know I knew. Instead of confronting my sources with questions about sensitive current events, I started with the French colonial past when the opium trade was still legal, gradually uncovering the underlying, unchanging logistics of drug production. As I followed this historical trail into the present, when the traffic became illegal and dangerously controversial, I began to use pieces from this past to assemble the present puzzle, until the names of contemporary dealers fell into place. In short, I had crafted a historical method that would prove, over the next 40 years of my career, surprisingly useful in analyzing a diverse array of foreign policy controversies — CIA alliances with drug lords, the agency’s propagation of psychological torture, and our spreading state surveillance. The CIA Makes Its Entrance in My Life Those months on the road, meeting gangsters and warlords in isolated places, offered only one bit of real danger. While hiking in the mountains of Laos, interviewing Hmong farmers about their opium shipments on CIA helicopters, I was descending a steep slope when a burst of bullets ripped the ground at my feet. I had walked into an ambush by agency mercenaries. While the five Hmong militia escorts whom the local village headman had prudently provided laid down a covering fire, my Australian photographer John Everingham and I flattened ourselves in the elephant grass and crawled through the mud to safety. Without those armed escorts, my research would have been at an end and so would I. After that ambush failed, a CIA paramilitary officer summoned me to a mountaintop meeting where he threatened to murder my Lao interpreter unless I ended my research. After winning assurances from the U.S. embassy that my interpreter would not be harmed, I decided to ignore that warning and keep going. Six months and 30,000 miles later, I returned to New Haven. My investigation of CIA alliances with drug lords had taught me more than I could have imagined about the covert aspects of U.S. global power. Settling into my attic apartment for an academic year of writing, I was confident that I knew more than enough for a book on this unconventional topic. But my education, it turned out, was just beginning. Within weeks, a massive, middle-aged guy in a suit interrupted my scholarly isolation. He appeared at my front door and identified himself as Tom Tripodi, senior agent for the Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). His agency, he confessed during a second visit, was worried about my writing and he had been sent to investigate. He needed something to tell his superiors. Tom was a guy you could trust. So I showed him a few draft pages of my book. He disappeared into the living room for a while and came back saying, “Pretty good stuff. You got your ducks in a row.” But there were some things, he added, that weren’t quite right, some things he could help me fix. Tom was my first reader. Later, I would hand him whole chapters and he would sit in a rocking chair, shirt sleeves rolled up, revolver in his shoulder holster, sipping coffee, scribbling corrections in the margins, and telling fabulous stories — like the time Jersey Mafia boss “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli tried to buy a thousand rifles from a local gun store to overthrow Fidel Castro. Or when some CIA covert warrior came home for a vacation and had to be escorted everywhere so he didn’t kill somebody in a supermarket aisle. Best of all, there was the one about how the Bureau of Narcotics caught French intelligence protecting the Corsican syndicates smuggling heroin into New York City. Some of his stories, usually unacknowledged, would appear in my book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. These conversations with an undercover operative, who had trained Cuban exiles for the CIA in Florida and later investigated Mafia heroin syndicates for the DEA in Sicily, were akin to an advanced seminar, a master class in covert operations. In the summer of 1972, with the book at press, I went to Washington to testify before Congress. As I was making the rounds of congressional offices on Capitol Hill, my editor rang unexpectedly and summoned me to New York for a meeting with the president and vice president of Harper & Row, my book’s publisher. Ushered into a plush suite of offices overlooking the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I listened to those executives tell me that Cord Meyer, Jr., the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, had called on their company’s president emeritus, Cass Canfield, Sr. The visit was no accident, for Canfield, according to an authoritative history, “enjoyed prolific links to the world of intelligence, both as a former psychological warfare officer and as a close personal friend of Allen Dulles,” the ex-head of the CIA. Meyer denounced my book as a threat to national security. He asked Canfield, also an old friend, to quietly suppress it. I was in serious trouble. Not only was Meyer a senior CIA official but he also had impeccable social connections and covert assets in every corner of American intellectual life. After graduating from Yale in 1942, he served with the marines in the Pacific, writing eloquent war dispatches published in the Atlantic Monthly. He later worked with the U.S. delegation drafting the U.N. charter. Personally recruited by spymaster Allen Dulles, Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and was soon running its International Organizations Division, which, in the words of that same history, “constituted the greatest single concentration of covert political and propaganda activities of the by now octopus-like CIA,” including “Operation Mockingbird” that planted disinformation in major U.S. newspapers meant to aid agency operations. Informed sources told me that the CIA still had assets inside every major New York publisher and it already had every page of my manuscript. As the child of a wealthy New York family, Cord Meyer moved in elite social circles, meeting and marrying Mary Pinchot, the niece of Gifford Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forestry Service and a former governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot was a breathtaking beauty who later became President Kennedy’s mistress, making dozens of secret visits to the White House. When she was found shot dead along the banks of a canal in Washington in 1964, the head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, another Yale alumnus, broke into her home in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her diary. Mary’s sister Toni and her husband, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, later found the diary and gave it to Angleton for destruction by the agency. To this day, her unsolved murder remains a subject of mystery and controversy. Cord Meyer was also in the Social Register of New York’s fine families along with my publisher, Cass Canfield, which added a dash of social cachet to the pressure to suppress my book. By the time he walked into Harper & Row’s office in that summer of 1972, two decades of CIA service had changed Meyer (according to that same authoritative history) from a liberal idealist into “a relentless, implacable advocate for his own ideas,” driven by “a paranoiac distrust of everyone who didn’t agree with him” and a manner