From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Feb 1 03:22:01 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2018 21:22:01 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The 1% front group MoveOn References: <231423c-305c4-5a7281ee@list.moveon.org> Message-ID: <2B1BEAD2-7D05-420C-9480-9D7B706935B2@gmail.com> MoveOn has been from its beginning a facade for the political establishment (neocons, neolibs, the 'intelligence community,’ the Rep & Dem leadership, the Clinton campaign, etc.) - a front for the one-percent and their pro-war and pro-Wall Street policies. ‘Russiagate’ is the hysterical invention of that establishment. ============================ > Remove Representative Devin Nunes > Rep. Nunes must be removed from participating in the Russia investigation, so we can get the answers we deserve. > Sign Aimee's petition > > Dear MoveOn member, > > The FBI just challenged the accuracy of the so-called "Nunes memo"—a document that was drafted at the direction of the House Intelligence Committee's GOP chairman and Trump crony, Rep. Devin Nunes.1 > > This memo is just the latest in a long string of attempts by Republicans in Congress to undermine and smear Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Donald Trump and his team's connection to Russian efforts to meddle in U.S. elections. > > Rep. Nunes' attacks on the integrity of the Mueller investigation are a shameful partisan stunt. Click here to sign and share my petition pressuring Speaker Paul Ryan to remove Nunes from participating in the Russia investigation completely. > > We can't allow Rep. Nunes to continue spreading unfounded innuendo about the Russia probe to undermine its credibility. Last year, Rep. Nunes had said he'd remove himself from this investigation due to conflicts of interest, but instead has sought to misdirect the committee's investigation and disrupt Mueller's work. > > Click here to add your name to this petition, and then pass it along to your friends. > > Thanks! > > –Aimee Martinez, Common Cause > > Source: > > 1. "FBI raises 'grave concerns' about GOP intelligence memo, warns against its release," Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2018 > https://act.moveon.org/go/32726?t=18&akid=198084%2E36782652%2E2_jszZ > > You're receiving this petition because we thought it might interest you. It was created on MoveOn.org, where anyone can start their own online petitions. You can start your own petition here. > > > > Want to support our work? The MoveOn community will work every moment, day by day and year by year, to resist Trump's agenda, contain the damage, defeat hate with love, and begin the process of swinging the nation's pendulum back toward sanity, decency, and the kind of future that we must never give up on. And to do it we need your ongoing support, now more than ever. Will you stand with us? > > > Yes, I'll chip in $5 a month. > > No, I'm sorry, I can't make a monthly donation. > > > > > Contributions to MoveOn.org Civic Action are not tax deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. This email was sent to C Estabrook on February 1st, 2018. To change your email address or update your contact info, click here. To remove yourself from this list, click here. > > From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Feb 1 10:46:41 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 04:46:41 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: walt, ray, and bob -- 2/01/18 References: <1129926342692.1101151826392.130243.0.390332JL.2002@scheduler.constantcontact.com> Message-ID: <3D79B640-6EC6-488A-994E-1FFF3BC130FD@gmail.com> > > > > > > > Today's encore selection -- from These United States: A Nation in the Making 1890 to the Present by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue. In the early 1930s, the U.S. economy contracted by a draconian 20 percent, and unemployment reached as high as 25 percent. In this economic carnage, the federal government began to enact programs to try and overcome the adversity with controversial programs that had mixed and limited success. But there were successes. One program was a jobs program called the Civilian Conservation Corps, an effort that yielded some surprising stories: > > "Nineteen-year-old Walt's muscles ached from felling trees to clear a break for the fires raging up on Dead Horse Ridge. As he read his camp newspaper, Happy Days, and dug into the free lunch in the mess tent, he marveled at the thirty pounds he had gained in a few short months. The weight gain filled out his face, oddly haggard for a teenager. In Montana, he climbed Glacier Park's mountains and cut through undergrowth in Flathead National Forest. Sometimes he planted trees. Sometimes he cut them down. He carved out trails that snaked up the Rockies and built fire lookout rowers. He learned to love the outdoors, the food, and the work. Like most boys of his gener­ation, Walt had been hustling for as long as he could remember. When he graduated from high school in New York in 1934, there were no jobs. He joined the federal government's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), where a young man could put a canvas roof over his head, eat three meals a day, make $30 a month, and send $25 of it home to his family. The con­trast between the streets of New York and the trails of Montana could not have been starker. > > > "Unlike Walt, Ray didn't bother to finish high school in California before joining the CCC. He knew that a diploma didn't count for much when there was no work available. His single mom's music store had gone bankrupt. When the tall and rather austere teenager was sixteen, the CCC taught him the 'meaning of hard work, the joy of a job well done, while being paid for it.' Like Walt, Ray gained weight and his body became 'hardened ... and [his] sense of self-respect returned.' He learned carpen­try and construction techniques and built a fire tower and bridges on Mount Shasta. 'Mostly, I learned about this great country of ours,' Ray recalled. > > "Bob chose to join the CCC because he had run out of choices. The son of a Norwegian immigrant widow living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, by the time he was fifteen he had been thrown out of three schools in three states. He took to the road, hoboed around the country, and ended up digging ditches for the CCC. Bob may not have lived in the glorious wilderness that Walt experienced or developed the deep love for America that Ray did, but his enlistment in the CCC probably kept him out of jail. One Chicago judge reckoned that the CCC had accounted for a more than 50 percent drop in juvenile crime in his city. And the CCC changed Bob's life too, since his stint landed him in California, where he turned his smoldering good looks and bad boy persona into a career. > > "Civilian Conservation Corps workers Walt, Ray, and Bob -- Walter Matthau, Raymond Burr, and Robert Mitchum -- became three of Holly­wood's biggest stars. The CCC saved a generation of young men -- it repre­sented the New Deal's effort to put Americans back to work." > > To subscribe, please click here or text "nonfiction" to 22828. > > These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present > Author: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue > Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company > Copyright 2015 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue > Pages: 165-166 > > If you wish to read further: Click for Purchase Options > > > > > > All delanceyplace profits are donated to charity and support children's literacy projects. > > > > About Us > > Delanceyplace.com is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy. > > > > Delanceyplace.com , 1735 Market Street, Suite 3750, Philadelphia, PA 19104 > SafeUnsubscribe™ galliher at illinois.edu > Forward this email | Update Profile | About our service provider > Sent by daily at delanceyplace.com in collaboration with > > Try it free today -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 1 15:59:36 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 15:59:36 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Proposed Corporate Health Insurance In-Reply-To: <16151dcc42e-1728-1599c5@webjas-vab154.srv.aolmail.net> References: <16151dcc42e-1728-1599c5@webjas-vab154.srv.aolmail.net> Message-ID: Midge David Green’s statement below, nails it, as does the WSWS.ORG. My reason for posting their articles, they are the most timely to analyze new trends, statements, actions by the 1%, and neoliberals. They detail the action, narrative, and analyze. Yes, they utilize rhetoric that may offend some, but they are clear, precise and accurate. -----Original Message----- From: Mildred O'brien > To: davegreen84 >; davidjohnson1451 >; karenaram >; cgestabrook > Sent: Thu, Feb 1, 2018 8:51 am Subject: Proposed Corporate Health Insurance I was just about to ask your opinions about this proposal by the Masters of Greed how you think this would affect the Single Payer/Universal Healthcare movement politically? It must have been deliberated by the Big Three for some time, but just unleashed to MSM yesterday. It's surprising that Buffett, who until recently has publicly favored Single Payer (or so he said) would throw his hat/dough into this ring, which would be nonetheless win-win for them. Unfortunately it probably would have immediate support from the Ryan-McConnell Congress but also Schumer et al. It will be interesting to see how the Sanders people and Healthcare for All etc will react. Midge -----Original Message----- From: David Green via Peace-discuss > To: Peace-discuss List > Sent: Wed, Jan 31, 2018 4:13 pm Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Health care Just in case it isn't clear, the oligarchs of non-healthcare corporations want to decrease the profits of healthcare corporations, shifting those profits into their own pockets; that is increasing their own profits by decreasing what they pay for their employees' healthcare. Some portion of the $3.3 trillion spent on healthcare nationally will become additional surplus value to be appropriated to Bezos, Buffett, Dimon, etc., thus increasing their wealth and the wealth of the 1% who own most of the remaining stock in these corporations. That saving will not go to better healthcare, and may indeed provide justification for Medicare/Medicaid cutbacks. On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎January‎ ‎31‎, ‎2018‎ ‎01‎:‎43‎:‎24‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: * Print * Leaflet * Feedback * Share » Corporate giants announce partnership to cut employer health care costs By Barry Grey WSWS.ORG 31 January 2018 Three of the biggest corporations in the world—Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase—sent shockwaves through the US health care industry Tuesday with a joint announcement of plans to form a company dedicated to cutting employer health care costs. The press release issued by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Berkshire head Warren Buffett and JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon provided few details beyond a general goal of utilizing advanced technology to slash the cost of providing health care for the firms’ combined US work force of over 1 million. However, Dimon, who heads America’s biggest bank, hinted that their ambitions went beyond their own employees when he said, “Our goal is to create solutions that benefit our US employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans.” The initiative heralds a further monopolization of health care by a handful of billionaire-run corporations and a further subordination of social needs to Wall Street. Health care in the US is a $3.3 trillion industry that accounts for 18 percent of the American economy. Whoever controls it stands to pocket untold billions in personal wealth. Despite the companies’ talk of improving the availability and quality of health care for workers, the initiative announced Tuesday signals a further rationing of care for the working class. Its overriding purpose is to cut business costs and increase profitability, and that means restricting further the access of workers to quality care. Even before Tuesday’s announcement, the monopolization of health care in the US was accelerating, encouraged by the market-based “reform” enacted by the Obama administration in the form of “Obamacare.” According to the Healthcare Financial Management Association, the pace of consolidation doubled between 2011 and 2015. Last year saw a wave of hospital mergers, the largest of which combined Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives, uniting their 139 hospitals and 700 care sites across 28 states. A number of major mergers of health insurers and pharmacy companies were announced, topped off by the $69 billion purchase of insurance giant Aetna by the CVS drug store chain. But the sheer wealth, power and weight of the three firms involved in Tuesday’s announcement constitute a threat to the industry’s middlemen, from insurers and pharmacies to benefits managers. The new entity could eventually negotiate directly with drug makers, hospitals and doctors, undercutting the more traditional industry behemoths. As a result, the announcement triggered panic selling of shares of major health insurance and pharmacy firms, which in turn sparked a broader selloff on US markets on Tuesday. At the close of trading, CVS was down 4.11 percent, Walgreens had lost 5.16 percent and UnitedHealth Group suffered a drop of 4.35 percent. The Dow fell 362.6 points, or 1.4 percent, after falling 177.2 points on Monday, bringing its two-day loss to 540 points. This was the biggest two-day loss for the Dow since June 2016. The Standard & Poor’s 500 and Nasdaq indexes also declined sharply. The executives chosen by Bezos, Buffett and Dimon to head up the new venture underscore the dominant role of financial capital in the further private carve-up of the health care system. Amazon named Beth Gialetti, a senior vice president who had served as FedEx’s vice president for planning. Berkshire named investment banker Todd Combs, who was a hedge fund manager before joining Buffett’s firm. JPMorgan chose Marvelle Sullivan Berchtold, the global head of mergers and acquisitions at drug maker Novartis before joining JPMorgan last year. The sheer size of the three firms points to the increasing stranglehold of oligopolistic entities over society. Amazon has 542,000 employees around the world. Berkshire Hathaway employs 367,000 and JPMorgan Chase has more than 240,000 employees. These are corporations that have overseen massive attacks on working class living standards. Dimon was fully implicated in the criminal machinations on Wall Street that led to the financial crash of 2008 and has been named in a series of financial swindles since then. Bezos has made his fortune by running the world’s biggest sweatshop operation, subjecting workers in his distribution centers to backbreaking labor at poverty wages. The combined market capitalization of the three companies is $1.61 trillion, a sum larger than the gross domestic product of Spain ($1.2 trillion). Bezos, with a net worth of $115.6 billion, is the world’s richest person. Buffett, with $93.2 billion, ranks second. Dimon, despite an annual salary of $28 million, is a piker compared to his new partners, with net holdings of “only” $1.26 billion. The combined wealth of Bezos and Buffett alone ($210 billion) is almost twice the combined fiscal year 2018 budget levels proposed by the Trump administration for the departments of education, housing and labor. While the three CEOs in their joint press release said they had as yet no concrete policy proposals for their new company, some business commentators speculated as to the likely approach that would be taken. The New York Times spoke of a “wider use of telemedicine and virtual doctor visits,” and telemedicine companies saw a rise in their stock price. Bloomberg posted an opinion piece stating: “The one thing we can say, however, is that if it succeeds, its success may help usher in an era of even tighter employer control over employees’ lives… There are probably considerable savings to be had if employers use their power to guide employees toward better decisions about everything from ER use to smoking. “But one big reason that our health care system is such an expensive mess is that Americans hate being told what to do. They demand maximal, expensive freedom of choice about their health care. They rebel if they can’t get it. Worse still, if they are denied it, they call their legislators, who do things like telling insurers to stop denying so many claims for experimental treatments of dubious worth.” Another Bloomberg piece declared bluntly, “The most effective way to reduce health care costs is to restrict choice.” Trump economic adviser and former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, who played a central role in drawing up Trump’s multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich, endorsed the Amazon, Berkshire, JPMorgan plan on Tuesday. “We’re doing the same thing here at the White House,” he said. In his statement to the press, Buffett declared that growing health care costs “act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.” This is a completely false and self-serving presentation of the situation. The tapeworm is not an excess of money spent to provide health care for the population—although the existing corporate-dominated system is rife with corruption and profit-gouging. Rather, it is the financial oligarchy that rules over economic and political life under capitalism, of which the three CEOs are a part. The diversion of ever more obscene amounts of money and resources into the bank accounts of a parasitic elite, made possible by private ownership of the health care industry and all of the economic levers of society, makes any rational and humane approach to social needs, including health care, impossible. The essential step in solving the health care crisis and providing quality care for all is the expropriation of the fortunes of oligarchs like Bezos, Buffett and Dimon and the transformation of the banks and large corporations into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities—that is, a struggle by the working class to put an end to capitalism and establish socialism. [http://www.wsws.org/en/media/photos/legacy/frontpage/amazon-newsletter490.png] Fight Google's censorship! Google is blocking the World Socialist Web Sitefrom search results. To fight this blacklisting: Share this article with friends and coworkers * Facebook * Twitter * E-Mail * Reddit Commenting Discussion Rules » _______________________________________________ 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 Thu Feb 1 16:13:14 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 16:13:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: CALL TO ACTION! References: Message-ID: From: Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases > Subject: CALL TO ACTION! Date: February 1, 2018 at 06:55:57 PST Reply-To: Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases > View this email in your browser [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ccd625b69dbee766fcef0d707/images/96c99095-0a03-4303-856d-db04adbf86f1.jpg] THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR GENEROUS SUPPORT OF OUR CONFERENCE IN BALTIMORE NOW IT IS TIME TO ORGANIZE! PLEASE RSVP FOR THE FEBRUARY 3rd, 3:00 - 4:30 PM, CONFERENCE CALL FOR PLANNING OUR NATIONAL DAY OF ANTI-WAR ACTION Dear Friends, Please accept our most sincere thanks for your invaluable support of the Coalition and our most successful Conference Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases in Baltimore. We hope to benefit from your continued support in our future activities as well. The conference, endorsed by more than 40 national and international organizations, was attended by 200 people and viewed live by at least 13,000 viewers in the U.S. and around the world. The videos of the 3-day conference are available on our web site: NoForeignBases.org for those of you who may not have been able to attend the Conference or watch it online. As you are well aware, at the Conference we collectively adopted three important resolutions and issued a statement in support of Hiroji Yamashiro and other arrested anti-bases activists in Okinawa. Now we asking all of you to help us take concrete steps toward implementation of these resolutions: 1. With regard to our Resolution against Guantanamo, we are asking you and your organization to organize an action, in any form that is appropriate for you, on or around February 23rd. Please send us information about your planned actions ASAP so we can publicize them for you on our web site. 2. On the Resolution for a National Day of Anti-War action in Spring, we are setting up a conference call for all organizations that would like to participate in planning and organizing our collective Spring Action. This Conference call will be on February 3rd, at 3:00 - 4:30 PM. We have set up an RSVP form on our web site for your organization to register for and participate in the Call. Due to shortness of time, please RSVP for the call as soon as possible. 3. As to our upcoming Global Conference Against U.S./NATO Bases, we are happy to inform you that Peace & Neutrality Alliance (PANA) in Ireland has generously agreed to to host our Global Conference in Ireland. We are discussing the details with PANA and will inform you about the details as soon as they are available. 4. Thanks to our dear activist friends of Okinawa Peace Appeal in New York City area, our statement in support of Hiroji and other arrested Okinawa activists was translated into Japanese and distributed widely among anti-bases activists and the media in Okinawa and around the world. We were honored to receive a photo of Hiroji and his wife holding the Japanese translation of our statement in front of Camp Schwab in Okinawa. [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ccd625b69dbee766fcef0d707/images/75f96878-a3c6-4886-95d9-95a4c80cc570.png] We thank all of you again and are looking forward to a closer working relationship with you as our common struggle for peace and justice continues. Yours in Peace, Coordinating Committee, Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases NoForeignBases.org [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-twitter-48.png] [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-facebook-48.png] [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-link-48.png] Copyright © 2018 Gabbard Petition, All rights reserved. Recipients' email addresses have been obtained from the Congress members' office. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. [Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 1 16:23:58 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 16:23:58 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Black Agenda Report, on Intersectionality, or neoliberalism Part 2 Message-ID: [Black Agenda Report] Black Agenda Report News, commentary and analysis from the black left. Donate ________________________________ * Home * Africa * African America * Cartoon * Education * Environment * International * Media and Culture * Political Economy * Radio * US Politics * War and Empire ________________________________ Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism, Part 2 Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor 01 Feb 2018 [https://blackagendareport.com/themes/newsclick/assets/images/facebook.png] [https://blackagendareport.com/themes/newsclick/assets/images/twitter.png] [https://blackagendareport.com/themes/newsclick/assets/images/mail.png] [intersectionality 2] This week we take a longer look down the deep hole that is the most popular flavor of intersectionality. When I took a swipe at intersectionality last week, declaring that it was a hole, that afro-pessimism was a shovel and it was high time to stop digging, some friends and comrades were displeased. As far as they were concerned, questioning intersectionality amounted to a frontal attack on the place of women in the struggle against capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire, utterly inconsistent with my own politics and that of Black Agenda Report. I also threw some rocks at afro-pessimism, which I labeled the nappy headed step child of intersectionality, to the disappointment of its defenders, some of them friends and comrades too. Additionally neither group admits to understanding why I lumped them together, so I’m taking this opportunity to clarify both critiques and what joins them. "The second intersectionality according to Smith, is rooted in post-structuralism which categorically rejects socialism and class analysis..." Intersectionality is a termed coined by California law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 in her attempt to convince her fellow officers of the court to refine anti-discrimination law by incorporating the recognition of multiple overlapping oppressions into anti-discrimination law. While the term hasn’t made much headway the last three decades in the arguments of lawyers or the decisions of judges, it’s become a pervasive buzzword with multiple meanings in the realms of politics and the nonprofit industrial complex. Nowadays, and perhaps from the start, as Sharon Smith explains in an indispensable August 2017 Socialist Worker article titled “A Marxist Case for Intersectionality ,” there are two separate, distinct and mutually incompatible intersectionalities. The first, she says is firmly in the camp of the real left, those who oppose and aim to overthrow capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire – not two or three out of four but all four. This tradition, which puts intersectionality in the context of class analysis and class struggle goes back at least to Claudia Jones in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and the Cohambee River Collective in the 1970s, although neither of these ever heard or uttered the word “intersectional.” The second intersectionality according to Smith, is rooted in post-structuralism which categorically rejects socialism and class analysis, and either downgrades the importance of class struggle at most to something coequal in importance with ageism, ableism and speciesism. With no anchor in class struggle, and emphasizing the oppressed experience of individuals and non-class groups this kind of intersectionalism acts to perpetuate the division of the US left and wannabe left into squabbling constituency groups vying for attention, funding and acknowledgement of whose cause is the most righteous. With neither the means nor the inclination to contend for power, this intersectionalist emphasis on individual experience and deeds has given rise to atrocities like callout culture . Unfortunately this second version of intersectionality is nearly hegemonic among self defined radicals and even liberals in the academy. Since it’s vigorously promoted by sectors of corporate media and the funders of the nonprofit industrial complex, it’s likely to remain so for the forseeable future. Worse still, since class conscious and class oriented formations neither dominate or even figure prominently in the US left, the class struggle intersectionalists are seriously handicapped at playing the game they say they want to play. Add top this the fact that some left feminists doggedly insist on using the same name for themselves as the anti-socialist, anti-class struggle intersectionalists who have a far broader reach and bigger microphones, and we have what can only be described as a hot mess. "...the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric to deceive the unwary..." Zoologists identify about a hundred species of birds they call brood parasites . A brood parasite lays its egg in the nest of a host species, and it counts on fooling the host mom into hatching, feeding and raising the hostile alien offspring. Evolution has engineered the parasite chick to out-eat, out-compete or simply butcher its nest mates. The parasite chicks often grow bigger than both parents put together while still being fed in the nest. In the context of the real left, the community of those aiming to overthrow capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire – not two or three out of four but all four, the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric and branding to deceive the unwary and ensnare many bright, serious and sincere leftists into defending and promoting its fundamentally hostile project. Melissa Harris-Perry was lauded as a leading intersectionlist at the same time she aggressively defended the government’s right to intercept and record every email, text message, phone call and electronic brain fart on the planet and store them for future inspection. Democracy Now, which has given more air time to intersectionality than perhaps anybody refused to cover the lynching and ethnic cleansing of black Libyans during Obama’s 2012 war on that unhappy country even though they had a correspondent on the ground. To this day DemocracyNow dependably spouts US propaganda justifying Obama’s and Trump’s war on Syria. Angela Davis gets credit for being a leading proponent of intersectionality too, even though like hordes of other intersectionalists, she lost her mind over Barack Obama. All these people are examples of intersectionalists, with bigger audiences and far more visibility than left feminists are likely to achieve any time soon. When bona fide left feminists defend the word intersectionality and call themselves intersectional they confuse the lazy, the naive or unwary, they surrender their own credibility to the anti-socialist intersectionalists, and they provide protective cover to the eggs of these brood parasites. It doesn’t have to work that way. In the natural world brood parasites have been around for millions of years, long enough for hosts to evolve defenses against them. Birds defensively mark their eggs and their chicks to distinguish them from hostile parasites. Sometimes they stand watch to sound the alarm at the presence of intruders and strange eggs, and more. These are lessons left feminists might do well to emulate. You defeat a brood parasite not by adopting its name, but by making it easier, not harder to distinguish the parasite from the real thing. Real left feminists will never get as many professorships, grants, media outlets and TED Talks as the anti-socialist intersectionalists. They invented the term anyway, for their own reasons not yours. Get over it. The real left can't get intersectionality back and there was never a time when they had exclusive possession of it anyhow. Claudia Jones and the Cohambee comrades made themselves perfectly well understood without it. There’s no shortage of sharp, erudite left feminists who can if they want, come up with some new terminology that will allow ordinary people to distinguish between the anti-socialist intersectionalist project and authentic left feminism without a six paragraph discourse on postmoderism and post-structuralism. We cannot wait on natural selection to take care of this for us. At the risk of being that cis het guy who offers unsolicited advice to woman comrades, I respectfully suggest this is something that needs to happen real soon. "Like the dominant version of intersectionality afro-pessimism is pretty explicitly anti-socialist and anti-class struggle..." I said last week that afro pessimism was a stepchild of intersectionality. Like the dominant version of intersectionality afro-pessimism is pretty explicitly anti-socialist and anti-class struggle. It’s about centering (the woke intersectional word for putting something first and last and ignoring all else) the totality of anti-blackness, the permanent war against black bodies, black aspirations, black lives, black livelihoods and black dreams. Sounds a lot like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Like intersectionality afro-pessimism is not a theory. Like intersectionality, it only describes and does not explain. Like the prevailing flavor of intersectionality, it enjoys considerable support in the academy and mimics enough “woke” rhetoric to deceive the unwary into imagining afro-pessimism is some new kind of emancipatory project, that it prescribes or informs solutions and strategies to tackle real world stuff, even though its foremost proponent Frank Wilderson says it does not. The only instance where afro pessimism seems to have anything prescriptive to say about how struggle ought to be conducted in the real world is afro-pessisms’s consistent disparagement of the possibility of achieving anything in coalition with anybody who ain’t black. It’s never worked before, the afro-pessimists say, trotting out a long historical list of times and places white “allies” turned tail and defected from the cause of their black compatriots. But since in just about every instance neither the fickle white allies nor the black formations in question were class-based, class oriented or led by the working class it’s hard to see how things could have turned out differently. It’s a problem the Green Party, which I’m part of, has to this day. If the state, the media and the so-called economy are contraptions a particular class uses to rule the rest of us, how do you contend for power when you don’t have a class analysis, or even recognize the importance of class? Nobody can be a dependable ally, a steady rock on either side of an alliance contending for power without a class analysis and an understanding of how power is exercised. Clearly, the afro-pessimist injunction against working with non-blacks is a prescription for impotence. People of African descent are 13% of the US population. Slavery didn’t end until the political moment when a plurality of white people sided with blacks to end it. Reconstruction folded only when that plurality was shrunken, disarmed and shattered. Jim Crow also ended at the political moment that a plurality of whites took the same side as blacks to kill it. But afro-pessimists, even the ones who talk about reparations, rule coalitions off the table period exclamation point. How they plan to achieve that without cultivating and working with non-black political partners is anybody’s guess. But I misspoke-- Afro-pessimists do not plan. They engage, they propose, they put on a show making the point that nobody is or ever was as oppressed as they are, all in the same self-involved spirit of post structuralist intersectionality. Their shtick isn’t even unique; there’s a queer pessimist discourse that sounds a lot like Frank Wilderson or Ta-Nehisi Coates on whatever drug is the opposite of speed. Tellingly there was no queer pessimism in the early 1980s, when gay men (and even greater numbers of straight black women) were dying like flies from then untreatable HIV-AIDS. People were too busy fighting for their lives then, just as our own ancestors in the 1950s, the 40s, and prior decades had no time for anything like afro-pessimism when Africans in America could be lynched with impunity and Jim Crow was an everyday reality. Queer pessimism only emerged after drug therapies enabled people to live decades with HIV-AIDS. Similarly afro-pessimism only surfaced after enough black faces got comfy spots in the academy. A few years ago a young comrade in school somewhere told me his professor was insisting that Europeans colonized Africa and maybe the Americas too not because they wanted land, slaves, gold and empire, but because they feared and/or envied the sexual potency of all those outa control black bodies. After I stopped laughing, I assured my young friend this was errant nonsense and I didn’t think about it any more. Now I know this is part of a concept Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson and other afro-pessimist academics call, presumably with straight faces, “libidinal economy .” Ta Nehisi Coates has fashioned a lucrative and prestigious career out of that stuff, although I doubt he would call himself an afro-pessimist. Nice work if you can get it. I really believe the afro-pessimist shtick is about one-upping Coates. It’s working well for him, maybe it will work for them too. Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and co-chair of the GA Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)georgiagreenparty.org. He has to be reminded to answer Twitter messages @brucedixon, but he’s getting better at it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 1 17:06:47 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 17:06:47 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Statement on FB in relation to Robt. Parry Message-ID: Sam Husseini Yesterday at 7:38am · Interesting note from international lawyer Francis Boyle regarding the recently deceased Robert Parry: For what it is worth, I was down in Nicaragua in the Fall of 1985 with Ramsey Clark and Len Weinglass—RIP—to investigate Contra atrocities and try to help them out. Things were pretty grim. It looked like Reagan was about to invade Nicaragua despite our opposition to the contrary in the Pledge of Resistance Campaign for which I served as Counsel. I asked the Nicaraguans how they were going to defend themselves when Reagan invaded. It would have been another Vietnam. As we were leaving they hosted a little party for us where they saluted us for going to jail when Reagan invaded. It was a little eerie toasting your own impending incarceration. Then all of a sudden out of nowhere the Iran-Contra Scandal broke out. It was a Deus ex machina for the Nicaraguans and for us Americans avoiding another Vietnam. Reagan was dead in the water. There would be no invasion of Nicaragua. We owe that to Bob Parry. RIP A comment made by: Kelley Patrick Gerling: "Boyle is a legal blessing. To understand how conservative our constitutional system is, imaging the impossibility of presidential nomination and Senate confirmation of Francis Boyle, Glenn Greenwald or Noam Chomsky to the Supreme Court. They are progressives. There are none remotely like them in generations, perhaps since Robert Jackson.” -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 1 17:12:47 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 17:12:47 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Statement on FB in relation to Robt. Parry In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: And this too: And as we also know, Oliver North had already drawn up a Presidential Order for Reagan to put the entire Country under Marshall Law in the event the 100,000 Members of The Pledge of Resistance came out into the streets in order to protest and engage in civil resistance as they had pledged to do after Reagan’s invasion of Nicaragua. Bob’s expose prevented Reagan from imposing a police state and military dictatorship upon us all. We Americans owe that to Bob too. RIP. 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: Thursday, February 1, 2018 11:07 AM To: Peace-discuss List Cc: Boyle, Francis A Subject: Statement on FB in relation to Robt. Parry Sam Husseini Yesterday at 7:38am · Interesting note from international lawyer Francis Boyle regarding the recently deceased Robert Parry: For what it is worth, I was down in Nicaragua in the Fall of 1985 with Ramsey Clark and Len Weinglass—RIP—to investigate Contra atrocities and try to help them out. Things were pretty grim. It looked like Reagan was about to invade Nicaragua despite our opposition to the contrary in the Pledge of Resistance Campaign for which I served as Counsel. I asked the Nicaraguans how they were going to defend themselves when Reagan invaded. It would have been another Vietnam. As we were leaving they hosted a little party for us where they saluted us for going to jail when Reagan invaded. It was a little eerie toasting your own impending incarceration. Then all of a sudden out of nowhere the Iran-Contra Scandal broke out. It was a Deus ex machina for the Nicaraguans and for us Americans avoiding another Vietnam. Reagan was dead in the water. There would be no invasion of Nicaragua. We owe that to Bob Parry. RIP A comment made by: Kelley Patrick Gerling: "Boyle is a legal blessing. To understand how conservative our constitutional system is, imaging the impossibility of presidential nomination and Senate confirmation of Francis Boyle, Glenn Greenwald or Noam Chomsky to the Supreme Court. They are progressives. There are none remotely like them in generations, perhaps since Robert Jackson.” -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 1 17:17:41 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 17:17:41 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Nicaragua Must Survive! RIP:Bob Parry In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The then Dean of this Fascist College of Law filed a Complaint with the Vice Chancellor (now Provost) over my Nicaragua Must Survive! 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) For what it is worth, here is our Report on our trip to Nicaragua that I drafted and was signed by Ramsey Clark, Len Weinglass-RIP-and two French Canadian Human Rights Lawyers. I later published it under my own name. The situation was truly desperate. Bob's expose saved us all in Nicaragua and in the United States. RIP. 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 160616084443_0001.pdf Type: application/octet-stream Size: 750206 bytes Desc: 160616084443_0001.pdf URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 1 18:20:14 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 18:20:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Continuity of Agenda: US Encirclement of China Continues Under Trump Message-ID: Continuity of Agenda: US Encirclement of China Continues Under Trump Column: Politics Region: USA in the World [7744] The United States has pursued a decades-long policy of encircling, containing and if possible, undermining China as part of a larger strategy of achieving and maintaining what US policy papers call “primacy” over Asia. US policy has led to deeply-rooted networks operating within China’s borders and along China’s geopolitical peripheries to divide and destabilize the immense and increasingly powerful Asian state. These networks are funded and supported regardless of who occupies the White House. While the rhetoric shifts from president to president regarding “why” the US is providing so-called “activists” and “opposition” fronts aid, the aid and the agenda it serves continues. Under current US President Donald Trump’s predecessor President Barack Obama, this ongoing policy was marketed to the American and international public as the “Pivot to Asia.” It was spun as a means for the US to reengage with Asia but in reality constituted an overt attempt to co-opt the governments of China’s neighbors and break up the region’s growing ties with Beijing. Obama’s “Pivot” was a failure, but one within the greater context of a general decline in US primacy both in the Asia Pacific region and around the world. Under Trump, this policy of encircling and containing China continues. It is now marketed to the public as an “Indo-Pacific” strategy, with the US forced to court India, Australia and Japan on the fringes of Asia Pacific after failing to make progress within Asia Pacific itself. It is important to understand just how long-term these polices are so that when Trump announces them to the public, the public understands that it is not “Trump’s” policy, but simply Trump continuing to carry out the agenda of the very special interests (the so-called “Deep State”) he vowed to resist upon taking office. Understanding that these policies serve special interests and at the cost of the American public helps inoculate the public to rhetoric claiming that confronting China and destabilizing Asia is somehow part of “making America great again.” Tibet Tibet is one of the oldest and most clear-cut examples of a political controversy used by Washington to target and undermine Beijing’s credibility. The centerpiece of US strategy in Tibet has been an independence movement led by the Dali Lama, the so-called spiritual leader of Tibet and a political figure the US through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has backed both politically and militarily since at least as early as the 1950s. Upon the US State Department’s own website under a section titled, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XXX, China: 341. Memorandum for the 303 Committee,” it is admitted that: The CIA Tibetan program, parts of which were initiated in 1956 with the cognizance of the Committee, is based on U.S. Government commitments made to the Dalai Lama in 1951 and 1956. The program consists of political action, propaganda, paramilitary and intelligence operations, appropriately coordinated with and supported by [less than 1 line of source text not declassified]. The report also states that: In the political action and propaganda field, Tibetan program objectives are aimed toward lessening the influence and capabilities of the Chinese regime through support, among Tibetans and among foreign nations, of the concept of an autonomous Tibet under the leadership of the Dalai Lama; toward the creation of a capability for resistance against possible political developments inside Tibet; and the containment of Chinese Communist expansion—in pursuance of U.S. policy objectives stated initially in NSC 5913/1.2 [6 lines of source text not declassified]. It should be noted that the document specifically mentions “the containment of Chinese Communist expansion.” The policy of creating “autonomous” regions within a sovereign state aimed at “lessening the influence and capabilities” of a targeted central government is a policy that should look familiar to any impartial observer of contemporary US foreign policy. It is not only precisely the same policy the US openly pursues in the occupation and attempted partitioning of the Syrian Arab Republic, but it is also the very same policy the US is pursuing in another region of China, its western Xinjiang province. Separatist Terrorism in Xinjiang China’s western province of Xinjiang is home to some 21 million people. Of those 21 million, less than half are of the Turkic ethnic group known as Uyghurs. Practitioners of Islam, the US has used terrorist networks developed within NATO member Turkey to infiltrate, pervert and radicalize a fringe minority of the Uyghur community while the US itself openly funds and promotes separatism via political opposition fronts and across local and international media. Turkey’s notorious “Grey Wolves” terrorist organization was wielded by NATO during the Cold War as a tool of political coercion. It is still used today by US-NATO interests both within Turkey and beyond, even as far as Southeast Asia. The Grey Wolves have been implicated in training and arming terrorist cells within Xinjiang. Overt US support for separatists in Xinjiang can be easily found on the US State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) website. The US is so extensively engaged in political subversion within China that it was necessary to divide its funding of subversive activities into multiple categories: China (Hong Kong), China (Mainland), China (Tibet) and China (Xinjiang/East Turkistan). US support for separatism is exposed forthright with the inclusion of the term “East Turkistan,” it being the name of the political entity US-backed agitators and militants seek to carve off from Chinese territory. Over a quarter of a million US taxpayer dollars is allotted annually to the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), a Germany-based front with offices in Washington DC headed by Rebiya Kadeer who openly pursues separatism and who also refers to China’s Xinjiang province as “East Turkistan.” The US in its various policy papers regarding regime change elsewhere around the world has repeatedly admitted that “peaceful” movements like the WUC attempts to portray itself as are unlikely to succeed without an armed component to prevent a targeted government from simply uprooting foreign-funded sedition. Thus, just as the US State Department admitted it has done in Tibet, the US is clearly engaged via NATO-proxies and separatist political fronts it openly funds and directs, in efforts to “lessen the influence and capabilities” of Beijing in Xinjiang by attempting to create the “autonomous” region of “East Turkistan.” Demonstrations in Hong Kong Hong Kong was taken by the British Empire from China by force and occupied for over a century. When the British finally departed Hong Kong in 1997, it imposed upon Beijing demands instituting what is known as the “one country, two systems” under the Sino-British Joint Declaration. In essence, the British attempted to maintain Hong Kong as a political and economic foothold despite “returning” it to Beijing’s control. Beijing has since incrementally dismantled this arrangement and has steadily reasserted its sovereignty over its returned territory. To counter this, the US and its European allies have organized, funded and directed “pro-democracy” protests in Hong Kong who focus primarily on coercing Beijing to uphold the UK’s parting demands. The so-called “Umbrella Revolution” in 2014 was a textbook example of what is now widely known as a “color revolution.” The protests consisted of leaders openly funded by the US State Department including Martin Lee who had literally visited Washington DC (NED event including full video here) pleading for aid just months before the protests unfolded. Another political figure crafted by America’s immense media influence is Joshua Wong, a university student who repeatedly denied his sudden fame and political influence stemmed from ties with Washington, but who eagerly traveled to Washington DC to collect an award from NED subsidiary, Freedom House, upon the protests’ conclusion. The “pro-democracy” protests in Hong Kong, when put into context of Washington’s long-term strategy to contain and encircle China, are transparently illegitimate. While figures like Wong insist they are pursuing “democracy” and “self-determination” for Hong Kong, with their movement entirely propped up by the United States and its European allies it is clear that they represent foreign interests, specifically at the expense of any notion of “democracy” or “self-determination” for Hong Kong. Destabilizing Southeast Asia It is clear enough that China is being systematically targeted and undermined within its own borders by US foreign policy stretching from the end of World War II and continuing to present day. However, just as important, are US efforts to encircle, contain and undermine China along its peripheries. This includes Southeast Asia where the US has spent decades attempting to influence and control the region. This included the outright invasion of Vietnam, proxies wars fought in neighboring Laos and Cambodia and political upheaval the US has sponsored everywhere from Myanmar to Malaysia and Thailand to Indonesia. During the administration of US President George Bush Jr., the US had lined up proxy regimes in Thailand under Thaksin Shinawatra, Malaysia under Anwar Ibrahim and Myanmar under Aung San Suu Kyi. To a lesser extent, Cambodia under Hun Sen served US interests until only recently. However, of these four nations, only Myanmar represents a partial success. Thailand has ousted Shinawatra and his proxies from power, Anwar Ibrahim resides in prison and Cambodia has increasingly built ties with Beijing at Washington’s expense. Still, US-funded networks seek to impede Southeast Asian ties with China through a variety of activities including political destabilization and terrorism. The US also funds organizations posing as environmental and human right activists that impede regional development driven by Chinese infrastructure projects under the guise of protecting the environment and the livelihoods of villagers living near the future sites of rail, dam and other major projects. In any given nation across Southeast Asia, the US NED along with its various subsidiaries and partners can be found fueling social division, conflict and even attempting to impede security operations against suspiciously convenient terrorism. More recently, the US under Trump has increased subversive activities in Thailand and Cambodia as both nations move to further uproot US-backed opposition groups. Upon a map, if China finds itself facing US-backed subversion along the west in Tibet, Xinjiang and its short border with US-occupied Afghanistan and to the east with US troops literally stationed in Korea and Japan, then US subversion in Southeast Asia represents a third front of adversity fueled by Washington and one that now continues under Trump’s “Indo-Pacific” strategy. Afghanistan and the Korean Peninsula Of course, there are multiple theories to explain Washington’s perpetual occupation of Afghanistan including its proximity to Pakistan, Russia and Iran. But Afghanistan also shares a short border with China. A US military presence on China’s far western border helps bookend America’s substantial military presence in Korea, Japan and the Philippines to China’s far east. The US continues occupying South Korea following an armistice signed in 1953 marking the effective end of the Korean War. The US has since intentionally and continuously provoked North Korea, creating a strategy of tension and thus perpetually justifying its military presence on the peninsula. The US has openly and repeatedly called for regime change in North Korea. It has published entire policy papers detailing strategies for the invasion, occupation and subjugation of North Korea. And while the US insists its presence on the Korean Peninsula is a matter of global peace and security, it is transparently obvious that it remains involved in and in fact fueling the conflict for the sole purpose of maintaining a military presence toward China’s east as part of its wider, long-term containment policy. Rearming Japan After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the island nation adopted a pacifist foreign policy. It had refused to involve itself in foreign interventions and maintained what it termed Self-Defense Forces. Its constitution prohibits its rearmament and the use of warfare to resolve disputes. The constitution states specifically: 1. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. 2. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized. Yet, now as the US finds its influence in Asia Pacific waning, there have been attempts to pressure the Japanese government to amend its constitution and help augment US military aggression across the region. Far from a conspiracy theory, prominent Western policy analysts openly acknowledge this in their coverage of Japan’s defense policy. Defense News in a 2015 article titled, “Japan Pursues Rearmament, Despite Opposition,” would report that: Efforts by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to normalize Japan’s security posture and bolster its US alliance against China hit an obstacle when the Lower House Commission on the Constitution declared Abe’s moves unconstitutional. Still, Japan is expected to pass legislation around August to expand the nation’s ability to better support the US in the defense of Japan. In a minor bombshell, on June 4, Setsu Kobayashi, professor emeritus of Constitutional Law at Keio University and member of the Lower House Commission on the Constitution, said provisions allowing limited rights of collective self defense as promoted by the Abe administration are unconstitutional. “Paragraph 2 of Article 9 does not grant any legal standing for military activities abroad,” Kobayashi is reported to have said. “Going to war abroad to help a friendly nation is a violation of Article 9,” he said. Japan possesses the ability to more than adequately defend itself from any aggressor, including China. Furthermore, if free of Washington’s coercive influence bending Tokyo toward confrontation with Beijing, China and Japan could forge economic and defense pacts of their own that would make possible confrontations even more remote than they already are. US “ties” to Asian states including Japan represent a rather transparent effort to augment US primacy, offering little incentive to those being used. Japan, in other words, is viewed as an expendable buffer between US hegemonic ambitions and the states it is targeting to achieve that hegemony. Japan would then be first to pay the price for Washington’s geopolitical miscalculations vis-à-vis Beijing. That these policies have been pursued for decades, indifferent to the White House’s occupants helps shed light on those special interests that truly drive US policy and use political theater like that provided by the current Trump administration as cover to continue doing so with impunity. In the past when the US held uncontested global hegemony, both after World War II and again shortly after the Cold War, America paid few direct consequences for its actions abroad.Today, however, as US hegemony wanes and a multipolar balance of global power emerges, the US will increasingly pay a price for its attempts to cling to its unipolar “international order.” It is a price that the American people will pay economically and in terms of blood of their armed forces, a price that American special interests will continue shifting onto the American people themselves for as long as possible.Trump’s campaign mantra of “make America great again” echoes hallow in the face of this reality, exemplified in Asia in terms of US policy versus Beijing, but a reality that is repeated across the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe and beyond. As long as Trump continues pursuing policies put forth by unelected special interests at the cost of those who voted him into office, America’s position internationally will continue to fold and as more resources are poured into futile efforts to reverse this otherwise irreversible trend, America will never be “great” again. Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Feb 2 14:42:50 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 14:42:50 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: UofILLinois Chief Illiniwak--Oskee! Bow!Wow!Forever! 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, February 2, 2018 8:40 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: NYT:UofILLinois Chief Illiniwak--Oskee! Bow!Wow!Forever! 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 and 2017 Homecomings in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaigns, 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. [cid:image001.jpg at 01D39C01.CEB14220] 81. Doctor Illiniwak, M.D. Got a note >From a Doctor MD not PHD Saying he was just like me Illinois BS U Chicago Med Harvard Public Health He was so irate Against me for Chief Illiniwak That he told the Prez Of his beloved Alma Mater That he would not give a dime So long as I taught here Just like me? A sick puppy Pathetic Physician Typical Illinois BS Cult of Chief Illiniwak Brainwashing kids To become die-hard bigots and racists For the rest of their lives I pity his poor patients Dr. Illiniwak needs a Shrink! [cid:image002.png at 01D39C01.CEB14220] 83. The Principles on Which We Stand at the University of Illinois The Principles on Which We Stand At the University of Illinois: The Cult of Chief Illiniwak Long Live Chief Illiniwak! Our Official Honored and Revered Symbol For the University of Illiniwaks And Illiniwaks all over the world! Illiniwak Pride! Illiniwak Fever! The Daily Illiniwak Illiniwaks Yearbooks Illiniwaks Homecoming Our Redskin Tradition Eagle Feathers too Illiniwak Stadium Our Illiniwakettes Our Fighting Illiniwaks Illiniwak Cheerleaders Our Marching Illiniwaks Band Our Famous 3 in 1 Illiniwak Spectacle Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Oskee! Bow! Wow! "Just Honoring American Indians Not demeaning anyone Nor meaning them too All very civil How White of us all!" The University of Illiniwaks Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Racists to boot Genocidaires too So very educational Anthro 101 The Cult of Chief Illiniwak A required course To get our degrees >From the University of Illiniwaks Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 53343 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Fri Feb 2 16:24:53 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 16:24:53 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Liberal Totalitarianism and the Trump Diversion References: <2122281018.1577084.1517588693183.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <2122281018.1577084.1517588693183@mail.yahoo.com> - www.counterpunch.org - https://www.counterpunch.org - Liberal Totalitarianism and the Trump Diversion Posted By Ajamu Baraka On February 2, 2018 The ongoing political circus in the capital of the world’s most powerful empire opens almost daily  with a new act each day showcasing an even more bizarre and more revealing display of the internal rot of a culture and a political system in decline. The day before Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address, the Russia-gate drama took an unexpected and dangerous turn with the vote by the House Intelligence Committee to release a now classified memo that alleges that senior members of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) may have misled the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) in order to secure a warrant to engage in what Republicans assert is a politically motivated effort that spied on the Trump campaign before he won the 2016 election and attempted to undermine his presidency. Right-wing neoliberal Democrats who have engaged in a vigorous defense of the intelligence agencies of the U.S. state are concerned about the possible fallout with the public. They argue Republicans are deliberately undermining confidence in U.S. institutions by irresponsibly hurling allegations that support a growing public perception that the government and the individuals who populate governmental institutions are inherently corrupt. Republicans now refer to this as “FBI-gate” and Democrats counter by appealing to the dubious belief that the FBI is some kind of neutral political force populated by people of unreproachable character—those who would never engage in the kind of crass partisanship being alleged by Republicans in Congress. Even members of the Congressional Black Caucus–the one caucus that traditionally has always been wary of the FBI because of its history abuse against Black activists, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.–joined in the effort to prop up this institution and its former director Robert Mueller. This new narrative of FBI integrity and neutrality is predicated on the assumption that most of the public has forgotten or is unaware of the notorious history of the FBI and its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was a racist anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer. He shared his obsessive anti-communism and anti-Semitism with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Gestapo chief, who Hoover corresponded with personally and kept on the FBI’s mailing list right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. As the nation’s political police, the FBI has been at the center of domestic repression and political manipulation for decades. From Hoover’s early career working as special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, when Hoover was given the responsibility to plan and execute the infamous “Palmer raids” in which thousands were arrested in twenty-three states for “subversive activities,” to his and the FBI’s role in the first McCarthy period of repression in the 1950s through to the COINTELPRO program against the anti-war, Black Liberation and Civil Rights movement. The intelligence gathering, counter-insurgent role of the FBI has been consistent. When the history and role of the FBI is objectively understood as a central component of the repressive state apparatus, it is not farfetched to accept the meaning of the August 2016 message Peter Strzock, the director of the FBI’s counter-intelligence division, sent to Lisa Page, a high-level official with whom he was romantically involved. In that message, it is clear that Strzock thought it prudent to develop a strategy to undermine a Trump presidency, even when the chance of Trump getting elected seem impossible to many. Strzock is quoted as texting to Page over a secure device: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event that you die before you’re 40.” This quote reveals two things: (1) the thinking of individuals who hold institutional power and are well versed in the exercise of “extra-democratic” institutional power, or what some refer to as the power of the Deep State; and (2) the specific rationale for implementing what appears to have been a classic counter-intelligence project to influence, manipulate and control a political process, in this case the election for the presidency of the United States. In response to the information coming out about the memo and the explosive allegations of governmental malfeasance, Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democratic member of House Intelligence Committee made the laughable statement that the vote to release the memo “politicize(s) intelligence process.” Perhaps Schiff hoped that the public had forgotten all of the instances of politicized intelligence from the manufactured data supporting the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to the manufactured data about the existence of weapons of mass destruction that justified the disastrous attack on Iraq. But what Schiff, as well as some Republicans, are concerned with is how the public will process and respond to the existence of a massive, coordinated effort to exercise unelected political power. They are concerned the extent of the coordination between the state and elements of financial and corporate sectors exposes the hidden reality of how real power is exercised in Washington and the financial center in New York, the power behind the reach of the atrophied mechanisms of democratic accountability and control. Beyond the Circus: Strengthening the Ideological and Political Mechanisms of Domination It’s ironic, or perhaps just a reflection of the power of propaganda, that it is now just becoming apparent that while the attention of the people was mobilized and directed to fictitious external sources of electoral interference by the Russians, the real culprits working to undermine the limited democracy that does exist were always in the United States and in plain sight. They are the ones who re-authorized extending FISA section 702 that allows the state to collect communications from U.S. citizens and even tap into communications databases of companies like Google to collect information without a warrant. They supported inserting provisions of the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” into the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as one of Obama’s last legislative acts. They were silent as the government prosecuted whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, which justified expanded National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance and called for the head of former federal contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. They think it is a good idea for Facebook to establish “counter speech” controls and for Google to adjust its algorithms to bury alternative news sites and sources of “radical” analysis. And while Trump has been a useful idiot for the Deep State, it is important to clearly identify the forces driving this process and giving it political legitimacy–liberal Democrats! Despite the phony news of economic prosperity that came out of Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, the more insightful and “responsible” members of the ruling elite recognize the explosive potential of real opposition to the elite agenda and understand the crisis of confidence in and legitimacy of the system will continue to deepen. The recognition of that has resulted in ruling-class elements being united in one very important area– “domestic national security.” That is to say not the threat of “terror attacks” or other physical threats, but the security that the ruling class is attempting to acquire for itself by strengthening the repressive state apparatus against the people. Using the gift of “Russia-gate” given to it by the Democrats, the state in collaboration with the capitalist communication sector has attempted to tighten its ideological grip on the public by limiting the range of information available to the public. The neo-liberal right has always understood much better than many elements of the left what Cuba revolutionary Jose Marti meant when he said that “trenches of ideas are more powerful than weapons.” So, while we are entertained by the theatrics of Trump and shudder with horror after his latest antic, the real forces of totalitarianism are working right under our noses, normalizing the capitalist dictatorship in the name of upholding freedom. Article printed from www.counterpunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/02/liberal-totalitarianism-and-the-trump-diversion/ Click here to print. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 2 18:02:37 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 18:02:37 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] "My Fellow Americans" by Rich Whitney Message-ID: [Go to the profile of Rich Whitney] Rich WhitneyFollow Rich Whitney is an attorney, actor, disk jockey, environmental and peace activist, and former Green Party candidate for Illinois governor — among other things. Jan 27 My Fellow Americans: Please Wake Up Day after day, year after year, your government murders people and sows terror and misery on the people of the Middle East and Africa — while most of you do nothing to stop it. [https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*DCGJN6jFJwBpEeW0S-SV2g.jpeg] Your Tax Dollars at Work: Civilian Casualties of Coalition Airstrike Near Village of Duaij, Syria, Nov. 11, 2017 On January 13, 2018, warplanes for the U.S.-led Coalition in Syria, fired missiles on Hajin city, in the eastern suburbs of Deir Ez-Zour of that devastated country, killing five civilians. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, their names were Matrouk al Saleh and his wife, Bashar al-Saleh, Yasser Shaker Al Ismail and Abdul Qadir Shaker Al Ismail. I’m guessing that most people reading this article had no idea that this occurred. For the next several days after this killing, Americans who try to follow the “news,” including many who identify with the Left, were mostly discussing other topics. The most prominent at that time? An anonymous woman’s description of a bad sexual encounter with comic actor Aziz Ansari. The issue of sexual assault, sexual harassment and other misogynistic and predatory behavior towards women is without question a serious matter, so I understand why this was a subject worthy of discussion, as people debated where his alleged acts fell on the spectrum of evil. But isn’t blowing people up with a missile kind of evil, too? When are we going to talk about that evil? Does it not deserve at least equal time? The fault for this state of affairs does not lie entirely with the broad public. The corporate media in this country still tend to set the agenda for what it annoyingly calls the “national conversation.” The talking heads discuss Aziz Ansari, so most of us decide that that is what we need to be discussing as well. Ever since the Vietnam War, the human toll of our government’s acts of war simply don’t get much media coverage. But while the fault does not rest entirely with the general public, the responsibility does. Ultimately, we are responsible for what the government of the United States does in our name. We have a civic responsibility to find outand monitor what it is doing, oppose it when it commits harmful acts, and vote into office people who will put a stop to such harmful acts. To say that the American people have been falling down on the job in that respect would be a colossal understatement. Even when the media do cover new developments in U.S. wars, it doesn’t seem to generate much discussion. For example, on January 17th, in a speech at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that the United States military would continue to occupy Syrian territory for an indefinite period, strongly implying that it would remain there until Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was removed from office. A few weeks earlier, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis casually announcedthat he expected to see a larger U.S. civilian presence in Syria, including contractors and diplomats, to join the at least 2,000 U.S. troops currently occupying a slice of that sovereign nation, despite the flagrant illegality of their presence there. In interviewing Mattis, National Public Radio played its now familiar role as a cheerleader for neoliberal interventionist policies while pretending to engage in objective reporting. It claimed with a straight face that the U.S. was busy “stabilizing Syria,” echoing Mattis’s assertion that the troops’ role would be to protect the diplomats and contractors, “not only from any Islamic State fighters but potentially from Syrian government forces.” It didn’t see fit to mention that the U.S. presence in Syria violated international law. Where were the expressions of outrage over this? Where was the public debate over whether trying to overthrow the government of Syria — and risking a wider, possible apocalyptic war with Russia — was in the best interest of the American people? Perhaps I missed something, but neither of these pronouncements appeared to draw a whimper of protest, or even much reaction, from a single one of our so-called “representatives” in Congress, and they received precious little reaction from the news media, commentators or the general public. If there was one campaign promise that President Trump made that actually deserved support from Americans across the political spectrum, it was his promise to “pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past,” to “stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments.” What happened to that? Why aren’t Americans across the spectrum mad as hell about this betrayal — a betrayal that will end up costing American lives and American resources, as well as sow more murder, mayhem, misery — and create thousands of more refugees and future enemies of the United States? Granted, the mirror that the corporate media hold up to society is a distorted one. Some voices on the Left are calling attention to the utterly venal nature of the new Syrian land grab, as well as our foreign policy generally. Lack of mass discussion and mass action does not necessarily signify mass approval of our nation’s ongoing wars. There may be a lot more of us concerned about or opposed to war than we think there are. But there is no gainsaying the fact that not enough of us are talking about war, not enough of us are involved in the peace movement, not enough of us are demanding that our nation cease acting as the world’s number one murderous, criminal nation. Our nation has now been at war for over 16 straight years, and, counting the use of surrogate forces, we’ve been pretty close to a state of constant war since the Korean War. In 2016 alone, we dropped at least 26,171 bombs or other ordnance on seven Middle East and African nations — Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria. By some estimates, the number was over 30,000 — and the Trump administration had already eclipsed that figure, with sickening numbers of civilian casualties, by September of 2017. Year after year, Congress blithely writes the checks, funded by our current and future tax dollars, robbing us of the ability to meet pressing needs at home, while three different administrations repeatedly violated both international law and the Constitution in ordering military attacks in other countries. Yet it appears that there have been far more expressions of outrage over the Trump administration’s restrictions on refugees from Muslim countries entering the United States than over the acts of war committed by the prior administrations that created millions of refugees in the first place. One can justly describe this Ameri-centric myopia as “imperial privilege.” Too many of us sit in the relative comfort of the wealthiest nation on earth, waxing indignant about various domestic injustices and policy choices, while not giving a damn about the latest poor villager in Yemen, Iraq, Syria or Libya who just had his or her home and loved ones incinerated by a U.S. bomb or drone strike. It is the worst possible manifestation of “out of sight, out of mind.” This is unconscionable — and it has to end. The American people need to take heed of the criminal conduct of its government and stand up against it — and against the War Machine and ruling-class interests that benefit from, and perpetuate war. Accordingly, in the interest of poking as many of my fellow Americans as I possibly can in the posterior, with a pitchfork, I take this opportunity to remind my fellow Americans of the three “I”s: War is immoral, illegal and idiotic. At the conclusion, I will also provide some useful information about what you can do to put an end to war and the Warfare State. War is Immoral I should not have to dwell on this point, but it bears repeating: except in cases of actual self-defense, acts of war are intrinsically immoral. None of these nations — Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria — ever attacked the United States, or even threatened to attack the United States. It bears reminding people of the origins of our now 16-year war in Afghanistan — a war with no end in sight, a war that now has our nation supporting a military run by child sex abusers. Even assuming that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were responsible for the 9/11 attacks (not going to get into the whole 9/11 Truth debate here, just saying it is open to question), the nation of Afghanistan did not attack the United States, and it is debatable whether it was truly “harboring” bin Laden and Al Qaeda. It must be recalled that the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden if the United States had simply provided some evidence of his responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. Yet the United States rejected those offers and instead carried out a plan to invade Afghanistan that had already been prepared prior to 9/11, invading an entire sovereign nation on the pretext that it was trying to capture one person and his followers. How can that possibly justify continuing to occupy and continue a war on behalf of a surrogate government in that country, years after bin Laden has died? None of these ongoing wars have been waged for the purpose of making the United States safer or more secure. They cannot possibly be justified as a war on “terrorism” or terrorists, since the net effect of these wars have been to create more terrorists who hate the United States. Indeed, sometimes the United States has intentionally funneled arms to terrorists in pursuit of its goals of “regime change” — in Libya and Syria, for example. While it is beyond the scope of the present article to offer comprehensive proof, it should be clear to anyone who seriously examines the question that the real motives underlying U.S. war-making are to control the petroleum, other mineral and other resources, labor and markets of other nations, and to attain strategic objectives related to that control. For example, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has made a convincing argument that the real motives underlying the U.S. war in Syria were to facilitate the construction of a natural gas pipeline from Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey — a plan rejected by the Assad government. In Libya, the U.S. and France, primarily, were after that country’s vast oil and gold reserves, and they wanted to thwart Muammar Qaddafi’s plans to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar, which threatened Western monetary interests. An equally important motive for war, of course, is to continue the monetary pipeline from American taxpayers to the behemoth military-industrial complex, whose major players invest millions of dollars in influence peddlingto keep billions flowing into their coffers. Whether one’s moral precepts come from a faith tradition or secular humanitarian principles, I submit that it is the height of immorality, to: · commit acts of war against other sovereign nations; · inflict terror from the sky and on land, killing well over 1.3 million people, many of them innocent civilians; · wound countless others, · create millions of refugees; · sacrifice the lives and mental or physical well-being of countless thousands of American service men and women in the process, and · do all of this for the purpose of enriching and empowering an already obscenely wealthy and powerful U.S. ruling class. War Is Illegal Every single one of these acts of war are in flagrant violation of well-established international law, and under the principles of non-intervention that our nation once championed in the Nuremberg Tribunals following World War II. Article VI, paragraph 2 of our Constitution makes treaties to which the United States is a signatory a part of the “Supreme law of the land.” In addition, section 18.22 of the Department of Defense Law of War Manual, like its predecessor, section 498 of the U.S. Army Field Manual 27–10, holds individuals, be they soldiers, civilians or officials, responsible and liable for violations of international law, even if domestic law does not specifically forbid their actions. As commander in chief of the armed forces, the president is as much subject to that proscription as any person required to carry out his orders. One landmark treaty that is part of the “Supreme law of the land” is the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 (46 Stat. 2343), which made war illegal, and to which the United States was, and still is, a party. The terms of the treaty were short and to the point, and essentially covered in two sentences, found in Articles I and II: “ARTICLE I “The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another. “ARTICLE II “The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.” Although not all nations in the world have signed the Pact, Article I makes clear that it binds ratifying nations to reject war categorically, and not merely in their relations with other signatories. The Pact formed the basis for the concept of “crimes against peace,” upon which the prosecution of German and Japanese war criminals in Nuremberg and Tokyo were based. Shortly after the surrender of the Germans and Japanese, ending World War II, the U.S., France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union established an International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg for the purpose of prosecuting Nazi officials for crimes against peace and war crimes. In entering the agreement establishing the Tribunal, chief prosecutor and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson declared: “We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.” According to the Tribunal’s Charter, Article 6, the Allies claimed jurisdiction to try the officials responsible for the war and how it was conducted for three categories of crimes: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It defined “crimes against peace” as “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.” These same principles were later recognized as international law by the International Law Commission of the United Nations in 1950. In his monumental opening statement to the Tribunal, Jackson noted that the Tribunal was “implementing the Kellogg-Briand Pact,” thus recognizing the Pact as one of the legal foundations for the Charter, still in force despite the rampant violations of its provisions that had just transpired. Jackson’s opening statement should be required reading for everyone who aspires to live in a civilized and peaceful world. In words that should send a chill down the spine of every American, he wrote: “Unfortunately, the nature of these crimes is such that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. . . . The former high station of these defendants, the notoriety of their acts, and the adaptability of their conduct to provoke retaliation make it hard to distinguish between the demand for a just and measured retribution, and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war. It is our task, so far as humanly possible, to draw the line between the two. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.” (Emphasis added.) He added: “[T]he ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law. This trial represents mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors. “The usefulness of this effort to do justice is not to be measured by considering the law or your judgment in isolation. This trial is part of the great effort to make the peace more secure. One step in this direction is the United Nations organization, which may take joint political action to prevent war if possible, and joint military action to insure that any nation which starts a war will lose it. This Charter and this Trial, implementing the Kellogg-Briand Pact, constitute another step in the same direction and juridical action of a kind to ensure that those who start a war will pay for it personally.”(Emphasis added.) In its judgment on the original trial, rendered September 30, 1945 (at page 427), the Tribunal famously declared: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” In 1945, the newly formed United Nations incorporated the principles of the Kellogg-Briand Pact into its Charter. Article II, section 3 declares that: “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.” Section 4 adds that: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” Section 7 forbids the United Nations itself from intervening “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” Importantly, Article 51 of the UN Charter departed a bit from the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in recognizing the inherent right of self-defense, stating: Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security. Note, however, that the right of self-defense is limited under Article 51 to circumstances in which “an armed attack occurs.” It does not allow preemptive strikes against perceived or presumed enemies, let alone attacks against other sovereign nations on the grounds, or pretexts, that they are in some way complicit with, or aren’t doing enough to oppose, non-state antagonists like ISIS, al-Qaeda, or the Taliban. The United Nations Charter was ratified by the United States on August 8, 1945, taking effect on October 31st of that year — thus becoming part of the binding law of our own country. Yet our government has been rampantly violating its provisions, along with those of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Nuremberg Charter, for over 16 consecutive years, without even acknowledging the brazenly illegal nature of its conduct. Once again: Afghanistan never attacked the United States. Therefore, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was, and remains, illegal under established international law and under treaties to which the United States is a party — thus making it unconstitutional. Saddam Hussein never attacked the United States. Therefore, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was, and remains, illegal and unconstitutional for the same reasons. Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria never attacked the United States. Therefore, the drone attacks and aerial bombardments in these countries were all illegal and unconstitutional. I do not claim to be an expert in international law, but I know how to read and interpret law, the plain language of these texts are clear, and in asserting that these acts of war violate international law, I have found that I am in very, verygood company. When an individual intentionally or knowingly kills another individual without legal justification, we have a word for it — murder. When a national government, composed of individuals, intentionally or knowingly kills people in other nations without legal justification, we call it war. War is nothing but systematic mass murder carried out by governments. And that is what our government has been doing and is continuing to do, as you read this. In the face of these clear and continuing violations of international law, the advocates and apologists for these military attacks have essentially had two responses: They either simply ignore the fact that these military operations are illegal, or they produce utterly spurious legal “rationales” for the attacks, often based on the trendy but easily manipulated international doctrine known as the “responsibility to protect.” In Libya, for example, the “responsibility to protect” doctrine provided the window dressing for U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, authorizing the imposition of a “no-fly zone” in Libya, predicated on the baseless charge that it was needed to prevent a “bloodbath.” The United States and NATO immediately used the Resolution as an excuse to engage in an indiscriminate bombing campaign, going well beyond what the Resolution authorized. Then the goal seamlessly morphed, with nary a whimper from Congress, into a campaign for “regime change,” overthrowing the government of Muammar Qaddafi — with utterly disastrous consequences. We are now seeing the same disaster play out in Syria, as the “fight against ISIS” was transformed — both under Obama and now Trump — into a war and occupation aimed at overthrowing the sovereign government of Bashar al-Assad. A common objection to the legal case against war is that there is no international body to enforce international law. The argument goes something like this: “The United Nations is just a joke, so to cite to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, Nuremberg, the U.N. Charter, etc., is just being naïve, or quaint. The reality is that nations go to war when they need or want to. These laws have not been enforced and are a dead letter — so never mind about international law.” A somewhat related argument is the American exceptionalism argument — we are the only country with the military ability to impose order, so we have a responsibility to lead the free world, oppose bad dictators and terrorists, etc. None of these arguments hold water. The fact that international law has not been well enforced by the United Nations is largely a reflection of U.S. dominance of that institution. The other nations of the world are only willing to go so far in challenging U.S. hegemony, in the face of our nation’s intimidating nuclear capability and other military power. But the fact of U.S. bullying and the absence of international enforcement of international law is a problem to be overcome; it does not defeat the legal principle. Imagine if we applied the same argument to domestic criminal law: If a serial murderer got away with numerous murders, year after year, would anyone seriously make the argument that, because the law was not effectively enforced against that individual, murder should no longer be considered a crime? As to the American exceptionalism argument, that is mere self-serving nonsense, belied by the fact that the United States itself rains terror from the skies, creates some terrorists and supports others, and militarily supports nearly three-fourths of the world’s dictators. There is a way to enforce international law: We, the people of the United States, joining together with other peoples of the world, must demand it. This has been done before. The Kellogg-Briand Pact itself came about when working people in the U.S. and around the world, horrified by the devastation of World War I, gathered together into a powerful “outlawry” movement to demand that war be outlawed. Today, we can, and must, build a new “outlawry” movement to put a halt to our own nation’s violations of international law, and begin building an effective international system of justice that can enforce that law. War, and the Warfare State, Is Idiotic As if the moral and legal arguments against war were not compelling enough, war — at least from a working-class perspective — does not even make economic sense. Thus far, our nation has expended at least $2.1 trillion on the so-called “War on Terror,” in all of its manifestations, since 2001. That is in addition to the already whopping base budget (currently at $640 billion) for the misnamed Department of Defense, a sum greater than the military spending budgets of the next 8 most militarized nations — China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan — combined. War is a losing economic proposition for the American worker. On April 16, 1953, years before he warned us of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower declaimed: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” Eisenhower’s common-sense warning notwithstanding, the military-industrial complex, with the active and ongoing assistance of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, has become a firmly affixed parasite incessantly sucking the blood of the U.S. economy. Virtually, if not literally, every Congressional district derives some imagined benefit from having either a military base or military contractor or sub-contractor operating within its territory, providing employment. This allows members of Congress to posture as delivering the pork to their constituents every time they vote in favor of each year’s defense authorization bill — as all but 89 Representatives and 11 Senators did last year, in approving an expenditure substantially larger than what President Trump requested. (Even those who voted against the authorization bills, including senators Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, did not necessarily do so because they wanted to spend less money). I use the phrase “imagined benefit” advisedly — because while it is true that many Americans are employed by the military sector, either directly or indirectly, the same hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, if expended on just about anything else, would create far more employment opportunities for Americans, while also allowing Americans to benefit from the improved infrastructure, education, health care, social services, etc., resulting from the shift in spending. This was demonstrated by University of Massachusetts economists Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier several years ago, in their analysis, The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities: 2011 Update. As they summarize their findings: “[I]n terms of assessing the employment effects of military spending on the economy, the most important question is not the absolute number of jobs that are created by spending, for example, $1 billion. It is rather whether spending $1 billion on the military creates a greater or lesser number of jobs relative to spending the same $1 billion on alternative public purposes, such as education, health care or the green economy, or having consumers spend that amount of money in any way they choose. “As we show, . . . spending on the military is a relatively poor source of job creation. Indeed, our research finds that $1 billion in spending on the military will generate about 11,200 jobs. By contrast, the employment effects of spending in alternative areas will be 15,100 for household consumption, 16,800 for the green economy, 17,200 for health care, and 26,700 for education. That is, investments in the green economy, health care and education will produce between about 50–140 percent more jobs than if the same amount of money were spent by the Pentagon. “We do also find that jobs created by military spending provide relatively high average wages and benefits in comparison with these other sectors of the economy. . . . Nevertheless, because spending on clean energy, health care, and education produces substantially more jobs overall per $1 billion in spending, it also creates more good jobs. This includes jobs paying within a mid-range, which we define as between $32,000 — $64,000 per year, as well as high-paying jobs, i.e. those paying over $64,000.” Of course, the economic argument against the Warfare State is, at the same time, a profoundly moral one. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. maintained in his famous Beyond Vietnam address at the Riverside Church exactly one year before his death: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” By that measure, our nation, spiritually speaking, must now be a decaying corpse. However, I’m certain that King would have agreed that a spiritual resurrection is always possible — if enough good people show the resolve and make the requisite effort to change course. War: It’s immoral, illegal and idiotic. It robs us of the monetary and human resources that could be utilized to provide gainful employment for all, quality health-care and education for all, restore health to the global eco-system, construct a first-class transportation system and other infrastructure, provide quality services for those unable to work, and provide quality retirement benefits for all. Its only beneficiaries are the war profiteers and the corporate elite who profit from the domination of other nations’ resources, labor and markets. It may not be the only obstacle to progress — a persuasive case can be made that capitalism itself is the progenitor of the warfare state, and therefore is the larger obstacle. But, whatever one’s views on that question, mobilizing working people, both nationally and internationally, to categorically oppose war and demand real enforcement of international law banning it, would be a tremendous step in the right direction. Get Involved! Take a Stand Against War! There are a lot of organizations doing great work to educate and mobilize working people into a real movement to do just that. Here are some of the leading organizations doing just that: • Green Party of the United States and its various state affiliates. Protesting against war and demanding its end is necessary but not sufficient. If we want to end war and transform our economy into one that will be geared to meeting human needs, we need to get control of our federal government, not just protest its actions after the fact. That means electing genuine peace candidates to Congress, and ultimately the presidency. A U.S. government actually devoted to peace and international law would be a tremendous stride toward the goal of ending war once and for all. The Green Party and its candidates do not accept money from corporations, and the party is founded on nonviolence, as one of its core principles of unity. In addition to running candidates for office, Green Party activists, including myself, are deeply involved in the peace movement. Some of us interact with the movement through the Green Party Peace Action Committee (Facebook page here.) • The United National Antiwar Coalition is, in my estimation, the most active and principled of the nationwide peace organizations currently operating in the United States. Some of the same organizations and leaders have also recently formed a companion coalition focusing on closing the nearly 1,000 military bases that the U.S. currently has operating in dozens of countries around the world. The two coalitions recently issued a call for a day of mass actions against war, with a target date of April 14th. Please check the UNAC and Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases websites periodically for updates! • World Beyond War unites peace advocates around the world, provides great resources and information, and has the potential to become the real international movement for peace that is so badly needed. • The most oppressed sections of the working class are those who suffer most from war and have the most to gain from peace. The Black Alliance for Peace, led by longtime human rights advocate Ajamu Baraka, is doing great work drawing that connection and providing useful information, for workers of all colors, on a regular basis. * U.S. Labor Against the War represents a growing body of organized workers who recognize that it is in workers’ material interest to win the struggle for peace. It played an instrumental role in winning the AFL-CIO to that position, a major breakthrough largely ignored by the corporate media. * CODEPINK is a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs. Join us! For other useful news and information, some good sources to check on a regular basis include: davidswanson.org, antiwar.com, Consortium News, Counterpunch, airwars.org, Alternet’s Grayzone Project, the Costs of War page of the National Priorities Project, Information Clearing House and A Closer Look at Syria. Getting engaged in the struggle for peace is a matter of self-interest and survival of our species. There are plenty of productive ways to get involved. Please join the many who are already committed to the cause and help us reach critical mass. A much better world is possible if enough of us make the effort to create it. Rich Whitney is an attorney, actor, disk jockey, political commentator, environmental and peace activist, Co-Chair of the Green Party Peace Action Committee, and former Green Party candidate for governor. He also supports democracy and would like to see its establishment in the United States. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 2 18:28:49 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 18:28:49 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] "HOPE" because some Americans get it. Ed Norton reports for the Real News in NYC Message-ID: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:21009:Activists-Call-on-Senators-to-End-Catastrophic-US-Saudi-War-in-Yemen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Feb 2 19:13:43 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 19:13:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: VIDEO: Law prof: says Department of Justice a 'sh*thole' 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, February 2, 2018 4:55 AM Author: "Francis Boyle" - BingNews Subject: VIDEO: Law prof: says Department of Justice a 'sh*thole' Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart, who was invited by the university to discuss various topics relating to the justice system. More than a dozen of students and professors blasted the Illinois College of Law last week, labeling it a “sh*thole ... View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stuartnlevy at gmail.com Sat Feb 3 03:45:15 2018 From: stuartnlevy at gmail.com (stuartnlevy) Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2018 21:45:15 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - should we call off tomorrow's demonstration, or go ahead? Message-ID: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> Hello all, How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 mph.  This will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold will get to us. I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but would need to leave then.  Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go ahead.  But neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm end time. I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you all think?  -- Stuart -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Sat Feb 3 04:06:15 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 23:06:15 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - should we call off tomorrow's demonstration, or go ahead? In-Reply-To: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> References: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> Message-ID: <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> I’m out of town & will be unavailable to demonstrate or distribute flyers tomorrow. Regrets. Tell Doug to get inside & not risk frostbite. Spring will come & flags will fly... > On Feb 2, 2018, at 10:45 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Hello all, > > How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? > > Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 mph. This will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold will get to us. > > I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but would need to leave then. > > Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go ahead. But neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm end time. > > I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you all think? > > > > -- Stuart > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Sat Feb 3 04:44:56 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2018 04:44:56 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - should we call off tomorrow's demonstration, or go ahead? In-Reply-To: <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> References: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> I think we should cancel tomorrow, and keep on eye on the weather forecast on a week-by-week  basis for the first somewhat above freezing Saturday during February, or just wait until March 3rd. DG On ‎Friday‎, ‎February‎ ‎2‎, ‎2018‎ ‎10‎:‎06‎:‎53‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: I’m out of town & will be unavailable to demonstrate or distribute flyers tomorrow. Regrets. Tell Doug to get inside & not risk frostbite. Spring will come & flags will fly... > On Feb 2, 2018, at 10:45 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Hello all, > > How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? > > Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 mph.  This will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold will get to us. > > I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but would need to leave then. > > Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go ahead.  But neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm end time. > > I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you all think? > > > >  -- Stuart > _______________________________________________ > 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 Sat Feb 3 04:44:56 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2018 04:44:56 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - should we call off tomorrow's demonstration, or go ahead? In-Reply-To: <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> References: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> I think we should cancel tomorrow, and keep on eye on the weather forecast on a week-by-week  basis for the first somewhat above freezing Saturday during February, or just wait until March 3rd. DG On ‎Friday‎, ‎February‎ ‎2‎, ‎2018‎ ‎10‎:‎06‎:‎53‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: I’m out of town & will be unavailable to demonstrate or distribute flyers tomorrow. Regrets. Tell Doug to get inside & not risk frostbite. Spring will come & flags will fly... > On Feb 2, 2018, at 10:45 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Hello all, > > How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? > > Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 mph.  This will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold will get to us. > > I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but would need to leave then. > > Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go ahead.  But neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm end time. > > I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you all think? > > > >  -- Stuart > _______________________________________________ > 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 Sat Feb 3 13:17:29 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2018 13:17:29 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - should we call off tomorrow's demonstration, or go ahead? In-Reply-To: <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> References: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I agree, and don’t plan to be there. On Feb 2, 2018, at 20:44, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: I think we should cancel tomorrow, and keep on eye on the weather forecast on a week-by-week basis for the first somewhat above freezing Saturday during February, or just wait until March 3rd. DG On ‎Friday‎, ‎February‎ ‎2‎, ‎2018‎ ‎10‎:‎06‎:‎53‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: I’m out of town & will be unavailable to demonstrate or distribute flyers tomorrow. Regrets. Tell Doug to get inside & not risk frostbite. Spring will come & flags will fly... > On Feb 2, 2018, at 10:45 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > Hello all, > > How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? > > Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 mph. This will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold will get to us. > > I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but would need to leave then. > > Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go ahead. But neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm end time. > > I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you all think? > > > > -- Stuart > _______________________________________________ > 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://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C1e79d99b68cb4269672008d56ac0f747%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636532299373434351&sdata=ocpmzTmAHWvuxdkR2YBV4LrVkzpyp22d2qWrY45AQvo%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Feb 3 13:17:29 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2018 13:17:29 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - should we call off tomorrow's demonstration, or go ahead? In-Reply-To: <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> References: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I agree, and don’t plan to be there. On Feb 2, 2018, at 20:44, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: I think we should cancel tomorrow, and keep on eye on the weather forecast on a week-by-week basis for the first somewhat above freezing Saturday during February, or just wait until March 3rd. DG On ‎Friday‎, ‎February‎ ‎2‎, ‎2018‎ ‎10‎:‎06‎:‎53‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: I’m out of town & will be unavailable to demonstrate or distribute flyers tomorrow. Regrets. Tell Doug to get inside & not risk frostbite. Spring will come & flags will fly... > On Feb 2, 2018, at 10:45 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > Hello all, > > How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? > > Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 mph. This will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold will get to us. > > I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but would need to leave then. > > Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go ahead. But neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm end time. > > I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you all think? > > > > -- Stuart > _______________________________________________ > 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://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C1e79d99b68cb4269672008d56ac0f747%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636532299373434351&sdata=ocpmzTmAHWvuxdkR2YBV4LrVkzpyp22d2qWrY45AQvo%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From grapes17 at gmail.com Sat Feb 3 03:53:07 2018 From: grapes17 at gmail.com (James M.) Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 21:53:07 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - should we call off tomorrow's demonstration, or go ahead? In-Reply-To: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> References: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> Message-ID: I'm available to demonstrate if people decide to. But, I am also fine with canceling for weather. On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 9:45 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > Hello all, > > How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? > > Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 mph. This > will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold will get to us. > > I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but would need to > leave then. > > Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go ahead. But > neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm end time. > > I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you all think? > > > > -- Stuart > > _______________________________________________ > 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 grapes17 at gmail.com Sat Feb 3 04:50:21 2018 From: grapes17 at gmail.com (James M.) Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 22:50:21 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - should we call off tomorrow's demonstration, or go ahead? In-Reply-To: <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> References: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Sounds good. For those interested, Bend The Arc is doing a DACA walk/march tomorrow 11:30am-12:30pm starting at the WCIA building. Cheers! On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 10:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > I think we should cancel tomorrow, and keep on eye on the weather forecast > on a week-by-week basis for the first somewhat above freezing Saturday > during February, or just wait until March 3rd. > > DG > > On ‎Friday‎, ‎February‎ ‎2‎, ‎2018‎ ‎10‎:‎06‎:‎53‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Carl G. > Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > I’m out of town & will be unavailable to demonstrate or distribute flyers > tomorrow. Regrets. > > Tell Doug to get inside & not risk frostbite. Spring will come & flags > will fly... > > > > On Feb 2, 2018, at 10:45 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > > > Hello all, > > > > How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? > > > > Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 mph. > This will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold will get to us. > > > > I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but would need > to leave then. > > > > Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go ahead. But > neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm end time. > > > > I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you all think? > > > > > > > > -- Stuart > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 grapes17 at gmail.com Sat Feb 3 04:50:21 2018 From: grapes17 at gmail.com (James M.) Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 22:50:21 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - should we call off tomorrow's demonstration, or go ahead? In-Reply-To: <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> References: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Sounds good. For those interested, Bend The Arc is doing a DACA walk/march tomorrow 11:30am-12:30pm starting at the WCIA building. Cheers! On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 10:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > I think we should cancel tomorrow, and keep on eye on the weather forecast > on a week-by-week basis for the first somewhat above freezing Saturday > during February, or just wait until March 3rd. > > DG > > On ‎Friday‎, ‎February‎ ‎2‎, ‎2018‎ ‎10‎:‎06‎:‎53‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Carl G. > Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > I’m out of town & will be unavailable to demonstrate or distribute flyers > tomorrow. Regrets. > > Tell Doug to get inside & not risk frostbite. Spring will come & flags > will fly... > > > > On Feb 2, 2018, at 10:45 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > > > Hello all, > > > > How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? > > > > Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 mph. > This will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold will get to us. > > > > I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but would need > to leave then. > > > > Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go ahead. But > neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm end time. > > > > I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you all think? > > > > > > > > -- Stuart > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 Sat Feb 3 14:15:17 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2018 14:15:17 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [Peace] Who has TV studio uplink capacity in Champaign-Urbana they would make available? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Try WCIA, but it depends upon their regular schedule. WICD might. Fox did not the last time I dealt with them, but that was a while ago. 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 Robert Naiman via Peace Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 12:32 PM To: peace Subject: [Peace] Who has TV studio uplink capacity in Champaign-Urbana they would make available? From time to time, RT TV calls me for an interview. Usually, they have liked to do this in a studio, rather than via Skype; recently, they have made this a requirement, rather than a preference. Often, I have used the WILL-TV studio for this purpose. I like doing it this way, because RT pays them for the studio time, so it's a way of subsidizing WILL that doesn't cost me anything. Also, I like the people there and it's convenient. However, for whatever reason, that often doesn't work out. So I'm interested to know to what extent this capacity exists elsewhere in Champaign-Urbana or could be made to exist. Any leads? === Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 Senate: Wield the Constitution to Stop Saudi Starvation of Yemeni Children https://www.change.org/p/senate-invoke-war-powers-to-stop-saudi-from-starving-yemeni-kids -------------- 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 Sat Feb 3 14:16:28 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2018 14:16:28 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [Peace] Who has TV studio uplink capacity in Champaign-Urbana they would make available? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: And please let us know what you come up with beyond WCIA. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2018 8:15 AM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [Peace] Who has TV studio uplink capacity in Champaign-Urbana they would make available? Try WCIA, but it depends upon their regular schedule. WICD might. Fox did not the last time I dealt with them, but that was a while ago. 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 Robert Naiman via Peace Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 12:32 PM To: peace > Subject: [Peace] Who has TV studio uplink capacity in Champaign-Urbana they would make available? From time to time, RT TV calls me for an interview. Usually, they have liked to do this in a studio, rather than via Skype; recently, they have made this a requirement, rather than a preference. Often, I have used the WILL-TV studio for this purpose. I like doing it this way, because RT pays them for the studio time, so it's a way of subsidizing WILL that doesn't cost me anything. Also, I like the people there and it's convenient. However, for whatever reason, that often doesn't work out. So I'm interested to know to what extent this capacity exists elsewhere in Champaign-Urbana or could be made to exist. Any leads? === Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 Senate: Wield the Constitution to Stop Saudi Starvation of Yemeni Children https://www.change.org/p/senate-invoke-war-powers-to-stop-saudi-from-starving-yemeni-kids -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Feb 3 14:31:38 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2018 14:31:38 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [Peace] Who has TV studio uplink capacity in Champaign-Urbana they would make available? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The IMC, or UPTV? Both public stations. On Feb 3, 2018, at 06:16, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: And please let us know what you come up with beyond WCIA. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2018 8:15 AM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [Peace] Who has TV studio uplink capacity in Champaign-Urbana they would make available? Try WCIA, but it depends upon their regular schedule. WICD might. Fox did not the last time I dealt with them, but that was a while ago. 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 Robert Naiman via Peace Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 12:32 PM To: peace > Subject: [Peace] Who has TV studio uplink capacity in Champaign-Urbana they would make available? >From time to time, RT TV calls me for an interview. Usually, they have liked to do this in a studio, rather than via Skype; recently, they have made this a requirement, rather than a preference. Often, I have used the WILL-TV studio for this purpose. I like doing it this way, because RT pays them for the studio time, so it's a way of subsidizing WILL that doesn't cost me anything. Also, I like the people there and it's convenient. However, for whatever reason, that often doesn't work out. So I'm interested to know to what extent this capacity exists elsewhere in Champaign-Urbana or could be made to exist. Any leads? === Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 Senate: Wield the Constitution to Stop Saudi Starvation of Yemeni Children https://www.change.org/p/senate-invoke-war-powers-to-stop-saudi-from-starving-yemeni-kids _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cd6ec85375def4414e7d108d56b10c4fb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636532642119233229&sdata=vE8f%2Fb%2BsY6zWU8FzK7eMYYqVnccYduJ32AREtllKI3E%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stuartnlevy at gmail.com Sat Feb 3 15:15:30 2018 From: stuartnlevy at gmail.com (Stuart Levy) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2018 09:15:30 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - ok, let's ***call off*** today's demonstration. [but note Bend the Arc DACA march at 11:30] In-Reply-To: References: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1dccc1e2-0620-3c0b-05e7-b46cf955cfa7@gmail.com> Sending to Peace list too:     It's expected to be very windy today, as well as fairly cold.      Let's *cancel* today's AWARE demonstration for Saturday, Feb 3rd.     We can look for a Saturday with better weather as David suggests. Also, James M. points out the Bend the Arc demonstration at 11:30am-12:30pm today in support of DACA. It's only an hour, and the wind isn't forecast to be as strong by then as it will be by midafternoon. Starts at WCIA on Neil St.   Here are details for those interested:    https://www.facebook.com/events/1557551660960874/ They write: The Dreamers lives hang in the balance. Their families lives also hang in the balance. We want to show Rodney Davis, John Shimkus and all other congresspeople that refuse to have a clean Dream Act, that we, the people in their districts, support a path for the Dreamers that also keep their families together. We want the press to notice us, so they can amplify our voices. WITH THE PRESS IN MIND: Please join us in marching from the *WCIA Channel 3 office on Neil St in Champaign* to the *News-Gazette office at 15 Main St *in downtown Champaign. Bring signs in support of the Dreamers. We will be singing and chanting all along the way. This totals about 2/3 mile distance. If we are at their doorsteps, howcan they miss us? For those who are not able to walk or would prefer not to, we have a very special task for all of you. We will be walking north on Neil St from the WCIA offices to Main St. Then we will walk east on Main St to the News-Gazette offices. Could each of you drive to a parking lot along this route? Bring your DACA signs. As soon as the group reaches your location, can you wave your signs and honk your horns while we are all passing by? This way, everyone will notice us. We would like a general number of about how many marchers and honkers to expect. So please note if you are going. #DreamActNow On 02/02/2018 10:50 PM, James M. wrote: > Sounds good. For those interested, Bend The Arc is doing a DACA > walk/march tomorrow 11:30am-12:30pm starting at the WCIA building. Cheers! > > On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 10:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss > > wrote: > > I think we should cancel tomorrow, and keep on eye on the weather > forecast on a week-by-week  basis for the first somewhat above > freezing Saturday during February, or just wait until March 3rd. > > DG > > On ‎Friday‎, ‎February‎ ‎2‎, ‎2018‎ ‎10‎:‎06‎:‎53‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Carl > G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > > I’m out of town & will be unavailable to demonstrate or distribute > flyers tomorrow. Regrets. > > Tell Doug to get inside & not risk frostbite. Spring will come & > flags will fly... > > > > On Feb 2, 2018, at 10:45 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss > > wrote: > > > > Hello all, > > > > How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? > > > > Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 > mph.  This will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold > will get to us. > > > > I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but > would need to leave then. > > > > Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go > ahead.  But neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm > end time. > > > > I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you > all think? > > > > > > > >  -- Stuart > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 stuartnlevy at gmail.com Sat Feb 3 15:15:30 2018 From: stuartnlevy at gmail.com (Stuart Levy) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2018 09:15:30 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE - ok, let's ***call off*** today's demonstration. [but note Bend the Arc DACA march at 11:30] In-Reply-To: References: <5a75304c.8bdb0d0a.3056f.627d@mx.google.com> <78ABDE56-43C3-4200-99EC-E94350475081@illinois.edu> <1001901956.1830777.1517633096453@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1dccc1e2-0620-3c0b-05e7-b46cf955cfa7@gmail.com> Sending to Peace list too:     It's expected to be very windy today, as well as fairly cold.      Let's *cancel* today's AWARE demonstration for Saturday, Feb 3rd.     We can look for a Saturday with better weather as David suggests. Also, James M. points out the Bend the Arc demonstration at 11:30am-12:30pm today in support of DACA. It's only an hour, and the wind isn't forecast to be as strong by then as it will be by midafternoon. Starts at WCIA on Neil St.   Here are details for those interested:    https://www.facebook.com/events/1557551660960874/ They write: The Dreamers lives hang in the balance. Their families lives also hang in the balance. We want to show Rodney Davis, John Shimkus and all other congresspeople that refuse to have a clean Dream Act, that we, the people in their districts, support a path for the Dreamers that also keep their families together. We want the press to notice us, so they can amplify our voices. WITH THE PRESS IN MIND: Please join us in marching from the *WCIA Channel 3 office on Neil St in Champaign* to the *News-Gazette office at 15 Main St *in downtown Champaign. Bring signs in support of the Dreamers. We will be singing and chanting all along the way. This totals about 2/3 mile distance. If we are at their doorsteps, howcan they miss us? For those who are not able to walk or would prefer not to, we have a very special task for all of you. We will be walking north on Neil St from the WCIA offices to Main St. Then we will walk east on Main St to the News-Gazette offices. Could each of you drive to a parking lot along this route? Bring your DACA signs. As soon as the group reaches your location, can you wave your signs and honk your horns while we are all passing by? This way, everyone will notice us. We would like a general number of about how many marchers and honkers to expect. So please note if you are going. #DreamActNow On 02/02/2018 10:50 PM, James M. wrote: > Sounds good. For those interested, Bend The Arc is doing a DACA > walk/march tomorrow 11:30am-12:30pm starting at the WCIA building. Cheers! > > On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 10:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss > > wrote: > > I think we should cancel tomorrow, and keep on eye on the weather > forecast on a week-by-week  basis for the first somewhat above > freezing Saturday during February, or just wait until March 3rd. > > DG > > On ‎Friday‎, ‎February‎ ‎2‎, ‎2018‎ ‎10‎:‎06‎:‎53‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Carl > G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > > I’m out of town & will be unavailable to demonstrate or distribute > flyers tomorrow. Regrets. > > Tell Doug to get inside & not risk frostbite. Spring will come & > flags will fly... > > > > On Feb 2, 2018, at 10:45 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss > > wrote: > > > > Hello all, > > > > How do people feel about demonstrating tomorrow? > > > > Weather looks chilly - not bitter, but with strong winds, 20-35 > mph.  This will not be fun for people carrying signs, and the cold > will get to us. > > > > I could be there until around 3pm if we do demonstrate, but > would need to leave then. > > > > Happy to make signs available as usual if anyone wants to go > ahead.  But neither Karen nor I will be around at the usual 4pm > end time. > > > > I'll vote to not be on the streets this month, but what do you > all think? > > > > > > > >  -- Stuart > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 cgestabrook at gmail.com Sun Feb 4 01:54:33 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2018 19:54:33 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: [New post] The Increasing Likelihood Of Nuclear War Should Straighten Out All Our Priorities References: <139971992.3846.0@wordpress.com> Message-ID: <03474064-B7D5-4748-8506-174106EFE840@gmail.com> > > New post on Caitlin Johnstone > > > The Increasing Likelihood Of Nuclear War Should Straighten Out All Our Priorities by Caitlin Johnstone > A Russian pilot has been killed by US-armed terrorists in Syria. The Ron Paul Institute's Daniel McAdams writes the following about this new development: > > "The scenario where a US-backed, US-supplied jihadist group in Syria uses US weapons to shoot down a Russian plane and then murders the pilot on the ground should be seen as a near-nightmare escalation, drawing the US and Russia terrifyingly closer to direct conflict." > > McAdams is not fearmongering; he is stating a plainly obvious fact. The Trump administration has just announced that it is restructuring its nuclear weapons policy to take a more aggressive stance toward Russia than that which was held by the previous administration. This is coming after this administration's decision to arm Ukraine against Russia , a move Obama refused to take for fear of escalating tensions with Moscow, as well as its decision to continue to occupy Syria in order to effect regime change, along with numerous other escalations . The Council on Foreign Relations, which is without exaggeration as close to the voice of the US establishment as you can possibly get, is now openly admitting that the “United States is currently in a second Cold War with Russia.” > > In a recent interview with The Real News, leading US-Russian relations expert Stephen Cohen repeated his ongoing warning that "this new Cold War is much more dangerous, much more likely to end in Hot War, than was the 40-year of Cold War, which we barely survived." In a previous interview with the same outlet, Cohen elaborated more extensively: > > "We are in new cold war that is much more dangerous than the last cold war for various reasons. One is that the new cold war today, as we talk, includes three fronts. U.S.-Russian fronts, they're fought with hot war. That's Syria. That's the reckless NATO military build-up on Russia's western boarders, which has resulted in a situation today that ordinarily artillery, not missiles, ordinary artillery, can hit Russia's second city of Saint Petersburg. Just think about that and the instability. And the third front is Ukraine." > > Cohen explains how the political pressures placed on Trump by the ongoing fact-free allegation that he is a Kremlin puppet makes it far more difficult for him to negotiate on these multiple fronts agilely, thus making it much more likely that Trump will choose to advance when he should retreat, hold his ground when he should back down, and generally be locked into patterns of aggression and forward movement rather than the back-and-forth finesse required for safe cold war negotiations with a nuclear superpower. > > > We came within a hair's breadth of nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion during the last cold war, and the further things escalate in this new one the more likely we are to tempt fate again. The only reason we survived the extremely tense stand-offs in the last cold war ultimately boiled down to pure dumb luck in some cases, and there's no legitimate reason to believe we'll get lucky again. > > To be clear, I am not saying that the US or Russia actually want nuclear war. Two men with guns pointed at one another in a conventional standoff generally don't want either weapon to discharge, either. What I am saying is that we learned in situations snatched from the brink of disaster by men like Stanislov Petrov and Vasili Arkhipov that there are too many small, unpredictable moving parts involved in a nuclear standoff for cold war escalations to unfold safely and predictably, and the more tense things get the more likely it becomes that a nuclear warhead gets discharged in the chaos and confusion. Add into that the hot war dynamics and political pressures described by Stephen Cohen and we're looking at some very uncomfortable odds as a species. > > In my view most of the political disagreements I have with people ultimately boil down to this. I see us as facing an immediate existential crisis as a species that needs to be dealt with right now, and people say I should be more worried about this or that conservative figure saying rude things on Twitter. We are facing the very real possibility of near-term human extinction; I don't know how to care about the petty sectarian squabbles in America's various political factions. It really is time for us to all get over ourselves and grow up. > > This unprecedented crisis should be drawing us together, yet we're more politically divided than ever. It is evolve or die time, and we're all still arguing over airplane peanuts while the plane is in a full nose dive. > > > Thought experiment: > > Imagine if you wake up one morning and turn on the TV to an emergency broadcast alert that a nuclear weapon has been discharged by either the US or Russia in the chaos and confusion of this convoluted new cold war, and saying that you need to seek shelter immediately. > > What thoughts will go through your head as the realization dawns that this is really happening? Do you imagine that you will be spending much time thinking about how Trump said "shit hole countries"? Will you spend your last moments on earth mentally shaking your fist at Antifa and "libtards"? Or will you instead perhaps wish that you and your brothers and sisters around the world had more aggressively opposed these new cold war games your leaders have been playing? > > It is entirely possible that you will one day in the near future find yourself in this very situation and answering the questions I just asked you for yourself. > > Let's skip that part of our story together, please. The reason they need to work so hard to manufacture consent for these escalations is because they require that consent. If we all loudly raise our voices and say "No. Enough. This ends now," they will necessarily have to obey. The Russiagate psyop exists because the western power establishment is trying to cripple the Russia-China tandem in order to ensure US hegemony, and if they tried to thrust us all into a new cold war without our permission they'd shatter the illusion of freedom and democracy they depend on to rule you. If we all rise as one voice and withdraw that permission, they will be forced to obey. > > Can we do this, please? Can we make ensuring our survival into the future a priority right now and put bickering over identity politics and the president's tweets on the back burner until then? We'll have a whole future ahead of us to sort that stuff out if we survive the urgent crisis we are facing right now. > > _______________ > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Feb 4 13:50:57 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 13:50:57 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' Subject: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert "While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center...the man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure line that sounded like a real warning, he said." In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert in Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack on 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 cgestabrook at gmail.com Sun Feb 4 14:21:04 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 08:21:04 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <028D2B20-A584-4696-B93F-C7078946ED42@gmail.com> A War Party attempt to get its war on by faking a Pearl Harbor/Lusitania/Ft. Sumter? > On Feb 4, 2018, at 7:50 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > “While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center…the man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure line that sounded like a real warning, he said.” > In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert in Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack on 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) > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Feb 4 14:25:43 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 14:25:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert In-Reply-To: <028D2B20-A584-4696-B93F-C7078946ED42@gmail.com> References: <028D2B20-A584-4696-B93F-C7078946ED42@gmail.com> Message-ID: Yeah, the USG knows full well they always start a war with some type of false flag event so that they can blame it on the other side as the reason for going to war. 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:21 AM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert A War Party attempt to get its war on by faking a Pearl Harbor/Lusitania/Ft. Sumter? > On Feb 4, 2018, at 7:50 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > Subject: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > “While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center…the man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure line that sounded like a real warning, he said.” > In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert in Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack on 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) > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From rwhelbig at gmail.com Sun Feb 4 14:52:37 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 06:52:37 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Absolute bovine excrement - there was no False Flag - but you will spread that nonsense far and wide and the true believers that all US is evil will believe you just like the Trumpites believe the Liar-in-Chief in the White House. Roger On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 5:50 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.* > > *Champaign IL 61820 USA* > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only*) > > > > *From:* Boyle, Francis A > *Sent:* Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM > *To:* 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > *Subject:* AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > > > *“While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center…the > man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure > line that sounded like a real warning, he said.”* > > *In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert in > Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack on > DPRK?* > > *fab* > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.* > > *Champaign IL 61820 USA* > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only*) > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 rwhelbig at gmail.com Sun Feb 4 14:53:51 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 06:53:51 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert In-Reply-To: References: <028D2B20-A584-4696-B93F-C7078946ED42@gmail.com> Message-ID: more bovine excrement piled on top of the initial dump! Are you that in love with all your lies that you don't know how to tell the truth anymore On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:25 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > Yeah, the USG knows full well they always start a war with some type of > false flag event so that they can blame it on the other side as the reason > for going to war. 