that was “histrionic and even bellicose.” An unpublished 26-year-old graduate student versus the master of CIA media manipulation. It was hardly a fair fight. I began to fear my book would never appear. To his credit, Canfield refused Meyer’s request to suppress the book. But he did allow the agency a chance to review the manuscript prior to publication. Instead of waiting quietly for the CIA’s critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh, then an investigative reporter for the New York Times. The same day the CIA courier arrived from Langley to collect my manuscript, Hersh swept through Harper & Row’s offices like a tropical storm, pelting hapless executives with incessant, unsettling questions. The next day, his exposé of the CIA’s attempt at censorship appeared on the paper’s front page. Other national media organizations followed his lead. Faced with a barrage of negative coverage, the CIA gave Harper & Row a critique full of unconvincing denials. The book was published unaltered. My Life as an Open Book for the Agency I had learned another important lesson: the Constitution’s protection of press freedom could check even the world’s most powerful espionage agency. Cord Meyer reportedly learned the same lesson. According to his obituary in the Washington Post, “It was assumed that Mr. Meyer would eventually advance” to head CIA covert operations, “but the public disclosure about the book deal… apparently dampened his prospects.” He was instead exiled to London and eased into early retirement. Meyer and his colleagues were not, however, used to losing. Defeated in the public arena, the CIA retreated to the shadows and retaliated by tugging at every thread in the threadbare life of a graduate student. Over the next few months, federal officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare turned up at Yale to investigate my graduate fellowship. The Internal Revenue Service audited my poverty-level income. The FBI tapped my New Haven telephone (something I learned years later from a class-action lawsuit). In August 1972, at the height of the controversy over the book, FBI agents told the bureau’s director that they had “conducted [an] investigation concerning McCoy,” searching the files they had compiled on me for the past two years and interviewing numerous “sources whose identities are concealed [who] have furnished reliable information in the past” — thereby producing an 11-page report detailing my birth, education, and campus antiwar activities. A college classmate I hadn’t seen in four years, who served in military intelligence, magically appeared at my side in the book section of the Yale Co-op, seemingly eager to resume our relationship. The same week that a laudatory review of my book appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, an extraordinary achievement for any historian, Yale’s History Department placed me on academic probation. Unless I could somehow do a year’s worth of overdue work in a single semester, I faced dismissal. In those days, the ties between the CIA and Yale were wide and deep. The campus residential colleges screened students, including future CIA Director Porter Goss, for possible careers in espionage. Alumni like Cord Meyer and James Angleton held senior slots at the agency. Had I not had a faculty adviser visiting from Germany, the distinguished scholar Bernhard Dahm who was a stranger to this covert nexus, that probation would likely have become expulsion, ending my academic career and destroying my credibility. During those difficult days, New York Congressman Ogden Reid, a ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, telephoned to say that he was sending staff investigators to Laos to look into the opium situation. Amid this controversy, a CIA helicopter landed near the village where I had escaped that ambush and flew the Hmong headman who had helped my research to an agency airstrip. There, a CIA interrogator made it clear that he had better deny what he had said to me about the opium. Fearing, as he later told my photographer, that “they will send a helicopter to arrest me, or… soldiers to shoot me,” the Hmong headman did just that. At a personal level, I was discovering just how deep the country’s intelligence agencies could reach, even in a democracy, leaving no part of my life untouched: my publisher, my university, my sources, my taxes, my phone, and even my friends. Although I had won the first battle of this war with a media blitz, the CIA was winning the longer bureaucratic struggle. By silencing my sources and denying any culpability, its officials convinced Congress that it was innocent of any direct complicity in the Indochina drug trade. During Senate hearings into CIA assassinations by the famed Church Committee three years later, Congress accepted the agency’s assurance that none of its operatives had been directly involved in heroin trafficking (an allegation I had never actually made). The committee’s report did confirm the core of my critique, however, finding that “the CIA is particularly vulnerable to criticism” over indigenous assets in Laos “of considerable importance to the Agency,” including “people who either were known to be, or were suspected of being, involved in narcotics trafficking.” But the senators did not press the CIA for any resolution or reform of what its own inspector general had called the “particular dilemma” posed by those alliances with drug lords — the key aspect, in my view, of its complicity in the traffic. During the mid-1970s, as the flow of drugs into the United States slowed and the number of addicts declined, the heroin problem receded into the inner cities and the media moved on to new sensations. Unfortunately, Congress had forfeited an opportunity to check the CIA and correct its way of waging covert wars. In less than 10 years, the problem of the CIA’s tactical alliances with drug traffickers to support its far-flung covert wars was back with a vengeance. During the 1980s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic swept America’s cities, the agency, as its own Inspector General later reported, allied itself with the largest drug smuggler in the Caribbean, using his port facilities to ship arms to the Contra guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua and protecting him from any prosecution for five years. Simultaneously on the other side of the planet in Afghanistan, mujahedeen guerrillas imposed an opium tax on farmers to fund their fight against the Soviet occupation and, with the CIA’s tacit consent, operated heroin labs along the Pakistani border to supply international markets. By the mid-1980s, Afghanistan’s opium harvest had grown 10-fold and was providing 60% of the heroin for America’s addicts and as much as 90% in New York City. Almost by accident, I had launched my academic career by doing something a bit different. Embedded within that study of drug trafficking was an analytical approach that would take me, almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations, including diplomatic alliances, CIA interventions, developing military technology, recourse to torture, and global surveillance. Step by step, topic by topic, decade after decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient understanding of the parts to try to assemble the whole. In writing my new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, I drew on this research to assess the overall character of U.S. global power and the forces that might contribute to its perpetuation or decline. In the process, I slowly came to see a striking continuity and coherence in Washington’s century-long rise to global dominion. CIA torture techniques emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic robotic aerospace technology had its first trial in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all, Washington’s reliance on surveillance first appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900 and soon became an essential though essentially illegal tool for the FBI’s repression of domestic dissent that continued through the 1970s. Surveillance Today In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, I dusted off that historical method, and used it to explore the origins and character of domestic surveillance inside the United States. After occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. Army, facing a difficult pacification campaign in a restive land, discovered the power of systematic surveillance to crush the resistance of the country’s political elite. Then, during World War I, the Army’s “father of military intelligence,” the dour General Ralph Van Deman, who had learned his trade in the Philippines, drew upon his years pacifying those islands to mobilize a legion of 1,700 soldiers and 350,000 citizen-vigilantes for an intense surveillance program against suspected enemy spies among German-Americans, including my own grandfather. In studying Military Intelligence files at the National Archives, I found “suspicious” letters purloined from my grandfather’s army locker. In fact, his mother had been writing him in her native German about such subversive subjects as knitting him socks for guard duty. In the 1950s, Hoover’s FBI agents tapped thousands of phones without warrants and kept suspected subversives under close surveillance, including my mother’s cousin Gerard Piel, an anti-nuclear activist and the publisher of Scientific American magazine. During the Vietnam War, the bureau expanded its activities with an amazing array of spiteful, often illegal, intrigues in a bid to cripple the antiwar movement with pervasive surveillance of the sort seen in my own FBI file. Memory of the FBI’s illegal surveillance programs was largely washed away after the Vietnam War thanks to Congressional reforms that required judicial warrants for all government wiretaps. The terror attacks of September 2001, however, gave the National Security Agency the leeway to launch renewed surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale. Writing for TomDispatch in 2009, I observed that coercive methods first tested in the Middle East were being repatriated and might lay the groundwork for “a domestic surveillance state.” Sophisticated biometric and cyber techniques forged in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq had made a “digital surveillance state a reality” and so were fundamentally changing the character of American democracy. Four years later, Edward Snowden’s leak of secret NSA documents revealed that, after a century-long gestation period, a U.S. digital surveillance state had finally arrived. In the age of the Internet, the NSA could monitor tens of millions of private lives worldwide, including American ones, via a few hundred computerized probes into the global grid of fiber-optic cables. And then, as if to remind me in the most personal way possible of our new reality, four years ago, I found myself the target yet again of an IRS audit, of TSA body searches at national airports, and — as I discovered when the line went dead — a tap on my office telephone at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why? Maybe it was my current writing on sensitive topics like CIA torture and NSA surveillance, or maybe my name popped up from some old database of suspected subversives left over from the 1970s. Whatever the explanation, it was a reasonable reminder that, if my own family’s experience across three generations is in any way representative, state surveillance has been an integral part of American political life far longer than we might imagine. At the cost of personal privacy, Washington’s worldwide web of surveillance has now become a weapon of exceptional power in a bid to extend U.S. global hegemony deeper into the twenty-first century. Yet it’s worth remembering that sooner or later what we do overseas always seems to come home to haunt us, just as the CIA and crew have haunted me this last half-century. When we learn to love Big Brother, the world becomes a more, not less, dangerous place. This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. It originally appeared in TomDispatch. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 27 23:38:14 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 23:38:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Chris Hedges interviews Ajamu Baraka, who offers solutions to the agenda of hate Message-ID: https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/401051-ajamu-baraka-supremacist-groups/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From r-szoke at illinois.edu Mon Aug 28 00:02:00 2017 From: r-szoke at illinois.edu (Szoke, Ron) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:02:00 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A Conversation with Mark Lilla on His Critique of Identity Politics References: Message-ID: From: "Szoke, Ron" > Subject: From newyorker.com: A Conversation with Mark Lilla on His Critique of Identity Politics Date: August 26, 2017 The author of the new book “The Once and Future Liberal” argues that emphasizing identity politics is a losing electoral strategy for Democrats. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-conversation-with-mark-lilla-on-his-critique-of-identity-politics -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Aug 29 22:17:03 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2017 22:17:03 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Anti-War Teach In Message-ID: Anti-War Teach-In Sponsored by Students for Economic Empowerment (SEE) Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana (AWARE) Channing-Murray Foundation Oregon and Goodwin, Urbana Saturday, September 23rd 1:00 - 5:00pm Speakers and topics include: Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law Morton Brussel, Professor of Physics Emeritus Carl Estabrook, Professor of Sociology, Retired (History of U.S. Foreign Policy) David Green, Jewish Voice for Peace (Palestine & Israel) David Johnson, World Labor Hour (The Cost of War) Vukoni Lupa Lasaga, Ph.D Candidate (Africa) Father Tom Royer (Central America) Rich Whitney Esq., Illinois Green Party (Syria) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 30 02:19:22 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 02:19:22 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Aware On The Air References: <089e082349246e35890557ef1673@google.com> Message-ID: Good program today……. [http://s.ytimg.com/yt/img/email/digest/email_header.png] aramkaren64 at gmail.com has shared a video playlist with you on YouTube. [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/x2ne2cmzclc/hqdefault.jpg] 158 videos [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oGvDgzGll2I/mqdefault.jpg] [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8F4ypFtmK_I/mqdefault.jpg] [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/IGv5J5o_QZQ/mqdefault.jpg] AWARE on the Air PLAYLIST by UPTV6 Help center • Report spam ©2017 YouTube, LLC 901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA 94066, USA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From r-szoke at illinois.edu Wed Aug 30 05:38:49 2017 From: r-szoke at illinois.edu (Szoke, Ron) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 05:38:49 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump Orders Military To Give Cops Free Grenade Launchers, Bayonets, And Tanks References: Message-ID: <7C4D53EF-24B2-4966-9EA2-5577A341BFDD@illinois.edu> From: "Szoke, Ron" > Subject: Trump Orders Military To Give Cops Free Grenade Launchers, Bayonets, And Tanks Date: August 29, 2017 Trump Orders Military To Give Cops Free Grenade Launchers, Bayonets, And Tanks https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-orders-military-cops-free-141048710.html?