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:21 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > A War Party attempt to get its war on by faking a Pearl > Harbor/Lusitania/Ft. Sumter? > > > > On Feb 4, 2018, at 7:50 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM > > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > > Subject: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > > > “While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center…the > man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure > line that sounded like a real warning, he said.” > > In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert > in Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack > on 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) > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 Feb 4 14:56:44 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 14:56:44 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert In-Reply-To: References: <028D2B20-A584-4696-B93F-C7078946ED42@gmail.com> Message-ID: So says US “military intelligence” providing further confirmation of the report by Associated Press. 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:54 AM To: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert more bovine excrement piled on top of the initial dump! Are you that in love with all your lies that you don't know how to tell the truth anymore On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:25 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, the USG knows full well they always start a war with some type of false flag event so that they can blame it on the other side as the reason for going to war. 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:21 AM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert A War Party attempt to get its war on by faking a Pearl Harbor/Lusitania/Ft. Sumter? > On Feb 4, 2018, at 7:50 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > > Subject: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > “While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center…the man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure line that sounded like a real warning, he said.” > In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert in Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack on 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) > > _______________________________________________ > 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 rwhelbig at gmail.com Sun Feb 4 15:14:20 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 07:14:20 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert In-Reply-To: References: <028D2B20-A584-4696-B93F-C7078946ED42@gmail.com> Message-ID: No False Flag - that is what you insist upon - AP would never use that term either - so, don't tell me that your bovine excrement has been confirmed because it hasn't. There might have been a mistaken alert sent out by Pacific Command - Military Intelligence would not be saying anything about that; it just is not their job. Roger On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:56 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > *So says US “military intelligence” providing further confirmation of the > report by Associated Press. Fab.* > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > * > > *Champaign IL 61820 USA > * > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only*) > > > > *From:* Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] > *Sent:* Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:54 AM > *To:* Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss < > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> > *Subject:* Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > > > more bovine excrement piled on top of the initial dump! Are you that in > love with all your lies that you don't know how to tell the truth anymore > > > > On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:25 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > Yeah, the USG knows full well they always start a war with some type of > false flag event so that they can blame it on the other side as the reason > for going to war. 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:21 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > A War Party attempt to get its war on by faking a Pearl > Harbor/Lusitania/Ft. Sumter? > > > > On Feb 4, 2018, at 7:50 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM > > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > > Subject: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > > > “While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center…the > man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure > line that sounded like a real warning, he said.” > > In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert > in Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack > on 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) > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 Feb 4 15:30:45 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 15:30:45 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert In-Reply-To: References: <028D2B20-A584-4696-B93F-C7078946ED42@gmail.com> Message-ID: Roger already admitted he joined “military intelligence.” Once a Spook, always a Spook. 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 9:14 AM To: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert No False Flag - that is what you insist upon - AP would never use that term either - so, don't tell me that your bovine excrement has been confirmed because it hasn't. There might have been a mistaken alert sent out by Pacific Command - Military Intelligence would not be saying anything about that; it just is not their job. Roger On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:56 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: So says US “military intelligence” providing further confirmation of the report by Associated Press. 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:54 AM To: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert more bovine excrement piled on top of the initial dump! Are you that in love with all your lies that you don't know how to tell the truth anymore On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:25 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, the USG knows full well they always start a war with some type of false flag event so that they can blame it on the other side as the reason for going to war. 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:21 AM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert A War Party attempt to get its war on by faking a Pearl Harbor/Lusitania/Ft. Sumter? > On Feb 4, 2018, at 7:50 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > 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: Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > > Subject: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > “While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center…the man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure line that sounded like a real warning, he said.” > In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert in Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack on 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) > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 4 16:35:54 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 16:35:54 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette Articles on Chief Illiniwak: [NativeNews] Boyle's letter to U of I president Jimbo Whitey Message-ID: Our Fired And Disgraced University of Illiniwaks President Jimbo Whitey admitted to me that when the Board of Trustees "retired" Chief Illiniwak, it was a "compromise"-Namely, the White Racist Frat Boy in Fake Indian Drag would stop dancing at half-times at sporting events, but everything else would remain exactly the same. Thus prompting me to write the following letter to Whitey. So here we still are today stuck in the mud of Illiniwak bigotry and racism and idiocy. 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) __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages List info at: http://nativenewsonline.org/natnews.htm [Yahoo! Groups] Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe Recent Activity * 2 New Members Visit Your Group Yahoo! Mail Next gen email? Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail Beta. Y! Messenger Files to share? Send up to 1GB of files in an IM. Yahoo! Photos Create your own Photo Gifts . __,_._,___ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sun Feb 4 17:48:41 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 11:48:41 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert In-Reply-To: References: <028D2B20-A584-4696-B93F-C7078946ED42@gmail.com> Message-ID: It may have ben an accident - but it may have been another (and more serious) Gulf of Tonkin lie. We must demand no US war - and that the US accept the "double freeze” that China proposes. Vote against any incumbent who doesn’t support that. > On Feb 4, 2018, at 9:14 AM, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss wrote: > > No False Flag - that is what you insist upon - AP would never use that term either - so, don't tell me that your bovine excrement has been confirmed because it hasn't. There might have been a mistaken alert sent out by Pacific Command - Military Intelligence would not be saying anything about that; it just is not their job. > > Roger > > On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:56 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > So says US “military intelligence” providing further confirmation of the report by Associated Press. Fab. > > > From: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] > Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:54 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > > > more bovine excrement piled on top of the initial dump! Are you that in love with all your lies that you don't know how to tell the truth anymore > > > > On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:25 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Yeah, the USG knows full well they always start a war with some type of false flag event so that they can blame it on the other side as the reason for going to war. Fab. > > > -----Original Message----- > From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] > Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:21 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > A War Party attempt to get its war on by faking a Pearl Harbor/Lusitania/Ft. Sumter? > > > > On Feb 4, 2018, at 7:50 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > > > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > > Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM > > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > > Subject: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > > > “While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center…the man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure line that sounded like a real warning, he said.” > > In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert in Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack on DPRK? > > fab > > From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Sun Feb 4 18:31:01 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018 18:31:01 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Pertinent Invocation of Malcolm X References: <1583378291.2244574.1517769061016.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1583378291.2244574.1517769061016@mail.yahoo.com> And here we are.  If Trump is the darkest pit, a year in, I see little serious effort to get past it. I guess we’ll see if Oprah’s self-marketing regimen helps 200,000 deported Salvadorians get ahead in 2020.  Otherwise, the Democrat’s ‘Better Deal’ lacks even Trump’s hot-air.  As for the Right, any serious White Nationalist should look to a more-prescient Black Nationalist like Malcolm X, than to a suited jack-ass who says he wouldn’t want a poor person (you) running the economy.  In Malcolm’s words: We must understand the politics of our community and we must know what politics is supposed to produce. We must know what part politics play in our lives. And until we become politically mature we will always be mislead, lead astray, or deceived or maneuvered into supporting someone politically who doesn’t have the good of our community at heart. …Anytime you throw your weight behind a political party that controls two-thirds of the government, and that Party can’t keep the promise that it made to you during election time, and you’re dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that Party, you’re not only a chump, but you’re a traitor to your race. As for the Left, (and less-astray Right) we can substitute ‘race’ for virtually any word in our lexicon and the same remains true. …Anytime you throw your weight behind a political party that controls two-thirds of the government, and that Party can’t keep the promise that it made to you during election time, and you’re dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that Party, you’re not only a chump, but you’re a traitor to your ___. (Ballot Or Bullet, 1964) Let’s Not Make This About Identity, But About Power | | | | Let’s Not Make This About Identity, But About Power “If triangles made a god they would give it three sides.” -Montaigne A forgiving way (the liberal way) to defin... | | | -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Mon Feb 5 13:15:48 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 13:15:48 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial Message-ID: Protesters not 'naive' students Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. KAREN ARAM Urbana -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 13:33:41 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 13:33:41 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAY TO GO KAREN! Message-ID: For the letter in today's News Gazette! And Karen was the real sparkplug behind our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law! Fab. Protesters not 'naive' students Top of Form Bottom of Form Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. KAREN ARAM Urbana 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 moboct1 at aim.com Mon Feb 5 14:12:29 2018 From: moboct1 at aim.com (Mildred O'brien) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 09:12:29 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <161664f9f17-1721-879af@webjas-vad065.srv.aolmail.net> Whether accidental or intentional, the real culprit will never be punished; as always it will be some grunt who is sacrificed. MO'B -----Original Message----- From: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss To: Roger Helbig Cc: Peace-discuss Sent: Sun, Feb 4, 2018 11:49 am Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert It may have ben an accident - but it may have been another (and more serious) Gulf of Tonkin lie. We must demand no US war - and that the US accept the "double freeze” that China proposes. Vote against any incumbent who doesn’t support that. > On Feb 4, 2018, at 9:14 AM, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss wrote: > > No False Flag - that is what you insist upon - AP would never use that term either - so, don't tell me that your bovine excrement has been confirmed because it hasn't. There might have been a mistaken alert sent out by Pacific Command - Military Intelligence would not be saying anything about that; it just is not their job. > > Roger > > On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:56 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > So says US “military intelligence” providing further confirmation of the report by Associated Press. Fab. > > > From: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] > Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:54 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > > > more bovine excrement piled on top of the initial dump! Are you that in love with all your lies that you don't know how to tell the truth anymore > > > > On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:25 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Yeah, the USG knows full well they always start a war with some type of false flag event so that they can blame it on the other side as the reason for going to war. Fab. > > > -----Original Message----- > From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] > Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:21 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > A War Party attempt to get its war on by faking a Pearl Harbor/Lusitania/Ft. Sumter? > > > > On Feb 4, 2018, at 7:50 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > > > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > > Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM > > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > > Subject: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > > > “While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center…the man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure line that sounded like a real warning, he said.” > > In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert in Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack on DPRK? > > fab > > _______________________________________________ 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 Mon Feb 5 14:14:56 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 14:14:56 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert In-Reply-To: <161664f9f17-1721-879af@webjas-vad065.srv.aolmail.net> References: <161664f9f17-1721-879af@webjas-vad065.srv.aolmail.net> Message-ID: Yeah, they are already sacrificing if you read the AP article. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Mildred O'brien via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 8:12 AM To: cgestabrook at gmail.com; peace-discuss at anti-war.net Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert Whether accidental or intentional, the real culprit will never be punished; as always it will be some grunt who is sacrificed. MO'B -----Original Message----- From: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > To: Roger Helbig > Cc: Peace-discuss > Sent: Sun, Feb 4, 2018 11:49 am Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert It may have ben an accident - but it may have been another (and more serious) Gulf of Tonkin lie. We must demand no US war - and that the US accept the "double freeze” that China proposes. Vote against any incumbent who doesn’t support that. > On Feb 4, 2018, at 9:14 AM, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > No False Flag - that is what you insist upon - AP would never use that term either - so, don't tell me that your bovine excrement has been confirmed because it hasn't. There might have been a mistaken alert sent out by Pacific Command - Military Intelligence would not be saying anything about that; it just is not their job. > > Roger > > On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:56 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: > So says US “military intelligence” providing further confirmation of the report by Associated Press. Fab. > > > From: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] > Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:54 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss > > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > > > more bovine excrement piled on top of the initial dump! Are you that in love with all your lies that you don't know how to tell the truth anymore > > > > On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 6:25 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > Yeah, the USG knows full well they always start a war with some type of false flag event so that they can blame it on the other side as the reason for going to war. Fab. > > > -----Original Message----- > From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] > Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 8:21 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A > > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > A War Party attempt to get its war on by faking a Pearl Harbor/Lusitania/Ft. Sumter? > > > > On Feb 4, 2018, at 7:50 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > > > > > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > > Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2018 7:50 AM > > To: 'globenet at yahoogroups.com' > > > Subject: AP/News Gazette on Hawaii Nuclear Alert > > > > “While starting a Saturday shift at the emergency operations center…the man said, a co-worker took a phone call over the US Pacific Command secure line that sounded like a real warning, he said.” > > In other words, it was US PACOM that initiated the false nuclear alert in Hawaii. Why? Part of a False Flag event as prelude to a nuclear attack on DPRK? > > fab > > _______________________________________________ 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 Mon Feb 5 15:33:24 2018 From: divisek at yahoo.com (Dianna Visek) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 15:33:24 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <171289689.2523336.1517844804267@mail.yahoo.com> Good work! Dianna On Monday, February 5, 2018, 7:16:13 AM CST, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: Protesters not 'naive' students Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. KAREN ARAM Urbana _______________________________________________ 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 briandolinar at gmail.com Mon Feb 5 15:35:33 2018 From: briandolinar at gmail.com (Brian Dolinar) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 09:35:33 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAY TO GO KAREN! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Great piece Karen! The NG is the worst! BD On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 7:33 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > *For the letter in today’s News Gazette! And Karen was the real sparkplug > behind our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law! > Fab.* > > Protesters not 'naive' students > > Top of Form > > Bottom of Form > > Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette > > > The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial > related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. > > They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those > protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as > "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." > > The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of > involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and > "support for labor." > > Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many > possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best > and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their > speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." > > There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" > blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the > building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from > the building. > > What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker > supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and > Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, > with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations > which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. > > KAREN ARAM > > Urbana > > > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > * > > *Champaign IL 61820 USA > * > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only*) > > > -- Brian Dolinar, Ph.D. briandolinar.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 15:41:21 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 15:41:21 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial References: <171289689.2523336.1517844804267@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: For sure! All around! Thanks to everyone involved in organizing and supporting our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 9:33 AM To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; Karen Aram > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial Good work! Dianna On Monday, February 5, 2018, 7:16:13 AM CST, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Protesters not 'naive' students Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. KAREN ARAM Urbana _______________________________________________ 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 Mon Feb 5 16:51:13 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 16:51:13 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAY TO GO KAREN! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I do have to laugh, the NG, evidently has the same problem with their “spell check” as I. The word “intimidated” being continued as “intimated.” On Feb 5, 2018, at 07:35, Brian Dolinar via Peace-discuss > wrote: Great piece Karen! The NG is the worst! BD On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 7:33 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For the letter in today’s News Gazette! And Karen was the real sparkplug behind our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law! Fab. Protesters not 'naive' students Top of Form Bottom of Form Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. KAREN ARAM Urbana Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -- Brian Dolinar, Ph.D. briandolinar.com _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C7402c4860fcc46bfcabb08d56cae24ef%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534417553923452&sdata=%2FLDa9DCM7IdIXurHmP5BAVGYk4ymA1IUH8RdUmnvoFQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 16:55:27 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 16:55:27 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAY TO GO KAREN! References: Message-ID: And my sincere thanks to Brian for getting all the Immigrants’ Rights People out there for our rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. No surprise that the Trump Law School has refused your entreaties to establish an Immigrants’ Rights Legal Clinic. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 10:51 AM To: Brian Dolinar > Cc: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] WAY TO GO KAREN! I do have to laugh, the NG, evidently has the same problem with their “spell check” as I. The word “intimidated” being continued as “intimated.” On Feb 5, 2018, at 07:35, Brian Dolinar via Peace-discuss > wrote: Great piece Karen! The NG is the worst! BD On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 7:33 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For the letter in today’s News Gazette! And Karen was the real sparkplug behind our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law! Fab. Protesters not 'naive' students Top of Form Bottom of Form Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. KAREN ARAM Urbana Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -- Brian Dolinar, Ph.D. briandolinar.com _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C7402c4860fcc46bfcabb08d56cae24ef%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534417553923452&sdata=%2FLDa9DCM7IdIXurHmP5BAVGYk4ymA1IUH8RdUmnvoFQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Mon Feb 5 17:02:22 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 17:02:22 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAY TO GO KAREN! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Without Brian, I fear we would have been very few. He brought out not only most of the protestors, but many of the speakers as well. On Feb 5, 2018, at 08:55, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: And my sincere thanks to Brian for getting all the Immigrants’ Rights People out there for our rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. No surprise that the Trump Law School has refused your entreaties to establish an Immigrants’ Rights Legal Clinic. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 10:51 AM To: Brian Dolinar > Cc: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] WAY TO GO KAREN! I do have to laugh, the NG, evidently has the same problem with their “spell check” as I. The word “intimidated” being continued as “intimated.” On Feb 5, 2018, at 07:35, Brian Dolinar via Peace-discuss > wrote: Great piece Karen! The NG is the worst! BD On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 7:33 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For the letter in today’s News Gazette! And Karen was the real sparkplug behind our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law! Fab. Protesters not 'naive' students Top of Form Bottom of Form Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. KAREN ARAM Urbana Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -- Brian Dolinar, Ph.D. briandolinar.com _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C7402c4860fcc46bfcabb08d56cae24ef%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534417553923452&sdata=%2FLDa9DCM7IdIXurHmP5BAVGYk4ymA1IUH8RdUmnvoFQ%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C336acf3db61443e533a908d56cb995a1%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534466691595060&sdata=f%2FFf0sIDx3fVlZ6%2F4ef8DdczpneJT%2Fn%2FZGx6UeX4JHU%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 16:54:42 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 16:54:42 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAY TO GO KAREN! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: And my sincere thanks to Brian for getting all the Immigrants’ Rights People out there for our rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. No surprise that the Trump Law School has refused your entreaties to establish an Immigrants’ Rights Legal Clinic. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 10:51 AM To: Brian Dolinar Cc: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] WAY TO GO KAREN! I do have to laugh, the NG, evidently has the same problem with their “spell check” as I. The word “intimidated” being continued as “intimated.” On Feb 5, 2018, at 07:35, Brian Dolinar via Peace-discuss > wrote: Great piece Karen! The NG is the worst! BD On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 7:33 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For the letter in today’s News Gazette! And Karen was the real sparkplug behind our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law! Fab. Protesters not 'naive' students Top of Form Bottom of Form Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. KAREN ARAM Urbana Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -- Brian Dolinar, Ph.D. briandolinar.com _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C7402c4860fcc46bfcabb08d56cae24ef%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534417553923452&sdata=%2FLDa9DCM7IdIXurHmP5BAVGYk4ymA1IUH8RdUmnvoFQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 17:03:39 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 17:03:39 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAY TO GO KAREN! In-Reply-To: References: 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 11:02 AM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAY TO GO KAREN! Without Brian, I fear we would have been very few. He brought out not only most of the protestors, but many of the speakers as well. On Feb 5, 2018, at 08:55, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: And my sincere thanks to Brian for getting all the Immigrants’ Rights People out there for our rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. No surprise that the Trump Law School has refused your entreaties to establish an Immigrants’ Rights Legal Clinic. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 10:51 AM To: Brian Dolinar > Cc: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] WAY TO GO KAREN! I do have to laugh, the NG, evidently has the same problem with their “spell check” as I. The word “intimidated” being continued as “intimated.” On Feb 5, 2018, at 07:35, Brian Dolinar via Peace-discuss > wrote: Great piece Karen! The NG is the worst! BD On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 7:33 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For the letter in today’s News Gazette! And Karen was the real sparkplug behind our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law! Fab. Protesters not 'naive' students Top of Form Bottom of Form Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. KAREN ARAM Urbana Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -- Brian Dolinar, Ph.D. briandolinar.com _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C7402c4860fcc46bfcabb08d56cae24ef%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534417553923452&sdata=%2FLDa9DCM7IdIXurHmP5BAVGYk4ymA1IUH8RdUmnvoFQ%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C336acf3db61443e533a908d56cb995a1%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534466691595060&sdata=f%2FFf0sIDx3fVlZ6%2F4ef8DdczpneJT%2Fn%2FZGx6UeX4JHU%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 17:08:48 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 17:08:48 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAY TO GO KAREN! References: Message-ID: And of course Brian turned out everyone for the 3 nights of Hearings before the Urbana City Council on the reaffirmation of Urbana as a Sanctuary City. Thanks once again! Since my opening speech against Trump Fascism before the Trump Law School, the Trump/Sessions Department of Injustice are threatening to prosecute Mayors and Governors who have established their Cities and States as Sanctuaries. This Trump Law School is a “sanctuary” for Trump Fascism. 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, February 5, 2018 11:04 AM To: 'Karen Aram' Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAY TO GO KAREN! 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 11:02 AM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAY TO GO KAREN! Without Brian, I fear we would have been very few. He brought out not only most of the protestors, but many of the speakers as well. On Feb 5, 2018, at 08:55, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: And my sincere thanks to Brian for getting all the Immigrants’ Rights People out there for our rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. No surprise that the Trump Law School has refused your entreaties to establish an Immigrants’ Rights Legal Clinic. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 10:51 AM To: Brian Dolinar > Cc: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] WAY TO GO KAREN! I do have to laugh, the NG, evidently has the same problem with their “spell check” as I. The word “intimidated” being continued as “intimated.” On Feb 5, 2018, at 07:35, Brian Dolinar via Peace-discuss > wrote: Great piece Karen! The NG is the worst! BD On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 7:33 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: For the letter in today’s News Gazette! And Karen was the real sparkplug behind our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law! Fab. Protesters not 'naive' students Top of Form Bottom of Form Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. KAREN ARAM Urbana Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) -- Brian Dolinar, Ph.D. briandolinar.com _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C7402c4860fcc46bfcabb08d56cae24ef%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534417553923452&sdata=%2FLDa9DCM7IdIXurHmP5BAVGYk4ymA1IUH8RdUmnvoFQ%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C336acf3db61443e533a908d56cb995a1%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534466691595060&sdata=f%2FFf0sIDx3fVlZ6%2F4ef8DdczpneJT%2Fn%2FZGx6UeX4JHU%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Mon Feb 5 18:31:19 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 12:31:19 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The point of the editorial is nevertheless correct, that even speakers defending crimes, should not be 'de-platformed.' For the anti-war movement to try to do so is to give the Right an easy victory: they can shift their ground to a defense of free speech rather than a defense of the crimes the speakers are supporting. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, "The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” —CGE > On Feb 5, 2018, at 7:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > Protesters not 'naive' students > Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette > > The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. > > They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." > > The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." > > Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." > > There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. > > What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. > > > KAREN ARAM > > Urbana > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Mon Feb 5 18:48:48 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 18:48:48 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Carl NOBODY DE-PLATFORMED THE SPEAKER. > As Rosa Luxembourg wrote, “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT WE WERE DOING!!! > On Feb 5, 2018, at 10:31, C G Estabrook wrote: > > The point of the editorial is nevertheless correct, that even speakers defending crimes, should not be 'de-platformed.' > > For the anti-war movement to try to do so is to give the Right an easy victory: they can shift their ground to a defense of free speech rather than a defense of the crimes the speakers are supporting. > > As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, "The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” > > —CGE > > >> On Feb 5, 2018, at 7:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> >> Protesters not 'naive' students >> Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette >> >> The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. >> >> They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." >> >> The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." >> >> Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." >> >> There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. >> >> What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. >> >> >> KAREN ARAM >> >> Urbana >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C3020c6c493ac4e25323408d56cc6a90a%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534522842847111&sdata=AbDHy9VVSvZztmksxOPBLUq%2F1SC9zZys3VJnR2ZMRRA%3D&reserved=0 From cgestabrook at gmail.com Mon Feb 5 18:54:59 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 12:54:59 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial In-Reply-To: References: <171289689.2523336.1517844804267@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <08032B21-7A00-4CE7-8509-102CFDE59B99@gmail.com> “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. US war-making is: ===================================================================================== Why We Should Fear the ‘Washington Establishment’ Figures Who are Pulling the Strings in the Trump Administration by Patrick Cockburn People sitting in cafes in Baghdad under the rule of Saddam Hussein used to be nervous of accidentally spilling their cup of coffee over the front page of the newspaper spread out in front of them. They had a good reason for their anxiety because Iraqi newspapers at that time always carried a picture of Saddam on their front page. Defacing his features might be interpreted as an indication of disrespect or even of a critical or treasonous attitude towards the great leader. Saddam Hussein invariably got star billing in the Iraqi press, but he would be impressed at the astonishing way in which it has become the norm in the US media for the words and doings of President Trump to monopolise the top of the news. Day after day, the three or four lead stories in The New York Times and CNN relate directly or indirectly to Trump. And, unlike Saddam, this blanket coverage is voluntary on the part of the news outlets and overwhelmingly critical. Trump’s outrageous insults and lies have succeeded in keeping the spotlight firmly on him ever since he declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Whatever else he may be, he is seldom boring, unlike so many of his defeated rivals and opponents who believed that his obvious failings must inevitably sink him. One day they may be proved right, but that day is a long time coming; the open loathing for Trump on the part of much of the American media is curiously ineffectual because it is repetitious and no great disaster has so far hit America one year into his presidency. Commentators note that, for all his bellicose rhetoric, he has yet to start any wars – unlike all his Republican predecessors going back to President Ford. The constant demonisation of Trump carries another danger that is under-appreciated and may produce a real-world disaster. The US media blames everything on him and respectfully portrays the bevy of generals who populate the upper ranks of his administration – Chief of Staff John Kelly, Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser HR McMaster – as the only adults in the room. Yet it may turn out that they and other business and political figures, such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the CIA chief Mike Pompeo, are more likely to bring about a war than Trump himself. Just how poor is the judgement of the very people who are meant to be a restraining force on Trump was shown last month when Tillerson made a classic blunder that may have negative results for the US for years to come. On 17 January, he announced the US military forces would stay in Kurdish controlled north-east Syria after the defeat of Isis in order to weaken Iran and President Bashar al-Assad. Just three days later on 20 January, Turkey, predictably enraged at what it saw as a US territorial guarantee of a de facto Kurdish state, sent its forces across the Syrian border to invade the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. Tillerson had unwittingly initiated a new phase in the Syrian conflict in which the US is self-isolated and Turkey, Russia, Iran and Assad had been brought closer together. The Kurds in Afrin, one of the few places in Syria not devastated by war, have to hide in caves as the direct result of the new US initiative. Trump’s isolationism may be less risky than the neo-interventionism of his senior advisers. Reports from Washington suggest that the decision to get more fully engaged in the Syrian civil war was contrary to what Trump himself wanted. By this account, he would have preferred to use his State of the Union address to announce that the US mission in Syria had ended in triumph with the defeat of Isis and that he was withdrawing US ground forces. Instead, the decision went the other way as McMaster and Mattis supported by Tillerson successfully argued for keeping US ground forces in Syria and Iraq. These senior officials were only advocating the consensus opinion of the US foreign policy establishment, as was swiftly illustrated by media commentators. Even as Turkish tanks were rolling into Syria, an editorial in The Washington Post was applauding Tillerson for having “bluntly recognised a truth that both President Trump and President Barack Obama attempted to dodge” – which is that the US needs a political and military presence in Syria. What Trump and Obama were really dodging was repeating the post 9/11 US mistake in pursuing open-ended military ventures against multiple enemies in fragmented countries like Afghanistan and Iraq where it could not win. In the case of Obama, this sense of caution and ability to see what might go wrong was carefully calculated; in the case of Trump, the caution is instinctive and not always operative, but the end result was often the same. Despite all Trump’s condemnation of Obama’s supposed weakness, his strategy in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria did not differ much from his predecessor – that is until his chief security officials switched to an interventionist policy in Syria last month. Traditional policy of relying on force to overcome all obstacles or what Obama nicknamed “The Washington Playbook” looks as if it is back in business. He privately condemned the US foreign policy establishment for being wedded to dubious allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in pursuit of over-ambitious objectives American strength in the world was ebbing before Trump, though the divisive and mercurial nature of his presidency is speeding up the decline. In every continent a power vacuum has opened up which is being filled by many eager candidates. They generally have the same ingredients of populism, demagoguery, authoritarianism and nationalism, though the quantities of each may differ, and they are certainly making the world a more dangerous place because they do not know the limits of their own power. From Manila to Warsaw, there has been the rise of the mini-Trumps who tend to know the politics of their own country well, but be dangerously ignorant of that of other countries. It is in the nature of arbitrary rulers, who have suppressed domestic criticism, such as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, that they pursue exaggerated ambitions moving over ice that is always thinner than they imagine. US power in the world is declining, having reached its peak between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the start of the Iraq war in 2003. Two dangers are emerging: one is the feckless nature of Trump administration which acts as a sort of out-of-control wrecking ball, though the damage done is limited by Trump’s low attention span and divisions in Washington. A second danger is the US foreign policy establishment. which has learned nothing new from past failures, which would like to restore US power to what it once was and is does not understand that this can no longer be done. This is “the Washington Playbook”, which Obama came to deride and ignore and is just as dangerous as anything Trump may do. ### > On Feb 5, 2018, at 9:41 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > For sure! All around! Thanks to everyone involved in organizing and supporting our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. > 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 9:33 AM > To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; Karen Aram > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial > > Good work! > > Dianna > > > On Monday, February 5, 2018, 7:16:13 AM CST, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > Protesters not 'naive' students > Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette > > The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. > > They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." > > The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." > > Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." > > There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. > > What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. > > KAREN ARAM > > Urbana From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Mon Feb 5 18:57:57 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 12:57:57 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] No honour among thieves: Saudi war on Yemen falling apart Message-ID: <023701d39eb3$3cde1bc0$b69a5340$@comcast.net> Saturday, February 3, 2018 Saudi war on Yemen falling apart No honour among thieves: Saudi war on Yemen falling apart Hamid Alizadeh 02 February 2018 Yemen Saudi Arabia https://www.marxist.com/images/cache/cc17d3ec794fdbf3bfda40370e50b88e_w800_h 376.jpg Air strike in Yemen / Image: public domain Over the past week, tensions within the Saudi led coalition fighting Houthi forces in Yemen have reached a critical point. Between Sunday and Wednesday, troops loyal to the Southern Transitional Council (STC) took hold of all but a few remaining areas of the port city of Aden and surrounded the presidential palace in which the cabinet was essentially besieged. The events followed a conflict between the Saudi supported Hadi government and the STC the previous week where the government reportedly cracked down on a rally called by the STC. Following this, and blaming the government for corruption, non-payment of wages and for causing the collapse of the Yemeni Rial, the STC set a deadline for the removal of the cabinet headed by Prime Minister Ahmed Obeid bin Dagher. Seeing that its demands were not met, troops loyal to the STC quickly swept through the city taking over all but a few of its neighbourhoods and effectively besieging the presidential palace with some reports claiming that the Saudi troops guarding the palace had already been defeated. Significantly, there have been reports of Emirati jets giving aircover for the advancing STC linked forces against Saudi linked troops. Yemeni soldiers from the 1st Armoured Division Image public domain Yemeni soldiers / Image: public domain On Wednesday, a deal seems to have been reached which, if confirmed, will mark a full victory for the separatists and a complete humiliation for the Saudis and their puppet regime. According to the reports the deal includes the following points: All of Aden's security will be left in the hands of Emirati and STC linked forces; the STC will become the recognised entity representing southern Yemen and an equal partner in the Saudi-led coalition; the present government will be sacked and a new one formed where the STC will nominate ministers and governors who preside over the matters relating to the south; the UAE will organise a separate army of South Yemen; the UAE will be responsible for the rebuilding of Aden and supervising services in cooperation with the STC. Ejected from all the main cities, Saudi troops are being left with little room to manoeuvre. The coalition is now a hostage of the STC which is the only real force wielding power on the ground in the south - at least in the main cities. The Hadi government is reduced to being a government of the frontlines, although even here it is not in control of the myriad of mercenary, Jihadi and tribal forces it has enlisted. The STC has confirmed its intention to continue to support the Saudi effort to fight the Houthis who took power in Sanaa and northern Yemen in 2015, but it is clear that it is far more interested in fighting Al Qaeda and consolidating power in its own areas. Southern forces have little support in Houthi dominated areas, and they are not motivated to wage a war for those areas either. A de facto splitting off of southern Yemen has taken place, falling under the influence of the UAE and not Saudi Arabia. Southern-Hadi relations Since unification with the north in 1990 southern Yemen has rebelled a series of times against northern domination. After the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh in the 2011 revolution, all political forces including southern Nationalist leaders joined the Saudi promoted transitional regime led by Hadi. But seeing nothing had changed fundamentally, the masses quickly returned to the streets. In the south the movement quickly became the most formidable threat against the government. Disillusioned with the rotten Saudi imposed transitional regime, and lacking a revolutionary internationalist working class leadership, the demands for secession gained ground. In the north, the lack of any revolutionary alternative left a vacuum that the Houthi forces stepped into, taking power in early 2015 and forcefully trying to expand their rule throughout the country. This led to clashes with nationalist militias in the south which became key elements in taking the city of Aden. Whereas the southern nationalist militias officially became a part of the Saudi led war coalition, they were never motivated to go beyond their own traditional areas and they were always mistrustful of Hadi and his government. No honour among thieves Having embarked on the war against the Houthi forces after these took power in 2015, the Emiratis and the Saudis thought the war would be a quick affair. But the front lines quickly froze revealing the complete lack of support for the war and the Hadi regime that it was promoting. Seeing the impending defeat, the United Arab Emirates, that have been the closest ally of Saudi Arabia in the past period, changed their focus away from the ongoing war. For Saudi Arabia withdrawal is not as simple. The Saudi crown prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), who is the real ruler of the kingdom, bet a lot of his authority on the war. While imposing austerity at home, he has spent billions in fighting the Houthi forces and achieving nothing. With Saudi society in a deep top to bottom crisis, a defeat would immediately strengthen MBS's opponents in the royal clique, as well as lead to rising anger amongst the masses. One of the main reasons for starting the war was for MBS to give a concession to the Saudi Jihadi movement, which in spite of being at the heart of the kingdom, is also fiercely opposed to the royal family. But having failed to export these forces, they are sure to come back home to the roost. Finally, a defeat for Saudi Arabia in Yemen would immediately consolidate Houthi rule as well as give Iran, a Houthi ally, an important base on its border. Thus a defeat would spell disaster for Saudi Arabia. Muhammad bin Salman Image RuMuhammad bin Salman / Image: Ru The UAE, on the other hand, has few of such concerns. While it would seem that the move to consolidate power in Aden was done without Emirati approval, it nevertheless is in line with the general trend followed by the Emiratis. That is, to gradually disengage from the war on the Houthis and focus on setting up its own power base mainly centred around Aden which has a strategic position at the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. Furthermore the Emiratis are intent on fighting Al Qaeda, whereas the Saudis are less interested in that. The Emirates, and in particular its ruler Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, have had a close relationship with MBS and were instrumental in helping him rise in the ranks of the Saudi royal family. In the past period where Saudi Arabia has been increasingly isolated internationally, coming into conflict with Turkey, Qatar and even the US, the Emirates have been the kingdom's closest allies. But the changing circumstances on the ground are damaging this alliance. It is clear that the war on the Houthis was lost a long time ago. The Hadi regime is never going to rule Yemen. Hadi was appointed in 2012 and his term ran out in 2014. He is completely discredited and his compliance with his Saudi masters and the brutality of the war he supports have left him with no base whatsoever on the ground. The Emiratis are merely pulling out and having built a base on the ground, gaining leverage over the Saudis who now need Emirati compliance to operate in Yemen. More importantly, it is not certain which side the US will take. US imperialism, although it is deeply involved in the war, has been wanting to pull it back in from the beginning. It is far more worried about the rise of Al Qaeda than defeating the Houthis who have often worked with the US in the past. There has so far been no official US response to the events in Aden. This indicates that Donald Trump's promise of sticking to US allies, are just as empty as Obama's. In Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Qatar, US imperialism has taken decisions which were directly opposed to the wishes of the Saudis. This is because it is not in the US's interests. Saudi Arabia in crisis What is taking place in Yemen is yet another part of the existential crisis of Saudi Arabia. Although the war on Yemen was clearly a shortsighted and stupid move from the point of view of the Kingdom's ruling class, yet there is a logic to it. Like the recent civil wars in Syria and Iraq, the Yemeni war was started partially to combat Iran's growing influence, but more importantly in order to appease the Wahhabi opposition movement inside the Kingdom itself. The crisis of US imperialism and the economic crisis is upsetting the delicate balance on which the kingdom was built. While MBS is trying to appease the youth and the demands for democracy with small democratic concessions at home, he is trying to appease the clerics with international adventures against a phantom Shia threat. But none of these will satisfy the needs of any of these groups. Meanwhile the royal family itself and the tribes which are connected to it, are in a vicious internal war which so far has seen MBS's faction succeed. But rest assured that once his star begins to fade, all the knives will be out for him. The defeat in Yemen will increase all of the pressures which are building up. Many times in history a military defeat has been the forerunner to revolution. In Russia this was the case both in 1905 and in 1917. What the result of a social explosion will be in Saudi Arabia is hard to tell, but it is clear that the status quo is bound to break up at a certain point. Destroyed house in the south of Sanaa Image public domainDestroyed house in the south of Sana'a / Image: public domain This stage in the decline is the most dangerous in the life of any regime. The Yemeni masses are feeling this everyday. The situation does not look bright. The Saudi war has destroyed all of the main infrastructure of the country. It has killed tens of thousands and left millions in a state of starvation. Yemen was already the poorest arab country, now huge parts of it have been reduced to a state of barbarism. The masses in Yemen rose up heroically during the 2011 revolution, but they were not able to take take power into their own hands due to the lack of leadership. Thus the power vacuum was filled by a whole series of different counter-revolutionary groups who now hold the Yemeni masses hostage to their own reactionary internal conflict. That is a bitter lesson to learn, but it serves to prove that no capitalist force can solve the problems of the masses of the Middle East. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 24750 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: image004.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 109218 bytes Desc: not available URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 19:01:09 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 19:01:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial In-Reply-To: <08032B21-7A00-4CE7-8509-102CFDE59B99@gmail.com> References: <171289689.2523336.1517844804267@mail.yahoo.com> <08032B21-7A00-4CE7-8509-102CFDE59B99@gmail.com> Message-ID: “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. --------------------------------------------- Tell that to the 12 million Undocumented in this country; All Muslims living in this country;Organized and Organizing Labor and Unions; LGBTs;African Americans, etc. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 12:55 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. US war-making is: ===================================================================================== Why We Should Fear the ‘Washington Establishment’ Figures Who are Pulling the Strings in the Trump Administration by Patrick Cockburn People sitting in cafes in Baghdad under the rule of Saddam Hussein used to be nervous of accidentally spilling their cup of coffee over the front page of the newspaper spread out in front of them. They had a good reason for their anxiety because Iraqi newspapers at that time always carried a picture of Saddam on their front page. Defacing his features might be interpreted as an indication of disrespect or even of a critical or treasonous attitude towards the great leader. Saddam Hussein invariably got star billing in the Iraqi press, but he would be impressed at the astonishing way in which it has become the norm in the US media for the words and doings of President Trump to monopolise the top of the news. Day after day, the three or four lead stories in The New York Times and CNN relate directly or indirectly to Trump. And, unlike Saddam, this blanket coverage is voluntary on the part of the news outlets and overwhelmingly critical. Trump’s outrageous insults and lies have succeeded in keeping the spotlight firmly on him ever since he declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Whatever else he may be, he is seldom boring, unlike so many of his defeated rivals and opponents who believed that his obvious failings must inevitably sink him. One day they may be proved right, but that day is a long time coming; the open loathing for Trump on the part of much of the American media is curiously ineffectual because it is repetitious and no great disaster has so far hit America one year into his presidency. Commentators note that, for all his bellicose rhetoric, he has yet to start any wars – unlike all his Republican predecessors going back to President Ford. The constant demonisation of Trump carries another danger that is under-appreciated and may produce a real-world disaster. The US media blames everything on him and respectfully portrays the bevy of generals who populate the upper ranks of his administration – Chief of Staff John Kelly, Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser HR McMaster – as the only adults in the room. Yet it may turn out that they and other business and political figures, such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the CIA chief Mike Pompeo, are more likely to bring about a war than Trump himself. Just how poor is the judgement of the very people who are meant to be a restraining force on Trump was shown last month when Tillerson made a classic blunder that may have negative results for the US for years to come. On 17 January, he announced the US military forces would stay in Kurdish controlled north-east Syria after the defeat of Isis in order to weaken Iran and President Bashar al-Assad. Just three days later on 20 January, Turkey, predictably enraged at what it saw as a US territorial guarantee of a de facto Kurdish state, sent its forces across the Syrian border to invade the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. Tillerson had unwittingly initiated a new phase in the Syrian conflict in which the US is self-isolated and Turkey, Russia, Iran and Assad had been brought closer together. The Kurds in Afrin, one of the few places in Syria not devastated by war, have to hide in caves as the direct result of the new US initiative. Trump’s isolationism may be less risky than the neo-interventionism of his senior advisers. Reports from Washington suggest that the decision to get more fully engaged in the Syrian civil war was contrary to what Trump himself wanted. By this account, he would have preferred to use his State of the Union address to announce that the US mission in Syria had ended in triumph with the defeat of Isis and that he was withdrawing US ground forces. Instead, the decision went the other way as McMaster and Mattis supported by Tillerson successfully argued for keeping US ground forces in Syria and Iraq. These senior officials were only advocating the consensus opinion of the US foreign policy establishment, as was swiftly illustrated by media commentators. Even as Turkish tanks were rolling into Syria, an editorial in The Washington Post was applauding Tillerson for having “bluntly recognised a truth that both President Trump and President Barack Obama attempted to dodge” – which is that the US needs a political and military presence in Syria. What Trump and Obama were really dodging was repeating the post 9/11 US mistake in pursuing open-ended military ventures against multiple enemies in fragmented countries like Afghanistan and Iraq where it could not win. In the case of Obama, this sense of caution and ability to see what might go wrong was carefully calculated; in the case of Trump, the caution is instinctive and not always operative, but the end result was often the same. Despite all Trump’s condemnation of Obama’s supposed weakness, his strategy in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria did not differ much from his predecessor – that is until his chief security officials switched to an interventionist policy in Syria last month. Traditional policy of relying on force to overcome all obstacles or what Obama nicknamed “The Washington Playbook” looks as if it is back in business. He privately condemned the US foreign policy establishment for being wedded to dubious allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in pursuit of over-ambitious objectives American strength in the world was ebbing before Trump, though the divisive and mercurial nature of his presidency is speeding up the decline. In every continent a power vacuum has opened up which is being filled by many eager candidates. They generally have the same ingredients of populism, demagoguery, authoritarianism and nationalism, though the quantities of each may differ, and they are certainly making the world a more dangerous place because they do not know the limits of their own power. From Manila to Warsaw, there has been the rise of the mini-Trumps who tend to know the politics of their own country well, but be dangerously ignorant of that of other countries. It is in the nature of arbitrary rulers, who have suppressed domestic criticism, such as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, that they pursue exaggerated ambitions moving over ice that is always thinner than they imagine. US power in the world is declining, having reached its peak between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the start of the Iraq war in 2003. Two dangers are emerging: one is the feckless nature of Trump administration which acts as a sort of out-of-control wrecking ball, though the damage done is limited by Trump’s low attention span and divisions in Washington. A second danger is the US foreign policy establishment. which has learned nothing new from past failures, which would like to restore US power to what it once was and is does not understand that this can no longer be done. This is “the Washington Playbook”, which Obama came to deride and ignore and is just as dangerous as anything Trump may do. ### > On Feb 5, 2018, at 9:41 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > For sure! All around! Thanks to everyone involved in organizing and supporting our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. > 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] > On Behalf Of Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 9:33 AM > To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; Karen Aram > > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their > very negative editorial > > Good work! > > Dianna > > > On Monday, February 5, 2018, 7:16:13 AM CST, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > Protesters not 'naive' students > Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette > > The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. > > They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." > > The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." > > Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." > > There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. > > What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. > > KAREN ARAM > > Urbana From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 19:14:27 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 19:14:27 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial References: <171289689.2523336.1517844804267@mail.yahoo.com> <08032B21-7A00-4CE7-8509-102CFDE59B99@gmail.com> Message-ID: “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. --------------------------------------------- Tell that to the 12 million Undocumented in this country; All Muslims living in this country;Organized and Organizing Labor and Unions; LGBTs;African Americans, etc. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 12:55 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. US war-making is: ===================================================================================== Why We Should Fear the ‘Washington Establishment’ Figures Who are Pulling the Strings in the Trump Administration by Patrick Cockburn People sitting in cafes in Baghdad under the rule of Saddam Hussein used to be nervous of accidentally spilling their cup of coffee over the front page of the newspaper spread out in front of them. They had a good reason for their anxiety because Iraqi newspapers at that time always carried a picture of Saddam on their front page. Defacing his features might be interpreted as an indication of disrespect or even of a critical or treasonous attitude towards the great leader. Saddam Hussein invariably got star billing in the Iraqi press, but he would be impressed at the astonishing way in which it has become the norm in the US media for the words and doings of President Trump to monopolise the top of the news. Day after day, the three or four lead stories in The New York Times and CNN relate directly or indirectly to Trump. And, unlike Saddam, this blanket coverage is voluntary on the part of the news outlets and overwhelmingly critical. Trump’s outrageous insults and lies have succeeded in keeping the spotlight firmly on him ever since he declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Whatever else he may be, he is seldom boring, unlike so many of his defeated rivals and opponents who believed that his obvious failings must inevitably sink him. One day they may be proved right, but that day is a long time coming; the open loathing for Trump on the part of much of the American media is curiously ineffectual because it is repetitious and no great disaster has so far hit America one year into his presidency. Commentators note that, for all his bellicose rhetoric, he has yet to start any wars – unlike all his Republican predecessors going back to President Ford. The constant demonisation of Trump carries another danger that is under-appreciated and may produce a real-world disaster. The US media blames everything on him and respectfully portrays the bevy of generals who populate the upper ranks of his administration – Chief of Staff John Kelly, Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser HR McMaster – as the only adults in the room. Yet it may turn out that they and other business and political figures, such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the CIA chief Mike Pompeo, are more likely to bring about a war than Trump himself. Just how poor is the judgement of the very people who are meant to be a restraining force on Trump was shown last month when Tillerson made a classic blunder that may have negative results for the US for years to come. On 17 January, he announced the US military forces would stay in Kurdish controlled north-east Syria after the defeat of Isis in order to weaken Iran and President Bashar al-Assad. Just three days later on 20 January, Turkey, predictably enraged at what it saw as a US territorial guarantee of a de facto Kurdish state, sent its forces across the Syrian border to invade the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. Tillerson had unwittingly initiated a new phase in the Syrian conflict in which the US is self-isolated and Turkey, Russia, Iran and Assad had been brought closer together. The Kurds in Afrin, one of the few places in Syria not devastated by war, have to hide in caves as the direct result of the new US initiative. Trump’s isolationism may be less risky than the neo-interventionism of his senior advisers. Reports from Washington suggest that the decision to get more fully engaged in the Syrian civil war was contrary to what Trump himself wanted. By this account, he would have preferred to use his State of the Union address to announce that the US mission in Syria had ended in triumph with the defeat of Isis and that he was withdrawing US ground forces. Instead, the decision went the other way as McMaster and Mattis supported by Tillerson successfully argued for keeping US ground forces in Syria and Iraq. These senior officials were only advocating the consensus opinion of the US foreign policy establishment, as was swiftly illustrated by media commentators. Even as Turkish tanks were rolling into Syria, an editorial in The Washington Post was applauding Tillerson for having “bluntly recognised a truth that both President Trump and President Barack Obama attempted to dodge” – which is that the US needs a political and military presence in Syria. What Trump and Obama were really dodging was repeating the post 9/11 US mistake in pursuing open-ended military ventures against multiple enemies in fragmented countries like Afghanistan and Iraq where it could not win. In the case of Obama, this sense of caution and ability to see what might go wrong was carefully calculated; in the case of Trump, the caution is instinctive and not always operative, but the end result was often the same. Despite all Trump’s condemnation of Obama’s supposed weakness, his strategy in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria did not differ much from his predecessor – that is until his chief security officials switched to an interventionist policy in Syria last month. Traditional policy of relying on force to overcome all obstacles or what Obama nicknamed “The Washington Playbook” looks as if it is back in business. He privately condemned the US foreign policy establishment for being wedded to dubious allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in pursuit of over-ambitious objectives American strength in the world was ebbing before Trump, though the divisive and mercurial nature of his presidency is speeding up the decline. In every continent a power vacuum has opened up which is being filled by many eager candidates. They generally have the same ingredients of populism, demagoguery, authoritarianism and nationalism, though the quantities of each may differ, and they are certainly making the world a more dangerous place because they do not know the limits of their own power. From Manila to Warsaw, there has been the rise of the mini-Trumps who tend to know the politics of their own country well, but be dangerously ignorant of that of other countries. It is in the nature of arbitrary rulers, who have suppressed domestic criticism, such as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, that they pursue exaggerated ambitions moving over ice that is always thinner than they imagine. US power in the world is declining, having reached its peak between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the start of the Iraq war in 2003. Two dangers are emerging: one is the feckless nature of Trump administration which acts as a sort of out-of-control wrecking ball, though the damage done is limited by Trump’s low attention span and divisions in Washington. A second danger is the US foreign policy establishment. which has learned nothing new from past failures, which would like to restore US power to what it once was and is does not understand that this can no longer be done. This is “the Washington Playbook”, which Obama came to deride and ignore and is just as dangerous as anything Trump may do. ### > On Feb 5, 2018, at 9:41 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > For sure! All around! Thanks to everyone involved in organizing and supporting our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. > 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] > On Behalf Of Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 9:33 AM > To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; Karen Aram > > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their > very negative editorial > > Good work! > > Dianna > > > On Monday, February 5, 2018, 7:16:13 AM CST, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > Protesters not 'naive' students > Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette > > The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. > > They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." > > The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." > > Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." > > There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. > > What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. > > KAREN ARAM > > Urbana From karenaram at hotmail.com Mon Feb 5 19:14:52 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 19:14:52 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Message-ID: [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share * clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains * pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 * * About * Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 19:21:14 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 19:21:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) ; peace Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share · clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains · pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 · · About · Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. -------------- 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 Mon Feb 5 19:43:38 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 19:43:38 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Message-ID: The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share · clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains · pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 · About Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 19:51:25 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 19:51:25 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Message-ID: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! 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, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share · clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains · pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 · About Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 20:04:25 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 20:04:25 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Nuclear Power Industry is a Crime Against Humanity! - MWC News In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Leave it to the Dems to be promoting a Crime Against Humanity under the good name and reputation of WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott. 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) Feed: Francis Boyle - Google News Posted on: Sunday, March 20, 2011 12:22 PM Author: Francis Boyle - Google News Subject: Nuclear Power Industry is a Crime Against Humanity! - MWC News Nuclear Power Industry is a Crime Against Humanity! MWC News Dear Friends: I have now had the opportunity to review my information sources. I have already sent to you the basic thrust of my analysis: Namely, that the Japanese Nuclear Power Industry constitutes a Crime against Humanity as defined ... and more » View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Mon Feb 5 20:11:50 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 20:11:50 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? (Thats me being kind) Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! 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, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share • clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains • pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 • About Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C63e4c73191e14dd856e508d56cd22924%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534572265126627&sdata=bPV4VnsIq9tsFmZeCKdOsfcJ1TMpf0rHrM4xuRQFdF4%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 20:14:23 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 20:14:23 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? (Thats me being kind) Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! 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, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share • clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains • pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 • About Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C63e4c73191e14dd856e508d56cd22924%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534572265126627&sdata=bPV4VnsIq9tsFmZeCKdOsfcJ1TMpf0rHrM4xuRQFdF4%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 20:18:06 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 20:18:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" References: Message-ID: Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? (Thats me being kind) Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! 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, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share • clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains • pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 • About Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C63e4c73191e14dd856e508d56cd22924%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534572265126627&sdata=bPV4VnsIq9tsFmZeCKdOsfcJ1TMpf0rHrM4xuRQFdF4%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 20:46:25 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 20:46:25 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UIUC Alt.right Nazis Message-ID: Lots of discussion of the UIUC fascists. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43419-young-fascists-on-campus-turning-point-usa-and-its-far-right-connections -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brussel at illinois.edu Mon Feb 5 21:21:24 2018 From: brussel at illinois.edu (Brussel, Morton K) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 21:21:24 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? (Thats me being kind) Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! 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, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share • clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains • pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 • About Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C63e4c73191e14dd856e508d56cd22924%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534572265126627&sdata=bPV4VnsIq9tsFmZeCKdOsfcJ1TMpf0rHrM4xuRQFdF4%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Mon Feb 5 21:32:22 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 21:32:22 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> References: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Even if the design is positive, productive and safe. It is subject to human error, especially when being produced for profit, by private enterprise. That is the situation we face with company’s concerned only with profit and maximizing their stocks as opposed to hiring the most suitable and skilled people to do the job. Karen Aram, Project Recruiter for the AP 1000 in China Shaw, Stone & Webster, sold to CBI. On Feb 5, 2018, at 13:21, Brussel, Morton K > wrote: Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? (Thats me being kind) Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! 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, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share • clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains • pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 • About Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C63e4c73191e14dd856e508d56cd22924%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534572265126627&sdata=bPV4VnsIq9tsFmZeCKdOsfcJ1TMpf0rHrM4xuRQFdF4%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Mon Feb 5 21:54:02 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 15:54:02 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UIUC Alt.right Nazis In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8047B227-F795-421C-8ADC-A64F8680AF05@gmail.com> The late left journalist Alexander Cockburn used to say that 'Truth-out’ was often better termed ’Truth-Left-Out.’ He applied a similar critique to the soi-disant ’Southern Poverty Law Center.” (Links on request.) I fear we see here another identity-politics enthusiasm, to take the place of an anti-war/anti-capitalist movement. Our government is not killing people in MENA for white supremacy; nor are neoliberal policies designed to establish misogyny. But the 1% is happy to concentrate on those undoubted evils: it distracts attention from war and exploitation. —CGE > On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:46 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > Lots of discussion of the UIUC fascists. > > http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43419-young-fascists-on-campus-turning-point-usa-and-its-far-right-connections > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 6 00:01:05 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 00:01:05 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] UIUC Alt.right Nazis In-Reply-To: <8047B227-F795-421C-8ADC-A64F8680AF05@gmail.com> References: <8047B227-F795-421C-8ADC-A64F8680AF05@gmail.com> Message-ID: Yeah well the American Nazi Party publicly threatened to kill me if I argued the case for Urbana becoming Sanctuary City in 1986, which I did anyway and won. So I take these Local Nazis seriously. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:54 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] UIUC Alt.right Nazis The late left journalist Alexander Cockburn used to say that 'Truth-out’ was often better termed ’Truth-Left-Out.’ He applied a similar critique to the soi-disant ’Southern Poverty Law Center.” (Links on request.) I fear we see here another identity-politics enthusiasm, to take the place of an anti-war/anti-capitalist movement. Our government is not killing people in MENA for white supremacy; nor are neoliberal policies designed to establish misogyny. But the 1% is happy to concentrate on those undoubted evils: it distracts attention from war and exploitation. —CGE On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:46 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Lots of discussion of the UIUC fascists. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43419-young-fascists-on-campus-turning-point-usa-and-its-far-right-connections _______________________________________________ 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 Tue Feb 6 00:01:16 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 00:01:16 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] DIVEST LAUNCH PARTY Message-ID: Suggested Events See More Suggested Events [https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p100x100/27540197_452808625134247_6473153578122812252_n.png?oh=238ee7e52c343bcdbf4fbcd2cca4589f&oe=5B12F620] UIUC Divest Launch Party Friday CST at Channing Murray Foundation 3 friends are going Interested · Going [https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/c39.0.100.100/p100x100/26230957_10155534783869398_4042067285103433069_n.jpg?oh=7f965af8399bd42142a53ebfd57cea7d&oe=5B1B1F53] Weekly General Membership Meetings Thursday CST at Channing Murray Foundation by GEO Interested · Going [https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/c25.0.100.100/p100x100/25353791_2050893005188682_841156662023127079_n.jpg?oh=79e757dfbb5c69d8d29c41e5072fbfbb&oe=5B1ECD68] Judicial Candidate Forum Wed Feb 28 CST at University of Illinois College of Law Aaron O Ammons is going Interested · Going [https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/c83.0.100.100/p100x100/26167951_1618644334861779_2029904885178906331_n.jpg?oh=4f0ba790f5c118e7feb4d9f1d5dee100&oe=5AE72C55] Sustainability Shorts Film Festival Sat Feb 24 CST at Lincoln Avenue Residence Halls- University of Illinois Mary Jane Oviatt is going Interested · Going [https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/q81/c33.0.100.100/p100x100/27545014_878408265701207_2121076663769673023_n.jpg?oh=f68b6026d29481c184cc19e47f2fe90a&oe=5ADD475D] Zagloba Polish Club Pączki Sale 2018 Mon Feb 12 CST at University of Illinois Main Quad 405 guests Interested · Going [https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/q84/c19.0.100.100/p100x100/27332507_10156071213064116_5682435397780772520_n.jpg?oh=384a9fbd534d8a0998d92262cecf72b2&oe=5ADBC1C9] Fat Tuesday w/Vine Street Syncopators! Tue Feb 13 CST at Esquire Lounge Inc 105 guests Interested · Going English (US) · Español · Português (Brasil) · Français (France) · Deutsch Privacy · Terms · Advertising · Ad Choices · Cookies · More Facebook © 2018 [UIUC Divest's photo.] FEB9 UIUC Divest Launch Party Public · Hosted by UIUC Divest InterestedGoing Share * clock Friday, February 9 at 6 PM - 8 PM CST 4 days from now · 18–27°Snow Showers * pin Show Map Channing Murray Foundation 1209 W Oregon St, Urbana, Illinois 61801 * * About * Discussion 6 Going · 4 InterestedSee All * [https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-1/p74x74/23471903_10155875503199717_457712417170105222_n.jpg?oh=88b4f840fe6fc134a3a83bd9ffedf364&oe=5B237EE5] * [https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-1/p74x74/20108663_1106175956180116_551041218329168697_n.jpg?oh=946a05d3f733fbc6c1a262202466add5&oe=5B17E0CA] * [https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-1/p74x74/20770016_10111144332530094_8953385986207597454_n.jpg?oh=3fae59cda8edcdfb100bbfac4ee78f9e&oe=5B1F9377] Dunia, Muhammad and Joel are going Share Details We are incredibly proud to announce the 2018 launch of UIUC Divest: a campaign to withdraw the University's investments from companies which violate human rights locally and globally--including companies which are complicit in, enable, or carry out the suppression of oppressed and marginalized communities. Join us at the Channing Murray Foundation to celebrate this launch and to learn more about our campaign, goals, and who we are. We will be hosting a multitude of poets and performers from organizations that support Divest! Doors open at 6pm, with the event starting at 6:30pm. Refreshments will be provided, with Palestinian sweets from Nablus Sweets in Orland Park, IL. Co-sponsoring Organizations: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) Black Students for Revolution (BSFR) Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (MEChA) Campus Union for Trans Equality and Support (CUTES) United Muslim Minority Advocates (UMMA) Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC) Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) Muslim Students Association (MSA) Black Lives Matter-CU Chapter (BLM-CU) Black United Front (BUF) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Feb 6 00:10:04 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 00:10:04 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> References: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> Message-ID: That is not the point. The point is that WAND was founded by Dr. Helen Caldicott. And here the alleged Illinois chapter of WAND is being founded upon principles that are totally antithetical to everything Caldicott has stood for, including founding Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. This Illinois Chapter of WAND is a joke and a fraud organized by the Democratic Party who probably got substantial campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry to do so. 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: Brussel, Morton K Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:21 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? (Thats me being kind) Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! 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, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share • clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains • pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 • About Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C63e4c73191e14dd856e508d56cd22924%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534572265126627&sdata=bPV4VnsIq9tsFmZeCKdOsfcJ1TMpf0rHrM4xuRQFdF4%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 6 01:29:13 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 01:29:13 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> Message-ID: And now we know why the Dems kept the name of what they styled as their “campus peace feminist” under wraps until the very last minute. The Dems knew they were going to deal their card from the bottom of the deck down and dirty. Their Consciousness of Guilt. You just can’t trust those Dems. 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, February 05, 2018 6:10 PM To: Brussel, Morton K Cc: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" That is not the point. The point is that WAND was founded by Dr. Helen Caldicott. And here the alleged Illinois chapter of WAND is being founded upon principles that are totally antithetical to everything Caldicott has stood for, including founding Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. This Illinois Chapter of WAND is a joke and a fraud organized by the Democratic Party who probably got substantial campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry to do so. 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: Brussel, Morton K Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:21 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Karen Aram >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? (Thats me being kind) Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! 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, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share • clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains • pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 • About Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C63e4c73191e14dd856e508d56cd22924%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534572265126627&sdata=bPV4VnsIq9tsFmZeCKdOsfcJ1TMpf0rHrM4xuRQFdF4%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 6 02:06:15 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 02:06:15 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" References: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Nothing good can come from Illinois WAND. It has already been coopted and perverted by the nuclear power industry working in cahoots with the Dems in violation of everything Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her entire career. 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, February 05, 2018 7:29 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: FW: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" And now we know why the Dems kept the name of what they styled as their “campus peace feminist” under wraps until the very last minute. The Dems knew they were going to deal their card from the bottom of the deck down and dirty. Their Consciousness of Guilt. You just can’t trust those Dems. 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, February 05, 2018 6:10 PM To: Brussel, Morton K > Cc: Karen Aram >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" That is not the point. The point is that WAND was founded by Dr. Helen Caldicott. And here the alleged Illinois chapter of WAND is being founded upon principles that are totally antithetical to everything Caldicott has stood for, including founding Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. This Illinois Chapter of WAND is a joke and a fraud organized by the Democratic Party who probably got substantial campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry to do so. 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: Brussel, Morton K Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:21 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Karen Aram >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? (Thats me being kind) Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! 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, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" [State Representative Carol Ammons's photo.] FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War Public · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Going Share • clock Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST 5 days from now · 19–32°Snow Grains • pin Show Map Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 • About Discussion See All Share Details With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C63e4c73191e14dd856e508d56cd22924%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534572265126627&sdata=bPV4VnsIq9tsFmZeCKdOsfcJ1TMpf0rHrM4xuRQFdF4%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Tue Feb 6 02:37:43 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 20:37:43 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> Message-ID: One of the speakers is Robert Naiman, "Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy [and] president of the board of Truthout...” Although the Democratic Party front 'Just Foreign Policy' occasionally gets something right (e.g., Yemen), our sometimes-comrade (but not for Trots) Bob Naiman cannot be trusted on issues of science and Democrats. Witness his awful behavior during the election: . —CGE > On Feb 5, 2018, at 8:06 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Nothing good can come from Illinois WAND. It has already been coopted and perverted by the nuclear power industry working in cahoots with the Dems in violation of everything Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her entire career. Fab. > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 7:29 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: FW: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > And now we know why the Dems kept the name of what they styled as their “campus peace feminist” under wraps until the very last minute. The Dems knew they were going to deal their card from the bottom of the deck down and dirty. Their Consciousness of Guilt. You just can’t trust those Dems. Fab. > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 6:10 PM > To: Brussel, Morton K > Cc: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > That is not the point. The point is that WAND was founded by Dr. Helen Caldicott. And here the alleged Illinois chapter of WAND is being founded upon principles that are totally antithetical to everything Caldicott has stood for, including founding Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. This Illinois Chapter of WAND is a joke and a fraud organized by the Democratic Party who probably got substantial campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry to do so. Fab. > > > From: Brussel, Morton K > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:21 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb > > > On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. Fab. > > > From: Karen Aram [mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com] > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? > (Thats me being kind) > > Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. > > As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. > > Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. > > Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. > > Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. > > Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. > > I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. > > Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. > > > On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! fab > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. fab. > > > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. > I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! Fab. > > > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) ; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > > FEB10 > The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War > · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons > Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST > · Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center > 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 > · > With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. > > Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. > > The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. > > About our speakers: > > Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. > > Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. > > Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. > > *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. > _______________________________________________ From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Feb 6 02:49:30 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 02:49:30 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Yeah well, when we were all over there in front of the Urbana City Council in order to reaffirm Urbana as a City of Refuge for the 10,000 Undocumented living in Champaign County in late 2016 for 3 Mondays in a row, all of a sudden Naiman appears out of nowhere and argues to the Urbana City Council about who should be the next chair of the Democratic Party, thus distracting everyone's attention from this critical issue under consideration and wasting everyone's 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: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 8:38 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" One of the speakers is Robert Naiman, "Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy [and] president of the board of Truthout...” Although the Democratic Party front 'Just Foreign Policy' occasionally gets something right (e.g., Yemen), our sometimes-comrade (but not for Trots) Bob Naiman cannot be trusted on issues of science and Democrats. Witness his awful behavior during the election: . —CGE > On Feb 5, 2018, at 8:06 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Nothing good can come from Illinois WAND. It has already been coopted and perverted by the nuclear power industry working in cahoots with the Dems in violation of everything Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her entire career. Fab. > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 7:29 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > > Subject: FW: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > And now we know why the Dems kept the name of what they styled as their “campus peace feminist” under wraps until the very last minute. The Dems knew they were going to deal their card from the bottom of the deck down and dirty. Their Consciousness of Guilt. You just can’t trust those Dems. Fab. > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 6:10 PM > To: Brussel, Morton K > Cc: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss List > (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > That is not the point. The point is that WAND was founded by Dr. Helen Caldicott. And here the alleged Illinois chapter of WAND is being founded upon principles that are totally antithetical to everything Caldicott has stood for, including founding Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. This Illinois Chapter of WAND is a joke and a fraud organized by the Democratic Party who probably got substantial campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry to do so. Fab. > > > From: Brussel, Morton K > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:21 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss List > (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb > > > On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. Fab. > > > From: Karen Aram [mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com] > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? > (Thats me being kind) > > Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. > > As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. > > Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. > > Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. > > Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. > > Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. > > I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. > > Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. > > > On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen > Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking > disgrace and a scandal! fab > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. fab. > > > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] > On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. > I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! Fab. > > > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] > On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > ; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > > FEB10 > The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War · Hosted by State > Representative Carol Ammons Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST · > Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center > 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 > · > With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. > > Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. > > The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. > > About our speakers: > > Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. > > Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. > > Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. > > *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. > _______________________________________________ From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Tue Feb 6 02:58:12 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 20:58:12 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <036c01d39ef6$54348d70$fc9da850$@comcast.net> " our sometimes-comrade (but not for Trots) Bob Naiman " Not just " Not for Trots ", also - Anarchists, Greens, and anyone who criticizes the Democratic party. David J. -----Original Message----- From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 8:38 PM To: Francis A Boyle Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" One of the speakers is Robert Naiman, "Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy [and] president of the board of Truthout...” Although the Democratic Party front 'Just Foreign Policy' occasionally gets something right (e.g., Yemen), our sometimes-comrade (but not for Trots) Bob Naiman cannot be trusted on issues of science and Democrats. Witness his awful behavior during the election: . —CGE > On Feb 5, 2018, at 8:06 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Nothing good can come from Illinois WAND. It has already been coopted and perverted by the nuclear power industry working in cahoots with the Dems in violation of everything Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her entire career. Fab. > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 7:29 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > > Subject: FW: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > And now we know why the Dems kept the name of what they styled as their “campus peace feminist” under wraps until the very last minute. The Dems knew they were going to deal their card from the bottom of the deck down and dirty. Their Consciousness of Guilt. You just can’t trust those Dems. Fab. > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 6:10 PM > To: Brussel, Morton K > Cc: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss List > (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > That is not the point. The point is that WAND was founded by Dr. Helen Caldicott. And here the alleged Illinois chapter of WAND is being founded upon principles that are totally antithetical to everything Caldicott has stood for, including founding Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. This Illinois Chapter of WAND is a joke and a fraud organized by the Democratic Party who probably got substantial campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry to do so. Fab. > > > From: Brussel, Morton K > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:21 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss List > (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb > > > On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. Fab. > > > From: Karen Aram [mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com] > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? > (Thats me being kind) > > Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. > > As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. > > Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. > > Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. > > Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. > > Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. > > I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. > > Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. > > > On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen > Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking > disgrace and a scandal! fab > > > From: Boyle, Francis A > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. fab. > > > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] > On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. > I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! Fab. > > > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] > On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > ; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > > FEB10 > The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War · Hosted by State > Representative Carol Ammons Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST · > Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center > 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 > · > With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. > > Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. > > The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. > > About our speakers: > > Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. > > Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. > > Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. > > *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. > _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 6 03:18:32 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 03:18:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Re Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: <036c01d39ef6$54348d70$fc9da850$@comcast.net> References: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> <036c01d39ef6$54348d70$fc9da850$@comcast.net> Message-ID: If Bob focuses on “war” we have no problem with that. We’ll see what the Prof. has to say in relation to North Korea and US relations, she had better be accurate in relation to who is provoking war, another war with North Korea. We shouldn’t be too hard on the student supporting nuclear power, but we have a right to disagree with her. Is she the WAND Representative? If so, that does need to be addressed. I hope all who oppose war will join me, we can’t sit this one out. Though now they know we’re coming, they’ll probably cancel Q & A. > On Feb 5, 2018, at 18:58, David Johnson via Peace-discuss wrote: > > " our sometimes-comrade (but not for Trots) Bob Naiman " > > Not just " Not for Trots ", also - Anarchists, Greens, and anyone who criticizes the Democratic party. > > David J. > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 8:38 PM > To: Francis A Boyle > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > One of the speakers is Robert Naiman, "Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy [and] president of the board of Truthout...” > > Although the Democratic Party front 'Just Foreign Policy' occasionally gets something right (e.g., Yemen), our sometimes-comrade (but not for Trots) Bob Naiman cannot be trusted on issues of science and Democrats. Witness his awful behavior during the election: . > > —CGE > > >> On Feb 5, 2018, at 8:06 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> Nothing good can come from Illinois WAND. It has already been coopted and perverted by the nuclear power industry working in cahoots with the Dems in violation of everything Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her entire career. Fab. >> >> >> From: Boyle, Francis A >> Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 7:29 PM >> To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >> >> Subject: FW: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" >> >> And now we know why the Dems kept the name of what they styled as their “campus peace feminist” under wraps until the very last minute. The Dems knew they were going to deal their card from the bottom of the deck down and dirty. Their Consciousness of Guilt. You just can’t trust those Dems. Fab. >> >> >> From: Boyle, Francis A >> Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 6:10 PM >> To: Brussel, Morton K >> Cc: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss List >> (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >> Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" >> >> That is not the point. The point is that WAND was founded by Dr. Helen Caldicott. And here the alleged Illinois chapter of WAND is being founded upon principles that are totally antithetical to everything Caldicott has stood for, including founding Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. This Illinois Chapter of WAND is a joke and a fraud organized by the Democratic Party who probably got substantial campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry to do so. Fab. >> >> >> From: Brussel, Morton K >> Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:21 PM >> To: Boyle, Francis A >> Cc: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss List >> (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" >> >> Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb >> >> >> On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. Fab. >> >> >> From: Karen Aram [mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com] >> Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM >> To: Boyle, Francis A >> Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >> >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" >> >> Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? >> (Thats me being kind) >> >> Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. >> >> As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. >> >> Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. >> >> Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. >> >> Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. >> >> Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. >> >> I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. >> >> Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. >> >> >> On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen >> Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking >> disgrace and a scandal! fab >> >> >> From: Boyle, Francis A >> Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM >> To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >> >> Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" >> >> The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. fab. >> >> >> From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >> On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM >> To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >> >> Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" >> >> Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. >> I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! Fab. >> >> >> From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >> On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM >> To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >> ; peace >> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" >> >> >> FEB10 >> The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War · Hosted by State >> Representative Carol Ammons Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST · >> Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center >> 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 >> · >> With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. >> >> Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. >> >> The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. >> >> About our speakers: >> >> Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. >> >> Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. >> >> Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. >> >> *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. >> _______________________________________________ > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C366a808b2fa0424b20be08d56d0d8404%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534827174592297&sdata=Ns1FY12hUGy2RK8OFPpJwNCRUcVifkpWvMPr0sC6%2Buk%3D&reserved=0 > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C366a808b2fa0424b20be08d56d0d8404%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534827174592297&sdata=Ns1FY12hUGy2RK8OFPpJwNCRUcVifkpWvMPr0sC6%2Buk%3D&reserved=0 From brussel at illinois.edu Tue Feb 6 03:47:09 2018 From: brussel at illinois.edu (Brussel, Morton K) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 03:47:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Re Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> <036c01d39ef6$54348d70$fc9da850$@comcast.net> Message-ID: Dear Karen, I’m surprised at your statement: …This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast…. Please give references for this outrageous statement. —mkb On Feb 5, 2018, at 9:18 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: If Bob focuses on “war” we have no problem with that. We’ll see what the Prof. has to say in relation to North Korea and US relations, she had better be accurate in relation to who is provoking war, another war with North Korea. We shouldn’t be too hard on the student supporting nuclear power, but we have a right to disagree with her. Is she the WAND Representative? If so, that does need to be addressed. I hope all who oppose war will join me, we can’t sit this one out. Though now they know we’re coming, they’ll probably cancel Q & A. On Feb 5, 2018, at 18:58, David Johnson via Peace-discuss > wrote: " our sometimes-comrade (but not for Trots) Bob Naiman " Not just " Not for Trots ", also - Anarchists, Greens, and anyone who criticizes the Democratic party. David J. -----Original Message----- From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 8:38 PM To: Francis A Boyle Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" One of the speakers is Robert Naiman, "Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy [and] president of the board of Truthout...” Although the Democratic Party front 'Just Foreign Policy' occasionally gets something right (e.g., Yemen), our sometimes-comrade (but not for Trots) Bob Naiman cannot be trusted on issues of science and Democrats. Witness his awful behavior during the election: . —CGE On Feb 5, 2018, at 8:06 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Nothing good can come from Illinois WAND. It has already been coopted and perverted by the nuclear power industry working in cahoots with the Dems in violation of everything Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her entire career. Fab. From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 7:29 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: FW: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" And now we know why the Dems kept the name of what they styled as their “campus peace feminist” under wraps until the very last minute. The Dems knew they were going to deal their card from the bottom of the deck down and dirty. Their Consciousness of Guilt. You just can’t trust those Dems. Fab. From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 6:10 PM To: Brussel, Morton K > Cc: Karen Aram >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" That is not the point. The point is that WAND was founded by Dr. Helen Caldicott. And here the alleged Illinois chapter of WAND is being founded upon principles that are totally antithetical to everything Caldicott has stood for, including founding Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. This Illinois Chapter of WAND is a joke and a fraud organized by the Democratic Party who probably got substantial campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry to do so. Fab. From: Brussel, Morton K Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:21 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Karen Aram >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. Fab. From: Karen Aram [mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com] Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? (Thats me being kind) Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! fab From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. fab. From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! Fab. From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST · Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 · With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C366a808b2fa0424b20be08d56d0d8404%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534827174592297&sdata=Ns1FY12hUGy2RK8OFPpJwNCRUcVifkpWvMPr0sC6%2Buk%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C366a808b2fa0424b20be08d56d0d8404%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534827174592297&sdata=Ns1FY12hUGy2RK8OFPpJwNCRUcVifkpWvMPr0sC6%2Buk%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Tue Feb 6 03:56:49 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 21:56:49 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial In-Reply-To: References: <171289689.2523336.1517844804267@mail.yahoo.com> <08032B21-7A00-4CE7-8509-102CFDE59B99@gmail.com> Message-ID: <8685E82C-9E09-40E8-884C-678DB065FD43@illinois.edu> Tell me what 'Trump Fascism' is, when his policies don’t differ substantially from Obama’s. > On Feb 5, 2018, at 1:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. > --------------------------------------------- > Tell that to the 12 million Undocumented in this country; All Muslims living in this country;Organized and Organizing Labor and Unions; LGBTs;African Americans, etc. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 12:55 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial > > “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. US war-making is: > > ===================================================================================== > Why We Should Fear the ‘Washington Establishment’ Figures Who are Pulling the Strings in the Trump Administration by Patrick Cockburn > > People sitting in cafes in Baghdad under the rule of Saddam Hussein used to be nervous of accidentally spilling their cup of coffee over the front page of the newspaper spread out in front of them. They had a good reason for their anxiety because Iraqi newspapers at that time always carried a picture of Saddam on their front page. Defacing his features might be interpreted as an indication of disrespect or even of a critical or treasonous attitude towards the great leader. > > Saddam Hussein invariably got star billing in the Iraqi press, but he would be impressed at the astonishing way in which it has become the norm in the US media for the words and doings of President Trump to monopolise the top of the news. Day after day, the three or four lead stories in The New York Times and CNN relate directly or indirectly to Trump. And, unlike Saddam, this blanket coverage is voluntary on the part of the news outlets and overwhelmingly critical. > > Trump’s outrageous insults and lies have succeeded in keeping the spotlight firmly on him ever since he declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Whatever else he may be, he is seldom boring, unlike so many of his defeated rivals and opponents who believed that his obvious failings must inevitably sink him. > > One day they may be proved right, but that day is a long time coming; the open loathing for Trump on the part of much of the American media is curiously ineffectual because it is repetitious and no great disaster has so far hit America one year into his presidency. Commentators note that, for all his bellicose rhetoric, he has yet to start any wars – unlike all his Republican predecessors going back to President Ford. > > The constant demonisation of Trump carries another danger that is under-appreciated and may produce a real-world disaster. The US media blames everything on him and respectfully portrays the bevy of generals who populate the upper ranks of his administration – Chief of Staff John Kelly, Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser HR McMaster – as the only adults in the room. Yet it may turn out that they and other business and political figures, such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the CIA chief Mike Pompeo, are more likely to bring about a war than Trump himself. > > Just how poor is the judgement of the very people who are meant to be a restraining force on Trump was shown last month when Tillerson made a classic blunder that may have negative results for the US for years to come. On 17 January, he announced the US military forces would stay in Kurdish controlled north-east Syria after the defeat of Isis in order to weaken Iran and President Bashar al-Assad. Just three days later on 20 January, Turkey, predictably enraged at what it saw as a US territorial guarantee of a de facto Kurdish state, sent its forces across the Syrian border to invade the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. > > Tillerson had unwittingly initiated a new phase in the Syrian conflict in which the US is self-isolated and Turkey, Russia, Iran and Assad had been brought closer together. The Kurds in Afrin, one of the few places in Syria not devastated by war, have to hide in caves as the direct result of the new US initiative. > > Trump’s isolationism may be less risky than the neo-interventionism of his senior advisers. Reports from Washington suggest that the decision to get more fully engaged in the Syrian civil war was contrary to what Trump himself wanted. By this account, he would have preferred to use his State of the Union address to announce that the US mission in Syria had ended in triumph with the defeat of Isis and that he was withdrawing US ground forces. Instead, the decision went the other way as McMaster and Mattis supported by Tillerson successfully argued for keeping US ground forces in Syria and Iraq. > > These senior officials were only advocating the consensus opinion of the US foreign policy establishment, as was swiftly illustrated by media commentators. Even as Turkish tanks were rolling into Syria, an editorial in The Washington Post was applauding Tillerson for having “bluntly recognised a truth that both President Trump and President Barack Obama attempted to dodge” – which is that the US needs a political and military presence in Syria. > > What Trump and Obama were really dodging was repeating the post 9/11 US mistake in pursuing open-ended military ventures against multiple enemies in fragmented countries like Afghanistan and Iraq where it could not win. In the case of Obama, this sense of caution and ability to see what might go wrong was carefully calculated; in the case of Trump, the caution is instinctive and not always operative, but the end result was often the same. > > Despite all Trump’s condemnation of Obama’s supposed weakness, his strategy in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria did not differ much from his predecessor – that is until his chief security officials switched to an interventionist policy in Syria last month. > > Traditional policy of relying on force to overcome all obstacles or what Obama nicknamed “The Washington Playbook” looks as if it is back in business. He privately condemned the US foreign policy establishment for being wedded to dubious allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in pursuit of over-ambitious objectives > > American strength in the world was ebbing before Trump, though the divisive and mercurial nature of his presidency is speeding up the decline. In every continent a power vacuum has opened up which is being filled by many eager candidates. They generally have the same ingredients of populism, demagoguery, authoritarianism and nationalism, though the quantities of each may differ, and they are certainly making the world a more dangerous place because they do not know the limits of their own power. > > From Manila to Warsaw, there has been the rise of the mini-Trumps who tend to know the politics of their own country well, but be dangerously ignorant of that of other countries. It is in the nature of arbitrary rulers, who have suppressed domestic criticism, such as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, that they pursue exaggerated ambitions moving over ice that is always thinner than they imagine. > > US power in the world is declining, having reached its peak between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the start of the Iraq war in 2003. Two dangers are emerging: one is the feckless nature of Trump administration which acts as a sort of out-of-control wrecking ball, though the damage done is limited by Trump’s low attention span and divisions in Washington. > > A second danger is the US foreign policy establishment. which has learned nothing new from past failures, which would like to restore US power to what it once was and is does not understand that this can no longer be done. This is “the Washington Playbook”, which Obama came to deride and ignore and is just as dangerous as anything Trump may do. > > ### > >> On Feb 5, 2018, at 9:41 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> For sure! All around! Thanks to everyone involved in organizing and supporting our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. >> 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >> On Behalf Of Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 9:33 AM >> To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; Karen Aram >> >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their >> very negative editorial >> >> Good work! >> >> Dianna >> >> >> On Monday, February 5, 2018, 7:16:13 AM CST, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> >> >> Protesters not 'naive' students >> Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette >> >> The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. >> >> They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." >> >> The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." >> >> Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." >> >> There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. >> >> What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. >> >> KAREN ARAM >> >> Urbana > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Feb 6 04:02:27 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 04:02:27 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial In-Reply-To: <8685E82C-9E09-40E8-884C-678DB065FD43@illinois.edu> References: <171289689.2523336.1517844804267@mail.yahoo.com> <08032B21-7A00-4CE7-8509-102CFDE59B99@gmail.com> <8685E82C-9E09-40E8-884C-678DB065FD43@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Well I opposed Obama too for eight years and repeatedly publicly called for him to be impeached for one thing or another. And the difference is that Obama is worse than Trump, being a Magna Cum Laude Graduate of Harvard Law School, he knew better. And notice we all opposed Obama/Clinton/KillerKoh when he came to the Fascist College of Law on October 28, 2016 just before the presidential election in order to Shill for Hill. 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: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 9:57 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial Tell me what 'Trump Fascism' is, when his policies don’t differ substantially from Obama’s. > On Feb 5, 2018, at 1:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. > --------------------------------------------- > Tell that to the 12 million Undocumented in this country; All Muslims living in this country;Organized and Organizing Labor and Unions; LGBTs;African Americans, etc. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 12:55 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their > very negative editorial > > “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. US war-making is: > > ====================================================================== > =============== Why We Should Fear the ‘Washington Establishment’ > Figures Who are Pulling the Strings in the Trump Administration by > Patrick Cockburn > > People sitting in cafes in Baghdad under the rule of Saddam Hussein used to be nervous of accidentally spilling their cup of coffee over the front page of the newspaper spread out in front of them. They had a good reason for their anxiety because Iraqi newspapers at that time always carried a picture of Saddam on their front page. Defacing his features might be interpreted as an indication of disrespect or even of a critical or treasonous attitude towards the great leader. > > Saddam Hussein invariably got star billing in the Iraqi press, but he would be impressed at the astonishing way in which it has become the norm in the US media for the words and doings of President Trump to monopolise the top of the news. Day after day, the three or four lead stories in The New York Times and CNN relate directly or indirectly to Trump. And, unlike Saddam, this blanket coverage is voluntary on the part of the news outlets and overwhelmingly critical. > > Trump’s outrageous insults and lies have succeeded in keeping the spotlight firmly on him ever since he declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Whatever else he may be, he is seldom boring, unlike so many of his defeated rivals and opponents who believed that his obvious failings must inevitably sink him. > > One day they may be proved right, but that day is a long time coming; the open loathing for Trump on the part of much of the American media is curiously ineffectual because it is repetitious and no great disaster has so far hit America one year into his presidency. Commentators note that, for all his bellicose rhetoric, he has yet to start any wars – unlike all his Republican predecessors going back to President Ford. > > The constant demonisation of Trump carries another danger that is under-appreciated and may produce a real-world disaster. The US media blames everything on him and respectfully portrays the bevy of generals who populate the upper ranks of his administration – Chief of Staff John Kelly, Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser HR McMaster – as the only adults in the room. Yet it may turn out that they and other business and political figures, such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the CIA chief Mike Pompeo, are more likely to bring about a war than Trump himself. > > Just how poor is the judgement of the very people who are meant to be a restraining force on Trump was shown last month when Tillerson made a classic blunder that may have negative results for the US for years to come. On 17 January, he announced the US military forces would stay in Kurdish controlled north-east Syria after the defeat of Isis in order to weaken Iran and President Bashar al-Assad. Just three days later on 20 January, Turkey, predictably enraged at what it saw as a US territorial guarantee of a de facto Kurdish state, sent its forces across the Syrian border to invade the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. > > Tillerson had unwittingly initiated a new phase in the Syrian conflict in which the US is self-isolated and Turkey, Russia, Iran and Assad had been brought closer together. The Kurds in Afrin, one of the few places in Syria not devastated by war, have to hide in caves as the direct result of the new US initiative. > > Trump’s isolationism may be less risky than the neo-interventionism of his senior advisers. Reports from Washington suggest that the decision to get more fully engaged in the Syrian civil war was contrary to what Trump himself wanted. By this account, he would have preferred to use his State of the Union address to announce that the US mission in Syria had ended in triumph with the defeat of Isis and that he was withdrawing US ground forces. Instead, the decision went the other way as McMaster and Mattis supported by Tillerson successfully argued for keeping US ground forces in Syria and Iraq. > > These senior officials were only advocating the consensus opinion of the US foreign policy establishment, as was swiftly illustrated by media commentators. Even as Turkish tanks were rolling into Syria, an editorial in The Washington Post was applauding Tillerson for having “bluntly recognised a truth that both President Trump and President Barack Obama attempted to dodge” – which is that the US needs a political and military presence in Syria. > > What Trump and Obama were really dodging was repeating the post 9/11 US mistake in pursuing open-ended military ventures against multiple enemies in fragmented countries like Afghanistan and Iraq where it could not win. In the case of Obama, this sense of caution and ability to see what might go wrong was carefully calculated; in the case of Trump, the caution is instinctive and not always operative, but the end result was often the same. > > Despite all Trump’s condemnation of Obama’s supposed weakness, his strategy in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria did not differ much from his predecessor – that is until his chief security officials switched to an interventionist policy in Syria last month. > > Traditional policy of relying on force to overcome all obstacles or > what Obama nicknamed “The Washington Playbook” looks as if it is back > in business. He privately condemned the US foreign policy > establishment for being wedded to dubious allies like Saudi Arabia and > Pakistan in pursuit of over-ambitious objectives > > American strength in the world was ebbing before Trump, though the divisive and mercurial nature of his presidency is speeding up the decline. In every continent a power vacuum has opened up which is being filled by many eager candidates. They generally have the same ingredients of populism, demagoguery, authoritarianism and nationalism, though the quantities of each may differ, and they are certainly making the world a more dangerous place because they do not know the limits of their own power. > > From Manila to Warsaw, there has been the rise of the mini-Trumps who tend to know the politics of their own country well, but be dangerously ignorant of that of other countries. It is in the nature of arbitrary rulers, who have suppressed domestic criticism, such as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, that they pursue exaggerated ambitions moving over ice that is always thinner than they imagine. > > US power in the world is declining, having reached its peak between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the start of the Iraq war in 2003. Two dangers are emerging: one is the feckless nature of Trump administration which acts as a sort of out-of-control wrecking ball, though the damage done is limited by Trump’s low attention span and divisions in Washington. > > A second danger is the US foreign policy establishment. which has learned nothing new from past failures, which would like to restore US power to what it once was and is does not understand that this can no longer be done. This is “the Washington Playbook”, which Obama came to deride and ignore and is just as dangerous as anything Trump may do. > > ### > >> On Feb 5, 2018, at 9:41 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> For sure! All around! Thanks to everyone involved in organizing and supporting our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. >> 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >> On Behalf Of Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 9:33 AM >> To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; Karen Aram >> >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their >> very negative editorial >> >> Good work! >> >> Dianna >> >> >> On Monday, February 5, 2018, 7:16:13 AM CST, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> >> >> Protesters not 'naive' students >> Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette >> >> The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. >> >> They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." >> >> The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." >> >> Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." >> >> There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. >> >> What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. >> >> KAREN ARAM >> >> Urbana > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From galliher at illinois.edu Tue Feb 6 04:12:13 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 22:12:13 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial In-Reply-To: References: <171289689.2523336.1517844804267@mail.yahoo.com> <08032B21-7A00-4CE7-8509-102CFDE59B99@gmail.com> <8685E82C-9E09-40E8-884C-678DB065FD43@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <29BC5C22-4B89-42B2-96DC-0D70C8E016DB@illinois.edu> If Obama is worse than Trump, why use ‘Fascism’ only for Trump? That’s to fall in with the political establishment’s replacement fantasies - born as they are from that establishment’s fear that Trump *won’t* follow Obama’s neocon and neolib policies - more war and more inequality. —CGE > On Feb 5, 2018, at 10:02 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Well I opposed Obama too for eight years and repeatedly publicly called for him to be impeached for one thing or another. And the difference is that Obama is worse than Trump, being a Magna Cum Laude Graduate of Harvard Law School, he knew better. And notice we all opposed Obama/Clinton/KillerKoh when he came to the Fascist College of Law on October 28, 2016 just before the presidential election in order to Shill for Hill. 