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=ma -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 30 13:11:17 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 13:11:17 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Fears over deadly bugs in lab hit by Harvey Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 8:08 AM To: 'rpa discussion' Subject: FW: Fears over deadly bugs in lab hit by Harvey Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Tuesday, August 29, 2017 10:36 PM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: Fears over deadly bugs in lab hit by Harvey asks University of Illinois professor Francis Boyle, an expert in biological weapons. “The negative air pressure that keeps the bugs in there ends. And the bugs can then escape.” Boyle drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Aug 30 13:11:17 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 13:11:17 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Fears over deadly bugs in lab hit by Harvey Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 8:08 AM To: 'rpa discussion' Subject: FW: Fears over deadly bugs in lab hit by Harvey Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Tuesday, August 29, 2017 10:36 PM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: Fears over deadly bugs in lab hit by Harvey asks University of Illinois professor Francis Boyle, an expert in biological weapons. “The negative air pressure that keeps the bugs in there ends. And the bugs can then escape.” Boyle drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Aug 30 13:36:09 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 13:36:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fears over deadly bugs in lab hit by Harvey In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Biological lab in Galveston, what were they thinking? While living in Houston, one year, 2006-2007, I made a point of visiting Galveston, because I wanted to see it before it is wiped out by climate change. Based upon its history of storms, floods and devastation, it’s likely to be one of the first places to go in the US. The suffering of the people of Texas is just beginning, if as you say in the article below, the potential for viruses escaping is very high. On Aug 30, 2017, at 06:11, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 8:08 AM To: 'rpa discussion' > Subject: FW: Fears over deadly bugs in lab hit by Harvey Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) Feed: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Posted on: Tuesday, August 29, 2017 10:36 PM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: Fears over deadly bugs in lab hit by Harvey asks University of Illinois professor Francis Boyle, an expert in biological weapons. “The negative air pressure that keeps the bugs in there ends. And the bugs can then escape.” Boyle drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Aug 31 00:50:53 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 19:50:53 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy Message-ID: <1520CBB7-A43E-4ED7-9091-6B8C9DB8F553@gmail.com> https://blackagendareport.com/senators-cory-booker-al-franken-and-elizabeth-warren-propose-us-prevent-genocide An excellent and disturbing account of the pro-war hypocrisy of some leading American liberals. —CGE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 31 02:36:43 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 02:36:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy In-Reply-To: <1520CBB7-A43E-4ED7-9091-6B8C9DB8F553@gmail.com> References: <1520CBB7-A43E-4ED7-9091-6B8C9DB8F553@gmail.com> Message-ID: Dear Carl: With all due respect to you: So what else is new? Remember all the Liberals of the JFK administration and era who gave us the Vietnam War? The Best and The Brightest? Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 7:51 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: peace Subject: [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy https://blackagendareport.com/senators-cory-booker-al-franken-and-elizabeth-warren-propose-us-prevent-genocide An excellent and disturbing account of the pro-war hypocrisy of some leading American liberals. —CGE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 31 02:43:53 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 02:43:53 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy In-Reply-To: References: <1520CBB7-A43E-4ED7-9091-6B8C9DB8F553@gmail.com> Message-ID: Prof. Boyle: So very true, it’s not new. However, it is a well written piece, providing a humorous take on the absolute hypocrisy, of some of these popular, liberal politicians with hands dripping in blood. On Aug 30, 2017, at 19:36, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Dear Carl: With all due respect to you: So what else is new? Remember all the Liberals of the JFK administration and era who gave us the Vietnam War? The Best and The Brightest? Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 7:51 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: peace > Subject: [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy https://blackagendareport.com/senators-cory-booker-al-franken-and-elizabeth-warren-propose-us-prevent-genocide An excellent and disturbing account of the pro-war hypocrisy of some leading American liberals. —CGE _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Aug 31 02:44:19 2017 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 21:44:19 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy In-Reply-To: References: <1520CBB7-A43E-4ED7-9091-6B8C9DB8F553@gmail.com> Message-ID: <5F757665-CBB3-4A22-936B-D09A6534FC19@gmail.com> I remember the moment, in the mid-1960s, when I first realized that the word ‘liberal' was being used properly: scornfully. —CGE > On Aug 30, 2017, at 9:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Dear Carl: With all due respect to you: So what else is new? Remember all the Liberals of the JFK administration and era who gave us the Vietnam War? The Best and The Brightest? Fab. > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace > Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 7:51 PM > To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Cc: peace > Subject: [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy > > https://blackagendareport.com/senators-cory-booker-al-franken-and-elizabeth-warren-propose-us-prevent-genocide > > An excellent and disturbing account of the pro-war hypocrisy of some leading American liberals. —CGE From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 31 02:44:54 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 02:44:54 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy In-Reply-To: References: <1520CBB7-A43E-4ED7-9091-6B8C9DB8F553@gmail.com> Message-ID: For sure. Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Karen Aram [mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 9:44 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: C G Estabrook ; peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy Prof. Boyle: So very true, it’s not new. However, it is a well written piece, providing a humorous take on the absolute hypocrisy, of some of these popular, liberal politicians with hands dripping in blood. On Aug 30, 2017, at 19:36, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Dear Carl: With all due respect to you: So what else is new? Remember all the Liberals of the JFK administration and era who gave us the Vietnam War? The Best and The Brightest? Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 7:51 PM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: peace > Subject: [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy https://blackagendareport.com/senators-cory-booker-al-franken-and-elizabeth-warren-propose-us-prevent-genocide An excellent and disturbing account of the pro-war hypocrisy of some leading American liberals. —CGE _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 31 03:01:08 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 03:01:08 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy In-Reply-To: <5F757665-CBB3-4A22-936B-D09A6534FC19@gmail.com> References: <1520CBB7-A43E-4ED7-9091-6B8C9DB8F553@gmail.com> <5F757665-CBB3-4A22-936B-D09A6534FC19@gmail.com> Message-ID: Yeah, for sure. My Dad was a lawyer who heavily campaigned for JFK in 1960. But as a direct result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I thought Kennedy et al were insane for risking World War III. And see Chomsky's book on JFK. I stopped drinking the Kennedy Kool Aid then and there. I never drank the Obama Kool Aid. He was behind me at Harvard Law School, so I knew all about him. As our Mutual Jurisprudence Teacher Roberto Unger, the Founder of the Critical Legal Studies Movement said: "Obama is a disaster!" Fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -----Original Message----- From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 9:44 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy I remember the moment, in the mid-1960s, when I first realized that the word ‘liberal' was being used properly: scornfully. —CGE > On Aug 30, 2017, at 9:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Dear Carl: With all due respect to you: So what else is new? Remember all the Liberals of the JFK administration and era who gave us the Vietnam War? The Best and The Brightest? Fab. > Francis A. Boyle > Law Building > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > Champaign IL 61820 USA > 217-333-7954 (phone) > 217-244-1478 (fax) > (personal comments only) > > From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace > Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 7:51 PM > To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Cc: peace > Subject: [Peace] Liberal pro-war hypocrisy > > https://blackagendareport.com/senators-cory-booker-al-franken-and-elizabeth-warren-propose-us-prevent-genocide > > An excellent and disturbing account of the pro-war hypocrisy of some leading American liberals. —CGE From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 31 13:27:44 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 13:27:44 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Interview with Dan Kovalik, hold your stomach its tough to take the truth..... Message-ID: Empire Files: Human Rights Hypocrisy - Colombia vs ... - YouTube [Video for Empire Files: Human Rights Hypocrisy]▶ 39:06 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWAP8a7R5Uo -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 31 13:31:45 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 13:31:45 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Very encouraging news: The Democratic Socialists of America voted for BDS Message-ID: Ne[http://www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/facebook.png] [http://www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/twitter.png] [http://www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/rss.png] SEARCH Search form Search [Home] * ◀ * ENVIRONMENT / FOOD * ECONOMY * EDUCATION * RIGHTS * MEDIA / CULTURE * HEALTH * ACTIVISM * THE PERSONAL * TRUMP TRAUMA GRAYZONE PROJECT Why the Democratic Socialists of America Vote for BDS Is a Turning Point in American Left Politics America’s largest socialist organization votes to stand in solidarity with Palestine. By Rob Bryan / AlterNet August 9, 2017, 10:37 AM GMT * 1.7K49 Print 19 COMMENTS [http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/screen_shot_2017-08-09_at_2.26.03_pm.png?itok=C9O-CSPI] DSA members vote almost unanimously to support BDS at their 2017 convention in Chicago (photo by Annie Shields via Twitter) For a few veteran members of the Democratic Socialists of America like Eric Lee, this year’s annual convention in Chicago was a rude awakening. The DSA’s ranks suddenly swelled with thousands of new members, mostly younger activists mobilized by the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders and inspired by the success of socialist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. Lee shared their excitement about Sanders, and about the prospects of socialism gaining traction among middle-class voters worn down by decades of neoliberal austerity. What he could not stomach, however, was the new DSA generation’s enthusiastic support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. Forged out of a consensus of Palestinian civil society organizations, BDS is a movement sweeping grassroots activism in the West that calls for the right of return of Palestinian refugees, equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel and an end to the occupation. On August 5, DSA members voted almost unanimously in support of a resolution to back BDS. Immediately after the measure passed, spontaneous cheering erupted along with chants of “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as someone waved a giant Palestinian flag. [https://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_thumb/893857810517291008/pu/img/zqcXhfgQSeSUWuBd.jpg] Follow [https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/895382696532291584/h9HIoYB8_normal.jpg]liz[🌹] @ldrinkh20 The vote to endorse BDS passes! #dsacon17 8:35 AM - Aug 5, 2017 * 99 Replies * 137137 Retweets * 390390 likes Twitter Ads info and privacy The vote sent Lee into a rage, and ultimately out of an organization he had been affiliated with for decades. “I cannot in good conscience be a member of an organization which promotes a boycott of the Jewish state,” he wrote in a post on his personal blog. “I consider the BDS campaign to be antisemitic and racist. I oppose it as a socialist and as