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: Carl G. Estabrook [mailto:galliher at illinois.edu] > Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 9:57 PM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their very negative editorial > > Tell me what 'Trump Fascism' is, when his policies don’t differ substantially from Obama’s. > > >> On Feb 5, 2018, at 1:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> >> “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. >> --------------------------------------------- >> Tell that to the 12 million Undocumented in this country; All Muslims living in this country;Organized and Organizing Labor and Unions; LGBTs;African Americans, etc. 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: Monday, February 5, 2018 12:55 PM >> To: Boyle, Francis A >> Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >> >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their >> very negative editorial >> >> “Trump Fascism” is not the problem. US war-making is: >> >> ====================================================================== >> =============== Why We Should Fear the ‘Washington Establishment’ >> Figures Who are Pulling the Strings in the Trump Administration by >> Patrick Cockburn >> >> People sitting in cafes in Baghdad under the rule of Saddam Hussein used to be nervous of accidentally spilling their cup of coffee over the front page of the newspaper spread out in front of them. They had a good reason for their anxiety because Iraqi newspapers at that time always carried a picture of Saddam on their front page. Defacing his features might be interpreted as an indication of disrespect or even of a critical or treasonous attitude towards the great leader. >> >> Saddam Hussein invariably got star billing in the Iraqi press, but he would be impressed at the astonishing way in which it has become the norm in the US media for the words and doings of President Trump to monopolise the top of the news. Day after day, the three or four lead stories in The New York Times and CNN relate directly or indirectly to Trump. And, unlike Saddam, this blanket coverage is voluntary on the part of the news outlets and overwhelmingly critical. >> >> Trump’s outrageous insults and lies have succeeded in keeping the spotlight firmly on him ever since he declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Whatever else he may be, he is seldom boring, unlike so many of his defeated rivals and opponents who believed that his obvious failings must inevitably sink him. >> >> One day they may be proved right, but that day is a long time coming; the open loathing for Trump on the part of much of the American media is curiously ineffectual because it is repetitious and no great disaster has so far hit America one year into his presidency. Commentators note that, for all his bellicose rhetoric, he has yet to start any wars – unlike all his Republican predecessors going back to President Ford. >> >> The constant demonisation of Trump carries another danger that is under-appreciated and may produce a real-world disaster. The US media blames everything on him and respectfully portrays the bevy of generals who populate the upper ranks of his administration – Chief of Staff John Kelly, Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser HR McMaster – as the only adults in the room. Yet it may turn out that they and other business and political figures, such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the CIA chief Mike Pompeo, are more likely to bring about a war than Trump himself. >> >> Just how poor is the judgement of the very people who are meant to be a restraining force on Trump was shown last month when Tillerson made a classic blunder that may have negative results for the US for years to come. On 17 January, he announced the US military forces would stay in Kurdish controlled north-east Syria after the defeat of Isis in order to weaken Iran and President Bashar al-Assad. Just three days later on 20 January, Turkey, predictably enraged at what it saw as a US territorial guarantee of a de facto Kurdish state, sent its forces across the Syrian border to invade the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. >> >> Tillerson had unwittingly initiated a new phase in the Syrian conflict in which the US is self-isolated and Turkey, Russia, Iran and Assad had been brought closer together. The Kurds in Afrin, one of the few places in Syria not devastated by war, have to hide in caves as the direct result of the new US initiative. >> >> Trump’s isolationism may be less risky than the neo-interventionism of his senior advisers. Reports from Washington suggest that the decision to get more fully engaged in the Syrian civil war was contrary to what Trump himself wanted. By this account, he would have preferred to use his State of the Union address to announce that the US mission in Syria had ended in triumph with the defeat of Isis and that he was withdrawing US ground forces. Instead, the decision went the other way as McMaster and Mattis supported by Tillerson successfully argued for keeping US ground forces in Syria and Iraq. >> >> These senior officials were only advocating the consensus opinion of the US foreign policy establishment, as was swiftly illustrated by media commentators. Even as Turkish tanks were rolling into Syria, an editorial in The Washington Post was applauding Tillerson for having “bluntly recognised a truth that both President Trump and President Barack Obama attempted to dodge” – which is that the US needs a political and military presence in Syria. >> >> What Trump and Obama were really dodging was repeating the post 9/11 US mistake in pursuing open-ended military ventures against multiple enemies in fragmented countries like Afghanistan and Iraq where it could not win. In the case of Obama, this sense of caution and ability to see what might go wrong was carefully calculated; in the case of Trump, the caution is instinctive and not always operative, but the end result was often the same. >> >> Despite all Trump’s condemnation of Obama’s supposed weakness, his strategy in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria did not differ much from his predecessor – that is until his chief security officials switched to an interventionist policy in Syria last month. >> >> Traditional policy of relying on force to overcome all obstacles or >> what Obama nicknamed “The Washington Playbook” looks as if it is back >> in business. He privately condemned the US foreign policy >> establishment for being wedded to dubious allies like Saudi Arabia and >> Pakistan in pursuit of over-ambitious objectives >> >> American strength in the world was ebbing before Trump, though the divisive and mercurial nature of his presidency is speeding up the decline. In every continent a power vacuum has opened up which is being filled by many eager candidates. They generally have the same ingredients of populism, demagoguery, authoritarianism and nationalism, though the quantities of each may differ, and they are certainly making the world a more dangerous place because they do not know the limits of their own power. >> >> From Manila to Warsaw, there has been the rise of the mini-Trumps who tend to know the politics of their own country well, but be dangerously ignorant of that of other countries. It is in the nature of arbitrary rulers, who have suppressed domestic criticism, such as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, that they pursue exaggerated ambitions moving over ice that is always thinner than they imagine. >> >> US power in the world is declining, having reached its peak between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the start of the Iraq war in 2003. Two dangers are emerging: one is the feckless nature of Trump administration which acts as a sort of out-of-control wrecking ball, though the damage done is limited by Trump’s low attention span and divisions in Washington. >> >> A second danger is the US foreign policy establishment. which has learned nothing new from past failures, which would like to restore US power to what it once was and is does not understand that this can no longer be done. This is “the Washington Playbook”, which Obama came to deride and ignore and is just as dangerous as anything Trump may do. >> >> ### >> >>> On Feb 5, 2018, at 9:41 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> For sure! All around! Thanks to everyone involved in organizing and supporting our Rally against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law. >>> 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >>> On Behalf Of Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss >>> Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 9:33 AM >>> To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; Karen Aram >>> >>> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] My letter to the NG, responding to their >>> very negative editorial >>> >>> Good work! >>> >>> Dianna >>> >>> >>> On Monday, February 5, 2018, 7:16:13 AM CST, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> Protesters not 'naive' students >>> Mon, 02/05/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette >>> >>> The News-Gazette editorial board got it wrong in the Jan. 30 editorial related to the rally at the University of Illinois College of Law. >>> >>> They refer to those supporting Professor Francis Boyle and those protesting the dean bringing Malcolm Stewart to speak at the college as "lemmings," and a "handful of naive and gullible students." >>> >>> The majority were not only "not students," they were those with years of involvement in political issues such as "immigrant rights," "anti-war" and "support for labor." >>> >>> Many had years of experience teaching or working within the system, many possessed doctorates. Those who were students were clearly some of the best and brightest on campus, and all anyone had to do was listen to their speeches to know they were anything but "gullible or naive." >>> >>> There was no prevention of freedom of speech, no where was the "speaker" blocked, intimated or threatened. The protesters never entered the building, never blocked the pathway, and stayed in the courtyard away from the building. >>> >>> What the protesters insisted upon is their right to protest a speaker supporting an administration focused on "banning immigrants, DACA and Dreamers," forcible roundups by ICE and ignoring sanctuary cities rights, with federal takeovers, as well as a ban on Muslims from those nations which the U.S. is guilty of bombing and destroying. >>> >>> KAREN ARAM >>> >>> Urbana >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 6 12:05:37 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 12:05:37 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Re Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: <93E03FDD-371E-41B3-94A5-41019D0C1741@illinois.edu> <036c01d39ef6$54348d70$fc9da850$@comcast.net> Message-ID: If I can find the info I just read two days ago, in reference to damage from Fukushima, from science news, copy and paste, though I was only able to post yesterday, I will send it to you, otherwise, sorry no. On Feb 5, 2018, at 19:47, Brussel, Morton K > wrote: Dear Karen, I’m surprised at your statement: …This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast…. Please give references for this outrageous statement. —mkb On Feb 5, 2018, at 9:18 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: If Bob focuses on “war” we have no problem with that. We’ll see what the Prof. has to say in relation to North Korea and US relations, she had better be accurate in relation to who is provoking war, another war with North Korea. We shouldn’t be too hard on the student supporting nuclear power, but we have a right to disagree with her. Is she the WAND Representative? If so, that does need to be addressed. I hope all who oppose war will join me, we can’t sit this one out. Though now they know we’re coming, they’ll probably cancel Q & A. On Feb 5, 2018, at 18:58, David Johnson via Peace-discuss > wrote: " our sometimes-comrade (but not for Trots) Bob Naiman " Not just " Not for Trots ", also - Anarchists, Greens, and anyone who criticizes the Democratic party. David J. -----Original Message----- From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 8:38 PM To: Francis A Boyle Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" One of the speakers is Robert Naiman, "Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy [and] president of the board of Truthout...” Although the Democratic Party front 'Just Foreign Policy' occasionally gets something right (e.g., Yemen), our sometimes-comrade (but not for Trots) Bob Naiman cannot be trusted on issues of science and Democrats. Witness his awful behavior during the election: . —CGE On Feb 5, 2018, at 8:06 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Nothing good can come from Illinois WAND. It has already been coopted and perverted by the nuclear power industry working in cahoots with the Dems in violation of everything Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her entire career. Fab. From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 7:29 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: FW: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" And now we know why the Dems kept the name of what they styled as their “campus peace feminist” under wraps until the very last minute. The Dems knew they were going to deal their card from the bottom of the deck down and dirty. Their Consciousness of Guilt. You just can’t trust those Dems. Fab. From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, February 05, 2018 6:10 PM To: Brussel, Morton K > Cc: Karen Aram >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" That is not the point. The point is that WAND was founded by Dr. Helen Caldicott. And here the alleged Illinois chapter of WAND is being founded upon principles that are totally antithetical to everything Caldicott has stood for, including founding Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. This Illinois Chapter of WAND is a joke and a fraud organized by the Democratic Party who probably got substantial campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry to do so. Fab. From: Brussel, Morton K Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:21 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Karen Aram >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Helen Caldicott is, in my opinion, a nut case. Her statements are not to be believed. (Nuclear radiation courses through us all the time, and has been from the beginning of human and life evolution. It even has health benefits in managed small amounts. I could go on… ) —mkb On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Naiman must know Dr. Caldicott is completely against nuclear power. It looks to me like Exelon made a substantial campaign contribution to the Dems. Fab. From: Karen Aram [mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com] Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 2:12 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Maybe the local Dems don’t realize what they are doing? Maybe we’re wrong and it will be a debate? (Thats me being kind) Obama gave the go ahead to build more nuclear plants in the US, during his administration. As of December 27th Westinghouse was given approval to go ahead with 2 new nuclear power plants in Georgia. This is in spite of the high pay rates already occurred, and Westinghouse incurring bankruptcy, They will be “supported” by Exelon of Illinois, and Fluor. Westinghouse is also planning some in Saudi Arabia, and India, utilizing their AP1000. This in spite of the damage to the Pacific ocean and all life within, with high radiation levels approaching the west coast. Yes, Helen Caldecott the original organizer of WAND opposed nuclear power on the grounds, “there is no such thing as safe nuclear power.” Let’s hope the WAND Representative will debate this issue, is there a WAND Representative now? I was told a Representative from Chicago would be there. Unfortunately, WAND is now an NGO anyway. Add to that the Korean Representative speaking, is of South Korean heritage, I hope she presents complete and accurate information related to US/North Korea relations. I am urging all my (anti-war colleagues to be there, we have our work cut out for us, countering inaccurate information that maybe put forth. Let’s hope it won’t be necessary and we are wrong, and we will be presented with a just and accurate program. On Feb 5, 2018, at 11:51, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: The Dems are exploiting the good name and reputation of Dr. Helen Caldicott to promote the nuclear power industry. This is a shocking disgrace and a scandal! fab From: Boyle, Francis A Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:44 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" The presence of this apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel is totally antithetical to everything WAND Founder Dr. Helen Caldicott has stood for during her career. Obviously, the Democrats are trying to pull off political chicanery here. fab. From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:21 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. I have a very serious problem here. We were told that Dr. Helen Caldicott was behind the organization of WAND. Dr. Caldicott has literally pioneered the field against nuclear power. In her numerous writings Dr. Caldicott has definitively established that there is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation. How dare they put an apologist for the nuclear power industry on this panel! Fab. From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 1:15 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >; peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Program: Saturday "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" FEB10 The Role Of Women In Stopping Nuclear War · Hosted by State Representative Carol Ammons Saturday, February 10 at 2 PM - 4 PM CST · Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center 202 S Broadway Ave, Urbana, Illinois 61801 · With the threat of nuclear warning growing, now more than ever it is critical we bring to the table the voices of those directly impacted by war and organize ourselves to advocate for peaceful solutions. Join Representative Carol Ammons and a panel of experts discussing topics ranging from historical overview of United States involvement in global conflict, current international relations between the United States and key countries, experiences of military personnel who have served on the ground during wartime, and hear the experiences of those who have been forced to relocate because of war. The panel is the kickoff event to starting the Illinois Chapter of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND). WAND empowers women to be agents of change to reduce violence and militarism, support nuclear disarmament, and redirect excessive Pentagon spending to unmet human and environmental needs. About our speakers: Ji-Yeon Yuh is a History professor at Northwestern University and specializes in Asian American Studies, Comparative Race and Diaspora, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has extensively researched military conflicts, particularly focusing on how they have impacted women. She is also active in her community; she co-founded the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, is a board member of Korea Policy Institute, and was a board president of KANWIN, a Korean American women's organization focused on ending domestic violence. Robert Naiman is the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, a non-partisan organization dedicated to organizing Americans desirous of having foreign policy based in diplomacy, law, and cooperation. He is the president of the board of Truthout, a non-profit organization focused on providing independent daily news, and has worked as policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in Economics and Mathematics, and has both studied and lived in the Middle East. Tori Riso is a tutor at Illini Tutoring. Having graduated from UIUC with a Bachelor's in Engineering, Tori is now working towards getting a Master's in Nuclear Engineering. She is an advocate of developing nuclear energy as an efficient way to decrease carbon emissions and societal reliance on fossil fuels. After graduation, she hopes to conduct research in the nuclear energy industry. *All are welcome to attend the panel and join the Illinois Chapter of WAND. _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C366a808b2fa0424b20be08d56d0d8404%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534827174592297&sdata=Ns1FY12hUGy2RK8OFPpJwNCRUcVifkpWvMPr0sC6%2Buk%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C366a808b2fa0424b20be08d56d0d8404%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636534827174592297&sdata=Ns1FY12hUGy2RK8OFPpJwNCRUcVifkpWvMPr0sC6%2Buk%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 6 13:31:41 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 13:31:41 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] BDS: Stopping Zionist Genocide Against the Palestinians! Message-ID: Dear Friends: Sorry, but I have to now move on from our debate about our Rally Against Trump Fascism before the Trump College of Law that took place two weeks ago. At the request of the Students for Justice in Palestine, on Thursday March 1 I am giving a public Lecture on Campus entitled "BDS:Stopping Zionist Genocide against the Palestinians!" So I have to gear up for that. Hopefully I will see some of you there. Fab D in BDS. 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 cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Feb 6 13:34:37 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 07:34:37 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Your message to Peace awaits moderator approval In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: "Exelon’s Clinton and Quad Cities* reactors in Illinois, might have shut down last year too, except for a state taxpayer bailout worth $3.5 billion adopted in 2016." https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/06/nuclear-reactors-bankrupting-their-owners-closing-early/ —CGE > On Feb 5, 2018, at 8:38 PM, peace-owner at lists.chambana.net wrote: > > Your mail to 'Peace' with the subject > > Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Chicanery by the Dems: Program: Saturday > "The Role of Women in Stopping the Threat of Nuclear War" > > Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval. > > The reason it is being held: > > Post to moderated list > > Either the message will get posted to the list, or you will receive > notification of the moderator's decision. If you would like to cancel > this posting, please visit the following URL: > > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/confirm/peace/160b87876226dc51ff9b2faba0b7d31f0e614c69 > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 6 14:00:08 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 14:00:08 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Nuclear Reactors In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thank you for this very timely article Carl. As to Fukushima, I’m unable to post the info., I suggest anyone interested, check out Tepco who has been measuring the recent radiation leakage within the reactor, and though they say “we shouldn’t panic yet” the levels are high enough that the robots they use to measure, can only withstand two hours before they melt. I will forward in a separate email, the article from the Westinghouse News, which details what has taken place recently in respect to Georgia’s two new build, as well as plans to build in Saudi and India, two US allies, so if anyone thinks what is taking place isn’t political, think again. On Feb 6, 2018, at 05:34, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: "Exelon’s Clinton and Quad Cities* reactors in Illinois, might have shut down last year too, except for a state taxpayer bailout worth $3.5 billion adopted in 2016." https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/06/nuclear-reactors-bankrupting-their-owners-closing-early/ —CGE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 6 14:04:57 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 14:04:57 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Westinghouse going ahead with new build reactors References: <6041B7B1-1899-4633-88D7-C74D29113179@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Please see below: 1 U.S. nuclear plant goes forward as Westinghouse wades into the Middle East [Photo of Anya Litvak] ANYA LITVAK Pittsburgh Post-Gazette alitvak at post-gazette.com DEC 21, 2017 7:43 AM Plant Vogtle in Georgia — Westinghouse Electric Co.’s last hope for a U.S. showcase of its AP1000 nuclear power plant — will continue construction, delivering a much needed boost for the Cranberry-based nuclear firm. The news that the project won a key nod from Georgia officials on Thursday was critical for Westinghouse, which is in the throes of a bankruptcy brought about by delays and cost overruns on this very project and its cousin in South Carolina, which was canceled in July. Industry experts said that if Westinghouse wants to be able to sell any AP1000 plants abroad — as it is vying to do in India and Saudi Arabia — it will need a reference plant in the U.S. Vogtle will serve that function. Westinghouse is currently working on a proposal, due before the end of the year, to build two nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia. Its partners on the bid are Illinois-based utility Exelon, which would operate the plants, and infrastructure firm Fluor Corp., which was briefly in charge of Westinghouse’s U.S. nuclear construction projects until it was replaced by a competitor when Westinghouse’s role at Vogtle was downgraded. [Westinghouse headquarters in Cranberry] Anya Litvak Bankrupt Westinghouse inks $4.6 billion deal to be acquired by Canadian asset manager Even with its diminished involvement in Georgia, Westinghouse had a lot at stake in keeping the project alive. “If Vogtle were to fail, Westinghouse would be under greater pressure to succeed elsewhere and that could have an impact on the outcome of negotiations about future nuclear power plant sales,” said Mark Hibbs, a senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The decision to continue the project, where billions of dollars had already been spent, was far from certain when the vote came before the Georgia Public Service Commission on Thursday. The commission’s own staff had counseled against the path the commissioners set forth — warning that the utility and its contractors haven’t been able to accurately predict deadlines and costs, and that ratepayers should no longer be on the hook for the companies’ “mismanagement.” In the end, the commissioners thanked their staff but voted unanimously to continue supporting the plan to build two AP1000 plants near Waynesboro with some conditions that the utility owner, Southern Co., agreed to on the spot. “History, over time, will show that we were correct,” predicted commission chairman Stan Wise. The commisson’s conditions include a lower return on equity for Georgia Power, a division of Southern Co.; more money returned to ratepayers; and the possibility of reexamining the project once again if Congress doesn’t extend a production tax credit for nuclear power past its 2021 expiration date. Vogtle’s current in-service date is beyond that. Nuclear industry proponents were hoping to see the extension as part of the federal tax overhaul signed this week, but were disappointed to find it missing. There will also be a 5 megawatt community solar project at Vogtle, the commission declared, in an unexpected tangent. Global considerations While no one — not the commission, its staff, Georgia Power or many of the opposition groups that urged for the project to be canceled — had much love for Westinghouse (“Let’s be honest,” commissioners Chuck Eaton and Tim Echols wrote in a statement after the vote. “It was the bankruptcy of Westinghouse... that has put us in the pickle we are in”), the Cranberry-based nuclear firm’s precarious status in the world loomed large over these discussions. Mr. Eaton and Mr. Echols, for example, wrote, “The United States must maintain nuclear superiority in an age when Russia and China are building dozens of reactors and exporting their technology,” in their explanation of their votes. Georgia Power made a similar argument in its appeal to the commission earlier this week. “As the only nuclear units currently under construction in the United States, the project is also important to the country and its nuclear industry as a whole,” the utility wrote, alluding to “far-reaching state and national impacts” from the commission’s vote. José Emeterio Gutiérrez, president and CEO of the nuclear firm that employs about 11,000 total and 3,400 in Western Pennsylvania, echoed that in his statement on Thursday. While the Westinghouse executive led with the “thousands of high-paying, long-term jobs required to successfully complete the project,” Mr. Gutiérrez noted, “This is an especially important decision for the U.S. energy sector and the global nuclear energy industry.” That thread goes beyond keeping American companies competitive with rivals funded by rising powers. The involvement of the U.S. nuclear industry in building and servicing power plants abroad has always had national security component. Until recently, the U.S. could throw around its considerable nuclear weight to extract nonproliferation agreements from countries that wanted American nuclear technology. Such agreements typically have provisions prohibiting the foreign country from enriching or reprocessing nuclear fuel. The same technology used to enrich uranium for use in a commercial power plant can be used in service of making weapons-grade material. “The bottom line is enrichment is enrichment,” said Tom Congedo, associate director of the nuclear engineering program at the University of Pittsburgh who also works on nonproliferation. The difference between running a centrifuge to make commercial nuclear fuel and weapons is running it many more times, he simplified. Given the United States’ long-held stance on disallowing enrichment, it came as a surprise to some who work on nonproliferation that the government is in talks with Saudi Arabia to sign a so-called 123 agreement that may sidestep the issue in service of getting Westinghouse’s bid to the table. Bloomberg reported on these discussions earlier this month. “Today a 123 agreement is the basis for U.S. nuclear companies doing business in foreign countries,” Mr. Hibbs said. “If there is such a thing as a ‘gold standard,’ this has been it.” But previous negotiations with Saudi Arabia to sign such an agreement fell apart over the issue of enrichment, which some countries see as a critical path to secure their own fuel supply. Westinghouse and Exelon have had their eye on the Saudi market for years. Fluor, which has a controlling stake in the small modular reactor company NuScale, is already established in Saudi Arabia with infrastructure projects in rail and oil and gas. “Clearly, if we can get the Saudis to sign the 123 agreement, that kind of opens the door,” Fluor’s chairman and CEO, David Seaton, told analysts during an earnings call in November. Fluor’s involvement in the Westinghouse bid, confirmed by several sources with knowledge of the proposal, has not been disclosed in Westinghouse’s public bankruptcy documents, even though Fluor is the largest creditor in the proceeding and part of Westinghouse’s unsecured creditors committee. It is also not clear how the bid is structured — specifically how the risk for delays and cost overruns is split between the consortium. In light of what happened in South Carolina and Georgia, that is likely to be a key consideration for the three private equity firms that are bidding to buy Westinghouse from bankruptcy. Westinghouse spokesperson Sarah Cassella said she couldn’t provide any details on the bid. “Westinghouse is pleased that Saudi Arabia has decided to pursue nuclear energy,” she said. “We are fully participating in their request for information and are pleased to provide the AP1000 plant, the industry’s most advanced technology.” Anya Litvak: alitvak at post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Feb 6 15:52:23 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 15:52:23 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: The Criminality of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Energy: From Hiroshima to ... - Peace and Conflict Monitor In-Reply-To: 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) Feed: Francis Boyle - Google News Posted on: Wednesday, October 5, 2011 5:17 PM Author: Francis Boyle - Google News Subject: The Criminality of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Energy: From Hiroshima to ... - Peace and Conflict Monitor The Criminality of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Energy: From Hiroshima to ... Peace and Conflict Monitor Francis A. Boyle, a US professor of international law, delivered an address at this meeting, where he advocated his theory that, under the Nuremberg Charter, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are war crimes and crimes against humanity. ... and more » View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 7 18:23:08 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2018 18:23:08 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott Message-ID: [Nuclear explosion] US-NATO 'Buildup on Russian Border Could Lead to Nuclear War' - Nobel Laureate CC0 / NNSA / Nevada Site Office / The BADGER explosion MILITARY & INTELLIGENCE 21:40 12.01.2017(updated 21:41 12.01.2017)Get short URL Topic: NATO Seeks Expansion to Eastern Europe (362) 16715 US political leaders have falsely accused Moscow of threatening NATO member states while the alliance aggressively builds up military forces on Russia’s border, Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Thursday, US Secretary of Defense nominee James Mattis told a Senate committee in confirmation hearings that NATO must build capacity in eastern Europe to deter Russia’s alleged aggression. This came a day after Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson testified that the United States would defend NATO member states if Russia invaded. "There is little or no evidence that Russia is being aggressive towards the NATO countries," Caldicott, co-winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, told Sputnik. “That is a lie that the United States insists on maintaining." Caldicott pointed out, however, that it was the United States and NATO, not Russia, that was building up its armed forces to unprecedented levels in central and eastern Europe and exacerbating tensions in the region. "The severely provocative buildup of military forces, ABM [anti-ballistic missile] systems and equipment on the Russian border is at the least unnecessary and at the most could lead to a nuclear war with Russia," Caldicott warned. Far from threatening nuclear war, the Russian government and media were warning their people about the dangers of the NATO military buildup, Caldicott claimed. "Indeed, the Russian press and leading politicians in the Duma are now postulating that this could well be a future reality, and they are encouraging the Russian population to practice drills to shelter themselves from nuclear war," she said. The American public and US policymakers also need to take the threat of nuclear war and the nightmarish consequences that would flow from it far more seriously, Caldicott explained. In the event of any thermonuclear conflict breaking out between Russia and the United States and NATO "we are all doomed to die a dreadful death of vaporization, severe burns, acute radiation sickness, or freezing and starving to death in the nuclear winter that will ensue," Caldicott admonished. Although US Vice President Joe Biden praised the record of outgoing President Barack Obama on reducing the threat of nuclear war during his eight years in office, Caldicott said Obama’s anti-Russian policies had made the danger far worse. "What on earth Obama, the once-peace-maker, and [US Secretary of Defense] Ashton Carter think they are doing, God only knows unless they are obeying the dictates of their military industrial masters, who need war or the risk of such to survive economically," Caldicott added. Caldicott expressed the hope that President-elect Donald Trump would reverse the US force build-up in Eastern Europe after he took office on January 20. "Once Trump is inaugurated one hopes that his close relationship with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will lead to rapid withdrawal of these forces and a refashioning of the relationship between Russia and the United States which may ensure our survival," she said. Caldicott is the author of many books, including "The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex" and "War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space." Never miss a story again — sign up to our Telegram channel and we'll keep you up to speed! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 7 19:01:01 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2018 19:01:01 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yeah, as I said the Democrats are desecrating the good name of Helen Caldicott by having their APOLOGIST for the nuclear power industry speak at their conference on Saturday. In fact the Democrats on Saturday will be perverting the good name and reputation of Helen by using her as a pretext and a cover in order to promote the nuclear power industry. How much did the nuclear power industry pay the Dems? 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 12:23 PM To: Peace-discuss Subject: [Peace-discuss] From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott [Nuclear explosion] US-NATO 'Buildup on Russian Border Could Lead to Nuclear War' - Nobel Laureate CC0 / NNSA / Nevada Site Office / The BADGER explosion MILITARY & INTELLIGENCE 21:40 12.01.2017(updated 21:41 12.01.2017)Get short URL Topic: NATO Seeks Expansion to Eastern Europe (362) 16715 US political leaders have falsely accused Moscow of threatening NATO member states while the alliance aggressively builds up military forces on Russia’s border, Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Thursday, US Secretary of Defense nominee James Mattis told a Senate committee in confirmation hearings that NATO must build capacity in eastern Europe to deter Russia’s alleged aggression. This came a day after Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson testified that the United States would defend NATO member states if Russia invaded. "There is little or no evidence that Russia is being aggressive towards the NATO countries," Caldicott, co-winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, told Sputnik. “That is a lie that the United States insists on maintaining." Caldicott pointed out, however, that it was the United States and NATO, not Russia, that was building up its armed forces to unprecedented levels in central and eastern Europe and exacerbating tensions in the region. "The severely provocative buildup of military forces, ABM [anti-ballistic missile] systems and equipment on the Russian border is at the least unnecessary and at the most could lead to a nuclear war with Russia," Caldicott warned. Far from threatening nuclear war, the Russian government and media were warning their people about the dangers of the NATO military buildup, Caldicott claimed. "Indeed, the Russian press and leading politicians in the Duma are now postulating that this could well be a future reality, and they are encouraging the Russian population to practice drills to shelter themselves from nuclear war," she said. The American public and US policymakers also need to take the threat of nuclear war and the nightmarish consequences that would flow from it far more seriously, Caldicott explained. In the event of any thermonuclear conflict breaking out between Russia and the United States and NATO "we are all doomed to die a dreadful death of vaporization, severe burns, acute radiation sickness, or freezing and starving to death in the nuclear winter that will ensue," Caldicott admonished. Although US Vice President Joe Biden praised the record of outgoing President Barack Obama on reducing the threat of nuclear war during his eight years in office, Caldicott said Obama’s anti-Russian policies had made the danger far worse. "What on earth Obama, the once-peace-maker, and [US Secretary of Defense] Ashton Carter think they are doing, God only knows unless they are obeying the dictates of their military industrial masters, who need war or the risk of such to survive economically," Caldicott added. Caldicott expressed the hope that President-elect Donald Trump would reverse the US force build-up in Eastern Europe after he took office on January 20. "Once Trump is inaugurated one hopes that his close relationship with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will lead to rapid withdrawal of these forces and a refashioning of the relationship between Russia and the United States which may ensure our survival," she said. Caldicott is the author of many books, including "The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex" and "War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space." Never miss a story again — sign up to our Telegram channel and we'll keep you up to speed! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 7 22:38:54 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2018 22:38:54 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Tell Congress to say no to more "usable" nuclear weapons References: <7E.5A.24183.2BE7B7A5@asv11mtam006.ngpweb.com> Message-ID: Reply-To: ucsaction at ucsusa.org [UCS - Science for a healthy planet and safer world] A Recipe for Disaster Urge your members of Congress to speak out forcefully against the Trump administration's reckless new nuclear weapons policies. Take Action Today! ACTION ALERT Congress: Say No to More "Usable" Nuclear Weapons Last Friday, the Trump administration released its new "Nuclear Posture Review" outlining its plans for radical, dangerous, and costly changes in US nuclear weapons policy that will make nuclear war more likely and the United States—and the entire world—less safe. This truly is an all-hands-on-deck moment. Urge your members of Congress to help stop this potential disaster. What are they planning? Two new types of nuclear weapons on top of the seven we already have. These weapons will make it easier for the United States to use nuclear weapons, and expand the circumstances under which we would use nuclear weapons first—a rejection of decades of bipartisan efforts to reduce the role and number of US nuclear weapons. The administration wants to spend some $1.7 trillion—that's trillion—over the next 30 years to re-build the entire US nuclear arsenal. Throw in an intemperate, bellicose president with sole, unchecked authority over US nuclear weapons, and you have a recipe for disaster. Over the years, we've defeated similarly dangerous proposals. With your help, we'll do it again. Write to your members of Congress today and urge them to just say no to the Trump administration’s new nuclear weapons policies. Ask them to speak out publicly and to actively oppose plans and spending for new nuclear weapons. Nothing is more important than our safety and security. Nuclear weapons don't make us safe, and we must do everything we can to prevent nuclear war. [Take Action] Sincerely, [Sean Meyer] Sean Meyer Manager of Strategic Campaigns Global Security Program Union of Concerned Scientists [donate today] Science for a healthy planet and safer world UCS is a 501(c)(3) organization. All gifts are tax deductible. You can be confident your donations to UCS are spent wisely [Image] About UCS | Take Action | Donate | Contact Us | Privacy Policy | unsubscribe Union of Concerned Scientists 2 Brattle Square | Cambridge, MA 02138-3780 © Union of Concerned Scientists. All rights reserved. www.ucsusa.org [https://click.everyaction.com/j/4458099?nvep=ew0KICAiVGVuYW50VXJpIjogIm5ncHZhbjovL3Zhbi9VQ1MvVUNTLzEvNTgwOTciLA0KICAiRGlzdHJpYnV0aW9uVW5pcXVlSWQiOiAiZDdkNmU3MGMtNTYwYy1lODExLTgwYzItMDAxNTVkYTc1ZjE4IiwNCiAgIkVtYWlsQWRkcmVzcyI6ICJrYXJlbmFyYW1AaG90bWFpbC5jb20iDQp9&hmac=-CZ11dH0cES1dD2WH4hj3QciDD7KATKCQ8aQwsH0VDI=] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brussel at illinois.edu Wed Feb 7 22:56:12 2018 From: brussel at illinois.edu (Brussel, Morton K) Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2018 22:56:12 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2F9DFF49-47E2-423D-9A63-9AA043AF0C17@illinois.edu> On the issue here given, she's to be commended, on the dangers of radioactivity—off the wall. As for “Dems” and nuclear power, Boyle ’s claims need evidence. —mkb On Feb 7, 2018, at 1:01 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, as I said the Democrats are desecrating the good name of Helen Caldicott by having their APOLOGIST for the nuclear power industry speak at their conference on Saturday. In fact the Democrats on Saturday will be perverting the good name and reputation of Helen by using her as a pretext and a cover in order to promote the nuclear power industry. How much did the nuclear power industry pay the Dems? 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 12:23 PM To: Peace-discuss > Subject: [Peace-discuss] From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott [Nuclear explosion] US-NATO 'Buildup on Russian Border Could Lead to Nuclear War' - Nobel Laureate CC0 / NNSA / Nevada Site Office / The BADGER explosion MILITARY & INTELLIGENCE 21:40 12.01.2017(updated 21:41 12.01.2017)Get short URL Topic: NATO Seeks Expansion to Eastern Europe (362) 16715 US political leaders have falsely accused Moscow of threatening NATO member states while the alliance aggressively builds up military forces on Russia’s border, Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Thursday, US Secretary of Defense nominee James Mattis told a Senate committee in confirmation hearings that NATO must build capacity in eastern Europe to deter Russia’s alleged aggression. This came a day after Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson testified that the United States would defend NATO member states if Russia invaded. "There is little or no evidence that Russia is being aggressive towards the NATO countries," Caldicott, co-winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, told Sputnik. “That is a lie that the United States insists on maintaining." Caldicott pointed out, however, that it was the United States and NATO, not Russia, that was building up its armed forces to unprecedented levels in central and eastern Europe and exacerbating tensions in the region. "The severely provocative buildup of military forces, ABM [anti-ballistic missile] systems and equipment on the Russian border is at the least unnecessary and at the most could lead to a nuclear war with Russia," Caldicott warned. Far from threatening nuclear war, the Russian government and media were warning their people about the dangers of the NATO military buildup, Caldicott claimed. "Indeed, the Russian press and leading politicians in the Duma are now postulating that this could well be a future reality, and they are encouraging the Russian population to practice drills to shelter themselves from nuclear war," she said. The American public and US policymakers also need to take the threat of nuclear war and the nightmarish consequences that would flow from it far more seriously, Caldicott explained. In the event of any thermonuclear conflict breaking out between Russia and the United States and NATO "we are all doomed to die a dreadful death of vaporization, severe burns, acute radiation sickness, or freezing and starving to death in the nuclear winter that will ensue," Caldicott admonished. Although US Vice President Joe Biden praised the record of outgoing President Barack Obama on reducing the threat of nuclear war during his eight years in office, Caldicott said Obama’s anti-Russian policies had made the danger far worse. "What on earth Obama, the once-peace-maker, and [US Secretary of Defense] Ashton Carter think they are doing, God only knows unless they are obeying the dictates of their military industrial masters, who need war or the risk of such to survive economically," Caldicott added. Caldicott expressed the hope that President-elect Donald Trump would reverse the US force build-up in Eastern Europe after he took office on January 20. "Once Trump is inaugurated one hopes that his close relationship with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will lead to rapid withdrawal of these forces and a refashioning of the relationship between Russia and the United States which may ensure our survival," she said. Caldicott is the author of many books, including "The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex" and "War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space." Never miss a story again — sign up to our Telegram channel and we'll keep you up to speed! _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 7 23:04:20 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2018 23:04:20 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott In-Reply-To: <2F9DFF49-47E2-423D-9A63-9AA043AF0C17@illinois.edu> References: <2F9DFF49-47E2-423D-9A63-9AA043AF0C17@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. Yes well Helen did win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work against the nuclear power industry and radiation. There has been ample documentation already on this list and elsewhere that the nuclear power industry has given enormous sums to the Dems. In any event, WAND is the Brainchild of Helen Caldicott and here the Dems are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry under the cover of Helen’s good name and reputation in order to promote nuclear power. Truly perverse and disgusting! But what else do you expect from the Dems? He who pays the Piper calls the tune. 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: Brussel, Morton K Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 4:56 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott On the issue here given, she's to be commended, on the dangers of radioactivity—off the wall. As for “Dems” and nuclear power, Boyle ’s claims need evidence. —mkb On Feb 7, 2018, at 1:01 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, as I said the Democrats are desecrating the good name of Helen Caldicott by having their APOLOGIST for the nuclear power industry speak at their conference on Saturday. In fact the Democrats on Saturday will be perverting the good name and reputation of Helen by using her as a pretext and a cover in order to promote the nuclear power industry. How much did the nuclear power industry pay the Dems? 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 12:23 PM To: Peace-discuss > Subject: [Peace-discuss] From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott [Nuclear explosion] US-NATO 'Buildup on Russian Border Could Lead to Nuclear War' - Nobel Laureate CC0 / NNSA / Nevada Site Office / The BADGER explosion MILITARY & INTELLIGENCE 21:40 12.01.2017(updated 21:41 12.01.2017)Get short URL Topic: NATO Seeks Expansion to Eastern Europe (362) 16715 US political leaders have falsely accused Moscow of threatening NATO member states while the alliance aggressively builds up military forces on Russia’s border, Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Thursday, US Secretary of Defense nominee James Mattis told a Senate committee in confirmation hearings that NATO must build capacity in eastern Europe to deter Russia’s alleged aggression. This came a day after Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson testified that the United States would defend NATO member states if Russia invaded. "There is little or no evidence that Russia is being aggressive towards the NATO countries," Caldicott, co-winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, told Sputnik. “That is a lie that the United States insists on maintaining." Caldicott pointed out, however, that it was the United States and NATO, not Russia, that was building up its armed forces to unprecedented levels in central and eastern Europe and exacerbating tensions in the region. "The severely provocative buildup of military forces, ABM [anti-ballistic missile] systems and equipment on the Russian border is at the least unnecessary and at the most could lead to a nuclear war with Russia," Caldicott warned. Far from threatening nuclear war, the Russian government and media were warning their people about the dangers of the NATO military buildup, Caldicott claimed. "Indeed, the Russian press and leading politicians in the Duma are now postulating that this could well be a future reality, and they are encouraging the Russian population to practice drills to shelter themselves from nuclear war," she said. The American public and US policymakers also need to take the threat of nuclear war and the nightmarish consequences that would flow from it far more seriously, Caldicott explained. In the event of any thermonuclear conflict breaking out between Russia and the United States and NATO "we are all doomed to die a dreadful death of vaporization, severe burns, acute radiation sickness, or freezing and starving to death in the nuclear winter that will ensue," Caldicott admonished. Although US Vice President Joe Biden praised the record of outgoing President Barack Obama on reducing the threat of nuclear war during his eight years in office, Caldicott said Obama’s anti-Russian policies had made the danger far worse. "What on earth Obama, the once-peace-maker, and [US Secretary of Defense] Ashton Carter think they are doing, God only knows unless they are obeying the dictates of their military industrial masters, who need war or the risk of such to survive economically," Caldicott added. Caldicott expressed the hope that President-elect Donald Trump would reverse the US force build-up in Eastern Europe after he took office on January 20. "Once Trump is inaugurated one hopes that his close relationship with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will lead to rapid withdrawal of these forces and a refashioning of the relationship between Russia and the United States which may ensure our survival," she said. Caldicott is the author of many books, including "The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex" and "War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space." Never miss a story again — sign up to our Telegram channel and we'll keep you up to speed! _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 7 23:09:42 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2018 23:09:42 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott In-Reply-To: References: <2F9DFF49-47E2-423D-9A63-9AA043AF0C17@illinois.edu> Message-ID: We don’t know yet, who is representing WAND. I am waiting for a response to my questioning of that. The student maybe representing the U of I. Bob represents “anti-war” and the Professor “Korean relations” which is a potential war. WAND is no longer “Helen," its now an NGO according to their website. On Feb 7, 2018, at 15:04, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. Yes well Helen did win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work against the nuclear power industry and radiation. There has been ample documentation already on this list and elsewhere that the nuclear power industry has given enormous sums to the Dems. In any event, WAND is the Brainchild of Helen Caldicott and here the Dems are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry under the cover of Helen’s good name and reputation in order to promote nuclear power. Truly perverse and disgusting! But what else do you expect from the Dems? He who pays the Piper calls the tune. 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: Brussel, Morton K Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 4:56 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott On the issue here given, she's to be commended, on the dangers of radioactivity—off the wall. As for “Dems” and nuclear power, Boyle ’s claims need evidence. —mkb On Feb 7, 2018, at 1:01 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, as I said the Democrats are desecrating the good name of Helen Caldicott by having their APOLOGIST for the nuclear power industry speak at their conference on Saturday. In fact the Democrats on Saturday will be perverting the good name and reputation of Helen by using her as a pretext and a cover in order to promote the nuclear power industry. How much did the nuclear power industry pay the Dems? 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 12:23 PM To: Peace-discuss > Subject: [Peace-discuss] From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott [Nuclear explosion] US-NATO 'Buildup on Russian Border Could Lead to Nuclear War' - Nobel Laureate CC0 / NNSA / Nevada Site Office / The BADGER explosion MILITARY & INTELLIGENCE 21:40 12.01.2017(updated 21:41 12.01.2017)Get short URL Topic: NATO Seeks Expansion to Eastern Europe (362) 16715 US political leaders have falsely accused Moscow of threatening NATO member states while the alliance aggressively builds up military forces on Russia’s border, Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Thursday, US Secretary of Defense nominee James Mattis told a Senate committee in confirmation hearings that NATO must build capacity in eastern Europe to deter Russia’s alleged aggression. This came a day after Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson testified that the United States would defend NATO member states if Russia invaded. "There is little or no evidence that Russia is being aggressive towards the NATO countries," Caldicott, co-winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, told Sputnik. “That is a lie that the United States insists on maintaining." Caldicott pointed out, however, that it was the United States and NATO, not Russia, that was building up its armed forces to unprecedented levels in central and eastern Europe and exacerbating tensions in the region. "The severely provocative buildup of military forces, ABM [anti-ballistic missile] systems and equipment on the Russian border is at the least unnecessary and at the most could lead to a nuclear war with Russia," Caldicott warned. Far from threatening nuclear war, the Russian government and media were warning their people about the dangers of the NATO military buildup, Caldicott claimed. "Indeed, the Russian press and leading politicians in the Duma are now postulating that this could well be a future reality, and they are encouraging the Russian population to practice drills to shelter themselves from nuclear war," she said. The American public and US policymakers also need to take the threat of nuclear war and the nightmarish consequences that would flow from it far more seriously, Caldicott explained. In the event of any thermonuclear conflict breaking out between Russia and the United States and NATO "we are all doomed to die a dreadful death of vaporization, severe burns, acute radiation sickness, or freezing and starving to death in the nuclear winter that will ensue," Caldicott admonished. Although US Vice President Joe Biden praised the record of outgoing President Barack Obama on reducing the threat of nuclear war during his eight years in office, Caldicott said Obama’s anti-Russian policies had made the danger far worse. "What on earth Obama, the once-peace-maker, and [US Secretary of Defense] Ashton Carter think they are doing, God only knows unless they are obeying the dictates of their military industrial masters, who need war or the risk of such to survive economically," Caldicott added. Caldicott expressed the hope that President-elect Donald Trump would reverse the US force build-up in Eastern Europe after he took office on January 20. "Once Trump is inaugurated one hopes that his close relationship with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will lead to rapid withdrawal of these forces and a refashioning of the relationship between Russia and the United States which may ensure our survival," she said. Caldicott is the author of many books, including "The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex" and "War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space." Never miss a story again — sign up to our Telegram channel and we'll keep you up to speed! _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cefce56f3093141b664bd08d56e7f2dec%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636536414861083019&sdata=rQ3tX%2B2MkATdZTvpa1ks0sqLIF2BDGXmTzJRRXvk6Ys%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 00:57:26 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 00:57:26 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Message-ID: Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND, founded by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career working against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The Champaign County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on Saturday they are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and exploiting the good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute and irradiate and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who paid the Dem Piper called this tune! Fab. WAND's thoughts on the disaster in Japan Posted by Admin * March 15, 2011 * Printer-friendly WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats. Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the unfolding crisis in Japan: 1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: "We ask all those who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios and turn towards much less risky energy solutions." We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for U.S. nuclear power. Send a short message here. For more information see our link of Georgia WAND's response and "Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for the U.S." from USA Today. 2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear weapons " in the Washington Post. 3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring system. It is also essential that the United States show effective leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all sources - including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear weapons.[https://www.wand.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/031411tsunamigeo_512x288-300x168.jpg] For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid Radiation Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com and the Project for the CTBT. Tagged as: CTBT, Japan disaster, nuclear weapons WAND | Women's Action for New Directions * Log in * Entries RSS * Comments RSS * WordPress.org Contact Us National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 more Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 more (c) 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions * Powered by Campaigns by Design [rss]Entries(RSS) [rss] Comments (RSS) 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15947 bytes Desc: image002.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 542 bytes Desc: image003.gif URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 8 01:21:47 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 01:21:47 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] GEO Message-ID: Emergency rally of the GEO taking place tonight at 7:00pm as a result of the Administration attempting to use legalisms to break their union, to threaten the attempts of grad employees to go to school, with the removal of tuition wavers. From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 8 01:23:13 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 01:23:13 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Legal strategy to break GEO Union Message-ID: ADMINISTRATION REVEALS NEW LEGAL STRATEGY TO BUST GEO At this session, the administration revealed their plans to terminate full tuition waiver protections and bust our Union. The administration argues that our tuition waivers are a permissive subject of bargaining, meaning that we legally cannot strike over it. Our position is that, as compensation, tuition waivers are a mandatory subject of bargaining and legal to strike over, a position upheld by two separate legally binding arbitration decisions. The administration wants to make it so that they can re-designate any program to self-supporting, which means that both current and incoming graduate students could lose access to tuition waiver generating appointments, even if they do the work of a TA or GA. If members are ineligible for tuition waivers, they won’t be able to attend school here. Furthermore, as tuition waiver generating appointments disappear from many departments, we’ll be forced to compete over the limited number of waiver-generating positions in the small number of departments that offer them. Not only will this make graduate education unaffordable, but it means that fewer graduate employees will be legally protected by GEO’s contract, as the Administration’s position is that only employees with tuition waivers are members of our bargaining unit. In the long term, this will decimate individual graduate programs: departments will only be able to recruit those who can afford to pay tuition rather than seeking out the best students. With fewer graduate students on campus and fewer positions covered by the contract, GEO will go extinct. Publically, the administration is claiming that the GEO is attempting to prevent them from creating new programs. The GEO recognizes that the administration has the right to create new programs. However, as long as a graduate employee performs bargaining unit work, then that graduate employee MUST be paid their full compensation under the terms of our contract, including a tuition waiver. What this means is that we’re no longer just fighting for fair compensation and working conditions: we’re fighting for the life of our Union, our ability to attend grad school, the future of our departments, and the future of higher education. Here is a link to the university administration’s proposal from 30th Jan. Their proposed tuition waiver side letter language has not changed since then. We are seeking the same tuition waiver side letter language as our last contract, which can be found at uigeo.org. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 8 01:34:54 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 01:34:54 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Picket training for GEO strike Message-ID: Channing Murray Foundation 5:00pm Saturday, for “Picket Training” From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 04:36:29 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 04:36:29 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: It took me under a one minute google search to come up with this WAND Statement against nuclear power. So of course the Champaign County Dems are trying to pull a fast one on us on behalf of the nuclear power industry exploiting Helen Caldicott's Good Name and Reputation and Brainchild. He who paid the Dems Piper called this despicable tune-- Poisoning and polluting and irradiating and murdering our children. That's the Dems for you. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2018 6:57 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND, founded by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career working against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The Champaign County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on Saturday they are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and exploiting the good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute and irradiate and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who paid the Dem Piper called this tune! Fab. WAND's thoughts on the disaster in Japan Posted by Admin * March 15, 2011 * Printer-friendly WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats. Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the unfolding crisis in Japan: 1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: "We ask all those who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios and turn towards much less risky energy solutions." We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for U.S. nuclear power. Send a short message here. For more information see our link of Georgia WAND's response and "Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for the U.S." from USA Today. 2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear weapons " in the Washington Post. 3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring system. It is also essential that the United States show effective leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all sources - including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear weapons.[https://www.wand.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/031411tsunamigeo_512x288-300x168.jpg] For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid Radiation Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com and the Project for the CTBT. Tagged as: CTBT, Japan disaster, nuclear weapons WAND | Women's Action for New Directions * Log in * Entries RSS * Comments RSS * WordPress.org Contact Us National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 more Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 more (c) 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions * Powered by Campaigns by Design [rss]Entries(RSS) [rss] Comments (RSS) 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15947 bytes Desc: image002.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 542 bytes Desc: image003.gif URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From brussel at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 05:00:23 2018 From: brussel at illinois.edu (Brussel, Morton K) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 05:00:23 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott In-Reply-To: References: <2F9DFF49-47E2-423D-9A63-9AA043AF0C17@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <112A9CC0-9BC0-4C5A-9012-ED3063457EBC@illinois.edu> No evidence presented, as far as I can see. Also, see list of Nobel Peace prize winners: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/ Caldicott’s name is missing! It is sometimes hard to tell where Francis Boyle is coming from with questionable assertions. Anti- war people should be responsible and reliable. —mkb On Feb 7, 2018, at 5:04 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. Yes well Helen did win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work against the nuclear power industry and radiation. There has been ample documentation already on this list and elsewhere that the nuclear power industry has given enormous sums to the Dems. In any event, WAND is the Brainchild of Helen Caldicott and here the Dems are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry under the cover of Helen’s good name and reputation in order to promote nuclear power. Truly perverse and disgusting! But what else do you expect from the Dems? He who pays the Piper calls the tune. 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: Brussel, Morton K Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 4:56 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott On the issue here given, she's to be commended, on the dangers of radioactivity—off the wall. As for “Dems” and nuclear power, Boyle ’s claims need evidence. —mkb On Feb 7, 2018, at 1:01 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, as I said the Democrats are desecrating the good name of Helen Caldicott by having their APOLOGIST for the nuclear power industry speak at their conference on Saturday. In fact the Democrats on Saturday will be perverting the good name and reputation of Helen by using her as a pretext and a cover in order to promote the nuclear power industry. How much did the nuclear power industry pay the Dems? 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 12:23 PM To: Peace-discuss > Subject: [Peace-discuss] From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott [Nuclear explosion] US-NATO 'Buildup on Russian Border Could Lead to Nuclear War' - Nobel Laureate CC0 / NNSA / Nevada Site Office / The BADGER explosion MILITARY & INTELLIGENCE 21:40 12.01.2017(updated 21:41 12.01.2017)Get short URL Topic: NATO Seeks Expansion to Eastern Europe (362) 16715 US political leaders have falsely accused Moscow of threatening NATO member states while the alliance aggressively builds up military forces on Russia’s border, Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Thursday, US Secretary of Defense nominee James Mattis told a Senate committee in confirmation hearings that NATO must build capacity in eastern Europe to deter Russia’s alleged aggression. This came a day after Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson testified that the United States would defend NATO member states if Russia invaded. "There is little or no evidence that Russia is being aggressive towards the NATO countries," Caldicott, co-winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, told Sputnik. “That is a lie that the United States insists on maintaining." Caldicott pointed out, however, that it was the United States and NATO, not Russia, that was building up its armed forces to unprecedented levels in central and eastern Europe and exacerbating tensions in the region. "The severely provocative buildup of military forces, ABM [anti-ballistic missile] systems and equipment on the Russian border is at the least unnecessary and at the most could lead to a nuclear war with Russia," Caldicott warned. Far from threatening nuclear war, the Russian government and media were warning their people about the dangers of the NATO military buildup, Caldicott claimed. "Indeed, the Russian press and leading politicians in the Duma are now postulating that this could well be a future reality, and they are encouraging the Russian population to practice drills to shelter themselves from nuclear war," she said. The American public and US policymakers also need to take the threat of nuclear war and the nightmarish consequences that would flow from it far more seriously, Caldicott explained. In the event of any thermonuclear conflict breaking out between Russia and the United States and NATO "we are all doomed to die a dreadful death of vaporization, severe burns, acute radiation sickness, or freezing and starving to death in the nuclear winter that will ensue," Caldicott admonished. Although US Vice President Joe Biden praised the record of outgoing President Barack Obama on reducing the threat of nuclear war during his eight years in office, Caldicott said Obama’s anti-Russian policies had made the danger far worse. "What on earth Obama, the once-peace-maker, and [US Secretary of Defense] Ashton Carter think they are doing, God only knows unless they are obeying the dictates of their military industrial masters, who need war or the risk of such to survive economically," Caldicott added. Caldicott expressed the hope that President-elect Donald Trump would reverse the US force build-up in Eastern Europe after he took office on January 20. "Once Trump is inaugurated one hopes that his close relationship with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will lead to rapid withdrawal of these forces and a refashioning of the relationship between Russia and the United States which may ensure our survival," she said. Caldicott is the author of many books, including "The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex" and "War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space." Never miss a story again — sign up to our Telegram channel and we'll keep you up to speed! _______________________________________________ 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 rwhelbig at gmail.com Thu Feb 8 06:02:13 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2018 22:02:13 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Caldicott may have a great name in the anti-nuclear activist community, but she often lies about the basic science and you have bought into that! Nuclear power has not poisoned, polluted, irradiated or murdered any children. The anti-nuclear weapons movement should divorce itself from the anti-nuclear power movement. The only real thing that they have in common is the word "nuclear" and then the lies begin because of that vague similarity. On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > *It took me under a one minute google search to come up with this WAND > Statement against nuclear power. So of course the Champaign County Dems are > trying to pull a fast one on us on behalf of the nuclear power industry > exploiting Helen Caldicott’s Good Name and Reputation and Brainchild. He > who paid the Dems Piper called this despicable tune-- Poisoning and > polluting and irradiating and murdering our children. That’s the Dems for > you. Fab.* > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.* > > *Champaign IL 61820 USA* > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only*) > > > > *From:* Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] *On > Behalf Of *Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > *Sent:* Wednesday, February 07, 2018 6:57 PM > *To:* Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> > *Subject:* [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! > > > > *Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND**, founded > by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career working > against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The Champaign > County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on Saturday they > are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and exploiting the > good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute and irradiate > and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who paid the Dem > Piper called this tune! Fab.* > > *WAND’s thoughts on the disaster in Japan* > > *Posted by Admin > > • March 15, 2011 • Printer-friendly > > * > > *WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and > nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, > the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear > reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of > earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their > desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease > the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to > alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats.* > > *Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the > unfolding crisis in Japan:* > > *1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can > be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time > when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop > subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan > guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in > less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: “We ask all those > who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it > up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their > position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of > those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By > combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios > and turn towards much less risky energy solutions.“ * > > *We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for U.S. > nuclear power. Send a short message here. > * > > *For more information see our link > > of Georgia WAND's response and “Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for > the U.S." from USA Today. > * > > *2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The > specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know > the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the > devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after > the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the > United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times > more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to > destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we > plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and > their delivery systems.* > > *For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear > weapons " in the Washington Post. > * > > *3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and > should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive > Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is > being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification > efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. > This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the > earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking > radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States > should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring > system. It is also essential that the United States show effective > leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in > preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all > sources – including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is > crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear > weapons.**[image: > https://www.wand.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/031411tsunamigeo_512x288-300x168.jpg]* > > > *For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid Radiation > Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com > and > the Project for the CTBT. > * > > > * Tagged as: CTBT > , > Japan disaster > , > nuclear weapons > > * > > *WAND | Women’s Action for New Directions* > > - Log in > > - Entries RSS > > - Comments RSS > > - WordPress.org > > > *Contact Us* > > National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 <(202)%20459-4769> more > > > Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 <(404)%20524-5999> more > > > © 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions • Powered by Campaigns by > Design > > > [image: rss]Entries(RSS) > [image: > rss]Comments (RSS) > > > > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.* > > *Champaign, IL 61820 USA* > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only)* > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15947 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 542 bytes Desc: not available URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Feb 8 11:01:16 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 05:01:16 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott In-Reply-To: <112A9CC0-9BC0-4C5A-9012-ED3063457EBC@illinois.edu> References: <2F9DFF49-47E2-423D-9A63-9AA043AF0C17@illinois.edu> <112A9CC0-9BC0-4C5A-9012-ED3063457EBC@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <2CF4DC8F-EA3B-421B-9B62-4F4D322718D6@gmail.com> "In 1985, the Caldicott-inspired International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won the Nobel Peace Prize. The organization beat out Caldicott herself, who had been nominated by Linus Pauling, the renowned chemist, anti-nuclear activist, and 1962 Nobel Peace Prize winner.” . Caldicott’s (b. 1938) political judgement is excellent: e.g. . A physician, she recalls being alerted to the treat of nuclear war by the 1957 Nevil Shute novel On the Beach. —CGE > On Feb 7, 2018, at 11:00 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss wrote: > > No evidence presented, as far as I can see. > Also, see list of Nobel Peace prize winners: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/ > Caldicott’s name is missing! > It is sometimes hard to tell where Francis Boyle is coming from with questionable assertions. Anti- war people should be responsible and reliable. > > —mkb > > >> On Feb 7, 2018, at 5:04 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: >> >> Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. >> Yes well Helen did win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work against the nuclear power industry and radiation. There has been ample documentation already on this list and elsewhere that the nuclear power industry has given enormous sums to the Dems. In any event, WAND is the Brainchild of Helen Caldicott and here the Dems are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry under the cover of Helen’s good name and reputation in order to promote nuclear power. Truly perverse and disgusting! But what else do you expect from the Dems? He who pays the Piper calls the tune. >> >> From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 12:58:03 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 12:58:03 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott In-Reply-To: <2CF4DC8F-EA3B-421B-9B62-4F4D322718D6@gmail.com> References: <2F9DFF49-47E2-423D-9A63-9AA043AF0C17@illinois.edu> <112A9CC0-9BC0-4C5A-9012-ED3063457EBC@illinois.edu> <2CF4DC8F-EA3B-421B-9B62-4F4D322718D6@gmail.com> Message-ID: A distinction without a difference.Everyone knows it was her organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize. 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, February 08, 2018 5:01 AM To: Brussel, Morton K Cc: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Sputnik, quoting Helen Caldecott "In 1985, the Caldicott-inspired International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won the Nobel Peace Prize. The organization beat out Caldicott herself, who had been nominated by Linus Pauling, the renowned chemist, anti-nuclear activist, and 1962 Nobel Peace Prize winner.” . Caldicott’s (b. 1938) political judgement is excellent: e.g. . A physician, she recalls being alerted to the treat of nuclear war by the 1957 Nevil Shute novel On the Beach. —CGE > On Feb 7, 2018, at 11:00 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss wrote: > > No evidence presented, as far as I can see. > Also, see list of Nobel Peace prize winners: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/ > Caldicott’s name is missing! > It is sometimes hard to tell where Francis Boyle is coming from with questionable assertions. Anti- war people should be responsible and reliable. > > —mkb > > >> On Feb 7, 2018, at 5:04 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: >> >> Nobel Peace Prize winner and global peace activist Helen Caldicott told Sputnik. >> Yes well Helen did win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work against the nuclear power industry and radiation. There has been ample documentation already on this list and elsewhere that the nuclear power industry has given enormous sums to the Dems. In any event, WAND is the Brainchild of Helen Caldicott and here the Dems are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry under the cover of Helen’s good name and reputation in order to promote nuclear power. Truly perverse and disgusting! But what else do you expect from the Dems? He who pays the Piper calls the tune. >> >> From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 13:07:21 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 13:07:21 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Trump May Expand Gitmo Capacity to Bush-Era Levels on Dubious Legal Grounds - 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: Thursday, February 08, 2018 7:06 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Trump May Expand Gitmo Capacity to Bush-Era Levels on Dubious Legal Grounds - Sputnik International University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik that the terminology used by Trump during his State of the Union address was chosen deliberately, leaving suspects vulnerable to being indefinitely detained without due process. "By determining that they are 'unlawful combatants' - a completely bogus category under international humanitarian law - Trump has tried to strip them of all of their international legal rights and render them non-persons," he said. Trump, Boyle added, was also likely to permit the renewed use of torture, or so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques at Guantanamo in the coming years. Captured terror suspects "will be shipped to Gitmo where they will be subjected to torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and subjected to the Pentagon's Kangaroo Courts that even the US Supreme Court has ruled violate the Geneva Conventions, which is a war crime," Boyle said. "Trump wants to terrorize and intimidate all armed and unarmed opposition to further US imperial aggression and Occupations all over the world," Boyle said. https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201802081061457158-trump-expand-gitmo-capacity/ From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 13:11:56 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 13:11:56 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: So says “military intelligence.” 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2018 12:02 AM To: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Caldicott may have a great name in the anti-nuclear activist community, but she often lies about the basic science and you have bought into that! Nuclear power has not poisoned, polluted, irradiated or murdered any children. The anti-nuclear weapons movement should divorce itself from the anti-nuclear power movement. The only real thing that they have in common is the word "nuclear" and then the lies begin because of that vague similarity. On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: It took me under a one minute google search to come up with this WAND Statement against nuclear power. So of course the Champaign County Dems are trying to pull a fast one on us on behalf of the nuclear power industry exploiting Helen Caldicott’s Good Name and Reputation and Brainchild. He who paid the Dems Piper called this despicable tune-- Poisoning and polluting and irradiating and murdering our children. That’s the Dems for you. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2018 6:57 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND, founded by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career working against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The Champaign County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on Saturday they are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and exploiting the good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute and irradiate and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who paid the Dem Piper called this tune! Fab. WAND’s thoughts on the disaster in Japan Posted by Admin • March 15, 2011 • Printer-friendly WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats. Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the unfolding crisis in Japan: 1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: “We ask all those who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios and turn towards much less risky energy solutions.“ We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for U.S. nuclear power. Send a short message here. For more information see our link of Georgia WAND's response and “Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for the U.S." from USA Today. 2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear weapons " in the Washington Post. 3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring system. It is also essential that the United States show effective leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all sources – including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear weapons.[https://www.wand.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/031411tsunamigeo_512x288-300x168.jpg] For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid Radiation Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com and the Project for the CTBT. Tagged as: CTBT, Japan disaster, nuclear weapons WAND | Women’s Action for New Directions * Log in * Entries RSS * Comments RSS * WordPress.org Contact Us National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 more Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 more © 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions • Powered by Campaigns by Design [rss]Entries(RSS) [rss] Comments (RSS) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) _______________________________________________ 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15947 bytes Desc: image001.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 542 bytes Desc: image002.gif URL: From rwhelbig at gmail.com Thu Feb 8 13:28:50 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 05:28:50 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Bullshit - so say a lot of scientists - I am not in the military - I never served in Intelligence - I do my own research - I even corresponded with Dr Caldicott and I found her reply not creditable. I know a number of other people who also have found her to be a dishonest information broker. I am probably the only one, though, who wrote to the licensing authority in Australia to request that her medical license be revoked since she knowingly disseminates false information and that is contrary to the Hippocratic Oath. Roger Is anyone on this list an attorney who can inform FAB that I am tired of his miscontruing who I am and that knowingly lying about someone with the intention of damaging their reputation is legally wrong. On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:11 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > *So says “military intelligence.” fab* > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > * > > *Champaign IL 61820 USA > * > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only*) > > > > *From:* Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] > *Sent:* Thursday, February 08, 2018 12:02 AM > *To:* Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss < > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> > *Subject:* Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! > > > > Caldicott may have a great name in the anti-nuclear activist community, > but she often lies about the basic science and you have bought into that! > Nuclear power has not poisoned, polluted, irradiated or murdered any > children. The anti-nuclear weapons movement should divorce itself from the > anti-nuclear power movement. The only real thing that they have in common > is the word "nuclear" and then the lies begin because of that vague > similarity. > > > > On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > *It took me under a one minute google search to come up with this WAND > Statement against nuclear power. So of course the Champaign County Dems are > trying to pull a fast one on us on behalf of the nuclear power industry > exploiting Helen Caldicott’s Good Name and Reputation and Brainchild. He > who paid the Dems Piper called this despicable tune-- Poisoning and > polluting and irradiating and murdering our children. That’s the Dems for > you. Fab.* > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > * > > *Champaign IL 61820 USA > * > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only*) > > > > *From:* Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] *On > Behalf Of *Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > *Sent:* Wednesday, February 07, 2018 6:57 PM > *To:* Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> > *Subject:* [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! > > > > *Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND**, founded > by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career working > against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The Champaign > County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on Saturday they > are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and exploiting the > good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute and irradiate > and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who paid the Dem > Piper called this tune! Fab.* > > *WAND’s thoughts on the disaster in Japan* > > *Posted by Admin > > • March 15, 2011 • Printer-friendly > > * > > *WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and > nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, > the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear > reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of > earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their > desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease > the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to > alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats.* > > *Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the > unfolding crisis in Japan:* > > *1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can > be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time > when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop > subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan > guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in > less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: “We ask all those > who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it > up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their > position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of > those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By > combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios > and turn towards much less risky energy solutions.“ * > > *We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for U.S. > nuclear power. Send a short message here. > * > > *For more information see our link > > of Georgia WAND's response and “Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for > the U.S." from USA Today. > * > > *2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The > specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know > the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the > devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after > the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the > United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times > more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to > destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we > plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and > their delivery systems.* > > *For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear > weapons " in the Washington Post. > * > > *3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and > should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive > Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is > being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification > efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. > This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the > earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking > radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States > should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring > system. It is also essential that the United States show effective > leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in > preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all > sources – including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is > crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear > weapons.**[image: > https://www.wand.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/031411tsunamigeo_512x288-300x168.jpg]* > > > *For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid Radiation > Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com > and > the Project for the CTBT. > * > > > * Tagged as: CTBT > , > Japan disaster > , > nuclear weapons > > * > > *WAND | Women’s Action for New Directions* > > - Log in > > - Entries RSS > > - Comments RSS > > - WordPress.org > > > *Contact Us* > > National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 <(202)%20459-4769> more > > > Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 <(404)%20524-5999> more > > > © 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions • Powered by Campaigns by > Design > > > [image: rss]Entries(RSS) > [image: > rss]Comments (RSS) > > > > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > * > > *Champaign, IL 61820 USA > * > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only)* > > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15947 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 542 bytes Desc: not available URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 8 13:52:08 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 13:52:08 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Roger, You have, in the past, admitted to having been in the military. On Feb 8, 2018, at 05:28, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss > wrote: Bullshit - so say a lot of scientists - I am not in the military - I never served in Intelligence - I do my own research - I even corresponded with Dr Caldicott and I found her reply not creditable. I know a number of other people who also have found her to be a dishonest information broker. I am probably the only one, though, who wrote to the licensing authority in Australia to request that her medical license be revoked since she knowingly disseminates false information and that is contrary to the Hippocratic Oath. Roger Is anyone on this list an attorney who can inform FAB that I am tired of his miscontruing who I am and that knowingly lying about someone with the intention of damaging their reputation is legally wrong. On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:11 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: So says “military intelligence.” 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2018 12:02 AM To: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Caldicott may have a great name in the anti-nuclear activist community, but she often lies about the basic science and you have bought into that! Nuclear power has not poisoned, polluted, irradiated or murdered any children. The anti-nuclear weapons movement should divorce itself from the anti-nuclear power movement. The only real thing that they have in common is the word "nuclear" and then the lies begin because of that vague similarity. On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: It took me under a one minute google search to come up with this WAND Statement against nuclear power. So of course the Champaign County Dems are trying to pull a fast one on us on behalf of the nuclear power industry exploiting Helen Caldicott’s Good Name and Reputation and Brainchild. He who paid the Dems Piper called this despicable tune-- Poisoning and polluting and irradiating and murdering our children. That’s the Dems for you. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2018 6:57 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND, founded by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career working against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The Champaign County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on Saturday they are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and exploiting the good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute and irradiate and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who paid the Dem Piper called this tune! Fab. WAND’s thoughts on the disaster in Japan Posted by Admin • March 15, 2011 • Printer-friendly WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats. Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the unfolding crisis in Japan: 1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: “We ask all those who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios and turn towards much less risky energy solutions.“ We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for U.S. nuclear power. Send a short message here. For more information see our link of Georgia WAND's response and “Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for the U.S." from USA Today. 2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear weapons " in the Washington Post. 3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring system. It is also essential that the United States show effective leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all sources – including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear weapons. For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid Radiation Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com and the Project for the CTBT. Tagged as: CTBT, Japan disaster, nuclear weapons WAND | Women’s Action for New Directions * Log in * Entries RSS * Comments RSS * WordPress.org Contact Us National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 more Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 more © 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions • Powered by Campaigns by Design Entries(RSS) Comments (RSS) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) _______________________________________________ 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://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4a881f5d7a084394d98008d56ef7f839%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636536933654999637&sdata=vjV4Jq%2FPzL1AUILNN5LcqQ0iXy12mWus98TZ0lZA2KI%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 13:55:51 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 13:55:51 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yeah Roger even admitted he tried to join “military intelligence.” Maybe they were too smart to have him? 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: Thursday, February 08, 2018 7:52 AM To: Roger Helbig Cc: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Roger, You have, in the past, admitted to having been in the military. On Feb 8, 2018, at 05:28, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss > wrote: Bullshit - so say a lot of scientists - I am not in the military - I never served in Intelligence - I do my own research - I even corresponded with Dr Caldicott and I found her reply not creditable. I know a number of other people who also have found her to be a dishonest information broker. I am probably the only one, though, who wrote to the licensing authority in Australia to request that her medical license be revoked since she knowingly disseminates false information and that is contrary to the Hippocratic Oath. Roger Is anyone on this list an attorney who can inform FAB that I am tired of his miscontruing who I am and that knowingly lying about someone with the intention of damaging their reputation is legally wrong. On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:11 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: So says “military intelligence.” 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2018 12:02 AM To: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Caldicott may have a great name in the anti-nuclear activist community, but she often lies about the basic science and you have bought into that! Nuclear power has not poisoned, polluted, irradiated or murdered any children. The anti-nuclear weapons movement should divorce itself from the anti-nuclear power movement. The only real thing that they have in common is the word "nuclear" and then the lies begin because of that vague similarity. On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: It took me under a one minute google search to come up with this WAND Statement against nuclear power. So of course the Champaign County Dems are trying to pull a fast one on us on behalf of the nuclear power industry exploiting Helen Caldicott’s Good Name and Reputation and Brainchild. He who paid the Dems Piper called this despicable tune-- Poisoning and polluting and irradiating and murdering our children. That’s the Dems for you. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2018 6:57 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND, founded by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career working against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The Champaign County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on Saturday they are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and exploiting the good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute and irradiate and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who paid the Dem Piper called this tune! Fab. WAND’s thoughts on the disaster in Japan Posted by Admin • March 15, 2011 • Printer-friendly WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats. Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the unfolding crisis in Japan: 1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: “We ask all those who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios and turn towards much less risky energy solutions.“ We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for U.S. nuclear power. Send a short message here. For more information see our link of Georgia WAND's response and “Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for the U.S." from USA Today. 2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear weapons " in the Washington Post. 3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring system. It is also essential that the United States show effective leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all sources – including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear weapons. For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid Radiation Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com and the Project for the CTBT. Tagged as: CTBT, Japan disaster, nuclear weapons WAND | Women’s Action for New Directions * Log in * Entries RSS * Comments RSS * WordPress.org Contact Us National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 more Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 more © 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions • Powered by Campaigns by Design Entries(RSS) Comments (RSS) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) _______________________________________________ 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://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4a881f5d7a084394d98008d56ef7f839%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636536933654999637&sdata=vjV4Jq%2FPzL1AUILNN5LcqQ0iXy12mWus98TZ0lZA2KI%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 8 14:04:14 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 14:04:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Nuclear Posture of the US Message-ID: From Jean Bricmont: my reaction to the new nuclear posture of the US: My impression is that this is still a militaristic boondoggle. I still cannot believe that, crazy as they are, the US generals would launch a preemptive strike against a nuclear power. Remember that, for that to work, one has to knock off all the adversaries nuclear weapons. Could it work against North Korea? Maybe, but I doubt it. Launching a nuclear attack against a non nuclear power like Iran might work, but would provoke a world wide negative reaction against the US and I doubt that they will take that risk. Finally, what about a conventional attack against a nuclear or non nuclear power? For a nuclear one, the danger of nuclear escalation, which is almost certain to occur, is too great. For a non nuclear power, which one? Given the results in Iraq, Syria and Libya, I don’t see how that can work either. The conventional forces of Iran are far too strong. My objections to their policies are two fold: it is huge waste of money, both for the US and for its potential targets (Russia, China etc.) where there will be also a military using this to boost its own spending; and, more importantly, it increases the risk of a nuclear war by accident. As we saw during the other Cold War, this is a real possibility. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 14:21:52 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 14:21:52 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump May Expand Gitmo Capacity to Bush-Era Levels on Dubious Legal Grounds - Sputnik International Message-ID: Here is the exact quote I sent to Sputnik: Trump wants to terrorize and intimidate all armed and unarmed opposition to further U.S. Imperial Aggressions and Occupations all over the world. By determining that they are "unlawful combatants"-a completely bogus category under international humanitarian law-Trump has tried to strip them of all of their international legal rights and render them non-persons-exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews. Then they will be shipped to Gitmo where they will be subjected to torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and subjected to the Pentagon's Kangaroo Courts that even the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled violate the Geneva Conventions, which is a war crime. After Stalinist Show Trials , some very well could be executed/murdered, giving the United States of America its first Nazi-style death camp on Gitmo. 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, February 08, 2018 7:07 AM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: FW: Trump May Expand Gitmo Capacity to Bush-Era Levels on Dubious Legal Grounds - Sputnik International 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, February 08, 2018 7:06 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Trump May Expand Gitmo Capacity to Bush-Era Levels on Dubious Legal Grounds - Sputnik International University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik that the terminology used by Trump during his State of the Union address was chosen deliberately, leaving suspects vulnerable to being indefinitely detained without due process. "By determining that they are 'unlawful combatants' - a completely bogus category under international humanitarian law - Trump has tried to strip them of all of their international legal rights and render them non-persons," he said. Trump, Boyle added, was also likely to permit the renewed use of torture, or so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques at Guantanamo in the coming years. Captured terror suspects "will be shipped to Gitmo where they will be subjected to torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and subjected to the Pentagon's Kangaroo Courts that even the US Supreme Court has ruled violate the Geneva Conventions, which is a war crime," Boyle said. "Trump wants to terrorize and intimidate all armed and unarmed opposition to further US imperial aggression and Occupations all over the world," Boyle said. https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201802081061457158-trump-expand-gitmo-capacity/ From rwhelbig at gmail.com Thu Feb 8 15:14:43 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 07:14:43 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Karen, re-read what I said and then decide that you made a mistake. I have never denied that I served in the US Air Force. That does not make me "Military Intelligence". I am retired. I stopped serving in the active AF Reserve in 1994. I began receiving retired pay when I turned age 60 in 2007. I have had no active connection with the Air Force other than receiving a retired pay check since 1994. Those are the facts. Roger On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:52 AM, Karen Aram wrote: > Roger, > > You have, in the past, admitted to having been in the military. > > > On Feb 8, 2018, at 05:28, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > Bullshit - so say a lot of scientists - I am not in the military - I never > served in Intelligence - I do my own research - I even corresponded with Dr > Caldicott and I found her reply not creditable. I know a number of other > people who also have found her to be a dishonest information broker. I am > probably the only one, though, who wrote to the licensing authority in > Australia to request that her medical license be revoked since she > knowingly disseminates false information and that is contrary to the > Hippocratic Oath. > > Roger > > Is anyone on this list an attorney who can inform FAB that I am tired of > his miscontruing who I am and that knowingly lying about someone with the > intention of damaging their reputation is legally wrong. > > On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:11 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: > >> *So says “military intelligence.” fab* >> >> >> >> *Francis A. Boyle* >> >> *Law Building* >> >> *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. >> * >> >> *Champaign IL 61820 USA >> * >> >> *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* >> >> *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* >> >> *(personal comments only*) >> >> >> >> *From:* Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] >> *Sent:* Thursday, February 08, 2018 12:02 AM >> *To:* Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss < >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> >> *Subject:* Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! >> >> >> >> Caldicott may have a great name in the anti-nuclear activist community, >> but she often lies about the basic science and you have bought into that! >> Nuclear power has not poisoned, polluted, irradiated or murdered any >> children. The anti-nuclear weapons movement should divorce itself from the >> anti-nuclear power movement. The only real thing that they have in common >> is the word "nuclear" and then the lies begin because of that vague >> similarity. >> >> >> >> On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < >> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: >> >> *It took me under a one minute google search to come up with this WAND >> Statement against nuclear power. So of course the Champaign County Dems are >> trying to pull a fast one on us on behalf of the nuclear power industry >> exploiting Helen Caldicott’s Good Name and Reputation and Brainchild. He >> who paid the Dems Piper called this despicable tune-- Poisoning and >> polluting and irradiating and murdering our children. That’s the Dems for >> you. Fab.* >> >> >> >> *Francis A. Boyle* >> >> *Law Building* >> >> *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. >> * >> >> *Champaign IL 61820 USA >> * >> >> *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* >> >> *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* >> >> *(personal comments only*) >> >> >> >> *From:* Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] *On >> Behalf Of *Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss >> *Sent:* Wednesday, February 07, 2018 6:57 PM >> *To:* Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) < >> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> >> *Subject:* [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! >> >> >> >> *Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND**, >> founded by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career >> working against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The >> Champaign County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on >> Saturday they are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and >> exploiting the good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute >> and irradiate and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who >> paid the Dem Piper called this tune! Fab.* >> >> *WAND’s thoughts on the disaster in Japan* >> >> *Posted by Admin >> >> • March 15, 2011 • Printer-friendly >> >> * >> >> *WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and >> nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, >> the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear >> reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of >> earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their >> desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease >> the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to >> alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats.* >> >> *Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the >> unfolding crisis in Japan:* >> >> *1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can >> be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time >> when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop >> subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan >> guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in >> less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: “We ask all those >> who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it >> up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their >> position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of >> those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By >> combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios >> and turn towards much less risky energy solutions.“ * >> >> *We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for >> U.S. nuclear power. Send a short message here. >> * >> >> *For more information see our link >> >> of Georgia WAND's response and “Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for >> the U.S." from USA Today. >> * >> >> *2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The >> specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know >> the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the >> devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after >> the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the >> United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times >> more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to >> destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we >> plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and >> their delivery systems.* >> >> *For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear >> weapons " in the Washington Post. >> * >> >> *3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and >> should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive >> Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is >> being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification >> efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. >> This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the >> earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking >> radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States >> should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring >> system. It is also essential that the United States show effective >> leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in >> preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all >> sources – including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is >> crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear >> weapons.*** >> >> >> *For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid >> Radiation Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com >> and >> the Project for the CTBT. >> * >> >> >> * Tagged as: CTBT >> , >> Japan disaster >> , >> nuclear weapons >> >> * >> >> *WAND | Women’s Action for New Directions* >> >> - Log in >> >> - Entries RSS >> >> - Comments RSS >> >> - WordPress.org >> >> >> *Contact Us* >> >> National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 <(202)%20459-4769> more >> >> >> Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 <(404)%20524-5999> more >> >> >> © 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions • Powered by Campaigns >> by Design >> >> >> Entries(RSS) >> >> Comments (RSS) >> >> >> >> >> >> >> *Francis A. Boyle* >> >> *Law Building* >> >> *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. >> * >> >> *Champaign, IL 61820 USA >> * >> >> *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* >> >> *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* >> >> *(personal comments only)* >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url= > https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo% > 2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4a881f5d7a084394d98008d56ef7f839% > 7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636536933654999637&sdata= > vjV4Jq%2FPzL1AUILNN5LcqQ0iXy12mWus98TZ0lZA2KI%3D&reserved=0 > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 15:34:06 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 15:34:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: . I am probably the only one, though, who wrote to the licensing authority in Australia to request that her medical license be revoked since she knowingly disseminates false information and that is contrary to the Hippocratic Oath. Roger tried to revoke the Medical License of Dr. Helen Caldicott who has devoted her entire life to making the world a better place. Roger is SICK AND DEMENTED! QED. 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 8, 2018 9:15 AM To: Karen Aram ; Peace-discuss ; Boyle, Francis A Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Karen, re-read what I said and then decide that you made a mistake. I have never denied that I served in the US Air Force. That does not make me "Military Intelligence". I am retired. I stopped serving in the active AF Reserve in 1994. I began receiving retired pay when I turned age 60 in 2007. I have had no active connection with the Air Force other than receiving a retired pay check since 1994. Those are the facts. Roger On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:52 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: Roger, You have, in the past, admitted to having been in the military. On Feb 8, 2018, at 05:28, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss > wrote: Bullshit - so say a lot of scientists - I am not in the military - I never served in Intelligence - I do my own research - I even corresponded with Dr Caldicott and I found her reply not creditable. I know a number of other people who also have found her to be a dishonest information broker. I am probably the only one, though, who wrote to the licensing authority in Australia to request that her medical license be revoked since she knowingly disseminates false information and that is contrary to the Hippocratic Oath. Roger Is anyone on this list an attorney who can inform FAB that I am tired of his miscontruing who I am and that knowingly lying about someone with the intention of damaging their reputation is legally wrong. On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:11 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: So says “military intelligence.” 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2018 12:02 AM To: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Caldicott may have a great name in the anti-nuclear activist community, but she often lies about the basic science and you have bought into that! Nuclear power has not poisoned, polluted, irradiated or murdered any children. The anti-nuclear weapons movement should divorce itself from the anti-nuclear power movement. The only real thing that they have in common is the word "nuclear" and then the lies begin because of that vague similarity. On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: It took me under a one minute google search to come up with this WAND Statement against nuclear power. So of course the Champaign County Dems are trying to pull a fast one on us on behalf of the nuclear power industry exploiting Helen Caldicott’s Good Name and Reputation and Brainchild. He who paid the Dems Piper called this despicable tune-- Poisoning and polluting and irradiating and murdering our children. That’s the Dems for you. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2018 6:57 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND, founded by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career working against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The Champaign County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on Saturday they are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and exploiting the good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute and irradiate and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who paid the Dem Piper called this tune! Fab. WAND’s thoughts on the disaster in Japan Posted by Admin • March 15, 2011 • Printer-friendly WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats. Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the unfolding crisis in Japan: 1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: “We ask all those who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios and turn towards much less risky energy solutions.“ We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for U.S. nuclear power. Send a short message here. For more information see our link of Georgia WAND's response and “Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for the U.S." from USA Today. 2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear weapons " in the Washington Post. 3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring system. It is also essential that the United States show effective leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all sources – including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear weapons. For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid Radiation Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com and the Project for the CTBT. Tagged as: CTBT, Japan disaster, nuclear weapons WAND | Women’s Action for New Directions · Log in · Entries RSS · Comments RSS · WordPress.org Contact Us National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 more Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 more © 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions • Powered by Campaigns by Design Entries(RSS) Comments (RSS) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) _______________________________________________ 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://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4a881f5d7a084394d98008d56ef7f839%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636536933654999637&sdata=vjV4Jq%2FPzL1AUILNN5LcqQ0iXy12mWus98TZ0lZA2KI%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 8 16:21:06 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 16:21:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Roger I did not make a mistake, you did in fact admit to being in the military previously, the US Air Force does qualify as military. Your recent statement this morning, was to deny being in the military. That aside, your attempts to vilify even going so far as taking action against those concerned with war, or nuclear proliferation certainly raises “red flags” of concern. And, why we have you on this “Peace Discuss List” is beyond me, as you certainly don’t support “peace” when all you do is support the USG actions and military build up. End of conversation on my part. Waste of time. On Feb 8, 2018, at 07:14, Roger Helbig > wrote: Karen, re-read what I said and then decide that you made a mistake. I have never denied that I served in the US Air Force. That does not make me "Military Intelligence". I am retired. I stopped serving in the active AF Reserve in 1994. I began receiving retired pay when I turned age 60 in 2007. I have had no active connection with the Air Force other than receiving a retired pay check since 1994. Those are the facts. Roger On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:52 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: Roger, You have, in the past, admitted to having been in the military. On Feb 8, 2018, at 05:28, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss > wrote: Bullshit - so say a lot of scientists - I am not in the military - I never served in Intelligence - I do my own research - I even corresponded with Dr Caldicott and I found her reply not creditable. I know a number of other people who also have found her to be a dishonest information broker. I am probably the only one, though, who wrote to the licensing authority in Australia to request that her medical license be revoked since she knowingly disseminates false information and that is contrary to the Hippocratic Oath. Roger Is anyone on this list an attorney who can inform FAB that I am tired of his miscontruing who I am and that knowingly lying about someone with the intention of damaging their reputation is legally wrong. On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:11 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: So says “military intelligence.” 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2018 12:02 AM To: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Caldicott may have a great name in the anti-nuclear activist community, but she often lies about the basic science and you have bought into that! Nuclear power has not poisoned, polluted, irradiated or murdered any children. The anti-nuclear weapons movement should divorce itself from the anti-nuclear power movement. The only real thing that they have in common is the word "nuclear" and then the lies begin because of that vague similarity. On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: It took me under a one minute google search to come up with this WAND Statement against nuclear power. So of course the Champaign County Dems are trying to pull a fast one on us on behalf of the nuclear power industry exploiting Helen Caldicott’s Good Name and Reputation and Brainchild. He who paid the Dems Piper called this despicable tune-- Poisoning and polluting and irradiating and murdering our children. That’s the Dems for you. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2018 6:57 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND, founded by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career working against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The Champaign County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on Saturday they are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and exploiting the good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute and irradiate and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who paid the Dem Piper called this tune! Fab. WAND’s thoughts on the disaster in Japan Posted by Admin • March 15, 2011 • Printer-friendly WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats. Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the unfolding crisis in Japan: 1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: “We ask all those who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios and turn towards much less risky energy solutions.“ We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for U.S. nuclear power. Send a short message here. For more information see our link of Georgia WAND's response and “Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for the U.S." from USA Today. 2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear weapons " in the Washington Post. 3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring system. It is also essential that the United States show effective leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all sources – including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear weapons. For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid Radiation Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com and the Project for the CTBT. Tagged as: CTBT, Japan disaster, nuclear weapons WAND | Women’s Action for New Directions * Log in * Entries RSS * Comments RSS * WordPress.org Contact Us National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 more Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 more © 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions • Powered by Campaigns by Design Entries(RSS) Comments (RSS) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) _______________________________________________ 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://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4a881f5d7a084394d98008d56ef7f839%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636536933654999637&sdata=vjV4Jq%2FPzL1AUILNN5LcqQ0iXy12mWus98TZ0lZA2KI%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 16:22:45 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 16:22:45 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Every Peace List has at least one MOLE who is there to disrupt 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: Karen Aram [mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 8, 2018 10:21 AM To: Roger Helbig Cc: Peace-discuss ; Boyle, Francis A Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Roger I did not make a mistake, you did in fact admit to being in the military previously, the US Air Force does qualify as military. Your recent statement this morning, was to deny being in the military. That aside, your attempts to vilify even going so far as taking action against those concerned with war, or nuclear proliferation certainly raises “red flags” of concern. And, why we have you on this “Peace Discuss List” is beyond me, as you certainly don’t support “peace” when all you do is support the USG actions and military build up. End of conversation on my part. Waste of time. On Feb 8, 2018, at 07:14, Roger Helbig > wrote: Karen, re-read what I said and then decide that you made a mistake. I have never denied that I served in the US Air Force. That does not make me "Military Intelligence". I am retired. I stopped serving in the active AF Reserve in 1994. I began receiving retired pay when I turned age 60 in 2007. I have had no active connection with the Air Force other than receiving a retired pay check since 1994. Those are the facts. Roger On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:52 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: Roger, You have, in the past, admitted to having been in the military. On Feb 8, 2018, at 05:28, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss > wrote: Bullshit - so say a lot of scientists - I am not in the military - I never served in Intelligence - I do my own research - I even corresponded with Dr Caldicott and I found her reply not creditable. I know a number of other people who also have found her to be a dishonest information broker. I am probably the only one, though, who wrote to the licensing authority in Australia to request that her medical license be revoked since she knowingly disseminates false information and that is contrary to the Hippocratic Oath. Roger Is anyone on this list an attorney who can inform FAB that I am tired of his miscontruing who I am and that knowingly lying about someone with the intention of damaging their reputation is legally wrong. On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 5:11 AM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: So says “military intelligence.” 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2018 12:02 AM To: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Caldicott may have a great name in the anti-nuclear activist community, but she often lies about the basic science and you have bought into that! Nuclear power has not poisoned, polluted, irradiated or murdered any children. The anti-nuclear weapons movement should divorce itself from the anti-nuclear power movement. The only real thing that they have in common is the word "nuclear" and then the lies begin because of that vague similarity. On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: It took me under a one minute google search to come up with this WAND Statement against nuclear power. So of course the Champaign County Dems are trying to pull a fast one on us on behalf of the nuclear power industry exploiting Helen Caldicott’s Good Name and Reputation and Brainchild. He who paid the Dems Piper called this despicable tune-- Poisoning and polluting and irradiating and murdering our children. That’s the Dems for you. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2018 6:57 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: [Peace-discuss] WAND AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER! Here is a very strong Statement against Nuclear Power by WAND, founded by my Friend Helen Caldicott, who has devoted her entire career working against the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear power. The Champaign County Dems can read this as well as we can. Nevertheless on Saturday they are bringing in a Pimp for the Nuclear Power Industry and exploiting the good name of Helen and WAND in order to poison and pollute and irradiate and murder our children. How dare the Dems do this! He who paid the Dem Piper called this tune! Fab. WAND’s thoughts on the disaster in Japan Posted by Admin • March 15, 2011 • Printer-friendly WAND is looking at the disaster in Japan with both heartbreak and nerve-wracking worry. Days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, the crises are continuing to mount. Of particular concern are the nuclear reactor explosions, fires and radioactive releases, all coming on top of earthquake aftershocks. Our hearts go out to the Japanese people in their desperate need for finding safe shelter and food so they can begin to ease the trauma and process grief. WAND passionately supports efforts to alleviate suffering and diminish evolving threats. Here are some lessons we in the United States must learn from the unfolding crisis in Japan: 1) Nuclear power is fraught with risk. There is a limit to what can be done to predict, mitigate and control that risk. Particularly at a time when we are cutting federal spending, the U.S. government should stop subsidizing this inherently dangerous energy source with federal loan guarantees and other subsidies. The United States should instead invest in less risky energy solutions. As Georgia WAND has stated: “We ask all those who support nuclear power expansion and the federal loans needed to prop it up - whether here or in other parts of the world - to rethink their position and consider how nuclear power threatens the safety and health of those who live directly downwind and downstream of nuclear power plants. By combining intelligence with imagination we can face "unthinkable" scenarios and turn towards much less risky energy solutions.“ We urge you to take action: Ask the President to stop subsidies for U.S. nuclear power. Send a short message here. For more information see our link of Georgia WAND's response and “Japan's nuke threat 'a wake-up call' for the U.S." from USA Today. 2) The United States should also rethink nuclear weapons policy. The specter of radiation exposure in Japan is so frightening because we know the lethality of not just nuclear reactor accidents, but also the devastation of nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after the recently passed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the United States plans to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons many times more destructive than the bombs dropped in Japan. More than enough to destroy the world and make the rubble bounce. Over the next 10 years, we plan to spend about $200 Billion on maintaining these nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. For more information see "How much can we justify spending on nuclear weapons " in the Washington Post. 3) International cooperation to reduce nuclear dangersis crucial and should be strengthened. The United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). An extensive monitoring and detection system is being built up as part of the CTBT Organization to support verification efforts of this treaty that prohibits all nuclear weapons test explosions. This monitoring system was important in early detection and warning of the earthquakes and tsunami and it is continuing to play a role in tracking radionuclides in the unfolding nuclear reactor crisis. The United States should participate in funding to expand this international monitoring system. It is also essential that the United States show effective leadership with prompt CTBT ratification. We must be vigilant in preventing environmental degradation and radiation exposure from all sources – including from nuclear test explosions. Moreover the CTBT is crucial to prevent the spread of new and more sophisticated nuclear weapons. For more information see the "Nuclear Test Gauges Beat CNN, Aid Radiation Watch in Japan" from Bloomberg.com and the Project for the CTBT. Tagged as: CTBT, Japan disaster, nuclear weapons WAND | Women’s Action for New Directions · Log in · Entries RSS · Comments RSS · WordPress.org Contact Us National Office - Washington, DC - 202.459.4769 more Atlanta, GA Office - 404.524.5999 more © 2018 WAND | Women's Action for New Directions • Powered by Campaigns by Design Entries(RSS) Comments (RSS) Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) _______________________________________________ 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://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4a881f5d7a084394d98008d56ef7f839%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636536933654999637&sdata=vjV4Jq%2FPzL1AUILNN5LcqQ0iXy12mWus98TZ0lZA2KI%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 8 18:53:39 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 18:53:39 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Saturdays program "Women Against Nuclear War" References: Message-ID: > > No one from WAND is coming. They don't have speakers that can travel for events. Rep Ammons will be talking about WAND and why they are starting an IL chapter. Obviously the Democrats want to set up this chapter, and given WAND, according to their website, is now an NGO, the Democrats are funding it. I support setting up a chapter of WAND, and doing everything we can to ensure they oppose nuclear power as well as nuclear war. Always pointing out of course, war with non nuclear weapons do a lot of damage, as has been seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc.,etc. Having the conversation is better than, not having the conversation. People aren’t born anti-war activists, they are enlightened or educated to be anti-war activists, in many different ways. > From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 8 19:00:43 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 19:00:43 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Responding to your message In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: To my true anti-war activist colleagues. Please resist the urge to regurgitate upon reading this message, because it gives us an idea of the rhetoric to be used in support of continued US taxpayers supporting military weapons proliferation, aggression, provocations, and imperialism. On Feb 8, 2018, at 10:45, Senator Tammy Duckworth > wrote: Dear Neighbor, Thank you for contacting me to share your thoughts on the dangers of nuclear weapons. I appreciate you taking the time to make me aware of your concerns on this important matter. Our Nation must have an in-depth discussion on behalf of our men and women in uniform regarding our role in any international conflict and how we engage in those conflicts. I strongly support the need for Congress to reassert the Legislative Branch's role in authorizing and overseeing military operations. This duty is particularly grave when considering the use of nuclear weapons. I also believe that any significant change to our nuclear deterrence policy must be carefully considered to guard against unintended consequences. Since the Cold War, the United States has been a partner to global treaties with the aim of ensuring global security and stability through reducing nuclear threats and proliferation. We must continue to uphold these vital mutual nuclear security agreements that have achieved real results. For example, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which was signed with the Soviet Union in 1987, committed both countries to ban all ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. By 1991, we were joined by five additional countries, further enhancing global nuclear security. I believe it is in our national interest to continue honoring treaties like the INF Treaty, and subsequent agreements such as New START, which limits the number of strategic warheads both Russia and the United States may retain. We should also continuing implementing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, which has helped bring Iran back from the brink of becoming a nuclear power. The United States demonstrates global leadership when it serves as a reliable and committed partner to advancing global security through nuclear nonproliferation agreements. However, while we must support and strengthen global nonproliferation efforts, the U.S. must always retain its right to self-defense, as well as the defense of our allies -- for me, this is non-negotiable. This means retaining a ready and capable nuclear deterrent in the form of the nuclear triad, which refers to our ability to launch nuclear strikes from land, sea or air. The responsibility for conscientious nuclear arms policy remains extremely important. As our relationship with Russia continues to change, and other actors like North Korea recklessly accelerate their dangerous nuclear development and ballistic missile testing, the United States faces a difficult challenge of conducting effective diplomacy, developing a coherent strategy to counter nuclear threats, while always maintaining our right to defend ourselves and our allies. Rest assured, I will keep your views in mind if legislation addressing nuclear weapons come comes to the Senate floor for a vote. Thank you again for contacting me on this important issue. If you would like more information on my work in the Senate, please visit my website at www.duckworth.senate.gov. You can access my voting record and see what I am doing to address today’s most important issues. I hope that you will continue to share your views and opinions with me and let me know whenever I may be of assistance to you. Sincerely, [https://outreach.senate.gov/iqextranet/Customers/SenDuckworth/Duckworth.png] Tammy Duckworth United States Senator Subscribe to our enewsletter Please do not reply to this email. The mailbox is unattended. To share your thoughts, please visit my webpage. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From baldwinricky at yahoo.com Thu Feb 8 19:27:34 2018 From: baldwinricky at yahoo.com (Ricky Baldwin) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 19:27:34 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] GEO set to strike at UIUC References: <681515627.1254179.1518118054949.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <681515627.1254179.1518118054949@mail.yahoo.com> Good afternoon, fans of justice! Grad employees on campus earn on average about $16,000 a year, well below the UI's own livable wage standard.  Without tuition waivers this would largely just go straight back to the University.  For such basic economic and other reasons grad employees at UIUC have been fighting for a union for many years.  It took years to win legal recognition and bargain their first contract.  Then in 2009 the GEO had to strike to get guaranteed tuition waivers and other basic provisions in writing.  The University immediately reneged and only after a long and costly arbitration did the GEO prevail, only to have the University refuse to abide by the arbitrator's decision (a serious violation of labor law), and GEO had to fight again - and did prevail again.  Now the UI is trying to back out again - as well as refusing to bargain in good faith over grad employee pay and stonewalling other important issues. So the GEO just  this morning set a date to strike if the University does not seriously change its tune in bargaining: Mon. Feb. 26 Please sign up to join the picket line!  Community support is crucial.  I am part of a small committee coordinating signups by allies, so you can email me (privately, please, off list) your name, number, and what time you can picket Mon. Feb. 26 (preferable) between 8AM-5PM, or Tuesday 2/17.  Or you can try this nifty googledocs signup, which Nick Goodell set up: Strike Support Sign-Up | | | | | | | | | | | Strike Support Sign-Up Sheet1 Name, email, Phone, time available 2-26, time available 2-27, time available 2-28, Affiliation( communi... | | | I can meet you or make sure someone meets you at the Illini Union (Quad Side) at your appointed time to get you what you need.  Thanks!  Solidarity!Ricky Ricky Baldwin "Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kmedina67 at gmail.com Thu Feb 8 20:42:01 2018 From: kmedina67 at gmail.com (Karen Medina) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 14:42:01 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] GEO set to strike at UIUC In-Reply-To: <681515627.1254179.1518118054949@mail.yahoo.com> References: <681515627.1254179.1518118054949.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <681515627.1254179.1518118054949@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: to add to Ricky's post... Grad employees on campus earn on average about $16,000 a year. Without tuition waivers this entire income would not even cover the entire cost of tuition, fees, books, and health insurance. -- Academic year tuition rate for graduate students at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Base: $12, 488 ; Nonresident: $26,980 Highest: $39,000 ; Nonresident: $48,672 -- Law school has its own set of tuition levels between 35,000-49,500 -- Academic year for graduate students: Fees: $ 4,222 Books & supplies: $ 1,800 Health insurance: $ 1,170 Room or rent: Food: Transportation, clothing: References: 1. 2017-2018 Academic Year Graduate & Professional Tuition Rates. https://registrar.illinois.edu/g-tuition-rates-1718 2. 2018-2019 Academic Year Graduate Estimated Additional Expenses. https://registrar.illinois.edu/g-additional-expenses-1819 On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 1:27 PM, Ricky Baldwin via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > Good afternoon, fans of justice! > > Grad employees on campus earn on average about $16,000 a year, well below > the UI's own livable wage standard. Without tuition waivers this would > largely just go straight back to the University. For such basic economic > and other reasons grad employees at UIUC have been fighting for a union for > many years. It took years to win legal recognition and bargain their first > contract. Then in 2009 the GEO had to strike to get guaranteed tuition > waivers and other basic provisions in writing. The University immediately > reneged and only after a long and costly arbitration did the GEO prevail, > only to have the University refuse to abide by the arbitrator's decision (a > serious violation of labor law), and GEO had to fight again - and did > prevail again. Now the UI is trying to back out again - as well as > refusing to bargain in good faith over grad employee pay and stonewalling > other important issues. > > So the GEO just this morning set a date to strike if the University does > not seriously change its tune in bargaining: > > Mon. Feb. 26 > > Please sign up to join the picket line! Community support is crucial. I > am part of a small committee coordinating signups by allies, so you can > email me (privately, please, off list) your name, number, and what time you > can picket Mon. Feb. 26 (preferable) between 8AM-5PM, or Tuesday 2/17. Or > you can try this nifty googledocs signup, which Nick Goodell set up: > > Strike Support Sign-Up > > > Strike Support Sign-Up > > Sheet1 Name, email, Phone, time available 2-26, time available 2-27, time > available 2-28, Affiliation( communi... > > > > > I can meet you or make sure someone meets you at the Illini Union (Quad > Side) at your appointed time to get you what you need. Thanks! Solidarity! > Ricky > > > > > Ricky Baldwin > "Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes." > - Maggie Kuhn > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > -- -- karen medina "The really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." - Mark Twain -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Thu Feb 8 23:20:55 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 17:20:55 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Saturdays program "Women Against Nuclear War" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0B3B6DBB-51D1-4A36-9C88-A4CBF36ACD76@illinois.edu> WAND = Women Against Nuclear Disarmament? Will "Rep Ammons ... talking about WAND and why they are starting an IL chapter” include condemnation of Israeli nuclear weapons? Carol (and IL Democrats) has carried water for Israeli crimes before; I don’t expect her to change now. —CGE > On Feb 8, 2018, at 12:53 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > >> >> No one from WAND is coming. They don't have speakers that can travel for events. Rep Ammons will be talking about WAND and why they are starting an IL chapter. > > Obviously the Democrats want to set up this chapter, and given WAND, according to their website, is now an NGO, the Democrats are funding it. > > I support setting up a chapter of WAND, and doing everything we can to ensure they oppose nuclear power as well as nuclear war. Always pointing out of course, war with non nuclear weapons do a lot of damage, as has been seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc.,etc. > > Having the conversation is better than, not having the conversation. People aren’t born anti-war activists, they are enlightened or educated to be anti-war activists, in many different ways. >> > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 8 23:35:51 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 23:35:51 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: From the Desk of Rodney Davis References: <201802082246.w18MkNaA006700@s-bulk2-f.house.gov> Message-ID: If you think Tammy Duckworth is bad, read what Rodney has to say: “ hold your nose,” Begin forwarded message: From: "Rep. Rodney Davis" > Subject: From the Desk of Rodney Davis Date: February 8, 2018 at 14:46:24 PST Rodney Davis 13th District, Illinois ________________________________ www.rodneydavis.house.gov www.facebook.com/reprodneydavis www.twitter.com/rodneydavis ________________________________ 1740 Longworth House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 (202) 225-2371 [Congress of the United States // House of Representatives // Washington, DC 20515] Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee Chairman Biotechnology, Horticulture, and Research Subcommittee on Commodity Exchanges, Energy, and Credit Subcommittee on Nutrition Committee on House Administration Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation Subcommittee on Highways and Transit Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment February 8, 2018 February 8, 2018 Ms. Karen A. Aram 803 E Green St Urbana, IL 61802-3411 Dear Ms. Aram, Thank you for contacting me regarding nuclear weapons and the recently proposed treaty to ban the use or possession of all nuclear weapons by the United Nations (U.N.) I appreciate hearing from constituents in my district and the time you took to share your thoughts. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is the first legally binding international agreement with the goal of eventually eliminating all nuclear weapons from the world. It first passed the United Nations on July 7 of this year but will require signatures from at least 50 countries in the U.N. in order to be officially ratified. One of my top priorities is ensuring our national security in an increasingly destabilized world. I believe that in providing for this security, a strong military demands the wisdom of when to use nuclear weapons. A strong nuclear deterrent remains necessary as long as violent, unpredictable nations such as Iran and North Korea also have access to nuclear weapons. In addition, nearly 20 percent of America's electricity was provided by nuclear power in 2016. Nuclear power provides our country with an extremely valuable source of energy that produces virtually no emissions. If we do away with nuclear weapons, we could fall behind on valuable research and development relating to nuclear power. Nuclear power plants across our nation provide energy as well as thousands of well-paying jobs, including those at the Clinton nuclear power plant in my district. I understand you support the United States signing this treaty and I will keep your thoughts in mind moving forward if this particular issue comes before the United States Congress as legislation. Again, thank you for contacting me and let me know if my office can be of assistance to you in the future. In addition, if you would like to stay informed on what is happening in Washington, DC and around the 13th District, please sign up to receive my e-newsletter by visiting https://rodneydavis.house.gov/contact/newsletter. It is truly an honor to represent you. Sincerely, [(signed)] Rodney Davis Member of Congress 2004 Fox Drive Champaign, IL 61820 (217) 403-4690 108 W. MarketSt. Taylorville, IL 62568 (217) 824-5117 15 Professional Park Drive Maryville, IL 62062 (618) 205-8660 2833 S. Grand Avenue East Springfield, IL 62703 (217) 791-6224 104 W. North Street Normal, IL 61761 (309) 252-8834 243 S. Water Street, Suite 100 Decatur, IL 62523 (217) 791-6224 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 9 12:52:58 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2018 12:52:58 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Operation Pacific Eagle Message-ID: NEOCOLONIALISM Operation Pacific Eagle in the Philippines: Washington’s New Colonial War Critics contend that Operation Pacific Eagle Philippines is aimed at strengthening Washington’s grip on the long-subjugated people of the Philippines, defeating a half-century leftist insurgency, and securing the country for the interests of U.S. multinational corporations. by Elliott Gabriel Most Americans don’t know that the Philippines was our colony, and now they are our latest occupied territory in our “war on terror.” One of the poorest people in Asia, SE Asia, the Pacific they are workers everywhere in the world. with their major export being their people. February 07th, 2018 By Elliott Gabriel In the first part of this MPN exclusive, we speak to Ka Oris of the New People’s Army and Professors William I. Robinson and Roland Simbulan about the new U.S. intervention in Asia, which raises the Philippines to the same level as Syria and Iraq for the Pentagon’s war plans. In the second part, we will look at the 1999-2015 counterinsurgency initiative “Plan Colombia” as a template for Operation Pacific Eagle, as well as the use of the operation to continue the encirclement of China by U.S. bases. MANILA, PHILIPPINES – Last month, the U.S. Armed Forces finally admitted that a new mission was underway in the Philippines. Dubbed “Operation Pacific Eagle – Philippines,” the operation allows for an unlimited budget to be set aside for the purpose of armed U.S. operations in the Southeast Asian region. [https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Citizen-Activist-email.png] Designated on Sept. 1, 2017 by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis amid total secrecy in the U.S. and the Philippines, the overseas contingency operation – an official designation for the military theaters of the former “War on Terror” – is presented as a continuation of Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. military’s crusade against the Islamic State group (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria. Pacific Eagle, an open-ended mission aimed at “countering radicalization and violent extremism” in the Southeast Asian region, could see the U.S. military re-establish itself as a virtually permanent fixture in a former U.S. colony described by President Donald Trump as a “prime piece of real estate.” Critics contend that the operation is aimed at strengthening Washington’s grip on the long-subjugated people of the Philippines, defeating a half-century leftist insurgency, and securing the country for the interests of U.S. multinational corporations. The ‘ISIS’ specter [Defense Secretary James Mattis meets with the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Defense Ministers (ASEAN) meeting in Clark, Philippines on Oct. 24, 2017. (Photo: DVIDS)] Defense Secretary James Mattis meets with the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Defense Ministers (ASEAN) meeting in Clark, Philippines on Oct. 24, 2017. (Photo: DVIDS) The operation comes to light months after the conclusion of the bloody siege of Marawi, a now-pulverized city in the southernmost island of Mindanao that became the scene of a ruinous counterinsurgency campaign by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) against hundreds of alleged “Islamic State affiliates” of the Maute and Abu Sayyaf groups. The campaign entailed the declaration of martial law in Mindanao until the end of 2018, the displacement of thousands of families, and the deployment of U.S. Special Forces to the city as advisors and drone operators assisting the Philippine military. A recent video released by Philippine Army Special Operations Command, highlighted by Interaksyon, noted the clear evidence of U.S. logistical support to the AFP campaign, including M4s rifle optics, PEQ-2 laser designators, machine guns, grenade launchers and Harris tactical radio systems. Watch | The Philippine Army Special Operations Command’s Battle of Marawi The U.S. participation was seen by the country’s leftists as proof of President Rodrigo Duterte’s hypocrisy, exposing his angry anti-U.S. statements and pledges to align with regional powerhouses such as Russia and China as the empty bluster of a U.S. puppet. A report published for the U.S. Congress last Friday by Lead Inspector General Glenn Fine repeatedly invokes “ISIS-Philippines” as justification for the report while subtly mentioning “other terrorist organizations” that remain unnamed: OPE-P is described as the comprehensive counterterrorism campaign by the DoD, in coordination with other U.S. Government agencies and international partners, to support the Philippine government and military in their efforts to isolate, degrade, and defeat Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) affiliates and other terrorist organizations in the Philippines.” Critics see the use of the term “other terrorist organizations” as a red flag signaling that the Pentagon’s focus is far from limited to those who are seeking to help establish a global “caliphate” from the Southeast Asian archipelago. ________________________________ Read more by Elliott Gabriel * Kerry’s Alleged Talks With Palestinians: Amid Pro-Israeli Stampede by US, A Silent Tug-of-War? * TeleSUR English’s Day in Facebook ‘Jail’ Raises Doubts About Silicon Valley Hospitality * Do Korea Talks Reflect Alienation from US Threats of War? * Tokyo Warns of War: US Wary as Seoul Asserts Itself, Pursues Peace Talks with North ________________________________ For, Roland Simbulan, a professor at the University of the Philippines and scholar of U.S. military activities in the region, Operation Pacific Eagle represents a new stage in the counterinsurgency against the Maoist guerrillas of the New People’s Army (NPA). “The Operation Pacific Eagle marks a new era of U.S. military intervention in the Philippines,” Simbulan told MintPress News: Internally, it is directed against the Philippine left and externally, to use the Philippines as a springboard to reassert U.S. military power in the Pacific. It is Trump’s way of supporting the creeping authoritarianism in the country while using U.S. military forces and assets to make sure that Duterte does not change the U.S. military presence [in relation to] China.” The Philippine Revolution [Members of the New People's Army march during the entry of colors as part of ceremonies before a news conference held at their guerrilla encampment tucked in the harsh wilderness of the Sierra Madre mountains southeast of Manila, Philippines. The group warns that a peace deal with President Rodrigo Duterte's government is unlikely if he won't end the Philippines' treaty alliance with the United States and resist control by other countries, Nov. 23, 2016. (AP/Aaron Favila)] Members of the New People’s Army march during the entry of colors as part of ceremonies before a news conference held at their guerrilla encampment tucked in the harsh wilderness of the Sierra Madre mountains southeast of Manila, Philippines. The group warns that a peace deal with President Rodrigo Duterte’s government is unlikely if he won’t end the Philippines’ treaty alliance with the United States and resist control by other countries, Nov. 23, 2016. (AP/Aaron Favila) For nearly 50 years, the NPA – affiliated with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) – has waged a prolonged insurgency against successive governments in Manila, which it accuses of serving U.S. imperialist interests rather than the interests of poor people and Indigenous communities in resource-rich rural areas desired by multinational mining firms and local exporters. Duterte once called himself a “socialist” and “anti-imperialist,” and even expressed sympathies for the red fighters in a manner considered taboo in a country that, for decades under former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, once nursed a single-minded hatred of the left. Since 1986, however, Manila has taken part in intermittent peace talks with the banned Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) through the National Democratic Front, an alliance of social movements affiliated with the clandestine party. While Duterte initially championed the peace process, which hinged on the implementation of an ambitious socio-economic reform agenda, the negotiations were derailed last May after his declaration of martial law in Mindanao. Watch | Why is there an armed revolution in the Philippines? Accordingly, the end of last year’s peace talks eventually led to Duterte designating the Philippine communists, both armed and unarmed, as “terrorists.” “I will follow America, since they say that I am an American boy,” Duterte noted. “OK, granted, I will admit that I am a fascist. I will categorize you already as a terrorist.” The clandestine party and its military wing have both been included in the official U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations since 2002. Duterte’s accusations came shortly after U.S. President Trump’s visit to Manila for the ASEAN leaders’ summit last November, drawing criticisms that the Philippine president was acting under the direction of his “idol and puppet-master” from Washington. “Duterte’s martial law against the so-called ‘ISIS’ in Mindanao set a perfect backdrop for the reentry of U.S. troops and their permanent basing in the country without a signed treaty,” the CPP Information Bureau said in a statement released last month: His termination of the peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and subsequent declaration of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army as ‘terrorist organizations’ further set the stage. The declaration, which was made specifically in line with the U.S. State Department’s foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) listing, bolstered Duterte access to the U.S.’ budget for overseas contingency operations (OCO), the Pentagon’s bloated ‘anti-terror’ slush fund.” Mindanao’s riches [The mountains of the South Cotabato province of Mindanao Island in the southern Philippines. (AP Photo)] The mountains of the South Cotabato province in the resource-rich Mindanao Island in the southern Philippines. (AP Photo) The material incentives of the United States government are key to understanding why the U.S. declared Operation Pacific Eagle, according to Jorge “Ka Oris” Madlos, the spokesman for the New People’s Army (NPA) National Operations Command. “ISIS in the Philippines is more imagined than real,” Ka Oris told MintPress News: By using the general catchphrase ‘radicalization and violent extremism,’ the U.S. is encompassing all armed groups resistant to its puppet state’s rule, both existing and those bound to emerge due to its interference. In Mindanao, this includes legitimate Moro groups/clans fighting for their ancestral lands and right to self-determination.” The lush island has long been known for its lucrative natural gas and mineral deposits and its wide tracts of land ideal for large-scale commercial plantations operated by multinational corporations based in the U.S., Ka Oris explains. Multinationals have also looked covetously at the Liguasan Marsh, a huge and biodiverse complex of rivers, channels, lakes, freshwater marshes and ponds. Viewed as sacred patrimony for the Maguindanaoan Muslim tribe, the 220,000-hectare marsh was described in U.S. diplomatic cables from 2006, obtained by WikiLeaks, as containing untapped mineral wealth totaling anywhere from $840 billion to $1 trillion. Manila government officials at the time described the region as a “treasure trove” of mineral resources — including gold, copper, chromites, nickel, manganese, silver, iron ore, lead and zinc. According to subsequent surveys carried out by U.S. oil engineers, the natural gas reserves of Liguasan alone amount to $580 billion. Watch | Making a Difference in Ligawasan Marsh “At the same time, the island is also home to robust people’s movements and has a strong presence of armed groups, including the NPA,” Ka Oris notes. In hopes to advance their demands for self-determination from the distant Manila government, Maguindanaoans have long taken part in armed insurgencies led by groups such as the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) — both groups that faced accusations of terrorism” from Manila and the U.S. Both groups have since signed peace deals and now hope to finalize a law granting autonomy to local elites. Controversially, Duterte has tied the granting of autonomy to a new push to drastically raise the constitutional ceiling limiting the right of foreign investors to own Philippine land, among other measures that have raised the ire of watchdogs and opposition figures. Filipinos who oppose Duterte see the reform of foreign land ownership laws as key ingredients of a recipe for a return to colonialism in the country. [A protester holds a placard during a rally in Manila, Philippines, near the U.S. Embassy to denounce the U.S. military's role in the battle between government forces and Islamist militants. The protesters also denounced President Rodrigo Duterte's declaration of martial law in the whole region of Mindanao in southern Philippines. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)] A protester holds a placard during a rally in Manila, Philippines, near the U.S. Embassy to denounce the U.S. military’s role in the battle between government forces and Islamist militants. The protesters also denounced President Rodrigo Duterte’s declaration of martial law in the whole region of Mindanao in southern Philippines. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez) Manila also hopes a new law on autonomy can smooth over the lingering rage provoked by Marawi’s destruction. According to Moro advocates, the city’s Islamist insurgency was itself rooted more in a neglect of Moro people’s legitimate interests than in locals’ interest in the ISIS program. “The U.S. even acknowledges that the Marawi siege may have further complicated the Moro situation in this part of the country,” Ka Oris explained. Local Moro advocates see recent developments, such as plans to build a second major military camp in the city, as proof that Manila intends to transform Marawi City into a de facto “military reservation” directly owned and operated by the U.S. armed forces. The developments cast new light on the overuse of force against the city’s civilian infrastructure and neighborhoods for the purpose of quelling a relatively small number of Islamist insurgents. Ka Oris notes: The U.S. is sure to consider the city as one of its potential bases, as it hosted the main U.S. base in Mindanao in the 1900s (then known as Camp Keithley). Duterte has already displaced almost all its civilian population and is in the process of building a military base there. Resistance, both armed and unarmed, to this latest injustice is bound to intensify.” Making the Philippines safe for global capitalism [Protesters display placards behind a mock logo of the World Bank outside a hotel near Manila, Philippines to, Oct. 23, 2014. Protesters gathered to coincide with the World Bank consultations with different non-government organizations and civil society groups on the World Bank's new draft of "safeguards" that was launched in Washington. Protest leaders would later reject the draft and demand policies to ensure real protections for people and the planet." (AP/Bullit Marquez)] Protesters display placards behind a mock logo of the World Bank outside a hotel near Manila, Philippines to, Oct. 23, 2014. Protesters gathered to coincide with the World Bank consultations with different non-government organizations and civil society groups on the World Bank’s new draft of “safeguards” that was launched in Washington. Protest leaders would later reject the draft and demand policies to ensure real protections for people and the planet.” (AP/Bullit Marquez) When former dictator Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972 — ostensibly to contain the communist insurgency of the CPP-NPA and growing unrest in the cities and schools — the neocolonial status of the Philippines was drastically deepened. The country was transformed into a laboratory for neoliberal experiments, free-market policies, special economic zones, and a lifting of protectionist laws under World Bank structural adjustment loan requirements. U.S. multinational corporations, operating through loyal elites and oligarch clans, gained unprecedented access to the country’s riches — including its banking, petrochemical, construction, telecoms, and mineral extraction industries, among other strategic sectors. For William I. Robinson, an author and professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, a new period of martial law and militarization would come as little surprise: Both Trumpism and Duterteism are far-right authoritarian responses to crises of state legitimacy and internecine feuding among the elite. Militarization and authoritarianism in the United States and the Philippines will become more closely linked through Operation Pacific Eagle.” Even in the past, when Manila abstained from the iron-fisted policies of Duterte, the country’s governance entailed the violent displacement of millions throughout the country and the resultant export of several millions of displaced Filipinos to all corners of the globe as “guest workers” lacking rights in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North Africa. While women find work as domestic laborers, servers, caregivers, nurses, or hospitality industry workers — where they are often vulnerable to rape, physical assault, and murder — men find hazardous jobs as construction workers and agricultural laborers. Some reports claim that around 6,000 are forced to leave the country to seek work every day. [Relatives of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) display placards as they pitch their tent to begin their planned three-day camp-out at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila, Philippines, Monday April 29, 2013. The camp-out was organized in sympathy with more than 2,500 who pitched their tents in Jedda, Saudi Arabia to escape alleged crackdowns on undocument overseas workers by the Saudi government. (AP/Bullit Marquez)] Relatives of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) display placards as they pitch their tent to begin their planned three-day camp-out at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila, Philippines, Monday April 29, 2013. The camp-out was organized in sympathy with more than 2,500 who pitched their tents in Jedda, Saudi Arabia to escape alleged crackdowns on undocument overseas workers by the Saudi government. (AP/Bullit Marquez) “The export of this surplus labor has provided a political escape value to an explosive situation of displacement and mass immiseration,” Robertson told MintPress News. Likewise, he continues, Agro-industrial zones have spread through the countryside and the export-industry that first took off in the 1980s has eclipsed national industrial development and has been expanding, as has the transfer of transnational corporate services – call centers, Facebook censors – to the Philippines. These transnational agro-industrial, industrial, and service complexes, along with the global export of Philippine labor, are the face of capitalist globalization in the Philippines.“ Such processes can only accelerate in a “hot-house fashion,” as global markets and the transnational capitalist class seek temporary fixes to their deepening financial worries in resource-rich yet poverty-stricken countries such as the Philippines, Robertson suggests — ensuring that Operation Pacific Eagle will embroil the U.S. in a deeper role policing the internal social turmoil within the country. Robinson also sees Operation Pacific Eagle as quite similar to Plan Colombia, the 1999-2015 counterinsurgency aid program that saw billions of dollars in weaponry poured into Colombian security forces and paramilitaries for the purpose of destroying the FARC’s left-wing insurgency and, ostensibly, continuing the “war on drugs.” The New People’s Army is prepared to weather the storm, according to Ka Oris, who sees continued revolutionary rigor as key to the survival of the Filipino people and New People’s Army: Expanding the mass base, strengthening and expanding the people’s army through trainings and mass recruitments, making sure that revolutionary work is done in a comprehensive manner – [this is how we can] ensure that the guerilla forces and bases can withstand and outlast relentless attacks from enemy forces. These, alongside the study and adaptation of the NPA and the people to U.S. sophisticated weapons, such as surveillance and attack drones, that the local armed forces are already using against civilian communities.” For the Filipino revolutionaries, it remains unclear as to whether Operation Pacific Eagle marks a new phase in Washington’s militarization of the Philippines. The interventionist policies of the United States have been a constant since the end of the Spanish colonial period when the U.S. military waged a brutal war that claimed around one million lives in the country. However, Ka Oris notes, Operation Pacific Eagle is clearly consistent with the past administration’s so-called “pivot to the Pacific” and the United States’ push to maintain military supremacy in the Asia-Pacific region. For the Pentagon’s war-planners, the Philippines remains key to their plans for containing an increasingly strong and confident China. In Part II, we will look at the 1999-2015 U.S. initiative “Plan Colombia” as a template for Operation Pacific Eagle, as well as the use of the operation to continue the encirclement of China by U.S. bases. Top Photo | A U.S. Marine teaches a Philippine Marine weapon handling techniques during Air Assault Support Exercise 2015-2 at Basa Air Base in Pampanga, Philippines, July 15, 2015. (Photo: U.S. Marine Corp) Elliott Gabriel is a former staff writer for teleSUR English and a MintPress News contributor based in Quito, Ecuador. He has taken extensive part in advocacy and organizing in the pro-labor, migrant justice and police accountability movements of Southern California and the state’s Central Coast. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 9 14:22:16 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2018 14:22:16 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Columbia U. refuses to recognize grad student union, the GEO at the U of I must prevail Message-ID: Columbia University refuses to recognize graduate student union By Isaac Finn 9 February 2018 On January 30, Columbia University in New York City announced it would not recognize the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers (GWC-UAW) Local 2110 as the bargaining agent for student workers on campus. Columbia’s announcement is a response by the recent ruling by the regional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which accepted the result of a 2016 vote by graduate students to join the UAW. The university has challenged the results of the certification vote—which was 1,602 to 623 in favor—and has steadfastly refused to recognize the right of student workers to organize. Columbia Provost John Coatsworth acknowledged in an open letter that the administration’s decision would create “disappointment and dispute” but made it clear the university would not back down. “While the National Labor Relations Board’s position on student assistants has shifted repeatedly with changes in political administrations, the University’s view has remained constant.” In 2015, the NLRB twice rejected petitions by graduate students to form a union, but the following year it overturned the ruling. University administrators have indicated they will ask a federal appellate court to review the dispute. In the meantime, however, administrators no doubt hope the NLRB will reverse its decision once the Trump administration appoints a fifth member to the board. Responding to the decision, the GWC-UAW bargaining committee said, “While it is deeply disappointing to continue putting legal hurdles in the way of justice, their action merely underscores the need to continue building majority support until they finally respect our choice and start bargaining.” On February 1, the union organized a protest of a few hundred Columbia students, as well as students from nearby universities and medical assistants from the Columbia University Medical Center, on the university’s main campus. Graduate students are highly exploited. According to glassdoor.com a base salary for a teaching assistant is $22,686, while the university estimates that the cost of tuition and living expenses for a master’s student in 2017-2018 is $79,890. In addition to trying to get by on these poverty wages, in one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the world, grad students must pay $1,000 for health insurance premiums. At the same time, the “non-profit” university is making hundreds of millions of dollars from stock market and real estate and its top administrators are raking in enormous salaries. An Upper West Side Patch articletitled, “Who Profits From ‘Columbia University Inc.’ On Upper West Side?” notes, “Between July 2014 and June 2015, Columbia University’s annual income from its Wall Street investments exceeded $856 million. In addition, during the same period, Columbia University’s annual rental income from its real estate property exceeded $23 million and its annual income from research ‘royalties’ exceeded $89 million.” Much of the university’s $4.9 billion in annual revenues between July 2014 and June 2015 went to provide huge total compensation payments to administrators and professors. These include: Nirmal Narvekar, president of Investment Management ($7,221,568); Peter Holland, executive vice president of Investment Management ($6,509,884); David Silvers, clinical professor ($4,633,927); and Jeffrey Moses, professor of medicine, ($2,672,693). Provost John Coatsworth “only” received $756,218, 34 times more than the base salary of a teaching assistant. Teaching and research assistants have every reason to organize to fight for their rights against the university administration and the powerful financial and political forces that stand behind it. However, it is fatally naïve to believe that the UAW is, as the GWC-UAW web site claims, “one of the strongest unions in the country,” which will bring decades of organizing and bargaining experience and expertise to our campaign.” On the contrary, the UAW is deeply hated by hundreds of thousands of autoworkers and other workers who have suffered decades of mass layoffs, wage and benefit concessions and worsening working conditions at the hands of the UAW. As recent federal indictments have revealed, the “bargaining expertise” of the UAW was manifested through the more than $1.5 million in bribes to UAW negotiators from Fiat Chrysler. The UAW long ago abandoned any association with the class struggle and since the 1980s has been based on labor-management “partnership.” In the name of making the corporations more competitive and profitable the UAW suppressed strikes and helped transform autoworkers, once the highest paid industrial workers in the US, into a largely cheap labor and temporary workforce. The only interest the UAW apparatus has in “organizing” university workers is to bolster its dues income after its disastrous policies led to a collapse in membership from over 1.5 million in 1979 to 415,000 today. The nationalist and pro-capitalist program of the UAW has long manifested itself through the political subordination of the working class to the corporate-controlled Democratic Party. The GWC-UAW has openly sought the support of Democratic Party politicians. In 2016 they hailed the endorsements of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Senator Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, all of whom are shills of Wall Street. Under the Obama administration 300,000 teaching and school jobs were destroyed while de Blasio has overseen a sharp expansion of for-profit charter schools in New York City. Students who turned to the UAW at New York University have not overcome their poverty wages and pariah status. In 2005, after NYU refused to negotiate with the GSOC-UAW Local 2110, Democrat Jesse Jackson came in to negotiate only to see talks collapse. TAs and RAs were on strike for six months when the union shut down the walkout without a new contract. GSOC-UAW was not recognized until 2013 and NYU did not negotiate a contract until 2015. The deal included a paltry wage increase of 2.25 to 2.5 percent from 2015 to 2020 even though the cost of attending the university is estimated to increase 5 percent for the 2017-2018 school year and for every subsequent year. Grad students need organization. But not organizations like the UAW, the American Federation of Teachers and other unions, which defend capitalism and politically subordinate workers to the Democrats, a party of austerity and war, no less ruthless than Trump and the Republicans. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) urges students to build rank-and-file workplace committees, democratically controlled by university workers themselves, to counterpoise their will to the dictates of the administration. These workplace committees should fight for the broadest mobilization of the working class against the corporate control of universities. Sign up for the WSWS Teacher Newsletter The WSWS urges teachers and supporters to sign up for the Teacher Newsletter for frequent updates and to leave your comments or questions. To do so, click here. Share this article: * Facebook * Twitter * Digg * Reddit * Delicious * StumbleUpon * Blogger * E-Mail Commenting Discussion Rules » -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Fri Feb 9 15:00:56 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2018 09:00:56 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Ten Years After: I'd Love to Change the World... Message-ID: [I’ve recently come across a piece I wrote for an independent journal at Notre Dame at the time of Obama’s election, in 2008. The theme is the continuity of US government crimes, domestic and foreign, regardless of a seemingly transformative presidential election. I think that theme is still apropos.] CEREMONIES IN A DARK YOUNG MAN: THE INAUGURATION IS NOT A NEW BEGINNING ========================================================================= Can’t we hear what they’re saying? The Democrats elected to Congress and the Presidency in this autumn's election have made it clear that they intend to dispense more public money to the richest people in this country via "bailouts" -- and to kill more people in an expanded "war on terrorism." These were of course also the intentions of the outgoing administration. The new administration has simply added a certain ecumenical quality to its predecessor's policies by being staffed with right-wing Democrats from the Clinton administration, from Rahm Emanuel to Hillary Clinton. The president-elect's so-called security team consists of Mrs. Clinton (whose views on foreign policy were said during the primaries to be antithetical to Obama's) at the State Department, Robert Gates (an apparatchik and fixer since the Reagan administration, the real administrator of the Bush war policies since the eclipse of the Neocons) at Defense, and James Jones (ex-commandant of the Marine Corps and close friend of John McCain) as National Security Advisor. It's a line-up of supporters of aggressive war -- the supreme international crime, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal. From the point of view of the promoters of America's war with the Middle East, that's not bad for a candidate who campaigned on being "against this war from the beginning" and was able to mislead and neutralize the US antiwar movement. Remember that the largest anti-war demonstrations in history occurred between the US attack on Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and the US invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. Claiming to be against the Iraq war in order to defraud the anti-war movement was the policy of the Democratic party in the election of 2006, when all admit that they were given control of Congress especially to bring the war to an end. But the Democrats have always supported the general US policy in the Middle East, of which the Iraq war was a part. Recently they -- and Obama -- have simply pretended that they didn't. And it worked. WAR ON 'TERRORISM' -- OR THE MIDDLE EAST? The US political system, particularly the Democrats, have worked hard to prevent an understanding -- and even any public discussion -- of the war that the US is carrying on this winter and into the coming year in the Middle East. The new administration will continue to present it (falsely) as a "war on terrorism." It is instead an imperialist war to control Middle East energy resources, a cornerstone of US policy for decades, in which there has been no change. The US goal in every administration for half a century has been to secure by means of the control of Middle East oil and natural gas what senior Obama foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (who was National Security Advisor thirty years ago) calls "indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the region." Those economies in Europe and northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are the real rivals to US economic hegemony, and the control of energy resources gives the US the whip-hand. The theatres of this war stretch from the Mediterranean to the subcontinent (as we've seen in the Mumbai attacks), and from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa. (There was even some speculation that the Mumbai attacks were connected to the Indian navy's attack on Somalian pirates, themselves a response to American devastation of Somalia; they were in any case surely prompted by the desire to disrupt the US-supported rapprochement between Pakistan and India, against the resistance to US domination of "AfPak," as they say in Washington.) As the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon war of the 1960s-70s spread murder and environmental desolation across SE Asia, so the Clinton-Bush-Obama war of the current decade involves all of SW Asia and environs -- an area far more important to the US than SE Asia ever was. In spite of the hundreds of thousands of people our government has recently killed in SW Asia, and the increase in killing planned for the coming year, we still have a long way to go before we begin to equal the bloodbath we visited on SE Asia (because the South Vietnamese refused to follow orders and install the government that we had picked out for them). The Clinton and Bush administrations each killed about a million people in SW Asia, but perhaps four million were killed by the US government in SE Asia; so far only about 5,000 Americans have been sent to die in SW Asia -- 50,000 were killed in SE Asia. So, on form, there is plenty of room on the upside for killing in the coming years of the decade... Noam Chomsky says, "With regard to the Middle East, policy has been quite stable since World War II, when Washington recognized that Middle East oil supplies are 'a stupendous source of strategic power' and 'one of the greatest material prizes in world history.' That remains true ... there is, currently, no substantial basis for expecting any significant change under a new administration with regard to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, or any other crucial issue involving the Middle East." (And Obama's discussion of Israel and the oppression of the Palestinians during the campaign "leaves us with nothing except his fervent professions of love for Israel and dismissal of Palestinian concerns." ) FORTY YEARS ON The presidential election that the election of 2008 most closely resembles is that of 1968. In each case, a party that had controlled the presidency for two terms was waging an unpopular war. (Almost three-quarters of Americans disapproved of the US government's policy in Vietnam in 1968, about the same percentage who disapprove of its policy in Iraq today.) And in each case, the election went to the other major party (Republicans in 1968, Democrats in 2008) -- in substantially less than a landslide -- after they fielded an ambiguous anti-war candidate. (Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate in 1968, said that he had "a secret plan for ending the Vietnamese war.") What is more instructive about the two elections are not the similarities but the differences. For all that Obama's position is like Nixon's, there was in 1968 a vigorous and independent anti-war movement that the Nixon administration (notably its National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger) knew that they had to deal with. No such movement exists today: Obama's real victory is successfully to have co-opted it. There's a second and perhaps more important difference between America of 1968 and today: inequality in income (and even more in wealth) -- having declined from the Great Depression to 1968 -- has increased rapidly since 1968 and is now back to 1929 levels. Of course there is no recursion to the general social situation of 1968, much less to that of 1929. The US is a far more civilized society than it was forty years ago, as the election of an African-American as president (and the major-party candidacy of two women) illustrates. But wages have been generally flat for the large majority of Americans since about 1973, while a tiny minority have increased their wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. That after all was the goal of the successful counterattack by capitalism in the last 35 years that goes by the name of "neoliberalism" in the rest of the world. Americans for the most part don't know what to call the vast politico-economic crusade to increase the wealth of the few that took control in the Reagan and Thatcher governments and subsequently ('conservatism' won't do). But class differences are clearly more pronounced in America today, as tacitly admitted by liberal support for diversity as a substitute for equality. (See Walter Benn Michaels' important 2006 book, "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.") OBAMA AS BUSH, CLINTON -- OR NIXON? With the advent of winter 2008, we have already an answer to the question, Will the Obama administration be George Bush's third term, or Bill Clinton's? As we survey the personnel in place and the proposed policies, it's clear that it will be both. Ignoring style, we see that the continuity in US policy, at home and even more abroad, is remarkable. Mark Twain once observed that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme... But Obama is not Bush or Clinton: he's Nixon -- without the liberalism. Progressive policies (especially in environmental matters) were forced upon the Nixon-Ford administration by "the sixties" (which began late and peaked in the 1970s -- provoking the neoliberal backlash). Like Nixon, Obama will continue and even intensify the metastasizing war that he inherits, even though he ran against it. The repudiation of Nixon in the 1970s led to the end of a war and an efflorescence of domestic progressivism. Despite all the differences, we may perhaps be permitted to hope for a rhyme in 2010s. President-elect Obama is a dark man -- only trivially so in regard to the amount of melanin in his skin, although that seems to be the most celebrated aspect of his election. Much darker were his purposes in pursuing the traditional American policies of war and the enrichment of the few, while presenting himself in the campaign as "a blank slate on which supporters could write their wishes," as Chomsky said. Darkest of all are the prospects for peace and human development in a world dominated by yet another American administration pursuing those policies. [C. G. Estabrook, who taught at Notre Dame in the dark backward and abysm of time, presents a weekly hour of political commentary, "News from Neptune" on Urbana (IL) Public Television; he can be contacted at .] From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 9 15:09:32 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2018 15:09:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Interview by Chris Hedges, in relation to Amazon's treatment of its elderly, itinerant workers. Message-ID: An absolute horror for the elderly and the vulnerable in this situation. Many young people will be facing this situation in the future. This interview should encourage all, but the cruelest, to stop funding Amazon, stop purchasing their products, stop using their services. https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/415855-jessica-bruder-nomadland-book/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Fri Feb 9 15:15:16 2018 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2018 09:15:16 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: From the Desk of Rodney Davis Message-ID: Dear Karen: Thank you for putting Rodney Davis' letter on the list. I find it difficult to pick which outrageous statement /lie to take apart first. Anne Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Karen Aram via Peace-discussDate: Thu, Feb 8, 2018 5:36 PMTo: Peace-discuss;Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] Fwd: From the Desk of Rodney Davis If you think Tammy Duckworth is bad, read what Rodney has to say: “ hold your nose,” Begin forwarded message: From: "Rep. Rodney Davis" Subject: >From the Desk of Rodney Davis Date: February 8, 2018 at 14:46:24 PST Rodney Davis 13th District, Illinois www.rodneydavis.house.gov www.facebook.com/reprodneydavis www.twitter.com/rodneydavis 1740 Longworth House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 (202) 225-2371 Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee Chairman Biotechnology, Horticulture, and Research Subcommittee on Commodity Exchanges, Energy, and Credit Subcommittee on Nutrition Committee on House Administration Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation Subcommittee on Highways and Transit Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment February 8, 2018 February 8, 2018 Ms. Karen A. Aram 803 E Green St Urbana, IL 61802-3411 Dear Ms. Aram, Thank you for contacting me regarding nuclear weapons and the recently proposed treaty to ban the use or possession of all nuclear weapons by the United Nations (U.N.) I appreciate hearing from constituents in my district and the time you took to share your thoughts. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is the first legally binding international agreement with the goal of eventually eliminating all nuclear weapons from the world. It first passed the United Nations on July 7 of this year but will require signatures from at least 50 countries in the U.N. in order to be officially ratified. One of my top priorities is ensuring our national security in an increasingly destabilized world. I believe that in providing for this security, a strong military demands the wisdom of when to use nuclear weapons. A strong nuclear deterrent remains necessary as long as violent, unpredictable nations such as Iran and North Korea also have access to nuclear weapons. In addition, nearly 20 percent of America's electricity was provided by nuclear power in 2016. Nuclear power provides our country with an extremely valuable source of energy that produces virtually no emissions. If we do away with nuclear weapons, we could fall behind on valuable research and development relating to nuclear power. Nuclear power plants across our nation provide energy as well as thousands of well-paying jobs, including those at the Clinton nuclear power plant in my district. I understand you support the United States signing this treaty and I will keep your thoughts in mind moving forward if this particular issue comes before the United States Congress as legislation. Again, thank you for contacting me and let me know if my office can be of assistance to you in the future. In addition, if you would like to stay informed on what is happening in Washington, DC and around the 13th District, please sign up to receive my e-newsletter by visiting https://rodneydavis.house.gov/contact/newsletter. It is truly an honor to represent you. Sincerely, Rodney Davis Member of Congress 2004 Fox Drive Champaign, IL 61820 (217) 403-4690 108 W. MarketSt. Taylorville, IL 62568 (217) 824-5117 15 Professional Park Drive Maryville, IL 62062 (618) 205-8660 2833 S. Grand Avenue East Springfield, IL 62703 (217) 791-6224 104 W. North Street Normal, IL 61761 (309) 252-8834 243 S. Water Street, Suite 100 Decatur, IL 62523 (217) 791-6224 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 9 15:41:19 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2018 15:41:19 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: From the Desk of Rodney Davis In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: He does keep one busy. On Feb 9, 2018, at 07:15, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss > wrote: Dear Karen: Thank you for putting Rodney Davis' letter on the list. I find it difficult to pick which outrageous statement /lie to take apart first. Anne Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------ From: Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Date: Thu, Feb 8, 2018 5:36 PM To: Peace-discuss; Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] Fwd: From the Desk of Rodney Davis If you think Tammy Duckworth is bad, read what Rodney has to say: “ hold your nose,” Begin forwarded message: From: "Rep. Rodney Davis" > Subject: From the Desk of Rodney Davis Date: February 8, 2018 at 14:46:24 PST Rodney Davis 13th District, Illinois ________________________________ www.rodneydavis.house.gov www.facebook.com/reprodneydavis www.twitter.com/rodneydavis ________________________________ 1740 Longworth House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 (202) 225-2371 [Congress of the United States // House of Representatives // Washington, DC 20515] Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee Chairman Biotechnology, Horticulture, and Research Subcommittee on Commodity Exchanges, Energy, and Credit Subcommittee on Nutrition Committee on House Administration Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation Subcommittee on Highways and Transit Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment February 8, 2018 February 8, 2018 Ms. Karen A. Aram 803 E Green St Urbana, IL 61802-3411 Dear Ms. Aram, Thank you for contacting me regarding nuclear weapons and the recently proposed treaty to ban the use or possession of all nuclear weapons by the United Nations (U.N.) I appreciate hearing from constituents in my district and the time you took to share your thoughts. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is the first legally binding international agreement with the goal of eventually eliminating all nuclear weapons from the world. It first passed the United Nations on July 7 of this year but will require signatures from at least 50 countries in the U.N. in order to be officially ratified. One of my top priorities is ensuring our national security in an increasingly destabilized world. I believe that in providing for this security, a strong military demands the wisdom of when to use nuclear weapons. A strong nuclear deterrent remains necessary as long as violent, unpredictable nations such as Iran and North Korea also have access to nuclear weapons. In addition, nearly 20 percent of America's electricity was provided by nuclear power in 2016. Nuclear power provides our country with an extremely valuable source of energy that produces virtually no emissions. If we do away with nuclear weapons, we could fall behind on valuable research and development relating to nuclear power. Nuclear power plants across our nation provide energy as well as thousands of well-paying jobs, including those at the Clinton nuclear power plant in my district. I understand you support the United States signing this treaty and I will keep your thoughts in mind moving forward if this particular issue comes before the United States Congress as legislation. Again, thank you for contacting me and let me know if my office can be of assistance to you in the future. In addition, if you would like to stay informed on what is happening in Washington, DC and around the 13th District, please sign up to receive my e-newsletter by visiting https://rodneydavis.house.gov/contact/newsletter. It is truly an honor to represent you. Sincerely, [(signed)] Rodney Davis Member of Congress 2004 Fox Drive Champaign, IL 61820 (217) 403-4690 108 W. MarketSt. Taylorville, IL 62568 (217) 824-5117 15 Professional Park Drive Maryville, IL 62062 (618) 205-8660 2833 S. Grand Avenue East Springfield, IL 62703 (217) 791-6224 104 W. North Street Normal, IL 61761 (309) 252-8834 243 S. Water Street, Suite 100 Decatur, IL 62523 (217) 791-6224 _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C1abb267f04a54d0ff07908d56fcfffe6%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636537861524751814&sdata=pW7KXzWUMdjoOHV9UiUqo%2FWgzU3hkn5XZFQZh4f4KLA%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Feb 9 15:56:12 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2018 15:56:12 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Does Trump Decide on War? References: <5a7dc2a8506d8_739d3fe4242c1e7c176864041@ip-10-0-0-119.mail> 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, February 9, 2018 9:56 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: FW: Does Trump Decide on War? Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Institute for Public Accuracy via ActionNetwork.org [mailto:accuracy at accuracy.org] Sent: Friday, February 9, 2018 9:48 AM To: francis.a.boyle at gmail.com Subject: Does Trump Decide on War? On the web: Does Trump Decide on War? [On Twitter] NBC News reports today: "Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine is demanding the release of a secret memo outlining President Trump’s interpretation of his legal authority to wage war. "Kaine, a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, sent a letter Thursday night to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson seeking a 7-page memo the administration has kept under wraps for months. ... "There is a new urgency to obtain the memo given increasing U.S. involvement in Syria and recent Trump administration rhetoric on North Korea. Shortly after the 2017 bombing raid [on Syria], several members of Congress called on Trump to justify it under U.S. and international law. Article I of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. ... "'The fact that there is a lengthy memo with a more detailed legal justification that has not been shared with Congress, or the American public, is unacceptable,' Kaine said in the letter to Tillerson, obtained by NBC News." The Washington Post reports in "U.S. troops may be at risk of ‘mission creep’ after a deadly battle in the Syrian desert": "The Syrian government accused the United States of 'aggression' in launching the strikes, which it said killed 'scores' of people. Russia denounced the U.S. presence in Syria as 'illegal' and accused the United States of seeking to seize Syria’s oil." FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu Boyle is professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He said today: "There's no 'mission creep,' it's clear the U.S. government has been using ISIS as a pretext to illegally intervene in Syria. None of the stated rationales for U.S. military involvement -- including the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force or alleged 'self-defense' or buttressing the 2002 authorization regarding Iraq -- are remotely legally valid. Syria has a sovereign government, the U.S. government should get out. The AUMFs should be rescinded. "This memo that Kaine refers to was likely written by these Federalist Society lawyers that Trump has surrounded himself with, just like George W. Bush did." In September 2001, Boyle warned on an Institute for Public Accuracy news release that the 2001 AUMF would be like the "Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which the Johnson administration used to provide dubious legal cover for massive escalation of the Vietnam War." Last year, after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. claimed that the authority to attack Syria stemmed from the 2001 AUMF, Boyle stated: “What the U.S. government is getting away with here is incredible. Gen. Dunford is citing the 2001 AUMF to go after Al Qaeda as justification to go after a secular government -- Syria -- that is actually fighting Al Qaeda, as well as ISIS." See "Need to “Repeal the Perpetual Illegal Wars.” Boyle’s books include Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations (Duke University Press). For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 February 9, 2018 Institute for Public Accuracy 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org [Action Network] Sent via Action Network, a free online toolset anyone can use to organize. Click here to sign up and get started building an email list and creating online actions today. Action Network is an open platform that empowers individuals and groups to organize for progressive causes. We encourage responsible activism, and do not support using the platform to take unlawful or other improper action. We do not control or endorse the conduct of users and make no representations of any kind about them. . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Feb 9 17:54:29 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2018 17:54:29 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Letter by Chief Illiniwak in News-Gazoo Message-ID: We are supposed to feel sorry for a genocidal racist who shamelessly desecrates everything American Indians hold Sacred? LOL! 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 [mailto:fboyle at illinois.edu] Sent: Friday, February 2, 2018 8:57 AM To: Killeacle Subject: UofILLinois Chief Illiniwak--Oskee! Bow!Wow!Forever! 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 and 2017 Homecomings in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaigns, 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. [cid:image003.jpg at 01D3A19C.B841DA90] 81. Doctor Illiniwak, M.D. Got a note >From a Doctor MD not PHD Saying he was just like me Illinois BS U Chicago Med Harvard Public Health He was so irate Against me for Chief Illiniwak That he told the Prez Of his beloved Alma Mater That he would not give a dime So long as I taught here Just like me? A sick puppy Pathetic Physician Typical Illinois BS Cult of Chief Illiniwak Brainwashing kids To become die-hard bigots and racists For the rest of their lives I pity his poor patients Dr. Illiniwak needs a Shrink! [cid:image004.png at 01D3A19C.B841DA90] 83. The Principles on Which We Stand at the University of Illinois The Principles on Which We Stand At the University of Illinois: The Cult of Chief Illiniwak Long Live Chief Illiniwak! Our Official Honored and Revered Symbol For the University of Illiniwaks And Illiniwaks all over the world! Illiniwak Pride! Illiniwak Fever! The Daily Illiniwak Illiniwaks Yearbooks Illiniwaks Homecoming Our Redskin Tradition Eagle Feathers too Illiniwak Stadium Our Illiniwakettes Our Fighting Illiniwaks Illiniwak Cheerleaders Our Marching Illiniwaks Band Our Famous 3 in 1 Illiniwak Spectacle Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Oskee! Bow! Wow! "Just Honoring American Indians Not demeaning anyone Nor meaning them too All very civil How White of us all!" The University of Illiniwaks Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Racists to boot Genocidaires too So very educational Anthro 101 The Cult of Chief Illiniwak A required course To get our degrees >From the University of Illiniwaks Oskee! Bow! Wow! Forever! 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 53344 bytes Desc: image003.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.png Type: image/png Size: 393228 bytes Desc: image004.png URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Feb 10 13:33:02 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 13:33:02 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? Message-ID: By Rania Khalek: The ease with which American foreign policy “experts” can suddenly reinvent themselves, switching focus as the DC mood changes, exposes the Washington think tank racket as a giant sham designed to manipulate opinion. When protests broke out in Iran at the end of 2017, Washington think tanks were ecstatic. They saw an opportunity to push for regime change and they went for it. Almost overnight, all of the self-proclaimed "Syria experts" who spent the last several years arguing for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad shifted their focus to Tehran. The Hudson Institute, a conservative pro-war Washington outfit funded by major corporations and oil companies, is a case in point. On January 16, Hudson hosted a panel of so-called experts, titled “Iran Protests: Consequences for the Region and Opportunities for the Trump Administration.” The panel featured a who’s who of warmongers discussing how to weaken yet another Middle Eastern state. Read more [An opponent of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani chants slogans during a protest outside the European Union Council in Brussels, Belgium January 3, 2018 © Francois Lenoir]From ‘Russian meddling’ to Iran regime change: Social media as tools of US policy The most notorious among them was regime change aficionado Charles Lister, a "senior fellow” (read lobbyist) at the Middle East Institute, an influential DC think tank that receives tens of millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates, a country whose leadership is committed to regime change in Iran. Before he was an "Iran expert," Lister rose to prominence agitating for regime change in Syria. He is perhaps best known for cheerleading Salafi jihadist Syrian rebel groups like Ahrar al-Sham and Nour al-Din al-Zenki, which Lister insisted were moderate despite their explicitly stated intention to wipe out minorities in Syria and their open alliance with Syria’s Al-Qaeda affiliate. Anyone who dared to criticize such groups or highlight their genocidal agendas quickly became targets of Lister over the years – he would brand them dictator lovers and Assadists. It’s unclear whether Lister speaks any Arabic or whether he’s ever spent any significant amount of time in Syria or the Middle East more generally. But he says what the foreign policy establishment wants to hear, and for that, he is quoted extensively in the mainstream press on everything from Syria to Iran to even Egypt, with the New Yorker’s Robin Wright labelling him “an expert on Jihadism.” During the Hudson panel, Lister argued against the US participating in locally negotiated ceasefires in Syria that have played a major role in de-escalating the violence that tore apart the country. Ceasefires benefit Hezbollah and Iran, warned Lister, who would apparently rather the bloodshed continue if it helps the US and its jihadist proxies. Lister also painted Israel as the ultimate victim of Iran in Syria and suggested the CIA assassinate Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Soleimani heads Iran's elite Quds Force, which conducts operations outside of Iran in both Iraq and Syria. He has been credited with helping to turn the tide in both countries against Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) which has led to American fears that he threatens US hegemony in the region. Blind Eye Hudson’s in-house counterterrorism expert Michael Pregent, who previously accused Iran of refusing to fight IS while arguing that the sometimes IS-allied Free Syrian Army was the only force capable of defeating the terrorist group, also agitated for the assassination of Soleimani, but he called for Israel to do the dirty work rather than the CIA. Read more [People protest in Los Angeles, California, U.S., in support of anti-government protesters in Iran © Lucy Nicholson]Iranian prosecutor points finger at CIA, Israel and Saudi Arabia for unrest Omri Ceren from the right-wing Likud-aligned Israel Project was also on the panel. Echoing Israeli government talking points, he called for the US to spread a “freedom agenda” in Iran – which is code for regime change. Another speaker was Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank that also receives funding from the UAE. Katulis employed empty slogans about supporting “freedom and justice”in Iran. Almost everything he said was forgettable. The UAE funding might explain why these experts continually blasted Iran for supposedly destabilizing Yemen without mentioning a word about the punishing Saudi-imposed siege which has led to famine and a cholera outbreak of epic proportions that kills a Yemeni child every 10 minutes. The Hudson panel perfectly encapsulates how these establishment experts have no actual expertise, just fancy titles and shady funding that gives them a veneer of scholarly seriousness. They shift from one country to the next and are considered authoritative without any real credentials other than being white men who provide the intellectual backbone to Washington’s permanent war agenda, which all the panelists have a history of supporting. The fact that their policy prescriptions have ended in disaster for the people of the region doesn’t slow them down. Death Toll The war in Iraq killed over a million people and catapulted the region into violent sectarian warfare from which it has yet to recover. The Western intervention in Libya threw that country into chaos, transforming what was once the richest nation in Africa, with the highest literacy rates, into an ungovernable gang-run state home to IS slave markets. And then there’s Syria, where the US poured billions into funding Al-Qaeda-linked rebel groups to overthrow the government, creating the worst refugee crisis since World War Two. Read more [People protest in Tehran, Iran December 30, 2017 © Reuters]Iran: Surviving another attack supported from abroad The men who made up the Hudson panel supported all of these disastrous wars, which goes to show that being wrong gets you places in Washington. In fact, being wrong seems to be a prerequisite for promotion in Beltway circles. No one epitomizes this dynamic more than Peter Bergen, a national security analyst at CNN. Two decades ago Bergen produced a rare interview with Osama bin Laden and he’s been capitalizing on it for 20 years. Since then he has fallen up to expert status on any and all issues pertaining to national security, counterterrorism and the Middle East, no matter how wrong he is. He supported the conflicts in Iraq and Libya. And here he is debating an actual expert, journalist Nir Rosen, and like always, Bergen argues for more war. Another example is Ken Pollack from the Brookings Institute. He pushed hard for the war in Iraq and US interference in Libya and Syria. Despite the disastrous consequences of these policies, he is still described as an “expert" and recently penned a report for the Atlantic Council on countering Iran. Destabilizing Iran has long been a policy goal of the US and its Israeli and Saudi allies. But the reality is that Iran is the most stable country in the Middle East and it played a crucial role in protecting the region from IS and Al-Qaeda. Whatever one thinks of the government in Iran, and there are of course many legitimate critiques as is true of any government, Iran’s only crime is that it acts independently of American interests and for that, it must be strong-armed into submission. So, let’s hope the experts don’t have their way. The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Feb 10 13:50:02 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 13:50:02 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I have my PHD in Political Science from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Government, the No. 1 ranked program in the country. Those who are not good enough to get tenure track slots as professors perforce go into the “think tanks.” 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2018 7:33 AM To: Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net Subject: [Peace-discuss] Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? By Rania Khalek: The ease with which American foreign policy “experts” can suddenly reinvent themselves, switching focus as the DC mood changes, exposes the Washington think tank racket as a giant sham designed to manipulate opinion. When protests broke out in Iran at the end of 2017, Washington think tanks were ecstatic. They saw an opportunity to push for regime change and they went for it. Almost overnight, all of the self-proclaimed "Syria experts" who spent the last several years arguing for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad shifted their focus to Tehran. The Hudson Institute, a conservative pro-war Washington outfit funded by major corporations and oil companies, is a case in point. On January 16, Hudson hosted a panel of so-called experts, titled “Iran Protests: Consequences for the Region and Opportunities for the Trump Administration.” The panel featured a who’s who of warmongers discussing how to weaken yet another Middle Eastern state. Read more [An opponent of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani chants slogans during a protest outside the European Union Council in Brussels, Belgium January 3, 2018 © Francois Lenoir]From ‘Russian meddling’ to Iran regime change: Social media as tools of US policy The most notorious among them was regime change aficionado Charles Lister, a "senior fellow” (read lobbyist) at the Middle East Institute, an influential DC think tank that receives tens of millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates, a country whose leadership is committed to regime change in Iran. Before he was an "Iran expert," Lister rose to prominence agitating for regime change in Syria. He is perhaps best known for cheerleading Salafi jihadist Syrian rebel groups like Ahrar al-Sham and Nour al-Din al-Zenki, which Lister insisted were moderate despite their explicitly stated intention to wipe out minorities in Syria and their open alliance with Syria’s Al-Qaeda affiliate. Anyone who dared to criticize such groups or highlight their genocidal agendas quickly became targets of Lister over the years – he would brand them dictator lovers and Assadists. It’s unclear whether Lister speaks any Arabic or whether he’s ever spent any significant amount of time in Syria or the Middle East more generally. But he says what the foreign policy establishment wants to hear, and for that, he is quoted extensively in the mainstream press on everything from Syria to Iran to even Egypt, with the New Yorker’s Robin Wright labelling him “an expert on Jihadism.” During the Hudson panel, Lister argued against the US participating in locally negotiated ceasefires in Syria that have played a major role in de-escalating the violence that tore apart the country. Ceasefires benefit Hezbollah and Iran, warned Lister, who would apparently rather the bloodshed continue if it helps the US and its jihadist proxies. Lister also painted Israel as the ultimate victim of Iran in Syria and suggested the CIA assassinate Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Soleimani heads Iran's elite Quds Force, which conducts operations outside of Iran in both Iraq and Syria. He has been credited with helping to turn the tide in both countries against Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) which has led to American fears that he threatens US hegemony in the region. Blind Eye Hudson’s in-house counterterrorism expert Michael Pregent, who previously accused Iran of refusing to fight IS while arguing that the sometimes IS-allied Free Syrian Army was the only force capable of defeating the terrorist group, also agitated for the assassination of Soleimani, but he called for Israel to do the dirty work rather than the CIA. Read more [People protest in Los Angeles, California, U.S., in support of anti-government protesters in Iran © Lucy Nicholson]Iranian prosecutor points finger at CIA, Israel and Saudi Arabia for unrest Omri Ceren from the right-wing Likud-aligned Israel Project was also on the panel. Echoing Israeli government talking points, he called for the US to spread a “freedom agenda” in Iran – which is code for regime change. Another speaker was Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank that also receives funding from the UAE. Katulis employed empty slogans about supporting “freedom and justice”in Iran. Almost everything he said was forgettable. The UAE funding might explain why these experts continually blasted Iran for supposedly destabilizing Yemen without mentioning a word about the punishing Saudi-imposed siege which has led to famine and a cholera outbreak of epic proportions that kills a Yemeni child every 10 minutes. The Hudson panel perfectly encapsulates how these establishment experts have no actual expertise, just fancy titles and shady funding that gives them a veneer of scholarly seriousness. They shift from one country to the next and are considered authoritative without any real credentials other than being white men who provide the intellectual backbone to Washington’s permanent war agenda, which all the panelists have a history of supporting. The fact that their policy prescriptions have ended in disaster for the people of the region doesn’t slow them down. Death Toll The war in Iraq killed over a million people and catapulted the region into violent sectarian warfare from which it has yet to recover. The Western intervention in Libya threw that country into chaos, transforming what was once the richest nation in Africa, with the highest literacy rates, into an ungovernable gang-run state home to IS slave markets. And then there’s Syria, where the US poured billions into funding Al-Qaeda-linked rebel groups to overthrow the government, creating the worst refugee crisis since World War Two. Read more [People protest in Tehran, Iran December 30, 2017 © Reuters]Iran: Surviving another attack supported from abroad The men who made up the Hudson panel supported all of these disastrous wars, which goes to show that being wrong gets you places in Washington. In fact, being wrong seems to be a prerequisite for promotion in Beltway circles. No one epitomizes this dynamic more than Peter Bergen, a national security analyst at CNN. Two decades ago Bergen produced a rare interview with Osama bin Laden and he’s been capitalizing on it for 20 years. Since then he has fallen up to expert status on any and all issues pertaining to national security, counterterrorism and the Middle East, no matter how wrong he is. He supported the conflicts in Iraq and Libya. And here he is debating an actual expert, journalist Nir Rosen, and like always, Bergen argues for more war. Another example is Ken Pollack from the Brookings Institute. He pushed hard for the war in Iraq and US interference in Libya and Syria. Despite the disastrous consequences of these policies, he is still described as an “expert" and recently penned a report for the Atlantic Council on countering Iran. Destabilizing Iran has long been a policy goal of the US and its Israeli and Saudi allies. But the reality is that Iran is the most stable country in the Middle East and it played a crucial role in protecting the region from IS and Al-Qaeda. Whatever one thinks of the government in Iran, and there are of course many legitimate critiques as is true of any government, Iran’s only crime is that it acts independently of American interests and for that, it must be strong-armed into submission. So, let’s hope the experts don’t have their way. The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. · -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Feb 10 14:22:40 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 14:22:40 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: And, then, they focus on pleasing the financial supporters. On Feb 10, 2018, at 05:50, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: I have my PHD in Political Science from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Government, the No. 1 ranked program in the country. Those who are not good enough to get tenure track slots as professors perforce go into the “think tanks.” 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2018 7:33 AM To: Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net Subject: [Peace-discuss] Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? By Rania Khalek: The ease with which American foreign policy “experts” can suddenly reinvent themselves, switching focus as the DC mood changes, exposes the Washington think tank racket as a giant sham designed to manipulate opinion. When protests broke out in Iran at the end of 2017, Washington think tanks were ecstatic. They saw an opportunity to push for regime change and they went for it. Almost overnight, all of the self-proclaimed "Syria experts" who spent the last several years arguing for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad shifted their focus to Tehran. The Hudson Institute, a conservative pro-war Washington outfit funded by major corporations and oil companies, is a case in point. On January 16, Hudson hosted a panel of so-called experts, titled “Iran Protests: Consequences for the Region and Opportunities for the Trump Administration.” The panel featured a who’s who of warmongers discussing how to weaken yet another Middle Eastern state. Read more [An opponent of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani chants slogans during a protest outside the European Union Council in Brussels, Belgium January 3, 2018 © Francois Lenoir]From ‘Russian meddling’ to Iran regime change: Social media as tools of US policy The most notorious among them was regime change aficionado Charles Lister, a "senior fellow” (read lobbyist) at the Middle East Institute, an influential DC think tank that receives tens of millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates, a country whose leadership is committed to regime change in Iran. Before he was an "Iran expert," Lister rose to prominence agitating for regime change in Syria. He is perhaps best known for cheerleading Salafi jihadist Syrian rebel groups like Ahrar al-Sham and Nour al-Din al-Zenki, which Lister insisted were moderate despite their explicitly stated intention to wipe out minorities in Syria and their open alliance with Syria’s Al-Qaeda affiliate. Anyone who dared to criticize such groups or highlight their genocidal agendas quickly became targets of Lister over the years – he would brand them dictator lovers and Assadists. It’s unclear whether Lister speaks any Arabic or whether he’s ever spent any significant amount of time in Syria or the Middle East more generally. But he says what the foreign policy establishment wants to hear, and for that, he is quoted extensively in the mainstream press on everything from Syria to Iran to even Egypt, with the New Yorker’s Robin Wright labelling him “an expert on Jihadism.” During the Hudson panel, Lister argued against the US participating in locally negotiated ceasefires in Syria that have played a major role in de-escalating the violence that tore apart the country. Ceasefires benefit Hezbollah and Iran, warned Lister, who would apparently rather the bloodshed continue if it helps the US and its jihadist proxies. Lister also painted Israel as the ultimate victim of Iran in Syria and suggested the CIA assassinate Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Soleimani heads Iran's elite Quds Force, which conducts operations outside of Iran in both Iraq and Syria. He has been credited with helping to turn the tide in both countries against Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) which has led to American fears that he threatens US hegemony in the region. Blind Eye Hudson’s in-house counterterrorism expert Michael Pregent, who previously accused Iran of refusing to fight IS while arguing that the sometimes IS-allied Free Syrian Army was the only force capable of defeating the terrorist group, also agitated for the assassination of Soleimani, but he called for Israel to do the dirty work rather than the CIA. Read more [People protest in Los Angeles, California, U.S., in support of anti-government protesters in Iran © Lucy Nicholson]Iranian prosecutor points finger at CIA, Israel and Saudi Arabia for unrest Omri Ceren from the right-wing Likud-aligned Israel Project was also on the panel. Echoing Israeli government talking points, he called for the US to spread a “freedom agenda” in Iran – which is code for regime change. Another speaker was Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank that also receives funding from the UAE. Katulis employed empty slogans about supporting “freedom and justice”in Iran. Almost everything he said was forgettable. The UAE funding might explain why these experts continually blasted Iran for supposedly destabilizing Yemen without mentioning a word about the punishing Saudi-imposed siege which has led to famine and a cholera outbreak of epic proportions that kills a Yemeni child every 10 minutes. The Hudson panel perfectly encapsulates how these establishment experts have no actual expertise, just fancy titles and shady funding that gives them a veneer of scholarly seriousness. They shift from one country to the next and are considered authoritative without any real credentials other than being white men who provide the intellectual backbone to Washington’s permanent war agenda, which all the panelists have a history of supporting. The fact that their policy prescriptions have ended in disaster for the people of the region doesn’t slow them down. Death Toll The war in Iraq killed over a million people and catapulted the region into violent sectarian warfare from which it has yet to recover. The Western intervention in Libya threw that country into chaos, transforming what was once the richest nation in Africa, with the highest literacy rates, into an ungovernable gang-run state home to IS slave markets. And then there’s Syria, where the US poured billions into funding Al-Qaeda-linked rebel groups to overthrow the government, creating the worst refugee crisis since World War Two. Read more [People protest in Tehran, Iran December 30, 2017 © Reuters]Iran: Surviving another attack supported from abroad The men who made up the Hudson panel supported all of these disastrous wars, which goes to show that being wrong gets you places in Washington. In fact, being wrong seems to be a prerequisite for promotion in Beltway circles. No one epitomizes this dynamic more than Peter Bergen, a national security analyst at CNN. Two decades ago Bergen produced a rare interview with Osama bin Laden and he’s been capitalizing on it for 20 years. Since then he has fallen up to expert status on any and all issues pertaining to national security, counterterrorism and the Middle East, no matter how wrong he is. He supported the conflicts in Iraq and Libya. And here he is debating an actual expert, journalist Nir Rosen, and like always, Bergen argues for more war. Another example is Ken Pollack from the Brookings Institute. He pushed hard for the war in Iraq and US interference in Libya and Syria. Despite the disastrous consequences of these policies, he is still described as an “expert" and recently penned a report for the Atlantic Council on countering Iran. Destabilizing Iran has long been a policy goal of the US and its Israeli and Saudi allies. But the reality is that Iran is the most stable country in the Middle East and it played a crucial role in protecting the region from IS and Al-Qaeda. Whatever one thinks of the government in Iran, and there are of course many legitimate critiques as is true of any government, Iran’s only crime is that it acts independently of American interests and for that, it must be strong-armed into submission. So, let’s hope the experts don’t have their way. The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. • _______________________________________________ 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://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C2175ce3e4d954d45bfed08d5708d3ef5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636538674303028345&sdata=Sm2%2Bo2XrpRlmnO7dHA3jlJM8J4sHOi7G4k9dK%2BtIZA4%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Feb 10 14:31:51 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 14:31:51 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: He who pays the piper calls the tune. 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: Saturday, February 10, 2018 8:23 AM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? And, then, they focus on pleasing the financial supporters. On Feb 10, 2018, at 05:50, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: I have my PHD in Political Science from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Government, the No. 1 ranked program in the country. Those who are not good enough to get tenure track slots as professors perforce go into the “think tanks.” 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2018 7:33 AM To: Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net Subject: [Peace-discuss] Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? By Rania Khalek: The ease with which American foreign policy “experts” can suddenly reinvent themselves, switching focus as the DC mood changes, exposes the Washington think tank racket as a giant sham designed to manipulate opinion. When protests broke out in Iran at the end of 2017, Washington think tanks were ecstatic. They saw an opportunity to push for regime change and they went for it. Almost overnight, all of the self-proclaimed "Syria experts" who spent the last several years arguing for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad shifted their focus to Tehran. The Hudson Institute, a conservative pro-war Washington outfit funded by major corporations and oil companies, is a case in point. On January 16, Hudson hosted a panel of so-called experts, titled “Iran Protests: Consequences for the Region and Opportunities for the Trump Administration.” The panel featured a who’s who of warmongers discussing how to weaken yet another Middle Eastern state. Read more [An opponent of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani chants slogans during a protest outside the European Union Council in Brussels, Belgium January 3, 2018 © Francois Lenoir]From ‘Russian meddling’ to Iran regime change: Social media as tools of US policy The most notorious among them was regime change aficionado Charles Lister, a "senior fellow” (read lobbyist) at the Middle East Institute, an influential DC think tank that receives tens of millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates, a country whose leadership is committed to regime change in Iran. Before he was an "Iran expert," Lister rose to prominence agitating for regime change in Syria. He is perhaps best known for cheerleading Salafi jihadist Syrian rebel groups like Ahrar al-Sham and Nour al-Din al-Zenki, which Lister insisted were moderate despite their explicitly stated intention to wipe out minorities in Syria and their open alliance with Syria’s Al-Qaeda affiliate. Anyone who dared to criticize such groups or highlight their genocidal agendas quickly became targets of Lister over the years – he would brand them dictator lovers and Assadists. It’s unclear whether Lister speaks any Arabic or whether he’s ever spent any significant amount of time in Syria or the Middle East more generally. But he says what the foreign policy establishment wants to hear, and for that, he is quoted extensively in the mainstream press on everything from Syria to Iran to even Egypt, with the New Yorker’s Robin Wright labelling him “an expert on Jihadism.” During the Hudson panel, Lister argued against the US participating in locally negotiated ceasefires in Syria that have played a major role in de-escalating the violence that tore apart the country. Ceasefires benefit Hezbollah and Iran, warned Lister, who would apparently rather the bloodshed continue if it helps the US and its jihadist proxies. Lister also painted Israel as the ultimate victim of Iran in Syria and suggested the CIA assassinate Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Soleimani heads Iran's elite Quds Force, which conducts operations outside of Iran in both Iraq and Syria. He has been credited with helping to turn the tide in both countries against Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) which has led to American fears that he threatens US hegemony in the region. Blind Eye Hudson’s in-house counterterrorism expert Michael Pregent, who previously accused Iran of refusing to fight IS while arguing that the sometimes IS-allied Free Syrian Army was the only force capable of defeating the terrorist group, also agitated for the assassination of Soleimani, but he called for Israel to do the dirty work rather than the CIA. Read more [People protest in Los Angeles, California, U.S., in support of anti-government protesters in Iran © Lucy Nicholson]Iranian prosecutor points finger at CIA, Israel and Saudi Arabia for unrest Omri Ceren from the right-wing Likud-aligned Israel Project was also on the panel. Echoing Israeli government talking points, he called for the US to spread a “freedom agenda” in Iran – which is code for regime change. Another speaker was Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank that also receives funding from the UAE. Katulis employed empty slogans about supporting “freedom and justice”in Iran. Almost everything he said was forgettable. The UAE funding might explain why these experts continually blasted Iran for supposedly destabilizing Yemen without mentioning a word about the punishing Saudi-imposed siege which has led to famine and a cholera outbreak of epic proportions that kills a Yemeni child every 10 minutes. The Hudson panel perfectly encapsulates how these establishment experts have no actual expertise, just fancy titles and shady funding that gives them a veneer of scholarly seriousness. They shift from one country to the next and are considered authoritative without any real credentials other than being white men who provide the intellectual backbone to Washington’s permanent war agenda, which all the panelists have a history of supporting. The fact that their policy prescriptions have ended in disaster for the people of the region doesn’t slow them down. Death Toll The war in Iraq killed over a million people and catapulted the region into violent sectarian warfare from which it has yet to recover. The Western intervention in Libya threw that country into chaos, transforming what was once the richest nation in Africa, with the highest literacy rates, into an ungovernable gang-run state home to IS slave markets. And then there’s Syria, where the US poured billions into funding Al-Qaeda-linked rebel groups to overthrow the government, creating the worst refugee crisis since World War Two. Read more [People protest in Tehran, Iran December 30, 2017 © Reuters]Iran: Surviving another attack supported from abroad The men who made up the Hudson panel supported all of these disastrous wars, which goes to show that being wrong gets you places in Washington. In fact, being wrong seems to be a prerequisite for promotion in Beltway circles. No one epitomizes this dynamic more than Peter Bergen, a national security analyst at CNN. Two decades ago Bergen produced a rare interview with Osama bin Laden and he’s been capitalizing on it for 20 years. Since then he has fallen up to expert status on any and all issues pertaining to national security, counterterrorism and the Middle East, no matter how wrong he is. He supported the conflicts in Iraq and Libya. And here he is debating an actual expert, journalist Nir Rosen, and like always, Bergen argues for more war. Another example is Ken Pollack from the Brookings Institute. He pushed hard for the war in Iraq and US interference in Libya and Syria. Despite the disastrous consequences of these policies, he is still described as an “expert" and recently penned a report for the Atlantic Council on countering Iran. Destabilizing Iran has long been a policy goal of the US and its Israeli and Saudi allies. But the reality is that Iran is the most stable country in the Middle East and it played a crucial role in protecting the region from IS and Al-Qaeda. Whatever one thinks of the government in Iran, and there are of course many legitimate critiques as is true of any government, Iran’s only crime is that it acts independently of American interests and for that, it must be strong-armed into submission. So, let’s hope the experts don’t have their way. The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. • _______________________________________________ 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://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C2175ce3e4d954d45bfed08d5708d3ef5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636538674303028345&sdata=Sm2%2Bo2XrpRlmnO7dHA3jlJM8J4sHOi7G4k9dK%2BtIZA4%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Feb 10 14:58:06 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 14:58:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Exactly, which is why “privatization” is so dangerous. Small groups of wealthy elites buying up resources such as water across the continent. Utilities should never be privatized because it places control in the hands of the most greedy, profit driven individuals. Unfortunately, they already own our government, so even insisting on government control and regulation is no longer a viable solution. Capitalism is the root cause and we have reached the end stage as portrayed by our imperialist wars. Only further devastation awaits the masses. There is only one solution and most of us know what it is, and it isn’t reform. Reform is like hitting a bear attacking us, with a twig. On Feb 10, 2018, at 06:31, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: He who pays the piper calls the tune. 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: Saturday, February 10, 2018 8:23 AM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? And, then, they focus on pleasing the financial supporters. On Feb 10, 2018, at 05:50, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: I have my PHD in Political Science from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Government, the No. 1 ranked program in the country. Those who are not good enough to get tenure track slots as professors perforce go into the “think tanks.” 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2018 7:33 AM To: Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net Subject: [Peace-discuss] Syrian experts now Iranian experts, qualifications? By Rania Khalek: The ease with which American foreign policy “experts” can suddenly reinvent themselves, switching focus as the DC mood changes, exposes the Washington think tank racket as a giant sham designed to manipulate opinion. When protests broke out in Iran at the end of 2017, Washington think tanks were ecstatic. They saw an opportunity to push for regime change and they went for it. Almost overnight, all of the self-proclaimed "Syria experts" who spent the last several years arguing for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad shifted their focus to Tehran. The Hudson Institute, a conservative pro-war Washington outfit funded by major corporations and oil companies, is a case in point. On January 16, Hudson hosted a panel of so-called experts, titled “Iran Protests: Consequences for the Region and Opportunities for the Trump Administration.” The panel featured a who’s who of warmongers discussing how to weaken yet another Middle Eastern state. Read more [An opponent of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani chants slogans during a protest outside the European Union Council in Brussels, Belgium January 3, 2018 © Francois Lenoir]From ‘Russian meddling’ to Iran regime change: Social media as tools of US policy The most notorious among them was regime change aficionado Charles Lister, a "senior fellow” (read lobbyist) at the Middle East Institute, an influential DC think tank that receives tens of millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates, a country whose leadership is committed to regime change in Iran. Before he was an "Iran expert," Lister rose to prominence agitating for regime change in Syria. He is perhaps best known for cheerleading Salafi jihadist Syrian rebel groups like Ahrar al-Sham and Nour al-Din al-Zenki, which Lister insisted were moderate despite their explicitly stated intention to wipe out minorities in Syria and their open alliance with Syria’s Al-Qaeda affiliate. Anyone who dared to criticize such groups or highlight their genocidal agendas quickly became targets of Lister over the years – he would brand them dictator lovers and Assadists. It’s unclear whether Lister speaks any Arabic or whether he’s ever spent any significant amount of time in Syria or the Middle East more generally. But he says what the foreign policy establishment wants to hear, and for that, he is quoted extensively in the mainstream press on everything from Syria to Iran to even Egypt, with the New Yorker’s Robin Wright labelling him “an expert on Jihadism.” During the Hudson panel, Lister argued against the US participating in locally negotiated ceasefires in Syria that have played a major role in de-escalating the violence that tore apart the country. Ceasefires benefit Hezbollah and Iran, warned Lister, who would apparently rather the bloodshed continue if it helps the US and its jihadist proxies. Lister also painted Israel as the ultimate victim of Iran in Syria and suggested the CIA assassinate Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Soleimani heads Iran's elite Quds Force, which conducts operations outside of Iran in both Iraq and Syria. He has been credited with helping to turn the tide in both countries against Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) which has led to American fears that he threatens US hegemony in the region. Blind Eye Hudson’s in-house counterterrorism expert Michael Pregent, who previously accused Iran of refusing to fight IS while arguing that the sometimes IS-allied Free Syrian Army was the only force capable of defeating the terrorist group, also agitated for the assassination of Soleimani, but he called for Israel to do the dirty work rather than the CIA. Read more [People protest in Los Angeles, California, U.S., in support of anti-government protesters in Iran © Lucy Nicholson]Iranian prosecutor points finger at CIA, Israel and Saudi Arabia for unrest Omri Ceren from the right-wing Likud-aligned Israel Project was also on the panel. Echoing Israeli government talking points, he called for the US to spread a “freedom agenda” in Iran – which is code for regime change. Another speaker was Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank that also receives funding from the UAE. Katulis employed empty slogans about supporting “freedom and justice”in Iran. Almost everything he said was forgettable. The UAE funding might explain why these experts continually blasted Iran for supposedly destabilizing Yemen without mentioning a word about the punishing Saudi-imposed siege which has led to famine and a cholera outbreak of epic proportions that kills a Yemeni child every 10 minutes. The Hudson panel perfectly encapsulates how these establishment experts have no actual expertise, just fancy titles and shady funding that gives them a veneer of scholarly seriousness. They shift from one country to the next and are considered authoritative without any real credentials other than being white men who provide the intellectual backbone to Washington’s permanent war agenda, which all the panelists have a history of supporting. The fact that their policy prescriptions have ended in disaster for the people of the region doesn’t slow them down. Death Toll The war in Iraq killed over a million people and catapulted the region into violent sectarian warfare from which it has yet to recover. The Western intervention in Libya threw that country into chaos, transforming what was once the richest nation in Africa, with the highest literacy rates, into an ungovernable gang-run state home to IS slave markets. And then there’s Syria, where the US poured billions into funding Al-Qaeda-linked rebel groups to overthrow the government, creating the worst refugee crisis since World War Two. Read more [People protest in Tehran, Iran December 30, 2017 © Reuters]Iran: Surviving another attack supported from abroad The men who made up the Hudson panel supported all of these disastrous wars, which goes to show that being wrong gets you places in Washington. In fact, being wrong seems to be a prerequisite for promotion in Beltway circles. No one epitomizes this dynamic more than Peter Bergen, a national security analyst at CNN. Two decades ago Bergen produced a rare interview with Osama bin Laden and he’s been capitalizing on it for 20 years. Since then he has fallen up to expert status on any and all issues pertaining to national security, counterterrorism and the Middle East, no matter how wrong he is. He supported the conflicts in Iraq and Libya. And here he is debating an actual expert, journalist Nir Rosen, and like always, Bergen argues for more war. Another example is Ken Pollack from the Brookings Institute. He pushed hard for the war in Iraq and US interference in Libya and Syria. Despite the disastrous consequences of these policies, he is still described as an “expert" and recently penned a report for the Atlantic Council on countering Iran. Destabilizing Iran has long been a policy goal of the US and its Israeli and Saudi allies. But the reality is that Iran is the most stable country in the Middle East and it played a crucial role in protecting the region from IS and Al-Qaeda. Whatever one thinks of the government in Iran, and there are of course many legitimate critiques as is true of any government, Iran’s only crime is that it acts independently of American interests and for that, it must be strong-armed into submission. So, let’s hope the experts don’t have their way. The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. • _______________________________________________ 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://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C2175ce3e4d954d45bfed08d5708d3ef5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636538674303028345&sdata=Sm2%2Bo2XrpRlmnO7dHA3jlJM8J4sHOi7G4k9dK%2BtIZA4%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Feb 10 16:19:01 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 16:19:01 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Dems. and Repubs. pass budget to prepare US for war Message-ID: Democrats and Republicans pass budget to prepare US for war 10 February 2018 The bipartisan budget bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump Friday morning marks a new stage in the American ruling class’ drive for social counterrevolution and world military domination. The deal, which reached Trump’s desk only because of support from congressional Democrats, expresses the oligarchic character of American society. Behind the factional mudslinging and mutual recrimination between Democrats, Republicans and Trump, it is the corporations and the military-intelligence agencies that dictate government policy. All sections of the financial aristocracy agree: the desperate social needs of working people must be subordinated to private profit and the preparation of the American military machine for a major war. The budget agreement provides the military with $1.4 trillion over the course of the next two years, a 13 percent increase from 2017 and 7 percent more than what the White House requested. The size of the year-to-year increase alone—$80 billion—is larger than the combined annual military spending of every other country in the world except China. An additional $71 billion is earmarked for “overseas contingency operations,” i.e., ongoing wars, indicating plans to continue indefinitely the 17-year-old war in Afghanistan and escalate the war in Syria, where US air and artillery strikes killed over 100 Syrian government-backed forces on Wednesday. In preparation for the possibility that increased US military operations abroad may lead to conflict with a nuclear-armed power such as Russia or China, the budget provides the military with the resources necessary to replace its entire nuclear arsenal. It puts an end to limits placed on military spending in 2013 as part of a bipartisan agreement to cap domestic social spending, paving the way for even more astronomical increases in funding for the Pentagon. The role of the Democrats in passing this deal exposes the right-wing character of their opposition to Trump. It was the Democrats who ensured that there would be sufficient votes to pass the bill in both houses of Congress after a faction of Republican deficit hawks in the House of Representatives announced its opposition. In the Senate, the Democrats voted four-to-one for the bill, providing more “yes” votes and fewer “no” votes than the Republicans. In the House, 73 Democrats voted for the agreement. Without their votes, the bill would have fallen short by a wide margin. After the Democrats saved the budget bill, Trump signed it, tweeting, “Just signed Bill. Our Military will now be stronger than ever before. We love and need our Military and gave them everything.” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer echoed Trump in praising the deal, saying it “gives our fighting forces the resources they need to keep our country safe.” In an effort to lend the war budget a democratic veneer, Schumer claimed that it increases social spending. In reality, the bulk of the non-military spending comes from the limited expansion of several programs that already exist, such as the Community Healthcare Center (CHC) system and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Prior to this budget, 54 percent of federal discretionary spending, i.e., excluding entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, went to the military. Now this figure will increase to 59 percent. Little of the new spending will reach people in need. For example, a paltry $2 billion is being made available to fix the electrical grid in Puerto Rico, where one third of the population remains without power more than four months after Hurricane Maria. In contrast, the bill provides $2.3 billion in recovery funds to the Florida citrus industry. Puerto Rico has estimated that fixing its grid would cost $17 billion. Six billion dollars is allocated for the opioid crisis, a major factor in the ongoing decline in US life expectancy. This is far less than the $45 billion proposed in the 2017 congressional health care debate, which leading advocates called “woefully, woefully short.” Much of the $6 billion will go to arming the police and prosecuting users. An unnamed White House official told CNN on Thursday that opioid spending “is a law enforcement issue.” On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions placed the blame for the opioid crisis, which killed 63,000 people in 2016, on its victims. “I mean, people need to take some aspirin sometimes,” Sessions said. “Tough it out.” The budget deal provides a mere $20 billion for infrastructure spending. According to the Federal Highway Administration, $328 billion is required just to fix crumbling bridges in the US. Coming on top of the multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich passed in December, which the Democrats never seriously opposed, the massive increase in military spending will increase the federal budget deficit to $1 trillion or more for years to come. The drive to use the resulting increase in the US debt as justification for dismantling the core social programs from the 1930s and 1960s—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—has already begun. At his weekly press conference, Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan reiterated his pledge to wage war on these entitlement programs. “The military is not the reason we’ve got fiscal problems. It is entitlements,” he declared. After signing the budget bill on Friday, Trump said the social spending in the agreement was “waste.” He added that “costs on non-military lines will never come down if we do not elect more Republicans in the 2018 election and beyond.” Perhaps the most cynical point in the political theater surrounding the bill’s passage was the eight-hour speech Wednesday by Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who read the stories of young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US when they were children and have legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The bill includes no protection for the 800,000 DACA beneficiaries who face possible deportation beginning March 5, when the DACA program expires. Pelosi’s stunt, which followed the announcement of a bipartisan budget agreement in the Senate, was an elaborate attempt to provide political cover for the Democratic Party, which had already agreed behind the scenes to provide the votes needed to pass the measure in the House. In typical fashion, a number of Democrats were allowed to cast meaningless “no” votes to preserve their “progressive” bona fides for future elections. The Democrats have only disdain for those who sought to pressure them to the left. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown said of constituents who appealed to him to vote against the budget deal, “If the suggestion is if I’m spooked by them or they affect my voting record, the answer is of course not.” The passage of the budget bill shows the social character and political role of the Democratic Party. It is as much a pro-war, pro-corporate party as its Republican counterpart. It shares the Trump administration’s goals of increasing “border security,” reducing taxes on the wealthy, boosting corporate profits and preparing the military for total war—with its domestic component of internal repression. The Democratic Party’s main differences with Trump are of a right-wing character, aimed primarily at forcing Trump to adopt a more bellicose policy against Russia in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Democratic Party-inspired hysteria against “Russian interference,” including the bogus Mueller investigation into Trump collusion with the Russians, is a central element in this drive. It is accompanied by the reactionary campaign against “fake news” on social media, aimed at creating the framework for Internet censorship and an escalating attack on free speech. In the working class, there is broad opposition of an entirely different character, based on anger over poverty, social inequality, police violence, poisoned water, student debt, health care costs and fear of deportation. This tremendous potential social power must be awakened and given an independent, socialist direction. It is only on this basis that the catastrophic war plans of US imperialism can be stopped. Eric London WSWS.ORG -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From r-szoke at illinois.edu Sat Feb 10 23:14:36 2018 From: r-szoke at illinois.edu (Szoke, Ron) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 23:14:36 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] How are your investments doing? Message-ID: <0E6F68C2-1C2D-4031-9722-A800C95FC2CA@illinois.edu> Here’s the really bad news: Only half of Americans own stocks WSJ Feb 10, 2018 And the wealthiest among us own 81% of their value By ALESSANDRA MALITO For more than a year, investors have been touting strong returns from a raging bull market. At least, until this week. After a week of intense market volatility, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.38% falling 10% since last month’s peak, investors are left wondering: What will this do to my 401(k) plan? Should I call my broker? What will happen to my retirement funds? Spare a thought for all those Americans who have no investments in the stock market. Why? There are, unfortunately, quite a lot of them. Just over half (54%) of Americans own stocks, according to a 2017 Gallup report. That includes individual stocks, 401(k) plans, shares in an equity mutual fund or an IRA account. What’s more, two-thirds of Americans do not participate or have access to a 401(k) plan, according to Census Bureau researchers. In fact, the wealthiest Americans possess more than 80% of the aggregate value of stocks. “Despite the fact that 46% of households owned stock shares either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, trusts, or various pension accounts, the richest 10% of households accounted for 81% of the total value of these stocks, though less than its 91% share of directly owned stocks 22 and mutual funds,” Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University, wrote in his 2017 paper “Household Wealth Trends in the United States.” “Housing, liquid assets, and pension assets accounted for 87% of the total assets of the middle class,” he added. “The remainder was about evenly split among nonhome real estate, business equity, and various financial securities and corporate stock. Stocks directly or indirectly owned amounted to only 10% of their total assets.” - - - Upshot (to me): The stock market is not the economy. In the shorter run, its ups & downs have little or no significant effect on middle-class people. (The great majority of Americans think they are “middle class.”) ~~ Ron -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sun Feb 11 00:42:58 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 18:42:58 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] How are your investments doing? In-Reply-To: <0E6F68C2-1C2D-4031-9722-A800C95FC2CA@illinois.edu> References: <0E6F68C2-1C2D-4031-9722-A800C95FC2CA@illinois.edu> Message-ID: This is important, and part of the reason for Trump’s election. Wealth in America was more evenly distributed 40 years ago. Since then, there’s been a massive (and accelerating) rise in inequality of wealth (and income). > On Feb 10, 2018, at 5:14 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Here’s the really bad news: Only half of Americans own stocks > WSJ Feb 10, 2018 > And the wealthiest among us own 81% of their value > > By ALESSANDRA MALITO > > For more than a year, investors have been touting strong returns from a raging bull market. At least, until this week. > After a week of intense market volatility, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.38% falling 10% since last month’s peak, investors are left wondering: What will this do to my 401(k) plan? Should I call my broker? What will happen to my retirement funds? > Spare a thought for all those Americans who have no investments in the stock market. Why? There are, unfortunately, quite a lot of them. > Just over half (54%) of Americans own stocks, according to a 2017 Gallup report. That includes individual stocks, 401(k) plans, shares in an equity mutual fund or an IRA account. What’s more, two-thirds of Americans do not participate or have access to a 401(k) plan, according to Census Bureau researchers. > > In fact, the wealthiest Americans possess more than 80% of the aggregate value of stocks. “Despite the fact that 46% of households owned stock shares either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, trusts, or various pension accounts, the richest 10% of households accounted for 81% of the total value of these stocks, though less than its 91% share of directly owned stocks 22 and mutual funds,” Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University, wrote in his 2017 paper “Household Wealth Trends in the United States.” > > “Housing, liquid assets, and pension assets accounted for 87% of the total assets of the middle class,” he added. “The remainder was about evenly split among nonhome real estate, business equity, and various financial securities and corporate stock. Stocks directly or indirectly owned amounted to only 10% of their total assets.” > - - - > > Upshot (to me): > The stock market is not the economy. > In the shorter run, its ups & downs have little or no significant effect on middle-class people. > (The great majority of Americans think they are “middle class.”) > ~~ Ron > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Sun Feb 11 03:53:47 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2018 03:53:47 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] How are your investments doing? In-Reply-To: References: <0E6F68C2-1C2D-4031-9722-A800C95FC2CA@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <1823562209.5584788.1518321227240@mail.yahoo.com> According to the Piketty-Saez data, that 81% for the top 10% in stocks is lowered only to about 75% when all wealth is included--real estate, etc. But the top 10th of each segment owns  half of that segment's wealth: 40% for the top 1%, 20% for the top .1%, and 10% for the top .01%.  Thus the top .1% has almost as much as the bottom 90%; the latter's share is almost all held by the "middle" 40%, with the bottom 50% having zero net wealth on average, meaning that much of the bottom quarter has negative net wealth. Thus the factoid you hear about half of the population being unable to meet a $400 emergency, many of whom found themselves cast among the "deplorables." DG On ‎Saturday‎, ‎February‎ ‎10‎, ‎2018‎ ‎06‎:‎43‎:‎29‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: This is important, and part of the reason for Trump’s election. Wealth in America was more evenly distributed 40 years ago. Since then, there’s been a massive (and accelerating) rise in inequality of wealth (and income). > On Feb 10, 2018, at 5:14 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Here’s the really bad news: Only half of Americans own stocks > WSJ  Feb 10, 2018 > And the wealthiest among us own 81% of their value > > By ALESSANDRA MALITO > > For more than a year, investors have been touting strong returns from a raging bull market. At least, until this week. > After a week of intense market volatility, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.38% falling 10% since last month’s peak, investors are left wondering: What will this do to my 401(k) plan? Should I call my broker? What will happen to my retirement funds? > Spare a thought for all those Americans who have no investments in the stock market. Why? There are, unfortunately, quite a lot of them. > Just over half (54%) of Americans own stocks, according to a 2017 Gallup report. That includes individual stocks, 401(k) plans, shares in an equity mutual fund or an IRA account. What’s more, two-thirds of Americans do not participate or have access to a 401(k) plan, according to Census Bureau researchers. > > In fact, the wealthiest Americans possess more than 80% of the aggregate value of stocks. “Despite the fact that 46% of households owned stock shares either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, trusts, or various pension accounts, the richest 10% of households accounted for 81% of the total value of these stocks, though less than its 91% share of directly owned stocks 22 and mutual funds,” Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University, wrote in his 2017 paper “Household Wealth Trends in the United States.” > > “Housing, liquid assets, and pension assets accounted for 87% of the total assets of the middle class,” he added. “The remainder was about evenly split among nonhome real estate, business equity, and various financial securities and corporate stock. Stocks directly or indirectly owned amounted to only 10% of their total assets.” >  -  -  - > > Upshot (to me): > The stock market is not the economy. > In the shorter run, its ups & downs have little or no significant effect on middle-class people.  > (The great majority of Americans think they are “middle class.”) > ~~ Ron > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 11 03:53:47 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2018 03:53:47 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] How are your investments doing? In-Reply-To: References: <0E6F68C2-1C2D-4031-9722-A800C95FC2CA@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <1823562209.5584788.1518321227240@mail.yahoo.com> According to the Piketty-Saez data, that 81% for the top 10% in stocks is lowered only to about 75% when all wealth is included--real estate, etc. But the top 10th of each segment owns  half of that segment's wealth: 40% for the top 1%, 20% for the top .1%, and 10% for the top .01%.  Thus the top .1% has almost as much as the bottom 90%; the latter's share is almost all held by the "middle" 40%, with the bottom 50% having zero net wealth on average, meaning that much of the bottom quarter has negative net wealth. Thus the factoid you hear about half of the population being unable to meet a $400 emergency, many of whom found themselves cast among the "deplorables." DG On ‎Saturday‎, ‎February‎ ‎10‎, ‎2018‎ ‎06‎:‎43‎:‎29‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: This is important, and part of the reason for Trump’s election. Wealth in America was more evenly distributed 40 years ago. Since then, there’s been a massive (and accelerating) rise in inequality of wealth (and income). > On Feb 10, 2018, at 5:14 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Here’s the really bad news: Only half of Americans own stocks > WSJ  Feb 10, 2018 > And the wealthiest among us own 81% of their value > > By ALESSANDRA MALITO > > For more than a year, investors have been touting strong returns from a raging bull market. At least, until this week. > After a week of intense market volatility, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.38% falling 10% since last month’s peak, investors are left wondering: What will this do to my 401(k) plan? Should I call my broker? What will happen to my retirement funds? > Spare a thought for all those Americans who have no investments in the stock market. Why? There are, unfortunately, quite a lot of them. > Just over half (54%) of Americans own stocks, according to a 2017 Gallup report. That includes individual stocks, 401(k) plans, shares in an equity mutual fund or an IRA account. What’s more, two-thirds of Americans do not participate or have access to a 401(k) plan, according to Census Bureau researchers. > > In fact, the wealthiest Americans possess more than 80% of the aggregate value of stocks. “Despite the fact that 46% of households owned stock shares either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, trusts, or various pension accounts, the richest 10% of households accounted for 81% of the total value of these stocks, though less than its 91% share of directly owned stocks 22 and mutual funds,” Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University, wrote in his 2017 paper “Household Wealth Trends in the United States.” > > “Housing, liquid assets, and pension assets accounted for 87% of the total assets of the middle class,” he added. “The remainder was about evenly split among nonhome real estate, business equity, and various financial securities and corporate stock. Stocks directly or indirectly owned amounted to only 10% of their total assets.” >  -  -  - > > Upshot (to me): > The stock market is not the economy. > In the shorter run, its ups & downs have little or no significant effect on middle-class people.  > (The great majority of Americans think they are “middle class.”) > ~~ Ron > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 11 16:39:57 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2018 16:39:57 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: [New post] Verbal Solidarity Is Not Enough References: <61854989.2072.0@wordpress.com> Message-ID: A message from Thailand: New post on Uglytruth-Thailand [http://s0.wp.com/i/emails/blavatar.png] [http://2.gravatar.com/avatar/b94c98491e599510a5ec039e64af3261?s=50&d=identicon&r=G] Verbal Solidarity Is Not Enough by uglytruththailand Giles Ji Ungpakorn [https://uglytruththailand.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/s__23994374-e1517487923673.jpg?w=300] As many young activists who have come out against the military dictatorship now face imprisonment or even lèse-majesté charges, it is worth building an understanding of the potential power of social movements and the importance of politics in leading the struggles of these movements. If we do not do this, the activists will languish in jail and Thai society will not be freed from the influence of the military. [https://uglytruththailand.