a Jew. I am appalled that DSA would take such a position.” (In a previous blog entry, Lee boasted of his service in the Israeli military and defended its occupation of the Palestinian West Bank.) Though the old DSA had its share of anti-Zionists, it has typically avoided contentious votes that might have rankled the sensibilities of left Zionists like Lee. But at the DSA’s convention this year, its members voted to end the party’s 35-year relationship with the Socialist International, a constellation of center-left parties that include the corruption laden Mexican PRI, the increasingly neoliberal Socialist Party of France and Germany’s SPD—all parties that supported the special relationship with Israel in one form or another. The vote set the stage for approving the resolution in support of BDS. Formed in 1982, DSA grew out of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the New American Movement. Membership has more than tripled in the last two years to over 25,000, owing largely to the momentous energy behind Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, anger with Trump and widespread disillusionment with the Democratic Party. The new members have brought fresh life and vital new perspectives to the group, allowing it to shake off whatever vestiges of Zionism remained among members, particularly that handful who still believed in the ethnically exclusive “socialism” of the kibbutzim. For the new generation of DSA members, supporting the Palestinian civil society boycott of Israel made more sense than seeking common ground with liberal-left Israeli parties like Meretz or Labor whose leadership had thrown their weight behind Israel’s past three wars on the Gaza Strip. The question of how to respond to Israel has long been an issue that divided DSA members. The breakdown among the ranks went something like this: certain members (usually older), tried to reconcile socialism with Zionism by condemning the Israeli right while ignoring the many human rights abuses carried out by so-called leftists in the name of engineering a demographic majority for Jews in Palestine. Other members (usually younger), supported BDS unequivocally, recognizing it as the latest manifestation of a time-tested means of nonviolent protest and the most powerful force to combat Israeli apartheid in the 21st century. These contradictory stances led to some interorganizational disputes, but without a vote on the official stance, determining how many people believed what, and what they thought DSA should do about it, remained a challenge. Support from France’s Mélenchon and a direct challenge to Democrats Chip Gibbons joined DSA earlier this year after being involved in BDS activism since 2007. An architect of the BDS resolution, he sees Palestine solidarity as an essential component of the socialist tradition of internationalism. Gibbons told me that a representative of La France Insoumise, the party of French leftist presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, commended the delegates after they passed the measure. The text’s other main author, Delé Balogun from DSA’s North Chicago chapter, saw Israel’s occupation up close when he joined the African Heritage Delegation to Palestine, a special trip to Israel-Palestine aimed at fostering Black solidarity for the Palestinian struggle. At this past weekend’s convention, Balogun was elected to the 16-person National Political Committee, DSA’s primary governing body. Report Advertisement DSA’s resolution arrives at a crucial moment for the BDS movement. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland recently introduced a billcalled the Israel Anti-Boycott Act that would make boycotting Israel a felony punishable by up to a $1 million fine or 20 years in prison. After a major public backlash, Cardin amended the bill so it would not apply to individuals and would not apply criminal penalties to violators, but the language remains disturbingly vague. The DSA resolution took direct aim at Cardin, declaring that “DSA strongly opposes the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which would make it a felony to advocate or support boycotts targeting Israel, as well as all similar legislation at the state and local levels.” With this statement, DSA has recorded its formal objection to the reactionary brand of hate speech laws that have already led to the arrests and convictions of BDS activists in France. Rising anti-imperialism in DSA’sranks Though DSA has come under fire from some quarters for its perceived indifference to imperialism, the organization’s critics may surprised to learn that over 90% of the delegates voted for the BDS resolution on Saturday morning. The 700 delegates’ votes, representing 42 local and statewide chapters, were so close to unanimous than an official tally wasn’t necessary. “Those who struggle against oppression and for equality will always have our support,” said DSA Deputy National Director David Duhalde in an official statement. “Just as we answered the call to boycott South Africa during apartheid, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.” Rawan Tayoon, a Palestinian activist with DSA’s youth wing (known as Young Democratic Socialists, or YDS), added, “Democratic socialists aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo and demand what’s right. We stand against imperialism, we stand against racism, and so we must stand against Israeli apartheid and occupation.” An informal group within DSA calling itself Democratic Socialists for Justice in Palestine workshopped and revised the text multiple times in order to maximize the impact of the statement and ensure that it represented the spirit of democratic socialism. Olivia Katbi Smith, a Portland delegate and member of the group, felt a sense of urgency in drafting the document: “As an Arab woman and a democratic socialist, it was incredibly important to me that the BDS resolution passed, especially in the face of the disgusting anti-BDS legislation that's currently being pushed nationally.” She saw the vote as a chance for DSA members to participate in campaigns with concrete goals and demonstrated successes—an opportunity to go beyond moral symbolism and performative politics. “Frankly this organization should have endorsed BDS a decade ago,” says Smith, reflecting the mood of many longtime DSA members. “As socialists we have a responsibility to side with the oppressed and commit to their unconditional liberation, and it's about time that DSA takes a public stand in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters.” Rob Bryan is a journalist who has written for Jacobin and Mondoweiss among other publications. Follow him on Twitter at @rbryan86 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mickalideh at gmail.com Thu Aug 31 15:24:58 2017 From: mickalideh at gmail.com (Harry Mickalide) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 10:24:58 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Very encouraging news: The Democratic Socialists of America voted for BDS In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: great news! Thanks Karen On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 8:31 AM, Karen Aram via Peace < peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > Ne > > SEARCH > Search form > Search > [image: Home] > > - ◀ > - ENVIRONMENT / FOOD > - ECONOMY > - EDUCATION > - RIGHTS > - MEDIA / CULTURE > - HEALTH > - ACTIVISM > - THE PERSONAL > - TRUMP TRAUMA > > GRAYZONE PROJECT > Why the Democratic Socialists of America Vote for BDS Is a Turning Point > in American Left Politics > America’s largest socialist organization votes to stand in solidarity with > Palestine. > *By* *Rob Bryan * / AlterNet > > *August 9, 2017, 10:37 AM GMT* > > - > > 1.7K49 > Print > > 19 COMMENTS > > > DSA members vote almost unanimously to support BDS at their 2017 > convention in Chicago (photo by Annie Shields via Twitter) > > For a few veteran members of the Democratic Socialists of America like > Eric Lee, this year’s annual convention in Chicago was a rude awakening. > The DSA’s ranks suddenly swelled with thousands of new members, mostly > younger activists mobilized by the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie > Sanders and inspired by the success of socialist Labour Party leader Jeremy > Corbyn in the U.K. Lee shared their excitement about Sanders, and about the > prospects of socialism gaining traction among middle-class voters worn down > by decades of neoliberal austerity. What he could not stomach, however, was > the new DSA generation’s enthusiastic support for the boycott, divestment > and sanctions (BDS) movement. > > Forged out of a consensus of Palestinian civil society organizations, BDS > is a movement sweeping grassroots activism in the West that calls for the > right of return of Palestinian refugees, equal rights for Palestinian > citizens of Israel and an end to the occupation. On August 5, DSA members > voted almost unanimously in support of a resolution to back BDS. > > Immediately after the measure passed, spontaneous cheering erupted along > with chants of “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine > will be free” as someone waved a giant Palestinian flag. > > > Follow > liz[image: 🌹] @ldrinkh20 > > The vote to endorse BDS passes! #dsacon17 > > 8:35 AM - Aug 5, 2017 > > > - > 99 Replies > > - > 137137 Retweets > > - > 390390 likes > > > Twitter Ads info and privacy > > > > > The vote sent Lee into a rage, and ultimately out of an organization he > had been affiliated with for decades. “I cannot in good conscience be a > member of an organization which promotes a boycott of the Jewish state,” he > wrote in a post on his personal blog > . “I consider the BDS campaign to > be antisemitic and racist. I oppose it as a socialist and as a Jew. I am > appalled that DSA would take such a position.” (In a previous blog entry > , Lee boasted of his service in the > Israeli military and defended its occupation of the Palestinian West Bank.) > > Though the old DSA had its share of anti-Zionists, it has typically > avoided contentious votes that might have rankled the sensibilities of left > Zionists like Lee. But at the DSA’s convention this year, its members voted > to end > the > party’s 35-year relationship with the Socialist International, a > constellation of center-left parties that include the corruption laden > Mexican PRI, the increasingly neoliberal Socialist Party of France and > Germany’s SPD—all parties that supported the special relationship with > Israel in one form or another. The vote set the stage for approving the > resolution in support of BDS. > > Formed in 1982, DSA grew out of the Democratic Socialist Organizing > Committee and the New American Movement. Membership has more than tripled > in the last two years to over 25,000, owing largely to the momentous energy > behind Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, anger with Trump and > widespread disillusionment with the Democratic Party. The new members have > brought fresh life and vital new perspectives to the group, allowing it to > shake off whatever vestiges of Zionism remained among members, particularly > that handful who still believed in the ethnically exclusive “socialism” of > the kibbutzim. For the new generation of DSA members, supporting the > Palestinian civil society boycott of Israel made more sense than seeking > common ground with liberal-left Israeli parties like Meretz or Labor whose > leadership had thrown their weight behind Israel’s past three wars on the > Gaza Strip. > > The question of how to respond to Israel has long been an issue that > divided DSA members. The breakdown among the ranks went something like > this: certain members (usually older), tried to reconcile socialism with > Zionism by condemning the Israeli right while ignoring the many human > rights abuses carried out by so-called leftists in the name of engineering > a demographic majority for Jews in Palestine. Other members (usually > younger), supported BDS unequivocally, recognizing it as the latest > manifestation of a time-tested means of nonviolent protest and the most > powerful force to combat Israeli apartheid in the 21st century. These > contradictory stances led to some interorganizational disputes, but without > a vote on the official stance, determining how many people believed what, > and what they thought DSA should do about it, remained a challenge. > > *Support from France’s Mélenchon and a direct challenge to Democrats* > > Chip Gibbons joined DSA earlier this year after being involved in BDS > activism since 2007. An architect of the BDS resolution, he sees Palestine > solidarity as an essential component of the socialist tradition of > internationalism. > > Gibbons told me that a representative of La France Insoumise, the party of > French leftist presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, commended the > delegates after they passed the measure. > > The text’s other main author, Delé Balogun from DSA’s North Chicago > chapter, saw Israel’s occupation up close when he joined the African > Heritage Delegation to Palestine, a special trip to Israel-Palestine aimed > at fostering Black solidarity for the Palestinian struggle. At this past > weekend’s convention, Balogun was elected to the 16-person National > Political Committee, DSA’s primary governing body. > Report Advertisement > > > DSA’s resolution arrives at a crucial moment for the BDS movement. > Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland recently introduced a bill > called > the Israel Anti-Boycott Act that would make boycotting Israel a felony > punishable by up to a $1 million fine or 20 years in prison. After a major > public backlash, Cardin amended the bill so it would not apply to > individuals and would not apply criminal penalties to violators, but the > language remains disturbingly vague. > > The DSA resolution took direct aim at Cardin, declaring that “DSA strongly > opposes the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which would make it a felony to > advocate or support boycotts targeting Israel, as well as all similar > legislation at the state and local levels.” With this statement, DSA has > recorded its formal objection to the reactionary brand of hate speech laws > that have already led to the arrests > and > convictions of BDS activists in France. > > *Rising anti-imperialism in DSA’s**ranks* > > Though DSA has come under fire from some quarters for its perceived > indifference to imperialism, the organization’s critics may surprised to > learn that over 90% of the delegates voted for the BDS resolution on > Saturday morning. The 700 delegates’ votes, representing 42 local and > statewide chapters, were so close to unanimous than an official tally > wasn’t necessary. > > “Those who struggle against oppression and for equality will always have > our support,” said DSA Deputy National Director David Duhalde in an > official statement. “Just as we answered the call to boycott South Africa > during apartheid, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.” > Rawan Tayoon, a Palestinian activist with DSA’s youth wing (known as Young > Democratic Socialists, or YDS), added, “Democratic socialists aren’t afraid > to challenge the status quo and demand what’s right. We stand against > imperialism, we stand against racism, and so we must stand against Israeli > apartheid and occupation.” > > An informal group within DSA calling itself Democratic Socialists for > Justice in Palestine workshopped and revised the text multiple times in > order to maximize the impact of the statement and ensure that it > represented the spirit of democratic socialism. Olivia Katbi Smith, a > Portland delegate and member of the group, felt a sense of urgency in > drafting the document: “As an Arab woman and a democratic socialist, it was > incredibly important to me that the BDS resolution passed, especially in > the face of the disgusting anti-BDS legislation that's currently being > pushed nationally.” She saw the vote as a chance for DSA members to > participate in campaigns with concrete goals and demonstrated successes—an > opportunity to go beyond moral symbolism and performative politics. > > “Frankly this organization should have endorsed BDS a decade ago,” says > Smith, reflecting the mood of many longtime DSA members. “As socialists we > have a responsibility to side with the oppressed and commit to their > unconditional liberation, and it's about time that DSA takes a public stand > in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters.” > > Rob Bryan is a journalist who has written for Jacobin and Mondoweiss among > other publications. Follow him on Twitter at @rbryan86 > > _______________________________________________ > Peace mailing list > Peace at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 31 17:59:23 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 17:59:23 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Joke of the Day: Daily "Illini" Editorial Condemns "Bigotry" But Supports Illiniwak and St. Patrick's Day Bar Crawls Message-ID: · 34439_a4michael_zhang_cartoonf.jpg Share on Facebook Image Posted: February 12, 2012 - 9:33 PM Updated: February 12, 2012 - 9:34 PM [a4michael_zhang_cartoon] Michael Zhang The Daily Illini [http://www.dailyillini.com/media/00/00/03/45/34583_di02172012page001p.png] · News o Campus o Champaign-Urbana o Illinois o U.S. o World · Opinions o Editorial Cartoons o Editorials o Letters to the Editor o Submit a Letter · Features o Business & Technology o Health & Living o Greeks & Campus o Beardo o Marco and Marty o Cynicism · Sports o Baseball o Men's Basketball o Women's Basketball o Cheerleading o Men's Cross Country o Women's Cross Country o Football o Men's Golf o Women's Golf o Women's Gymnastics o Men's Gymnastics o Hockey o Soccer o Softball o Volleyball o Women's Swimming o Men's Tennis o Women's Tennis o Men's Track & Field o Women's Track & Field o Wrestling o Pro Sports · Multimedia o Photo o Video o Audio o Interactive · On-Air o Illini Drive @ 5 o Standing Room Only o The Week that Was · Blogs o Behind the Headlines o CU in the News o DI Sports Wrap-Up o Different Perspectives o On the Town o Pass It On o Touchdown Tidbits · Classifieds · Apartment Search · Special Sections o New Student Guide · About Us · Donate · Contact Us · Editorial Staff · Print Schedule · Reprint Requests · Site News · Get Daily Illini Merch · Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Ethics Code · [Build Your Brand] o Advertise with Us · E-mail News · RSS Feeds · Twitter · Podcasts · Digital Archives · Mobile · Buy Photos © 2012 Illini Media Powered by Detroit Softworks [X] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: image011.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 6866 bytes Desc: image011.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Aug 31 17:59:23 2017 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 17:59:23 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Joke of the Day: Daily "Illini" Editorial Condemns "Bigotry" But Supports Illiniwak and St. Patrick's Day Bar Crawls Message-ID: · 34439_a4michael_zhang_cartoonf.jpg Share on Facebook Image Posted: February 12, 2012 - 9:33 PM Updated: February 12, 2012 - 9:34 PM [a4michael_zhang_cartoon] Michael Zhang The Daily Illini [http://www.dailyillini.com/media/00/00/03/45/34583_di02172012page001p.png] · News o Campus o Champaign-Urbana o Illinois o U.S. o World · Opinions o Editorial Cartoons o Editorials o Letters to the Editor o Submit a Letter · Features o Business & Technology o Health & Living o Greeks & Campus o Beardo o Marco and Marty o Cynicism · Sports o Baseball o Men's Basketball o Women's Basketball o Cheerleading o Men's Cross Country o Women's Cross Country o Football o Men's Golf o Women's Golf o Women's Gymnastics o Men's Gymnastics o Hockey o Soccer o Softball o Volleyball o Women's Swimming o Men's Tennis o Women's Tennis o Men's Track & Field o Women's Track & Field o Wrestling o Pro Sports · Multimedia o Photo o Video o Audio o Interactive · On-Air o Illini Drive @ 5 o Standing Room Only o The Week that Was · Blogs o Behind the Headlines o CU in the News o DI Sports Wrap-Up o Different Perspectives o On the Town o Pass It On o Touchdown Tidbits · Classifieds · Apartment Search · Special Sections o New Student Guide · About Us · Donate · Contact Us · Editorial Staff · Print Schedule · Reprint Requests · Site News · Get Daily Illini Merch · Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Ethics Code · [Build Your Brand] o Advertise with Us · E-mail News · RSS Feeds · Twitter · Podcasts · Digital Archives · Mobile · Buy Photos © 2012 Illini Media Powered by Detroit Softworks [X] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 43 bytes Desc: image001.gif URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image009.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 198001 bytes Desc: image009.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image010.png Type: image/png Size: 183473 bytes Desc: image010.png URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image011.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 6866 bytes Desc: image011.jpg URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 31 19:39:45 2017 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 19:39:45 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Anti-war Teach In Message-ID: Rich Is there any chance Paula will accompany you here on September 23rd? If so, is there any chance Paula would be willing to speak on any topic of her choice? The fact that I organized this event, with no women on the panel, has some of the men, who have been attacked by feminists in the past, insisting I take a more prominent role. I would much rather stay in the background doing as I am. There are no women that I know in Champaign, who can speak on anti-war, that I would ask to be on the panel. The few that I know are not able to speak for various reasons. Paula is terrific, what do you think, would she?