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/750x422_790330_1517054855.jpg?w=300] It is not enough to praise these young activists and wish them well, as many have quite rightly done. If we remain as mere spectators, viewing some symbolic defiance of the junta by the students or NGO activists, the dictatorship can never be overthrown. It is not merely about pushing the junta to call elections or demanding civil rights in an abstract manner. The whole authoritarian structure of Thai politics, which the military dictatorships have been building needs to be dismantled. This means we must pay attention to “power” and political leadership. [27798264_353664365041999_7619343842983816625_o] The latest protest at the Democracy Monument yesterday was a good start, but much more needs to be done to build an organised movement. Rungsima Rome, one of the leaders, was right when he said yesterday that just observing the protest via the internet is not enough. People need to come out and join the protests. But merely making a call for action does not automatically result in a mass uprising against the military either. Hard work on the ground is necessary in building strong social movements. It may seem too easy for someone in exile like me to state this, but it nevertheless remains true. We need to learn from the lessons of the 14th October 1973 uprising against the dictatorship, when half a million students and working people came out on to the streets of Bangkok and faced down tanks and guns and beat the military. That uprising was sparked by the arrests of pro-democracy activists. Of course we can all hope that this happens again. But there are some crucial differences between the situation in 1973 and 2018. One of the most important lessons from the 14th October 1973 uprising was that it did not just arise out of thin air. Students and workers in those days had mass organisations and the anger at the military repression fed into those mass organisations and resulted in half a million people being pulled on to the streets. Added to this was the political influence of the Communist Party in building a clear and unified critique of society, even though the party played little role in organising the uprising itself and made serious mistakes 3 years later. What we urgently need is mass organisation. The Red Shirts were a mass movement, but the Taksin allied UDD leadership has placed the Red Shirt Movement in cold storage. This has destroyed the movement. It is up to all of us to step up to the challenge and rebuild a democracy movement which is independent of politicians like Taksin. The absence of a Left political party has also created difficulties. If we look around Thai society we see that the so-called NGO-led “Peoples Movement” is blinded by its post-communist adherence to single-issues. Many even supported the junta in the past. The 14th October 1973 uprising linked discontent with social and economic issues in with the struggle against the military. That was why it was so powerful. The military junta is busy designing an authoritarian political system similar to that which we see in Burma. This aims to extend the dark shadow of the military into the future, even if elections are eventually held. Today the challenge for us all, but also for the active students and NGOs, is whether we can all help to rebuild a mass movement for democracy which weaves together all the pressing issues of society and is linked to a newly organised political party built from below. For more on Thai Social Movements, see this paper from 2015: http://bit.ly/2aDzest uglytruththailand | February 11, 2018 at 6:07 am | Tags: Giles Ji Ungpakorn, Military junta, Political prisoners, social movements, struggle for democracy, Thai politics | Categories: Thai politics | URL: https://wp.me/p4bxj7-xq Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Uglytruth-Thailand. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://uglytruththailand.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/verbal-solidarity-is-not-enough/ 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 Sun Feb 11 18:54:04 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2018 12:54:04 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: [unac] Spring Actions and more References: Message-ID: <0A95B51D-0DD9-4698-AA7F-3C4E4E3EF5C5@gmail.com> > > > > Spring Actions Against the Wars at Home and Abroad Announced by a Broad Coalition of Peace and Justice Organizations. > > > > > On Saturday, February 3rd, 66 people representing 42 organizations met by conference call and called for regional mobilizations against the wars at home and abroad on the weekend of April 14 - 15. It was clear that it is time for the antiwar movement to mobilize and make ourselves visible during this midterm election period as the bi-partisan wars continue to escalate. > > We have witnessed a massive increase in the military budget and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy while programs that benefit the people are cut. The U.S. has announced a permanent military force in Syria and the 16-year war in Afghanistan has been escalated. Threats to N. Korea, Russia and China raise the spectre of nuclear war. The U.S. has provocatively declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel and has decided to move its embassy there, a move the entire world has opposed. The U.S. military presence in Africa is increasing and in Yemen, the U.S. and Saudia Arabia continue the devastation of that country as famine and disease are on the rise. Venezuela, Syria, Iran and other countries continue to be the U.S. targets for regime change, > > At home the militarization of the police continues. Unions are under attack. Immigrants are subject to the daily terror of ICE deportations and white supremacists and neo-Nazis are called honorable men by Trump and the racist officials in his administration. > > Join us on April 14 - 15. > > A new web site has been set up to help build the actions. Please go here, endorse the actions and become part of the solution: http://SpringAction2018.org . > > Planning meeting in the Bay Area > Monday, February 12, 7-9 pm at the > Niebyl Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. > > Planning meeting in Chicago > 12:30 pm to 3 pm > Saturday, Feb. 17 > United Electrical Workers Hall > 37 S. Ashland Avenue, Chicago > Planning meeting in New York > > To be announced > > Close Guantanamo! Return the Land to Cuba! Stop the Torture! > > > > UNAC supports the call for actions around Feb 23, the 115th anniversary of the seizure of the Guantanamo Navy base on Cuban land. This is generally considered the first U.S. foreign military base. The call for actions was made at the Baltimore conference against U.S. foreign military bases. > > We urge all groups to take action on or around Feb 23 calling for the closing of the base, returning of the land to Cuba and freeing of the political prisoners held there. > > UNAC urges all groups to take action around Feb 23 and let the Bases Coalition know by sending an email with details of your action to info at NoForeignBases.org . You can see a list of the actions here: http://noforeignbases.org/calendar/ > Petition to Drop Charges Against Arrested Okinawa Anti-Bases Activists > > As a citizen of the world and an advocate for peace and people’s human and democratic rights, I demand that all charges against Hiroji Yamashiro, and his co-defendants, Hiroshi Inaba and Atsuhiro Soeda, be dropped and all attempts to silence the people of Okinawa in their just quest to rid their homeland of the many U.S. military bases be stopped. > > To sign this petition and have automatic letters sent to Japanese officials click here: http://noforeignbases.org/1975-2/ > For the best analysis from a progressive perspective, read the UNAC Blog > > https://unac.papillonweb.net/ > > Please make a contribution to UNAC: https://www.unacpeace.org/donate.html > If your organization would like to join the UNAC coalition, please click here: https://www.unacpeace.org/join.html > To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to UNAC-unsubscribe at lists.riseup.net --- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Feb 11 22:36:46 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2018 22:36:46 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette for Eugenics Message-ID: Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Champaign News-Gazette Dec. 12 1922 p.4.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 8315 bytes Desc: Champaign News-Gazette Dec. 12 1922 p.4.pdf URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Feb 11 22:39:32 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2018 22:39:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazette for Mussolini Message-ID: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Champaign News-Gazette, Nov. 5, 1926, p.4.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 12898 bytes Desc: Champaign News-Gazette, Nov. 5, 1926, p.4.pdf URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Mon Feb 12 01:50:13 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2018 19:50:13 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Meeting place for AWARE Message-ID: AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their operation in March. It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine Avionics' in Champaign >. Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign > - 2029 South Neil Street. A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. Recall Marx and the Red Lion: >. Solidarity and salubrity, CGE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 12 12:45:26 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 12:45:26 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] BDS: Stopping Zionist Genocide Against the Palestinians! Message-ID: Your message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments: Official Francis Boyle Flyer (004).jpg Note: To protect against computer viruses, e-mail programs may prevent sending or receiving certain types of file attachments. Check your e-mail security settings to determine how attachments are handled. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Official Francis Boyle Flyer (004).jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 52244 bytes Desc: Official Francis Boyle Flyer (004).jpg URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Mon Feb 12 17:43:21 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 11:43:21 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Question In-Reply-To: References: <0127129A-0B1A-4153-AB5E-784ECEF80364@gmail.com> Message-ID: AWARE'S CLUBHOUSE AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their operation in March. It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine Avionics' in Champaign >. Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign > - 2029 South Neil Street. A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. Recall Marx and the Red Lion: >. Solidarity and salubrity, CGE > On Feb 10, 2018, at 9:33 AM, Karen Aram wrote: > > Good, has it been decided yet, where AWARE will move? > > I like the cafe on First Street, there coffee is better and less expensive, they have beer but I don’t know much about it. They don’t have food or cooking facilities other than muffins, donuts stuff. > > They are closer to those living in Champaign, you, Karen and Stuart, Charley. I think parking is adequate in that area. > > It is small, that could be a problem, when crowded. > >> On Feb 10, 2018, at 07:28, C. G. Estabrook wrote: >> >> Yes. The place is open for another month. Then we’ll have to move... >> >> Sent from my iPhone >> >>> On Feb 10, 2018, at 8:51 AM, Karen Aram wrote: >>> >>> Carl >>> >>> Does AWARE still meet in the Cafeteria Restaurant, on Sundays? ... >>> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jbw292002 at gmail.com Mon Feb 12 18:28:48 2018 From: jbw292002 at gmail.com (John W.) Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 12:28:48 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:50 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace < peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote: AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. > > Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their > operation in March. > > It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine > Avionics' in Champaign 1321317537993963/>. > > Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. > > I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign < > https://www.facebook.com/HarvestMarketChampaign/> - 2029 South Neil > Street. > > A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) > on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. > > It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. > > I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. > > We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. > Yes, that's what Fidel and Chairman Mao said. ;-) > Recall Marx and the Red Lion: com/memorials/the-red-lion>. > > Solidarity and salubrity, CGE > Virus-free. www.avg.com <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Mon Feb 12 18:33:41 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 18:33:41 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The suggestion that AWARE has any interest in overthrowing the government, is about as absurd as Democrats singing the “International” or being referred to as “leftists.” They maybe “left" of the right wing, but thats as far as it goes. On Feb 12, 2018, at 10:28, John W. via Peace > wrote: On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:50 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace > wrote: AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their operation in March. It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine Avionics' in Champaign >. Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign > - 2029 South Neil Street. A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. Yes, that's what Fidel and Chairman Mao said. ;-) Recall Marx and the Red Lion: >. Solidarity and salubrity, CGE [https://ipmcdn.avast.com/images/icons/icon-envelope-tick-green-avg-v1.png] Virus-free. www.avg.com _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=4uca8n8A%2BTY75uO3VYfz3Sqzb9CYFZ4dzBdbK6%2F%2B8hM%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Mon Feb 12 19:43:38 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 13:43:38 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <60B28849-CAAE-43AE-9C92-BC931296F4ED@illinois.edu> “A revolution is not a dinner-party.” —Mao Zedong Sent from my iPhone > On Feb 12, 2018, at 12:28 PM, John W. via Peace wrote: > > >> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:50 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace wrote: >> >> AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. >> >> Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their operation in March. >> >> It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine Avionics' in Champaign . >> >> Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. >> >> I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign - 2029 South Neil Street. >> >> A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. >> >> It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. >> >> I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. >> >> We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. > > > Yes, that's what Fidel and Chairman Mao said. ;-) > > > >> Recall Marx and the Red Lion: . >> >> Solidarity and salubrity, CGE > > > Virus-free. www.avg.com > _______________________________________________ > 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 Mon Feb 12 20:09:54 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 20:09:54 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Black Agenda Radio - 02.12.18 - Progressive Radio Network 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 Sent: Monday, February 12, 2018 2:09 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: FW: Black Agenda Radio - 02.12.18 - Progressive Radio Network U.S. forces attacked and claimed to have killed about 100 Syrian soldiers. Syria and Russia are warning that the U.S. is playing with fire, and has no right to station soldiers on another country’s territory. But the fine points of international law don’t seem to matter to Washington. We called Dr. Francis Boyle, the esteemed professor of international law at the University of Illinois, at Champaign. Francis 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, February 12, 2018 2:08 PM To: Boyle, Francis A > Subject: Black Agenda Radio - 02.12.18 - Progressive Radio Network Black Agenda Radio - 02.12.18 - Progressive Radio Network http://prn.fm/black-agenda-radio-02-12-18/ Sent from Mail for Windows 10 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stuartnlevy at gmail.com Tue Feb 13 00:34:42 2018 From: stuartnlevy at gmail.com (Stuart Levy) Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 18:34:42 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE statement in support of GEO and their labor struggle against the U of I administration? Message-ID: <56af7544-056e-40d1-c4c9-e6146113116d@gmail.com> I should have brought this up at Sunday's meeting, but here is a proposal by e-mail: I suggest that AWARE offer a public statement in support of the GEO in their labor negotiations against the U of I administration. The argument is not solely over pay and benefits, which would be worthy enough; the administration's proposal would redefine graduate students' tuition waivers as basically optional, dependent on available funding.    This naturally would mean that tuition waivers wouldn't remain widely available for long.   Worse, since the administration considers that the GEO contract only covers grad students with tuition waivers, the GEO's bargaining power would shrink as the waivers were taken away.   The GEO considers this a really serious attack, and community support is critical. The GEO in the past has gone out of their way to support issues which AWARE has also supported, such as the case of Steven Salaita - they consider the role of a labor union to extend far beyond simply taking care of its current members' employment, and they put real substantive resources into their mission of solidarity with other issues in our community, including ones of direct interest to AWARE.   For example, the GEO spoke out against the firing of Steven Salaita. Below is a template of a letter we could sign on to.   What do people think of this? ==== We, [organization], support the Graduate Employees’ Organization in their effort to bargain a fair contract with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Graduate employees at UIUC have been without a contract since August 2017 and have been in negotiations since March 2017. We urge Provost Cangellaris to accept the GEO’s proposals for a new collective bargaining agreement which preserves graduate employees’ tuition waivers, pays them a living wage, and provides them and their dependents with affordable, accessible healthcare and childcare resources. Graduate employees perform essential work for the University as Teaching and Graduate Assistants. At some point, every undergraduate student is taught by a graduate instructor, and over 2,500 graduate workers on this campus provide invaluable labor. In fact, Illinois ranks 6th in the country among universities where graduate employees teach the most classes. Grad employees make Illinois work. The university administration is attempting to cut the tuition waivers that are an essential part of grad workers’ compensation. They insist on removing protections for tuition waivers that GEO won in 2009, and fought to keep in 2012. They want to give themselves “authority to waive tuition” and the “right to determine and modify tuition waivers for each graduate program,” enabling them to not only cut tuition waivers, but to replace waiver-generating appointments with hourly graduate positions not covered by GEO’s contract. They’ve also recently revealed a plan to legally prevent GEO from striking over tuition waivers, a drastic measure that shows their intent to break the union: by replacing graduate appointments covered by GEO’s contract, the administration would have the power to erode and ultimately eliminate GEO’s bargaining unit. On top of this, the administration refuses to pay graduate workers a living wage, and refuses to provide health care and child care resources for those with dependents. Teaching and Graduate Assistants making the minimum salary earn about $6,000 less than the University’s own published cost of living and most have not received a raise in five years. The administration is also refusing to provide healthcare coverage for dependents of graduate workers, or a childcare subsidy for graduate worker parents. Without these important benefits, graduate workers will not have financial stability and graduate school will not be equally accessible to everyone. For these reasons, the GEO has declared that it will strike on February 26th to protect both tuition waivers and its survival. We urge Provost Cangellaris and the University bargaining team to work with GEO to provide graduate employees with a fair contract. If the Graduate Employees’ Organization is forced to strike, we understand that this drastic measure signals the University administration’s unwillingness to resolve negotiations at the bargaining table. We will support actions deemed necessary by graduate employees to protect themselves, undergraduates, and the integrity and quality of education at the University of Illinois. All graduate employees, students, and workers deserve better living, learning, and working conditions. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Feb 13 00:44:59 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 18:44:59 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE statement in support of GEO and their labor struggle against the U of I administration? In-Reply-To: <56af7544-056e-40d1-c4c9-e6146113116d@gmail.com> References: <56af7544-056e-40d1-c4c9-e6146113116d@gmail.com> Message-ID: I think AWARE should retain its focus on war and war-reated issues. That would mean supporting some campus issues that have a connection to US war-making - like Salaita’s firing, or SJP’s concerns. Most AWAREists support other - non-war related - good causes, like the GEO's campaign, but I don’t think they should be folded into anti-war work. —CGE > On Feb 12, 2018, at 6:34 PM, Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I should have brought this up at Sunday's meeting, but here is a proposal by e-mail: > > I suggest that AWARE offer a public statement in support of the GEO in their labor negotiations against the U of I administration. > > The argument is not solely over pay and benefits, which would be worthy enough; the administration's proposal would redefine graduate students' tuition waivers as basically optional, dependent on available funding. This naturally would mean that tuition waivers wouldn't remain widely available for long. Worse, since the administration considers that the GEO contract only covers grad students with tuition waivers, the GEO's bargaining power would shrink as the waivers were taken away. The GEO considers this a really serious attack, and community support is critical. > > The GEO in the past has gone out of their way to support issues which AWARE has also supported, such as the case of Steven Salaita - they consider the role of a labor union to extend far beyond simply taking care of its current members' employment, and they put real substantive resources into their mission of solidarity with other issues in our community, including ones of direct interest to AWARE. For example, the GEO spoke out against the firing of Steven Salaita. > > Below is a template of a letter we could sign on to. What do people think of this? > > ==== > > We, [organization], support the Graduate Employees’ Organization in their effort to bargain a fair contract with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Graduate employees at UIUC have been without a contract since August 2017 and have been in negotiations since March 2017. We urge Provost Cangellaris to accept the GEO’s proposals for a new collective bargaining agreement which preserves graduate employees’ tuition waivers, pays them a living wage, and provides them and their dependents with affordable, accessible healthcare and childcare resources. > > Graduate employees perform essential work for the University as Teaching and Graduate Assistants. At some point, every undergraduate student is taught by a graduate instructor, and over 2,500 graduate workers on this campus provide invaluable labor. In fact, Illinois ranks 6th in the country among universities where graduate employees teach the most classes. Grad employees make Illinois work. > > The university administration is attempting to cut the tuition waivers that are an essential part of grad workers’ compensation. They insist on removing protections for tuition waivers that GEO won in 2009, and fought to keep in 2012. They want to give themselves “authority to waive tuition” and the “right to determine and modify tuition waivers for each graduate program,” enabling them to not only cut tuition waivers, but to replace waiver-generating appointments with hourly graduate positions not covered by GEO’s contract. They’ve also recently revealed a plan to legally prevent GEO from striking over tuition waivers, a drastic measure that shows their intent to break the union: by replacing graduate appointments covered by GEO’s contract, the administration would have the power to erode and ultimately eliminate GEO’s bargaining unit. > > On top of this, the administration refuses to pay graduate workers a living wage, and refuses to provide health care and child care resources for those with dependents. Teaching and Graduate Assistants making the minimum salary earn about $6,000 less than the University’s own published cost of living and most have not received a raise in five years. The administration is also refusing to provide healthcare coverage for dependents of graduate workers, or a childcare subsidy for graduate worker parents. Without these important benefits, graduate workers will not have financial stability and graduate school will not be equally accessible to everyone. > > For these reasons, the GEO has declared that it will strike on February 26th to protect both tuition waivers and its survival. > > We urge Provost Cangellaris and the University bargaining team to work with GEO to provide graduate employees with a fair contract. If the Graduate Employees’ Organization is forced to strike, we understand that this drastic measure signals the University administration’s unwillingness to resolve negotiations at the bargaining table. We will support actions deemed necessary by graduate employees to protect themselves, undergraduates, and the integrity and quality of education at the University of Illinois. All graduate employees, students, and workers deserve better living, learning, and working conditions. > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 13 03:41:49 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 03:41:49 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] U.S. Attack on Syrian Troops Illegitimate | Black Agenda Report Message-ID: https://www.blackagendareport.com/us-attack-syrian-troops-illegitimate From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 13 14:56:20 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 14:56:20 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE statement in support of GEO and their labor struggle against the U of I administration? In-Reply-To: References: <56af7544-056e-40d1-c4c9-e6146113116d@gmail.com> Message-ID: Though Carl is “technically” correct, I suggest we do it anyway. While I agree we need to remain on focus, specifically in respect to the “AWARE on the Air” tv program, when some wish to focus on “local” issues, which would water down the “reason to exist.” Everything is connected, and therefore on the tv program we do relate “war” to that which is taking place both locally and nationally. There is no question “the militarization of the police,” “austerity policies” of the government, “high cost of education”, “crushing labor and unions” is very related. Thus verbally offering support for those groups, such as the GEO, is related to war, when we further impoverish people, and limit education to only the elite, and foreign students, it is related. Though I wonder why I bother to address the issue, why Stuart bothered to raise the issue, since AWARE seems to support a decision by consensus, knowing well that Carl will not agree. As AWARE has no By-Laws, no Officers, and its even unclear as to who members consist of, I question the issue of "consensus.” When voting to disallow a anti-semite speak on the program, we used a “majority rule” at my suggestion, vote to prevent. On Feb 12, 2018, at 16:44, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: I think AWARE should retain its focus on war and war-reated issues. That would mean supporting some campus issues that have a connection to US war-making - like Salaita’s firing, or SJP’s concerns. Most AWAREists support other - non-war related - good causes, like the GEO's campaign, but I don’t think they should be folded into anti-war work. —CGE On Feb 12, 2018, at 6:34 PM, Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss > wrote: I should have brought this up at Sunday's meeting, but here is a proposal by e-mail: I suggest that AWARE offer a public statement in support of the GEO in their labor negotiations against the U of I administration. The argument is not solely over pay and benefits, which would be worthy enough; the administration's proposal would redefine graduate students' tuition waivers as basically optional, dependent on available funding. This naturally would mean that tuition waivers wouldn't remain widely available for long. Worse, since the administration considers that the GEO contract only covers grad students with tuition waivers, the GEO's bargaining power would shrink as the waivers were taken away. The GEO considers this a really serious attack, and community support is critical. The GEO in the past has gone out of their way to support issues which AWARE has also supported, such as the case of Steven Salaita - they consider the role of a labor union to extend far beyond simply taking care of its current members' employment, and they put real substantive resources into their mission of solidarity with other issues in our community, including ones of direct interest to AWARE. For example, the GEO spoke out against the firing of Steven Salaita. Below is a template of a letter we could sign on to. What do people think of this? ==== We, [organization], support the Graduate Employees’ Organization in their effort to bargain a fair contract with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Graduate employees at UIUC have been without a contract since August 2017 and have been in negotiations since March 2017. We urge Provost Cangellaris to accept the GEO’s proposals for a new collective bargaining agreement which preserves graduate employees’ tuition waivers, pays them a living wage, and provides them and their dependents with affordable, accessible healthcare and childcare resources. Graduate employees perform essential work for the University as Teaching and Graduate Assistants. At some point, every undergraduate student is taught by a graduate instructor, and over 2,500 graduate workers on this campus provide invaluable labor. In fact, Illinois ranks 6th in the country among universities where graduate employees teach the most classes. Grad employees make Illinois work. The university administration is attempting to cut the tuition waivers that are an essential part of grad workers’ compensation. They insist on removing protections for tuition waivers that GEO won in 2009, and fought to keep in 2012. They want to give themselves “authority to waive tuition” and the “right to determine and modify tuition waivers for each graduate program,” enabling them to not only cut tuition waivers, but to replace waiver-generating appointments with hourly graduate positions not covered by GEO’s contract. They’ve also recently revealed a plan to legally prevent GEO from striking over tuition waivers, a drastic measure that shows their intent to break the union: by replacing graduate appointments covered by GEO’s contract, the administration would have the power to erode and ultimately eliminate GEO’s bargaining unit. On top of this, the administration refuses to pay graduate workers a living wage, and refuses to provide health care and child care resources for those with dependents. Teaching and Graduate Assistants making the minimum salary earn about $6,000 less than the University’s own published cost of living and most have not received a raise in five years. The administration is also refusing to provide healthcare coverage for dependents of graduate workers, or a childcare subsidy for graduate worker parents. Without these important benefits, graduate workers will not have financial stability and graduate school will not be equally accessible to everyone. For these reasons, the GEO has declared that it will strike on February 26th to protect both tuition waivers and its survival. We urge Provost Cangellaris and the University bargaining team to work with GEO to provide graduate employees with a fair contract. If the Graduate Employees’ Organization is forced to strike, we understand that this drastic measure signals the University administration’s unwillingness to resolve negotiations at the bargaining table. We will support actions deemed necessary by graduate employees to protect themselves, undergraduates, and the integrity and quality of education at the University of Illinois. All graduate employees, students, and workers deserve better living, learning, and working conditions. _______________________________________________ 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://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4365ab71744144a25d7f08d5727b0ebc%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540795208135953&sdata=JXA%2FPHeFooA5lronoNEEHGxehVVnWF5NH04oL0mK7IE%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Tue Feb 13 17:15:09 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 17:15:09 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Vice - A World in Disarray References: <1464385388.184691.1518542109677.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1464385388.184691.1518542109677@mail.yahoo.com> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAqkfbGJhhI Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton have been discussing Vice and Neocons on their podcast Moderate Rebels. Part 2 discusses this film produced by Vice with the CFR and HBO. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Feb 13 19:40:50 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 13:40:50 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Question References: Message-ID: <70328FBC-9A3D-47F2-A9E3-31F134392D03@gmail.com> > AWARE'S CLUBHOUSE > > AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. > > Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their operation in March. > > It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine Avionics' in Champaign >. > > Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. > > I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign > - 2029 South Neil Street. > > A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. > > It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. > > I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. > > We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. Recall Marx and the Red Lion: >. > > Solidarity and salubrity, CGE > > >> On Feb 10, 2018, at 9:33 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: >> >> Good, has it been decided yet, where AWARE will move? >> >> I like the cafe on First Street, there coffee is better and less expensive, they have beer but I don’t know much about it. They don’t have food or cooking facilities other than muffins, donuts stuff. >> >> They are closer to those living in Champaign, you, Karen and Stuart, Charley. I think parking is adequate in that area. >> >> It is small, that could be a problem, when crowded. >> >>> On Feb 10, 2018, at 07:28, C. G. Estabrook > wrote: >>> >>> Yes. The place is open for another month. Then we’ll have to move... >>> >>> Sent from my iPhone >>> >>>> On Feb 10, 2018, at 8:51 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: >>>> >>>> Carl >>>> >>>> Does AWARE still meet in the Cafeteria Restaurant, on Sundays? ... >>>> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From divisek at yahoo.com Tue Feb 13 20:16:00 2018 From: divisek at yahoo.com (Dianna Visek) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 20:16:00 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? References: <397073248.316950.1518552960887.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <397073248.316950.1518552960887@mail.yahoo.com> http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_pat_buchanan/is_us_being_sucked_into_syria_s_war -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 13 20:19:37 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 20:19:37 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: 2018 Winter Olympics held in Korea under shadow of war References: <380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5.2cb7388bc9.20180213190151.02b00c7b42.b384d4b8@mail154.atl121.mcsv.net> Message-ID: The 2018 Winter Olympic Games opened in South Korea last Friday under the official theme of “peace,” with a ceremony that included a choreographed candlelight depiction of a white dove and a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Such bromides should not be taken seriously. The reality is that not since the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany have the games been held under such an immediate threat of war. View this email in your browser [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/56c0471b-a650-4887-b620-7bd723295460.png] [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/3c9efcaf-8c08-4513-a33e-9a7a93c39f3f.jpg] 2018 Winter Olympics held in Korea under shadow of war By Will Morrow The 2018 Winter Olympic Games opened in South Korea last Friday under the official theme of “peace,” with a ceremony that included a choreographed candlelight depiction of a white dove and a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, declared that it would send a “powerful message of peace to the world.” Bach noted, with no apparent sense of irony, that the 2016 Olympics had officially provided a “message of hope” to refugees, in a year that ended with more than 5,000 refugees drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean, with many thousands more since. This year’s bromides should be taken no more seriously. The reality is that not since the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany have the games been held under such an immediate threat of war. Overshadowing the events in South Korea is the real possibility that the United States will launch a “bloody nose” strike on North Korean military facilities in the immediate aftermath of the games, which could trigger a nuclear conflagration and lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions, on the Korean Peninsula. Read more » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/46220966-ca86-495c-890f-538eaf0e5bb6.jpg]US to expand military deployments as war danger builds in Asia By James Cogan The National Defense Strategy released by the Trump administration last month defined China and Russia as the paramount “strategic competition” facing US imperialism. It labelled the two nuclear-armed states as “revisionist powers” that must be prevented from undermining American global dominance. The document declared that the US had to “prioritize preparedness for war.” The American military has been doing precisely that in Asia for over six years, since the Obama administration announced its provocative “pivot” to the region in November 2011. It has prepared and positioned a vast array of surface ships, submarines, bombers, jet-fighters, infantry divisions and marine units to wage a region-wide war against China. New bases for US forces have been established in Australia and Singapore and re-established in the Philippines and Thailand. India, which has been groomed as a “strategic partner” against China, now provides access, maintenance and supply arrangements to the US military. The US has some 50,000 personnel in Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan, including 18,000 marines, an aircraft carrier battlegroup and squadrons of Air Force jet fighters. It has some 29,500 personnel in South Korea, on the frontline of any conflict with North Korea. Guam hosts 7,000 military personnel, as well as B-52 and B2 strategic bombers capable of delivering nuclear weapons. Read more » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/f6d304a5-43cb-42cb-b3fd-1d9085745ec6.jpg]US Congress begins debate on milestone anti-immigrant legislation By Eric London The Senate voted 97-1 yesterday to open debate on legislation to revamp the US immigration system and address the legal status of 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants who are either beneficiaries of or eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The program, which shields from deportation young undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children, was terminated last fall by President Trump, who set a March 5 date for the termination to take effect. Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has given no firm pledge to start debate on immigration and DACA in the lower chamber, saying he will do so only if the proposed bill is backed by President Trump, who is demanding a further buildup of border security and immigration police and prisons, along with sharp reductions in legal immigration. Read more » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/9e9233a6-0688-4e1d-9843-80e3ae8e2e12.jpg]Israeli attack on Syria heightens danger of wider Mideast war By Chris Marsden Casualties from Israeli air strikes on military sites in Syria, carried out Saturday, reportedly included Iranian personnel working in conjunction with the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made clear that his government deliberately targeted Iranian personnel in the attacks. He gave as justification for the air strikes the destruction of an Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle that had allegedly invaded Israeli airspace from Syria. In response to the Israeli strikes, the Syrian army brought down an Israeli F-16 jet after firing more than 20 antiaircraft missiles. The pilots bailed out. Read more » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/33dc53ae-21fd-451d-ba5d-0d741678c556.jpg]ICE arrests immigrant at asylum interview in San Francisco By our reporter On February 8, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents took the unprecedented step of arresting an asylum applicant, Omer Abdelmaed, after he appeared for an interview at a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) building in San Francisco. Abdelmaed, a resident of San Jose, California showed up at the asylum office in San Francisco to explain his fear of returning to Sudan, having fled after being arrested and tortured. After the customary interview, which lasted two hours, Abdelmaed and his attorney, Caleb Arring, began to leave the office. However, as Arring explained in a Facebook post, as they began to leave, “someone who I assume is a supervisor at the asylum office came in with 3-4 ICE Officers. The ICE Officers put handcuffs on my client and said they were taking him into custody. I asked why. At first they wouldn’t even answer me.” Read more » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/8d8d4c25-8f6a-4ad9-b7fd-25961eb47beb.jpg] The unquiet death of a young Ford worker The parents of Jacoby Hennings demand to know why their son died By Jerry White It is nearly four months since the tragic death of Jacoby Marquis Hennings, a 21-year-old part-time temporary worker at Ford’s Woodhaven Stamping plant, just south of Detroit, on October 20, 2017. The police and United Auto Workers officials claim the young man pulled a gun on UAW officials during an unexplained dispute in their office, and then took his own life as police charged up the stairs and confronted him. The official story is laced with contradictions and unanswered questions. The claims by UAW Local 387 officials—Arnold Miller and Christopher Pfaff—and a Ford Human Resource Manager Martin Hernandez that Jacoby Hennings, “appeared under the influence of alcohol or drugs,” have been refuted by the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s autopsy report, which found nothing in the young man’s system but caffeine. Read more » [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 Socialist Equality Party | socialequality.com Articles: Copyright © 2017 wsws.org, All rights reserved. unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From r-szoke at illinois.edu Tue Feb 13 20:39:22 2018 From: r-szoke at illinois.edu (Szoke, Ron) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 20:39:22 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Another "Be careful what you wish for" Message-ID: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> This is what concerns me about proposals for a guaranteed Universal Basic Income (UBI), which sounds like something I would in principle support: ~~ Ron (( Looking specifically at the question of whether Friedman’s proposal would actually improve the conditions of the poor, Hyman A. Minsky, himself a renowned and highly regarded economist, wrote the “The Macroeconomics of a Negative Income Tax.” Minsky looks at the outcome of a “social dividend,” which “transfers to every person alive, rich or poor, working or unemployed, young or old, a designated money income by right.” Minsky conclusively shows that such a program would “be inflationary even if budgets are balanced” and that the “rise in prices will erode the real value of benefits to the poor … and may impose unintended real costs upon families with modest incomes.” This means that any improved spending power afforded to citizens through an instrument such as UBI will be completely absorbed by higher prices for necessities. )) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Feb 13 21:04:27 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 15:04:27 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Another "Be careful what you wish for" In-Reply-To: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> References: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> I’m willing to take that chance. If you give the starving food, they might overeat, so you shouldn’t? > On Feb 13, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: > > This is what concerns me about proposals for a guaranteed Universal Basic Income (UBI), which sounds like something I would in principle support: ~~ Ron > > (( Looking specifically at the question of whether Friedman’s proposal would actually improve the conditions of the poor, Hyman A. Minsky, himself a renowned and highly regarded economist, wrote the “The Macroeconomics of a Negative Income Tax.” Minsky looks at the outcome of a “social dividend,” which “transfers to every person alive, rich or poor, working or unemployed, young or old, a designated money income by right.” Minsky conclusively shows that such a program would “be inflationary even if budgets are balanced” and that the “rise in prices will erode the real value of benefits to the poor … and may impose unintended real costs upon families with modest incomes.” This means that any improved spending power afforded to citizens through an instrument such as UBI will be completely absorbed by higher prices for necessities. )) > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From brussel at illinois.edu Tue Feb 13 22:32:04 2018 From: brussel at illinois.edu (Brussel, Morton K) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 22:32:04 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Vice - A World in Disarray In-Reply-To: <1464385388.184691.1518542109677@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1464385388.184691.1518542109677.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <1464385388.184691.1518542109677@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <42D60865-1A4F-4DED-9B93-D69F07E53757@illinois.edu> What an effective(?) pile of crap! But give a link to Blumenthal, and part 2. On Feb 13, 2018, at 11:15 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAqkfbGJhhI Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton have been discussing Vice and Neocons on their podcast Moderate Rebels. Part 2 discusses this film produced by Vice with the CFR and HBO. _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 14 00:30:18 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:30:18 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Vice - A World in Disarray In-Reply-To: <42D60865-1A4F-4DED-9B93-D69F07E53757@illinois.edu> References: <1464385388.184691.1518542109677.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <1464385388.184691.1518542109677@mail.yahoo.com> <42D60865-1A4F-4DED-9B93-D69F07E53757@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <947345167.426486.1518568218029@mail.yahoo.com> http://moderaterebelsradio.com/vice-media-us-empire-robbie-martin-episode-13/ http://moderaterebelsradio.com/vice-a-world-in-disarray-us-imperialism-episode-14/ But it's important because it combines the prestige of the CFR with the edginess of Vice, and shows that neocon foreign policy can co-exist with "anti-racist" criticism of Trump, such as you might find on the Vice website. On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎04‎:‎32‎:‎18‎ ‎PM, Brussel, Morton K wrote: What an effective(?) pile of crap! But give a link to Blumenthal, and part 2. On Feb 13, 2018, at 11:15 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAqkfbGJhhI Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton have been discussing Vice and Neocons on their podcast Moderate Rebels. Part 2 discusses this film produced by Vice with the CFR and HBO. _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 14 00:47:10 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:47:10 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Another "Be careful what you wish for" In-Reply-To: <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> References: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> Message-ID: <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> A UBI might well incentivize both workers and employers to move more quickly to more productive robots without fear of unchosen unemployment or hyper-inflation. And there's no reason why the UBI, in an environment of moderate inflation, can't maintain its value. On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎03‎:‎05‎:‎03‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: I’m willing to take that chance. If you give the starving food, they might overeat, so you shouldn’t? > On Feb 13, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: > > This is what concerns me about proposals for a guaranteed Universal Basic Income (UBI), which sounds like something I would in principle support:  ~~ Ron > > (( Looking specifically at the question of whether Friedman’s proposal would actually improve the conditions of the poor, Hyman A. Minsky, himself a renowned and highly regarded economist, wrote the “The Macroeconomics of a Negative Income Tax.” Minsky looks at the outcome of a “social dividend,” which “transfers to every person alive, rich or poor, working or unemployed, young or old, a designated money income by right.” Minsky conclusively shows that such a program would “be inflationary even if budgets are balanced” and that the “rise in prices will erode the real value of benefits to the poor … and may impose unintended real costs upon families with modest incomes.”  This means that any improved spending power afforded to citizens through an instrument such as UBI will be completely absorbed by higher prices for necessities.  )) > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 14 00:47:10 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:47:10 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Another "Be careful what you wish for" In-Reply-To: <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> References: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> Message-ID: <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> A UBI might well incentivize both workers and employers to move more quickly to more productive robots without fear of unchosen unemployment or hyper-inflation. And there's no reason why the UBI, in an environment of moderate inflation, can't maintain its value. On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎03‎:‎05‎:‎03‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: I’m willing to take that chance. If you give the starving food, they might overeat, so you shouldn’t? > On Feb 13, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: > > This is what concerns me about proposals for a guaranteed Universal Basic Income (UBI), which sounds like something I would in principle support:  ~~ Ron > > (( Looking specifically at the question of whether Friedman’s proposal would actually improve the conditions of the poor, Hyman A. Minsky, himself a renowned and highly regarded economist, wrote the “The Macroeconomics of a Negative Income Tax.” Minsky looks at the outcome of a “social dividend,” which “transfers to every person alive, rich or poor, working or unemployed, young or old, a designated money income by right.” Minsky conclusively shows that such a program would “be inflationary even if budgets are balanced” and that the “rise in prices will erode the real value of benefits to the poor … and may impose unintended real costs upon families with modest incomes.”  This means that any improved spending power afforded to citizens through an instrument such as UBI will be completely absorbed by higher prices for necessities.  )) > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Wed Feb 14 01:05:14 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 19:05:14 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Another "Be careful what you wish for" In-Reply-To: <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> References: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: [1] It has been clear at least since Keynes that the source of modern economic woes is excess capacity and inadequate demand. A UBI obviously increases demand. [2] For Christians (and others) “the gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor” (attr. Dorothy Day). —CGE > On Feb 13, 2018, at 6:47 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > A UBI might well incentivize both workers and employers to move more quickly to more productive robots without fear of unchosen unemployment or hyper-inflation. And there's no reason why the UBI, in an environment of moderate inflation, can't maintain its value. > > On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎03‎:‎05‎:‎03‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I’m willing to take that chance. > > If you give the starving food, they might overeat, so you shouldn’t? > > > On Feb 13, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > This is what concerns me about proposals for a guaranteed Universal Basic Income (UBI), which sounds like something I would in principle support: ~~ Ron > > > > (( Looking specifically at the question of whether Friedman’s proposal would actually improve the conditions of the poor, Hyman A. Minsky, himself a renowned and highly regarded economist, wrote the “The Macroeconomics of a Negative Income Tax.” Minsky looks at the outcome of a “social dividend,” which “transfers to every person alive, rich or poor, working or unemployed, young or old, a designated money income by right.” Minsky conclusively shows that such a program would “be inflationary even if budgets are balanced” and that the “rise in prices will erode the real value of benefits to the poor … and may impose unintended real costs upon families with modest incomes.” This means that any improved spending power afforded to citizens through an instrument such as UBI will be completely absorbed by higher prices for necessities. )) > > > > > > From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 14 01:05:14 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 19:05:14 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Another "Be careful what you wish for" In-Reply-To: <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> References: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: [1] It has been clear at least since Keynes that the source of modern economic woes is excess capacity and inadequate demand. A UBI obviously increases demand. [2] For Christians (and others) “the gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor” (attr. Dorothy Day). —CGE > On Feb 13, 2018, at 6:47 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > A UBI might well incentivize both workers and employers to move more quickly to more productive robots without fear of unchosen unemployment or hyper-inflation. And there's no reason why the UBI, in an environment of moderate inflation, can't maintain its value. > > On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎03‎:‎05‎:‎03‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I’m willing to take that chance. > > If you give the starving food, they might overeat, so you shouldn’t? > > > On Feb 13, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > This is what concerns me about proposals for a guaranteed Universal Basic Income (UBI), which sounds like something I would in principle support: ~~ Ron > > > > (( Looking specifically at the question of whether Friedman’s proposal would actually improve the conditions of the poor, Hyman A. Minsky, himself a renowned and highly regarded economist, wrote the “The Macroeconomics of a Negative Income Tax.” Minsky looks at the outcome of a “social dividend,” which “transfers to every person alive, rich or poor, working or unemployed, young or old, a designated money income by right.” Minsky conclusively shows that such a program would “be inflationary even if budgets are balanced” and that the “rise in prices will erode the real value of benefits to the poor … and may impose unintended real costs upon families with modest incomes.” This means that any improved spending power afforded to citizens through an instrument such as UBI will be completely absorbed by higher prices for necessities. )) > > > > > > From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 14 01:11:57 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 01:11:57 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Another "Be careful what you wish for" In-Reply-To: <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> References: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: A UBI, is positive and like Single Payer Healthcare, a necessity. As long as its recognized as temporary, until we have changed the system. Changing the system should be the goal, because the UBI, like Social Security can always be whittled down and away, by those who control the system. The same way Single Payer is valuable, but only a stepping stone to that which we should have which is “Universal Healthcare for All." We don’t want to throw out the “good” for the “perfect, but we should never give up insisting upon the “perfect.” On Feb 13, 2018, at 16:47, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: A UBI might well incentivize both workers and employers to move more quickly to more productive robots without fear of unchosen unemployment or hyper-inflation. And there's no reason why the UBI, in an environment of moderate inflation, can't maintain its value. On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎03‎:‎05‎:‎03‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: I’m willing to take that chance. If you give the starving food, they might overeat, so you shouldn’t? > On Feb 13, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > This is what concerns me about proposals for a guaranteed Universal Basic Income (UBI), which sounds like something I would in principle support: ~~ Ron > > (( Looking specifically at the question of whether Friedman’s proposal would actually improve the conditions of the poor, Hyman A. Minsky, himself a renowned and highly regarded economist, wrote the “The Macroeconomics of a Negative Income Tax.” Minsky looks at the outcome of a “social dividend,” which “transfers to every person alive, rich or poor, working or unemployed, young or old, a designated money income by right.” Minsky conclusively shows that such a program would “be inflationary even if budgets are balanced” and that the “rise in prices will erode the real value of benefits to the poor … and may impose unintended real costs upon families with modest incomes.” This means that any improved spending power afforded to citizens through an instrument such as UBI will be completely absorbed by higher prices for necessities. )) > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Caa7228afcd3249341f0308d573448848%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636541660532870357&sdata=8IjBC%2BaRxDgME72tDgwbJ59RfDU6TNaZwqanQb86Lvw%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 14 01:11:57 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 01:11:57 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Another "Be careful what you wish for" In-Reply-To: <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> References: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: A UBI, is positive and like Single Payer Healthcare, a necessity. As long as its recognized as temporary, until we have changed the system. Changing the system should be the goal, because the UBI, like Social Security can always be whittled down and away, by those who control the system. The same way Single Payer is valuable, but only a stepping stone to that which we should have which is “Universal Healthcare for All." We don’t want to throw out the “good” for the “perfect, but we should never give up insisting upon the “perfect.” On Feb 13, 2018, at 16:47, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: A UBI might well incentivize both workers and employers to move more quickly to more productive robots without fear of unchosen unemployment or hyper-inflation. And there's no reason why the UBI, in an environment of moderate inflation, can't maintain its value. On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎03‎:‎05‎:‎03‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: I’m willing to take that chance. If you give the starving food, they might overeat, so you shouldn’t? > On Feb 13, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > This is what concerns me about proposals for a guaranteed Universal Basic Income (UBI), which sounds like something I would in principle support: ~~ Ron > > (( Looking specifically at the question of whether Friedman’s proposal would actually improve the conditions of the poor, Hyman A. Minsky, himself a renowned and highly regarded economist, wrote the “The Macroeconomics of a Negative Income Tax.” Minsky looks at the outcome of a “social dividend,” which “transfers to every person alive, rich or poor, working or unemployed, young or old, a designated money income by right.” Minsky conclusively shows that such a program would “be inflationary even if budgets are balanced” and that the “rise in prices will erode the real value of benefits to the poor … and may impose unintended real costs upon families with modest incomes.” This means that any improved spending power afforded to citizens through an instrument such as UBI will be completely absorbed by higher prices for necessities. )) > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Caa7228afcd3249341f0308d573448848%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636541660532870357&sdata=8IjBC%2BaRxDgME72tDgwbJ59RfDU6TNaZwqanQb86Lvw%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 14 01:16:07 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 19:16:07 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Another "Be careful what you wish for" In-Reply-To: References: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: [1] It has been clear at least since Keynes that the source of modern economic woes is excess capacity and inadequate demand. A UBI obviously increases demand. [2] For Christians (and others) “the gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor” (attr. Dorothy Day). [3] The common sense goal has long been, "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” (Marx, 1875). —CGE On Feb 13, 2018, at 6:47 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: A UBI might well incentivize both workers and employers to move more quickly to more productive robots without fear of unchosen unemployment or hyper-inflation. And there's no reason why the UBI, in an environment of moderate inflation, can't maintain its value. On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎03‎:‎05‎:‎03‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: I’m willing to take that chance. If you give the starving food, they might overeat, so you shouldn’t? On Feb 13, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: This is what concerns me about proposals for a guaranteed Universal Basic Income (UBI), which sounds like something I would in principle support: ~~ Ron (( Looking specifically at the question of whether Friedman’s proposal would actually improve the conditions of the poor, Hyman A. Minsky, himself a renowned and highly regarded economist, wrote the “The Macroeconomics of a Negative Income Tax.” Minsky looks at the outcome of a “social dividend,” which “transfers to every person alive, rich or poor, working or unemployed, young or old, a designated money income by right.” Minsky conclusively shows that such a program would “be inflationary even if budgets are balanced” and that the “rise in prices will erode the real value of benefits to the poor … and may impose unintended real costs upon families with modest incomes.” This means that any improved spending power afforded to citizens through an instrument such as UBI will be completely absorbed by higher prices for necessities. )) From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 14 01:16:07 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 19:16:07 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Another "Be careful what you wish for" In-Reply-To: References: <3F82089A-133C-4E41-A90A-F970C614FE3D@illinois.edu> <70167EC4-BD83-4469-A88F-B58202D756F0@gmail.com> <1763066545.436092.1518569230760@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: [1] It has been clear at least since Keynes that the source of modern economic woes is excess capacity and inadequate demand. A UBI obviously increases demand. [2] For Christians (and others) “the gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor” (attr. Dorothy Day). [3] The common sense goal has long been, "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” (Marx, 1875). —CGE On Feb 13, 2018, at 6:47 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: A UBI might well incentivize both workers and employers to move more quickly to more productive robots without fear of unchosen unemployment or hyper-inflation. And there's no reason why the UBI, in an environment of moderate inflation, can't maintain its value. On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎03‎:‎05‎:‎03‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: I’m willing to take that chance. If you give the starving food, they might overeat, so you shouldn’t? On Feb 13, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: This is what concerns me about proposals for a guaranteed Universal Basic Income (UBI), which sounds like something I would in principle support: ~~ Ron (( Looking specifically at the question of whether Friedman’s proposal would actually improve the conditions of the poor, Hyman A. Minsky, himself a renowned and highly regarded economist, wrote the “The Macroeconomics of a Negative Income Tax.” Minsky looks at the outcome of a “social dividend,” which “transfers to every person alive, rich or poor, working or unemployed, young or old, a designated money income by right.” Minsky conclusively shows that such a program would “be inflationary even if budgets are balanced” and that the “rise in prices will erode the real value of benefits to the poor … and may impose unintended real costs upon families with modest incomes.” This means that any improved spending power afforded to citizens through an instrument such as UBI will be completely absorbed by higher prices for necessities. )) From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 14 01:51:02 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 19:51:02 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE on the Air 2/13/18 Message-ID: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek9tnlk1Dxs Topics include ~ A shameful attempt by local Democrats to co-opt anti-war sentiment re Korea ~ FOA (Friend of AWARE) Paul Street destroys the second greatest deleterious myth in US politics ### -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Wed Feb 14 03:47:39 2018 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 21:47:39 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? Message-ID: I never thought I would see Patrick Buchanan urge caution on the part of carmakers.  Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Dianna Visek via Peace-discussDate: Tue, Feb 13, 2018 2:16 PMTo: Peace-discuss List;Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_pat_buchanan/is_us_being_sucked_into_syria_s_war -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Wed Feb 14 03:49:01 2018 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 21:49:01 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? Message-ID: Um War makers. ;) Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Dianna Visek via Peace-discussDate: Tue, Feb 13, 2018 2:16 PMTo: Peace-discuss List;Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_pat_buchanan/is_us_being_sucked_into_syria_s_war -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Wed Feb 14 04:24:19 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 22:24:19 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1A6F7D40-9B13-445C-BEB6-056FD35E58FB@illinois.edu> Crash of civilizations? Barbarisms? > On Feb 13, 2018, at 9:49 PM, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Um > War makers. ;) > > Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone > > ------ Original message------ > From: Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss > Date: Tue, Feb 13, 2018 2:16 PM > To: Peace-discuss List; > Cc: > Subject:[Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? > > http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_pat_buchanan/is_us_being_sucked_into_syria_s_war > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 14 12:54:14 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 12:54:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE on the Air 2/13/18 In-Reply-To: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> Message-ID: Carl Did I give you permission to read my statement, made to a couple friends in relation to the “Panel on Women” against war recently? No, I did not. Your as usual negativity towards everyone in the community coming under the banner of “Democrat” is likely one of the reasons your “we” in relation to AWARE on the “Air” is now only “you.” On Feb 13, 2018, at 17:51, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek9tnlk1Dxs Topics include ~ A shameful attempt by local Democrats to co-opt anti-war sentiment re Korea ~ FOA (Friend of AWARE) Paul Street destroys the second greatest deleterious myth in US politics ### _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C1e08dcf597a44914303f08d5734d74ab%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636541698855575309&sdata=0iZgkcot5IfcVsvzkQTFz1RA%2B8jLUdCmysfYQa%2BqeRs%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 14 13:18:04 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 07:18:04 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE on the Air 2/13/18 In-Reply-To: References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> Message-ID: <97CFA1BA-FEDC-4F56-A1B1-6AE83882FCCD@gmail.com> Karen— That was your public account of the panel, which I hoped you’d present on the tv program. I think we should be concerned that soi-disant liberals are making such efforts to declare what can’t be said. Regards, CGE > On Feb 14, 2018, at 6:54 AM, Karen Aram wrote: > > Carl > > Did I give you permission to read my statement, made to a couple friends in relation to the “Panel on Women” against war recently? > > No, I did not. Your as usual negativity towards everyone in the community coming under the banner of “Democrat” is likely one of the reasons your “we” in relation to AWARE on the “Air” is now only “you.” > > >> On Feb 13, 2018, at 17:51, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: >> >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek9tnlk1Dxs >> >> Topics include >> >> ~ A shameful attempt by local Democrats to co-opt anti-war sentiment re Korea >> >> ~ FOA (Friend of AWARE) Paul Street destroys the second greatest deleterious myth in US politics >> >> ### >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C1e08dcf597a44914303f08d5734d74ab%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636541698855575309&sdata=0iZgkcot5IfcVsvzkQTFz1RA%2B8jLUdCmysfYQa%2BqeRs%3D&reserved=0 > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 14 13:25:21 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 13:25:21 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE on the Air 2/13/18 In-Reply-To: <97CFA1BA-FEDC-4F56-A1B1-6AE83882FCCD@gmail.com> References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> <97CFA1BA-FEDC-4F56-A1B1-6AE83882FCCD@gmail.com> Message-ID: No, that was not meant for publication by you. If I had been on the program, I might have read it, I would have discussed it, but you had no permission to use my statement made to a few friends who couldn’t or wouldn’t make it to the program. My having to defend Bob Naiman is not something I like doing, but one must give credit where credit is due. He made it clear that the US is responsible for the policies provoking war with N.K. He did not blame Trump. He made it clear that its US foreign policy that began with Obama, which is responsible for the situation, and beginning with the war in Korea in the 50’s. There is no hope for an anti-war movement in our town, a real anti-war movement in a town that is capable of bringing out thousands, but AWARE can’t get beyond 13 people, on good days, unless we stop playing the blame game. That is “the Democrats did it.” anymore than those who assume all began with Trump and the Republicans. Negativity towards everyone who doesn’t agree with us, is not conducive to uniting in common cause, or ending wars. It takes more than just “talking” about war to end it. On Feb 14, 2018, at 05:18, C G Estabrook > wrote: Karen— That was your public account of the panel, which I hoped you’d present on the tv program. I think we should be concerned that soi-disant liberals are making such efforts to declare what can’t be said. Regards, CGE On Feb 14, 2018, at 6:54 AM, Karen Aram > wrote: Carl Did I give you permission to read my statement, made to a couple friends in relation to the “Panel on Women” against war recently? No, I did not. Your as usual negativity towards everyone in the community coming under the banner of “Democrat” is likely one of the reasons your “we” in relation to AWARE on the “Air” is now only “you.” On Feb 13, 2018, at 17:51, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek9tnlk1Dxs Topics include ~ A shameful attempt by local Democrats to co-opt anti-war sentiment re Korea ~ FOA (Friend of AWARE) Paul Street destroys the second greatest deleterious myth in US politics ### _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C1e08dcf597a44914303f08d5734d74ab%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636541698855575309&sdata=0iZgkcot5IfcVsvzkQTFz1RA%2B8jLUdCmysfYQa%2BqeRs%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 14 13:34:36 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 13:34:36 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Whitey In News Gazoo 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: copier-202 at law.uiuc.edu [mailto:copier-202 at law.uiuc.edu] Sent: Monday, February 01, 2010 1:49 PM To: Carrell, Susan ; Boyle, Francis Subject: Whitey -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 3233_001.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 127414 bytes Desc: 3233_001.pdf URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 14 14:03:18 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 08:03:18 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Of course AWARE - and the entire peace movement - means to overthrow the government, if by ‘the government’ we mean its effective actions around the world, spreading war and immiseration. > On Feb 12, 2018, at 12:33 PM, Karen Aram wrote: > > The suggestion that AWARE has any interest in overthrowing the government, is about as absurd as Democrats singing the “International” or being referred to as “leftists.” They maybe “left" of the right wing, but thats as far as it goes. > > >> On Feb 12, 2018, at 10:28, John W. via Peace > wrote: >> >> >> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:50 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace > wrote: >> >> AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. >> >> Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their operation in March. >> >> It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine Avionics' in Champaign >. >> >> Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. >> >> I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign > - 2029 South Neil Street. >> >> A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. >> >> It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. >> >> I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. >> >> We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. >> >> >> Yes, that's what Fidel and Chairman Mao said. ;-) >> >> >> >> Recall Marx and the Red Lion: >. >> >> Solidarity and salubrity, CGE >> >> Virus-free. www.avg.com _______________________________________________ >> Peace mailing list >> Peace at lists.chambana.net >> https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=4uca8n8A%2BTY75uO3VYfz3Sqzb9CYFZ4dzBdbK6%2F%2B8hM%3D&reserved=0 > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 14 14:20:08 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 08:20:08 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] AWARE on the Air 2/13/18 In-Reply-To: References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> <97CFA1BA-FEDC-4F56-A1B1-6AE83882FCCD@gmail.com> Message-ID: <6BF53444-D14D-4488-AFB6-138B9A3E27F0@gmail.com> For a serious discussion of US policy toward the DPRK, I read the following on AWARE on the Air: . "Brainwashed Americans believe that Kim Jong-un is responsible for the confrontation between Pyongyang and Washington, but nothing could be further from the truth. The real problem is not Kim’s nuclear weapons but Washington’s 65 year-long military occupation that continues to reinforce a political solution that was arbitrarily imposed on a sovereign nation in order to split the country in two, install a puppet regime in the south, establish a permanent military presence to defend US commercial interests, and maintain control of a strategically-located territory that is a critical part of Washington’s plan to encircle Russia and China to remain the dominant global power throughout the century…" —CGE > On Feb 14, 2018, at 7:25 AM, Karen Aram via Peace wrote: > > No, that was not meant for publication by you. If I had been on the program, I might have read it, I would have discussed it, but you had no permission to use my statement made to a few friends who couldn’t or wouldn’t make it to the program. > > My having to defend Bob Naiman is not something I like doing, but one must give credit where credit is due. He made it clear that the US is responsible for the policies provoking war with N.K. He did not blame Trump. He made it clear that its US foreign policy that began with Obama, which is responsible for the situation, and beginning with the war in Korea in the 50’s. > > There is no hope for an anti-war movement in our town, a real anti-war movement in a town that is capable of bringing out thousands, but AWARE can’t get beyond 13 people, on good days, unless we stop playing the blame game. That is “the Democrats did it.” anymore than those who assume all began with Trump and the Republicans. > > Negativity towards everyone who doesn’t agree with us, is not conducive to uniting in common cause, or ending wars. It takes more than just “talking” about war to end it. > >> On Feb 14, 2018, at 05:18, C G Estabrook wrote: >> >> Karen— >> >> That was your public account of the panel, which I hoped you’d present on the tv program. >> >> I think we should be concerned that soi-disant liberals are making such efforts to declare what can’t be said. >> >> Regards, CGE >> >> >>> On Feb 14, 2018, at 6:54 AM, Karen Aram wrote: >>> >>> Carl >>> >>> Did I give you permission to read my statement, made to a couple friends in relation to the “Panel on Women” against war recently? >>> >>> No, I did not. Your as usual negativity towards everyone in the community coming under the banner of “Democrat” is likely one of the reasons your “we” in relation to AWARE on the “Air” is now only “you.” >>> >>> >>>> On Feb 13, 2018, at 17:51, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: >>>> >>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek9tnlk1Dxs >>>> >>>> Topics include >>>> >>>> ~ A shameful attempt by local Democrats to co-opt anti-war sentiment re Korea >>>> >>>> ~ FOA (Friend of AWARE) Paul Street destroys the second greatest deleterious myth in US politics >>>> >>>> ### >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>>> https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C1e08dcf597a44914303f08d5734d74ab%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636541698855575309&sdata=0iZgkcot5IfcVsvzkQTFz1RA%2B8jLUdCmysfYQa%2BqeRs%3D&reserved=0 >>> >> > > _______________________________________________ > Peace mailing list > Peace at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 14 14:32:53 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 14:32:53 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: It’s not going to happen unless we unite with other anti-war groups, but as you say in reference to the USG: they pit one against the other,” but it appears to occur within the “Left,” and amongst various anti war groups, to such an extent, it will likely never happen. As to your new coffee shop, sorry, too far for me, and its in a supermarket, not very appealing. Though I haven’t been there, only to the supermarket, so I shouldn’t critique. Maybe you’ll attract some newcomers, from that area, that would be nice. On Feb 14, 2018, at 06:03, C G Estabrook > wrote: Of course AWARE - and the entire peace movement - means to overthrow the government, if by ‘the government’ we mean its effective actions around the world, spreading war and immiseration. On Feb 12, 2018, at 12:33 PM, Karen Aram > wrote: The suggestion that AWARE has any interest in overthrowing the government, is about as absurd as Democrats singing the “International” or being referred to as “leftists.” They maybe “left" of the right wing, but thats as far as it goes. On Feb 12, 2018, at 10:28, John W. via Peace > wrote: On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:50 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace > wrote: AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their operation in March. It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine Avionics' in Champaign >. Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign > - 2029 South Neil Street. A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. Yes, that's what Fidel and Chairman Mao said. ;-) Recall Marx and the Red Lion: >. Solidarity and salubrity, CGE [https://ipmcdn.avast.com/images/icons/icon-envelope-tick-green-avg-v1.png] Virus-free. www.avg.com _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=4uca8n8A%2BTY75uO3VYfz3Sqzb9CYFZ4dzBdbK6%2F%2B8hM%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 14 14:50:35 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 08:50:35 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0D5C3419-B1D0-492E-AB93-DA7EE313D4E6@gmail.com> Take a look at the ‘new coffee shop’ as a place for AWARE’s Sunday meetings: >. It’s a large space on the second floor on S. Neil Street, with good parking. We can consider other places, before we have to move next month. > On Feb 14, 2018, at 8:32 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > It’s not going to happen unless we unite with other anti-war groups, but as you say in reference to the USG: they pit one against the other,” but it appears to occur within the “Left,” and amongst various anti war groups, to such an extent, it will likely never happen. > > As to your new coffee shop, sorry, too far for me, and its in a supermarket, not very appealing. Though I haven’t been there, only to the supermarket, so I shouldn’t critique. Maybe you’ll attract some newcomers, from that area, that would be nice. > >> On Feb 14, 2018, at 06:03, C G Estabrook > wrote: >> >> Of course AWARE - and the entire peace movement - means to overthrow the government, if by ‘the government’ we mean its effective actions around the world, spreading war and immiseration. >> >> >>> On Feb 12, 2018, at 12:33 PM, Karen Aram > wrote: >>> >>> The suggestion that AWARE has any interest in overthrowing the government, is about as absurd as Democrats singing the “International” or being referred to as “leftists.” They maybe “left" of the right wing, but thats as far as it goes. >>> >>> >>>> On Feb 12, 2018, at 10:28, John W. via Peace > wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:50 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace > wrote: >>>> >>>> AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. >>>> >>>> Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their operation in March. >>>> >>>> It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine Avionics' in Champaign >. >>>> >>>> Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. >>>> >>>> I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign > - 2029 South Neil Street. >>>> >>>> A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. >>>> >>>> It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. >>>> >>>> I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. >>>> >>>> We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. >>>> >>>> >>>> Yes, that's what Fidel and Chairman Mao said. ;-) >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> Recall Marx and the Red Lion: >. >>>> >>>> Solidarity and salubrity, CGE >>>> >>>> Virus-free. www.avg.com _______________________________________________ >>>> Peace mailing list >>>> Peace at lists.chambana.net >>>> https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=4uca8n8A%2BTY75uO3VYfz3Sqzb9CYFZ4dzBdbK6%2F%2B8hM%3D&reserved=0 >>> >> > > _______________________________________________ > 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 davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Wed Feb 14 15:02:46 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 09:02:46 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Regime Change Fails: Is A Military Coup Or Invasion Of Venezuela Next? Message-ID: <004301d3a5a4$dfc251b0$9f46f510$@comcast.net> Regime Change Fails: Is A Military Coup Or Invasion Of Venezuela Next? By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance February 13, 2018 | Educate! Speaking at his alma mater, the University of Texas, on February 1, Secretary of State Tillerson suggested a potential military coup in Venezuela. Tillerson then visited allied Latin American countries urging regime change and more economic sanctions on Venezuela. Tillerson is considering banning the processing or sale of Venezuelan oil in the United States and is discouraging other countries from buying Venezuelan oil. Further, the US is laying the groundwork for war against Venezuela. In a series of tweets, Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican from Florida, where many Venezuelan oligarchs live, called for a military coup in Venezueala. How absurd — remove an elected president with a military coup to restore democracy? Does that pass the straight face test? This refrain of Rubio and Tillerson seems to be the nonsensical public position of US policy. The US has been seeking regime change in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998. Trump joined Presidents Obama and Bush before him in continuing efforts to change the government and put in place a US-friendly oligarch government. They came closest in 2002 when a military coup removed Chavez. The Commander-in-Chief of the Venezuelan military announced Chavez had resigned and Pedro Carmona, of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce, became interim president. Carmona dissolved the National Assembly and Supreme Court and declared the Constitution void. The people surrounded the presidential palace and seized television stations, Carmona resigned and fled to Colombia. Within 47 hours, civilians and the military restored Chavez to the presidency. The coup was a turning point that strengthened the Bolivarian Revolution, showed people could defeat a coup and exposed the US and oligarchs. US Regime Change Tactics Have Failed In Venezuela The US and oligarchs continue their efforts to reverse the Bolivarian Revolution. The US has a long history of regime change around the world and has tried all of its regime change tools in Venezuela. So far they have failed. Economic War Destroying the Venezuelan economy has been an ongoing campaign by the US and oligarchs. It is reminiscent of the US coup in Chile which ended the presidency of Salvador Allende. To create the environment for the Chilean coup, President Nixon ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream.” Henry Kissinger devised the coup noting a billion dollars of investment were at stake. He also feared the “the insidious model effect” of the example of Chile leading to other countries breaking from the United States and capitalism. Kissinger’s top deputy at the National Security Council, Viron Vaky, opposed the coup saying, “What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets . If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat . . . our survival.” These objections hold true regarding recent US coups, including in Venezuela and Honduras, Ukraine and Brazil, among others. Allende died in the coup and wrote his last words to the people of Chile, especially the workers, “Long live the people! Long live the workers!” He was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, a brutal and violent dictator. For decades the US has been fighting an economic war, “making the economy scream,” in Venezuela. Wealthy Venezuelans have been conducting economic sabotage aided by the US with sanctions and other tactics. This includes hoarding food, supplies and other necessities in warehouses or in Colombia while Venezuelan markets are bare. The scarcity is used to fuel protests, e.g. “The March of the Empty Pots,” a carbon copy of marches in Chile before the September 11, 1973 coup. Economic warfare has escalated through Obama and under Trump, with Tillerson now urging economic sanctions on oil. President Maduro recognized the economic hardship but also said sanctions open up the opportunity for a new era of independence and “begins the stage of post-domination by the United States, with Venezuela again at the center of this struggle for dignity and liberation.” The second-in-command of the Socialist Party, Diosdado Cabello, said, “[if they] apply sanctions, we will apply elections.” Opposition Protests Another common US regime change tool is supporting opposition protests. The Trump administration renewed regime change operations in Venezuela and the anti-Maduro protests, which began under Obama, grew more violent. The opposition protests included barricades, snipers and murders as well as widespread injuries. When police arrested those using violence, the US claimed Venezuela opposed free speech and protests. The opposition tried to use the crack down against violence to achieve the US tactic of dividing the military. The US and western media ignored opposition violence and blamed the Venezuelan government instead. Violence became so extreme it looked like the opposition was pushing Venezuela into a Syrian-type civil war. Instead, opposition violence backfired on them. Violent protests are part of US regime change repertoire. This was demonstrated in the US coup in Ukraine, where the US spent $5 billion to organize government opposition including US and EU funding violent protesters. This tactic was used in early US coups like the 1953 Iran coup of Prime Minister Mossadegh. The US has admitted organizing this coup that ended Iran’s brief experience with democracy. Like Venezuela, a key reason for the Iran coup was control of the nation’s oil. Funding Opposition There has been massive US investment in creating opposition to the Venezuelan government. Tens of millions of dollars have been openly spent through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy and other related US regime change agencies. It is unknown how much the CIA has spent from its secret budget, but the CIA has also been involved in Venezuela. Current CIA director, Mike Pompeo, said he is “hopeful there can be a transition in Venezuela.” The United States has also educated leaders of opposition movements, e.g. Leopoldo López was educated at private schools in the US, including the CIA-associated Kenyon College. He was groomed at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and made repeated visits to the regime change agency, the National Republican Institute. Elections While the US calls Venezuela a dictatorship, it is in fact a strong democracy with an excellent voting system. Election observers monitor every election. In 2016, the economic crisis led to the opposition winning a majority in the National Assembly. One of their first acts was to pass an amnesty law. The law described 17 years of crimes including violent felonies and terrorism committed by the opposition. It was an admission of crimes back to the 2002 coup and through 2016. The law demonstrated violent treason against Venezuela. One month later, the Supreme Court of Venezuela ruled the amnesty law was unconstitutional. US media, regime change advocates and anti-Venezuela human rights groups attacked the Supreme Court decision, showing their alliance with the admitted criminals. Years of violent protests and regime change attempts, and then admitting their crimes in an amnesty bill, have caused those opposed to the Bolivarian Revolution to lose power and become unpopular. In three recent elections Maduro’s party won regional, local and the Constituent Assembly elections. The electoral commission announced the presidential election will be held on April 22. Maduro will run for re-election with the United Socialist Party. Opposition leaders such as Henry Ramos and Henri Falcon have expressed interest in running, but the opposition has not decided whether to participate. Henrique Capriles, who narrowly lost to Maduro in the last election, was banned from running for office because of irregularities in his campaign, including taking foreign donations. Capriles has been a leader of the violent protests. When his ban was announced he called for protests to remove Maduro from office. Also banned was Leopoldo Lopez, another leader of the violent protests who is under house arrest serving a thirteen year sentence for inciting violence. Now, the United States says it will not recognize the presidential election and urges a military coup. For two years, the opposition demanded presidential elections, but now it is unclear whether they will participate. They know they are unpopular and Maduro is likely to be re-elected. Is War Against Venezuela Coming? A military coup faces challenges in Venezuela as the people, including the military, are well educated about US imperialism. Tillerson openly urging a military coup makes it more difficult. The government and opposition recently negotiated a peace settlement entitled “Democratic Coexistence Agreement for Venezuela.” They agreed on all of the issues including ending economic sanctions, scheduling elections and more. They agreed on the date of the next presidential election. It was originally planned for March, but in a concession to the opposition, it was rescheduled for the end of April. Maduro signed the agreement even though the opposition did not attend the signing ceremony. They backed out after Colombian President Santos, who was meeting with Secretary Tillerson, called and told them not to sign. Maduro will now make the agreement a public issue by allowing the people of Venezuela to sign it. Not recognizing elections and urging a military coup are bad enough, but more disconcerting is that Admiral Kurt Tidd, head of Southcom, held a closed door meeting in Colombia after Tillerson’s visit. The topic was “regional destabilization” and Venezuela was a focus. A military attack on Venezuela from its Colombian and Brazilian borders is not far fetched. In January, the NY Times asked, “Should the US military invade Venezuela?” President Trump said the US is considering US military force against Venezuela. His chief of staff, John Kelly, was formerly the general in charge of Southcom. Tidd has claimed the crisis, created in large part by the economic war against Venezuela, requires military action for humanitarian reasons. War preparations are already underway in Colombia, which plays the role of Israel for the US in Latin America. The coup government in Brazil, increased its military budget 36 percent, and participated in Operation: America United, the largest joint military exercise in Latin American history. It was one of four military exercises by the US with Brazil, Colombia and Peru in Latin America in 2017. The US Congress ordered the Pentagon to develop military contingencies for Venezuela in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. While there is opposition to US military bases, James Patrick Jordan explains, on our radio show, the US has military bases in Colombia and the Caribbean and military agreements with countries in the region; and therefore, Venezuela is already surrounded. The United States is targeting Venezuela because the Bolivarian Revolution provides an example against US imperialism. An invasion of Venezuela will become another war-quagmire that kills innocent Venezuelans, US soldiers and others over control of oil. People in the United States who support the self-determination of countries should show solidarity with Venezuelans, expose the US agenda and publicly denounce regime change. We need to educate people about what is really happening in Venezuela to overcome the false media coverage. Share this article and the interview we did on Clearing The FOG about Venezuela and the US’ role in Latin America. The fate of Venezuela is critical for millions of Latin Americans struggling under the domination of US Empire. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 14 15:33:06 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 15:33:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Professor Francis Boyle on The US War Powers | KPFA In-Reply-To: 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 Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 9:32 AM To: Boyle, Francis A Subject: Professor Francis Boyle on The US War Powers | KPFA [https://kpfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/hqdefault.jpg] Professor Francis Boyle on The US War Powers | KPFA Today on Flashpoints: Who has the power to make war for America? Today we feature a mini teach in on the US war powers and the imperial presidency with author, activist Professor Francis Boyle. Also, Julian Assange faces a setback from a Britian court regarding his freedom and safety. https://kpfa.org/episode/flashpoints-february-13-2018/ Sent from Mail for Windows 10 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 14 15:35:25 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 15:35:25 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Good analysis of the Korean issue on "Crosstalk" today. Message-ID: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xsSrwLj6tA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From divisek at yahoo.com Wed Feb 14 15:45:39 2018 From: divisek at yahoo.com (Dianna Visek) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 15:45:39 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1537619108.729389.1518623139204@mail.yahoo.com> Buchanan is a historian and longtime critic of America's wars.  He wrote a great book delineating all of our conflicts up to the time of writing: A Republic, Not an Empire | | | | | | | | | | | A Republic, Not an Empire Now available in paperback. All but predicting the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Buchanan exami... | | | On Tuesday, February 13, 2018, 9:48:13 PM CST, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss wrote: I never thought I would see Patrick Buchanan urge caution on the part of carmakers.  Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Dianna Visek via Peace-discussDate: Tue, Feb 13, 2018 2:16 PMTo: Peace-discuss List;Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_pat_buchanan/is_us_being_sucked_into_syria_s_war _______________________________________________ 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 Wed Feb 14 16:00:18 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 10:00:18 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Good analysis of the Korean issue on "Crosstalk" today. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: What did they say? > On Feb 14, 2018, at 9:35 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xsSrwLj6tA _______________________________________________ > 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 cwjenne at gmail.com Wed Feb 14 16:20:56 2018 From: cwjenne at gmail.com (Wayne Jenne) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 16:20:56 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Peace-discuss Digest, Vol 169, Issue 102 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 8:33 AM wrote: > Send Peace-discuss mailing list submissions to > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > peace-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net > > You can reach the person managing the list at > peace-discuss-owner at lists.chambana.net > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of Peace-discuss digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Re: [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE (C G Estabrook) > 2. Re: [Peace] AWARE on the Air 2/13/18 (C G Estabrook) > 3. Re: [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE (Karen Aram) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 08:03:18 -0600 > From: C G Estabrook > To: Karen Aram > Cc: "John W." , "Peace-discuss List > \(peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net\)" > > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE > Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Of course AWARE - and the entire peace movement - means to overthrow the > government, if by ‘the government’ we mean its effective actions around the > world, spreading war and immiseration. > > > > On Feb 12, 2018, at 12:33 PM, Karen Aram wrote: > > > > The suggestion that AWARE has any interest in overthrowing the > government, is about as absurd as Democrats singing the “International” or > being referred to as “leftists.” They maybe “left" of the right wing, but > thats as far as it goes. > > > > > >> On Feb 12, 2018, at 10:28, John W. via Peace > wrote: > >> > >> > >> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:50 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace < > peace at lists.chambana.net > wrote: > >> > >> AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. > >> > >> Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their > operation in March. > >> > >> It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine > Avionics' in Champaign < > https://www.facebook.com/Flying-Machine-Avionics-1321317537993963/ < > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FFlying-Machine-Avionics-1321317537993963%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=JgINkyeZ3%2FtpNRpjNaxPGx9139R3AvXEQSqRVbhaXOw%3D&reserved=0 > >>. > >> > >> Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. > >> > >> I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign < > https://www.facebook.com/HarvestMarketChampaign/ < > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FHarvestMarketChampaign%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=KspEEicYcGBByOLAFjg3Jz167Di%2BZWxGby7GNKZxjL8%3D&reserved=0>> > - 2029 South Neil Street. > >> > >> A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we > want) on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. > >> > >> It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a > look. > >> > >> I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. > >> > >> We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the > government. > >> > >> > >> Yes, that's what Fidel and Chairman Mao said. ;-) > >> > >> > >> > >> Recall Marx and the Red Lion: < > https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/the-red-lion < > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.londonremembers.com%2Fmemorials%2Fthe-red-lion&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=z%2Fti4w5L2jphpge1lHubFUXNBejc8LAYxQ0jDzoYvyE%3D&reserved=0 > >>. > >> > >> Solidarity and salubrity, CGE > >> > >> < > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.avg.com%2Femail-signature%3Futm_medium%3Demail%26utm_source%3Dlink%26utm_campaign%3Dsig-email%26utm_content%3Dwebmail&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=yjVogxhM3gHflPNmMNoMrIo5zSya5znD0j4zJtHdOOg%3D&reserved=0> > Virus-free. www.avg.com < > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.avg.com%2Femail-signature%3Futm_medium%3Demail%26utm_source%3Dlink%26utm_campaign%3Dsig-email%26utm_content%3Dwebmail&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=yjVogxhM3gHflPNmMNoMrIo5zSya5znD0j4zJtHdOOg%3D&reserved=0> > _______________________________________________ > >> Peace mailing list > >> Peace at lists.chambana.net > >> > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=4uca8n8A%2BTY75uO3VYfz3Sqzb9CYFZ4dzBdbK6%2F%2B8hM%3D&reserved=0 > > > > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: < > http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20180214/5db6ce29/attachment-0001.html > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 08:20:08 -0600 > From: C G Estabrook > To: Karen Aram > Cc: "peace-discuss at anti-war.net" , peace > > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] AWARE on the Air 2/13/18 > Message-ID: <6BF53444-D14D-4488-AFB6-138B9A3E27F0 at gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 > > For a serious discussion of US policy toward the DPRK, I read the > following on AWARE on the Air: > > < > https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/06/if-theres-a-war-in-korea-blame-trump/ > >. > > "Brainwashed Americans believe that Kim Jong-un is responsible for the > confrontation between Pyongyang and Washington, but nothing could be > further from the truth. The real problem is not Kim’s nuclear weapons but > Washington’s 65 year-long military occupation that continues to reinforce a > political solution that was arbitrarily imposed on a sovereign nation in > order to split the country in two, install a puppet regime in the south, > establish a permanent military presence to defend US commercial interests, > and maintain control of a strategically-located territory that is a > critical part of Washington’s plan to encircle Russia and China to remain > the dominant global power throughout the century…" > > —CGE > > > On Feb 14, 2018, at 7:25 AM, Karen Aram via Peace < > peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > > > No, that was not meant for publication by you. If I had been on the > program, I might have read it, I would have discussed it, but you had no > permission to use my statement made to a few friends who couldn’t or > wouldn’t make it to the program. > > > > My having to defend Bob Naiman is not something I like doing, but one > must give credit where credit is due. He made it clear that the US is > responsible for the policies provoking war with N.K. He did not blame > Trump. He made it clear that its US foreign policy that began with Obama, > which is responsible for the situation, and beginning with the war in Korea > in the 50’s. > > > > There is no hope for an anti-war movement in our town, a real anti-war > movement in a town that is capable of bringing out thousands, but AWARE > can’t get beyond 13 people, on good days, unless we stop playing the blame > game. That is “the Democrats did it.” anymore than those who assume all > began with Trump and the Republicans. > > > > Negativity towards everyone who doesn’t agree with us, is not conducive > to uniting in common cause, or ending wars. It takes more than just > “talking” about war to end it. > > > >> On Feb 14, 2018, at 05:18, C G Estabrook wrote: > >> > >> Karen— > >> > >> That was your public account of the panel, which I hoped you’d present > on the tv program. > >> > >> I think we should be concerned that soi-disant liberals are making such > efforts to declare what can’t be said. > >> > >> Regards, CGE > >> > >> > >>> On Feb 14, 2018, at 6:54 AM, Karen Aram wrote: > >>> > >>> Carl > >>> > >>> Did I give you permission to read my statement, made to a couple > friends in relation to the “Panel on Women” against war recently? > >>> > >>> No, I did not. Your as usual negativity towards everyone in the > community coming under the banner of “Democrat” is likely one of the > reasons your “we” in relation to AWARE on the “Air” is now only “you.” > >>> > >>> > >>>> On Feb 13, 2018, at 17:51, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > >>>> > >>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek9tnlk1Dxs > >>>> > >>>> Topics include > >>>> > >>>> ~ A shameful attempt by local Democrats to co-opt anti-war sentiment > re Korea > >>>> > >>>> ~ FOA (Friend of AWARE) Paul Street destroys the second greatest > deleterious myth in US politics > >>>> > >>>> ### > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> _______________________________________________ > >>>> Peace-discuss mailing list > >>>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > >>>> > https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C1e08dcf597a44914303f08d5734d74ab%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636541698855575309&sdata=0iZgkcot5IfcVsvzkQTFz1RA%2B8jLUdCmysfYQa%2BqeRs%3D&reserved=0 > >>> > >> > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Peace mailing list > > Peace at lists.chambana.net > > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 14:32:53 +0000 > From: Karen Aram > To: C G Estabrook > Cc: "John W." , "Peace-discuss List > \(peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net\)" > > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE > Message-ID: > < > SN1PR08MB1677607E09E4B6CD6CD93475A3F50 at SN1PR08MB1677.namprd08.prod.outlook.com > > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > It’s not going to happen unless we unite with other anti-war groups, but > as you say in reference to the USG: they pit one against the other,” but it > appears to occur within the “Left,” and amongst various anti war groups, to > such an extent, it will likely never happen. > > As to your new coffee shop, sorry, too far for me, and its in a > supermarket, not very appealing. Though I haven’t been there, only to the > supermarket, so I shouldn’t critique. Maybe you’ll attract some newcomers, > from that area, that would be nice. > > On Feb 14, 2018, at 06:03, C G Estabrook cgestabrook at gmail.com>> wrote: > > Of course AWARE - and the entire peace movement - means to overthrow the > government, if by ‘the government’ we mean its effective actions around the > world, spreading war and immiseration. > > > On Feb 12, 2018, at 12:33 PM, Karen Aram karenaram at hotmail.com>> wrote: > > The suggestion that AWARE has any interest in overthrowing the government, > is about as absurd as Democrats singing the “International” or being > referred to as “leftists.” They maybe “left" of the right wing, but thats > as far as it goes. > > > On Feb 12, 2018, at 10:28, John W. via Peace > wrote: > > > On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:50 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace < > peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. > > Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their > operation in March. > > It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine > Avionics' in Champaign < > https://www.facebook.com/Flying-Machine-Avionics-1321317537993963/< > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FFlying-Machine-Avionics-1321317537993963%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=JgINkyeZ3%2FtpNRpjNaxPGx9139R3AvXEQSqRVbhaXOw%3D&reserved=0 > >>. > > Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. > > I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign < > https://www.facebook.com/HarvestMarketChampaign/< > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FHarvestMarketChampaign%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=KspEEicYcGBByOLAFjg3Jz167Di%2BZWxGby7GNKZxjL8%3D&reserved=0>> > - 2029 South Neil Street. > > A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) > on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. > > It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. > > I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. > > We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. > > > Yes, that's what Fidel and Chairman Mao said. ;-) > > > > Recall Marx and the Red Lion: < > https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/the-red-lion< > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.londonremembers.com%2Fmemorials%2Fthe-red-lion&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=z%2Fti4w5L2jphpge1lHubFUXNBejc8LAYxQ0jDzoYvyE%3D&reserved=0 > >>. > > Solidarity and salubrity, CGE > > [https://ipmcdn.avast.com/images/icons/icon-envelope-tick-green-avg-v1.png > ]< > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.avg.com%2Femail-signature%3Futm_medium%3Demail%26utm_source%3Dlink%26utm_campaign%3Dsig-email%26utm_content%3Dwebmail&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=yjVogxhM3gHflPNmMNoMrIo5zSya5znD0j4zJtHdOOg%3D&reserved=0> > Virus-free. www.avg.com< > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.avg.com%2Femail-signature%3Futm_medium%3Demail%26utm_source%3Dlink%26utm_campaign%3Dsig-email%26utm_content%3Dwebmail&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=yjVogxhM3gHflPNmMNoMrIo5zSya5znD0j4zJtHdOOg%3D&reserved=0 > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace mailing list > Peace at lists.chambana.net > > https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=4uca8n8A%2BTY75uO3VYfz3Sqzb9CYFZ4dzBdbK6%2F%2B8hM%3D&reserved=0 > > > > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: < > http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20180214/b8c9f2da/attachment.html > > > > ------------------------------ > > Subject: Digest Footer > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > ------------------------------ > > End of Peace-discuss Digest, Vol 169, Issue 102 > *********************************************** > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 14 18:43:02 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 18:43:02 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Good analysis of the Korean issue on "Crosstalk" today. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Carl You have to listen to it. On Feb 14, 2018, at 08:00, Carl G. Estabrook > wrote: What did they say? On Feb 14, 2018, at 9:35 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xsSrwLj6tA _______________________________________________ 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 Wed Feb 14 18:45:05 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 12:45:05 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Good analysis of the Korean issue on "Crosstalk" today. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I’m old and deaf. > On Feb 14, 2018, at 12:43 PM, Karen Aram wrote: > > Carl > > You have to listen to it. > >> On Feb 14, 2018, at 08:00, Carl G. Estabrook > wrote: >> >> What did they say? >> >> >>> On Feb 14, 2018, at 9:35 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>> >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xsSrwLj6tA _______________________________________________ >>> 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 Feb 14 18:56:19 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 18:56:19 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Meeting place for AWARE In-Reply-To: <0D5C3419-B1D0-492E-AB93-DA7EE313D4E6@gmail.com> References: <0D5C3419-B1D0-492E-AB93-DA7EE313D4E6@gmail.com> Message-ID: Carl, you should go with the venue for that which Stuart, Karen M., David Green, and Doug Clough prefer. If they like it, thats what’s important, as they are and have been major contributors to AWARE, I’m referring to work and effort contributions. On Feb 14, 2018, at 06:50, C G Estabrook > wrote: Take a look at the ‘new coffee shop’ as a place for AWARE’s Sunday meetings: >. It’s a large space on the second floor on S. Neil Street, with good parking. We can consider other places, before we have to move next month. On Feb 14, 2018, at 8:32 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: It’s not going to happen unless we unite with other anti-war groups, but as you say in reference to the USG: they pit one against the other,” but it appears to occur within the “Left,” and amongst various anti war groups, to such an extent, it will likely never happen. As to your new coffee shop, sorry, too far for me, and its in a supermarket, not very appealing. Though I haven’t been there, only to the supermarket, so I shouldn’t critique. Maybe you’ll attract some newcomers, from that area, that would be nice. On Feb 14, 2018, at 06:03, C G Estabrook > wrote: Of course AWARE - and the entire peace movement - means to overthrow the government, if by ‘the government’ we mean its effective actions around the world, spreading war and immiseration. On Feb 12, 2018, at 12:33 PM, Karen Aram > wrote: The suggestion that AWARE has any interest in overthrowing the government, is about as absurd as Democrats singing the “International” or being referred to as “leftists.” They maybe “left" of the right wing, but thats as far as it goes. On Feb 12, 2018, at 10:28, John W. via Peace > wrote: On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:50 PM, C G Estabrook via Peace > wrote: AWARE’s Sunday night meeting (5-6pm) needs a new venue. Our congenial hosts at Coffee Connection in Urbana are closing up their operation in March. It’s been suggested we move to their related venue, 'Flying Machine Avionics' in Champaign >. Avionics is a pleasant coffee shop, but small - and no beer or wine. I have another suggestion: Harvest Market in Champaign > - 2029 South Neil Street. A good coffee shop, beer & wine, and much room (even private, if we want) on the second floor. Also easy parking. And food. It’s new, spacious, and not crowded. AWAREists might want to take a look. I propose we meet there, beginning the first Sunday in March. We should be as comfortable as possible while overthrowing the government. Yes, that's what Fidel and Chairman Mao said. ;-) Recall Marx and the Red Lion: >. Solidarity and salubrity, CGE [https://ipmcdn.avast.com/images/icons/icon-envelope-tick-green-avg-v1.png] Virus-free. www.avg.com _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8a38a98150544198ced608d572468a55%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636540569648718767&sdata=4uca8n8A%2BTY75uO3VYfz3Sqzb9CYFZ4dzBdbK6%2F%2B8hM%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 brussel at illinois.edu Wed Feb 14 20:29:15 2018 From: brussel at illinois.edu (Brussel, Morton K) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 20:29:15 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? In-Reply-To: <1537619108.729389.1518623139204@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1537619108.729389.1518623139204@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Buchanan was a fervent anticommunist cold warrior during Soviet times, but has become more reasonable since. His book about how WWII might have been avoided, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, is useful, if somewhat fanciful. On Feb 14, 2018, at 9:45 AM, Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss > wrote: Buchanan is a historian and longtime critic of America's wars. He wrote a great book delineating all of our conflicts up to the time of writing: A Republic, Not an Empire [https://s.yimg.com/nq/storm/assets/enhancrV2/23/logos/amazon.png] A Republic, Not an Empire Now available in paperback. All but predicting the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Buchanan exami... On Tuesday, February 13, 2018, 9:48:13 PM CST, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss > wrote: I never thought I would see Patrick Buchanan urge caution on the part of carmakers. Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------ From: Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss Date: Tue, Feb 13, 2018 2:16 PM To: Peace-discuss List; Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_pat_buchanan/is_us_being_sucked_into_syria_s_war _______________________________________________ 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 galliher at illinois.edu Wed Feb 14 20:51:59 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 14:51:59 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? In-Reply-To: References: <1537619108.729389.1518623139204@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <9467957C-6D34-45E1-A366-F522124A38BC@illinois.edu> His WWII book might almost be compared to Nicholson Baker’s excellent "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization" (2008). He’s a paleoconservative, bitterly opposed to the neocons and the Iraq War. Also something of a racist, but a cogent critic of US warmaking, at least in this century. —CGE > On Feb 14, 2018, at 2:29 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Buchanan was a fervent anticommunist cold warrior during Soviet times, but has become more reasonable since. His book about how WWII might have been avoided, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, is useful, if somewhat fanciful. > >> On Feb 14, 2018, at 9:45 AM, Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss > wrote: >> >> Buchanan is a historian and longtime critic of America's wars. He wrote a great book delineating all of our conflicts up to the time of writing: >> >> A Republic, Not an Empire >> >> >> >> A Republic, Not an Empire >> Now available in paperback. All but predicting the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Buchanan exami... >> >> >> >> >> >> On Tuesday, February 13, 2018, 9:48:13 PM CST, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss > wrote: >> >> >> I never thought I would see Patrick Buchanan urge caution on the part of warmakers. >> >> Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone >> >> ------ Original message------ >> From: Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss >> Date: Tue, Feb 13, 2018 2:16 PM >> To: Peace-discuss List; >> Cc: >> Subject:[Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? >> >> http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_pat_buchanan/is_us_being_sucked_into_syria_s_war >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 14 21:18:05 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 21:18:05 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? In-Reply-To: <9467957C-6D34-45E1-A366-F522124A38BC@illinois.edu> References: <1537619108.729389.1518623139204@mail.yahoo.com> <9467957C-6D34-45E1-A366-F522124A38BC@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Nothing compares to Nicholson Baker’s “Human Smoke”. I doubt I would appreciate Baker’s other books but I was pleased to note “In 2001 he published Double Fold, in which he accuses certain librarians of lying about the decay of materials and being obsessed with technological fads, at the expense of both the public and historical preservation.” Something I thought was recent, getting rid of books, in favor of technology. A mistake we may live to regret, if the grid ever goes down, as well as elitist in that not everyone has access to technology. On Feb 14, 2018, at 12:51, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: His WWII book might almost be compared to Nicholson Baker’s excellent "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization" (2008). He’s a paleoconservative, bitterly opposed to the neocons and the Iraq War. Also something of a racist, but a cogent critic of US warmaking, at least in this century. —CGE On Feb 14, 2018, at 2:29 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss > wrote: Buchanan was a fervent anticommunist cold warrior during Soviet times, but has become more reasonable since. His book about how WWII might have been avoided, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, is useful, if somewhat fanciful. On Feb 14, 2018, at 9:45 AM, Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss > wrote: Buchanan is a historian and longtime critic of America's wars. He wrote a great book delineating all of our conflicts up to the time of writing: A Republic, Not an Empire [https://s.yimg.com/nq/storm/assets/enhancrV2/23/logos/amazon.png] A Republic, Not an Empire Now available in paperback. All but predicting the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Buchanan exami... On Tuesday, February 13, 2018, 9:48:13 PM CST, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss > wrote: I never thought I would see Patrick Buchanan urge caution on the part of warmakers. Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------ From: Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss Date: Tue, Feb 13, 2018 2:16 PM To: Peace-discuss List; Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_pat_buchanan/is_us_being_sucked_into_syria_s_war _______________________________________________ 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://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C7b0aec3103db40dd893508d573ecd94c%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636542383446142141&sdata=vtRaxcF9g4vKD6Mr5sFLR67F%2ButGYn%2FmFRm1AZs8d6I%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Wed Feb 14 22:27:15 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 22:27:15 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Immigration and Dreamers References: <1817393521.989685.1518647235814.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1817393521.989685.1518647235814@mail.yahoo.com> This article, I think, begins to get at some of the complex issues that lead me to distrust and distance myself from the local movement in support of the Dreamers, although I support the Dreamers themselves. The background regarding NAFTA is particularly important; but we do not find the local immigration rights movement talking about NAFTA, in my recollection. DG Immigration Law is by Nature Exclusionary and Racist | | | | | | | | | | | Immigration Law is by Nature Exclusionary and Racist We didn’t always have a federal immigration bureaucracy. The idea began in the 1870s and 1880s, when we had fini... | | | -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brussel at illinois.edu Wed Feb 14 22:28:03 2018 From: brussel at illinois.edu (Brussel, Morton K) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 22:28:03 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: [ufpj-activist] Video of Debate #2: Is War Ever Justifiable? References: Message-ID: <599ABF35-653B-4E83-B902-20CD58751F31@illinois.edu> Wouldn’t it be helpful to have such a debate here. David Swanson does his homework well. He is, evidently, quite persuasive. Read, or listen. —mkb Begin forwarded message: From: David Swanson > Subject: [ufpj-activist] Video of Debate #2: Is War Ever Justifiable? Date: February 14, 2018 at 6:50:18 AM CST To: David Swanson > Video of Debate #2: Is War Ever Justifiable? By David Swanson http://davidswanson.org/video-of-debate-2-is-war-ever-justifiable/ Our first debate was February 12th. This was our second, held February 13, 2018, at Eastern Mennonite University, moderated by Lisa Schirch. Youtube. Facebook. The two speakers’ bios: Pete Kilner is a writer and military ethicist who served more than 28 years in the Army as an infantryman and professor at the U.S. Military Academy. He deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan to conduct research on combat leadership. A graduate of West Point, he holds an MA in Philosophy from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. in Education from Penn State. David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie and War Is Never Just. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. He holds an MA in philosophy from UVA. No comprehensive effort was made to survey the audience as to the debate’s impact. Indicate your response, please, in the comments section below. These were my prepared remarks: Thanks for hosting this and being here. Pete and I debated last night at Radford. A video is at davidswanson.org. And we agreed, as the majority of this country has agreed for years, that military spending should be reduced. I want it gradually reduced to zero. I don’t know where Pete wants it, but he doesn’t want it at zero. However, I am certain that if military spending were significantly reduced, you would see a reverse arms race, a reduction in threats and hostility abroad, and consequently greater public desire to go on reducing it further. So, in a sense, we don’t need this debate, we just need democracy rather than wars in the name of democracy and a government that goes on year-after-year moving more money out of almost everything else and into militarism. But to build a movement powerful enough to influence the U.S. oligarchy we do need this debate, we do need a clearer understanding that no war can ever be justified, and therefore that dumping over a trillion dollars a year into preparing for a possible just war has to stop. After all, 3 percent of that money could end starvation on earth, 1 percent could end the lack of clean water, a bigger chunk could give us a chance against climate change (rather than serving as the leading cause of climate change). So it’s the institution of war that kills far more than the actual wars, and we can’t build the strength to reduce it as long as people imagine there might be a just war some day. [https://i1.wp.com/davidswanson.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0864.jpg?resize=525%2C689] Pete and I also agreed that numerous wars have been unjust. I’ll talk a little about why the wars he claims were just were actually unjust on their own terms and in isolation. But I think the burden for a just war is even higher than that. I think a war, to do more good than harm, has to do so much more good than harm as to outweigh the damage done by all the admittedly unjust wars as well as by the diversion of funding from where it could save and improve millions of lives rather than wasting them. War is an institution, and for any war to be justified it has to justify all the damage done by the institution. But Pete only named a couple of wars just and a couple unjust without ever giving us a method that would allow us to determine which are which when we turn to all the wars he didn’t label one way or the other. Those include wars he took part in: Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006 Pete claimed the war on Iraq was doing Iraq lots of good. I asked him repeatedly what that good was and never got an answer. He did call the 2003-begun war “imprudent” and a “mistake.” If that’s what you call a war that radically increases the use of the term sociocide (meaning the total destruction of a society), I wonder what level of slaughter is needed before a war gets labeled something harsher like “bad” or “unpleasant” or “mildly regrettable.” One current war that Pete agreed was unjust was the U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen. But will Pete join me in urging U.S. troops to refuse the immoral and illegal order to participate in that war? Isn’t that a moral duty comparable to that of encouraging participation in supposedly just wars? Doesn’t it expose one of the many problems with calling the U.S. military voluntary? Anything else you’re doing voluntarily you’re permitted to quit doing. What is the point of teaching soldiers morality if they aren’t supposed to act on it? [https://i1.wp.com/davidswanson.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0868.jpg?resize=525%2C394] Pete will say that he has explained what a just war is, it’s a war fought because you’ve been attacked. Except that he’ll then readily admit that the United States has been fighting all these wars without having been attacked. So what he actually means is that someone else has been attacked, allowing the United States to step in as a gesture of generosity and assistance. But, as a rule, this stepping in is not appreciated, not requested, not actually helpful, on the contrary catastrophically counterproductive, and also, by the way, illegal. Who died and made the United States the world’s policeman? Nobody. But millions of people have been killed by the policing. The publics of most countries polled in 2013 by Gallup called the United States the greatest threat to peace in the world. Pew found that viewpoint increased in 2017. To begin to grasp why, just imagine if some other country began bombing several nations at a time out of the goodness of its heart. The shrieks of “Rogue Nation!” and “War Criminal!” would echo across every corporate news outlet. Imagine if some country put missiles just inside Canada and Mexico aimed at the United States, the way that the United States does to Russia. Imagine if they justified this as defensive and pointed out that it was being done by their Defense Department which proved it. There’s a video of Vladimir Putin asking former U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock about U.S. missiles near Russia, and Matlock tells Putin not to worry because the missiles are purely a jobs program for back in the states. Would such an answer satisfy us if the case were reversed? Never mind that the studies done by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst show quite clearly that military spending costs us jobs rather than adding to them. Although the one relatively recent U.S. war that Pete says was just cannot possibly outweigh the damage done by all the U.S. wars we agree were not plus the diversion of funding, the risk of nuclear apocalypse, the war machine’s environmental damage, the political and cultural damage, the counterproductive endangerment rather than protection, etc., let me look at that one war very briefly. This is the Persian Gulf War. Recall that the United States had worked to bring Saddam Hussein to power and had armed and aided him in an aggressive war against Iran for years. A company called American Type Culture Collection in Manassas, Virginia, supplied the biological materials for anthrax to Saddam Hussein. Only later, when it was clear Iraq had no significant biological or chemical much less nuclear weapons, the pretense that it had new vast stockpiles of them was somehow a justification to bomb a nation full of human beings, 99.9 percent of whom had never shaken hands with Donald Rumsfeld. But first came the Gulf War. Like every war, it began with a period of threats, which bore no resemblance to the immediacy and urgency of a mugging in a dark alley or similar analogy that Pete likes to use. In fact, during this particular drawn-out period, a public relations company coached a girl to lie to Congress that Iraq was taking babies out of incubators. And meanwhile Iraq proposed to withdraw from Kuwait if Israel would withdraw from Palestinian territories illegally occupied, and Iraq proposed a weapons of mass destruction free Middle East. Numerous governments and even a guy who’s supposedly never wrong called The Pope urged the U.S. to pursue a peaceful settlement. The U.S. preferred war. At further odds with irrelevant analogies to personal self-defense, the U.S. in this war killed tens of thousands of Iraqis while they were retreating. [https://i0.wp.com/davidswanson.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0865.jpg?resize=525%2C419] Do you know why recent presidents other than Trump have not proposed big military parades? It’s because none of the U.S. wars since the Gulf War has been able to even remotely pretend to a “victory.” The point is not that we need a victory after which we should want a parade, but rather that there is no such thing as a victory — the Gulf War wasn’t one either — and we need to recognize that basic truth before we’re all turned into fire and fury. The endless bombings and sanctions (who remembers Madeleine Albright saying that killing a half million children was justified?), and the new wars, and troops in Saudi Arabia, and terrorism aimed at getting troops out of Saudi Arabia (what do you think 9/11 was, exactly?), and the further militarization of the Middle East, and horrible illnesses among veterans, and all the other horrors that followed from the Gulf War render grotesque the notion that it was a “victory.” Do you know what Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh said to excuse blowing up a building in Oklahoma City? Like a perfect Just War Theorist, he said that he had a higher purpose, so that the building and the people killed in it were merely collateral damage. And do you know why people didn’t fall for that line? Because McVeigh did not have effective control of any television networks. By the way, I do believe we should offer Trump a deal: one parade for each war he ends. Pete’s candidate number 2 for a Just War is Bosnia. As every war has a Hitler, the man Tony Blair labeled Hitler this time was Slobodan Milosevic. While very far from an admirable leader, he was lied about, the war failed to overthrow him, the creative nonviolent Otpur movement later did overthrow him, and the UN’s criminal tribunal later effectively and posthumously exonerated him of his charges in a lengthy ruling on another defendant. The U.S. had worked vigorously for the breakup of Yugoslavia and intentionally prevented negotiated agreements among the parties. Then-U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said, “In its first weeks in office, the Clinton administration has administered a death blow to the Vance-Owen plan that would have given the Serbs 43 percent of the territory of a unified state. In 1995 at Dayton, the administration took pride in an agreement that, after nearly three more years of horror and slaughter, gave the Serbs 49 percent in a state partitioned into two entities.” Three years later came the Kosovo war. The United States believed that, unlike Crimea, Kosovo had the right to secede. But the United States did not want it done, like Crimea, without any people getting killed. In the June 14, 1999 issue of The Nation, George Kenney, a former State Department Yugoslavia desk officer, reported: “An unimpeachable press source who regularly travels with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told this [writer] that, swearing reporters to deep-background confidentiality at the Rambouillet talks, a senior State Department official had bragged that the United States ‘deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.’ The Serbs needed, according to the official, a little bombing to see reason.” Jim Jatras, a foreign policy aide to Senate Republicans, reported in a May 18, 1999, speech at the Cato Institute in Washington that he had it “on good authority” that a “senior Administration official told media at Rambouillet, under embargo” the following: “We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.” In interviews with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, both Kenney and Jatras asserted that these were actual quotes transcribed by reporters who spoke with a U.S. official. [https://i0.wp.com/davidswanson.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0869.jpg?resize=525%2C394] The United Nations did not authorize the United States and its NATO allies to bomb Serbia in 1999. Neither did the United States Congress. The U.S. engaged in a massive bombing campaign that killed large numbers of people, injured many more, destroyed civilian infrastructure, hospitals, and media outlets, and created a refugee crisis. This destruction was accomplished through lies, fabrications, and exaggerations about atrocities, and then justified anachronistically as a response to violence that it helped generate. In the year prior to the bombing some 2,000 people were killed, a majority by Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas who, with support from the CIA, were seeking to incite a Serbian response that would appeal to Western humanitarian warriors. At the same time, NATO member Turkey was committing much larger atrocities, with 80% of their weapons coming from the United States. But Washington didn’t want war with Turkey, so no propaganda campaign was built around its crimes; instead weapons shipments to Turkey were increased. In contrast, a slick propaganda campaign regarding Kosovo established a model that would be followed in future wars, by connecting exaggerated and fictional atrocities to the Nazi holocaust. A photo of a thin man seen through barbed wire was reproduced endlessly. But investigative journalist Philip Knightly determined that it was probably the reporters and photographers who were behind the barbed wire, and that the place photographed, while ugly, was a refugee camp that people, including the fat man standing next to the thin man, were free to leave. There were indeed atrocities, but most of them occurred after the bombing, not before it. Most of Western reporting inverted that chronology. Last night Pete also labeled the Israeli Six Days War of 1967 as the quintessentially justifiable war on the part of Israel. Israeli General Matti Peled, popular hero of that war, has a son named Miko Peled who wrote this six years ago: “In 1967, as today, the two power centers in Israel were the IDF high command and the Cabinet. On June 2, 1967, the two groups met at IDF headquarters. The military hosts greeted the generally cautious and dovish prime minister, Levi Eshkol, with such a level of belligerence that the meeting was later commonly called ‘the Generals’ Coup.’ The transcripts of that meeting, which I found in the Israeli army archives, reveal that the generals made it clear to Eshkol that the Egyptians would need 18 months to two years before they would be ready for a full-scale war, and therefore this was the time for a preemptive strike. My father told Eshkol: ‘Nasser is advancing an ill-prepared army because he is counting on the Cabinet being hesitant. Your hesitation is working in his advantage.’ . . . Throughout the meeting, there was no mention of a threat but rather of an ‘opportunity’ that was there, to be seized. Within short order, the Cabinet succumbed to the pressure of the army, and the rest, as they say, is history.” A so-called preemptive mass-slaughter, followed by decades of illegal genocidal occupation, justified by a danger 18-months away, I propose, bears zero similarity to what you should do if you see someone confronted by a mugger in a dark alley in Harrisonburg. As mugging victims and surgeons and good Samaritans never justify their behavior with war analogies, how about we do them the same courtesy and not justify war with analogies to such unrelated endeavors? In 2011, so that NATO could begin bombing Libya, the African Union was prevented by NATO from presenting a peace plan to Libya. In 2003, Iraq was open to unlimited inspections or even the departure of its president, according to numerous sources, including the president of Spain to whom U.S. President Bush recounted Hussein’s offer to leave. In 2001, Afghanistan was open to turning Osama bin Laden over to a third country for trial. Go back through history. The United States sabotaged peace proposals for Vietnam. The Soviet Union proposed peace negotiations before the Korean War. Spain wanted the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine to go to international arbitration before the Spanish American War. Mexico was willing to negotiate the sale of its northern half. In each case, the U.S. preferred war. Peace has to be carefully avoided. [https://i1.wp.com/davidswanson.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0867.jpg?resize=525%2C394] So when someone asks me what I would do instead of attacking Afghanistan, I have three answers, progressively less flippant. 1. Don’t attack Afghanistan. 2. Prosecute crimes as crimes, don’t commit new crimes. Use diplomacy and the rule of law. 3. Work to create a world with systems of justice and dispute resolution and economies and politics that do without the institution of war altogether. PS: All the questions will be about World War II regardless, so I’ll just save that one for the Q&A. Thank you. ## -- David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Longer bio and photos and videos here. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook, and sign up for: Activist alerts. Articles. David Swanson news. World Beyond War news. Charlottesville news. _______________________________________________ ufpj-activist mailing list Guidelines: %(http://www.unitedforpeace.org/listserv-community-guidelines) 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/mkb0029%40gmail.com You are subscribed as: mkb0029 at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 15 03:55:14 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 03:55:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The Parade Message-ID: Trump’s parade and the threat of military dictatorship 8 February 2018 The order given by President Donald Trump to the Pentagon’s top brass to draw up plans for a military parade down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue later this year is a political development that should be approached with deadly seriousness. The Washington Post reported that the demand for the parade was delivered by Trump to senior military officials, including his defense secretary, the recently retired Marine Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, and Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a January 18 meeting in the “the tank,” the Joint Chiefs’ secret meeting room at the Pentagon. “This is being worked at the highest levels of the military,” a military official speaking on the condition of anonymity told the Post. Possible dates for the parade include Memorial Day, July 4 and Veterans Day. Some media reports have attributed Trump’s demand to his envy of a military parade he attended in France with French President Emmanuel Macron, watching French troops march down the Avenue des Champs-Ḗlysées along with tanks and other military vehicles on Bastille Day last July. While there have been critical and ironic pieces published in the corporate media about the planned parade, one can count on all of the major newspapers and broadcast networks to become willing cheerleaders once the troops and tanks are parading down Pennsylvania Avenue. There is far more at work here than some impressionistic whim of the US president. The French parade merely provided a pretext for Trump to express a militaristic agenda that he has held since well before taking office, based upon fascistic views imbibed as a child from his father, a former KKK member, and nurtured at a private military school. In an interview with the Washington Post before his January 2017 inauguration, Trump declared: “We’re going to show the people as we build up our military… That military may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, DC, for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military.” Documents obtained months after the inauguration showed that top members of Trump’s Presidential Inaugural Committee approached the Pentagon asking for a list and photographs of tanks, missile launchers and other military vehicles that could be deployed in the inaugural parade. The Pentagon at that time was extremely reluctant to organize such a deployment, and Trump’s aides dropped the proposal. Instead, the inauguration included the strange and unsettling episode of 10 military officers representing the different branches of the armed services marching up behind the incoming president and standing briefly in formation as he delivered his speech, only to disperse moments later after another officer approached with a whispered command. Neither the Pentagon nor the Trump White House has ever explained the incident, which appeared to have been an abortive attempt to provide a militaristic backdrop to Trump’s fascistic rant. If Trump’s longstanding desire to see tanks rolling down the main thoroughfare linking Capitol Hill and the White House and take the salute as commander-in-chief from America’s uniformed legions is now about to be fulfilled, it is because of deep-going changes in US society and the capitalist state apparatus. The last major military parade in the United States was organized under the administration of President George H.W. Bush over a quarter-century ago to celebrate the first one-sided and criminal US war against Iraq. Described by US officials themselves as a “turkey shoot,” the war saw the US military slaughter tens of thousands of defenseless Iraqi troops, mainly through relentless air strikes, while suffering little more than 100 American combat fatalities. Bombs and missiles laid waste to much of the country’s basic infrastructure. This, combined with punishing sanctions, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Iraqis, most of them children. That parade was meant to celebrate Washington’s supposed “unipolar moment” and the boast by Bush that with the bloodletting in Iraq, the US had finally “kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” As the intervening quarter-century of continuous war has made clear, however, the Gulf War represented only a nodal point in the deepening crisis of US and world imperialism and the accelerating breakdown of the post-World War II order. The parade was a shameful episode that elicited little enthusiasm and did nothing to dent the hostility to militarism and prevalence of antiwar sentiment among broad sections of the population. What will Trump’s parade celebrate? US military forces are engaged in combat across broad swathes of the world, with US warplanes simultaneously bombing at least seven different countries, with no discernible path to “victory” in any one of them. Administration officials claim the spectacle on Pennsylvania Avenue is being organized to show “love and respect” for the troops. This shopworn lie is used by every capitalist ruling class to hide its indifference and contempt for those it employs as cannon fodder in the pursuit of imperialist conquest and global profit interests. If anything, the parade will represent a celebration of militarism and the thoroughgoing militarization of the US government, with the present administration dominated by a cabal of retired and active-duty generals, including Mattis, White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly (ret.) and National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster. It will be staged as a show of strength and intimidation against all real and potential enemies, both foreign and domestic, of this quasi-military regime. It will put some teeth into the rhetorical threats of Trump, who has denounced those failing to stand and applaud his State of the Union address as “un-American” and “treasonous.” The parade will be staged as the American high command steers the US military from its two-decade-long focus on a “global war on terror” to the preparation for “great power” conflict, i.e., military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and China, as spelled out in the series of national strategy, defense and nuclear posture documents released over the past several weeks. This strategic shift is bound up with a massive buildup of the US military, which already spends more on arms than the next eight powers combined. More than half a century ago, in his farewell speech as president, Dwight Eisenhower warned against the extreme threat to American democracy posed by the rise of a “military-industrial complex.” The intervening period has seen the uninterrupted growth of this combined power of the Pentagon and a corporate-financial oligarchy beyond anything that the long-dead Ike could have ever imagined. This process finds its diseased expression not merely in the person of Donald Trump, but in changes in forms of rule. The last vestiges of democracy are increasingly incompatible with a social order dominated by a handful of plutocrats who have amassed staggering amounts of wealth at the expense of the working class, the vast majority of the population. New forms of rule are emerging, with the outlines of a quasi-military regime becoming visible. This has become apparent in the ongoing budget process, in which Congress is preparing a bipartisan package that provides a $160 billion increase in military spending over two years while leaving 700,000 young undocumented immigrants facing deportation and setting the stage for massive cuts in social programs to pay for the arms buildup. Trump’s defense secretary, Gen. Mattis, took the podium at the White House press conference Wednesday to celebrate this deal, which he played the predominant role in dictating. He repeatedly testified before Congress, appearing not as a supplicant seeking funds, but as a military chieftain giving the civilians their marching orders and indicating that any failure to provide unfettered funding to the Pentagon would be a stab in the back to the nation’s troops. The Democratic Party “opposition” to Trump is of entirely fraudulent and diversionary character. To the extent that they have opposed his administration, it has been from the right, based on demands for a more bellicose posture against Russia. Meanwhile, they and the so-called liberal media, led by the New York Times, have promoted the group of generals that are running the White House as “the adults in the room,” who would supposedly restrain Trump. There have always been factional divisions within the US military command between a more or less apolitical layer that accepts the constitutional principle of civilian control and an element, represented by the likes of generals Douglas McArthur and Curtis Lemay in the 1950s, who are prepared under the right circumstances to carry out a military coup. Decades of continuous war, the “all-volunteer” force, and the increasing separation of the military, as a separate caste, from the civilian population have given rise to an increasingly politicized and right-wing layer at the top of the uniformed hierarchy. There is every reason to believe that elements like the virulently anti-immigrant Kelly as well as Mattis and McMaster are every bit as reactionary as Trump himself, if not more so. Allied with Wall Street and the CIA, these elements are moving toward de facto military rule, with civilian government increasingly reduced to the role of political facade. It is not so far-fetched to raise the question: If they deploy the troops on the streets of Washington, how do we know that they will ever get them off again? Or will this demonstration prove to be the first step in the permanent military occupation of America’s capital? Bill Van Auken -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Feb 15 04:07:47 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 22:07:47 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] The Parade In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <94F9CA48-750C-40D5-B7B1-9091D47E55D3@gmail.com> We could support a military parade as Sen. Paul does - after all the troops are home: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/02/07/sen-rand-paul-trump-s-military-parade-is-good-idea-if-bring-troops-home-from-afghanistan-first.html > On Feb 14, 2018, at 9:55 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Trump’s parade and the threat of military dictatorship > 8 February 2018 > The order given by President Donald Trump to the Pentagon’s top brass to draw up plans for a military parade down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue later this year is a political development that should be approached with deadly seriousness. > The Washington Post reported that the demand for the parade was delivered by Trump to senior military officials, including his defense secretary, the recently retired Marine Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, and Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a January 18 meeting in the “the tank,” the Joint Chiefs’ secret meeting room at the Pentagon. > “This is being worked at the highest levels of the military,” a military official speaking on the condition of anonymity told the Post. Possible dates for the parade include Memorial Day, July 4 and Veterans Day. > Some media reports have attributed Trump’s demand to his envy of a military parade he attended in France with French President Emmanuel Macron, watching French troops march down the Avenue des Champs-Ḗlysées along with tanks and other military vehicles on Bastille Day last July. > While there have been critical and ironic pieces published in the corporate media about the planned parade, one can count on all of the major newspapers and broadcast networks to become willing cheerleaders once the troops and tanks are parading down Pennsylvania Avenue. > There is far more at work here than some impressionistic whim of the US president. The French parade merely provided a pretext for Trump to express a militaristic agenda that he has held since well before taking office, based upon fascistic views imbibed as a child from his father, a former KKK member, and nurtured at a private military school. > In an interview with the Washington Post before his January 2017 inauguration, Trump declared: > “We’re going to show the people as we build up our military… That military may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, DC, for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military.” > Documents obtained months after the inauguration showed that top members of Trump’s Presidential Inaugural Committee approached the Pentagon asking for a list and photographs of tanks, missile launchers and other military vehicles that could be deployed in the inaugural parade. The Pentagon at that time was extremely reluctant to organize such a deployment, and Trump’s aides dropped the proposal. > Instead, the inauguration included the strange and unsettling episode of 10 military officers representing the different branches of the armed services marching up behind the incoming president and standing briefly in formation as he delivered his speech, only to disperse moments later after another officer approached with a whispered command. Neither the Pentagon nor the Trump White House has ever explained the incident, which appeared to have been an abortive attempt to provide a militaristic backdrop to Trump’s fascistic rant. > If Trump’s longstanding desire to see tanks rolling down the main thoroughfare linking Capitol Hill and the White House and take the salute as commander-in-chief from America’s uniformed legions is now about to be fulfilled, it is because of deep-going changes in US society and the capitalist state apparatus. > The last major military parade in the United States was organized under the administration of President George H.W. Bush over a quarter-century ago to celebrate the first one-sided and criminal US war against Iraq. Described by US officials themselves as a “turkey shoot,” the war saw the US military slaughter tens of thousands of defenseless Iraqi troops, mainly through relentless air strikes, while suffering little more than 100 American combat fatalities. Bombs and missiles laid waste to much of the country’s basic infrastructure. This, combined with punishing sanctions, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Iraqis, most of them children. > That parade was meant to celebrate Washington’s supposed “unipolar moment” and the boast by Bush that with the bloodletting in Iraq, the US had finally “kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” As the intervening quarter-century of continuous war has made clear, however, the Gulf War represented only a nodal point in the deepening crisis of US and world imperialism and the accelerating breakdown of the post-World War II order. > The parade was a shameful episode that elicited little enthusiasm and did nothing to dent the hostility to militarism and prevalence of antiwar sentiment among broad sections of the population. > What will Trump’s parade celebrate? US military forces are engaged in combat across broad swathes of the world, with US warplanes simultaneously bombing at least seven different countries, with no discernible path to “victory” in any one of them. > Administration officials claim the spectacle on Pennsylvania Avenue is being organized to show “love and respect” for the troops. This shopworn lie is used by every capitalist ruling class to hide its indifference and contempt for those it employs as cannon fodder in the pursuit of imperialist conquest and global profit interests. > If anything, the parade will represent a celebration of militarism and the thoroughgoing militarization of the US government, with the present administration dominated by a cabal of retired and active-duty generals, including Mattis, White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly (ret.) and National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster. > It will be staged as a show of strength and intimidation against all real and potential enemies, both foreign and domestic, of this quasi-military regime. It will put some teeth into the rhetorical threats of Trump, who has denounced those failing to stand and applaud his State of the Union address as “un-American” and “treasonous.” > The parade will be staged as the American high command steers the US military from its two-decade-long focus on a “global war on terror” to the preparation for “great power” conflict, i.e., military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and China, as spelled out in the series of national strategy, defense and nuclear posture documents released over the past several weeks. > This strategic shift is bound up with a massive buildup of the US military, which already spends more on arms than the next eight powers combined. > More than half a century ago, in his farewell speech as president, Dwight Eisenhower warned against the extreme threat to American democracy posed by the rise of a “military-industrial complex.” The intervening period has seen the uninterrupted growth of this combined power of the Pentagon and a corporate-financial oligarchy beyond anything that the long-dead Ike could have ever imagined. > This process finds its diseased expression not merely in the person of Donald Trump, but in changes in forms of rule. The last vestiges of democracy are increasingly incompatible with a social order dominated by a handful of plutocrats who have amassed staggering amounts of wealth at the expense of the working class, the vast majority of the population. > New forms of rule are emerging, with the outlines of a quasi-military regime becoming visible. This has become apparent in the ongoing budget process, in which Congress is preparing a bipartisan package that provides a $160 billion increase in military spending over two years while leaving 700,000 young undocumented immigrants facing deportation and setting the stage for massive cuts in social programs to pay for the arms buildup. > Trump’s defense secretary, Gen. Mattis, took the podium at the White House press conference Wednesday to celebrate this deal, which he played the predominant role in dictating. He repeatedly testified before Congress, appearing not as a supplicant seeking funds, but as a military chieftain giving the civilians their marching orders and indicating that any failure to provide unfettered funding to the Pentagon would be a stab in the back to the nation’s troops. > The Democratic Party “opposition” to Trump is of entirely fraudulent and diversionary character. To the extent that they have opposed his administration, it has been from the right, based on demands for a more bellicose posture against Russia. Meanwhile, they and the so-called liberal media, led by the New York Times, have promoted the group of generals that are running the White House as “the adults in the room,” who would supposedly restrain Trump. > There have always been factional divisions within the US military command between a more or less apolitical layer that accepts the constitutional principle of civilian control and an element, represented by the likes of generals Douglas McArthur and Curtis Lemay in the 1950s, who are prepared under the right circumstances to carry out a military coup. > Decades of continuous war, the “all-volunteer” force, and the increasing separation of the military, as a separate caste, from the civilian population have given rise to an increasingly politicized and right-wing layer at the top of the uniformed hierarchy. There is every reason to believe that elements like the virulently anti-immigrant Kelly as well as Mattis and McMaster are every bit as reactionary as Trump himself, if not more so. > Allied with Wall Street and the CIA, these elements are moving toward de facto military rule, with civilian government increasingly reduced to the role of political facade. > It is not so far-fetched to raise the question: If they deploy the troops on the streets of Washington, how do we know that they will ever get them off again? Or will this demonstration prove to be the first step in the permanent military occupation of America’s capital? > Bill Van Auken > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Feb 15 10:13:26 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 04:13:26 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Video of Debate #2: Is War Ever Justifiable? In-Reply-To: <599ABF35-653B-4E83-B902-20CD58751F31@illinois.edu> References: <599ABF35-653B-4E83-B902-20CD58751F31@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <5D79AC5A-6C7D-4279-892B-9D07B8FB6866@gmail.com> I think frustration may be affecting Swanson’s current views, in spite of the virtues of this debate (and not just because of the silliness - or ignorance - of throw-aways like "even a guy who’s supposedly never wrong called The Pope urged the U.S. to pursue a peaceful settlement.”) See his peculiar comment, published today: . As the anti-war movement reaches the vanishing point, do we have here another case of Foaming-Paul-Streetism among people we’ve admired? Excesses from antifa to de-platforming look like that. We know he can do better: see Swanson's brilliant and swift exposure of fake news, below, that covered the criminal acts of recent presidents. And Swanson may have a way forward (in concert with Sen. Rand Paul): "I do believe we should offer Trump a deal: one parade for each war he ends.” —CGE > On Feb 14, 2018, at 4:28 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Wouldn’t it be helpful to have such a debate here. David Swanson does his homework well. He is, evidently, quite persuasive. Read, or listen. > > —mkb > > >> Begin forwarded message: >> >> From: David Swanson >> Subject: [ufpj-activist] Video of Debate #2: Is War Ever Justifiable? >> Date: February 14, 2018 at 6:50:18 AM CST >> To: David Swanson >> >> Video of Debate #2: Is War Ever Justifiable? >> >> By David Swanson >> >> http://davidswanson.org/video-of-debate-2-is-war-ever-justifiable/ >> Our first debate was February 12th. This was our second, held February 13, 2018, at Eastern Mennonite University, moderated by Lisa Schirch. >> >> >> Youtube. >> >> Facebook. >> >> The two speakers’ bios: >> >> Pete Kilner is a writer and military ethicist who served more than 28 years in the Army as an infantryman and professor at the U.S. Military Academy. He deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan to conduct research on combat leadership. A graduate of West Point, he holds an MA in Philosophy from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. in Education from Penn State. >> >> David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie and War Is Never Just. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. He holds an MA in philosophy from UVA. >> >> No comprehensive effort was made to survey the audience as to the debate’s impact. Indicate your response, please, in the comments section below. >> >> These were my prepared remarks: >> >> Thanks for hosting this and being here. Pete and I debated last night at Radford. A video is at davidswanson.org. And we agreed, as the majority of this country has agreed for years, that military spending should be reduced. I want it gradually reduced to zero. I don’t know where Pete wants it, but he doesn’t want it at zero. However, I am certain that if military spending were significantly reduced, you would see a reverse arms race, a reduction in threats and hostility abroad, and consequently greater public desire to go on reducing it further. So, in a sense, we don’t need this debate, we just need democracy rather than wars in the name of democracy and a government that goes on year-after-year moving more money out of almost everything else and into militarism. But to build a movement powerful enough to influence the U.S. oligarchy we do need this debate, we do need a clearer understanding that no war can ever be justified, and therefore that dumping over a trillion dollars a year into preparing for a possible just war has to stop. After all, 3 percent of that money could end starvation on earth, 1 percent could end the lack of clean water, a bigger chunk could give us a chance against climate change (rather than serving as the leading cause of climate change). So it’s the institution of war that kills far more than the actual wars, and we can’t build the strength to reduce it as long as people imagine there might be a just war some day. >> >> >> >> Pete and I also agreed that numerous wars have been unjust. I’ll talk a little about why the wars he claims were just were actually unjust on their own terms and in isolation. But I think the burden for a just war is even higher than that. I think a war, to do more good than harm, has to do so much more good than harm as to outweigh the damage done by all the admittedly unjust wars as well as by the diversion of funding from where it could save and improve millions of lives rather than wasting them. War is an institution, and for any war to be justified it has to justify all the damage done by the institution. >> >> But Pete only named a couple of wars just and a couple unjust without ever giving us a method that would allow us to determine which are which when we turn to all the wars he didn’t label one way or the other. Those include wars he took part in: Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006 Pete claimed the war on Iraq was doing Iraq lots of good. I asked him repeatedly what that good was and never got an answer. He did call the 2003-begun war “imprudent” and a “mistake.” If that’s what you call a war that radically increases the use of the term sociocide (meaning the total destruction of a society), I wonder what level of slaughter is needed before a war gets labeled something harsher like “bad” or “unpleasant” or “mildly regrettable.” >> >> One current war that Pete agreed was unjust was the U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen. But will Pete join me in urging U.S. troops to refuse the immoral and illegal order to participate in that war? Isn’t that a moral duty comparable to that of encouraging participation in supposedly just wars? Doesn’t it expose one of the many problems with calling the U.S. military voluntary? Anything else you’re doing voluntarily you’re permitted to quit doing. What is the point of teaching soldiers morality if they aren’t supposed to act on it? >> >> Pete will say that he has explained what a just war is, it’s a war fought because you’ve been attacked. Except that he’ll then readily admit that the United States has been fighting all these wars without having been attacked. So what he actually means is that someone else has been attacked, allowing the United States to step in as a gesture of generosity and assistance. But, as a rule, this stepping in is not appreciated, not requested, not actually helpful, on the contrary catastrophically counterproductive, and also, by the way, illegal. Who died and made the United States the world’s policeman? Nobody. But millions of people have been killed by the policing. The publics of most countries polled in 2013 by Gallup called the United States the greatest threat to peace in the world. Pew found that viewpoint increased in 2017. To begin to grasp why, just imagine if some other country began bombing several nations at a time out of the goodness of its heart. The shrieks of “Rogue Nation!” and “War Criminal!” would echo across every corporate news outlet. >> >> Imagine if some country put missiles just inside Canada and Mexico aimed at the United States, the way that the United States does to Russia. Imagine if they justified this as defensive and pointed out that it was being done by their Defense Department which proved it. There’s a video of Vladimir Putin asking former U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock about U.S. missiles near Russia, and Matlock tells Putin not to worry because the missiles are purely a jobs program for back in the states. Would such an answer satisfy us if the case were reversed? Never mind that the studies done by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst show quite clearly that military spending costs us jobs rather than adding to them. >> >> Although the one relatively recent U.S. war that Pete says was just cannot possibly outweigh the damage done by all the U.S. wars we agree were not plus the diversion of funding, the risk of nuclear apocalypse, the war machine’s environmental damage, the political and cultural damage, the counterproductive endangerment rather than protection, etc., let me look at that one war very briefly. >> >> This is the Persian Gulf War. Recall that the United States had worked to bring Saddam Hussein to power and had armed and aided him in an aggressive war against Iran for years. A company called American Type Culture Collection in Manassas, Virginia, supplied the biological materials for anthrax to Saddam Hussein. Only later, when it was clear Iraq had no significant biological or chemical much less nuclear weapons, the pretense that it had new vast stockpiles of them was somehow a justification to bomb a nation full of human beings, 99.9 percent of whom had never shaken hands with Donald Rumsfeld. But first came the Gulf War. Like every war, it began with a period of threats, which bore no resemblance to the immediacy and urgency of a mugging in a dark alley or similar analogy that Pete likes to use. In fact, during this particular drawn-out period, a public relations company coached a girl to lie to Congress that Iraq was taking babies out of incubators. And meanwhile Iraq proposed to withdraw from Kuwait if Israel would withdraw from Palestinian territories illegally occupied, and Iraq proposed a weapons of mass destruction free Middle East. Numerous governments and even a guy who’s supposedly never wrong called The Pope urged the U.S. to pursue a peaceful settlement. The U.S. preferred war. At further odds with irrelevant analogies to personal self-defense, the U.S. in this war killed tens of thousands of Iraqis while they were retreating. >> >> Do you know why recent presidents other than Trump have not proposed big military parades? It’s because none of the U.S. wars since the Gulf War has been able to even remotely pretend to a “victory.” The point is not that we need a victory after which we should want a parade, but rather that there is no such thing as a victory — the Gulf War wasn’t one either — and we need to recognize that basic truth before we’re all turned into fire and fury. The endless bombings and sanctions (who remembers Madeleine Albright saying that killing a half million children was justified?), and the new wars, and troops in Saudi Arabia, and terrorism aimed at getting troops out of Saudi Arabia (what do you think 9/11 was, exactly?), and the further militarization of the Middle East, and horrible illnesses among veterans, and all the other horrors that followed from the Gulf War render grotesque the notion that it was a “victory.” Do you know what Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh said to excuse blowing up a building in Oklahoma City? Like a perfect Just War Theorist, he said that he had a higher purpose, so that the building and the people killed in it were merely collateral damage. And do you know why people didn’t fall for that line? Because McVeigh did not have effective control of any television networks. >> >> By the way, I do believe we should offer Trump a deal: one parade for each war he ends. >> >> Pete’s candidate number 2 for a Just War is Bosnia. As every war has a Hitler, the man Tony Blair labeled Hitler this time was Slobodan Milosevic. While very far from an admirable leader, he was lied about, the war failed to overthrow him, the creative nonviolent Otpur movement later did overthrow him, and the UN’s criminal tribunal later effectively and posthumously exonerated him of his charges in a lengthy ruling on another defendant. The U.S. had worked vigorously for the breakup of Yugoslavia and intentionally prevented negotiated agreements among the parties. Then-U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said, “In its first weeks in office, the Clinton administration has administered a death blow to the Vance-Owen plan that would have given the Serbs 43 percent of the territory of a unified state. In 1995 at Dayton, the administration took pride in an agreement that, after nearly three more years of horror and slaughter, gave the Serbs 49 percent in a state partitioned into two entities.” >> >> Three years later came the Kosovo war. The United States believed that, unlike Crimea, Kosovo had the right to secede. But the United States did not want it done, like Crimea, without any people getting killed. In the June 14, 1999 issue of The Nation, George Kenney, a former State Department Yugoslavia desk officer, reported: “An unimpeachable press source who regularly travels with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told this [writer] that, swearing reporters to deep-background confidentiality at the Rambouillet talks, a senior State Department official had bragged that the United States ‘deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.’ The Serbs needed, according to the official, a little bombing to see reason.” Jim Jatras, a foreign policy aide to Senate Republicans, reported in a May 18, 1999, speech at the Cato Institute in Washington that he had it “on good authority” that a “senior Administration official told media at Rambouillet, under embargo” the following: “We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.” In interviews with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, both Kenney and Jatras asserted that these were actual quotes transcribed by reporters who spoke with a U.S. official. >> >> The United Nations did not authorize the United States and its NATO allies to bomb Serbia in 1999. Neither did the United States Congress. The U.S. engaged in a massive bombing campaign that killed large numbers of people, injured many more, destroyed civilian infrastructure, hospitals, and media outlets, and created a refugee crisis. This destruction was accomplished through lies, fabrications, and exaggerations about atrocities, and then justified anachronistically as a response to violence that it helped generate. >> >> In the year prior to the bombing some 2,000 people were killed, a majority by Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas who, with support from the CIA, were seeking to incite a Serbian response that would appeal to Western humanitarian warriors. At the same time, NATO member Turkey was committing much larger atrocities, with 80% of their weapons coming from the United States. But Washington didn’t want war with Turkey, so no propaganda campaign was built around its crimes; instead weapons shipments to Turkey were increased. In contrast, a slick propaganda campaign regarding Kosovo established a model that would be followed in future wars, by connecting exaggerated and fictional atrocities to the Nazi holocaust. A photo of a thin man seen through barbed wire was reproduced endlessly. But investigative journalist Philip Knightly determined that it was probably the reporters and photographers who were behind the barbed wire, and that the place photographed, while ugly, was a refugee camp that people, including the fat man standing next to the thin man, were free to leave. There were indeed atrocities, but most of them occurred after the bombing, not before it. Most of Western reporting inverted that chronology. >> >> Last night Pete also labeled the Israeli Six Days War of 1967 as the quintessentially justifiable war on the part of Israel. Israeli General Matti Peled, popular hero of that war, has a son named Miko Peled who wrote this six years ago: >> >> “In 1967, as today, the two power centers in Israel were the IDF high command and the Cabinet. On June 2, 1967, the two groups met at IDF headquarters. The military hosts greeted the generally cautious and dovish prime minister, Levi Eshkol, with such a level of belligerence that the meeting was later commonly called ‘the Generals’ Coup.’ The transcripts of that meeting, which I found in the Israeli army archives, reveal that the generals made it clear to Eshkol that the Egyptians would need 18 months to two years before they would be ready for a full-scale war, and therefore this was the time for a preemptive strike. My father told Eshkol: ‘Nasser is advancing an ill-prepared army because he is counting on the Cabinet being hesitant. Your hesitation is working in his advantage.’ . . . Throughout the meeting, there was no mention of a threat but rather of an ‘opportunity’ that was there, to be seized. Within short order, the Cabinet succumbed to the pressure of the army, and the rest, as they say, is history.” >> >> A so-called preemptive mass-slaughter, followed by decades of illegal genocidal occupation, justified by a danger 18-months away, I propose, bears zero similarity to what you should do if you see someone confronted by a mugger in a dark alley in Harrisonburg. As mugging victims and surgeons and good Samaritans never justify their behavior with war analogies, how about we do them the same courtesy and not justify war with analogies to such unrelated endeavors? >> >> In 2011, so that NATO could begin bombing Libya, the African Union was prevented by NATO from presenting a peace plan to Libya. >> >> In 2003, Iraq was open to unlimited inspections or even the departure of its president, according to numerous sources, including the president of Spain to whom U.S. President Bush recounted Hussein’s offer to leave. >> >> In 2001, Afghanistan was open to turning Osama bin Laden over to a third country for trial. >> >> Go back through history. The United States sabotaged peace proposals for Vietnam. The Soviet Union proposed peace negotiations before the Korean War. Spain wanted the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine to go to international arbitration before the Spanish American War. Mexico was willing to negotiate the sale of its northern half. In each case, the U.S. preferred war. Peace has to be carefully avoided. >> >> So when someone asks me what I would do instead of attacking Afghanistan, I have three answers, progressively less flippant. >> >> • Don’t attack Afghanistan. >> • Prosecute crimes as crimes, don’t commit new crimes. Use diplomacy and the rule of law. >> • Work to create a world with systems of justice and dispute resolution and economies and politics that do without the institution of war altogether. >> PS: All the questions will be about World War II regardless, so I’ll just save that one for the Q&A. >> >> Thank you. >> >> ## >> >> >> >> -- >> >> >> David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Longer bio and photos and videos here. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook, and sign up for: >> Activist alerts. >> Articles. >> David Swanson news. >> World Beyond War news. >> Charlottesville news. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> ufpj-activist mailing list >> >> Guidelines: %(http://www.unitedforpeace.org/listserv-community-guidelines) >> 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/mkb0029%40gmail.com From bjornsona at ameritech.net Thu Feb 15 13:23:42 2018 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 07:23:42 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? Message-ID: Thank you all. I see I have to update my reading list (again). Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Karen Aram via Peace-discussDate: Wed, Feb 14, 2018 3:18 PMTo: Carl G. Estabrook;Cc: Brussel, Morton K;Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss;Subject:Re: [Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? Nothing compares to Nicholson Baker’s “Human Smoke”. I doubt I would appreciate Baker’s other books but I was pleased to note “In 2001 he published Double Fold, in which he accuses certain librarians of lying about the decay of materials and being obsessed with technological fads, at the expense of both the public and historical preservation.” Something I thought was recent, getting rid of books, in favor of technology. A mistake we may live to regret, if the grid ever goes down, as well as elitist in that not everyone has access to technology. On Feb 14, 2018, at 12:51, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: His WWII book might almost be compared to Nicholson Baker’s excellent "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization" (2008). He’s a paleoconservative, bitterly opposed to the neocons and the Iraq War. Also something of  a racist, but a cogent critic of US warmaking, at least in this century.   —CGE On Feb 14, 2018, at 2:29 PM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss wrote: Buchanan was a fervent anticommunist cold warrior during Soviet times, but has become more reasonable since. His book about how WWII might have been avoided, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War,  is useful, if somewhat fanciful. On Feb 14, 2018, at 9:45 AM, Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss wrote: Buchanan is a historian and longtime critic of America's wars.  He wrote a great book delineating all of our conflicts up to the time of writing: A Republic, Not an Empire A Republic, Not an Empire Now available in paperback. All but predicting the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Buchanan exami... On Tuesday, February 13, 2018, 9:48:13 PM CST, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss wrote: I never thought I would see Patrick Buchanan urge caution on the part of warmakers.  Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------ From: Dianna Visek via Peace-discuss Date: Tue, Feb 13, 2018 2:16 PM To: Peace-discuss List; Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] Is US Being Sucked Into Syria's War? http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_pat_buchanan/is_us_being_sucked_into_syria_s_war _______________________________________________ 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://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C7b0aec3103db40dd893508d573ecd94c%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636542383446142141&sdata=vtRaxcF9g4vKD6Mr5sFLR67F%2ButGYn%2FmFRm1AZs8d6I%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 15 17:15:35 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 17:15:35 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Vice - A World in Disarray In-Reply-To: <947345167.426486.1518568218029@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1464385388.184691.1518542109677.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <1464385388.184691.1518542109677@mail.yahoo.com> <42D60865-1A4F-4DED-9B93-D69F07E53757@illinois.edu> <947345167.426486.1518568218029@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: David I’m pleased “VICE" is finally exposed. When the HBO program began, a couple years ago, it initially appeared okay. However it soon became apparent it was an organ of the USG, to some of us. I got rid of my television. I’m also pleased that the Moderate Rebels are revealing the Counsel on Foreign Relations, as the major influence behind USG policies, and highly recommend the book by Lawrence Shoup “Wall Street’s Think Tank” which takes up 1976 - 2014 where Shoup and Wm. Minter left off with their book “Imperial Brain Trust” taking up the CFR from the founding in the twenties up to 1975. On Feb 13, 2018, at 16:30, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: http://moderaterebelsradio.com/vice-media-us-empire-robbie-martin-episode-13/ http://moderaterebelsradio.com/vice-a-world-in-disarray-us-imperialism-episode-14/ But it's important because it combines the prestige of the CFR with the edginess of Vice, and shows that neocon foreign policy can co-exist with "anti-racist" criticism of Trump, such as you might find on the Vice website. On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎04‎:‎32‎:‎18‎ ‎PM, Brussel, Morton K > wrote: What an effective(?) pile of crap! But give a link to Blumenthal, and part 2. On Feb 13, 2018, at 11:15 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAqkfbGJhhI Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton have been discussing Vice and Neocons on their podcast Moderate Rebels. Part 2 discusses this film produced by Vice with the CFR and HBO. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C6b9a74b15a6649f0c37008d573422ddb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636541650425017002&sdata=IzpKJF8iErqUWm2k1mFrUjnU0TxzOvWd4x94CV8x5LQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Thu Feb 15 17:29:49 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 17:29:49 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Vice - A World in Disarray In-Reply-To: References: <1464385388.184691.1518542109677.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <1464385388.184691.1518542109677@mail.yahoo.com> <42D60865-1A4F-4DED-9B93-D69F07E53757@illinois.edu> <947345167.426486.1518568218029@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <518551552.1460415.1518715789204@mail.yahoo.com> Robbie Martin's "counter-movie" (trilogy), A Very Heavy Agenda, can be watched for $7. Watch A Very Heavy Agenda Trilogy Online | Vimeo On Demand | | | | | | | | | | | Watch A Very Heavy Agenda Trilogy Online | Vimeo On Demand * * DVDs now available for Parts 1, 2 & 3 at http://www.averyheavyagenda.com * * “Without doubt it is the best... | | | On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎15‎, ‎2018‎ ‎11‎:‎15‎:‎36‎ ‎AM‎ ‎CST, Karen Aram wrote: David I’m pleased “VICE" is finally exposed. When the HBO program began, a couple years ago, it initially appeared okay. However it soon became apparent it was an organ of the USG, to some of us. I got rid of my television. I’m also pleased that the Moderate Rebels are revealing the Counsel on Foreign Relations, as the major influence behind USG policies, and highly recommend the book by Lawrence Shoup “Wall Street’s Think Tank” which takes up 1976 - 2014 where Shoup and Wm. Minter left off with their book “Imperial Brain Trust” taking up the CFR from the founding in the twenties up to 1975. On Feb 13, 2018, at 16:30, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: http://moderaterebelsradio.com/vice-media-us-empire-robbie-martin-episode-13/ http://moderaterebelsradio.com/vice-a-world-in-disarray-us-imperialism-episode-14/ But it's important because it combines the prestige of the CFR with the edginess of Vice, and shows that neocon foreign policy can co-exist with "anti-racist" criticism of Trump, such as you might find on the Vice website. On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎13‎, ‎2018‎ ‎04‎:‎32‎:‎18‎ ‎PM, Brussel, Morton K wrote: What an effective(?) pile of crap! But give a link to Blumenthal, and part 2. On Feb 13, 2018, at 11:15 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAqkfbGJhhI Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton have been discussing Vice and Neocons on their podcast Moderate Rebels. Part 2 discusses this film produced by Vice with the CFR and HBO. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C6b9a74b15a6649f0c37008d573422ddb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636541650425017002&sdata=IzpKJF8iErqUWm2k1mFrUjnU0TxzOvWd4x94CV8x5LQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Thu Feb 15 17:50:01 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 17:50:01 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Amanda Taub, NYT "interpreter" References: <2018344864.1482442.1518717001957.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <2018344864.1482442.1518717001957@mail.yahoo.com> AmandaTaub, a product of Uni High, has been given the “interpreter” title at the NYT,with unfortunate results for truthfulness: NYTarticle by Amanda Taub https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/world/europe/europe-politics-far-right.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront DeanBaker’s comment: OneWay to Protect Democracy Is to Stop Pushing Policies that Redistribute IncomeUpward Published:12 February 2018 Thatone is apparently not on the agenda, at least according to Amanda Taub's NYT"The Interpreter" piece. The piece notesthe declining support for center right and center left parties in most westerndemocracies. While it notes that people feel unrepresented by these parties, itnever states the obvious, these parties have consistently supported monetary,fiscal, trade, and intellectual property policies that redistribute anever-larger share of income to people like Bill Gates and Robert Rubin. Itshould not be surprising that most of the public is not enthralled with thisoutcome and the parties that promote it. And yes, there are alternatives, as Ipoint out in my (free) book, Rigged: How Globalization andthe Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/one-way-to-protect-democracy-is-to-stop-pushing-policies-that-redistribute-income-upward https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/world/europe/europe-politics-far-right.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront   Commenterat NYT: “TheNYT insists on framing as "far right" the most mainstream goals ofany government: putting their citizens first, controlling their borders, andmaking the economy work for the average citizen. Liberal values, open immigration, global institutions that benefit citizens ofother (often poor countries) have no real support, other than in the la la landof the liberal press and liberal western elites. The so called "far right" or "populist" movements aresimply a yearning to a return to mainstream goals.”   Videoby Amada Taub and Max Fisher, Is There Something Wrong with Democracy? (5min.) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/24/world/is-there-something-wrong-with-democracy.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Famanda-taub&action=click&contentCollection=undefined®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=collection         -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 15 20:07:57 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 20:07:57 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Max Blumenthal on Gaza today....... Message-ID: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:21145:Max-Blumenthal-in-Gaza%3A-Netanyahu-Faces-Scandal%2C-Palestinians-a-Crisis -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 15 20:11:50 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 20:11:50 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] =?utf-8?q?=28no_subject=29?= Message-ID: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 15 21:18:48 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:18:48 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Why, DemocracyNow. is no longer, my news of the day. Message-ID: https://www.democracynow.org/2018/2/13/its_hard_to_believe_but_syrias TOPICS * Gun Control * Sexual Assault * Immigration * Climate Change * Honduras * Nuclear Weapons * Puerto Rico * Yemen * Ravi Ragbir * Sundance Film Festival “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Worse”: World Powers Clash as Civilian Deaths Soar STORYFEBRUARY 13, 2018 [Watch icon]Watch Full Show 48:30 49:57 Listen Media Options 2,042 Shares This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. DONATE TOPICS * Syria * Turkey * Iran * Russia * Pentagon ________________________________ GUESTS * Anne Barnard New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. Her recent articles are titled “Israel Strikes Iran in Syria and Loses a Jet” and “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse” * Yazan al Saadi Syrian-Canadian writer and researcher. Tensions across northern Syria are escalating sharply amid a series of clashes between external and internal powers, including Israel, Iran, Turkey, Russia and the Syrian government. On Saturday, Israel shot down what it says was an Iranian drone that had entered Israel’s airspace after being launched in Syria. Israel then mounted an attack on an Iranian command center in Syria, from where the drone was launched. One of the Israeli F-16 military jets was then downed by a Syrian government anti-aircraft missile. Meanwhile, also in northern Syria on Saturday, a Turkish Army helicopter was shot down by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPGfighters near the Syrian Kurdish city of Afrin, where Turkey has launched a bombing and ground offensive. All this comes as the United Nations is warning of soaring levels of civilian casualties in Syria. For more, we speak with Anne Barnard, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. Her recent articles are titled “Israel Strikes Iran in Syria and Loses a Jet” and “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse.” And we speak with Syrian-Canadian researcher Yazan al-Saadi. ________________________________ Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show with the ongoing war in Syria.Tensions across northern Syria are escalating sharply amidst a series of clashes between external and internal powers, including Israel, Iran, Turkey, Russia and the Syrian government. On Saturday, Israel shot down what it says was an Iranian drone that had entered Israel’s airspace after being launched from Syria. Israel then mounted an attack on an Iranian command center in Syria, from where the drone was launched. One of the Israeli F-16 military jets was then downed by a Syrian government anti-aircraft missile. Saturday’s event marks the first Israeli jet shot down since the 1980s. It is also believed to be the first time Israel has carried out an attack in Syria on a site where Iranian troops were present. On Tuesday, the Syrian government warned Israel it would face “more surprises” if it launches future attacks inside Syria. Meanwhile, also in northern Syria on Saturday, a Turkish Army helicopter was shot down by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG fighters near the Syrian Kurdish city of Afrin, where Turkey has launched a bombing and ground offensive. All this comes as the United Nations is warning of soaring levels of civilian casualties in Syria. This is U.N. high commissioner for human rights spokesperson Elizabeth Throssell. ELIZABETH THROSSELL: This has been a week of soaring violence and bloodshed in Syria—more than a thousand civilian casualties in six days. We’ve received reports that at least 277 civilians have been killed; 230 of these people were killed in airstrikes by the Syrian government and their allies. In addition, 812 people were injured. AMY GOODMAN: The United Nations is warning civilians are being killed and wounded at a rapid pace amidst an escalation in the Syrian government bombing against the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. At least 200 civilians have reportedly been killed in the last week alone. Well, for more, we’re joined by two guests. Anne Barnard is The New York Timesbureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, her recent articles headlined “Israel Strikes Iran in Syria and Loses a Jet” and “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse.” In Kuwait, we’re joined by the Syrian-Candadian researcher Yazan al-Saadi. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Anne, let’s begin with you. Your article, “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse,” you begin by saying, “Half a dozen newborns, blinking and arching their backs, were carried from a burning hospital hit by airstrikes. A bombed apartment house collapsed, burying families. Medics doused patients with water after a suspected chlorine attack, one of five in Syria since the start of the year. That was just a fraction of the violence this week in northern Syria,” you write. So, first let’s talk about what you found on the ground—you were just recently there [sic]—and then this global set of countries that continue to pummel Syria. ANNE BARNARD: Well, thank you so much, first of all, for being interested in this subject. That’s very important that it continues to be talked about. I have to correct one thing, which is that I was not in Syria since about one year ago. And the reason for that is I’m constantly applying for visas, but the Syrian government does not—it’s quite unpredictable and quite restrictive about when it grants visas to foreign journalists. And once you’re there, you can’t operate entirely freely anyway. So, just to know, we have covered the recent events from here in Beirut and through a very extensive network of contacts on all sides inside Syria. But, yes, it’s been an unbelievable week. And the thing that you really need to know to put this in even more perspective is that, yes, there’s been a spike in deaths and in civilian casualties. There was a period of—I think just from last week, from Monday to Friday, there were 230 people killed, civilians, mostly civilians, and a thousand casualties. So, that’s a lot, but, actually, over the last—most of the last seven years, there’s all—those kinds of death tolls are happening all the time, maybe at a slower pace, but in these places, civilians are under attack constantly, and hospitals are under attack. And, you know, there’s very difficult problems in getting humanitarian aid access. And it’s happening in many places in Syria, by many sides. But the Syrian government’s attempts to take back rebel-held areas have been particularly characterized lately by an intensified bombing campaign that has taken a very heavy toll on civilians, who are already tired, malnourished, maybe displaced already several times. Some of them are stuck behind siege boundaries. So, it’s really been a tough week. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Anne, most of the media attention in the United States have focused on the war against ISIS, and once the declaration that ISIS—the ISIS—or most of the ISIS enclaves had been defeated, the attention has largely dropped from the U.S. media. What has happened—since the so-called defeat of ISIS, how has the war in Syria transformed? ANNE BARNARD: Well, you’re exactly right. The U.S. focus has tended to be on ISISwithin a framework of the so-called war on terror. But the war in Syria did not begin with ISIS and is not going to end with ISIS. First of all, I think it’s probably a mistaken “mission accomplished” moment to claim that ISIS has actually been defeated, because many fighters have gone underground, and their ideology, of course, is continuing to assert itself in some places. But since then, what the relative defeat of ISIS has unleashed is the ability of the Syrian government and its allies—Russia and Iran—to turn their attention fully back to fighting the rebels, who have already been on the run. And it’s very complicated, because there are different patches of areas around the country that are not connected to each other, that are controlled by different rebel groups, Islamist groups, some Qaeda-linked groups. These are not even contiguous patches of territory. So you’re talking about many wars within a war. But what’s happened is that now the government is able to focus on those battles. And, you know, in a sense, the rest of the world cares less about that than they cared about ISIS, because they saw ISIS as a threat to themselves. AMY GOODMAN: So, the beginning of this conversation, we talked about just what happened among the major countries that are bombing Syria—again, Israel shooting down what it says is an Iranian drone, then attacking what it called the command-and-control center in Syria for the drone. Then one of the Israeli F-16 military jets were downed by the Syrian government anti-aircraft missile. Saturday’s event marking the first Israeli jet shot down since the 1980s, also believed to be the first time Israel carried out an attack in Syria on a site where Iranian troops were present. Can you talk about the significance of all of this? ANNE BARNARD: Yes. This brings us to the second consequence of the end of the main part of the territorial fight against Islamic State. Many different international powers, as well as the Syrian government and some of its rival—some of its opponents within Syria, were all against each other, in a way, but united against the Islamic State. And they launched competing campaigns to defeat the Islamic State, racing one another to take its territory. Once Islamic State was largely driven out of territory in Syria, those different combatants are finding that their conflicting interests are coming to the fore again. So, you see now Turkey going against Syrian Kurdish groups. You see even clashes—even confrontations between Turkey and the United States over the United States’ backing for Kurds, Kurdish militias that Turkey sees as terrorists and that the United States sees as its best ally in Syria. There’s a big question—the United States has upset both allies and enemies by saying that it wants to now remain in the areas that were taken by the U.S.-backed militias in the northeast of Syria. Israel has been bombing targets in Syria throughout the war, with relative impunity. This is the first time that the Syrian government has managed to shoot down a jet. You also have Syria’s allies—Russia and Iran—which have differing views about how exactly the future of Syria should be laid out. And I’m probably forgetting to mention somebody, but all of these—I fear that we may be getting to a phase in the Syrian war where all the foreign interveners are turning it into an arena to fight amongst each other, really regardless of what Syrians want or the effect on Syrians. And, unfortunately, that could go on for a long time. AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, then come back to this discussion, where we’ll also be joined, in addition to Anne Barnard, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, by Yazan al-Saadi, the Syrian-Canadian researcher. This is Democracy Now! Back with them in a moment. [break] AMY GOODMAN: “Uncle John” by Pearls Before Swine. The band’s founder, Tom Rapp, died on Sunday at the age of 70. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we return now to Syria. The United Nations is warning that civilians are being killed and wounded at a rapid pace amidst an escalation in the Syrian government bombing against the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. At least 200 civilians have been reportedly killed in the last week alone. We’re joined now by Yazan al-Saadi, a Syrian-Canadian writer, researcher. And still with us is Anne Barnard, from The New York Times, bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. Her recent article is titled “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse.” Anne, I wanted to begin again with you to ask you about the role of Hezbollah, because, obviously, Hezbollah was widely involved in the fighting in Syria, has undoubtedly grown stronger as a result. And could you talk about its role, particularly, in the conflict, and the concerns of Israel over the growth of Hezbollah? ANNE BARNARD: Well, Hezbollah entered the war overtly and in a sort of—in the manner of an expeditionary force in 2013. And that was a big surprise, because this is a group that was founded to fight Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon, not to go and help put down uprisings in other countries. But nonetheless, because of their close alliance with Damascus and Tehran, Hezbollah entered the war, first in areas that made sense, in a way, for it in a local—in a local sense, because they first focused on areas near the Lebanese border, on the shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab near Damascus, which is particularly revered by Shiites. But gradually their role expanded. They were a much more effective pound-for-pound force than the Syrian military, and they ended up helping out in battles steadily spreading across the country. Nobody imagined a few years ago that Hezbollah would end up fighting in Aleppo, near the Iraqi border, in northern Syria, all the way in southern Syria. Now, the southern Syria part is the biggest issue, because, of course, there’s always been conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, and tensions there across the Lebanese border, but now Hezbollah is entrenching itself increasingly in areas in the southern part of Syria, bordering the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the portion that’s held by the Israelis. So, that’s obviously of big concern to Israel. At the same time, the Syrian government accuses Israel of trying to increase its own buffer zone there, and that’s been a real flashpoint. And that really exploded on Saturday, not as badly as it could have been, though, because it seems to have been contained, for now, to this one incident. There is also, of course, an Iranian presence around. Iranian advisers are deeply involved throughout the war effort on the Syrian government side. So, that’s something that Israel has been trying to counter throughout the conflict, and I think we’re only going to see more tensions around that. AMY GOODMAN: Yazan al-Saadi, we want to bring you into this conversation. You’re a Syrian-Canadian researcher, usually where Anne is, in Beirut, Lebanon, but right now we’re talking to you in Kuwait. Talk about the situation in Syria, in your country, as you see it. YAZAN AL-SAADI: Wow! All right. It’s absolutely tragic. And it’s—what you’re seeing is all these actors, whether it’s the Syrian regime, the Bashar dictatorship or the armed opposition, or the Putin regime and the Trump regime and the apartheid Zionist regime, all attacking and destroying the Syrian population. What we’re seeing is basically a complete annihilation of the struggle for Syrian self-determination by various communities within the country. You’re seeing a complete devastation of a society. The healthcare system is gone. Half the population are either refugees or amputees. And it’s absolutely devastating. And what we’re witnessing in Syria—and we need to remember this, as well—is that we’re witnessing the failure of the international mechanisms to hold states accountable. And this is not only exceptional to Syria. We’ve seen this before in places like Iraq, Palestine, Congo, the Central African Republic, and even in Myanmar now with the Rohingya. So, if you want a sound bite, what we’re seeing is the typicalness of power over people. And this is something that is going to continue in various places, whether in Syria or elsewhere, as long as governments and states are allowed to do what they can do. And this can only end if populations and communities around the world start mobilizing and pressuring their own governments to stop these types of actions, to not allow power to dominate over people. And if we don’t do that, we’re just going to see the tragedy of Syria continue for a long time, and you’re going to see other tragedies in other places around the world. That is what’s happening. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yazan, I wanted to ask you about the role of Bashar al-Assad. Many of the Western powers were originally calling for regime change to end the civil war, and now that’s dropped off the table for a lot of them, in terms of the ongoing conflict. Could you talk about that, as well? YAZAN AL-SAADI: Yeah, of course. I’m not surprised it dropped off the table, because, let’s be honest, Western governments really don’t care about, you know, dictatorships. In fact, they’re quite a fan. There’s a lot of businesses and interests with dictatorships. And let’s be honest. When these protests happened—and they happened in a context—in 2011, in the region, where you had a large mobilization in different countries, by different people, to pressure change against dictatorships. But Western governments don’t really care. And let’s be—let’s be frank about this. They don’t really care if Bashar stays or not, as long as he plays ball and fits into their interests. Now, should Bashar go? Yes, obviously. He’s a dictatorship. But it cannot happen through the idea of Western intervention or Western forms of regime change, because we’ve seen what happened in Libya and Iraq. So we need to do something else here. There needs to be an international form of mechanism to hold dictatorships accountable, whoever they are, you know, whether they’re allies to the West or they’re allies to Putin. And this is something—this is a larger question that we really need to talk about. AMY GOODMAN: The escalation in Syria comes as the Pentagon has also indicated it plans to recruit and train thousands of U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria to form a border security force in northern Syria along the border with Turkey. The U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters already control large swaths of northern Syria. The significance of this? We talked, Yazan, earlier about what just happened in the last week. You know, you have the Israeli plane shot down, the Turkish plane shot down, etc. YAZAN AL-SAADI: So, I mean, this U.S. plan, like all U.S. plans, is going to be disastrous. I mean, it’s all part of, you know, really furthering U.S. military interests and a presence in certain countries around the world. This support for the SDF, which is the armed wing of the PYD, is really not going to be helpful, ultimately, for Kurdish self-determination, in my opinion. And I do believe that the Kurds have every right for self-determination, like every community around the world. What the U.S. are interested is just to have a hand in the geography. But ultimately, like we’ve seen over and over again in history every time the U.S. has a certain plan of backing armed groups, it’s disastrous, whether it’s the Contras in Latin America, the armed groups in Iraq and wherever else. It’s going to be a disaster. And we’re seeing bits of that happening right now, with everyone shooting everyone. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to go back to Anne Barnard for a second, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut. All of these governments—all of these foreign governments having their forces and their planes in Syria, could you talk about whether the potential is increasing or decreasing for some kind of a conflict between the outside powers spreading beyond Syria? ANNE BARNARD: Well, that’s certainly the danger. I mean, and just to build on what Yazan was saying, the reason that the international community, such as it is, has not been able to come to any consensus is the deadlocked Security Council. So, we start from a situation in which Russia and the United States are completely deadlocked, even on issues that seem as basic as human rights. They can’t agree on anything. And so, now they’re each backing a side in Syria which sees itself as fighting an existential battle. At the same time, this is also very much, for Russia, about restoring its great power status and countering the U.S. in a keystone area of the Middle East. Russia has interests with its port on the Mediterranean Sea, in Tartus, in the western coast of Syria. So, Russia has a lot of interests there. Russia has clearly put more skin in the game than the United States has. And at the same time, the United States has now extended its commitment, perhaps indefinitely, in northeastern Syria, where most of Syria’s oil is. So, the problem is that even though there is a deconfliction process, which is supposed to prevent their sort of competing air forces from clashing with each other by accident or having any small incident that could escalate, you know, mistakes happen. And even—there’s even a mysterious incident, where more information is still unfolding about it, from last week, when U.S. forces hit a pro-government force, which was initially described to us by a Syrian government source as a pro-government Syrian Shiite militia, but now it’s coming out that many, maybe scores of, Russian contractors were killed. So, the Kremlin is saying, “We don’t know anything about these people. They’re military contractors. They don’t work for us.” This is the Russian version of Blackwater, this company. And so, the idea that there are, you know, large numbers of Russian troops going around Syria, working for who knows who, in the same arena where American troops are, is obviously very risky. And, you know, that’s not to mention that Turkey, as I mentioned before, and the United States have even—at least Turkey has even threatened to attack an area where U.S. troops are there on the ground with the Kurdish militias that Turkey wants to fight. So you have the prospect of two NATO allies, theoretically, it’s possible, that they could clash. And you have the Israeli-Iran-Hezbollah-Syria nexus that we talked about before. So, it’s getting more and more dangerous. And, you know, in a world where collective action seems to be impossible, it seems that everybody bet on the idea that Syria was containable, and, you know, we could just let people die and let it stay within the borders of Syria, and some countries even consider that to be within their interests. They felt that, you know, their enemies were killing each other. Well, as we can see, instead we have a massive refugee crisis affecting Europe, a much more massive refugee crisis affecting Syria’s neighbors—Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan—and now we have the possibility of hot war between major state powers coming out of this. So, you know, it seems like it’s going to get more dangerous before it calms down. AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaking January 17th at the Hoover Institution, in which he called Iran a “strategic threat” to the United States and used this alleged threat as justification for keeping U.S. troops in Syria. SECRETARY OF STATE REX TILLERSON: Continued threats to the U.S., from not just ISIS and al-Qaeda, but from others, persist. And this threat I’m referring to is principally Iran. As part of its strategy to create a northern arch, stretching from Iran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean, Iran has dramatically strengthened its presence in Syria by deploying Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops, supporting Lebanese Hezbollah and importing proxy forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. Through its position in Syria, Iran is positioning to continue attacking U.S. interests, our allies and personnel in the region. It is spending billions of dollars a year to prop up Assad and wage proxy wars at the expense of supporting its own people. … U.S. disengagement from Syria would provide Iran the opportunity to further strengthen its position in Syria. As we have seen from Iran’s proxy wars and public announcements, Iran seeks dominance in the Middle East and the destruction of our ally, Israel. As a destabilized nation and one bordering Israel, Syria presents an opportunity that Iran is all too eager to exploit. AMY GOODMAN: Yazan al-Saadi, if you can respond to the U.S. secretary of state? YAZAN AL-SAADI: Well, there’s much to respond. I mean, it’s—well, it’s funny. The first thought that comes to mind is that, yeah, well, the U.S. is the strategic threat to everyone in this world, especially for self-determination of communities around the world, so I find his comments quite hilarious. Secondly, let’s be honest. There’s something that Anne said earlier about the U.S. and Russia not agreeing in the Security Council for basic human rights. That’s not surprising, considering that both countries are major violators of human rights. And really, they don’t take human rights seriously. Now, this concern by the U.S. about Iran is typical, in terms of the mentality, the warmongering mentality within the U.S. military-political establishment, in terms of their own dominance and their need to dominate the region. At the same time, let’s also not ignore that Iran is a dictatorship, it is a problematic regime, just like every other regime in the region, including the Syrian regime, the Zionist regime and the Saudi regime and others. So, we are all facing this major problem, where we really need to ask ourselves, “What can be done? How can we accept the status quo?” Because the status quo means that our bodies, our communities are going to be paying the price of the blood and devastation, while politics and power reign supreme. And me, personally, I don’t accept this, and I feel that we need to mobilize, as various communities, to push back against the politics of power, whether it’s the U.S. or Putin or the Iranian regime or the Syrian dictatorship or the Israeli regime and whoever else. That’s the core question here. That’s the core debate. It’s about self-determination. And that’s something that we really need to keep our eye on. And that also means that we need to start creating mechanisms of accountability that forces these regimes to hold—you know, forces these regimes to accept the power of people and the rights of people beyond all. AMY GOODMAN: Anne, you recently tweeted, “In '13 much skepticism (I shared it) of bigger US intervention in Syria—b/c Iraq debacle. So US avoided steps to shield civilians (like no-fly zone). Yet 5 yrs on, what it hasn't avoided is indefinite military commitment in huge chunk of Syria.” If you could expand on that and talk about where you are now, in Beirut, Lebanon? What percentage of Lebanon is now Syrian refugees who have come over the border, not to mention Jordan and other places, and what this means? ANNE BARNARD: Well, Lebanon is a country of around 4 million people, and there are at least one-and-a-half million Syrian refugees here. So, it’s more than a quarter of the population. And, you know, that’s by far the largest proportion of refugees on Earth. So, Lebanon is bearing a huge brunt, and Turkey and Jordan also have large numbers of refugees. So, obviously, the region is bearing the brunt more than anyone else. And yeah, I think the U.S. policy, you know, seems a case of neither having your cake nor eating it. They did not take a step, which, of course, there’s a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the idea of a U.S. intervention, but at the same time it’s not as if they’re not intervening, as Yazan said earlier. They’re intervening in other ways, without really having helped Syrian civilians a lot. So, you know, and I think Yazan’s point is very good, that—how can there be a mechanism? I mean, if the great—the whole problem is that the great powers—Russia and the United States—and anyone in power, they don’t want themselves to be held accountable, so there is no incentive for those in power to allow the creation of such a mechanism. And look what happened when Syrian people and people in many other countries in the region tried to speak up and use people power and ask for just some more rights or some reforms in their countries. Almost all of them were defeated by state power in one way or another. So, it’s really a puzzle. I wonder, Yazan, if you have any, you know, specific ideas about how things can go differently for ordinary people who want to make their voices heard. I mean, you know, we’ve seen a lot of idealistic people try, and, you know, you see the results. YAZAN AL-SAADI: Of course. ANNE BARNARD: So— YAZAN AL-SAADI: Of course. I mean, yeah. ANNE BARNARD: I don’t know. YAZAN AL-SAADI: I mean, people are trying, and they’re still trying 'til this day, and we should continue. I mean, one of the most important things is international solidarities, right? Working between communities, whether it's the Syrian community, working with communities in the United States, for example—let’s say the Black Lives Matter, because they are facing injustices and tyranny of the state. So I believe in creating ties like that. I believe in creating ties between the BDS movement in Palestine with other pro-rights movements in Bahrain or in the Rohingya. That’s the only way forward, because we’re dealing with an international problem of domination over our communities, wherever we are. What is happening in Syria is a violent, physical manifestation of that. And it’s going to continue in other forms in other places, as long as power is still power. You know? AMY GOODMAN: Yazan— YAZAN AL-SAADI: And I do think like, like I said earlier, networking and international solidarity, it’s the only way forward. AMY GOODMAN: Yazan al-Saadi, we want to thank you for being with us, Syrian-Canadian researcher, usually in Beirut, Lebanon, now in Kuwait, and Anne Barnard, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we go to Austin, Texas. As the budget is unveiled, we’re going to look at a particular struggle that’s going on around the country for paid sick leave—the cities that are trying to initiate it and the Koch brothers-backed group that’s fighting it. Stay with us. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stuartnlevy at gmail.com Thu Feb 15 20:31:33 2018 From: stuartnlevy at gmail.com (stuartnlevy) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 14:31:33 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] =?utf-8?q?Fwd=3A_US_Media_Turn_to_=E2=80=98Superh?= =?utf-8?q?ero=E2=80=99_Pence_to_Combat_Korean_Olympic_Peace_Threat?= In-Reply-To: <8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58.690cba8393.20180214224458.7eaf0ba40a.569428cb@mail121.atl91.mcsv.net> Message-ID: <5a86093f.555e240a.54390.6799@mx.google.com>  -- Stuart -------- Original message --------From: FAIR Date: 2/14/18 16:46 (GMT-06:00) To: stuartnlevy at gmail.com Subject: US Media Turn to ‘Superhero’ Pence to Combat Korean Olympic Peace Threat Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. US Media Turn to ‘Superhero’ Pence to Combat Korean Olympic Peace Threat by Adam JohnsonNorth Korea, like virtually every country on earth, is using the Olympics this week as an opportunity for political theater, and this has greatly upset many in US media. Ostensibly this is because North Korea, marching with South Korea in the opening ceremonies and sending a squadron of cheerleaders to the Winter Games, is getting a pass on human rights abuses. But if one scratches the surface of the widespread outrage, it’s clear the real objection is that North and South Korea are having bilateral peace talks without the permission of—much less the participation of—the United States. Not shown: the US military, whose budget is roughly 100 times the size of North Korea’s. Leading the charge were four pieces by Atlantic Media—an outlet that last year plastered the cover of its magazine (7–8/17) with a cartoonish depiction of a North Korean invasion one might see in a Tom Clancy video game: The Olympics Are a Mass Propaganda Tool for Countries to Assimilate Their Citizens (Quartz, 2/7/18) North Korea Is Sending Kim Jong-Un’s Sister to Attend the Winter Olympics (Quartz, 2/7/18) At the Olympics, North Korea Executed a Propaganda Coup (Quartz, 2/9/18) North Korea’s Undeserved Olympic Glory (The Atlantic, 2/9/18) The first piece (Quartz, 2/7/18), ostensibly a broad overview on a history of “regimes” using the Olympics to cover up their crimes, began the trend of decrying North Korea’s Olympic participation, calling it a “repressive authoritarian state that keep their citizens in check with fear and unchecked power” and “gross human rights violations.” These abuses are presented as prima facie reason to bar North Korea from any participation in the Olympics, without any indication as to what human rights standard Olympic countries ought to meet. The other two Quartz pieces and The Atlantic piece repeat the same line: North Korea’s human rights abuses are so great it should be barred from “propaganda” exercises, regardless of what the South Koreans think is in their best interests. The Atlantic’s Uri Friedman (2/9/18), lacking any coherent reason to level outrage at the peace gesture, disclosed it just sort of made him feel bad: There they were, the South and North Korean Olympic teams marching together in sparkling white jackets behind a flag symbolizing Korean unity, as the soulful notes of the Korean folk song “Arirang” played and top South and North Korean officials warmly greeted each other in the stands, during an Opening Ceremony in Pyeongchang extolling peace. It felt wonderful. But it also felt … wrong. Friedman seems chiefly aggrieved that South Korea’s athletes should have to dilute their moment of glory with North Koreans who were allowed to violate pointless formalities: They shared that exceedingly rare moment with athletes and coaches from North Korea, which did nothing to organize the event, missed the registration deadline for sending a delegation, and boasts only two athletes who qualified for the competition on merit. Oh no, not the registration deadline! Like all these articles, Friedman’s assumes the South Koreans are at best naive children being duped, and at worst cynical enablers indifferent to human suffering. The idea that there are larger concerns at work—namely staving off nuclear holocaust—is never seriously addressed. The Washington Post  (2/9/18) did not seem to be kidding when it called Vice President Mike Pence “a mild-mannered, if resolute, superhero.” The Washington Post took this line even further in “Pence’s Olympic Mission: Countering North Korean Propaganda”  (2/9/18), painting Vice President Mike Pence, who sat staring stonily at the joint Korean procession, as a noble bulwark against unfettered North Korean propaganda and human rights abuses: Vice President Pence was a man on a mission…. Thursday at Seoul’s Osan Air Base, Pence had transformed himself into something of an anti-propaganda warrior — a mild-mannered, if resolute, superhero who arrived in South Korea on the eve of the Winter Games to single-handedly rebuff North Korea’s public relations efforts…. Nearly every one of Pence’s actions during his five-day trip to Japan and South Korea this week—his public declarations, private murmurings and scripted meetings and visits—have been aimed at combating North Korea’s shiny propaganda with gritty talk of his own. It’s hard to think of a better illustration of the concept of cognitive dissonance than the Washington Post unironically referring to Mike Pence as a “superhero” in an article about the dangers of propaganda. To maintain the pretense of the US as noble arbiter of human rights and fighter of “propaganda,” the piece positioned Pence, the second-highest-ranking member of the Trump administration and its most frequent apologist, as somehow separate from the Trump administration: “Of course, as with most of his international travel, Pence’s goals were complicated somewhat by Trump.”  The more logical explanation—that Pence is simply wielding human rights concerns in service of Trump’s warmongering, not apart from or opposed to it—is never entertained. The US role of international defender of rights is an axiom of US corporate media (FAIR.org, 5/17/17, 7/24/17, 10/23/17), even as Trump  dismisses the idea of US as human rights champion and loudly buddies up to the world’s most egregious offenders. The Post, unable to challenge the fundamental myth of US as shining beacon of freedom, therefore paints Pence not as a representative of Trump, but a mitigating presence, acting apart from his warmongering agenda. Pence made clear that it isn’t peace he seeks from North Korea, but “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.” Why they would or should do that while the president of the United States tweets out threats of nuclear genocide is more of a mystery. The Post, like The Atlantic, doesn’t bother to interview any South Korean peace activists, or their newly elected left-wing President Moon Jae-in—who was ushered into office with an anti-Trump, pro-unification mandate. Instead, it engages in surface-level moralizing, seeking comment from hawkish Western think tanks like the Lockheed Martin–funded Center for Strategic and International Studies (FAIR.org, 5/8/17).   d Read the original post here. FAIR's Website FAIR counts on your support to do this work — please donate today.  Follow on Twitter | Friend on Facebook | Forward to a Friend  Copyright © 2018 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you signed up for email alerts from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. Our mailing address is: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201New York, NY 10001 Add us to your address book  unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences | view email in browser  -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Fri Feb 16 00:46:02 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 18:46:02 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Why, DemocracyNow. is no longer, my news of the day. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <963E15EF-ADE4-4868-A79E-8D53CDA58629@gmail.com> The Timeswoman remarks, “...we start from a situation in which Russia and the United States are completely deadlocked, even on issues that seem as basic as human rights. They can’t agree on anything. And so, now they’re each backing a side in Syria which sees itself as fighting an existential battle.” She neglects to note that the Russians are in Syria at the invitation of a legitimate government, a member of the UN; the US troops are an illegitimate invading force. Three generations of US imperial war in the Mideast have killed millions. A new Nuremberg Tribunal would have executed all post-WWII US presidents, up to today. —CGE > On Feb 15, 2018, at 3:18 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Worse”: World Powers Clash as Civilian Deaths Soar > STORYFEBRUARY 13, 2018 Watch Full Show > > GUESTS > • Anne Barnard > New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. Her recent articles are titled “Israel Strikes Iran in Syria and Loses a Jet” and “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse” > • Yazan al Saadi > Syrian-Canadian writer and researcher. > Tensions across northern Syria are escalating sharply amid a series of clashes between external and internal powers, including Israel, Iran, Turkey, Russia and the Syrian government. On Saturday, Israel shot down what it says was an Iranian drone that had entered Israel’s airspace after being launched in Syria. Israel then mounted an attack on an Iranian command center in Syria, from where the drone was launched. One of the Israeli F-16 military jets was then downed by a Syrian government anti-aircraft missile. Meanwhile, also in northern Syria on Saturday, a Turkish Army helicopter was shot down by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPGfighters near the Syrian Kurdish city of Afrin, where Turkey has launched a bombing and ground offensive. All this comes as the United Nations is warning of soaring levels of civilian casualties in Syria. For more, we speak with Anne Barnard, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. Her recent articles are titled “Israel Strikes Iran in Syria and Loses a Jet” and “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse.” And we speak with Syrian-Canadian researcher Yazan al-Saadi. > > Transcript > This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. > JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show with the ongoing war in Syria.Tensions across northern Syria are escalating sharply amidst a series of clashes between external and internal powers, including Israel, Iran, Turkey, Russia and the Syrian government. On Saturday, Israel shot down what it says was an Iranian drone that had entered Israel’s airspace after being launched from Syria. Israel then mounted an attack on an Iranian command center in Syria, from where the drone was launched. One of the Israeli F-16 military jets was then downed by a Syrian government anti-aircraft missile. Saturday’s event marks the first Israeli jet shot down since the 1980s. It is also believed to be the first time Israel has carried out an attack in Syria on a site where Iranian troops were present. On Tuesday, the Syrian government warned Israel it would face “more surprises” if it launches future attacks inside Syria. Meanwhile, also in northern Syria on Saturday, a Turkish Army helicopter was shot down by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG fighters near the Syrian Kurdish city of Afrin, where Turkey has launched a bombing and ground offensive. > > All this comes as the United Nations is warning of soaring levels of civilian casualties in Syria. This is U.N. high commissioner for human rights spokesperson Elizabeth Throssell. > > ELIZABETH THROSSELL: This has been a week of soaring violence and bloodshed in Syria—more than a thousand civilian casualties in six days. We’ve received reports that at least 277 civilians have been killed; 230 of these people were killed in airstrikes by the Syrian government and their allies. In addition, 812 people were injured. > > AMY GOODMAN: The United Nations is warning civilians are being killed and wounded at a rapid pace amidst an escalation in the Syrian government bombing against the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. At least 200 civilians have reportedly been killed in the last week alone. > > Well, for more, we’re joined by two guests. Anne Barnard is The New York Timesbureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, her recent articles headlined “Israel Strikes Iran in Syria and Loses a Jet” and “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse.” In Kuwait, we’re joined by the Syrian-Candadian researcher Yazan al-Saadi. > > We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Anne, let’s begin with you. Your article, “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse,” you begin by saying, “Half a dozen newborns, blinking and arching their backs, were carried from a burning hospital hit by airstrikes. A bombed apartment house collapsed, burying families. Medics doused patients with water after a suspected chlorine attack, one of five in Syria since the start of the year. That was just a fraction of the violence this week in northern Syria,” you write. So, first let’s talk about what you found on the ground—you were just recently there [sic]—and then this global set of countries that continue to pummel Syria. > > ANNE BARNARD: Well, thank you so much, first of all, for being interested in this subject. That’s very important that it continues to be talked about. I have to correct one thing, which is that I was not in Syria since about one year ago. And the reason for that is I’m constantly applying for visas, but the Syrian government does not—it’s quite unpredictable and quite restrictive about when it grants visas to foreign journalists. And once you’re there, you can’t operate entirely freely anyway. So, just to know, we have covered the recent events from here in Beirut and through a very extensive network of contacts on all sides inside Syria. > > But, yes, it’s been an unbelievable week. And the thing that you really need to know to put this in even more perspective is that, yes, there’s been a spike in deaths and in civilian casualties. There was a period of—I think just from last week, from Monday to Friday, there were 230 people killed, civilians, mostly civilians, and a thousand casualties. So, that’s a lot, but, actually, over the last—most of the last seven years, there’s all—those kinds of death tolls are happening all the time, maybe at a slower pace, but in these places, civilians are under attack constantly, and hospitals are under attack. And, you know, there’s very difficult problems in getting humanitarian aid access. And it’s happening in many places in Syria, by many sides. But the Syrian government’s attempts to take back rebel-held areas have been particularly characterized lately by an intensified bombing campaign that has taken a very heavy toll on civilians, who are already tired, malnourished, maybe displaced already several times. Some of them are stuck behind siege boundaries. So, it’s really been a tough week. > > JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Anne, most of the media attention in the United States have focused on the war against ISIS, and once the declaration that ISIS—the ISIS—or most of the ISIS enclaves had been defeated, the attention has largely dropped from the U.S. media. What has happened—since the so-called defeat of ISIS, how has the war in Syria transformed? > > ANNE BARNARD: Well, you’re exactly right. The U.S. focus has tended to be on ISISwithin a framework of the so-called war on terror. But the war in Syria did not begin with ISIS and is not going to end with ISIS. First of all, I think it’s probably a mistaken “mission accomplished” moment to claim that ISIS has actually been defeated, because many fighters have gone underground, and their ideology, of course, is continuing to assert itself in some places. > > But since then, what the relative defeat of ISIS has unleashed is the ability of the Syrian government and its allies—Russia and Iran—to turn their attention fully back to fighting the rebels, who have already been on the run. And it’s very complicated, because there are different patches of areas around the country that are not connected to each other, that are controlled by different rebel groups, Islamist groups, some Qaeda-linked groups. These are not even contiguous patches of territory. So you’re talking about many wars within a war. But what’s happened is that now the government is able to focus on those battles. And, you know, in a sense, the rest of the world cares less about that than they cared about ISIS, because they saw ISIS as a threat to themselves. > > AMY GOODMAN: So, the beginning of this conversation, we talked about just what happened among the major countries that are bombing Syria—again, Israel shooting down what it says is an Iranian drone, then attacking what it called the command-and-control center in Syria for the drone. Then one of the Israeli F-16 military jets were downed by the Syrian government anti-aircraft missile. Saturday’s event marking the first Israeli jet shot down since the 1980s, also believed to be the first time Israel carried out an attack in Syria on a site where Iranian troops were present. Can you talk about the significance of all of this? > > ANNE BARNARD: Yes. This brings us to the second consequence of the end of the main part of the territorial fight against Islamic State. Many different international powers, as well as the Syrian government and some of its rival—some of its opponents within Syria, were all against each other, in a way, but united against the Islamic State. And they launched competing campaigns to defeat the Islamic State, racing one another to take its territory. > > Once Islamic State was largely driven out of territory in Syria, those different combatants are finding that their conflicting interests are coming to the fore again. So, you see now Turkey going against Syrian Kurdish groups. You see even clashes—even confrontations between Turkey and the United States over the United States’ backing for Kurds, Kurdish militias that Turkey sees as terrorists and that the United States sees as its best ally in Syria. There’s a big question—the United States has upset both allies and enemies by saying that it wants to now remain in the areas that were taken by the U.S.-backed militias in the northeast of Syria. Israel has been bombing targets in Syria throughout the war, with relative impunity. This is the first time that the Syrian government has managed to shoot down a jet. You also have Syria’s allies—Russia and Iran—which have differing views about how exactly the future of Syria should be laid out. > > And I’m probably forgetting to mention somebody, but all of these—I fear that we may be getting to a phase in the Syrian war where all the foreign interveners are turning it into an arena to fight amongst each other, really regardless of what Syrians want or the effect on Syrians. And, unfortunately, that could go on for a long time. > > AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, then come back to this discussion, where we’ll also be joined, in addition to Anne Barnard, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, by Yazan al-Saadi, the Syrian-Canadian researcher. This is Democracy Now! Back with them in a moment. > > [break] > > AMY GOODMAN: “Uncle John” by Pearls Before Swine. The band’s founder, Tom Rapp, died on Sunday at the age of 70. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. > > JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we return now to Syria. The United Nations is warning that civilians are being killed and wounded at a rapid pace amidst an escalation in the Syrian government bombing against the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. At least 200 civilians have been reportedly killed in the last week alone. > > We’re joined now by Yazan al-Saadi, a Syrian-Canadian writer, researcher. And still with us is Anne Barnard, from The New York Times, bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. Her recent article is titled “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse.” > > Anne, I wanted to begin again with you to ask you about the role of Hezbollah, because, obviously, Hezbollah was widely involved in the fighting in Syria, has undoubtedly grown stronger as a result. And could you talk about its role, particularly, in the conflict, and the concerns of Israel over the growth of Hezbollah? > > ANNE BARNARD: Well, Hezbollah entered the war overtly and in a sort of—in the manner of an expeditionary force in 2013. And that was a big surprise, because this is a group that was founded to fight Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon, not to go and help put down uprisings in other countries. But nonetheless, because of their close alliance with Damascus and Tehran, Hezbollah entered the war, first in areas that made sense, in a way, for it in a local—in a local sense, because they first focused on areas near the Lebanese border, on the shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab near Damascus, which is particularly revered by Shiites. But gradually their role expanded. They were a much more effective pound-for-pound force than the Syrian military, and they ended up helping out in battles steadily spreading across the country. Nobody imagined a few years ago that Hezbollah would end up fighting in Aleppo, near the Iraqi border, in northern Syria, all the way in southern Syria. > > Now, the southern Syria part is the biggest issue, because, of course, there’s always been conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, and tensions there across the Lebanese border, but now Hezbollah is entrenching itself increasingly in areas in the southern part of Syria, bordering the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the portion that’s held by the Israelis. So, that’s obviously of big concern to Israel. At the same time, the Syrian government accuses Israel of trying to increase its own buffer zone there, and that’s been a real flashpoint. And that really exploded on Saturday, not as badly as it could have been, though, because it seems to have been contained, for now, to this one incident. There is also, of course, an Iranian presence around. Iranian advisers are deeply involved throughout the war effort on the Syrian government side. So, that’s something that Israel has been trying to counter throughout the conflict, and I think we’re only going to see more tensions around that. > > AMY GOODMAN: Yazan al-Saadi, we want to bring you into this conversation. You’re a Syrian-Canadian researcher, usually where Anne is, in Beirut, Lebanon, but right now we’re talking to you in Kuwait. Talk about the situation in Syria, in your country, as you see it. > > YAZAN AL-SAADI: Wow! All right. It’s absolutely tragic. And it’s—what you’re seeing is all these actors, whether it’s the Syrian regime, the Bashar dictatorship or the armed opposition, or the Putin regime and the Trump regime and the apartheid Zionist regime, all attacking and destroying the Syrian population. What we’re seeing is basically a complete annihilation of the struggle for Syrian self-determination by various communities within the country. You’re seeing a complete devastation of a society. The healthcare system is gone. Half the population are either refugees or amputees. And it’s absolutely devastating. > > And what we’re witnessing in Syria—and we need to remember this, as well—is that we’re witnessing the failure of the international mechanisms to hold states accountable. And this is not only exceptional to Syria. We’ve seen this before in places like Iraq, Palestine, Congo, the Central African Republic, and even in Myanmar now with the Rohingya. So, if you want a sound bite, what we’re seeing is the typicalness of power over people. And this is something that is going to continue in various places, whether in Syria or elsewhere, as long as governments and states are allowed to do what they can do. And this can only end if populations and communities around the world start mobilizing and pressuring their own governments to stop these types of actions, to not allow power to dominate over people. And if we don’t do that, we’re just going to see the tragedy of Syria continue for a long time, and you’re going to see other tragedies in other places around the world. That is what’s happening. > > JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yazan, I wanted to ask you about the role of Bashar al-Assad. Many of the Western powers were originally calling for regime change to end the civil war, and now that’s dropped off the table for a lot of them, in terms of the ongoing conflict. Could you talk about that, as well? > > YAZAN AL-SAADI: Yeah, of course. I’m not surprised it dropped off the table, because, let’s be honest, Western governments really don’t care about, you know, dictatorships. In fact, they’re quite a fan. There’s a lot of businesses and interests with dictatorships. And let’s be honest. When these protests happened—and they happened in a context—in 2011, in the region, where you had a large mobilization in different countries, by different people, to pressure change against dictatorships. But Western governments don’t really care. And let’s be—let’s be frank about this. They don’t really care if Bashar stays or not, as long as he plays ball and fits into their interests. > > Now, should Bashar go? Yes, obviously. He’s a dictatorship. But it cannot happen through the idea of Western intervention or Western forms of regime change, because we’ve seen what happened in Libya and Iraq. So we need to do something else here. There needs to be an international form of mechanism to hold dictatorships accountable, whoever they are, you know, whether they’re allies to the West or they’re allies to Putin. And this is something—this is a larger question that we really need to talk about. > > AMY GOODMAN: The escalation in Syria comes as the Pentagon has also indicated it plans to recruit and train thousands of U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria to form a border security force in northern Syria along the border with Turkey. The U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters already control large swaths of northern Syria. The significance of this? We talked, Yazan, earlier about what just happened in the last week. You know, you have the Israeli plane shot down, the Turkish plane shot down, etc. > > YAZAN AL-SAADI: So, I mean, this U.S. plan, like all U.S. plans, is going to be disastrous. I mean, it’s all part of, you know, really furthering U.S. military interests and a presence in certain countries around the world. This support for the SDF, which is the armed wing of the PYD, is really not going to be helpful, ultimately, for Kurdish self-determination, in my opinion. And I do believe that the Kurds have every right for self-determination, like every community around the world. What the U.S. are interested is just to have a hand in the geography. But ultimately, like we’ve seen over and over again in history every time the U.S. has a certain plan of backing armed groups, it’s disastrous, whether it’s the Contras in Latin America, the armed groups in Iraq and wherever else. It’s going to be a disaster. And we’re seeing bits of that happening right now, with everyone shooting everyone. > > JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to go back to Anne Barnard for a second, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut. All of these governments—all of these foreign governments having their forces and their planes in Syria, could you talk about whether the potential is increasing or decreasing for some kind of a conflict between the outside powers spreading beyond Syria? > > ANNE BARNARD: Well, that’s certainly the danger. I mean, and just to build on what Yazan was saying, the reason that the international community, such as it is, has not been able to come to any consensus is the deadlocked Security Council. So, we start from a situation in which Russia and the United States are completely deadlocked, even on issues that seem as basic as human rights. They can’t agree on anything. And so, now they’re each backing a side in Syria which sees itself as fighting an existential battle. > > At the same time, this is also very much, for Russia, about restoring its great power status and countering the U.S. in a keystone area of the Middle East. Russia has interests with its port on the Mediterranean Sea, in Tartus, in the western coast of Syria. So, Russia has a lot of interests there. Russia has clearly put more skin in the game than the United States has. And at the same time, the United States has now extended its commitment, perhaps indefinitely, in northeastern Syria, where most of Syria’s oil is. > > So, the problem is that even though there is a deconfliction process, which is supposed to prevent their sort of competing air forces from clashing with each other by accident or having any small incident that could escalate, you know, mistakes happen. And even—there’s even a mysterious incident, where more information is still unfolding about it, from last week, when U.S. forces hit a pro-government force, which was initially described to us by a Syrian government source as a pro-government Syrian Shiite militia, but now it’s coming out that many, maybe scores of, Russian contractors were killed. So, the Kremlin is saying, “We don’t know anything about these people. They’re military contractors. They don’t work for us.” This is the Russian version of Blackwater, this company. And so, the idea that there are, you know, large numbers of Russian troops going around Syria, working for who knows who, in the same arena where American troops are, is obviously very risky. > > And, you know, that’s not to mention that Turkey, as I mentioned before, and the United States have even—at least Turkey has even threatened to attack an area where U.S. troops are there on the ground with the Kurdish militias that Turkey wants to fight. So you have the prospect of two NATO allies, theoretically, it’s possible, that they could clash. And you have the Israeli-Iran-Hezbollah-Syria nexus that we talked about before. > > So, it’s getting more and more dangerous. And, you know, in a world where collective action seems to be impossible, it seems that everybody bet on the idea that Syria was containable, and, you know, we could just let people die and let it stay within the borders of Syria, and some countries even consider that to be within their interests. They felt that, you know, their enemies were killing each other. Well, as we can see, instead we have a massive refugee crisis affecting Europe, a much more massive refugee crisis affecting Syria’s neighbors—Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan—and now we have the possibility of hot war between major state powers coming out of this. So, you know, it seems like it’s going to get more dangerous before it calms down. > > AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaking January 17th at the Hoover Institution, in which he called Iran a “strategic threat” to the United States and used this alleged threat as justification for keeping U.S. troops in Syria. > > SECRETARY OF STATE REX TILLERSON: Continued threats to the U.S., from not just ISIS and al-Qaeda, but from others, persist. And this threat I’m referring to is principally Iran. As part of its strategy to create a northern arch, stretching from Iran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean, Iran has dramatically strengthened its presence in Syria by deploying Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops, supporting Lebanese Hezbollah and importing proxy forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. Through its position in Syria, Iran is positioning to continue attacking U.S. interests, our allies and personnel in the region. It is spending billions of dollars a year to prop up Assad and wage proxy wars at the expense of supporting its own people. … > > U.S. disengagement from Syria would provide Iran the opportunity to further strengthen its position in Syria. As we have seen from Iran’s proxy wars and public announcements, Iran seeks dominance in the Middle East and the destruction of our ally, Israel. As a destabilized nation and one bordering Israel, Syria presents an opportunity that Iran is all too eager to exploit. > > AMY GOODMAN: Yazan al-Saadi, if you can respond to the U.S. secretary of state? > > YAZAN AL-SAADI: Well, there’s much to respond. I mean, it’s—well, it’s funny. The first thought that comes to mind is that, yeah, well, the U.S. is the strategic threat to everyone in this world, especially for self-determination of communities around the world, so I find his comments quite hilarious. Secondly, let’s be honest. There’s something that Anne said earlier about the U.S. and Russia not agreeing in the Security Council for basic human rights. That’s not surprising, considering that both countries are major violators of human rights. And really, they don’t take human rights seriously. > > Now, this concern by the U.S. about Iran is typical, in terms of the mentality, the warmongering mentality within the U.S. military-political establishment, in terms of their own dominance and their need to dominate the region. At the same time, let’s also not ignore that Iran is a dictatorship, it is a problematic regime, just like every other regime in the region, including the Syrian regime, the Zionist regime and the Saudi regime and others. So, we are all facing this major problem, where we really need to ask ourselves, “What can be done? How can we accept the status quo?” Because the status quo means that our bodies, our communities are going to be paying the price of the blood and devastation, while politics and power reign supreme. > > And me, personally, I don’t accept this, and I feel that we need to mobilize, as various communities, to push back against the politics of power, whether it’s the U.S. or Putin or the Iranian regime or the Syrian dictatorship or the Israeli regime and whoever else. That’s the core question here. That’s the core debate. It’s about self-determination. And that’s something that we really need to keep our eye on. And that also means that we need to start creating mechanisms of accountability that forces these regimes to hold—you know, forces these regimes to accept the power of people and the rights of people beyond all. > > AMY GOODMAN: Anne, you recently tweeted, “In '13 much skepticism (I shared it) of bigger US intervention in Syria—b/c Iraq debacle. So US avoided steps to shield civilians (like no-fly zone). Yet 5 yrs on, what it hasn't avoided is indefinite military commitment in huge chunk of Syria.” If you could expand on that and talk about where you are now, in Beirut, Lebanon? What percentage of Lebanon is now Syrian refugees who have come over the border, not to mention Jordan and other places, and what this means? > > ANNE BARNARD: Well, Lebanon is a country of around 4 million people, and there are at least one-and-a-half million Syrian refugees here. So, it’s more than a quarter of the population. And, you know, that’s by far the largest proportion of refugees on Earth. So, Lebanon is bearing a huge brunt, and Turkey and Jordan also have large numbers of refugees. So, obviously, the region is bearing the brunt more than anyone else. > > And yeah, I think the U.S. policy, you know, seems a case of neither having your cake nor eating it. They did not take a step, which, of course, there’s a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the idea of a U.S. intervention, but at the same time it’s not as if they’re not intervening, as Yazan said earlier. They’re intervening in other ways, without really having helped Syrian civilians a lot. > > So, you know, and I think Yazan’s point is very good, that—how can there be a mechanism? I mean, if the great—the whole problem is that the great powers—Russia and the United States—and anyone in power, they don’t want themselves to be held accountable, so there is no incentive for those in power to allow the creation of such a mechanism. > > And look what happened when Syrian people and people in many other countries in the region tried to speak up and use people power and ask for just some more rights or some reforms in their countries. Almost all of them were defeated by state power in one way or another. So, it’s really a puzzle. > > I wonder, Yazan, if you have any, you know, specific ideas about how things can go differently for ordinary people who want to make their voices heard. I mean, you know, we’ve seen a lot of idealistic people try, and, you know, you see the results. > > YAZAN AL-SAADI: Of course. > > ANNE BARNARD: So— > > YAZAN AL-SAADI: Of course. I mean, yeah. > > ANNE BARNARD: I don’t know. > > YAZAN AL-SAADI: I mean, people are trying, and they’re still trying 'til this day, and we should continue. I mean, one of the most important things is international solidarities, right? Working between communities, whether it's the Syrian community, working with communities in the United States, for example—let’s say the Black Lives Matter, because they are facing injustices and tyranny of the state. So I believe in creating ties like that. I believe in creating ties between the BDS movement in Palestine with other pro-rights movements in Bahrain or in the Rohingya. That’s the only way forward, because we’re dealing with an international problem of domination over our communities, wherever we are. What is happening in Syria is a violent, physical manifestation of that. And it’s going to continue in other forms in other places, as long as power is still power. You know? > > AMY GOODMAN: Yazan— > > YAZAN AL-SAADI: And I do think like, like I said earlier, networking and international solidarity, it’s the only way forward. > > AMY GOODMAN: Yazan al-Saadi, we want to thank you for being with us, Syrian-Canadian researcher, usually in Beirut, Lebanon, now in Kuwait, and Anne Barnard, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. > > This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we go to Austin, Texas. As the budget is unveiled, we’re going to look at a particular struggle that’s going on around the country for paid sick leave—the cities that are trying to initiate it and the Koch brothers-backed group that’s fighting it. Stay with us. > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From cgestabrook at gmail.com Fri Feb 16 02:29:31 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 20:29:31 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Supremacy and murder Message-ID: Supremacy and murder It's a fundamental and not always innocent mistake to say that the US is killing people in MENA (Mideast and North Africa) for white supremacy. We're doing so for the economic supremacy of the American one percent. Racism can be a convenient cover story. (Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris - “it’s human nature to hate those you have injured.”) In response to the assault of neoliberalism in the 1970s, American liberals shamefully chose to stop noticing the class basis of US imperialism, which they had painfully learnt in Vietnam: 'By 1969 about 70% of the public had come to regard the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” largely as a result of the impact of student protest on general consciousness. And that mass opposition compelled the business community and then the government to stop the escalation of the war.' But the business community and then the government counterattacked in the 1970s, notably among partisans of Israel, who feared that US war weariness would interfere with US military support for the Zionist state. Thus neoconservatism was born. The broader response was neoliberalism - the conscious, calculated campaign by US business leaders against the social democratic traditions that began in the New Deal of the 1930s and lasted into the 1970s. Social democracy from the 1930s to the 1970s in the US sought to lessen the rigors of capitalism for the majority by means of supports such as Social Security and Medicare. The strategy of neoliberalism was to use the power of government to protect and enhance the return on capital; to free capital from government restraints, not to free the economy from government, as 19th-century Liberalism had proposed. Neoliberalism therefore depended on limiting democracy in government. (See "The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies," a 1975 report to the Trilateral Commission - the crisis being, in the eyes of this international business group, that too much democracy had developed in the capitalist world during 'the Sixties' and had to be reversed.) The principal neoliberal tools, from the 1970s on, were (a) globalization (in search of low-wage platforms around the world, with the concomitant de-industrialization of the US economy) and (b) financialization of the economy (the balance of power shifting from industrial corporations to financial corporations). The effects were immediate and lasting: wages in the US, which had risen along with productivity 1945-73, have been flat since 1973, although productivity has continued to rise. And the concentration of wealth has increased, and at an accelerating rate, while median household income continued to decline, throughout the Obama years. —CGE From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 16 03:09:32 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 03:09:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Why, DemocracyNow. is no longer, my news of the day. In-Reply-To: <963E15EF-ADE4-4868-A79E-8D53CDA58629@gmail.com> References: <963E15EF-ADE4-4868-A79E-8D53CDA58629@gmail.com> Message-ID: Yes, a facade, with the NYT’s bureau person giving the impression that the problem was primarily due to Hezbollah. One would think it was a civil war, with Russia being there all along, no mention, the US has been there all along, Russia only since end of 2015. The US desire for a “no fly zone” had little to do with “protecting civilians.” The tone throughout was one of both the US and Russia there to fight ISIS. No mention of the fact that the USG was there for regime change, and set up and supported ISIS. I found it difficult to take anything either of those being interviewed cared about the people of Syria. Even Yazan mouthed words, that were less than convincing. > On Feb 15, 2018, at 16:46, C G Estabrook wrote: > > The Timeswoman remarks, “...we start from a situation in which Russia and the United States are completely deadlocked, even on issues that seem as basic as human rights. They can’t agree on anything. And so, now they’re each backing a side in Syria which sees itself as fighting an existential battle.” > > She neglects to note that the Russians are in Syria at the invitation of a legitimate government, a member of the UN; the US troops are an illegitimate invading force. > > Three generations of US imperial war in the Mideast have killed millions. A new Nuremberg Tribunal would have executed all post-WWII US presidents, up to today. > > —CGE > >> On Feb 15, 2018, at 3:18 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Worse”: World Powers Clash as Civilian Deaths Soar >> STORYFEBRUARY 13, 2018 Watch Full Show >> >> GUESTS >> • Anne Barnard >> New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. Her recent articles are titled “Israel Strikes Iran in Syria and Loses a Jet” and “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse” >> • Yazan al Saadi >> Syrian-Canadian writer and researcher. >> Tensions across northern Syria are escalating sharply amid a series of clashes between external and internal powers, including Israel, Iran, Turkey, Russia and the Syrian government. On Saturday, Israel shot down what it says was an Iranian drone that had entered Israel’s airspace after being launched in Syria. Israel then mounted an attack on an Iranian command center in Syria, from where the drone was launched. One of the Israeli F-16 military jets was then downed by a Syrian government anti-aircraft missile. Meanwhile, also in northern Syria on Saturday, a Turkish Army helicopter was shot down by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPGfighters near the Syrian Kurdish city of Afrin, where Turkey has launched a bombing and ground offensive. All this comes as the United Nations is warning of soaring levels of civilian casualties in Syria. For more, we speak with Anne Barnard, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. Her recent articles are titled “Israel Strikes Iran in Syria and Loses a Jet” and “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse.” And we speak with Syrian-Canadian researcher Yazan al-Saadi. >> >> Transcript >> This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. >> JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show with the ongoing war in Syria.Tensions across northern Syria are escalating sharply amidst a series of clashes between external and internal powers, including Israel, Iran, Turkey, Russia and the Syrian government. On Saturday, Israel shot down what it says was an Iranian drone that had entered Israel’s airspace after being launched from Syria. Israel then mounted an attack on an Iranian command center in Syria, from where the drone was launched. One of the Israeli F-16 military jets was then downed by a Syrian government anti-aircraft missile. Saturday’s event marks the first Israeli jet shot down since the 1980s. It is also believed to be the first time Israel has carried out an attack in Syria on a site where Iranian troops were present. On Tuesday, the Syrian government warned Israel it would face “more surprises” if it launches future attacks inside Syria. Meanwhile, also in northern Syria on Saturday, a Turkish Army helicopter was shot down by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG fighters near the Syrian Kurdish city of Afrin, where Turkey has launched a bombing and ground offensive. >> >> All this comes as the United Nations is warning of soaring levels of civilian casualties in Syria. This is U.N. high commissioner for human rights spokesperson Elizabeth Throssell. >> >> ELIZABETH THROSSELL: This has been a week of soaring violence and bloodshed in Syria—more than a thousand civilian casualties in six days. We’ve received reports that at least 277 civilians have been killed; 230 of these people were killed in airstrikes by the Syrian government and their allies. In addition, 812 people were injured. >> >> AMY GOODMAN: The United Nations is warning civilians are being killed and wounded at a rapid pace amidst an escalation in the Syrian government bombing against the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. At least 200 civilians have reportedly been killed in the last week alone. >> >> Well, for more, we’re joined by two guests. Anne Barnard is The New York Timesbureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, her recent articles headlined “Israel Strikes Iran in Syria and Loses a Jet” and “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse.” In Kuwait, we’re joined by the Syrian-Candadian researcher Yazan al-Saadi. >> >> We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Anne, let’s begin with you. Your article, “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse,” you begin by saying, “Half a dozen newborns, blinking and arching their backs, were carried from a burning hospital hit by airstrikes. A bombed apartment house collapsed, burying families. Medics doused patients with water after a suspected chlorine attack, one of five in Syria since the start of the year. That was just a fraction of the violence this week in northern Syria,” you write. So, first let’s talk about what you found on the ground—you were just recently there [sic]—and then this global set of countries that continue to pummel Syria. >> >> ANNE BARNARD: Well, thank you so much, first of all, for being interested in this subject. That’s very important that it continues to be talked about. I have to correct one thing, which is that I was not in Syria since about one year ago. And the reason for that is I’m constantly applying for visas, but the Syrian government does not—it’s quite unpredictable and quite restrictive about when it grants visas to foreign journalists. And once you’re there, you can’t operate entirely freely anyway. So, just to know, we have covered the recent events from here in Beirut and through a very extensive network of contacts on all sides inside Syria. >> >> But, yes, it’s been an unbelievable week. And the thing that you really need to know to put this in even more perspective is that, yes, there’s been a spike in deaths and in civilian casualties. There was a period of—I think just from last week, from Monday to Friday, there were 230 people killed, civilians, mostly civilians, and a thousand casualties. So, that’s a lot, but, actually, over the last—most of the last seven years, there’s all—those kinds of death tolls are happening all the time, maybe at a slower pace, but in these places, civilians are under attack constantly, and hospitals are under attack. And, you know, there’s very difficult problems in getting humanitarian aid access. And it’s happening in many places in Syria, by many sides. But the Syrian government’s attempts to take back rebel-held areas have been particularly characterized lately by an intensified bombing campaign that has taken a very heavy toll on civilians, who are already tired, malnourished, maybe displaced already several times. Some of them are stuck behind siege boundaries. So, it’s really been a tough week. >> >> JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Anne, most of the media attention in the United States have focused on the war against ISIS, and once the declaration that ISIS—the ISIS—or most of the ISIS enclaves had been defeated, the attention has largely dropped from the U.S. media. What has happened—since the so-called defeat of ISIS, how has the war in Syria transformed? >> >> ANNE BARNARD: Well, you’re exactly right. The U.S. focus has tended to be on ISISwithin a framework of the so-called war on terror. But the war in Syria did not begin with ISIS and is not going to end with ISIS. First of all, I think it’s probably a mistaken “mission accomplished” moment to claim that ISIS has actually been defeated, because many fighters have gone underground, and their ideology, of course, is continuing to assert itself in some places. >> >> But since then, what the relative defeat of ISIS has unleashed is the ability of the Syrian government and its allies—Russia and Iran—to turn their attention fully back to fighting the rebels, who have already been on the run. And it’s very complicated, because there are different patches of areas around the country that are not connected to each other, that are controlled by different rebel groups, Islamist groups, some Qaeda-linked groups. These are not even contiguous patches of territory. So you’re talking about many wars within a war. But what’s happened is that now the government is able to focus on those battles. And, you know, in a sense, the rest of the world cares less about that than they cared about ISIS, because they saw ISIS as a threat to themselves. >> >> AMY GOODMAN: So, the beginning of this conversation, we talked about just what happened among the major countries that are bombing Syria—again, Israel shooting down what it says is an Iranian drone, then attacking what it called the command-and-control center in Syria for the drone. Then one of the Israeli F-16 military jets were downed by the Syrian government anti-aircraft missile. Saturday’s event marking the first Israeli jet shot down since the 1980s, also believed to be the first time Israel carried out an attack in Syria on a site where Iranian troops were present. Can you talk about the significance of all of this? >> >> ANNE BARNARD: Yes. This brings us to the second consequence of the end of the main part of the territorial fight against Islamic State. Many different international powers, as well as the Syrian government and some of its rival—some of its opponents within Syria, were all against each other, in a way, but united against the Islamic State. And they launched competing campaigns to defeat the Islamic State, racing one another to take its territory. >> >> Once Islamic State was largely driven out of territory in Syria, those different combatants are finding that their conflicting interests are coming to the fore again. So, you see now Turkey going against Syrian Kurdish groups. You see even clashes—even confrontations between Turkey and the United States over the United States’ backing for Kurds, Kurdish militias that Turkey sees as terrorists and that the United States sees as its best ally in Syria. There’s a big question—the United States has upset both allies and enemies by saying that it wants to now remain in the areas that were taken by the U.S.-backed militias in the northeast of Syria. Israel has been bombing targets in Syria throughout the war, with relative impunity. This is the first time that the Syrian government has managed to shoot down a jet. You also have Syria’s allies—Russia and Iran—which have differing views about how exactly the future of Syria should be laid out. >> >> And I’m probably forgetting to mention somebody, but all of these—I fear that we may be getting to a phase in the Syrian war where all the foreign interveners are turning it into an arena to fight amongst each other, really regardless of what Syrians want or the effect on Syrians. And, unfortunately, that could go on for a long time. >> >> AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, then come back to this discussion, where we’ll also be joined, in addition to Anne Barnard, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, by Yazan al-Saadi, the Syrian-Canadian researcher. This is Democracy Now! Back with them in a moment. >> >> [break] >> >> AMY GOODMAN: “Uncle John” by Pearls Before Swine. The band’s founder, Tom Rapp, died on Sunday at the age of 70. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. >> >> JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we return now to Syria. The United Nations is warning that civilians are being killed and wounded at a rapid pace amidst an escalation in the Syrian government bombing against the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. At least 200 civilians have been reportedly killed in the last week alone. >> >> We’re joined now by Yazan al-Saadi, a Syrian-Canadian writer, researcher. And still with us is Anne Barnard, from The New York Times, bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. Her recent article is titled “It’s Hard to Believe, But Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse.” >> >> Anne, I wanted to begin again with you to ask you about the role of Hezbollah, because, obviously, Hezbollah was widely involved in the fighting in Syria, has undoubtedly grown stronger as a result. And could you talk about its role, particularly, in the conflict, and the concerns of Israel over the growth of Hezbollah? >> >> ANNE BARNARD: Well, Hezbollah entered the war overtly and in a sort of—in the manner of an expeditionary force in 2013. And that was a big surprise, because this is a group that was founded to fight Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon, not to go and help put down uprisings in other countries. But nonetheless, because of their close alliance with Damascus and Tehran, Hezbollah entered the war, first in areas that made sense, in a way, for it in a local—in a local sense, because they first focused on areas near the Lebanese border, on the shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab near Damascus, which is particularly revered by Shiites. But gradually their role expanded. They were a much more effective pound-for-pound force than the Syrian military, and they ended up helping out in battles steadily spreading across the country. Nobody imagined a few years ago that Hezbollah would end up fighting in Aleppo, near the Iraqi border, in northern Syria, all the way in southern Syria. >> >> Now, the southern Syria part is the biggest issue, because, of course, there’s always been conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, and tensions there across the Lebanese border, but now Hezbollah is entrenching itself increasingly in areas in the southern part of Syria, bordering the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the portion that’s held by the Israelis. So, that’s obviously of big concern to Israel. At the same time, the Syrian government accuses Israel of trying to increase its own buffer zone there, and that’s been a real flashpoint. And that really exploded on Saturday, not as badly as it could have been, though, because it seems to have been contained, for now, to this one incident. There is also, of course, an Iranian presence around. Iranian advisers are deeply involved throughout the war effort on the Syrian government side. So, that’s something that Israel has been trying to counter throughout the conflict, and I think we’re only going to see more tensions around that. >> >> AMY GOODMAN: Yazan al-Saadi, we want to bring you into this conversation. You’re a Syrian-Canadian researcher, usually where Anne is, in Beirut, Lebanon, but right now we’re talking to you in Kuwait. Talk about the situation in Syria, in your country, as you see it. >> >> YAZAN AL-SAADI: Wow! All right. It’s absolutely tragic. And it’s—what you’re seeing is all these actors, whether it’s the Syrian regime, the Bashar dictatorship or the armed opposition, or the Putin regime and the Trump regime and the apartheid Zionist regime, all attacking and destroying the Syrian population. What we’re seeing is basically a complete annihilation of the struggle for Syrian self-determination by various communities within the country. You’re seeing a complete devastation of a society. The healthcare system is gone. Half the population are either refugees or amputees. And it’s absolutely devastating. >> >> And what we’re witnessing in Syria—and we need to remember this, as well—is that we’re witnessing the failure of the international mechanisms to hold states accountable. And this is not only exceptional to Syria. We’ve seen this before in places like Iraq, Palestine, Congo, the Central African Republic, and even in Myanmar now with the Rohingya. So, if you want a sound bite, what we’re seeing is the typicalness of power over people. And this is something that is going to continue in various places, whether in Syria or elsewhere, as long as governments and states are allowed to do what they can do. And this can only end if populations and communities around the world start mobilizing and pressuring their own governments to stop these types of actions, to not allow power to dominate over people. And if we don’t do that, we’re just going to see the tragedy of Syria continue for a long time, and you’re going to see other tragedies in other places around the world. That is what’s happening. >> >> JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yazan, I wanted to ask you about the role of Bashar al-Assad. Many of the Western powers were originally calling for regime change to end the civil war, and now that’s dropped off the table for a lot of them, in terms of the ongoing conflict. Could you talk about that, as well? >> >> YAZAN AL-SAADI: Yeah, of course. I’m not surprised it dropped off the table, because, let’s be honest, Western governments really don’t care about, you know, dictatorships. In fact, they’re quite a fan. There’s a lot of businesses and interests with dictatorships. And let’s be honest. When these protests happened—and they happened in a context—in 2011, in the region, where you had a large mobilization in different countries, by different people, to pressure change against dictatorships. But Western governments don’t really care. And let’s be—let’s be frank about this. They don’t really care if Bashar stays or not, as long as he plays ball and fits into their interests. >> >> Now, should Bashar go? Yes, obviously. He’s a dictatorship. But it cannot happen through the idea of Western intervention or Western forms of regime change, because we’ve seen what happened in Libya and Iraq. So we need to do something else here. There needs to be an international form of mechanism to hold dictatorships accountable, whoever they are, you know, whether they’re allies to the West or they’re allies to Putin. And this is something—this is a larger question that we really need to talk about. >> >> AMY GOODMAN: The escalation in Syria comes as the Pentagon has also indicated it plans to recruit and train thousands of U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria to form a border security force in northern Syria along the border with Turkey. The U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters already control large swaths of northern Syria. The significance of this? We talked, Yazan, earlier about what just happened in the last week. You know, you have the Israeli plane shot down, the Turkish plane shot down, etc. >> >> YAZAN AL-SAADI: So, I mean, this U.S. plan, like all U.S. plans, is going to be disastrous. I mean, it’s all part of, you know, really furthering U.S. military interests and a presence in certain countries around the world. This support for the SDF, which is the armed wing of the PYD, is really not going to be helpful, ultimately, for Kurdish self-determination, in my opinion. And I do believe that the Kurds have every right for self-determination, like every community around the world. What the U.S. are interested is just to have a hand in the geography. But ultimately, like we’ve seen over and over again in history every time the U.S. has a certain plan of backing armed groups, it’s disastrous, whether it’s the Contras in Latin America, the armed groups in Iraq and wherever else. It’s going to be a disaster. And we’re seeing bits of that happening right now, with everyone shooting everyone. >> >> JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to go back to Anne Barnard for a second, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut. All of these governments—all of these foreign governments having their forces and their planes in Syria, could you talk about whether the potential is increasing or decreasing for some kind of a conflict between the outside powers spreading beyond Syria? >> >> ANNE BARNARD: Well, that’s certainly the danger. I mean, and just to build on what Yazan was saying, the reason that the international community, such as it is, has not been able to come to any consensus is the deadlocked Security Council. So, we start from a situation in which Russia and the United States are completely deadlocked, even on issues that seem as basic as human rights. They can’t agree on anything. And so, now they’re each backing a side in Syria which sees itself as fighting an existential battle. >> >> At the same time, this is also very much, for Russia, about restoring its great power status and countering the U.S. in a keystone area of the Middle East. Russia has interests with its port on the Mediterranean Sea, in Tartus, in the western coast of Syria. So, Russia has a lot of interests there. Russia has clearly put more skin in the game than the United States has. And at the same time, the United States has now extended its commitment, perhaps indefinitely, in northeastern Syria, where most of Syria’s oil is. >> >> So, the problem is that even though there is a deconfliction process, which is supposed to prevent their sort of competing air forces from clashing with each other by accident or having any small incident that could escalate, you know, mistakes happen. And even—there’s even a mysterious incident, where more information is still unfolding about it, from last week, when U.S. forces hit a pro-government force, which was initially described to us by a Syrian government source as a pro-government Syrian Shiite militia, but now it’s coming out that many, maybe scores of, Russian contractors were killed. So, the Kremlin is saying, “We don’t know anything about these people. They’re military contractors. They don’t work for us.” This is the Russian version of Blackwater, this company. And so, the idea that there are, you know, large numbers of Russian troops going around Syria, working for who knows who, in the same arena where American troops are, is obviously very risky. >> >> And, you know, that’s not to mention that Turkey, as I mentioned before, and the United States have even—at least Turkey has even threatened to attack an area where U.S. troops are there on the ground with the Kurdish militias that Turkey wants to fight. So you have the prospect of two NATO allies, theoretically, it’s possible, that they could clash. And you have the Israeli-Iran-Hezbollah-Syria nexus that we talked about before. >> >> So, it’s getting more and more dangerous. And, you know, in a world where collective action seems to be impossible, it seems that everybody bet on the idea that Syria was containable, and, you know, we could just let people die and let it stay within the borders of Syria, and some countries even consider that to be within their interests. They felt that, you know, their enemies were killing each other. Well, as we can see, instead we have a massive refugee crisis affecting Europe, a much more massive refugee crisis affecting Syria’s neighbors—Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan—and now we have the possibility of hot war between major state powers coming out of this. So, you know, it seems like it’s going to get more dangerous before it calms down. >> >> AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaking January 17th at the Hoover Institution, in which he called Iran a “strategic threat” to the United States and used this alleged threat as justification for keeping U.S. troops in Syria. >> >> SECRETARY OF STATE REX TILLERSON: Continued threats to the U.S., from not just ISIS and al-Qaeda, but from others, persist. And this threat I’m referring to is principally Iran. As part of its strategy to create a northern arch, stretching from Iran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean, Iran has dramatically strengthened its presence in Syria by deploying Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops, supporting Lebanese Hezbollah and importing proxy forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. Through its position in Syria, Iran is positioning to continue attacking U.S. interests, our allies and personnel in the region. It is spending billions of dollars a year to prop up Assad and wage proxy wars at the expense of supporting its own people. … >> >> U.S. disengagement from Syria would provide Iran the opportunity to further strengthen its position in Syria. As we have seen from Iran’s proxy wars and public announcements, Iran seeks dominance in the Middle East and the destruction of our ally, Israel. As a destabilized nation and one bordering Israel, Syria presents an opportunity that Iran is all too eager to exploit. >> >> AMY GOODMAN: Yazan al-Saadi, if you can respond to the U.S. secretary of state? >> >> YAZAN AL-SAADI: Well, there’s much to respond. I mean, it’s—well, it’s funny. The first thought that comes to mind is that, yeah, well, the U.S. is the strategic threat to everyone in this world, especially for self-determination of communities around the world, so I find his comments quite hilarious. Secondly, let’s be honest. There’s something that Anne said earlier about the U.S. and Russia not agreeing in the Security Council for basic human rights. That’s not surprising, considering that both countries are major violators of human rights. And really, they don’t take human rights seriously. >> >> Now, this concern by the U.S. about Iran is typical, in terms of the mentality, the warmongering mentality within the U.S. military-political establishment, in terms of their own dominance and their need to dominate the region. At the same time, let’s also not ignore that Iran is a dictatorship, it is a problematic regime, just like every other regime in the region, including the Syrian regime, the Zionist regime and the Saudi regime and others. So, we are all facing this major problem, where we really need to ask ourselves, “What can be done? How can we accept the status quo?” Because the status quo means that our bodies, our communities are going to be paying the price of the blood and devastation, while politics and power reign supreme. >> >> And me, personally, I don’t accept this, and I feel that we need to mobilize, as various communities, to push back against the politics of power, whether it’s the U.S. or Putin or the Iranian regime or the Syrian dictatorship or the Israeli regime and whoever else. That’s the core question here. That’s the core debate. It’s about self-determination. And that’s something that we really need to keep our eye on. And that also means that we need to start creating mechanisms of accountability that forces these regimes to hold—you know, forces these regimes to accept the power of people and the rights of people beyond all. >> >> AMY GOODMAN: Anne, you recently tweeted, “In '13 much skepticism (I shared it) of bigger US intervention in Syria—b/c Iraq debacle. So US avoided steps to shield civilians (like no-fly zone). Yet 5 yrs on, what it hasn't avoided is indefinite military commitment in huge chunk of Syria.” If you could expand on that and talk about where you are now, in Beirut, Lebanon? What percentage of Lebanon is now Syrian refugees who have come over the border, not to mention Jordan and other places, and what this means? >> >> ANNE BARNARD: Well, Lebanon is a country of around 4 million people, and there are at least one-and-a-half million Syrian refugees here. So, it’s more than a quarter of the population. And, you know, that’s by far the largest proportion of refugees on Earth. So, Lebanon is bearing a huge brunt, and Turkey and Jordan also have large numbers of refugees. So, obviously, the region is bearing the brunt more than anyone else. >> >> And yeah, I think the U.S. policy, you know, seems a case of neither having your cake nor eating it. They did not take a step, which, of course, there’s a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the idea of a U.S. intervention, but at the same time it’s not as if they’re not intervening, as Yazan said earlier. They’re intervening in other ways, without really having helped Syrian civilians a lot. >> >> So, you know, and I think Yazan’s point is very good, that—how can there be a mechanism? I mean, if the great—the whole problem is that the great powers—Russia and the United States—and anyone in power, they don’t want themselves to be held accountable, so there is no incentive for those in power to allow the creation of such a mechanism. >> >> And look what happened when Syrian people and people in many other countries in the region tried to speak up and use people power and ask for just some more rights or some reforms in their countries. Almost all of them were defeated by state power in one way or another. So, it’s really a puzzle. >> >> I wonder, Yazan, if you have any, you know, specific ideas about how things can go differently for ordinary people who want to make their voices heard. I mean, you know, we’ve seen a lot of idealistic people try, and, you know, you see the results. >> >> YAZAN AL-SAADI: Of course. >> >> ANNE BARNARD: So— >> >> YAZAN AL-SAADI: Of course. I mean, yeah. >> >> ANNE BARNARD: I don’t know. >> >> YAZAN AL-SAADI: I mean, people are trying, and they’re still trying 'til this day, and we should continue. I mean, one of the most important things is international solidarities, right? Working between communities, whether it's the Syrian community, working with communities in the United States, for example—let’s say the Black Lives Matter, because they are facing injustices and tyranny of the state. So I believe in creating ties like that. I believe in creating ties between the BDS movement in Palestine with other pro-rights movements in Bahrain or in the Rohingya. That’s the only way forward, because we’re dealing with an international problem of domination over our communities, wherever we are. What is happening in Syria is a violent, physical manifestation of that. And it’s going to continue in other forms in other places, as long as power is still power. You know? >> >> AMY GOODMAN: Yazan— >> >> YAZAN AL-SAADI: And I do think like, like I said earlier, networking and international solidarity, it’s the only way forward. >> >> AMY GOODMAN: Yazan al-Saadi, we want to thank you for being with us, Syrian-Canadian researcher, usually in Beirut, Lebanon, now in Kuwait, and Anne Barnard, The New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. >> >> This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we go to Austin, Texas. As the budget is unveiled, we’re going to look at a particular struggle that’s going on around the country for paid sick leave—the cities that are trying to initiate it and the Koch brothers-backed group that’s fighting it. Stay with us. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C95a75e275e324e06cca308d574d6aac1%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636543387682261017&sdata=fTxzM%2FojchtDccQ4WyQnGbPzgNdzfc9RvmAL9RK3XHA%3D&reserved=0 > From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Fri Feb 16 04:22:12 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 04:22:12 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Supremacy and murder In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <72430092.1754433.1518754932554@mail.yahoo.com> The brilliant Pankaj Mishra writes a scathing analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates' book on Obama in the London Review of Books: (excerpt) As early as 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois identified fear and loathing of minorities as a ‘public and psychological wage’ for many whites in American society. More brazenly than his predecessors, Trump linked the misfortunes of the ‘white working class’ to Chinese cheats, Mexican rapists and treacherous blacks. But racism, Du Bois knew, was not just an ugly or deep-rooted prejudice periodically mobilised by opportunistic politicians and defused by social liberalism: it was a widely legitimated way of ordering social and economic life, with skin colour only one way of creating degrading hierarchies. Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R. James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Transcending the parochial idioms of their national cultures, they analysed the way in which the processes of capital accumulation and racial domination had become inseparable early in the history of the modern world; the way race emerged as an ideologically flexible category for defining the dangerously lawless civilisational other – black Africans yesterday, Muslims and Hispanics today. The realisation that economic conditions and religion were as much markers of difference as skin colour made Nina Simone, Mohammed Ali and Malcolm X, among others, connect their own aspirations to decolonisation movements in India, Liberia, Ghana, Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Martin Luther King absorbed from Gandhi not only the tactic of non-violent protest but also a comprehensive critique of modern imperialism. ‘The Black revolution,’ he argued, much to the dismay of his white liberal supporters, ‘is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes.’ Compared to these internationalist thinkers, partisans of the second black president, who happen to be the most influential writers and journalists in the US, have provincialised their aspiration for a just society. They have neatly separated it from opposition to an imperial dispensation that incarcerates and deports millions of people each year – disproportionately people of colour – and routinely exercises its right to assault and despoil other countries and murder and torture their citizens. Perceptive about the structural violence of the new Jim Crow, Coates has little to say about its manifestation in the new world order. For all his searing corroboration of racial stigma in America, he has yet to make a connection as vital and powerful as the one that MLK detected in his disillusioned last days between the American devastation of Vietnam and ‘the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society’. He has so far considered only one of what King identified as ‘the giant American triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism’ – the ‘inter-related flaws’ that turned American society into a ‘burning house’ for the blacks trying to integrate into it. And in Coates’s worldview even race, despite his formidable authority of personal witness, rarely transcends a rancorously polarised American politics of racial division, in which the world’s most powerful man appears to have been hounded for eight years by unreconstructed American racists. ‘My President Was Black’, a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives. Coates has been accused of mystifying race and of ‘essentialising’ whiteness. Nowhere, however, does his view of racial identity seem as static as in his critical tenderness for a black member of the 1 per cent. LRB · Pankaj Mishra · Why do white people like what I write?: Ta-Nehisi Coates | | | | | | | | | | | LRB · Pankaj Mishra · Why do white people like what I write?: Ta-Nehisi ... During the big antiwar protests in early 2003, Ta-Nehisi Coates was a deliveryman for a deli in Park Slope, Broo... | | | On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎15‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎30‎:‎01‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: Supremacy and murder It's a fundamental and not always innocent mistake to say that the US is killing people in MENA (Mideast and North Africa) for white supremacy. We're doing so for the economic supremacy of the American one percent. Racism can be a convenient cover story. (Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris - “it’s human nature to hate those you have injured.”) In response to the assault of neoliberalism in the 1970s, American liberals shamefully chose to stop noticing the class basis of US imperialism, which they had painfully learnt in Vietnam: 'By 1969 about 70% of the public had come to regard the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” largely as a result of the impact of student protest on general consciousness. And that mass opposition compelled the business community and then the government to stop the escalation of the war.' But the business community and then the government counterattacked in the 1970s, notably among partisans of Israel, who feared that US war weariness would interfere with US military support for the Zionist state. Thus neoconservatism was born. The broader response was neoliberalism - the conscious, calculated campaign by US business leaders against the social democratic traditions that began in the New Deal of the 1930s and lasted into the 1970s. Social democracy from the 1930s to the 1970s in the US sought to lessen the rigors of capitalism for the majority by means of supports such as Social Security and Medicare. The strategy of neoliberalism was to use the power of government to protect and enhance the return on capital; to free capital from government restraints, not to free the economy from government, as 19th-century Liberalism had proposed. Neoliberalism therefore depended on limiting democracy in government. (See "The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies," a 1975 report to the Trilateral Commission - the crisis being, in the eyes of this international business group, that too much democracy had developed in the capitalist world during 'the Sixties' and had to be reversed.) The principal neoliberal tools, from the 1970s on, were (a) globalization (in search of low-wage platforms around the world, with the concomitant de-industrialization of the US economy) and (b) financialization of the economy (the balance of power shifting from industrial corporations to financial corporations). The effects were immediate and lasting: wages in the US, which had risen along with productivity 1945-73, have been flat since 1973, although productivity has continued to rise. And the concentration of wealth has increased, and at an accelerating rate, while median household income continued to decline, throughout the Obama years. —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 Fri Feb 16 04:40:57 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 22:40:57 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump is not the disgrace - U.S. war-making is; your senators and Congress members can stop it In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Trump is not the disgrace - U.S. war-making is; your senators and Congress members can stop it. Trump inherited eight wars from Obama, who was the first US president ever to be at war throughout two presidential terms: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and the Philippines. More than a quarter million US military personnel are today deployed in a thousand US bases, most of them ringing Russia and China. Obama’s drone assassinations, which killed thousands and were accurately called “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times,” continue under Trump - as do the war provocations against Russia and China, from Ukraine to the South China Sea. The 70,000-members of the US ‘Special Operations Command’ are active in no less than three-quarters of the countries of the world. If American leaders were put on trial today as German leaders were, at Nuremberg after World War II, for “launching aggressive war,” they - like the German leaders - would be hanged. President Obama was elected as an anti-war candidate, but in office he sent thousands of additional US troops into America’s longest 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 US troops engaged in foreign wars and don’t see the killing as justified; both candidates had to seem to oppose the wars, in order to get elected. But the ‘one percent’ - the US economic elite - do want the wars. When World War II ended in 1945, the US was the least-damaged major country on either side, and controlled the world economy. America’s wars since then - in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and the Mideast - have killed between 20 and 30 million people for the purpose of maintaining that control. Ordinary Americans have paid for these vicious wars, but they haven’t profited from them. The Australian filmmaker John Pilger wrote before the election, "The CIA has demanded Trump not be elected. Pentagon generals have demanded he not be elected. The pro-war New York Times - taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears - demands that he not be elected. Something is up. These tribunes of 'perpetual war' are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Russian president Putin, then with China’s president Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace – however unlikely – would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire." We must demand that foreign military bases be closed, US troops (and weapons) be brought home, and social support - including free medical care, education, and a universal basic income - be provided for Americans immiserated by generations of US government wars. ### From moboct1 at aim.com Fri Feb 16 12:40:37 2018 From: moboct1 at aim.com (Mildred O'brien) Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 07:40:37 -0500 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump is not the disgrace - U.S. war-making is; your senators and Congress members can stop it In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1619ea17615-c8b-e653@webjas-vae189.srv.aolmail.net> tRump is the INSTRUMENT--orchestrating the Ryan-McConnell Congress--he reads the lines, like Reagan (but not as well).   Graduate of military school, son of a son of KKK, he doesn't need to be persuaded.   MO'B -----Original Message----- From: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss To: Peace Discuss Cc: peace Sent: Thu, Feb 15, 2018 10:41 pm Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump is not the disgrace - U.S. war-making is; your senators and Congress members can stop it Trump is not the disgrace - U.S. war-making is; your senators and Congress members can stop it. Trump inherited eight wars from Obama, who was the first US president ever to be at war throughout two presidential terms: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and the Philippines. More than a quarter million US military personnel are today deployed in a thousand US bases, most of them ringing Russia and China. Obama’s drone assassinations, which killed thousands and were accurately called “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times,” continue under Trump - as do the war provocations against Russia and China, from Ukraine to the South China Sea. The 70,000-members of the US ‘Special Operations Command’ are active in no less than three-quarters of the countries of the world. If American leaders were put on trial today as German leaders were, at Nuremberg after World War II, for “launching aggressive war,” they - like the German leaders - would be hanged. President Obama was elected as an anti-war candidate, but in office he sent thousands of additional US troops into America’s longest 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 US troops engaged in foreign wars and don’t see the killing as justified; both candidates had to seem to oppose the wars, in order to get elected. But the ‘one percent’ - the US economic elite - do want the wars. When World War II ended in 1945, the US was the least-damaged major country on either side, and controlled the world economy. America’s wars since then - in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and the Mideast - have killed between 20 and 30 million people for the purpose of maintaining that control. Ordinary Americans have paid for these vicious wars, but they haven’t profited from them. The Australian filmmaker John Pilger wrote before the election, "The CIA has demanded Trump not be elected. Pentagon generals have demanded he not be elected. The pro-war New York Times - taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears - demands that he not be elected. Something is up. These tribunes of 'perpetual war' are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Russian president Putin, then with China’s president Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace – however unlikely – would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire." We must demand that foreign military bases be closed, US troops (and weapons) be brought home, and social support - including free medical care, education, and a universal basic income - be provided for Americans immiserated by generations of US government wars. ### _______________________________________________ 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 Fri Feb 16 12:53:18 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 06:53:18 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump is not the disgrace - U.S. war-making is; your senators and Congress members can stop it In-Reply-To: <1619ea17615-c8b-e653@webjas-vae189.srv.aolmail.net> References: <1619ea17615-c8b-e653@webjas-vae189.srv.aolmail.net> Message-ID: He's the weakest US president since Calvin Coolidge. His presidency is ‘in commission,’ in the British phrase - i.e., others are running it. Mostly generals, neolibs (notably Gary Cohn) and neocons. > On Feb 16, 2018, at 6:40 AM, Mildred O'brien via Peace-discuss wrote: > > tRump is the INSTRUMENT--orchestrating the Ryan-McConnell Congress--he reads the lines, like Reagan (but not as well). Graduate of military school, son of a son of KKK, he doesn't need to be persuaded. > > MO'B > > > -----Original Message----- > From: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > To: Peace Discuss > Cc: peace > Sent: Thu, Feb 15, 2018 10:41 pm > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Trump is not the disgrace - U.S. war-making is; your senators and Congress members can stop it > > Trump is not the disgrace - U.S. war-making is; your senators and Congress members can stop it. Trump inherited eight wars from Obama, who was the first US president ever to be at war throughout two presidential terms: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and the Philippines. More than a quarter million US military personnel are today deployed in a thousand US bases, most of them ringing Russia and China. Obama’s drone assassinations, which killed thousands and were accurately called “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times,” continue under Trump - as do the war provocations against Russia and China, from Ukraine to the South China Sea. The 70,000-members of the US ‘Special Operations Command’ are active in no less than three-quarters of the countries of the world. If American leaders were put on trial today as German leaders were, at Nuremberg after World War II, for “launching aggressive war,” they - like the German leaders - would be hanged. President Obama was elected as an anti-war candidate, but in office he sent thousands of additional US troops into America’s longest 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 US troops engaged in foreign wars and don’t see the killing as justified; both candidates had to seem to oppose the wars, in order to get elected. But the ‘one percent’ - the US economic elite - do want the wars. When World War II ended in 1945, the US was the least-damaged major country on either side, and controlled the world economy. America’s wars since then - in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and the Mideast - have killed between 20 and 30 million people for the purpose of maintaining that control. Ordinary Americans have paid for these vicious wars, but they haven’t profited from them. The Australian filmmaker John Pilger wrote before the election, "The CIA has demanded Trump not be elected. Pentagon generals have demanded he not be elected. The pro-war New York Times - taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears - demands that he not be elected. Something is up. These tribunes of 'perpetual war' are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Russian president Putin, then with China’s president Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace – however unlikely – would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire." We must demand that foreign military bases be closed, US troops (and weapons) be brought home, and social support - including free medical care, education, and a universal basic income - be provided for Americans immiserated by generations of US government wars. ### _______________________________________________ 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 From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sat Feb 17 01:23:44 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 19:23:44 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News from Neptune on UPTV 2/16/18 In-Reply-To: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> Message-ID: <2DD76F8E-7A32-405D-A2F7-717EFEF83A7C@gmail.com> Good evening, & welcome to News from Neptune for the 7th week of 2018 {February 16}. I’m Carl Estabrook. Since 1990, this program has been a weekly hour of spontaneous & unrehearsed discussion of the news of the week and its coverage by the media - first, on a so-called community radio station - and now via Urbana Public TV, YouTube, & . [Program #369 on UPTV] Our program’s name, 'News from Neptune,' comes from Noam Chomsky, who’s been writing sensible things about U.S. politics for half a century. Chomsky says that in the U.S. media, “Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.” Tonight David Green and I will try to say some true things on what is inevitably a GUN CONTROL edition ~ with thanks to Doctor Know, J. B. Nicholson, for research. KNOW’S NOTES will be posted on the program’s Facebook page. We try to bear in mind the murdered Rosa Luxemburg’s remark, from a century ago, “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” ### From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Feb 17 22:17:20 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2018 22:17:20 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: [unac] Spring Actions and more References: Message-ID: April 14th - 15th [http://nepajac.org/bannerweb.jpg] Spring Actions Against the Wars at Home and Abroad Announced by a Broad Coalition of Peace and Justice Organizations. [http://nepajac.org/spring1.jpg] [http://nepajac.org/spring2.jpg] On Saturday, February 3rd, 66 people representing 42 organizations met by conference call and called for regional mobilizations against the wars at home and abroad on the weekend of April 14 - 15. It was clear that it is time for the antiwar movement to mobilize and make ourselves visible during this midterm election period as the bi-partisan wars continue to escalate. We have witnessed a massive increase in the military budget and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy while programs that benefit the people are cut. The U.S. has announced a permanent military force in Syria and the 16-year war in Afghanistan has been escalated. Threats to N. Korea, Russia and China raise the spectre of nuclear war. The U.S. has provocatively declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel and has decided to move its embassy there, a move the entire world has opposed. The U.S. military presence in Africa is increasing and in Yemen, the U.S. and Saudia Arabia continue the devastation of that country as famine and disease are on the rise. Venezuela, Syria, Iran and other countries continue to be the U.S. targets for regime change, At home the militarization of the police continues. Unions are under attack. Immigrants are subject to the daily terror of ICE deportations and white supremacists and neo-Nazis are called honorable men by Trump and the racist officials in his administration. Join us on April 14 - 15. A new web site has been set up to help build the actions. Please go here, endorse the actions and become part of the solution: http://SpringAction2018.org. Planning meeting in the Bay Area Monday, February 12, 7-9 pm at the Niebyl Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Planning meeting in Chicago 12:30 pm to 3 pm Saturday, Feb. 17 United Electrical Workers Hall 37 S. Ashland Avenue, Chicago Planning meeting in New York To be announced Close Guantanamo! Return the Land to Cuba! Stop the Torture! [http://nepajac.org/Guantanamoprotest.jpg] UNAC supports the call for actions around Feb 23, the 115th anniversary of the seizure of the Guantanamo Navy base on Cuban land. This is generally considered the first U.S. foreign military base. The call for actions was made at the Baltimore conference against U.S. foreign military bases. We urge all groups to take action on or around Feb 23 calling for the closing of the base, returning of the land to Cuba and freeing of the political prisoners held there. UNAC urges all groups to take action around Feb 23 and let the Bases Coalition know by sending an email with details of your action to info at NoForeignBases.org. You can see a list of the actions here: http://noforeignbases.org/calendar/ Petition to Drop Charges Against Arrested Okinawa Anti-Bases Activists As a citizen of the world and an advocate for peace and people’s human and democratic rights, I demand that all charges against Hiroji Yamashiro, and his co-defendants, Hiroshi Inaba and Atsuhiro Soeda, be dropped and all attempts to silence the people of Okinawa in their just quest to rid their homeland of the many U.S. military bases be stopped. To sign this petition and have automatic letters sent to Japanese officials click here: http://noforeignbases.org/1975-2/ For the best analysis from a progressive perspective, read the UNAC Blog https://unac.papillonweb.net/ Please make a contribution to UNAC: https://www.unacpeace.org/donate.html If your organization would like to join the UNAC coalition, please click here: https://www.unacpeace.org/join.html To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to UNAC-unsubscribe at lists.riseup.net --- _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C05e7b1fff47b4e2607cd08d57180e18e%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636539720706247591&sdata=S%2F9hWz177wayDcKtsJq%2FqKCgIL2aeqDjpytQsuCZ8Yk%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Feb 18 02:23:22 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2018 02:23:22 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Fwd: [unac] Spring Actions and more References: Message-ID: The anti-war demonstration will be held in Chicago, at noon on April 21st. [http://nepajac.org/bannerweb.jpg] Spring Actions Against the Wars at Home and Abroad Announced by a Broad Coalition of Peace and Justice Organizations. [http://nepajac.org/spring1.jpg] [http://nepajac.org/spring2.jpg] On Saturday, February 3rd, 66 people representing 42 organizations met by conference call and called for regional mobilizations against the wars at home and abroad on the weekend of April 14 - 15. It was clear that it is time for the antiwar movement to mobilize and make ourselves visible during this midterm election period as the bi-partisan wars continue to escalate. We have witnessed a massive increase in the military budget and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy while programs that benefit the people are cut. The U.S. has announced a permanent military force in Syria and the 16-year war in Afghanistan has been escalated. Threats to N. Korea, Russia and China raise the spectre of nuclear war. The U.S. has provocatively declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel and has decided to move its embassy there, a move the entire world has opposed. The U.S. military presence in Africa is increasing and in Yemen, the U.S. and Saudia Arabia continue the devastation of that country as famine and disease are on the rise. Venezuela, Syria, Iran and other countries continue to be the U.S. targets for regime change, At home the militarization of the police continues. Unions are under attack. Immigrants are subject to the daily terror of ICE deportations and white supremacists and neo-Nazis are called honorable men by Trump and the racist officials in his administration. Join us on April 14 - 15. A new web site has been set up to help build the actions. Please go here, endorse the actions and become part of the solution: http://SpringAction2018.org. Planning meeting in the Bay Area Monday, February 12, 7-9 pm at the Niebyl Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Planning meeting in Chicago 12:30 pm to 3 pm Saturday, Feb. 17 United Electrical Workers Hall 37 S. Ashland Avenue, Chicago Planning meeting in New York To be announced Close Guantanamo! Return the Land to Cuba! Stop the Torture! [http://nepajac.org/Guantanamoprotest.jpg] UNAC supports the call for actions around Feb 23, the 115th anniversary of the seizure of the Guantanamo Navy base on Cuban land. This is generally considered the first U.S. foreign military base. The call for actions was made at the Baltimore conference against U.S. foreign military bases. We urge all groups to take action on or around Feb 23 calling for the closing of the base, returning of the land to Cuba and freeing of the political prisoners held there. UNAC urges all groups to take action around Feb 23 and let the Bases Coalition know by sending an email with details of your action to info at NoForeignBases.org. You can see a list of the actions here: http://noforeignbases.org/calendar/ Petition to Drop Charges Against Arrested Okinawa Anti-Bases Activists As a citizen of the world and an advocate for peace and people’s human and democratic rights, I demand that all charges against Hiroji Yamashiro, and his co-defendants, Hiroshi Inaba and Atsuhiro Soeda, be dropped and all attempts to silence the people of Okinawa in their just quest to rid their homeland of the many U.S. military bases be stopped. To sign this petition and have automatic letters sent to Japanese officials click here: http://noforeignbases.org/1975-2/ For the best analysis from a progressive perspective, read the UNAC Blog https://unac.papillonweb.net/ Please make a contribution to UNAC: https://www.unacpeace.org/donate.html If your organization would like to join the UNAC coalition, please click here: https://www.unacpeace.org/join.html To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to UNAC-unsubscribe at lists.riseup.net --- _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C05e7b1fff47b4e2607cd08d57180e18e%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636539720706247591&sdata=S%2F9hWz177wayDcKtsJq%2FqKCgIL2aeqDjpytQsuCZ8Yk%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cbc0bfcbab5834389f26108d5765444ce%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636545026657891182&sdata=unQyln99M6F0UHDPRJMx5zZ0rSjRsFS8RSVO%2BDFgz1U%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From r-szoke at illinois.edu Sun Feb 18 03:04:45 2018 From: r-szoke at illinois.edu (Szoke, Ron) Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2018 03:04:45 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] "Endless war" Message-ID: <9D1AD541-1076-49FE-8CA8-D79136010368@illinois.edu> ‘An Endless War’: Why 4 U.S. Soldiers Died in a Remote African Desert https://nyti.ms/2BAfwgo -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Feb 18 19:28:04 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2018 19:28:04 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: [New post] How not to struggle for democracy in Thailand, or any where else. References: <61854989.2079.0@wordpress.com> Message-ID: New post on Uglytruth-Thailand [http://s0.wp.com/i/emails/blavatar.png] [http://2.gravatar.com/avatar/b94c98491e599510a5ec039e64af3261?s=50&d=identicon&r=G] How not to struggle for democracy in Thailand by uglytruththailand Giles Ji Ungpakorn In response to the junta crack-down on pro-democracy activists who were protesting against the junta’s postponement of elections, one of the female leaders declared in public that she would willingly go to jail if summonses and charges against other people who attended the same protest were dropped. Despite this being a brave personal sacrifice, the tactic is highly problematic because she rejects the role of ordinary people and mass movements in the struggle for democracy, seeking instead to build herself into the sole embodiment of the fight against the dictatorship. [750x422_790330_1517054855] Not only will this not change the minds of the junta leaders who are hell-bent on using repression against anyone who takes part in anti-junta protests, but it is a reflection of the kind of individualistic politics prevalent among some young activists. In practice it could lead to the demobilisation of any further protests, rather than trying to draw more and more people into a pro-democracy mass movement. In Burma, this was the same kind of tactic used by Aung San Suu Kyi during the great 8-8-88 uprising, when she addressed the crowds and urged them to return home and put their trust in her leadership and the sincerity of the military. After the mass movement was demobilised, the military made sure that the democratic space remained closed off for decades. When they eventually allowed “Guided Democracy” style elections, Suu Kyi had not only become a semi-dictator in her own party, but she totally compromised with the military. She sank so low that she was complicit in the violence against the Rohingya people. This is what happens when leaders are no longer accountable to a mass movement. They make decisions on behalf of millions and can become egotistical. Another problematic tactic proposed by a pro-democracy academic is to build a political party like Spain’s Podemos. Dr. Piyabutr Saengkanokkul has suggested that Podemos could be a model for a new political party in Thailand “because it goes beyond the left-right divide which, unlike Europe, does not exist in Thailand.” He also claims that a Podemos-like party could heal the rift between the reds and yellows and would be a “new-style” party. It is unfortunate that Piyabutr’s analysis is so shallow and out of date. It is simply not true that there is no left-right division in Thailand. The divisions between left-wing and the right-wing politics throughout the world, and over the last 200 years, reflects class and differing class interests in capitalist society. Workers and small farmers in Thailand have and still have profound differences in their class interests with the middle-classes and the business and military elites. What is more, the Red-Yellow conflict reflects this class antagonism with the yellows opposed to using state funds to decrease inequalities of wealth or build a universal health care system. The Yellows are also in favour of limiting the democratic participation by poorer citizens. Pipe-dreams about uniting Reds and Yellows are neither realistic nor desirable and could only result in a limited form of democracy. [See http://bit.ly/2nAiXvZ ] The last thing Thailand needs right now is a new political party which does not side with workers or poor farmers, but seeks a populist-type fudge between Left and Right. Since the collapse of the Communist Party, there has been an urgent need for workers and peasants to be represented by a political party. Ironically, Taksin’s Thai Rak Thai was actually a populist party run by big business leaders, seeking to bridge the class divide between rich and poor! In terms of a “new-style” political party, Podemos has become a top-down party, run by Pablo Iglesias, with little internal democracy. One commentator from Ireland wrote that: “a politics that is neither left nor right is almost always linked to a desire for charismatic leaders. Once charismatic leaders are in place, they must develop an extremely hierarchical and centralised organisation. [See http://bit.ly/2sc9VtP ] Any party that hopes to be a key part of the struggle for democracy in Thailand needs to prioritise building mass movements over standing candidates in the next election, where the rules set by the juntas are going to restrict the functioning of radical or progressive parties. Unfortunately Podemos has become a party which prioritises elections over principles. It is hardly a good example for Thailand. For more on Podemos, see http://bit.ly/2nINgj3 and http://bit.ly/2nJb6vm . uglytruththailand | February 18, 2018 at 6:19 am | Categories: Uncategorized| URL: https://wp.me/p4bxj7-xx Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Uglytruth-Thailand. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://uglytruththailand.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/how-not-to-struggle-for-democracy-in-thailand/ Thanks for flying with [https://s0.wp.com/i/emails/blavatar-default.png] WordPress.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Mon Feb 19 18:07:25 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 12:07:25 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Mueller, Russia and Oil Politics In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <008701d3a9ac$7fb34340$7f19c9c0$@comcast.net> Mueller, Russia and Oil Politics by ROB URIE https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/19/mueller-russia-and-oil-politics/ Mueller, Russia and Oil Politics www.counterpunch.org The Mueller indictment made public on Friday charges 13 Russian nationals with trolling the American electoral process to 'sow discord' by falsely representing themselves as American dissident personas. Once the field of presidential aspirants had been narrowed in 2016, their goal became to support Donald Trump's candidacy while disparaging Hillary Clinton. There is no charge that the outcome of the 2016 election was changed by these actions. More Dunder-Mifflin as Troll Farm The Mueller indictment made public on Friday charges 13 Russian nationals with trolling the American electoral process to 'sow discord' by falsely representing themselves as American dissident personas. Once the field of presidential aspirants had been narrowed in 2016, their goal became to support Donald Trump's candidacy while disparaging Hillary Clinton. There is no charge that the outcome of the 2016 election was changed by these actions. The form of the alleged conspiracy was a 'troll farm,' an office populated by various functionaries who worked together from 2014 to today to magnify already existing social tensions on social media. Those charged were likewise mainly functionaries- IT workers, managers, etc. Despite allegations to the contrary in the American press, no links between the alleged troll farm and the Kremlin and / or Vladimir Putin were put forward. The 13 people charged are Russian nationals presumably living in Russia. As of this writing none have been arrested. Unless they plan to voluntarily return to the U.S., an unlikely move, the charges will never be contested in a courtroom. This most certainly was understood by Mr. Mueller before the indictments were handed down. Lest this remain unclear, charges made without the likelihood of a trial are unlikely to ever be resolved. In reading through the charges, what is striking is that the Russians aren't charged with creating social tensions. They are charged with exploiting and exacerbating them. It is their personas that are deemed to be false, not the familiar chatter of quasi-anonymous voices on social media. The point is that the social tensions preceded the chatter. Mr. Mueller's term 'sowing discord' literally means that discord was planted. The actual sequence is of discord being exploited. This distinction is important for a number of reasons. Following the electoral debacles in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, the continued use of electronic voting machines provides a legitimate basis for believing that the American electoral system is compromised. The national Democrats did conspire to undermine Bernie Sanders in order to secure the nomination for Hillary Clinton. The racist subtext of the Clintons' 1994 Crime Bill ('Black criminality') is a rational reason for Blacks to vote for someone else. These points are necessary because the discord the Russians are alleged to have sown related to rational political grievances. What is insidious in Mr. Mueller's charges is conflation of trolling with the substance of political dissent. The certainty officials have that no votes were changed by the Russians comes from the fact that the election machinery isn't connected to the internet. This means that distant trolls can't get to it to change votes. But this does not assure that entirely home-grown 'meddling' didn't compromise the integrity of the election. The indictments are a major political story, but not for the reasons given in mainstream press coverage. Once Mr. Mueller's indictment is understood to charge the exploitation of existing social tensions (read it and decide for yourself), the FBI, which Mr. Mueller directed from 2001 - 2013, is precisely the wrong entity to be rendering judgment. The FBI has been America's political police since its founding in 1908. Early on former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover led legally dubious mass arrests of American dissidents. He practically invented the slander of conflating legitimate dissent with foreign agency. This is the institutional backdrop from which Mr. Mueller proceeds. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the FBI's targets included the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Black Panther Party and any other political organization Mr. Hoover deemed a threat. The secret (hidden) FBI program COINTELPRO was intended to subvert political outcomes outside of allegations of criminal wrongdoing and with no regard for the lives of its targets. Throughout its history the FBI has sided with the powerful against the powerless to maintain an unjust social order. Robert Mueller became FBI Director only days before the attacks of September 11, 2001. One of his first acts as Director was to arrest 1,000 persons without any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. None of those arrested were ever charged in association with the attacks. The frame in which the FBI acted- to maintain political stability threatened by 'external' forces, was ultimately chosen by the George W. Bush administration to justify its aggressive war against Iraq. It is the FBI's legacy of conflating dissent with being an agent of a foreign power that Mr. Mueller's indictment most insidiously perpetuates. Russians are 'sowing discord,' and they are using Americans to do so, goes the allegation. Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders are listed in the indictment as roadblocks to the unfettered ascension of Hillary Clinton to the presidency. Russians are sowing discord, therefore discord is both suspect in itself and evidence of being a foreign agent. The posture of simple reporting at work in the indictment- that it isn't the FBI's fault that the Russians (allegedly) inserted themselves into the electoral process, runs against the history of the FBI's political role, the tilt used to craft criminal charges and the facts put forward versus those put to the side. Given the political agendas of the other agencies that the FBI joined through the charges, they are most certainly but a small piece of a larger story. In the aftermath of the indictments it's easy to forget that the Pentagon created the internet, that the NSA has its tentacles in all of its major chokepoints, that the CIA has been heavily involved in funding and 'using' social media toward its own ends and that the FBI is only reputable in the present because of Americans' near-heroic ignorance of history. The claim that the Russian operation was sophisticated because it had corporate form and function is countered by the fact that it was, by the various agencies' own claims, ineffectual in changing the outcome of the election. I Have a List While Robert Mueller was busy charging never-to-be-tried Russians with past crimes, Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, declared that future Russian meddling has already cast a shadow over the integrity of the 2018 election. Why the Pentagon that created the internet, the NSA that has its tentacles in all of its major chokepoints, the CIA that has been heavily involved in funding and 'using' social media toward its own ends and the FBI that just landed such a glorious victory of good over evil would be quivering puddles when it comes to precluding said meddling is a question that needs to be asked. The political frame being put forward is that only these agencies know if particular elections and candidates have been tainted by meddling, therefore we need to trust them to tell us which candidates were legitimately elected and which weren't. As generous as this offer seems, wouldn't the creation of free and fair elections be a more direct route to achieving this end? Put differently, who among those making the offer, whether personally or as functionaries of their respective agencies, has a demonstrated history of supporting democratic institutions? The 2016 election was apparently a test case for posing these agencies as the meddling police. By getting the bourgeois electocracy- liberal Democrats, to agree that the loathsome Trump is illegitimate, future candidates will be vetted by the CIA, NSA and FBI with impunity. It's apparently only the pre-'discord, ' the social angst that the decade of the Great Recession left as its residual, that shifts this generous offer from the deterministic to the realm of the probable. The social conditions that led to the Great Recession and its aftermath are entirely home grown. More broadly, how do the government agencies and people that spent the better part of the last century undermining democracy at home and abroad intend to stop 'Russian meddling?' If the FBI couldn't disentangle home grown 'discord' from that allegedly exploited and exacerbated by the Russians, isn't the likely intention to edit out all discord? And if fake news is a problem in need of addressing, wouldn't the New York Times and the Washington Post have been shut down years ago? The Great Satin (sic) While Russia is the villain of the day, week and year due to alleged election 'meddling,' the process of demonization that Russia has undergone has shown little variation from (alleged) villain to villain. It is thanks to cable news and the 'newspaper of record' that the true villainy of Vladimir Putin, Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Nicolas Maduro and the political leadership of Iran has been revealed. In the face of such monsters, questions of motivation are moot. Why wouldn't Mr. Putin 'sow discord?' The question as yet unasked, and therefore unanswered is: is there something besides base villainy that brought these national leaders, and the nations they lead, into the crosshairs of America's fair and wise leadership? This question might forever go unanswered were it not for the secret list from which their names were apparently drawn. No, not that secret list. This one is publicly available- hiding in plain sight, as it were. It is the list of proven oil reserves by country (below). This is no doubt unduly reductive- evil is as evil does, but read on. The question of how such a list could divide so evenly between heroes and villains I leave to the philosophers. On second thought, no I won't. The heroes are allies of a small cadre of America's political and economic elite who have made themselves fabulously rich through the alliances. The villains have oil, gas, pipelines and other resources that this elite wants. Reductive, yes. But this simple list certainly appears to explain American foreign policy over the last half-century quite well. Image removed by sender. Source: gulfbusiness.com It's almost as if America's love for humanity, as demonstrated through humanitarian interventions, is determined by imperial competition for natural resources- in this case oil and gas. Amongst these countries, only one (Canada) is 'democratic' in the American sense of being run by a small cadre of plutocrats who use the state to further their own interests. Two- Iraq and Libya, were recently reduced to rubble (for the sake of humanity) by the U.S. Nigeria is being 'brought' under the control of AFRICOM. What remains are various and sundry petro-states plus Venezuela and Russia. Following the untimely death of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, the horrible tyrant kept in office via free and fair elections, who used Venezuela's petro-dollars to feed, clothe and educate his people and was in the process of creating a regional Left alliance to counter American abuse of power, the CIA joined with local plutocrats to overthrow his successor, Nicolas Maduro. The goal: to 'liberate' Venezuela's oil revenues in their own pockets. At the moment Mr. Maduro is down the list of villains, not nearly the stature of a 'new Hitler' like Vladimir Putin. But where he ends up will depend on how successfully the CIA (with Robert Mueller's help) can drum up a war against nuclear armed Russia. What separates Russia from the other heroes and villains on the list is its history as a competing empire as well as the manner in which Russian oil and gas is distributed. Geography placed it closer to the population centers of Europe than to Southeastern China where Chinese economic development has been concentrated. This makes Europe a 'natural' market for Russian oil and gas. The former Soviet state of Ukraine did stand between, or rather under, Russian pipelines and Europe until Hillary Clinton had her lieutenants engineer a coup there in 2014. In contrast to the 'new Hitler' of Mr. Putin (or was that Trump?) Mrs. Clinton and her comrades demonstrated a preference for the old Hitler in the form of Ukrainian fascists who were the ideological descendants of 'authentic' WWII Nazis. But rest assured, not all of the U.S.'s allies in this affair were ideological Nazis. Image removed by sender. Chart: Demonization of Russia centers on competition for oil and gas revenues. Pipelines to deliver oil and gas from the Middle East to Europe run through North Africa (Libya) and Syria and / or Turkey. These pipelines are substantially controlled by Western interests with imperial / colonial ties to the U.S., Britain and 'developed' Europe. Russian oil and gas did run through Ukraine, which is now negotiating to join NATO, or otherwise hits a NATO wall before entering Europe. In contrast to the alternative hypotheses given in the American press, NATO, the geopolitical extension of the U.S. military in Europe, admits that the U.S. engineered coup in Ukraine was 'about' oil geopolitics with Russia. The American storyline that Crimea was seized by Russia ignores that the Russian navy has had a Black Sea port in Crimea for decades. How amenable, precisely, might Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and his friends be if Russia seized a major U.S. naval port given their generous offer to take over the U.S. electoral system because of a few Russian trolls? Although Russia is toward the bottom of the top ten countries in terms of oil reserves, it faces a problem of distribution that the others don't. Imperial ties and recent military incursions have left the distribution of oil and gas from the Middle East to Europe largely under Western control. Syria, Turkey and North Africa are necessary to moving this oil and gas through pipelines to Europe. That Syria, Libya and Turkey are now, or recently have been, militarily contested adds credence to the contention that the 'international community's' heroes and villains are largely determined by whose hands their oil and gas resources are currently in. Democratic Party loyalists who see Putin, Maduro et al as the problemfirst need to answer for the candidate they put forward in 2016. Hillary Clinton led the carnage in Libya that murdered 30,000 - 50,000 innocents for Western oil and gas interests. Russia didn't force the U.S. into its calamitous invasion of Iraq. Russia didn't take Americans' jobs, houses and pensions in the Great Recession. Russia didn't reward Wall Street for causing it. Democrats need to take responsibility for their failed candidates and their failed Party. Part of the point in relating oil reserves to American foreign entanglements is that the countries and leaders involved are incidental. Vladimir Putin certainly seems smarter than the American leadership. But this has no bearing on whether or not his leadership of Russia is broadly socially beneficial. The only possible resolution of climate crisis requires both Russia and the U.S. to greatly reduce their use of fossil fuels. Reports have it that Mr. Putin has no interest in doing so. And once the marketing chatter is set to the side, neither do the Americans. By placing themselves as arbiters of the electoral process, the Director of National Intelligence and the heads of the CIA, NSA and FBI can effectively control it. Is it accidental that the candidate of liberal Democrats in the 2016 election was the insiders'- the intelligence agencies' and military contractors,' candidate as well? Implied is that these agencies and contractors are now 'liberal.' Good luck with that program if you value peace and prosperity. There are lots of ways to create free and fair elections if that is the goal. Use paper ballots that are counted in public, automatically register all eligible voters, make election days national holidays and eliminate 'private' funding of electoral campaigns. But why make elections free and fair when fanciful nonsense about 'meddling' will convince the liberal class to deliver power to grey corpses in the CIA, NSA and FBI for the benefit of a tiny cabal of stupendously rich plutocrats. Who says America isn't already great? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 2270 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 2348 bytes Desc: not available URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Mon Feb 19 19:41:25 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 19:41:25 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Mueller, Russia and Oil Politics In-Reply-To: <008701d3a9ac$7fb34340$7f19c9c0$@comcast.net> References: <008701d3a9ac$7fb34340$7f19c9c0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: <1170746572.1031165.1519069285661@mail.yahoo.com> Thanks David, the best thing of read on the topic. On ‎Monday‎, ‎February‎ ‎19‎, ‎2018‎ ‎12‎:‎07‎:‎57‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, David Johnson via Peace-discuss wrote:       Mueller, Russia and Oil Politics by ROB URIE   https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/19/mueller-russia-and-oil-politics/ | | | Mueller, Russia and Oil Politics www.counterpunch.org The Mueller indictment made public on Friday charges 13 Russian nationals with trolling the American electoral process to ‘sow discord’ by falsely representing themselves as American dissident personas. Once the field of presidential aspirants had been narrowed in 2016, their goal became to support Donald Trump’s candidacy while disparaging Hillary Clinton. There is no charge that the outcome of the 2016 election was changed by these actions. More |     Dunder-Mifflin as Troll Farm The Mueller indictment made public on Friday charges 13 Russian nationals with trolling the American electoral process to ‘sow discord’ by falsely representing themselves as American dissident personas. Once the field of presidential aspirants had been narrowed in 2016, their goal became to support Donald Trump’s candidacy while disparaging Hillary Clinton. There is no charge that the outcome of the 2016 election was changed by these actions. The form of the alleged conspiracy was a ‘troll farm,’ an office populated by various functionaries who worked together from 2014 to today to magnify already existing social tensions on social media. Those charged were likewise mainly functionaries— IT workers, managers, etc. Despite allegations to the contrary in the American press, no links between the alleged troll farm and the Kremlin and / or Vladimir Putin were put forward. The 13 people charged are Russian nationals presumably living in Russia. As of this writing none have been arrested. Unless they plan to voluntarily return to the U.S., an unlikely move, the charges will never be contested in a courtroom. This most certainly was understood by Mr. Mueller before the indictments were handed down. Lest this remain unclear, charges made without the likelihood of a trial are unlikely to ever be resolved. In reading through the charges, what is striking is that the Russians aren’t charged with creating social tensions. They are charged with exploiting and exacerbating them. It is their personas that are deemed to be false, not the familiar chatter of quasi-anonymous voices on social media. The point is that the social tensions preceded the chatter. Mr. Mueller’s term ‘sowing discord’ literally means that discord was planted. The actual sequence is of discord being exploited. This distinction is important for a number of reasons. Following the electoral debacles in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, the continued use of electronic voting machines provides a legitimate basis for believing that the American electoral system is compromised. The national Democrats did conspire to undermine Bernie Sanders in order to secure the nomination for Hillary Clinton. The racist subtext of the Clintons’ 1994 Crime Bill (‘Black criminality’) is a rational reason for Blacks to vote for someone else. These points are necessary because the discord the Russians are alleged to have sown related to rational political grievances. What is insidious in Mr. Mueller’s charges is conflation of trolling with the substance of political dissent. The certainty officials have that no votes were changed by the Russians comes from the fact that the election machinery isn’t connected to the internet. This means that distant trolls can’t get to it to change votes. But this does not assure that entirely home-grown ‘meddling’ didn’t compromise the integrity of the election. The indictments are a major political story, but not for the reasons given in mainstream press coverage. Once Mr. Mueller’s indictment is understood to charge the exploitation of existing social tensions (read it and decide for yourself), the FBI, which Mr. Mueller directed from 2001 – 2013, is precisely the wrong entity to be rendering judgment. The FBI has been America’s political police since its founding in 1908. Early on former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover led legally dubious mass arrests of American dissidents. He practically invented the slander of conflating legitimate dissent with foreign agency. This is the institutional backdrop from which Mr. Mueller proceeds. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the FBI’s targets included the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Black Panther Party and any other political organization Mr. Hoover deemed a threat. The secret (hidden) FBI program COINTELPRO was intended to subvert political outcomes outside of allegations of criminal wrongdoing and with no regard for the lives of its targets. Throughout its history the FBI has sided with the powerful against the powerless to maintain an unjust social order. Robert Mueller became FBI Director only days before the attacks of September 11, 2001. One of his first acts as Director was to arrest 1,000 persons without any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. None of those arrested were ever charged in association with the attacks. The frame in which the FBI acted— to maintain political stability threatened by ‘external’ forces, was ultimately chosen by the George W. Bush administration to justify its aggressive war against Iraq. It is the FBI’s legacy of conflating dissent with being an agent of a foreign power that Mr. Mueller’s indictment most insidiously perpetuates. Russians are ‘sowing discord,’ and they are using Americans to do so, goes the allegation. Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders are listed in the indictment as roadblocks to the unfettered ascension of Hillary Clinton to the presidency. Russians are sowing discord, therefore discord is both suspect in itself and evidence of being a foreign agent. The posture of simple reporting at work in the indictment— that it isn’t the FBI’s fault that the Russians (allegedly) inserted themselves into the electoral process, runs against the history of the FBI’s political role, the tilt used to craft criminal charges and the facts put forward versus those put to the side. Given the political agendas of the other agencies that the FBI joined through the charges, they are most certainly but a small piece of a larger story. In the aftermath of the indictments it’s easy to forget that the Pentagon created the internet, that the NSA has its tentacles in all of its major chokepoints, that the CIA has been heavily involved in funding and ‘using’ social media toward its own ends and that the FBI is only reputable in the present because of Americans’ near-heroic ignorance of history. The claim that the Russian operation was sophisticated because it had corporate form and function is countered by the fact that it was, by the various agencies’ own claims, ineffectual in changing the outcome of the election. I Have a List While Robert Mueller was busy charging never-to-be-tried Russians with past crimes, Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, declared that future Russian meddling has already cast a shadow over the integrity of the 2018 election. Why the Pentagon that created the internet, the NSA that has its tentacles in all of its major chokepoints, the CIA that has been heavily involved in funding and ‘using’ social media toward its own ends and the FBI that just landed such a glorious victory of good over evil would be quivering puddles when it comes to precluding said meddling is a question that needs to be asked. The political frame being put forward is that only these agencies know if particular elections and candidates have been tainted by meddling, therefore we need to trust them to tell us which candidates were legitimately elected and which weren’t. As generous as this offer seems, wouldn’t the creation of free and fair elections be a more direct route to achieving this end? Put differently, who among those making the offer, whether personally or as functionaries of their respective agencies, has a demonstrated history of supporting democratic institutions? The 2016 election was apparently a test case for posing these agencies as the meddling police. By getting the bourgeois electocracy— liberal Democrats, to agree that the loathsome Trump is illegitimate, future candidates will be vetted by the CIA, NSA and FBI with impunity. It’s apparently only the pre-‘discord, ‘ the social angst that the decade of the Great Recession left as its residual, that shifts this generous offer from the deterministic to the realm of the probable. The social conditions that led to the Great Recession and its aftermath are entirely home grown. More broadly, how do the government agencies and people that spent the better part of the last century undermining democracy at home and abroad intend to stop ‘Russian meddling?’ If the FBI couldn’t disentangle home grown ‘discord’ from that allegedly exploited and exacerbated by the Russians, isn’t the likely intention to edit out all discord? And if fake news is a problem in need of addressing, wouldn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post have been shut down years ago? The Great Satin (sic) While Russia is the villain of the day, week and year due to alleged election ‘meddling,’ the process of demonization that Russia has undergone has shown little variation from (alleged) villain to villain. It is thanks to cable news and the ‘newspaper of record’ that the true villainy of Vladimir Putin, Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Nicolas Maduro and the political leadership of Iran has been revealed. In the face of such monsters, questions of motivation are moot. Why wouldn’t Mr. Putin ‘sow discord?’ The question as yet unasked, and therefore unanswered is: is there something besides base villainy that brought these national leaders, and the nations they lead, into the crosshairs of America’s fair and wise leadership?  This question might forever go unanswered were it not for the secret list from which their names were apparently drawn. No, not that secret list. This one is publicly available— hiding in plain sight, as it were. It is the list of proven oil reserves by country (below). This is no doubt unduly reductive— evil is as evil does, but read on. The question of how such a list could divide so evenly between heroes and villains I leave to the philosophers. On second thought, no I won’t. The heroes are allies of a small cadre of America’s political and economic elite who have made themselves fabulously rich through the alliances. The villains have oil, gas, pipelines and other resources that this elite wants. Reductive, yes. But this simple list certainly appears to explain American foreign policy over the last half-century quite well. Source: gulfbusiness.com It’s almost as if America’s love for humanity, as demonstrated through humanitarian interventions, is determined by imperial competition for natural resources— in this case oil and gas. Amongst these countries, only one (Canada) is ‘democratic’ in the American sense of being run by a small cadre of plutocrats who use the state to further their own interests. Two— Iraq and Libya, were recently reduced to rubble (for the sake of humanity) by the U.S. Nigeria is being ‘brought’ under the control of AFRICOM. What remains are various and sundry petro-states plus Venezuela and Russia. Following the untimely death of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, the horrible tyrant kept in office via free and fair elections, who used Venezuela’s petro-dollars to feed, clothe and educate his people and was in the process of creating a regional Left alliance to counter American abuse of power, the CIA joined with local plutocrats to overthrow his successor, Nicolas Maduro. The goal: to ‘liberate’ Venezuela’s oil revenues in their own pockets. At the moment Mr. Maduro is down the list of villains, not nearly the stature of a ‘new Hitler’ like Vladimir Putin. But where he ends up will depend on how successfully the CIA (with Robert Mueller’s help) can drum up a war against nuclear armed Russia. What separates Russia from the other heroes and villains on the list is its history as a competing empire as well as the manner in which Russian oil and gas is distributed. Geography placed it closer to the population centers of Europe than to Southeastern China where Chinese economic development has been concentrated. This makes Europe a ‘natural’ market for Russian oil and gas. The former Soviet state of Ukraine did stand between, or rather under, Russian pipelines and Europe until Hillary Clinton had her lieutenants engineer a coup there in 2014. In contrast to the ‘new Hitler’ of Mr. Putin (or was that Trump?)  Mrs. Clinton and her comrades demonstrated a preference for the old Hitler in the form of Ukrainian fascists who were the ideological descendants of ‘authentic’ WWII Nazis. But rest assured, not all of the U.S.’s allies in this affair were ideological Nazis. Chart: Demonization of Russia centers on competition for oil and gas revenues. Pipelines to deliver oil and gas from the Middle East to Europe run through North Africa (Libya) and Syria and / or Turkey. These pipelines are substantially controlled by Western interests with imperial / colonial ties to the U.S., Britain and ‘developed’ Europe. Russian oil and gas did run through Ukraine, which is now negotiating to join NATO, or otherwise hits a NATO wall before entering Europe. In contrast to the alternative hypotheses given in the American press, NATO, the geopolitical extension of the U.S. military in Europe, admits that the U.S. engineered coup in Ukraine was ‘about’ oil geopolitics with Russia. The American storyline that Crimea was seized by Russia ignores that the Russian navy has had a Black Sea port in Crimea for decades. How amenable, precisely, might Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and his friends be if Russia seized a major U.S. naval port given their generous offer to take over the U.S. electoral system because of a few Russian trolls? Although Russia is toward the bottom of the top ten countries in terms of oil reserves, it faces a problem of distribution that the others don’t. Imperial ties and recent military incursions have left the distribution of oil and gas from the Middle East to Europe largely under Western control. Syria, Turkey and North Africa are necessary to moving this oil and gas through pipelines to Europe. That Syria, Libya and Turkey are now, or recently have been, militarily contested adds credence to the contention that the ‘international community’s’ heroes and villains are largely determined by whose hands their oil and gas resources are currently in. Democratic Party loyalists who see Putin, Maduro et al as the problemfirst need to answer for the candidate they put forward in 2016. Hillary Clinton led the carnage in Libya that murdered 30,000 – 50,000 innocents for Western oil and gas interests. Russia didn’t force the U.S. into its calamitous invasion of Iraq. Russia didn’t take Americans’ jobs, houses and pensions in the Great Recession. Russia didn’t reward Wall Street for causing it. Democrats need to take responsibility for their failed candidates and their failed Party. Part of the point in relating oil reserves to American foreign entanglements is that the countries and leaders involved are incidental. Vladimir Putin certainly seems smarter than the American leadership. But this has no bearing on whether or not his leadership of Russia is broadly socially beneficial. The only possible resolution of climate crisis requires both Russia and the U.S. to greatly reduce their use of fossil fuels. Reports have it that Mr. Putin has no interest in doing so. And once the marketing chatter is set to the side, neither do the Americans. By placing themselves as arbiters of the electoral process, the Director of National Intelligence and the heads of the CIA, NSA and FBI can effectively control it. Is it accidental that the candidate of liberal Democrats in the 2016 election was the insiders’— the intelligence agencies’ and military contractors,’ candidate as well? Implied is that these agencies and contractors are now ‘liberal.’ Good luck with that program if you value peace and prosperity. There are lots of ways to create free and fair elections if that is the goal. Use paper ballots that are counted in public, automatically register all eligible voters, make election days national holidays and eliminate ‘private’ funding of electoral campaigns. But why make elections free and fair when fanciful nonsense about ‘meddling’ will convince the liberal class to deliver power to grey corpses in the CIA, NSA and FBI for the benefit of a tiny cabal of stupendously rich plutocrats. Who says America isn’t already great?   _______________________________________________ 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 2348 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 2270 bytes Desc: not available URL: From r-szoke at illinois.edu Mon Feb 19 19:49:11 2018 From: r-szoke at illinois.edu (Szoke, Ron) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 19:49:11 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] How some were suckered (not you, of course) Message-ID: [page1image5792960.png] [page1image3835360.png] https://nyti.ms/2C5LodP How Unwitting Americans Encountered Russian Operatives Online By SCOTT SHANE NYT online, FEB. 18, 2018 They were politically active Americans scattered around the country, dedicating their spare time to the 2016 presidential campaign or various causes. And the seeming fellow activists who called them to rallies via Facebook, or joined in the free-for-all on Twitter, appeared unremarkable. Except that their English sometimes seemed a little odd. “We are looking for friendship because we are fighting for the same reasons,” someone purporting to be with an online group calling itself Blacktivist wrote via Twitter to the Rev. Dr. Heber Brown III, a Baltimore pastor, in April 2016. “Actually we are open for your thoughts and offers.” In late October 2016, in Nederland, Tex., the Texas Nationalist Movement got a Facebook message from someone representing a group called Heart of Texas, which planned to organize rallies in favor of Texas secession on the eve of the election. But on a follow-up call, “something was off,” said Daniel Miller, the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement. Despite their wariness, neither Dr. Brown nor Mr. Miller had any inkling of what was really behind those odd encounters. Heart of Texas and Blacktivist were phony groups, part of a sweeping Russian disinformation campaign that was funded with millions of dollars and carried out by 80 people operating out of St. Petersburg, Russia. The Russian attempt at long-distance choreography was playing out in many cities across the United States. Facebook has disclosed that about 130 rallies were promoted by 13 of the Russian pages, which reached 126 million Americans with provocative content on race, guns, immigration and other volatile issues. An indictment filed in court on Friday by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election, laid out for the first time, in riveting detail, how Russia carried out its campaign on social media. And while the indictment did not suggest any involvement by President Trump or his associates, it did say many Americans engaged with the Russian trolls without knowing who or where they really were. “Some defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities,” the indictment said. Among others, it said, the Russians contacted “a real U.S. person affiliated with a Texas-based grass-roots organization,” who advised them to focus their efforts on “purple states like Colorado, Virginia and Florida.” The indictment did not name the activist, but Mr. Miller said in an interview that the mention had set off a slightly unnerving guessing game in his state as to who the helpful Texan might be. It was not him, he said. “Every organization in Texas that’s been politically involved over the last few years is sort of eyeing the other ones,” said Mr. Miller, whose group decided not to endorse the Heart of Texas rallies. “Mueller’s team needs to clarify this.” (A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment.) Sometimes the Russian efforts fell flat. Dr. Brown had challenged Blacktivist on Twitter because it seemed to be an out-of-town group, yet it was calling for a Baltimore rally to mark the anniversary of the death of Freddie Gray, who sustained a fatal injury while in police custody. The pastor had no idea just how far out of town. “The way you’re going about this is deeply offensive to those of us who are from Baltimore and have been organizing here all our lives,” Dr. Brown wrote to the stranger. Seemingly chastened, Blacktivist replied, “This must be really wrong. I feel ashamed.” The pastor replied: “Post a public apology. Cancel the event and take your cues from those working locally.” The Heart of Texas group had more success with a Houston rally to “Stop the Islamization of Texas,” which provoked an angry confrontation in May 2016. United Muslims of America, another Russian creation, called its own rally to “Save Islamic Knowledge” for the same time and place, outside the Islamic Da’wah Center. A dozen people who turned out for the first event, some carrying rifles, Confederate flags and a banner saying “White Lives Matter,” faced off across a street with a far larger crowd of counterprotesters. The police kept the crowds apart, and there was no trouble at the event, which was caught on video. Later, on social media, some puzzled participants complained that no one from Heart of Texas, which had about 250,000 likes on Facebook, had shown up for the group’s own rally. But the online pitches reached a big audience. In written answers to questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee, Facebook said some 338,300 people saw the announcements of rallies promoted by the bogus pages — and 62,500 said they planned to attend one. Those numbers are modest against the background of the entire presidential campaign, but they show that the Russians were able not just to attract Americans to their ersatz groups but actually manipulate their actions. “The fact that they got people to show up at real-world events is impressive,” said Renee DiResta, the head of policy at Data for Democracy, a nonprofit that has studied the Russian activity. “What we have is an engine for reaching people and growing an audience, which is fantastic. But this shows that it can be used for very shady purposes.” Facebook’s vice president for advertising, Rob Goldman, said on Twitter on Friday, “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal” — a statement that President Trump retweeted. But Mr. Mueller’s indictment repeatedly states that the Russian operation was designed not just to provoke division among Americans but also to denigrate Hillary Clinton and support her rivals, mainly Mr. Trump. The hashtags the Russian operation used included #Trump2016, #TrumpTrain, #MAGA and #Hillary4Prison, and one Russian operative was reprimanded for “a low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton,” the indictment says. A glance at the Russian posts supports the idea that they focus on candidates. Heart of Texas ran an unflattering portrait of Mrs. Clinton with the tag “Pure Evil”; posted a fake photo of her shaking hands with Osama bin Laden; and paired her with Adolf Hitler as a supporter of gun control. Mr. Trump was shown surrounded by police officers wearing Trump hats and grinning outside a fake cage with Mrs. Clinton inside. While most of the Americans duped by the Russian trolls were not public figures, some higher-profile people were fooled. The indictment mentions the Russian Twitter feed @TEN_GOP, which posed as a Tennessee Republican account and attracted more than 100,000 followers. It was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr.; Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; and his son, Michael Flynn Jr. They have expressed no regret that they were apparently taken in by the Russian operatives. Instead, since Friday’s indictment, Donald Trump Jr., like his father, has pointed mainly to the fact that it did not accuse the president or his associates of assisting the Russian operation. Jeremy Bowers contributed research. Read the special counsel’s indictment against 13 Russians and three companies here. A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Russians Exploited Web In ’16 Meddling. © 2018 The New York Times Company -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: page1image3835360.png Type: image/png Size: 3959 bytes Desc: page1image3835360.png URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Mon Feb 19 19:59:19 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 13:59:19 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] How some were suckered (not you, of course) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <79058264-E71F-43A1-B773-30013E4B7EB8@gmail.com> Does the truth of a statement depend on the motives of those expressing it? > On Feb 19, 2018, at 1:49 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > https://nyti.ms/2C5LodP > > How Unwitting Americans Encountered Russian Operatives Online > > By SCOTT SHANE NYT online, FEB. 18, 2018 > > They were politically active Americans scattered around the country, dedicating their spare time to the 2016 presidential campaign or various causes. And the seeming fellow activists who called them to rallies via Facebook, or joined in the free-for-all on Twitter, appeared unremarkable. > > Except that their English sometimes seemed a little odd. > > “We are looking for friendship because we are fighting for the same reasons,” someone purporting to be with an online group calling itself Blacktivist wrote via Twitter to the Rev. Dr. Heber Brown III, a Baltimore pastor, in April 2016. “Actually we are open for your thoughts and offers.” > > In late October 2016, in Nederland, Tex., the Texas Nationalist Movement got a Facebook message from someone representing a group called Heart of Texas, which planned to organize rallies in favor of Texas secession on the eve of the election. But on a follow-up call, “something was off,” said Daniel Miller, the > > president of the Texas Nationalist Movement. > > Despite their wariness, neither Dr. Brown nor Mr. Miller had any inkling of what was really behind those odd encounters. Heart of Texas and Blacktivist were phony groups, part of a sweeping Russian disinformation campaign that was funded with millions of dollars and carried out by 80 people operating out of St. Petersburg, Russia. > > The Russian attempt at long-distance choreography was playing out in many cities across the United States. Facebook has disclosed that about 130 rallies were promoted by 13 of the Russian pages, which reached 126 million Americans with provocative content on race, guns, immigration and other volatile issues. > > An indictment filed in court on Friday by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election, laid out for the first time, in riveting detail, how Russia carried out its campaign on social media. And while the indictment did not suggest any involvement by President Trump or his associates, it did say many Americans engaged with the Russian trolls without knowing who or where they really were. > > “Some defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities,” the indictment said. Among others, it said, the Russians contacted “a real U.S. person affiliated with a Texas-based grass-roots organization,” who advised them to focus their efforts on “purple states like Colorado, Virginia and Florida.” > > The indictment did not name the activist, but Mr. Miller said in an interview that the mention had set off a slightly unnerving guessing game in his state as to who the helpful Texan might be. It was not him, he said. > > “Every organization in Texas that’s been politically involved over the last few years is sort of eyeing the other ones,” said Mr. Miller, whose group decided not to endorse the Heart of Texas rallies. “Mueller’s team needs to clarify this.” (A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment.) > > Sometimes the Russian efforts fell flat. Dr. Brown had challenged Blacktivist on Twitter because it seemed to be an out-of-town group, yet it was calling for a Baltimore rally to mark the anniversary of the death of Freddie Gray, who sustained a fatal injury while in police custody. The pastor had no idea just how far out of town. > > “The way you’re going about this is deeply offensive to those of us who are from Baltimore and have been organizing here all our lives,” Dr. Brown wrote to the stranger. > > Seemingly chastened, Blacktivist replied, “This must be really wrong. I feel ashamed.” > > The pastor replied: “Post a public apology. Cancel the event and take your cues from those working locally.” > > The Heart of Texas group had more success with a Houston rally to “Stop the Islamization of Texas,” which provoked an angry confrontation in May 2016. United Muslims of America, another Russian creation, called its own rally to “Save Islamic Knowledge” for the same time and place, outside the Islamic Da’wah Center. > > A dozen people who turned out for the first event, some carrying rifles, Confederate flags and a banner saying “White Lives Matter,” faced off across a street with a far larger crowd of counterprotesters. The police kept the crowds apart, and there was no trouble at the event, which was caught on video. > > Later, on social media, some puzzled participants complained that no one from Heart of Texas, which had about 250,000 likes on Facebook, had shown up for the group’s own rally. > > But the online pitches reached a big audience. In written answers to questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee, Facebook said some 338,300 people saw the announcements of rallies promoted by the bogus pages — and 62,500 said they planned to attend one. Those numbers are modest against the background of the entire presidential campaign, but they show that the Russians were able not just to attract Americans to their ersatz groups but actually manipulate their actions. > > “The fact that they got people to show up at real-world events is impressive,” said Renee DiResta, the head of policy at Data for Democracy, a nonprofit that has studied the Russian activity. “What we have is an engine for reaching people and growing an audience, which is fantastic. But this shows that it can be used for very shady purposes.” > > Facebook’s vice president for advertising, Rob Goldman, said on Twitter on Friday, “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal” — a statement that President Trump retweeted. > > But Mr. Mueller’s indictment repeatedly states that the Russian operation was designed not just to provoke division among Americans but also to denigrate Hillary Clinton and support her rivals, mainly Mr. Trump. The hashtags the Russian operation used included #Trump2016, #TrumpTrain, #MAGA and > > #Hillary4Prison, and one Russian operative was reprimanded for “a low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton,” the indictment says. > > A glance at the Russian posts supports the idea that they focus on candidates. Heart of Texas ran an unflattering portrait of Mrs. Clinton with the tag “Pure Evil”; posted a fake photo of her shaking hands with Osama bin Laden; and paired her with Adolf Hitler as a supporter of gun control. Mr. Trump was shown surrounded by police officers wearing Trump hats and grinning outside a fake cage with Mrs. Clinton inside. > > While most of the Americans duped by the Russian trolls were not public figures, some higher-profile people were fooled. The indictment mentions the Russian Twitter feed @TEN_GOP, which posed as a Tennessee Republican account and attracted more than 100,000 followers. It was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr.; Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; and his son, Michael Flynn Jr. > > They have expressed no regret that they were apparently taken in by the Russian operatives. Instead, since Friday’s indictment, Donald Trump Jr., like his father, has pointed mainly to the fact that it did not accuse the president or his associates of assisting the Russian operation. > > Jeremy Bowers contributed research. > > Read the special counsel’s indictment against 13 Russians and three companies here. > > A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Russians Exploited Web In ’16 Meddling. > > © 2018 The New York Times Company > > > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From cgestabrook at gmail.com Mon Feb 19 21:44:33 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 15:44:33 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE meetings, Sundays 5-6pm Message-ID: <3680BC02-D9C1-4786-A9E2-5972504A519C@gmail.com> AWARE meetings, Sundays 5-6pm Our meeting on Sunday Feb. 25 will be at the usual place, Cafeteria & Company on Main St. in Urbana - which is unfortunately closing in March. So, beginning on Sunday, March 4, we will meet in the large room on the second floor of the coffee shop in the Harvest Market, 2029 S Neil St, Champaign, IL 61820. Members and friends of AWARE are welcome. —CGE From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Mon Feb 19 23:03:35 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 17:03:35 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] How some were suckered (not you, of course) In-Reply-To: <79058264-E71F-43A1-B773-30013E4B7EB8@gmail.com> References: <79058264-E71F-43A1-B773-30013E4B7EB8@gmail.com> Message-ID: <00f701d3a9d5$defb84b0$9cf28e10$@comcast.net> What totally amazes me is how so many otherwise intelligent and at least somewhat politically savvy people have bought into this absurd ruling class / corporate media propaganda narrative, regardless how increasingly ridiculous and absurd it increasingly becomes over time, as each new fairy tale falls apart after a short time. I still have seen absolutely no evidence, just accusations repeated over and over again. David J. -----Original Message----- From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss Sent: Monday, February 19, 2018 1:59 PM To: Ron Szoke Cc: Peace Discuss Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] How some were suckered (not you, of course) Does the truth of a statement depend on the motives of those expressing it? > On Feb 19, 2018, at 1:49 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > https://nyti.ms/2C5LodP > > How Unwitting Americans Encountered Russian Operatives Online > > By SCOTT SHANE NYT online, FEB. 18, 2018 > > They were politically active Americans scattered around the country, dedicating their spare time to the 2016 presidential campaign or various causes. And the seeming fellow activists who called them to rallies via Facebook, or joined in the free-for-all on Twitter, appeared unremarkable. > > Except that their English sometimes seemed a little odd. > > “We are looking for friendship because we are fighting for the same reasons,” someone purporting to be with an online group calling itself Blacktivist wrote via Twitter to the Rev. Dr. Heber Brown III, a Baltimore pastor, in April 2016. “Actually we are open for your thoughts and offers.” > > In late October 2016, in Nederland, Tex., the Texas Nationalist > Movement got a Facebook message from someone representing a group > called Heart of Texas, which planned to organize rallies in favor of > Texas secession on the eve of the election. But on a follow-up call, > “something was off,” said Daniel Miller, the > > president of the Texas Nationalist Movement. > > Despite their wariness, neither Dr. Brown nor Mr. Miller had any inkling of what was really behind those odd encounters. Heart of Texas and Blacktivist were phony groups, part of a sweeping Russian disinformation campaign that was funded with millions of dollars and carried out by 80 people operating out of St. Petersburg, Russia. > > The Russian attempt at long-distance choreography was playing out in many cities across the United States. Facebook has disclosed that about 130 rallies were promoted by 13 of the Russian pages, which reached 126 million Americans with provocative content on race, guns, immigration and other volatile issues. > > An indictment filed in court on Friday by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election, laid out for the first time, in riveting detail, how Russia carried out its campaign on social media. And while the indictment did not suggest any involvement by President Trump or his associates, it did say many Americans engaged with the Russian trolls without knowing who or where they really were. > > “Some defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities,” the indictment said. Among others, it said, the Russians contacted “a real U.S. person affiliated with a Texas-based grass-roots organization,” who advised them to focus their efforts on “purple states like Colorado, Virginia and Florida.” > > The indictment did not name the activist, but Mr. Miller said in an interview that the mention had set off a slightly unnerving guessing game in his state as to who the helpful Texan might be. It was not him, he said. > > “Every organization in Texas that’s been politically involved over the > last few years is sort of eyeing the other ones,” said Mr. Miller, > whose group decided not to endorse the Heart of Texas rallies. > “Mueller’s team needs to clarify this.” (A spokesman for Mr. Mueller > declined to comment.) > > Sometimes the Russian efforts fell flat. Dr. Brown had challenged Blacktivist on Twitter because it seemed to be an out-of-town group, yet it was calling for a Baltimore rally to mark the anniversary of the death of Freddie Gray, who sustained a fatal injury while in police custody. The pastor had no idea just how far out of town. > > “The way you’re going about this is deeply offensive to those of us who are from Baltimore and have been organizing here all our lives,” Dr. Brown wrote to the stranger. > > Seemingly chastened, Blacktivist replied, “This must be really wrong. I feel ashamed.” > > The pastor replied: “Post a public apology. Cancel the event and take your cues from those working locally.” > > The Heart of Texas group had more success with a Houston rally to “Stop the Islamization of Texas,” which provoked an angry confrontation in May 2016. United Muslims of America, another Russian creation, called its own rally to “Save Islamic Knowledge” for the same time and place, outside the Islamic Da’wah Center. > > A dozen people who turned out for the first event, some carrying rifles, Confederate flags and a banner saying “White Lives Matter,” faced off across a street with a far larger crowd of counterprotesters. The police kept the crowds apart, and there was no trouble at the event, which was caught on video. > > Later, on social media, some puzzled participants complained that no one from Heart of Texas, which had about 250,000 likes on Facebook, had shown up for the group’s own rally. > > But the online pitches reached a big audience. In written answers to questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee, Facebook said some 338,300 people saw the announcements of rallies promoted by the bogus pages — and 62,500 said they planned to attend one. Those numbers are modest against the background of the entire presidential campaign, but they show that the Russians were able not just to attract Americans to their ersatz groups but actually manipulate their actions. > > “The fact that they got people to show up at real-world events is impressive,” said Renee DiResta, the head of policy at Data for Democracy, a nonprofit that has studied the Russian activity. “What we have is an engine for reaching people and growing an audience, which is fantastic. But this shows that it can be used for very shady purposes.” > > Facebook’s vice president for advertising, Rob Goldman, said on Twitter on Friday, “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal” — a statement that President Trump retweeted. > > But Mr. Mueller’s indictment repeatedly states that the Russian > operation was designed not just to provoke division among Americans > but also to denigrate Hillary Clinton and support her rivals, mainly > Mr. Trump. The hashtags the Russian operation used included > #Trump2016, #TrumpTrain, #MAGA and > > #Hillary4Prison, and one Russian operative was reprimanded for “a low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton,” the indictment says. > > A glance at the Russian posts supports the idea that they focus on candidates. Heart of Texas ran an unflattering portrait of Mrs. Clinton with the tag “Pure Evil”; posted a fake photo of her shaking hands with Osama bin Laden; and paired her with Adolf Hitler as a supporter of gun control. Mr. Trump was shown surrounded by police officers wearing Trump hats and grinning outside a fake cage with Mrs. Clinton inside. > > While most of the Americans duped by the Russian trolls were not public figures, some higher-profile people were fooled. The indictment mentions the Russian Twitter feed @TEN_GOP, which posed as a Tennessee Republican account and attracted more than 100,000 followers. It was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr.; Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; and his son, Michael Flynn Jr. > > They have expressed no regret that they were apparently taken in by the Russian operatives. Instead, since Friday’s indictment, Donald Trump Jr., like his father, has pointed mainly to the fact that it did not accuse the president or his associates of assisting the Russian operation. > > Jeremy Bowers contributed research. > > Read the special counsel’s indictment against 13 Russians and three companies here. > > A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Russians Exploited Web In ’16 Meddling. > > © 2018 The New York Times Company > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Mon Feb 19 23:08:00 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 17:08:00 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: The media and the Mueller indictment: A conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <010b01d3a9d6$7d39c5b0$77ad5110$@comcast.net> http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/02/19/pers-f19.html Image removed by sender. The media and the Mueller indictment: A conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories www.wsws.org Nothing in the indictment comes close to supporting the wild claims from the media being used to justify a campaign for war and domestic repression. The media and the Mueller indictment: A conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories 19 February 2018 The announcement Friday by the US Department of Justice that a federal grand jury has returned criminal indictments against 13 Russian citizens and three Russian companies, charging illegal activities in the 2016 US presidential election, has become the occasion for a barrage of war propaganda in the American corporate media. Leading the charge is the New York Times, which published a front-page "news" lead Sunday, authored by Peter Baker. The article was published online Saturday evening under the headline, "Trump's Conspicuous Silence Leaves a Struggle Against Russia Without a Leader." In the newspaper's print edition, the "struggle" was upgraded to a "war . being fought on the American side without a commander in chief." The indictments, the Times argues, "underscored the broader conclusion by the American government that Russia is engaged in a virtual war against the United States through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda." It noted that only a few days ago, the Trump administration "formally blamed Russia for an expansive cyberattack last year called NotPetya and threatened unspecified 'international consequences'." Given that the US government has just issued a series of strategy documents that, among other conclusions, suggest that a significant cyberattack on the United States could justify retaliation with nuclear weapons, the implications of the argument put forward on the front page of the Times are chilling: What cyberattack could be more significant than an effort to hijack the US presidential election? By the logic of the leading "newspaper of record," the US government would be justified in responding militarily to an alleged Russian election operation. What is propounded in the media coverage is a conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and much of the media are espousing paranoid views that were once associated with the John Birch Society, which notoriously claimed that President Dwight Eisenhower was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. This supposed conspiracy is described in breathless terms in media accounts: "sophisticated," "massive," of "breathtaking" scope, one with "tentacles" that "reached deeply into American political life." Even if one accepts the facts of the indictment as alleged-and that is hardly a legitimate assumption, given the capacity of the FBI and other intelligence agencies for fabrication-nothing in the indictment comes close to supporting what is being claimed by the Times and other media outlets. The 37-page document details an alleged operation of individuals in Russia to establish false identities on social media platforms and use them to influence political discussion in the US during the election. Conspicuously absent is any indication of direct Russian government involvement in the operation, which was funded by a Russian multimillionaire. Nor is there any claim that the Trump campaign collaborated with the activities of the Russian operatives, or that these activities had any impact on the course of the election. Only two Russians actually traveled to the United States, visiting several states for what is described in the indictment, with inadvertent humor, as "intelligence-gathering" on the US political scene. The total resources for the effort, under $15 million, could not pay for a serious campaign in a single major US state, let alone influence a presidential election on which billions of dollars were being expended by the Democrats and Republicans. The claim that this half-baked operation played any significant role in the outcome of the election is an absurdity. There were ample reasons for tens of millions of Americans, particularly working people, to be hostile to the campaign of Hillary Clinton, the favorite of Wall Street and the Pentagon. She ran a campaign of complacency and entitlement promising nothing to those suffering after eight years of supposed "economic recovery" under the Obama administration. That a section of working people, in desperation, cast their votes for Trump only testifies to the reactionary blind alley of the corporate-controlled two-party system. One fact in the indictment is of genuine significance: the operation began in April 2014. This was well before Donald Trump was on anyone's campaign radar screen except perhaps his own, and only a month after the right-wing US-backed political coup in Ukraine, which mobilized fascist mobs in the streets of Kyiv to drive an elected pro-Russian president out of office and replace him with an American stooge. The Ukraine operation was the culmination of a decades-long effort costing an estimated $5 billion, according to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. In other words, the supposed Russian operation in the US election was, if anything, a pinprick response to the devastating US attack on Russian influence in Ukraine, a country with long historical and ethnic ties to Russia, and with a large minority of its population speaking Russian at home. The primary purpose of the indictment was to provide the media with a flimsy basis for headlines screaming about a massive operation by Russia to undermine American democracy. What is fueling this campaign? First, there is the effort to condition the population for war with Russia. The Times and the Democratic Party are acting as the media and political spokesmen for a section of the US military-intelligence apparatus that objects to any turning away from the ferociously anti-Russian axis of US foreign policy established during the second term of the Obama administration. The US military-intelligence apparatus is escalating its anti-Russian military provocations, most recently with an airstrike against Russian forces in Syria, apparently the most significant loss of life in a US-Russia conflict in history. The very fact that the Putin regime has downplayed the incident is an indication of its fears that this could become the spark for a much wider conflagration. Second, there is the effort to present all social opposition within the United States as the product of Russian operations. The ruling class is terrified of the mounting social tensions within the United States. It is this fear that is motivating the extremely rapid moves to censor the Internet and suppress free speech. The same issue of the Times that claims Russia is at war with the United States carried an attack on Facebook, headlined, " To Stir Discord in 2016, Russians Turned Most Often to Facebook." According to the Times, Russia used the most widely used social media platform to foment political and social discontent in the United States. The implication: Facebook must implement even more aggressive censorship methods. It would be fatally wrong to underestimate the right-wing character of the political conceptions being propounded by the Times and Democrats through the anti-Russian campaign. In the 20th century, only dictatorial regimes were able to get away with lying on the scale now being carried out by the advocates of the anti-Russia narrative. But Hitler's "big lie" and Stalin's doctoring of history are the political forerunners of the campaign being waged by the intelligence agents who work in the guise of "editors" and "journalists" at the Times. Patrick Martin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 740 bytes Desc: not available URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Mon Feb 19 23:09:01 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 17:09:01 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Mueller Indictment - The "Russian Influence" Is A Commercial Marketing Scheme In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <011a01d3a9d6$a1dc6f30$e5954d90$@comcast.net> February 17, 2018 Mueller Indictment - The "Russian Influence" Is A Commercial Marketing Scheme http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/mueller-indictement-the-russian-influen ce-is-a-commercial-marketing-scheme.html#more Yesterday the U.S. Justice Department indicted the Russian Internet Research Agency on some dubious legal grounds. It covers thirteen Russian people and three Russian legal entities. The main count of the indictment is an alleged "Conspiracy to Defraud the United States". The published indictment gives support to our long held believe that there was no "Russian influence" campaign during the U.S. election. What is described and denounced as such was instead a commercial marketing scheme which ran click-bait websites to generate advertisement revenue and created online crowds around virtual persona to promote whatever its commercial customers wanted to promote. The size of the operation was tiny when compared to the hundreds of millions in campaign expenditures. It had no influence on the election outcome. The indictment is fodder for the public to prove that the Mueller investigation is "doing something". It distracts from further questioning the origin of the Steele dossier. It is full of unproven assertions and assumptions. It is a sham in that none of the Russian persons or companies indicted will ever come in front of a U.S. court. That is bad because the indictment is build on the theory of a new crime which, unless a court throws it out, can be used to incriminate other people in other cases and might even apply to this blog. The later part of this post will refer to that. In the early 1990s some dude in St.Petersburg made a good business selling hot dogs. He opened a colorful restaurant. Local celebrities and politicians were invited to gain notoriety while the restaurant served cheap food for too high prices. It was a good business. A few years later he moved to Moscow and gained contracts to cater to schools and to the military. The food he served was still substandard. But catering bad food as school lunches gave him, by chance, the idea for a new business: Parents were soon up in arms. Their children wouldn't eat the food, saying it smelled rotten. As the bad publicity mounted, Mr. Prigozhin's company, Concord Catering, launched a counterattack, a former colleague said. He hired young men and women to overwhelm the internet with comments and blog posts praising the food and dismissing the parents' protests. "In five minutes, pages were drowning in comments," said Andrei Ilin, whose website serves as a discussion board about public schools. "And all the trolls were supporting Concord." The trick worked beyond expectations. Prigozhin had found a new business. He hired some IT staff and low paid temps to populate various message boards, social networks and the general internet with whatever his customers asked him for. You have a bad online reputation? Prigozhin can help. His internet company will fill the net with positive stories and remarks about you. Your old and bad reputation will be drowned by the new and good one. Want to promote a product or service? Prigozhin's online marketeers can address the right crowds. Image removed by sender. Pic: A Russian influencer To achieve those results the few temps who worked on such projects needed to multiply their online personalities. It is better to have fifty people vouch for you online than just five. No one cares if these are real people or just virtual ones. The internet makes it easy to create such sock-puppets. The virtual crowd can then be used to push personalities, products or political opinions. Such schemes are nothing new or special. Every decent "western" public relations and marketing company will offer a similar service and has done so for years. While it is relatively easy to have sock-puppets swamp the comment threads of such sites as this blog, it is more difficult to have a real effect on social networks. These depend on multiplier effects. To gain many real "likes", "re-tweets" or "followers" an online persona needs a certain history and reputation. Real people need to feel attached to it. It takes some time and effort to build such a multiplier personality, be it real or virtual. At some point Prigozhin, or whoever by then owned the internet marketing company, decided to expand into the lucrative English speaking market. This would require to build many English language online persona and to give those some history and time to gain crowds of followers and a credible reputation. The company sent a few of its staff to the U.S. to gain some impressions, pictures and experience of the surroundings. They would later use these to impersonate as U.S. locals. It was a medium size, long-term investment of maybe a hundred-thousand bucks over two or three years. The U.S. election provided an excellent environment to build reputable online persona with large followings of people with discriminable mindsets. The political affinity was not important. The personalities only had to be very engaged and stick to their issue - be it left or right or whatever. The sole point was to gain as many followers as possible who could be segmented along social-political lines and marketed to the companies customers. Again - there is nothing new to this. It is something hundreds, if not thousands of companies are doing as their daily business. The Russian company hoped to enter the business with a cost advantage. Even its mid-ranking managers were paid as little as $1,200 per month. The students and other temporary workers who would 'work' the virtual personas as puppeteers would earn even less. Any U.S. company in a similar business would have higher costs. In parallel to building virtual online persona the company also built some click-bait websites and groups and promoted these through mini Facebook advertisements. These were the "Russian influence ads" on Facebook the U.S. media were so enraged about. They included the promotion of a Facebook page about cute puppies. Back in October we described how those "Russian influence" ads (most of which were shown after the election or were not seen at all) were simply part of a commercial scheme: The pages described and the ads leading to them are typical click-bait, not part of a political influence op. ... One builds pages with "hot" stuff that hopefully attracts lots of viewers. One creates ad-space on these pages and fills it with Google ads. One attracts viewers and promotes the spiked pages by buying $3 Facebook mini-ads for them. The mini-ads are targeted at the most susceptible groups. A few thousand users will come and look at such pages. Some will 'like' the puppy pictures or the rant for or against LGBT and further spread them. Some will click the Google ads. Money then flows into the pockets of the page creator. One can rinse and repeat this scheme forever. Each such page is a small effort for a small revenue. But the scheme is highly scaleable and parts of it can be automatized. Because of the myriad of U.S. sanctions against Russia the monetization of these business schemes required some creativity. One can easily find the name of a real U.S. person together with the assigned social security number and its date of birth. Those data are enough to open, for example, a Paypal account under a U.S. name. A U.S. customer of the cloaked Russian Internet company could then pay to the Paypal account and the money could be transferred from there to Moscow. These accounts could also be used to buy advertisement on Facebook. The person who's data was used to create the account would never learn of it and would have no loss or other damage. Another scheme is to simply pay some U.S. person to open a U.S. bank account and to then hand over the 'keys' to that account. The Justice Department indictment is quite long and detailed. It must have been expensive. If you read it do so with the above in mind. Skip over the assumptions and claims of political interference and digest only the facts. All that is left is, as explained, a commercial marketing scheme. I will not go into all its detail of the indictment but here are some points that support the above description. Point 4: Defendants, posing as US. persons and creating false U.S. personas, operated social media pages and groups designed to attract U.S. audiences. These groups and pages, which addressed divisive US. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by US. activists when, in fact, they were controlled by Defendants. Defendants also used the stolen identities of real U.S. persons to post on social media accounts. Over time, these social media accounts became Defendants' means to reach significant numbers of Americans ... Point 10d: By in or around April 2014, the ORGANIZATION formed a department that went by various names but was at times referred to as the "translator project." This project focused on the US. population and conducted operations on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. By approximately July 2016, more than eighty ORGANIZATION employees were assigned to the translator project. (Some U.S. media today made the false claim that $1.25 million per month were spend by the company for its U.S. campaign. But Point 11 of the indictment says that the company ran a number of such projects directed at a Russian audience while only the one described in 10d above is aimed at an U.S. audience. All these projects together had a monthly budget of $1.25 million.) (Point 17, 18 and 19 indict individual persons who have worked for the "translator" project" "to at least in and around [some month] 2014". It is completely unclear how these persons, who seem to have left the company two years before the U.S. election, are supposed to have anything to do with the claimed "Russian influence" on the U.S. election and the indictment.) Point 32: Defendants and their co-conspirators, through fraud and deceit, created hundreds of social media accounts and used them to develop certain fictitious U.S. personas into "leader[s] of public opinion" in the United States. The indictment then goes on and on describing the "political activities" of the sock-puppet personas. Some posted pro-Hillary slogans, some anti-Hillary stuff, some were pro-Trump, some anti-everyone, some urged not to vote, others to vote for third party candidates. The sock-puppets did not create or post fake news. They posted mainstream media stories. Some of the persona called for going to anti-Islam rallies while others promoted pro-Islam rallies. The Mueller indictment lists a total of eight rallies. Most of these did not take place at all. No one joined the "Miners For Trump" rallies in Philly and Pittsburgh. A "Charlotte against Trump" march on November 19 - after the election - was attended by one hundred people. Eight people came for a pro-Trump rally in Fort Myers. The sock-puppets called for rallies to establish themselves as 'activist' and 'leadership' persona, to generated more online traffic and additional followers. There was in fact no overall political trend in what the sock-puppets did. The sole point of all such activities was to create a large total following by having multiple personas which together covered all potential social-political strata. At Point 86 the indictment turns to Count Two - "Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud and Bank Fraud". The puppeteers opened, as explained above, various Paypal accounts using 'borrowed' data. Then comes the point which confirms the commercial marketing story as laid out above: Point 95: Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the accounts to receive money from real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements on the ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages. Defendants and their co-conspirators typically charged certain U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content on their popular false U.S. persona accounts, including Being Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist. There you have it. There was no political point to what the Russian company did. Whatever political slogans one of the company's sock-puppets posted had only one aim: to increase the number of followers for that sock-puppet. The sole point of creating a diverse army of sock-puppets with large following crowds was to sell the 'eyeballs' of the followers to the paying customers of the marketing company. There were, according to the indictment, eighty people working on the "translator project". These controlled "hundreds" of sock-puppets online accounts each with a distinct "political" personality. Each of these sock-puppets had a large number of followers - in total several hundred-thousands. Now let's assume that one to five promotional posts can be sold per day on each of the sock-puppets content stream. The scheme generates several thousand dollars per day ($25 per promo, hundreds of sock-puppets, 1-5 promos per day per sock-puppet). The costs for this were limited to the wages of up to eighty persons in Moscow, many of them temps, of which the highest paid received some $1,000 per month. While the upfront multiyear investment to create and establish the virtual personas was probably significant, this likely was, over all, a profitable business. Again - this had nothing to do with political influence on the election. The sole point of political posts was to create 'engagement' and a larger number of followers in each potential social-political segment. People who buy promotional posts want these to be targeted at a specific audience. The Russian company could offer whatever audience was needed. It had sock-puppets with pro-LGBT view and a large following and sock-puppets with anti-LGBT views and a large following. It could provide pro-2nd amendment crowds as well as Jill Stein followers. Each of the sock-puppets had over time generated a group of followers that were like minded. The entity buying the promotion simply had to choose which group it preferred to address. The panic of the U.S. establishment over the loss of their preferred candidate created an artificial storm over "Russian influence" and assumed "collusion" with the Trump campaign. (Certain Democrats though, like Adam Schiff, profit from creating a new Cold War through their sponsoring armament companies.) The Mueller investigation found no "collusion" between anything Russia and the Trump campaign. The indictment does not mentions any. The whole "Russian influence" storm is based on a misunderstanding of commercial activities of a Russian marketing company in U.S. social networks. There is a danger in this. The indictment sets up a new theory of nefarious foreign influence that could be applied to even this blog. As U.S. lawyer Robert Barns explains: The only thing frightening about this indictment is the dangerous and dumb precedent it could set: foreign nationals criminally prohibited from public expression in the US during elections unless registered as foreign agents and reporting their expenditures to the FEC. ... Mueller's new crime only requires 3 elements: 1) a foreign national; 2) outspoken on US social media during US election; and 3) failed to register as a foreign agent or failed to report receipts/expenditures of speech activity. Could indict millions under that theory. ... The legal theory of the indictment for most of the defendants and most of the charges alleges that the "fraud" was simply not registering as a foreign agent or not reporting expenses to the FEC because they were a foreign national expressing views in a US election. Author Leonid Bershidsky, who prominently writes for Bloomberg, remarks: I'm actually surprised I haven't been indicted. I'm Russian, I was in the U.S. in 2016 and I published columns critical of both Clinton and Trump w/o registering as a foreign agent. As most of you will know your author writing this is German. I write pseudo-anonymously for a mostly U.S. audience. My postings are political and during the U.S. election campaign expressed an anti-Hillary view. The blog is hosted on U.S, infrastructure paid for by me. I am not registered as Foreign Agent or with the Federal Election Commission. Under the theory on which the indictment is based I could also be indicted for a similar "Conspiracy to Defraud the United States". (Are those of you who kindly donate for this blog co-conspiractors?) When Yevgeni Prigozhin, the hot dog caterer who allegedly owns the internet promotion business, was asked about the indictment he responded: "The Americans are really impressionable people, they see what they want to see. [...] If they want to see the devil, let them see him." Posted by b on February 17, 2018 at 03:09 PM | Permalink -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ~WRD000.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 823 bytes Desc: not available URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Mon Feb 19 23:09:38 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 17:09:38 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: A Response to David Axelrod In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <012901d3a9d6$b7bc9000$2735b000$@comcast.net> A Response to David Axelrod by MYLES HOENIG https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/19/a-response-to-david-axelrod/ A Response to David Axelrod www.counterpunch.org According to David Axelrod, and soon the entire mainstream media, minus Fox, I as a Green Party voter and candidate for Congress was duped by the Russians, as w Facebook Twitter Google+ Reddit Email Image removed by sender. According to David Axelrod, and soon the entire mainstream media, minus Fox, I as a Green Party voter and candidate for Congress was duped by the Russians, as were hundreds of thousands of us nation-wide. We are so impressionable that what? $100,000 FB ads convinced me to vote for Jill Stein just to give Trump the edge? But why was I targeted? I live in Maryland which went 2-1 for Clinton. Guess the Russians didn't want to take any chances and persuaded me to try to deny her Maryland's 10 electors. Mr. Russian, try a more narrow broadcast for 2018. You might succeed in getting Greens, not Democrats, elected. (Wink wink, we got some running in Maryland!) As preposterous as Axelrod's argument is, what's frightening is that it will be carried throughout mass media, and certainly in their letters to their registered voters that Greens are a threat to their way of life (for the members of Congress for their luxurious lifestyles, coziness to lobbyists, salaries way beyond the average American, excellent health insurance.) With a Russian behind every Green's back, no red-blooded American should endure the very thought that a democratic election actually means having different voices being heard, not just that of the capitalist parties, two wings of the same bird of prey. Axelrod's main contention is that we Greens, Independents and other parties' followers cannot think for ourselves. We have to be led by foreign agents capable of influencing us on matters that we feel so passionate about. For many of us, we oppose the imperial policies of the US. But who to vote for? Hmm. Russia, help us decide. The same can be said of so many issues. On the environment, anyone who really believes in it opposes fracking. It destroys groundwater, it's alleged to have caused earthquakes in Ohio, and it's a financial boon to the oil and gas industry. Candidate Clinton as Secretary of State promoted fracking all over the world. Russia! Help us decide who to vote for! War and Peace: Although peace is one of the 10 pillars of the Green Party, it's not something all of us totally support in the way some interpret it. Many of us support the idea that foreign (and imperial) soldiers on one's territory ought to be fought against with whatever one has at their disposal. The UN allows for all people to fight against occupation. That goes for US soldiers everywhere, Russians in Chechnya, Israel in the Occupied Territories, and against any other occupying force throughout the world. Candidate Clinton took the peaceful, progressive, advanced nation of Libya, and turned it into the hell hole it is, with open slave markets. Man, can't decide if I should vote for Clinton or not. Can Russia help me? We Greens kind of don't like Nazis. They walk funny in parades. Obama and Clinton brought Nazis into a European government for the first time since WW2 and turned them on fellow citizens in a near genocidal bloodbath against Ukrainians of Russian heritage. Now I see why Russia doesn't want me to vote for Clinton. Thanks comrades for letting me see the light. Most Greens and Independents strongly support public education. The Republicans, with Ted Kennedy's help, of course, gave us No Child Left Behind. Obama, however, put the nail in public education's coffin with his (Rat) Race to the Top, nearly weaponizing NCLB. Clinton strongly supported charters. Hmmm. Who to vote for? Need some help, Ivan. Lastly, although the list is truly endless, we Greens believe in Single Payer; get the health insurance industry out of our health care. They have manned the death panels for decades. Your candidate, Mr. Axelrod, said that Single Payer will never happen. She meant under her administration. Trump had praised it at one time. I guess Greens just had to vote for either Stein or Trump if health care (1/6 of the American economy) mattered that much to us voters. The Democrats have been extremely imaginative in coming up with excuses for why they would pick the only candidate in America who could lose to Trump, and why fixing the primaries against Sanders was good for the Party. Awhile ago when the picture of Jill Stein surfaced with her dining with Putin the propaganda knives were being sharpened. Now that there are indictments of Russians, the proof is there that Jill Stein acted as a foreign agent for Russia. Forget all the economic collusion between Clinton, her foundation and the Russian oligarchs, the Green Party is the latest cause for her loss. Such an insignificant national party that couldn't even garner more than 1% of the national vote is now the latest threat to our democracy and for the Democrats to have continued the Obama legacy. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ~WRD000.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 823 bytes Desc: not available URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Feb 20 00:57:14 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 18:57:14 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] How some were suckered (not you, of course) In-Reply-To: <00f701d3a9d5$defb84b0$9cf28e10$@comcast.net> References: <79058264-E71F-43A1-B773-30013E4B7EB8@gmail.com> <00f701d3a9d5$defb84b0$9cf28e10$@comcast.net> Message-ID: Perhaps an indication of how an "otherwise intelligent and at least somewhat politically savvy people” could be convinced that their state was under attack by an international conspiracy - and steps needed to be taken - in Germany in the 1930s. —CGE > On Feb 19, 2018, at 5:03 PM, David Johnson via Peace-discuss wrote: > > What totally amazes me is how so many otherwise intelligent and at least somewhat politically savvy people have bought into this absurd ruling class / corporate media propaganda narrative, regardless how increasingly ridiculous and absurd it increasingly becomes over time, as each new fairy tale falls apart after a short time. > I still have seen absolutely no evidence, just accusations repeated over and over again. > > David J. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > Sent: Monday, February 19, 2018 1:59 PM > To: Ron Szoke > Cc: Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] How some were suckered (not you, of course) > > Does the truth of a statement depend on the motives of those expressing it? > > >> On Feb 19, 2018, at 1:49 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> >> >> https://nyti.ms/2C5LodP >> >> How Unwitting Americans Encountered Russian Operatives Online >> >> By SCOTT SHANE NYT online, FEB. 18, 2018 >> >> They were politically active Americans scattered around the country, dedicating their spare time to the 2016 presidential campaign or various causes. And the seeming fellow activists who called them to rallies via Facebook, or joined in the free-for-all on Twitter, appeared unremarkable. >> >> Except that their English sometimes seemed a little odd. >> >> “We are looking for friendship because we are fighting for the same reasons,” someone purporting to be with an online group calling itself Blacktivist wrote via Twitter to the Rev. Dr. Heber Brown III, a Baltimore pastor, in April 2016. “Actually we are open for your thoughts and offers.” >> >> In late October 2016, in Nederland, Tex., the Texas Nationalist >> Movement got a Facebook message from someone representing a group >> called Heart of Texas, which planned to organize rallies in favor of >> Texas secession on the eve of the election. But on a follow-up call, >> “something was off,” said Daniel Miller, the >> >> president of the Texas Nationalist Movement. >> >> Despite their wariness, neither Dr. Brown nor Mr. Miller had any inkling of what was really behind those odd encounters. Heart of Texas and Blacktivist were phony groups, part of a sweeping Russian disinformation campaign that was funded with millions of dollars and carried out by 80 people operating out of St. Petersburg, Russia. >> >> The Russian attempt at long-distance choreography was playing out in many cities across the United States. Facebook has disclosed that about 130 rallies were promoted by 13 of the Russian pages, which reached 126 million Americans with provocative content on race, guns, immigration and other volatile issues. >> >> An indictment filed in court on Friday by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election, laid out for the first time, in riveting detail, how Russia carried out its campaign on social media. And while the indictment did not suggest any involvement by President Trump or his associates, it did say many Americans engaged with the Russian trolls without knowing who or where they really were. >> >> “Some defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities,” the indictment said. Among others, it said, the Russians contacted “a real U.S. person affiliated with a Texas-based grass-roots organization,” who advised them to focus their efforts on “purple states like Colorado, Virginia and Florida.” >> >> The indictment did not name the activist, but Mr. Miller said in an interview that the mention had set off a slightly unnerving guessing game in his state as to who the helpful Texan might be. It was not him, he said. >> >> “Every organization in Texas that’s been politically involved over the >> last few years is sort of eyeing the other ones,” said Mr. Miller, >> whose group decided not to endorse the Heart of Texas rallies. >> “Mueller’s team needs to clarify this.” (A spokesman for Mr. Mueller >> declined to comment.) >> >> Sometimes the Russian efforts fell flat. Dr. Brown had challenged Blacktivist on Twitter because it seemed to be an out-of-town group, yet it was calling for a Baltimore rally to mark the anniversary of the death of Freddie Gray, who sustained a fatal injury while in police custody. The pastor had no idea just how far out of town. >> >> “The way you’re going about this is deeply offensive to those of us who are from Baltimore and have been organizing here all our lives,” Dr. Brown wrote to the stranger. >> >> Seemingly chastened, Blacktivist replied, “This must be really wrong. I feel ashamed.” >> >> The pastor replied: “Post a public apology. Cancel the event and take your cues from those working locally.” >> >> The Heart of Texas group had more success with a Houston rally to “Stop the Islamization of Texas,” which provoked an angry confrontation in May 2016. United Muslims of America, another Russian creation, called its own rally to “Save Islamic Knowledge” for the same time and place, outside the Islamic Da’wah Center. >> >> A dozen people who turned out for the first event, some carrying rifles, Confederate flags and a banner saying “White Lives Matter,” faced off across a street with a far larger crowd of counterprotesters. The police kept the crowds apart, and there was no trouble at the event, which was caught on video. >> >> Later, on social media, some puzzled participants complained that no one from Heart of Texas, which had about 250,000 likes on Facebook, had shown up for the group’s own rally. >> >> But the online pitches reached a big audience. In written answers to questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee, Facebook said some 338,300 people saw the announcements of rallies promoted by the bogus pages — and 62,500 said they planned to attend one. Those numbers are modest against the background of the entire presidential campaign, but they show that the Russians were able not just to attract Americans to their ersatz groups but actually manipulate their actions. >> >> “The fact that they got people to show up at real-world events is impressive,” said Renee DiResta, the head of policy at Data for Democracy, a nonprofit that has studied the Russian activity. “What we have is an engine for reaching people and growing an audience, which is fantastic. But this shows that it can be used for very shady purposes.” >> >> Facebook’s vice president for advertising, Rob Goldman, said on Twitter on Friday, “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal” — a statement that President Trump retweeted. >> >> But Mr. Mueller’s indictment repeatedly states that the Russian >> operation was designed not just to provoke division among Americans >> but also to denigrate Hillary Clinton and support her rivals, mainly >> Mr. Trump. The hashtags the Russian operation used included >> #Trump2016, #TrumpTrain, #MAGA and >> >> #Hillary4Prison, and one Russian operative was reprimanded for “a low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton,” the indictment says. >> >> A glance at the Russian posts supports the idea that they focus on candidates. Heart of Texas ran an unflattering portrait of Mrs. Clinton with the tag “Pure Evil”; posted a fake photo of her shaking hands with Osama bin Laden; and paired her with Adolf Hitler as a supporter of gun control. Mr. Trump was shown surrounded by police officers wearing Trump hats and grinning outside a fake cage with Mrs. Clinton inside. >> >> While most of the Americans duped by the Russian trolls were not public figures, some higher-profile people were fooled. The indictment mentions the Russian Twitter feed @TEN_GOP, which posed as a Tennessee Republican account and attracted more than 100,000 followers. It was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr.; Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; and his son, Michael Flynn Jr. >> >> They have expressed no regret that they were apparently taken in by the Russian operatives. Instead, since Friday’s indictment, Donald Trump Jr., like his father, has pointed mainly to the fact that it did not accuse the president or his associates of assisting the Russian operation. >> >> Jeremy Bowers contributed research. >> >> Read the special counsel’s indictment against 13 Russians and three companies here. >> >> A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Russians Exploited Web In ’16 Meddling. >> >> © 2018 The New York Times Company >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 20 02:46:46 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 02:46:46 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] France and India, US proxies joining the containment of China. Message-ID: * Print * Leaflet * Feedback * Share » France to sign basing deal with India, drawing Europe into drive to war in Asia By Athiyan Silva 19 February 2018 As French President Emmanuel Macron called for a return to the draft and air strikes against Syria last week, he was also pushing to expand Europe’s role in the war drive in Asia. Under Trump, Washington has intensified its efforts to build up India as a counterweight to China in the Indian Ocean—Beijing’s lifeline for Persian Gulf oil and the pivotal channel for trade in manufactured products between Europe and Asia. France is also escalating its military relations with India and plotting to expand its role in the Indian Ocean. With Paris working with Berlin to transform the European Union into a military machine, France’s strategic thrust into South Asia and the Indian Ocean region must be taken as a warning regarding the size of the European imperialist powers’ appetites and the scope of the wars they are preparing behind the backs of the population. Macron is to visit India next month. While there, he is expected to sign off on a reciprocal agreement granting French naval vessels access to Indian ports for repair and resupply and Indian vessels the right to make routine use of France’s Indian Ocean military bases. Although France’s colonial empire collapsed decades ago, it retains an extensive network of strategically-located Indian Ocean military bases. Indeed, France has recently expanded this network to the Persian Gulf, cashing in on the backing Paris has provided Washington in various US-led Middle East wars. France has bases at Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, at Réunion island near Madagascar, in the United Arab Emirates, and in Mayotte off Mozambique. France and India are also preparing to build a military base in the Seychelles. The latter will be part of a network of Indian Ocean bases India is developing as it integrates itself evermore completely into US plans to seize Indian Ocean and South China Sea chokepoints so as to impose an economic blockade on China. Indian ships now routinely patrol the Straits of Malacca and India’s military exchanges intelligence with the Pentagon on Chinese ship and submarine movements in the Indian Ocean. Under the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) between New Delhi and Washington that was signed in 2016 and activated last summer, Indian and American warships and warplanes gained the right to routinely access each other’s military bases. Indian ships, for example, can now anchor at the Pentagon’s pivotal Indian Ocean base in Diego Garcia. India has also set up military observation centers in the Maldives, Madagascar and Mauritius and earlier this month, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Oman, obtained rights to use that country’s key Arabian Sea port, Duqm, for supplying Indian Navy vessels. India is also expanding its naval presence into the Pacific Ocean, including the South China Sea. Toward that end, New Delhi has dramatically enhanced its military-security cooperation with Singapore, including gaining the right to service its naval vessels there. The Indian Ocean more and more resembles a powder keg that could explode into war at any time, with competing nuclear-armed powers setting up rival networks of bases to surveille and threaten each other. India presents the expansion of its Indian Ocean presence as defensive, given its dependence on Mideast oil and the importance of the waterway for its foreign trade. But such claims are clearly bogus. Since the beginning of the current century, India has dramatically expanded its military might, embarking on a crash-program to build a blue water navy and developing a nuclear triad, that is the capacity to launch nuclear weapons from land, air, and underwater. The Indian bourgeoisie see its growing military capacities as a key means of compensating, in the great power struggle for markets, resources, and profits, for its chronic economic weakness and for securing the support of American imperialism. India’s burgeoning navy and naval base network allows New Delhi in tandem with Washington to threaten to cut off Chinese oil imports from the Middle East, bring the Chinese economy to a halt, and force Beijing to its knees. China, the world’s biggest oil importer, receives 60 percent of its oil from the Middle East and transports 80 percent of that through the Indian Ocean, as well as other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa. Beijing has responded to the moves to strategically encircle it, by advancing its One Belt-One Road (OBOR) project for trade routes on land and sea across Eurasia, financed by Beijing's Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). With Pakistan, its ally and longstanding rival of India, China launched in 2015 the $50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor project (CPEC). It links western China to Gwadar, a strategically-located Pakistani port on the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. When fully operational, the CPEC will enable China to transport Middle East oil and gas to China via a land route through Pakistan, thereby diminishing the threat of a US-Indian naval blockade in the Indian Ocean and cutting 16,000 km from the distance Chinese goods must travel to the Middle East and Africa. China has also secured a rival military basing deal in Djibouti, and it is developing deep-water ports across the Indian Ocean, including with a 99-year lease on Hambantota port in southern Sri Lanka and the development of the Chittagong port in Bangladesh. It has also made major investments in the Maldives, including a development project that India claimed was in “listening distance” of its military bases. The great-power tensions surging beneath the surface exploded into view this month, when it emerged that India might invade the Maldives to oust Chinese-backed President Abdulla Yameen. Beijing responded to reports that India’s military is ready for any eventuality in the Maldives, by urging all powers to respect state sovereignty. China's state-owned Global Times went considerably further, declaring in an editorial, “China will not interfere in the internal affairs of the Maldives, but that does not mean Beijing will sit idly by if India breaks the principle. If India one-sidedly sends troops to the Maldives, China will take action to stop New Delhi.” Such conflicts underscore the explosive implications of Macron's decision to allow Indian forces onto French bases and Paris’ assertions that France is an Indian Ocean power. Any of a number of strategic rivalries or unresolved border conflicts in the Indian Ocean region could escalate into a global war between nuclear-armed powers including India, Pakistan, China, the United States and now France. This also underscores the significance of the call by the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, for the publication of agreements underlying the proposed conservative/social-democratic coalition government in Berlin that would work with Macron. Amid the relentless drive to war by the major powers, workers have a right to know what war plans are being formulated to advance the strategic and commercial interests of European imperialism. Last November, France’s Ambassador to India, Alexandre Ziegler, boasted, “We have a growing cooperation in the Indian Ocean, where both India and France have focal positions, and we are in the process of forming a defence and security partnership in the Indo-Pacific.” In this context, New Delhi has in recent years built up its air force and navy with the assistance of France. France has sold India six Scorpene submarines and 36 Rafale fighter jets, which are capable of carrying and firing nuclear weapons, for a cost of about 8 billion euros. France also conducts military exercises with India such as the Varuna (Navy), Garuda (Air Force), and Shakti (Army) exercises. The two countries have formed a High Committee on Defence Cooperation, and top-ranking defence officials from both countries meet annually. France, India’s 9th-largest investor, is putting billions of dollars in Indian armament, space, nuclear energy, railways, renewable energy and urban development projects. About 750 French companies, and 39 of the top 40 corporations in the French stock exchange, the so-called the CAC-40—including Areva, Eurocopter, Dassault, Thales, Alstom, Safrane, Renault and SolaireDirect—exploit the cheap labor available in India. [http://www.wsws.org/en/media/photos/legacy/frontpage/201802appeal490.png] Fight Google's censorship! Google is blocking the World Socialist Web Sitefrom search results. To fight this blacklisting: Share this article with friends and coworkers * Facebook * Twitter * E-Mail * Reddit Commenting Discussion Rules » -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 20 04:03:42 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 04:03:42 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] How We Fight Fascism, by Chris Hedges Message-ID: TRUTH DIG How We Fight Fascism COMMENTS * * * * * * [https://smhttp-ssl-62992.nexcesscdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Clara-Zetkin-Fish-Hedges-18Feb2018-850x710.jpg]Political theorist and activist Clara Zetkin (1857-1933). (Mr. Fish / Truthdig) In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. Fascism, then in its infancy, was written off by many liberals, socialists and communists as little more than mob rule, terror and street violence. But Zetkin, a German revolutionary, understood its virulence, its seduction and its danger. She warned that the longer the stagnation and rot of a dysfunctional democracy went unaddressed, the more attractive fascism would become. And as 21st-century America’s own capitalist democracy disintegrates, replaced by a naked kleptocracy that disdains the rule of law, the struggle of past anti-fascists mirrors our own. History has amply illustrated where political paralysis, economic decline, hypermilitarism and widespread corruption lead. Zetkin’s analysis, eerily prophetic and reprinted in the book “Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win,” edited by John Riddell and Mike Taber, highlights the principal features of emerging fascist movements. Fascism, Zetkin warned, arises when capitalism enters a period of crisis and breakdown of the democratic institutions that once offered the possibility of reform and protection from an uninhibited assault by the capitalist class. The unchecked capitalist assault pushes the middle class, the bulwark of a capitalist democracy, into the working class and often poverty. It strips workers of all protection and depresses wages. The longer the economic and social stagnation persists, the more attractive fascism becomes. Zetkin would have warned us that Donald Trump is not the danger; the danger is the growing social and economic inequality that concentrates wealth in the hands of an oligarchic elite and degrades the lives of citizens. The collapse of a capitalist democracy, she wrote, leaves those in the working class disempowered. Their pleas go unheard. Reforms to address their suffering are cosmetic and useless. Their anger is written off as irrational or racist. A bankrupt liberal class, which formerly made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, ameliorating the worst excesses of capitalism, mouths empty slogans about social justice and the rights of workers while selling them out to capitalist elites. The hypocrisy of the liberal class evokes not only a disdain for it but a hatred for the liberal, democratic values it supposedly espouses. The “virtues” of democracy become distasteful. The crude taunts, threats and insults hurled by fascists at the liberal establishment express a legitimate anger among a betrayed working class. Trump’s coarseness, for this reason, resonates with many pushed to the margins of society. Demoralized workers, who also find no defense of their interests by establishment intellectuals, the press and academics, lose faith in the political process. Realizing the liberal elites have lied to them, they are open to bizarre and fantastic conspiracy theories. Fascists direct this rage and yearning for revenge against an array of phantom enemies, most of them scapegoated minorities. “What weighs on them above all is the lack of security for their basic existence,” Zetkin wrote of the dispossessed working class. ADVERTISEMENT “Masses in their thousands streamed to fascism,” she went on. “It became an asylum for all the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned. … The petty-bourgeois and intermediate social forces at first vacillate indecisively between the powerful historical camps of the proletariat and bourgeoisie. They are induced to sympathize with the proletariat by their life’s suffering and, in part, by their soul’s noble longings and high ideals, so long as it is revolutionary in its conduct and seems to have prospects for victory. Under the pressure of the masses and their needs, and influenced by this situation, even the fascist leaders are forced to at least flirt with the revolutionary proletariat, even though they may not have any sympathy with it.” The discredited ideals of democracy are replaced by a hypernationalism that divides the population not by class but between the patriotic and the unpatriotic. National and religious symbols such as the Christian cross and the American flag are fused under fascism. Fascism offers the dispossessed a tangible enemy and a right to physically strike back. Those demonized for a nation’s decline—Jews and communists in Nazi Germany, the kulaks in the Soviet Union and the undocumented, African-Americans and Muslims in the United States—become social pariahs. The stigmatized, along with intellectuals, liberals, gays, feminists and dissidents, are attacked as the embodiment of the disease that has destroyed the nation and will be exorcised by the fascists. This fascist rhetoric is always couched in the language of renewal and moral purity. “[W]hat [the masses] no longer hoped for from the revolutionary proletarian class and from socialism, they now hoped would be achieved by the most able, strong, determined, and bold elements of every social class,” Zetkin, a close friend of the murdered revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, wrote. “All these forces must come together in a community. And this community, for the fascists, is the nation. … The instrument to achieve fascist ideals is, for them, the state. A strong and authoritarian state that will be their very own creation and their obedient tool. This state will tower high above all differences of party and class.” Zetkin, a cofounder of the radical Spartacus League, cautioned against demonizing the rank and file of fascist movements. She reminded us that only when the real and profound grievances of those attracted to fascism are addressed can they be pried from its grip. “The best of them are seeking an escape from deep anguish of the soul,” she wrote of those who joined fascist organizations. “They are longing for new and unshakable ideals and a world outlook that enables them to understand nature, society, and their own life; a world outlook that is not a sterile formula but operates creatively and constructively. Let us not forget that violent fascist gangs are not composed entirely of ruffians of war, mercenaries by choice, and venal lumpens who take pleasure in acts of terror. We also find among them the most energetic forces of these social layers, those most capable of development. We must go to them with conviction and understanding for their condition and their fiery longing, work among them, and show them a solution that does not lead backward but rather forward to communism.” The highest aesthetic of fascism is war. Its veneration of militarized force and violence, its inability to deal in the world of ideas, nuance and complexity, and its emotional numbness leave it unable to communicate in any language other than threats and coercion. Institutions that pay deference to complexity, that seek to cross cultural barriers to communicate and understand others, are belittled and destroyed by fascists. Diplomacy, scholarship, culture and journalism are an anathema. One obeys, both internally and beyond the nation’s borders, or is crushed. This moral and intellectual vacuum leads fascists to overreach, especially through military adventurism and imperial expansion. They begin long and futile wars that drain the depleted resources of the nation while eradicating civil liberties at home. And in the end, they practice a brutality inside and outside the nation that is genocidal. Fascism, Zetkin wrote, pits one segment of the working class against another. Last year at the Charlottesville, Va., demonstration that turned deadly, the “antifa” activists and neo-Nazis who clashed came largely from the same dispossessed economic stratum. The divisions created within the working class by fascism, coupled with fascism’s attack on unions, intellectuals, dissidents and the press, foster an uneasy alliance with the capitalist elites, who often view the fascists as imbeciles and buffoons. In essence, much as Trump has done, the capitalists are bought off by fascists with tax cuts, deregulation, the breaking of unions and the dismantling of institutions that carry out oversight and the protection of workers. The expansion of the military, which provides capitalists with increased profit, coupled with the expanded powers of the organs of internal security, binds the capitalist elites to the fascists. Their marriage is one of mutual convenience. This is why the capitalist elites tolerate Trump and endure the international embarrassment he has become. “There is a blatant contradiction between what fascism promised and what it delivered to the masses,” Zetkin wrote. “All the talk about how the fascist state will place the interests of the nation above everything, once exposed to the wind of reality, burst like a soap bubble. The ‘nation’ revealed itself to be the bourgeoisie; the ideal fascist state revealed itself to be the vulgar, unscrupulous bourgeois class state. … Class contradictions are mightier than all the ideologies that deny their existence.” “The bourgeoisie needs to use aggressive force to defend itself against the working class,” she wrote. “The old and seemingly ‘apolitical’ repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state no longer provides it with sufficient security. The bourgeoisie moves to create special bands of class struggle against the proletariat. Fascism provides such troops. Although fascism includes revolutionary currents related to its origin and the forces supporting it—currents that could turn against capitalism and its state—it nonetheless develops into a dangerous force for counterrevolution.” “Fascism clearly will display different features in each country, owing from the given historical circumstances,” she wrote. “But it consists everywhere of an amalgam of brutal, terrorist violence together with deceptive revolutionary phraseology, linking up demagogically with the needs and moods of broad masses of producers.” In 1932 Zetkin, at 74 the oldest elected member of the Nazi-controlled Reichstag, was by tradition supposed to open the first session of the legislature. She was an object of vitriol in the Nazi press, which attacked her as a “Communist Jew,” a “traitor” and, as Joseph Goebbels called her, a “slut.” The Nazis threatened her with assault if she appeared in the chamber, threats that led her to quip she would be there “dead or alive.” In poor health, she arrived at the Reichstag on a stretcher but at the podium recovered her familiar fire. Her 40-minute speech was one of the last public denunciations of fascism in Nazi Germany. Within a year, the Nazis banned the Communist Party and Zetkin had died in exile in the Soviet Union. She told the Reichstag: Our most urgent task today is to form a united front of all working people in order to turn back fascism. All the differences that divide and shackle us—whether founded on political, trade-union, religious, or ideological outlooks—must give way before this imperious historical necessity. All those who are menaced, all those who suffer, all those who desire freedom must join the united front against fascism and its representatives in government. Working people must assert themselves against fascism. That is the urgent and indispensable precondition for a united front against economic crisis, imperialist war and its causes, and the capitalist mode of production. The revolt of millions of laboring men and women in Germany against hunger, deprivation, fascist murder, and imperialist war expresses the imperishable destiny of producers the world over. This destiny, shared among us around the world, must find expression through forging an iron-like community of struggle of all working people in every sphere ruled by capitalism. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 20 12:42:53 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 12:42:53 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] "US Admiral advocates war footing against China" and more chilling nonsense Message-ID: * Print * Leaflet * Feedback * Share » US admiral advocates war footing against China By James Cogan 20 February 2018 The US Congress House Armed Services Committee (HASC) dedicated two days of hearings last Thursday and Friday to “security challenges” and “strategic competition” with China in the “Indo-Asia-Pacific region.” The hearing took place in the wake of the publication by the Pentagon of its new National Defense Strategy, which labelled China and Russia as the primary threats to US security and insisted on the need to “prioritise preparedness for war.” The sole witness at the February 14 hearing was Admiral Harry Harris, the commander of US Pacific Command (USPACOM), who was nominated just days before by President Donald Trump to fill the vacant post of US ambassador to Australia. Harris and his headquarters submitted a 20,500-word statement to the committee and he fielded questions for over two hours. The admiral portrayed the US military, with its $1.4 trillion two-year budget, 1.3 million active personnel, 11 aircraft carrier battlegroups and arsenal of over 4,000 ground, air and sea-launched nuclear weapons, as under-resourced, under-manned and in the danger of being overtaken by military rivals. He complained that it did not have enough forward-deployed munitions and logistics, while bases and infrastructure on the US West Coast were run-down. He bitterly condemned the minor limits on increased military spending that were imposed by Congress via budget sequestration in 2013—which were lifted in the latest budget. Repeating a line that appears regularly in his speeches, Harris’s statement asserted: “If USPACOM has to fight tonight, I don’t want it to be a fair fight. If it’s a knife fight, I want to bring a gun. If it’s a gun fight, I want to bring in the artillery, and the artillery of all of our allies. I have said during my last two appearances before this Committee, that sequestration could reduce us to wielding a butter knife in this fight. This is unacceptable. We must not let that happen.… “China has developed and fielded capability and capacity to challenge our regional maritime dominance. I need increased lethality, specifically ships and aircraft equipped with faster and more survivable weapons systems. Longer range offensive weapons on every platform are an imperative.” Harris accused China, as he has before, of seeking to militarise the South China Sea and turn islets and reefs into “forward military posts” against the US Navy. The US, he indicated, should never accept a challenge to its ability to deploy military forces directly off China’s coast. Harris presented a vision of the world in which US economic and strategic interests are under siege from not only a rising China, but Russia, “rogue states” such as North Korea, international terrorism, transnational crime, and even piracy and natural disasters. The US military, he asserted, “remains the most powerful in the world, but our relative advantage and ability to counter these threats have declined. For USPACOM to continue to underpin US diplomatic efforts and deter future conflict against peer competitors, rogue states, and transnational threats, the joint force must maintain a clear ability to fight and win when called upon to do so.” Harris’s witness statement left no doubt that he believes military spending must be ramped up by hundreds of billions of dollars. His wish list for new hardware ranged from missile defense systems, dozens more ships and submarines, more fifth generation fighters, through to more lethal cluster bombs. The United States, Harris argued to the HASC, needs to go on a war footing, with every aspect of economic and social life subordinated to the armed forces. His perspective would require even more savage cutbacks to social spending. It is incompatible with even the façade of democracy that now exists. And not only in the US. Harris indicated that all the key US allies in Asia—specifically Japan, South Korea and Australia, as well as the Philippines and Thailand—must likewise boost war preparations. He proposed that the US seek greater military involvement by France and the United Kingdom in operations targeting Chinese influence. He named Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the Pacific Island states as all potential participants in the US “camp.” Above all, however, he stressed the burgeoning strategic ties between the US and India. It had the “potential to be the most consequential bilateral relationship of the 21st century,” due to India’s “growing influence and expanding military.” Questioned about the possibility of war, Harris stated: “At the end of the day the ability to wage war is important, or you become a paper tiger. I’m hopeful that it won’t come to a conflict with China, but we all must be prepared for that if it should come to that.” In a second hearing on February 15, Aaron Friedberg from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and Ely Ratner from the Council on Foreign Relations made sweeping accusations of Chinese “interference” in US politics and society so as to demonise Beijing as the US prepares for war. Friedberg testified: “China is now using a combination of its rapidly growing military, economic and political or information warfare capabilities to try to weaken the US position in Asia with the aim of displacing it as the preponderant regional power.” He called for action against Chinese “political warfare” within the US, including purported efforts to develop relations with universities and academics, politicians, former government official and Hollywood studios. Chinese students and migrants were accused of being used “to support Beijing’s aims.” Ratner, in his statement, declared: “Beijing is working overseas—including in the United States—to undermine academic freedom, censor foreign media, restrict the free flow of information, and curb civil society. Beijing is also promoting its own state-led model of development in explicit contrast to liberal democracy.” The US had to “prioritise defense resources for the China challenge.” To do so, Ratner advocated abandoning costly US operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East, avoiding so-called “wars of choice” with North Korea and Iran, and massively boosting military forces in Asia. He called for concerted action by the US, Japan and other countries to undermine Chinese investment and development plans in Eurasia as part of its “One Belt, One Road” strategy. Ratner concluded by calling for action to “root out Chinese Communist Party influence operations in the US.” Painting a truly bizarre portrait of the US, he alleged: “As a result of various forms of Chinese espionage and coercion, American schools and universities are avoiding topics Beijing deems sensitive, students in the United States are intimidated from speaking freely, US media outlets and scholars are self-censoring, US companies are curbing their speech to placate China, and millions of Americans are subject to veiled Chinese propaganda through Communist Party-run online, television, print, and radio media.” Such rhetoric, with all its xenophobic overtones, has one motive: to ideologically justify the war preparations advocated by Harris and anti-China hawks throughout the corporate, political military and intelligence establishment. Campaigns against purported Chinese interference and influence are well underway in Australia and New Zealand. The Australian parliament is currently considering draconian legislation that would criminalise political opposition to the militarist stance of the US and its allies and a range of commercial activities with so-called “overseas organisations.” While American politics has been largely consumed by the accusations of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election, the HASC hearings are another sign that efforts are being made to shift the focus onto China. The author recommends: Australian government unveils draconian “foreign interference” bills—Three-part series [31 January 2018] CIA director brands China “as big a threat to the US” as Russia [1 February 2018] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Tue Feb 20 13:17:31 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 07:17:31 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] "US Admiral advocates war footing against China" and more chilling nonsense In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: This seems to me accurate and quite dangerous. But there are some peculiar aspects of the conflict between those US ‘leaders’ who see Russia as the primary target of US fp (like Brzezinski) and those who regard China that way (like Kissinger): ‘...Ratner advocated abandoning [SIC] costly US operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East, avoiding [SIC] so-called “wars of choice” with North Korea and Iran, and massively boosting military forces in Asia. He called for concerted action by the US, Japan and other countries to undermine ... “One Belt, One Road” strategy.' The principal hostility to Trump from the US political establishment comes from his suggestions in the campaign that deals can be done with Russia and China. John Pilger saw it clearly before the election: "The CIA has demanded Trump not be elected. Pentagon generals have demanded he not be elected. The pro-war New York Times - taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears - demands that he not be elected. Something is up. These tribunes of 'perpetual war' are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Russian president Putin, then with China’s president Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace – however unlikely – would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire.” Luckily for the establishment (but not for the world), Trump has been tamed to the neolib and neocon policies of the Obama-Clinton administration. The war party rules. > On Feb 20, 2018, at 6:42 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > US admiral advocates war footing against China > By James Cogan > 20 February 2018 > The US Congress House Armed Services Committee (HASC) dedicated two days of hearings last Thursday and Friday to “security challenges” and “strategic competition” with China in the “Indo-Asia-Pacific region.” The hearing took place in the wake of the publication by the Pentagon of its new National Defense Strategy, which labelled China and Russia as the primary threats to US security and insisted on the need to “prioritise preparedness for war.” > The sole witness at the February 14 hearing was Admiral Harry Harris, the commander of US Pacific Command (USPACOM), who was nominated just days before by President Donald Trump to fill the vacant post of US ambassador to Australia. Harris and his headquarters submitted a 20,500-word statement to the committee and he fielded questions for over two hours. > The admiral portrayed the US military, with its $1.4 trillion two-year budget, 1.3 million active personnel, 11 aircraft carrier battlegroups and arsenal of over 4,000 ground, air and sea-launched nuclear weapons, as under-resourced, under-manned and in the danger of being overtaken by military rivals. He complained that it did not have enough forward-deployed munitions and logistics, while bases and infrastructure on the US West Coast were run-down. He bitterly condemned the minor limits on increased military spending that were imposed by Congress via budget sequestration in 2013—which were lifted in the latest budget. > Repeating a line that appears regularly in his speeches, Harris’s statement asserted: “If USPACOM has to fight tonight, I don’t want it to be a fair fight. If it’s a knife fight, I want to bring a gun. If it’s a gun fight, I want to bring in the artillery, and the artillery of all of our allies. I have said during my last two appearances before this Committee, that sequestration could reduce us to wielding a butter knife in this fight. This is unacceptable. We must not let that happen.… > “China has developed and fielded capability and capacity to challenge our regional maritime dominance. I need increased lethality, specifically ships and aircraft equipped with faster and more survivable weapons systems. Longer range offensive weapons on every platform are an imperative.” > Harris accused China, as he has before, of seeking to militarise the South China Sea and turn islets and reefs into “forward military posts” against the US Navy. The US, he indicated, should never accept a challenge to its ability to deploy military forces directly off China’s coast. > Harris presented a vision of the world in which US economic and strategic interests are under siege from not only a rising China, but Russia, “rogue states” such as North Korea, international terrorism, transnational crime, and even piracy and natural disasters. > The US military, he asserted, “remains the most powerful in the world, but our relative advantage and ability to counter these threats have declined. For USPACOM to continue to underpin US diplomatic efforts and deter future conflict against peer competitors, rogue states, and transnational threats, the joint force must maintain a clear ability to fight and win when called upon to do so.” > Harris’s witness statement left no doubt that he believes military spending must be ramped up by hundreds of billions of dollars. His wish list for new hardware ranged from missile defense systems, dozens more ships and submarines, more fifth generation fighters, through to more lethal cluster bombs. > The United States, Harris argued to the HASC, needs to go on a war footing, with every aspect of economic and social life subordinated to the armed forces. His perspective would require even more savage cutbacks to social spending. It is incompatible with even the façade of democracy that now exists. > And not only in the US. Harris indicated that all the key US allies in Asia—specifically Japan, South Korea and Australia, as well as the Philippines and Thailand—must likewise boost war preparations. He proposed that the US seek greater military involvement by France and the United Kingdom in operations targeting Chinese influence. He named Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the Pacific Island states as all potential participants in the US “camp.” > Above all, however, he stressed the burgeoning strategic ties between the US and India. It had the “potential to be the most consequential bilateral relationship of the 21st century,” due to India’s “growing influence and expanding military.” > Questioned about the possibility of war, Harris stated: “At the end of the day the ability to wage war is important, or you become a paper tiger. I’m hopeful that it won’t come to a conflict with China, but we all must be prepared for that if it should come to that.” > In a second hearing on February 15, Aaron Friedberg from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and Ely Ratner from the Council on Foreign Relations made sweeping accusations of Chinese “interference” in US politics and society so as to demonise Beijing as the US prepares for war. > Friedberg testified: “China is now using a combination of its rapidly growing military, economic and political or information warfare capabilities to try to weaken the US position in Asia with the aim of displacing it as the preponderant regional power.” He called for action against Chinese “political warfare” within the US, including purported efforts to develop relations with universities and academics, politicians, former government official and Hollywood studios. Chinese students and migrants were accused of being used “to support Beijing’s aims.” > Ratner, in his statement, declared: “Beijing is working overseas—including in the United States—to undermine academic freedom, censor foreign media, restrict the free flow of information, and curb civil society. Beijing is also promoting its own state-led model of development in explicit contrast to liberal democracy.” > The US had to “prioritise defense resources for the China challenge.” To do so, Ratner advocated abandoning costly US operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East, avoiding so-called “wars of choice” with North Korea and Iran, and massively boosting military forces in Asia. He called for concerted action by the US, Japan and other countries to undermine Chinese investment and development plans in Eurasia as part of its “One Belt, One Road” strategy. > Ratner concluded by calling for action to “root out Chinese Communist Party influence operations in the US.” > Painting a truly bizarre portrait of the US, he alleged: “As a result of various forms of Chinese espionage and coercion, American schools and universities are avoiding topics Beijing deems sensitive, students in the United States are intimidated from speaking freely, US media outlets and scholars are self-censoring, US companies are curbing their speech to placate China, and millions of Americans are subject to veiled Chinese propaganda through Communist Party-run online, television, print, and radio media.” > Such rhetoric, with all its xenophobic overtones, has one motive: to ideologically justify the war preparations advocated by Harris and anti-China hawks throughout the corporate, political military and intelligence establishment. > Campaigns against purported Chinese interference and influence are well underway in Australia and New Zealand. The Australian parliament is currently considering draconian legislation that would criminalise political opposition to the militarist stance of the US and its allies and a range of commercial activities with so-called “overseas organisations.” > While American politics has been largely consumed by the accusations of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election, the HASC hearings are another sign that efforts are being made to shift the focus onto China. > The author recommends: > Australian government unveils draconian “foreign interference” bills—Three-part series > [31 January 2018] > CIA director brands China “as big a threat to the US” as Russia > [1 February 2018] > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 20 16:27:10 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 16:27:10 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] "US Admiral advocates war footing against China" and more chilling nonsense In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: My response to Roger and other McCarthyites : Yes, there is much in relation to the battle within the “Establishment” related to “who do we target next.” The WSWS.ORG, spells it out better than anyone else, and given it’s my first “port of call” mornings, and within my email, it is what I provide. That being said, they are also quite prescient with their news, and offer the details of conversation within the powers that be, that we rarely get from others, who often just skim the surface. Maybe thats why they were the first to be targeted by google. > On Feb 20, 2018, at 05:17, Carl G. Estabrook wrote: > > This seems to me accurate and quite dangerous. But there are some peculiar aspects of the conflict between those US ‘leaders’ who see Russia as the primary target of US fp (like Brzezinski) and those who regard China that way (like Kissinger): > > ‘...Ratner advocated abandoning [SIC] costly US operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East, avoiding [SIC] so-called “wars of choice” with North Korea and Iran, and massively boosting military forces in Asia. He called for concerted action by the US, Japan and other countries to undermine ... “One Belt, One Road” strategy.' > > The principal hostility to Trump from the US political establishment comes from his suggestions in the campaign that deals can be done with Russia and China. > > John Pilger saw it clearly before the election: "The CIA has demanded Trump not be elected. Pentagon generals have demanded he not be elected. The pro-war New York Times - taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears - demands that he not be elected. Something is up. These tribunes of 'perpetual war' are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Russian president Putin, then with China’s president Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace – however unlikely – would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire.” > > Luckily for the establishment (but not for the world), Trump has been tamed to the neolib and neocon policies of the Obama-Clinton administration. The war party rules. > > >> On Feb 20, 2018, at 6:42 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> US admiral advocates war footing against China >> By James Cogan >> 20 February 2018 >> The US Congress House Armed Services Committee (HASC) dedicated two days of hearings last Thursday and Friday to “security challenges” and “strategic competition” with China in the “Indo-Asia-Pacific region.” The hearing took place in the wake of the publication by the Pentagon of its new National Defense Strategy, which labelled China and Russia as the primary threats to US security and insisted on the need to “prioritise preparedness for war.” >> The sole witness at the February 14 hearing was Admiral Harry Harris, the commander of US Pacific Command (USPACOM), who was nominated just days before by President Donald Trump to fill the vacant post of US ambassador to Australia. Harris and his headquarters submitted a 20,500-word statement to the committee and he fielded questions for over two hours. >> The admiral portrayed the US military, with its $1.4 trillion two-year budget, 1.3 million active personnel, 11 aircraft carrier battlegroups and arsenal of over 4,000 ground, air and sea-launched nuclear weapons, as under-resourced, under-manned and in the danger of being overtaken by military rivals. He complained that it did not have enough forward-deployed munitions and logistics, while bases and infrastructure on the US West Coast were run-down. He bitterly condemned the minor limits on increased military spending that were imposed by Congress via budget sequestration in 2013—which were lifted in the latest budget. >> Repeating a line that appears regularly in his speeches, Harris’s statement asserted: “If USPACOM has to fight tonight, I don’t want it to be a fair fight. If it’s a knife fight, I want to bring a gun. If it’s a gun fight, I want to bring in the artillery, and the artillery of all of our allies. I have said during my last two appearances before this Committee, that sequestration could reduce us to wielding a butter knife in this fight. This is unacceptable. We must not let that happen.… >> “China has developed and fielded capability and capacity to challenge our regional maritime dominance. I need increased lethality, specifically ships and aircraft equipped with faster and more survivable weapons systems. Longer range offensive weapons on every platform are an imperative.” >> Harris accused China, as he has before, of seeking to militarise the South China Sea and turn islets and reefs into “forward military posts” against the US Navy. The US, he indicated, should never accept a challenge to its ability to deploy military forces directly off China’s coast. >> Harris presented a vision of the world in which US economic and strategic interests are under siege from not only a rising China, but Russia, “rogue states” such as North Korea, international terrorism, transnational crime, and even piracy and natural disasters. >> The US military, he asserted, “remains the most powerful in the world, but our relative advantage and ability to counter these threats have declined. For USPACOM to continue to underpin US diplomatic efforts and deter future conflict against peer competitors, rogue states, and transnational threats, the joint force must maintain a clear ability to fight and win when called upon to do so.” >> Harris’s witness statement left no doubt that he believes military spending must be ramped up by hundreds of billions of dollars. His wish list for new hardware ranged from missile defense systems, dozens more ships and submarines, more fifth generation fighters, through to more lethal cluster bombs. >> The United States, Harris argued to the HASC, needs to go on a war footing, with every aspect of economic and social life subordinated to the armed forces. His perspective would require even more savage cutbacks to social spending. It is incompatible with even the façade of democracy that now exists. >> And not only in the US. Harris indicated that all the key US allies in Asia—specifically Japan, South Korea and Australia, as well as the Philippines and Thailand—must likewise boost war preparations. He proposed that the US seek greater military involvement by France and the United Kingdom in operations targeting Chinese influence. He named Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the Pacific Island states as all potential participants in the US “camp.” >> Above all, however, he stressed the burgeoning strategic ties between the US and India. It had the “potential to be the most consequential bilateral relationship of the 21st century,” due to India’s “growing influence and expanding military.” >> Questioned about the possibility of war, Harris stated: “At the end of the day the ability to wage war is important, or you become a paper tiger. I’m hopeful that it won’t come to a conflict with China, but we all must be prepared for that if it should come to that.” >> In a second hearing on February 15, Aaron Friedberg from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and Ely Ratner from the Council on Foreign Relations made sweeping accusations of Chinese “interference” in US politics and society so as to demonise Beijing as the US prepares for war. >> Friedberg testified: “China is now using a combination of its rapidly growing military, economic and political or information warfare capabilities to try to weaken the US position in Asia with the aim of displacing it as the preponderant regional power.” He called for action against Chinese “political warfare” within the US, including purported efforts to develop relations with universities and academics, politicians, former government official and Hollywood studios. Chinese students and migrants were accused of being used “to support Beijing’s aims.” >> Ratner, in his statement, declared: “Beijing is working overseas—including in the United States—to undermine academic freedom, censor foreign media, restrict the free flow of information, and curb civil society. Beijing is also promoting its own state-led model of development in explicit contrast to liberal democracy.” >> The US had to “prioritise defense resources for the China challenge.” To do so, Ratner advocated abandoning costly US operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East, avoiding so-called “wars of choice” with North Korea and Iran, and massively boosting military forces in Asia. He called for concerted action by the US, Japan and other countries to undermine Chinese investment and development plans in Eurasia as part of its “One Belt, One Road” strategy. >> Ratner concluded by calling for action to “root out Chinese Communist Party influence operations in the US.” >> Painting a truly bizarre portrait of the US, he alleged: “As a result of various forms of Chinese espionage and coercion, American schools and universities are avoiding topics Beijing deems sensitive, students in the United States are intimidated from speaking freely, US media outlets and scholars are self-censoring, US companies are curbing their speech to placate China, and millions of Americans are subject to veiled Chinese propaganda through Communist Party-run online, television, print, and radio media.” >> Such rhetoric, with all its xenophobic overtones, has one motive: to ideologically justify the war preparations advocated by Harris and anti-China hawks throughout the corporate, political military and intelligence establishment. >> Campaigns against purported Chinese interference and influence are well underway in Australia and New Zealand. The Australian parliament is currently considering draconian legislation that would criminalise political opposition to the militarist stance of the US and its allies and a range of commercial activities with so-called “overseas organisations.” >> While American politics has been largely consumed by the accusations of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election, the HASC hearings are another sign that efforts are being made to shift the focus onto China. >> The author recommends: >> Australian government unveils draconian “foreign interference” bills—Three-part series >> [31 January 2018] >> CIA director brands China “as big a threat to the US” as Russia >> [1 February 2018] >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cb1b5afbd4428470c2b9408d57864799d%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636547295281804793&sdata=4ebONTusWsKxNFOL56rvXyevMvP%2BLDkhc11qq8n8vdA%3D&reserved=0 > From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 20 17:43:05 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 17:43:05 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Big Illinois labor rally this Saturday References: Message-ID: Begin forwarded message: From: Stansfield Smith > Subject: Big Illinois labor rally this Saturday Date: February 20, 2018 at 09:41:51 PST To: Stop-us-empire at googlegroups.com There is a big labor rally this Saturday, if people want to go and leaftet. http://www.chicagolabor.org/take-action/working-peoples-day-of-action -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 20 18:44:11 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 18:44:11 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Ad Homonyms, Louis Proyect and other provocateurs Message-ID: Below please see a posting dated June 2015 which reflects my view of Louis Proyect. “Louis Proyect” like a couple other so called socialists who label anyone criticizing the USG interventions in Syria, as “Assad supporters” or Assad Ists, or Putinists. He uses lies, propaganda and ad homonyms to make his points. An article by Rick Sterling of 2016 lays out the formula, or strategy used by Ashley Smith, which certainly applies to Proyect on steroids. After last Friday’s excellent “News From Neptune” with Carl Estabrook and David Green, I took a look at Proyect’s website. It was “indescribably unreal” with his diatribe and ad homonyms against such journalists as Pilger, Hersch, Hedges, Blumenthal, Norton, and North, to name just a few. No one escaped his ire. In his articles he uses “guilt by association” as well as lies in relation to events and information. This is not the action of a true Marxist, writer, journalist. A true Socialist, Marxist, never supports “imperialism,” which is exactly what the US is guilty of perpetrating around the world and certainly in Syria. The heightened and bellicose rhetoric Proyect uses, along with others, is a sign that the USG, whether it be the Pentagon, CIA, CFR, those behind the throne, wielding power, are in disarray and confusion. The US is losing, in spite of all efforts. We failed to achieve regime change in Syria, but will settle for partition. That partition is looking quite murky, with so many players and the Kurds embedded with all sides in their efforts to achieve independence. The US is now immersed in our own initiated chaos. Please see: A postscript on Louis Proyect’s lies 11 June 2015 On Monday, the World Socialist Web Site exposed the allegations of Louis Proyect, publisher of the “Unrepentant Marxist” blog, that a WSWS article included false information aimed at exaggerating the Obama administration’s escalation of military threats against Russia. Refuting Proyect’s claim that a statement by Assistant Defense Secretary Robert Scher had been manufactured, the reply by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North provided a link to an online video of Scher’s testimony before a House Armed Services subcommittee. Readers could see and hear Scher state the sentence that Proyect had claimed was made up: “Another [military option] is taking a look at how we could go about and actually attack that missile where it is in Russia.” This should have been enough to compel Proyect to retract his allegation or keep his mouth shut. Instead, he continued to claim that the quotation was fabricated. He fell back on the position that the word “attack,” which had been deleted from the video due to a technical glitch, was never said. He wrote: “North admits that the word ‘attack’ is not audible in the recording but is convinced that this is the only conclusion that makes sense. Sad, really.” If anyone has cause for sadness, however, it is Louis Proyect. To settle the matter once and for all, the WSWS contacted Robert Burns, the author of an Associated Press article that reported Scher’s testimony and was cited by the WSWS, and brought Proyect’s allegations to his attention. Burns forwarded to the WSWS the exact transcript of Scher’s statement, which he had received from the US Department of Defense. The transcript reinforces what had already been established by the video: the sentence was exactly as it had been reported by Burns and the WSWS. Replying to a question from a congressman about what the US was planning to do in response to Russia’s alleged violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Scher said (emphasis added): We are looking at what actions we can take to ensure that any violation of the INF Treaty does not provide significant military advantage to the Russians. And as people have testified previously to this subcommittee and elsewhere, we look at that in sort of three categories of military activities. One is active defense—what we can do to defend places in Europe at locations that are—that the INF Treaty violating missile could reach. Another one is taking a look at how we could go about and actually attack that missile where it is in Russia. And then subsequently, a third part is looking at understanding that it is not simply attacking that capability, but that the—we can look at what things we can hold at risk within Russia itself. We are still looking at all of those possibilities, narrowing down what we think would be the most effective and working very closely with our allies to determine how to best deter this aggression from Russia, deter and bring Russia back in. This settles the matter and provides further evidence of what many have known for some time: Louis Proyect is a liar and a provocateur. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 20 18:44:11 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 18:44:11 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Ad Homonyms, Louis Proyect and other provocateurs Message-ID: Below please see a posting dated June 2015 which reflects my view of Louis Proyect. “Louis Proyect” like a couple other so called socialists who label anyone criticizing the USG interventions in Syria, as “Assad supporters” or Assad Ists, or Putinists. He uses lies, propaganda and ad homonyms to make his points. An article by Rick Sterling of 2016 lays out the formula, or strategy used by Ashley Smith, which certainly applies to Proyect on steroids. After last Friday’s excellent “News From Neptune” with Carl Estabrook and David Green, I took a look at Proyect’s website. It was “indescribably unreal” with his diatribe and ad homonyms against such journalists as Pilger, Hersch, Hedges, Blumenthal, Norton, and North, to name just a few. No one escaped his ire. In his articles he uses “guilt by association” as well as lies in relation to events and information. This is not the action of a true Marxist, writer, journalist. A true Socialist, Marxist, never supports “imperialism,” which is exactly what the US is guilty of perpetrating around the world and certainly in Syria. The heightened and bellicose rhetoric Proyect uses, along with others, is a sign that the USG, whether it be the Pentagon, CIA, CFR, those behind the throne, wielding power, are in disarray and confusion. The US is losing, in spite of all efforts. We failed to achieve regime change in Syria, but will settle for partition. That partition is looking quite murky, with so many players and the Kurds embedded with all sides in their efforts to achieve independence. The US is now immersed in our own initiated chaos. Please see: A postscript on Louis Proyect’s lies 11 June 2015 On Monday, the World Socialist Web Site exposed the allegations of Louis Proyect, publisher of the “Unrepentant Marxist” blog, that a WSWS article included false information aimed at exaggerating the Obama administration’s escalation of military threats against Russia. Refuting Proyect’s claim that a statement by Assistant Defense Secretary Robert Scher had been manufactured, the reply by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North provided a link to an online video of Scher’s testimony before a House Armed Services subcommittee. Readers could see and hear Scher state the sentence that Proyect had claimed was made up: “Another [military option] is taking a look at how we could go about and actually attack that missile where it is in Russia.” This should have been enough to compel Proyect to retract his allegation or keep his mouth shut. Instead, he continued to claim that the quotation was fabricated. He fell back on the position that the word “attack,” which had been deleted from the video due to a technical glitch, was never said. He wrote: “North admits that the word ‘attack’ is not audible in the recording but is convinced that this is the only conclusion that makes sense. Sad, really.” If anyone has cause for sadness, however, it is Louis Proyect. To settle the matter once and for all, the WSWS contacted Robert Burns, the author of an Associated Press article that reported Scher’s testimony and was cited by the WSWS, and brought Proyect’s allegations to his attention. Burns forwarded to the WSWS the exact transcript of Scher’s statement, which he had received from the US Department of Defense. The transcript reinforces what had already been established by the video: the sentence was exactly as it had been reported by Burns and the WSWS. Replying to a question from a congressman about what the US was planning to do in response to Russia’s alleged violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Scher said (emphasis added): We are looking at what actions we can take to ensure that any violation of the INF Treaty does not provide significant military advantage to the Russians. And as people have testified previously to this subcommittee and elsewhere, we look at that in sort of three categories of military activities. One is active defense—what we can do to defend places in Europe at locations that are—that the INF Treaty violating missile could reach. Another one is taking a look at how we could go about and actually attack that missile where it is in Russia. And then subsequently, a third part is looking at understanding that it is not simply attacking that capability, but that the—we can look at what things we can hold at risk within Russia itself. We are still looking at all of those possibilities, narrowing down what we think would be the most effective and working very closely with our allies to determine how to best deter this aggression from Russia, deter and bring Russia back in. This settles the matter and provides further evidence of what many have known for some time: Louis Proyect is a liar and a provocateur. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Tue Feb 20 18:44:34 2018 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 12:44:34 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Big Illinois labor rally this Saturday Message-ID: Thank you for posting, Karen! Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Karen Aram via Peace-discussDate: Tue, Feb 20, 2018 11:43 AMTo: peace;Peace Discuss;Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Big Illinois labor rally this Saturday Begin forwarded message: From: Stansfield Smith Subject: Big Illinois labor rally this Saturday Date: February 20, 2018 at 09:41:51 PST To: Stop-us-empire at googlegroups.com ?? ?? ?? There is a big labor rally this Saturday, if people want to go and leaftet. http://www.chicagolabor.org/take-action/working-peoples-day-of-action -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Tue Feb 20 18:44:34 2018 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 12:44:34 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Big Illinois labor rally this Saturday Message-ID: Thank you for posting, Karen! Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone ------ Original message------From: Karen Aram via Peace-discussDate: Tue, Feb 20, 2018 11:43 AMTo: peace;Peace Discuss;Cc: Subject:[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Big Illinois labor rally this Saturday Begin forwarded message: From: Stansfield Smith Subject: Big Illinois labor rally this Saturday Date: February 20, 2018 at 09:41:51 PST To: Stop-us-empire at googlegroups.com ?? ?? ?? There is a big labor rally this Saturday, if people want to go and leaftet. http://www.chicagolabor.org/take-action/working-peoples-day-of-action -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 20 19:09:03 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 19:09:03 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Media providing propaganda, even so trivial Message-ID: I recently read a Time magazine article, in relation to popular books. Evidently, its books related to “Why Danish People are the Happiest," and according to the review "its because they are always decorating, organizing and downsizing, especially later in life." As someone who is always decorating, organizing, and downsizing, yes, it does give me a sense of calm, and contentment. I consider “Happiness” an extreme description, for such a trivial endeavor. Fact: most articles, other than that in “Time Magazine”, suggest the Danish people are “happy,” because they don't have to worry about "healthcare, education, child care, or social services," given these services, are all provided free in Denmark. In the US “they” are the number one cause of anxiety and depression, amongst Americans not residing within the upper 1%. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Feb 20 19:25:09 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 13:25:09 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Media providing propaganda, even so trivial In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9F908AE2-2774-4706-9F86-E8CC452D314F@gmail.com> I think that’s right. > On Feb 20, 2018, at 1:09 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I recently read a Time magazine article, in relation to popular books. Evidently, its books related to “Why Danish People are the Happiest," and according to the review "its because they are always decorating, organizing and downsizing, especially later in life." > As someone who is always decorating, organizing, and downsizing, yes, it does give me a sense of calm, and contentment. I consider “Happiness” an extreme description, for such a trivial endeavor. > > Fact: most articles, other than that in “Time Magazine”, suggest the Danish people are “happy,” because they don't have to worry about "healthcare, education, child care, or social services," given these services, are all provided free in Denmark. In the US “they” are the number one cause of anxiety and depression, amongst Americans not residing within the upper 1%. > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 20 19:38:29 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 19:38:29 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Media providing propaganda, even so trivial In-Reply-To: <9F908AE2-2774-4706-9F86-E8CC452D314F@gmail.com> References: <9F908AE2-2774-4706-9F86-E8CC452D314F@gmail.com> Message-ID: Which one do you think is right, my assessment or Time’s? > On Feb 20, 2018, at 11:25, C G Estabrook wrote: > > I think that’s right. > >> On Feb 20, 2018, at 1:09 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> I recently read a Time magazine article, in relation to popular books. Evidently, its books related to “Why Danish People are the Happiest," and according to the review "its because they are always decorating, organizing and downsizing, especially later in life." >> As someone who is always decorating, organizing, and downsizing, yes, it does give me a sense of calm, and contentment. I consider “Happiness” an extreme description, for such a trivial endeavor. >> >> Fact: most articles, other than that in “Time Magazine”, suggest the Danish people are “happy,” because they don't have to worry about "healthcare, education, child care, or social services," given these services, are all provided free in Denmark. In the US “they” are the number one cause of anxiety and depression, amongst Americans not residing within the upper 1%. >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C41d66dfaa8c043af228908d57897aa0e%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636547515137238959&sdata=kwtPjlq1BvkBD0Ex8gw6PiSn5Q3lpj6W%2BfTopzE6ZnE%3D&reserved=0 From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Feb 20 19:49:04 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 13:49:04 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Media providing propaganda, even so trivial In-Reply-To: References: <9F908AE2-2774-4706-9F86-E8CC452D314F@gmail.com> Message-ID: <98BE5EDB-B881-489A-B357-F1A387F3F4EB@gmail.com> Yours, indeed. > On Feb 20, 2018, at 1:38 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Which one do you think is right, my assessment or Time’s? > >> On Feb 20, 2018, at 11:25, C G Estabrook wrote: >> >> I think that’s right. >> >>> On Feb 20, 2018, at 1:09 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> I recently read a Time magazine article, in relation to popular books. Evidently, its books related to “Why Danish People are the Happiest," and according to the review "its because they are always decorating, organizing and downsizing, especially later in life." >>> As someone who is always decorating, organizing, and downsizing, yes, it does give me a sense of calm, and contentment. I consider “Happiness” an extreme description, for such a trivial endeavor. >>> >>> Fact: most articles, other than that in “Time Magazine”, suggest the Danish people are “happy,” because they don't have to worry about "healthcare, education, child care, or social services," given these services, are all provided free in Denmark. In the US “they” are the number one cause of anxiety and depression, amongst Americans not residing within the upper 1%. >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C41d66dfaa8c043af228908d57897aa0e%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636547515137238959&sdata=kwtPjlq1BvkBD0Ex8gw6PiSn5Q3lpj6W%2BfTopzE6ZnE%3D&reserved=0 > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 21 12:07:15 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 06:07:15 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] 60 years ago... Message-ID: Gerald Holtom, the Briton who designed the peace symbol, was in “deep despair” when he created it on this day in 1958. “I drew myself,” wrote Mr. Holtom , a World War II conscientious objector who was alarmed by the nuclear arms race. “The representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outward and downward in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad .” An early sketch of the peace symbol designed by Gerald Holtom, on display at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yui Mok/PA Wire, via Associated Press The symbol also combined the semaphores, or flag-signaling codes , for the letters “N” and “D,” or “Nuclear Disarmament.” The circle around it represented the earth. Later that spring, the symbol appeared on buttons and signs in an antinuclear march to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, a warhead factory in Aldermaston, England. (The march became an annual event.) The symbol, which isn’t trademarked, was embraced by the broader antiwar movement and disparaged by critics as anti-Christian. Mr. Holtom is said to have later expressed a desire that the symbol be inverted so that it resembled hands reaching to the sky. Such a symbol, in addition to being more celebratory of peace, would also evoke the semaphore for the letter “U” — as in “Unilateral Disarmament.” The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , which still uses the symbol as its logo, is taking it on an anniversary tour around Britain this year. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 14:03:31 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 14:03:31 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Billie Graham 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, February 21, 2018 8:02 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: Billie Graham Let us never forget that on the night Bush Sr started his genocidal war against Iraq in January 1991, he invited his own Episcopal Bishop there in Washington DC to come to the White House in order to pray with him. To his everlasting credit, the Episcopal Bishop refused to do so as a matter of principle. In lieu thereof, Bush Sr asked Billie to come to the White House and pray with him while Bush started the massive carpet bombings of Iraqi Cities that exterminated about 25,000 human beings. Having No Principles, Billie readily agreed to do so. "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God." Billie ain't no child of God. 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 cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 21 14:18:19 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 08:18:19 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Billie Graham In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <94A942D9-77A6-4BF7-8F7A-0B446E6AF5E4@gmail.com> RIP. His interview with the Most High may be difficult… > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:03 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss 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, February 21, 2018 8:02 AM > To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org > Subject: Billie Graham > > Let us never forget that on the night Bush Sr started his genocidal war against Iraq in January 1991, he invited his own Episcopal Bishop there in Washington DC to come to the White House in order to pray with him. To his everlasting credit, the Episcopal Bishop refused to do so as a matter of principle. In lieu thereof, Bush Sr asked Billie to come to the White House and pray with him while Bush started the massive carpet bombings of Iraqi Cities that exterminated about 25,000 human beings. Having No Principles, Billie readily agreed to do so. > “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.” > > Billie ain’t no child of God. > 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) > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 14:41:01 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 14:41:01 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Billie Graham In-Reply-To: <94A942D9-77A6-4BF7-8F7A-0B446E6AF5E4@gmail.com> References: <94A942D9-77A6-4BF7-8F7A-0B446E6AF5E4@gmail.com> Message-ID: Bush Sr exterminated about 200,000 Iraqis with Billie's Blessings. RIP--Rot In Purgatory. 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, February 21, 2018 8:18 AM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Billie Graham RIP. His interview with the Most High may be difficult… > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:03 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss 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, February 21, 2018 8:02 AM > To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org > Subject: Billie Graham > > Let us never forget that on the night Bush Sr started his genocidal war against Iraq in January 1991, he invited his own Episcopal Bishop there in Washington DC to come to the White House in order to pray with him. To his everlasting credit, the Episcopal Bishop refused to do so as a matter of principle. In lieu thereof, Bush Sr asked Billie to come to the White House and pray with him while Bush started the massive carpet bombings of Iraqi Cities that exterminated about 25,000 human beings. Having No Principles, Billie readily agreed to do so. > “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.” > > Billie ain’t no child of God. > 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) > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 21 14:42:30 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 14:42:30 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Interview with Norm Finkelstein on crimes in Gaza Message-ID: https://www.rt.com/shows/going-underground/419434-norman-finkelstein-gaza-issue/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Wed Feb 21 17:29:41 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 17:29:41 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Letter to the editor References: <1932703994.2111327.1519234181210.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1932703994.2111327.1519234181210@mail.yahoo.com> Submitted to the News-Gazette: I have read with interest News-Gazette coverage of support for immigrant “Dreamers,”especially concerning the self-described Jewish progressive organization Bendthe Arc: their conversation with Rodney Davis, trip to Washington, local march,etc. Certainly, Dreamers deserve a clear and efficient path tocitizenship. Nevertheless, their plight is politically and morally exploited byboth supporters and detractors. At a fundamental level, this narrowly-construedissue ignores the “bipartisan” corporate/neoliberal policy context of globalization,the need for cheap immigrant labor, and the concurrent outsourcing of American industry,leading to bigoted liberal/elitist denigration of so-called “deplorables.” Specifically, Democratic Party support for NAFTA in theearly 1990s (Bill Clinton/Gore) devastated both American factory workers andMexican small industry and farmers, contributing to the origins of Dreamers’ now-sympatheticplight. Analogously, there are those liberals and so-calledprogressives who claim to support refugees while not opposing ongoing Americanwars at the root of their victimization. And there are those self-describedJewish progressives who support the Dreamers but are silent regardingPalestinian refugees and African refugees in Israel, the latter beingpersecuted by Israeli authorities in ways that are not sufficiently photogenicfor a News-Gazette article. Moreover, the Dreamers have become a “model” immigrantminority, providing a contrast that is historically familiar whether in termsof immigration status, race, or ethnicity. Anis Shivani writes on Counterpunch:“What exactly is a Dreamer? A Dreamer is the postmodern version of a slave,embodying the pliant immigrant we seem most comfortable with, expected to begrateful for grudging symbols of identity.” David Green Champaign -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brussel at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 17:38:35 2018 From: brussel at illinois.edu (Brussel, Morton K) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 17:38:35 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Billie Graham In-Reply-To: References: <94A942D9-77A6-4BF7-8F7A-0B446E6AF5E4@gmail.com> Message-ID: <747616CD-F2AD-4D67-B67D-18E731CFF9D9@illinois.edu> Onward Christian soldiers… tra-la > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Bush Sr exterminated about 200,000 Iraqis with Billie's Blessings. > RIP--Rot In Purgatory. 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, February 21, 2018 8:18 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Billie Graham > > RIP. His interview with the Most High may be difficult… > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:03 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss 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, February 21, 2018 8:02 AM >> To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org >> Subject: Billie Graham >> >> Let us never forget that on the night Bush Sr started his genocidal war against Iraq in January 1991, he invited his own Episcopal Bishop there in Washington DC to come to the White House in order to pray with him. To his everlasting credit, the Episcopal Bishop refused to do so as a matter of principle. In lieu thereof, Bush Sr asked Billie to come to the White House and pray with him while Bush started the massive carpet bombings of Iraqi Cities that exterminated about 25,000 human beings. Having No Principles, Billie readily agreed to do so. >> “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.” >> >> Billie ain’t no child of God. >> 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) >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 21 17:42:32 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 11:42:32 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria Message-ID: https://medium.com/stories-soas/the-war-is-far-from-being-over-in-syria-17937139ac29 SOAS Syria Society | Feb 12 | The war is far from being over in Syria Syrian Corner talks with Gilbert Achcar about recent developments in the Syrian conflict. Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as well as a well-known author focusing on the Middle East and the Arab World. He met with Syrian Corner during Syria Awareness Week 2018. Achcar posits that the Syrian conflict is far from over and that for Bashar al-Assad to establish a new political framework, an accord between the US and Russia is necessary. Achcar says the role of Iran in a future Syria is one of the key issues at stake, and discusses the Turkish war against the PYD, the regional role of Saudi Arabia, the international peace conferences for Syria, the recent demonstrations in Iran, and the new US foreign policy for the Middle East in the interview [above]. ### -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 17:44:40 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 17:44:40 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama's wars of aggression against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility whatsoever. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:43 AM To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net Cc: Peace Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria https://medium.com/stories-soas/the-war-is-far-from-being-over-in-syria-17937139ac29 SOAS Syria Society | Feb 12 | The war is far from being over in Syria Syrian Corner talks with Gilbert Achcar about recent developments in the Syrian conflict. Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as well as a well-known author focusing on the Middle East and the Arab World. He met with Syrian Corner during Syria Awareness Week 2018. Achcar posits that the Syrian conflict is far from over and that for Bashar al-Assad to establish a new political framework, an accord between the US and Russia is necessary. Achcar says the role of Iran in a future Syria is one of the key issues at stake, and discusses the Turkish war against the PYD, the regional role of Saudi Arabia, the international peace conferences for Syria, the recent demonstrations in Iran, and the new US foreign policy for the Middle East in the interview [above]. ### -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 21 17:54:39 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 11:54:39 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: That’s at least a bit overstated, Francis. What do you see wrong in this account of the situation in Syria? —CGE > On Feb 21, 2018, at 11:44 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama’s wars of aggression against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility whatsoever. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:43 AM > To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Cc: Peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria > > https://medium.com/stories-soas/the-war-is-far-from-being-over-in-syria-17937139ac29 > > SOAS Syria Society | Feb 12 | The war is far from being over in Syria > Syrian Corner talks with Gilbert Achcar about recent developments in the Syrian conflict. > > Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as well as a well-known author focusing on the Middle East and the Arab World. He met with Syrian Corner during Syria Awareness Week 2018. Achcar posits that the Syrian conflict is far from over and that for Bashar al-Assad to establish a new political framework, an accord between the US and Russia is necessary. Achcar says the role of Iran in a future Syria is one of the key issues at stake, and discusses the Turkish war against the PYD, the regional role of Saudi Arabia, the international peace conferences for Syria, the recent demonstrations in Iran, and the new US foreign policy for the Middle East in the interview [above]. > > ### From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 17:56:44 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 17:56:44 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I am not going to waste my time reading a warmongering lunatic who has publicly supported Obama's Nuremberg Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity, war crimes and genocide against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility on anything. 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, February 21, 2018 11:55 AM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria That’s at least a bit overstated, Francis. What do you see wrong in this account of the situation in Syria? —CGE > On Feb 21, 2018, at 11:44 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama’s wars of aggression against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility whatsoever. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] > On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:43 AM > To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Cc: Peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria > > https://medium.com/stories-soas/the-war-is-far-from-being-over-in-syri > a-17937139ac29 > > SOAS Syria Society | Feb 12 | The war is far from being over in Syria > Syrian Corner talks with Gilbert Achcar about recent developments in the Syrian conflict. > > Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as well as a well-known author focusing on the Middle East and the Arab World. He met with Syrian Corner during Syria Awareness Week 2018. Achcar posits that the Syrian conflict is far from over and that for Bashar al-Assad to establish a new political framework, an accord between the US and Russia is necessary. Achcar says the role of Iran in a future Syria is one of the key issues at stake, and discusses the Turkish war against the PYD, the regional role of Saudi Arabia, the international peace conferences for Syria, the recent demonstrations in Iran, and the new US foreign policy for the Middle East in the interview [above]. > > ### From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 21 18:03:37 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 12:03:37 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <73FFBDF4-D708-41B4-BB00-0034CF12E07C@gmail.com> You must have a manageable reading list, eh? > On Feb 21, 2018, at 11:56 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > I am not going to waste my time reading a warmongering lunatic who has publicly supported Obama's Nuremberg Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity, war crimes and genocide against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility on anything. 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, February 21, 2018 11:55 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria > > That’s at least a bit overstated, Francis. > > What do you see wrong in this account of the situation in Syria? > > —CGE > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 11:44 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: >> >> Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama’s wars of aggression against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility whatsoever. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >> On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:43 AM >> To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net >> Cc: Peace >> Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria >> >> https://medium.com/stories-soas/the-war-is-far-from-being-over-in-syri >> a-17937139ac29 >> >> SOAS Syria Society | Feb 12 | The war is far from being over in Syria >> Syrian Corner talks with Gilbert Achcar about recent developments in the Syrian conflict. >> >> Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as well as a well-known author focusing on the Middle East and the Arab World. He met with Syrian Corner during Syria Awareness Week 2018. Achcar posits that the Syrian conflict is far from over and that for Bashar al-Assad to establish a new political framework, an accord between the US and Russia is necessary. Achcar says the role of Iran in a future Syria is one of the key issues at stake, and discusses the Turkish war against the PYD, the regional role of Saudi Arabia, the international peace conferences for Syria, the recent demonstrations in Iran, and the new US foreign policy for the Middle East in the interview [above]. >> >> ### > From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 18:02:55 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:02:55 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria References: Message-ID: Obama exterminated 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians. Achcar publicly supported him. 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: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:57 AM To: 'C G Estabrook' Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria I am not going to waste my time reading a warmongering lunatic who has publicly supported Obama's Nuremberg Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity, war crimes and genocide against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility on anything. 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, February 21, 2018 11:55 AM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria That’s at least a bit overstated, Francis. What do you see wrong in this account of the situation in Syria? —CGE > On Feb 21, 2018, at 11:44 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama’s wars of aggression against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility whatsoever. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] > On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:43 AM > To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net > Cc: Peace > Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria > > https://medium.com/stories-soas/the-war-is-far-from-being-over-in-syri > a-17937139ac29 > > SOAS Syria Society | Feb 12 | The war is far from being over in Syria > Syrian Corner talks with Gilbert Achcar about recent developments in the Syrian conflict. > > Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as well as a well-known author focusing on the Middle East and the Arab World. He met with Syrian Corner during Syria Awareness Week 2018. Achcar posits that the Syrian conflict is far from over and that for Bashar al-Assad to establish a new political framework, an accord between the US and Russia is necessary. Achcar says the role of Iran in a future Syria is one of the key issues at stake, and discusses the Turkish war against the PYD, the regional role of Saudi Arabia, the international peace conferences for Syria, the recent demonstrations in Iran, and the new US foreign policy for the Middle East in the interview [above]. > > ### From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 21 18:46:29 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 12:46:29 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Many Western leftists (including Achcar) supported the initial Arab Spring uprising against Gaddafi (the ’17 February Revolution’) in 2011, and that against Assad in the same year. In regard to Libya, the UN Security Council passed an initial resolution on 26 February, freezing the assets of Gaddafi and his government and restricting their travel, and referred the matter to the International Criminal Court for investigation. In early March the Libyan army pushed eastwards and re-took several coastal cities before reaching Benghazi. To prevent what was portrayed in the West as an impending massacre in Benghazi (Democracy Now! mongered a rumor that Libyan troops were issued Viagra to facilitate rape...), a further UN resolution authorized member states to establish and enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, and to use "all necessary measures" to prevent attacks on civilians, especially in Benghazi. The US under the direction of Secretary of State Clinton initiated a bombing campaign by NATO. The Gaddafi government announced a ceasefire, but “she persisted...” NATO and the rebels rejected Gaddafi’s offers of a ceasefire and efforts by the African Union to end the fighting. The US was determined to remove the independent-minded Gaddafi. Clinton’s agents eventually sodomized him with a bayonet: “We came, we saw, he died,” said HRC. Achcar like many other leftists supported the UN resolutions, but not the Obama-Clinton takeover of the uprising. There were of course similarities in Syria, where an initial Arab Spring uprising was co-opted by the Obama administration, which sent and paid for jihadists from the KSA, Qatar, etc. (including AQ and eventually ISIS) to overthrow another oil-producing Arab government that wouldn’t follow all the orders from DC. It’s not over (as Achcar says in this article). Assad had better watch his ass (literally). And I’d still like to hear what you think is wrong with this article. —CGE > On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:02 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Obama exterminated 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians. Achcar publicly supported him. 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: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:57 AM > To: 'C G Estabrook' > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria > > I am not going to waste my time reading a warmongering lunatic who has publicly supported Obama's Nuremberg Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity, war crimes and genocide against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility on anything. 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, February 21, 2018 11:55 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria > > That’s at least a bit overstated, Francis. > > What do you see wrong in this account of the situation in Syria? > > —CGE > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 11:44 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: >> >> Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama’s wars of aggression against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility whatsoever. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >> On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:43 AM >> To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net >> Cc: Peace >> Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria >> >> https://medium.com/stories-soas/the-war-is-far-from-being-over-in-syri >> a-17937139ac29 >> >> SOAS Syria Society | Feb 12 | The war is far from being over in Syria >> Syrian Corner talks with Gilbert Achcar about recent developments in the Syrian conflict. >> >> Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as well as a well-known author focusing on the Middle East and the Arab World. He met with Syrian Corner during Syria Awareness Week 2018. Achcar posits that the Syrian conflict is far from over and that for Bashar al-Assad to establish a new political framework, an accord between the US and Russia is necessary. Achcar says the role of Iran in a future Syria is one of the key issues at stake, and discusses the Turkish war against the PYD, the regional role of Saudi Arabia, the international peace conferences for Syria, the recent demonstrations in Iran, and the new US foreign policy for the Middle East in the interview [above]. >> >> ### > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 18:55:20 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:55:20 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: BOOK: Destroying Libya and World Order/ Boyle In-Reply-To: <7CABA588D06FEAD0C52AB9AF906CF2DA3B113531E5EC2DAA-032bf111115d4a4bb411e19cfe9bdff9@emm.adhost.com> References: <7CABA588D06FEAD0C52AB9AF906CF2DA3B113531E5EC2DAA-032bf111115d4a4bb411e19cfe9bdff9@emm.adhost.com> Message-ID: Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama exterminating 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians, He has no credibility on anything. If you want to waste your time reading him, go ahead. 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: Clarity Press, Inc. [mailto:clarity at islandnet.com] Sent: Thursday, September 5, 2013 3:10 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Subject: BOOK: Destroying Libya and World Order/ Boyle A classic case study of the conduct of US foreign policy as it relates to international law [http://www.claritypress.com/sitebuilder/images/Destroying_Libya_and_World_Order_small_011613-400x600.jpg] DESTROYING LIBYA AND WORLD ORDER The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution by FRANCIS A. BOYLE ISBN: 978-0-9853353-7-3 $18.95 / 212 pp. / 2013 “Let the free people of the world know that we could have bargained over and sold out our cause in return for a personal secure and stable life. We received many offers to this effect but we chose to be at the vanguard of the confrontation as a badge of duty and honour. Even if we do not win immediately, we will give a lesson to future generations that choosing to protect the nation is an honour and selling it out is the greatest betrayal that history will remember forever despite the attempts of the others to tell you otherwise.” Muammar Qaddafi* “Qaddafi website publishes ‘last will’ of Libyan ex-leader”, BBC News, 23/10/2011 SYNOPSIS It took three decades for the United States government—spanning and working assiduously over five different presidential administrations (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II , and Obama)—to terminate the 1969 Qaddafi Revolution, seize control over Libya’s oil fields, and dismantle its Jamahiriya system. This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened, and what was both wrong and illegal with that from the perspective of an international law professor and lawyer who tried for over three decades to stop it. Francis Boyle provides a comprehensive history and critique of American foreign policy toward Libya from when the Reagan administration came to power in January of 1981 up to the 2011 NA TO war on Libya that ultimately achieved the US goal of regime change, and beyond. He sets the record straight on the series of military conflicts and crises between the United States and Libya over the Gulf of Sidra, exposing the Reagan administration’s fraudulent claims of Libyan instigation of international terrorism put forward over his eight years in office. Boyle reveals the inside story behind the Lockerbie bombing cases against the United States and the United Kingdom that he filed at the World Court for Colonel Qaddafi acting upon his advice—and the unjust resolution of those disputes. Deploying standard criteria of international law, Boyle analyzes and debunks the UN R2P “responsibility to protect” doctrine and its immediate predecessor,“humanitarian intervention”. He addresses how R2P served as the basis for the NATO assault on Libya in 2011, overriding the UN Charter commitment to state sovereignty and prevention of aggression. The purported NATO protection in actuality led to 50,000 Libyan casualties, and the complete breakdown of law and order. And this is just the beginning. Boyle lays out the ramifications: the destabilization of the Maghreb and Sahel, and the French intervention in Mali—with the USA/NATO/Europe starting a new imperial scramble for the natural resources of Africa. This book is not only a classic case study of the conduct of US foreign policy as it relates to international law, but a damning indictment of the newly-contrived R2P doctrine as legal cover for Western intervention into thiird world countries. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Chapter 1. Using International Law to Analyze American Foreign Policy Decision-Making. Chapter 2. The Confrontation Between the Reagan Administration and Libya over the Gulf of Sidra and Terrorism Chapter 3. The Reagan Administration’s Criminal Bombings of Tripoli and Benghazi Chapter 4. Resolving the Lockerbie Dispute by Means of International Law. Chapter 5. Responsibility to Protect (R2P) versus International Law. Chapter 6. The 2011 U.S./NATO War Against Libya. Conclusion AUTHOR FRANCIS A. BOYLE is a leading American expert in international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court. He served as legal adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993. In 2007, he delivered the Bertrand Russell Peace Lectures. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign and is author of, inter alia, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, Destroying World Order, Biowarfare and Terrorism, Tackling America's Toughest Problems, and The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka. He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University. [http://www.claritypress.com/sitebuilder/images/th_1_-226x246.jpg] View other Clarity Press titles on the Middle East Available now from Clarity Acquire this book from amazon.com Overseas orders from Marston Books, UK CLARITY PRESS, INC http://www.claritypress.com You are presently listed as a subscriber for press releases from Clarity Press, Inc. To unsubscribe -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 18:58:36 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:58:36 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama exterminating 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians, He has no credibility on anything. If you want to waste your time reading him, go ahead. 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) Feed: Peace Palace Library » International law news Posted on: Thursday, May 16, 2013 8:00 AM Author: Ingrid Kost Subject: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened and what went wrong between the United States and Libya from a perspective of a professor of international law. By Ludwig Watzal Source: MWC News View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 21 19:43:09 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 19:43:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] From Jacobin 2013 an exchange with Gilbert Achcar & Greg Shupak Message-ID: 09.06.2013 * LIBYA * 0 * * * An Exchange on Libya BY EDITORS A letter from Gilbert Achcar on Greg Shupak's recent Libya piece. The Keynesian Counterrevolution Mike Beggs Elon Musk is Not the Future Paris Marx Under Neoliberalism, You Can Be Your Own Tyrannical Boss Meagan Day Pablo Iglesias Thinks There Is an Alternative Pablo Iglesias Dear Editors, It was brought to my attention that an article signed Greg Shupak published recently on the Jacobinblog mentioned me as having “backed Western intervention” in Libya. A proof, if needed, that being an academic like the author doesn’t make one immune to misreading. Allow me please to remind the author and your readers that I have refuted this caricature of my position countless times: see in particular this interview and this follow-up. Note in particular this comment that I made in the latter interview: To be sure, the position I expressed was itself an unusually complex one, reflecting the intricacy of the situation. But this can’t be a sufficient explanation, let alone an excuse, for the fact that my critics were on the whole unable to represent my position accurately, whether it was deliberate misrepresentation — for those who mistake caricature for argument — or as a result of misreading under the influence of the former. Thus, I had a first-hand experience of what Francis Bacon meant with his famous saying: “Slander boldly, something always sticks.” Even though I never ever “supported” NATO’s intervention, several detractors immediately distorted my position into one of “support to NATO’s no-fly zone,” which translated naturally into “support to NATO intervention,” nay, “support to imperialism” for the most overexcited, without ever producing a single relevant quote. With best regards, Gilbert Achcar [https://images.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/30134255/beydoun_jacobin_300x600.jpg] ________________________________ Dear Editors: Over the course of an impressive career that has seen him make many important contributions to the anti-imperialist left, Gilbert Achcar has produced work that is clear and perceptive. Unfortunately, in his letter to Jacobin in response to my “Libya and Its Contexts,” Achcar demonstrates that he also has a knack for obfuscation. He insists that a quotation be produced to demonstrate the support for NATO’s intervention in Libya that I attribute to him. Very well: Here are a few from an article he published Le Monde diplomatique in March 2011: “The program [Gaddafi’s opponents] are united on is one of democratic change — political freedoms, human rights, and free elections — exactly like all other uprisings in the region. And if there is no clarity about what a post-Gaddafi Libya might look like . . . it can’t be worse than Gaddafi’s regime.” Or: “Can anyone claiming to belong to the left just ignore a popular movement’s plea for protection, even by means of imperialist bandit-cops, when the type of protection requested is not one through which control over their country could be exerted? Certainly not.” Or: “What then was the alternative to the no-fly zone in the Libyan case? None is convincing.” Or: “We should . . . demand that arms be delivered openly and massively to the insurgents.” In his letter to Jacobin, Achcar seems to insist upon a distinction between supporting a NATO-imposed no-fly zone and supporting NATO-intervention. This position cannot hold. Imposing and enforcing a no-fly zone is not a neutral act, but an intervention in its own right. I will leave it to reader to peruse Achcar’s statements and to conclude whether these add up to support for NATO’s intervention in Libya. Thanks, Greg Shupak -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 21 19:47:26 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 19:47:26 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars Message-ID: Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars By Alex Lantier 13 August 2013 In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 20:01:41 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:01:41 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yeah, Achcar stinks to high heaven. All the Imperialist Warmongers came out of their “Leftist” and “Socialist” closets when it came to Libya and Syria. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 1:47 PM To: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars By Alex Lantier 13 August 2013 In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 21 20:04:54 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:04:54 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] More on Achcar, there is a lot on him, as he attempts to "repackage himself" Message-ID: The ‘Anti-Imperialist’ Who Got Libya Wrong Serves Up The Same Failed Analysis on Syria Paris Match: Many people say the solution lies in your departure. Do you believe that your departure is the solution? Syrian president Assad: What was the result (of NATO policy when they attacked Gaddafi)? Chaos ensued after Gaddafi’s departure. So, was the departure the solution? Have things improved, and has Libya become a democracy? [1] Updated January 23, 2016 Originally posted December 24, 2015 By Stephen Gowans For a professed socialist and anti-imperialist, Gilbert Achcar is surprisingly mainstream, in fact, so much so that he could be appointed to a key position in the US State Department and fit in quite comfortably. He replicated the basic understanding of the nature of the conflict in Libya in 2011, as presented by the US government, in his own analysis, and dissents in no significant way from Washington on how to end the conflict in Syria (Achcar and the US president, and, for that matter, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, all agree that Assad must go.) In 2011, he supported the overthrow of Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi, arguing wrongly, it turns out, that a post-Gaddafi Libya, whatever its faults, would be an improvement on what preceded it, which indeed it is, if chaos, societal breakdown, and various fanatical Islamist armies, including ISIS, vying for control of the country by arms, counts as an improvement. Said Achcar on March 24, 2011: “And if there is no clarity about what a post-Gaddafi Libya might look like….it can’t be worse than Gaddafi’s regime.” [2] It’s difficult to imagine he could have been more wrong. But then he’s in good company. NATO leaders—the architects of the debacle—said the same. Achcar’s assurance that Gaddafi was an unparalleled evil, thus justifying his extermination without regard to the consequences, paralleled a similarly stunningly wrong prediction offered by supporters of the US-British war on Iraq. That argument held that elimination of the Iraqi leader couldn’t help but improve Iraq’s humanitarian situation—and it relied on a technique Achcar liberally uses of demonizing secular Arab nationalist leaders. Of course, it was not the expunction of Saddam Hussein that promised to ameliorate the humanitarian situation in Iraq but the abandonment by Western powers of their policy of murdering countless Iraqis through economic and conventional warfare in order to eliminate an impediment to their hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East. It is curious that the last remaining leaders of the principal obstacle to Washington’s hegemonic designs in the Arab world, namely, the secular Arab nationalist governments of Libya and Syria, should fall squarely within the sites of both Achcar and Washington; curious because Washington is clearly imperialist, and Achcar says he’s an anti-imperialist. So how is it that the anti-imperialist Achcar and the imperialist US foreign policy establishment see eye-to-eye on so much? On Libya, Achcar had cast doubt, in error it turns out, on the idea that the uprising had a substantial Sunni Islamist component, dismissing this as a canard originated by Gaddafi to mobilize US support. Gaddafi’s implicating Al-Qaeda in the uprising “was his way of trying to get the support of the West,” Achcar said. [3] We know now that the uprising was, as Gaddafi averred, largely Islamist. Similarly, Achcar blundered in declaring as preposterous the idea that “Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests.” [4] As it turns out, Western powers did indeed view Gaddafi’s “resource nationalism” and efforts to “Libyanize” the economy as hostile to the economic interests of Western investors, a group that exercises considerable, if not decisive, influence over Western foreign policy. [5] One year after then US secretary of state Hilary Clinton declared in connection with Gaddafi’s overthrow that “we came, we saw, he died,” The Wall Street Journal revealed evidence that the Achcar-supported NATO military intervention in Libya was rooted in objections to the Gaddafi government’s economic policies. According to the newspaper, private oil companies were incensed at the pro-Libyan oil deals the Gaddafi government was negotiating and “hoped regime change in Libya…would bring relief in some of the tough terms they had agreed to in partnership deals” with Libya’s national oil company. [6] Cont. on google….. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 21 20:11:07 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:11:07 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I just wanted to look him up, and was overwhelmed with the information and critiques of his support for war in both Libya and Syria. Rather like Louis Proyect, and Ashley Smith, so called socialists, but obviously not. A socialist never supports imperialism. Any suggestion that what took place, before, during or after in Libya as now Syria, to be anything but “imperialism,” is sheer nonsense and propaganda. On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:01, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, Achcar stinks to high heaven. All the Imperialist Warmongers came out of their “Leftist” and “Socialist” closets when it came to Libya and Syria. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 1:47 PM To: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars By Alex Lantier 13 August 2013 In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C105f3d060e25408037b908d579664d15%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548402633144991&sdata=g1cltBX00McVVOdEAZ%2FbCp5L1uSktDZINkTaDE24%2F68%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 20:15:53 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:15:53 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: …anything but “imperialism,” is sheer nonsense and propaganda For sure. and if you have the chance just run down the list of self-styled “leftists” and “socialists” and “progressives” who supported Obama on Libya and Syria. They all finally came out of the Warmongering Imperialist Closet when they were needed for us to identify and denounce forever. Good riddance to them all! Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing. 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, February 21, 2018 2:11 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars I just wanted to look him up, and was overwhelmed with the information and critiques of his support for war in both Libya and Syria. Rather like Louis Proyect, and Ashley Smith, so called socialists, but obviously not. A socialist never supports imperialism. Any suggestion that what took place, before, during or after in Libya as now Syria, to be anything but “imperialism,” is sheer nonsense and propaganda. On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:01, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, Achcar stinks to high heaven. All the Imperialist Warmongers came out of their “Leftist” and “Socialist” closets when it came to Libya and Syria. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 1:47 PM To: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars By Alex Lantier 13 August 2013 In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C105f3d060e25408037b908d579664d15%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548402633144991&sdata=g1cltBX00McVVOdEAZ%2FbCp5L1uSktDZINkTaDE24%2F68%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 20:12:58 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:12:58 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order References: Message-ID: I began writing this book right after Obama/Clinton/KillerKoh murdered Ghadafy and laughed about it. But towards the end of this book I deal with Syria in the Chapter against Responsibility to Protect/Humanitarian Intervention and in the Conclusion. Achcar is a sick joke and a demented fraud! Fab. Clarity Press, Atlanta 2013, 212 pp., $ 18.95. This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened and what went wrong between the United States and Libya from a perspective of a professor of international law. Among the U.S. Empire’s serving international law professors, Francis A. Boyle is an exception among American international law professors, because he offers his legal advice for government of states that are the victims of Western aggression. He has been opposing unlawful policies of states with his only available “weapon”: international law. He could be described as a defender of the downtrodden of the current international system such as the Palestinian people, Libya under Muammar al Gaddafi and others. Beyond that, he has contributed a great deal to the advancement of international law by, inter alia, drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. Since the early 1980s, Boyle visited Libya numerous times and advised the government on international legal cases. He convinced Gaddafi to sue the United States and the United Kingdom at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the Lockerbie bombing allegations. Before this lawsuit was filed, U. S. President Bush Sr. ordered the Sixth Fleet off the coast of Libya to carry out hostile maneuvers in preparation of another illegal attack as was done by his predecessor Ronald Reagan. After Boyle filed these two lawsuits at the ICJ, Bush ordered U. S. warships to stand down. Boyle also tried to support Gaddafi during the U.S./NATO war of 2011 but to no avail. Gaddafi fought and died for Libya, defending his country against the West like his hero Omar Mukthar had done against the Italian colonizers. Francis A. Boyle is a leading American expert in international law that he teaches at the University of Illinois, Campaign. He is also an author of numerous books on American foreign policy, international law and the foundations of the world order. He served on the Board of Director of Amnesty International and as an adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993. This delegation was headed by the highly respected Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi. Boyle was not responsible, however, for Yasser Arafat’s decision to secretly negotiate with Israel in Oslo behind the back of the Palestinian delegation. He bears thus no responsibility for the resulting “Declaration of Principles”, for which the Palestinian people have been paying since then a terrible price. In his book, Francis A. Boyle relates the history of U. S. foreign policy towards Libya, starting with the Reagan administration in 1981 till the U.S./NATO war that led to the overthrow of Col. Gaddafi. Before going into nuts and bolts, Boyle criticizes the American political establishment and explains why U. S. domestic and international policies are in a malaise. The reason, as stated by him, lies in the mindset of the American political and intellectual establishment that according to him is strongly influenced by Thomas Hobbes. Although he admits to differences between the views of American lawyers and those of political scientists, the author submits “that both groups essentially endorse [a] Hobbist perspective on the world of international relations and domestic affairs”. This commonly shared Hobbism “has become responsible for many of the major crimes, blunders, and tragedies of contemporary American foreign policy decision-making”. (p.19) According to Boyle, Hobbesian power politics contradicts several of the most fundamental principles upon which the United States is apparently founded: the inalienable rights of the individual, peoples’ self-determination, the sovereign equality and independence of states, non-interventionism, respect of international law and organizations, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Although various U. S. administrations “tried to live up to these principles” the net result has been a “counterproductive creation of a series of unmitigated disasters” (p. 30) for the U. S. One of the greatest mistakes has been the subversion of the entire post-World War II international and legal order that the United States helped to construct in 1945. I think that the Bush warriors and the U. S. power elite do not think that their policy was a disaster. The author accuses in particular the Reagan and the Bush junior administrations’ policy of double standards. They often “resort to legalistic subterfuges by pleading principles of international law in order to disguise their realpolitik foreign policy decisions”. (p. 31) Although the rules of international law are not a blueprint for reaching all policy objectives, they can still serve as a guideline for decision-makers what they should avoid running into troubles, writes Boyle. Boyle’s critic of the American foreign policy towards Libya is based on his functionalist, Fullerian, and anti-Hobbesian framework of analysis for international law and organizations. In two chapters, the author describes the series of conflicts between the U. S. and the Libyan leader over the Gulf of Sidra and the allegations of international terrorism made by the U. S. against Libya during the Reagan presidency. Chapter four contains a description of the Lockerbie bombing allegations and the legal dispute by the U. S. and the United Kingdom against Libya over it. The policies of the subsequent U. S. administrations, beginning with Bush senior, Clinton to Bush junior, which aimed at the control of the Libyan oil fields, so Boyle. In 2011, according to Boyle, the neoliberal Obama administration took over Libya’s oil fields under the pretext of the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, illustrating its fraudulent manipulation of international humanitarian law. He debunks not only R2P but also its predecessor “humanitarian intervention” (Serbia) with the standard criteria of international law as an excuse to overthrow unpopular governments in order to replace them with imported U. S. puppets like in Afghanistan or in Kosovo. He argues that all the wars started under a humanitarian pretext resulted in humanitarian catastrophes. The author doubts whether the U. S. and NATO will be able to establish a puppet regime in Libya because of “significant residual support for Gaddafi and his Green Revolution” and of the highly volatile political and military situation throughout the country as the killing of the U. S. ambassador in Benghazi has shown. “All the U. S./NATO really care about in Libya is its continued free flow of oil from Eastern Libya organized around Benghazi.” (p.155) The rest of the country can disintegrate into the Sahara as far as the U. S./NATO is concerned. According to Boyle, Obama uses the R2P doctrine in order to destabilize Syria and overthrow the Assad Family regime. Boyle even goes so far as claiming that R2P has been used by powerful Western countries to justify wanton military aggression and military occupation of weak countries in the South. This schema is based on racism because the aggression was carried out by “white” people from the North against “colored” people from the South. History teaches us indeed that great powers do not use military force for humanitarian reasons. The U. S. and its major allies have been behind most of the humanitarian atrocities in the modern world. (p. 156) Humanitarian interventionism is only used in a mere “propagandistic sense”. (p. 159) The World Court has already rejected R2P/Humanitarian Intervention twice and so did the UN General assembly. Western powers claimed “that there existed supposed principles of customary international law that permitted them to engage in the unilateral threat and use of military force against other states, peoples, and regions of the world. In particular, these alleged ‘principles’ included the so-called doctrines of intervention, protection, and self-help.” (p. 161) These supposed doctrines (R2P/Humanitarian Intervention) were unanimously rejected by the International Court of Justice. The author counters R2P with the rule of law. This doctrine is for him nothing more than “imperialist propaganda for wars of aggression in the name of human rights”. (p. 166) For Boyle, the U. S. and NATO form “the Axis of Genocide”. In this chapter, Boyle gave a damning indictment of the R2P doctrine. Some human rights organizations around the world should rethink their policy of being cheerleaders of a doctrine that serves not the people but only Western neo-imperialism. A detailed analysis on the 2011 U. S./NATO war on Libya is given in chapter six. Since 9/11 the U. S. and its allies in Europe and the Middle East have engaged in “unlimited imperialism” and a “global warfare” against Arab, Muslim and African states in order to steal their hydrocarbon resources. (p. 176) “Libya 2011 was a Nuremberg crime against peace perpetrated by the United States, France and Britain that was aided and abetted and facilitated by the NATO Alliance and its other member states.” (p. 185) Accomplice in this international crime was the Arab League. The book is a scathing critic of modern Western imperialist policy, especially in its Islamophobic and racist version against the Muslim world that might constitute the only force that has the potential to defeat Western unlimited imperialism. ________________________________ Francis 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, February 21, 2018 12:59 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: FW: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama exterminating 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians, He has no credibility on anything. If you want to waste your time reading him, go ahead. 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) Feed: Peace Palace Library » International law news Posted on: Thursday, May 16, 2013 8:00 AM Author: Ingrid Kost Subject: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened and what went wrong between the United States and Libya from a perspective of a professor of international law. By Ludwig Watzal Source: MWC News View article... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 21 20:27:20 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 14:27:20 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: But is his analysis of the current situation correct, regardless of his past sins and errors? I think it’s one of the best I’ve seen. Do you? If not, why not? Cogent critics of the Vietnam war, such as Daniel Ellsberg, often began as fervent supporters. > On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:11 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I just wanted to look him up, and was overwhelmed with the information and critiques of his support for war in both Libya and Syria. > > Rather like Louis Proyect, and Ashley Smith, so called socialists, but obviously not. A socialist never supports imperialism. Any suggestion that what took place, before, during or after in Libya as now Syria, to be anything but “imperialism,” is sheer nonsense and propaganda. > > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:01, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> Yeah, Achcar stinks to high heaven. All the Imperialist Warmongers came out of their “Leftist” and “Socialist” closets when it came to Libya and Syria. >> 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 1:47 PM >> To: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss >> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars >> >> Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. >> Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars >> By Alex Lantier >> 13 August 2013 >> In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” >> Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” >> In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” >> Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. >> From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. >> While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” >> He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” >> Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. >> Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” >> Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. >> He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” >> Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. >> In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. >> In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. >> In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” >> Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . >> In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” >> Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C105f3d060e25408037b908d579664d15%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548402633144991&sdata=g1cltBX00McVVOdEAZ%2FbCp5L1uSktDZINkTaDE24%2F68%3D&reserved=0 > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 20:39:06 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:39:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I don’t read Vietnam Warmongers either. They revolt me. Dan is an exception because he risked life in prison to end that war. Fab. Louis B. Zimmer’s The Vietnam War Debate: Hans J. Morgenthau and the Attempt to Halt the Drift into Disaster (Lexington Books: 2011). by Professor Francis A. Boyle University of Illinois College of Law Hans Morgenthau was my teacher, mentor and friend. He recommended me for my law professorship. It was my great honor and distinct pleasure to have studied with Morgenthau while he was heroically leading the forces of opposition to the genocidal Vietnam War at great personal cost to himself and his family. Morgenthau’s stellar example of brilliance in the service of courage, integrity and principles has inspired and motivated me now for over four decades. After reading Zimmer’s compelling book, Morgenthau will do the same for you. Zimmer vividly brings back to life Morgenthau, his epic battle against the Vietnam War, and those tumultuous and tragic events that shaped my generation and determined the destinies of two nations only now beginning to reconcile -- a volte-face preternaturally predicted by Morgenthau during the darkest days of the wars. This book is required reading for all those seeking to pursue peace with justice in today’s increasingly troubled and endangered world. Humanity desperately needs more like Morgenthau in order to survive. Zimmer explains why. A real tour de force of engaged historical research and scholarship. 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, February 21, 2018 2:27 PM To: Karen Aram Cc: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars But is his analysis of the current situation correct, regardless of his past sins and errors? I think it’s one of the best I’ve seen. Do you? If not, why not? Cogent critics of the Vietnam war, such as Daniel Ellsberg, often began as fervent supporters. > On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:11 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I just wanted to look him up, and was overwhelmed with the information and critiques of his support for war in both Libya and Syria. > > Rather like Louis Proyect, and Ashley Smith, so called socialists, but obviously not. A socialist never supports imperialism. Any suggestion that what took place, before, during or after in Libya as now Syria, to be anything but “imperialism,” is sheer nonsense and propaganda. > > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:01, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> Yeah, Achcar stinks to high heaven. All the Imperialist Warmongers came out of their “Leftist” and “Socialist” closets when it came to Libya and Syria. >> 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >> On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 1:47 PM >> To: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss >> >> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle >> East wars >> >> Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. >> Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars By >> Alex Lantier >> 13 August 2013 >> In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” >> Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” >> In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” >> Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. >> From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. >> While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” >> He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” >> Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. >> Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” >> Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. >> He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” >> Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. >> In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. >> In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. >> In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” >> Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . >> In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” >> Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flis >> ts.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C% >> 7C105f3d060e25408037b908d579664d15%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa >> %7C1%7C0%7C636548402633144991&sdata=g1cltBX00McVVOdEAZ%2FbCp5L1uSktDZ >> INkTaDE24%2F68%3D&reserved=0 > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From brussel at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 20:38:02 2018 From: brussel at illinois.edu (Brussel, Morton K) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:38:02 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2C296E57-C148-4D2C-AE80-45B8B438AC26@illinois.edu> As an aside, I had a falling out with Paul Street because he considered Ashcar his friend when I criticized Street’s reliance on him for interpretation. Ashcar appears in Z-Communications with articles, and is a reason I do not contribute to Albert’s website. Ashcar was one of those who advocated saving Libya from Gaddafi (sp?) by vigorously supporting NATO’s attack on Libya. He’s a phony, and Francis Boyle is right: Ashcar has virtual blood on his hands. —mkb > On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:02 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Obama exterminated 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians. Achcar publicly supported him. 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: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:57 AM > To: 'C G Estabrook' > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria > > I am not going to waste my time reading a warmongering lunatic who has publicly supported Obama's Nuremberg Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity, war crimes and genocide against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility on anything. 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, February 21, 2018 11:55 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria > > That’s at least a bit overstated, Francis. > > What do you see wrong in this account of the situation in Syria? > > —CGE > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 11:44 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: >> >> Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama’s wars of aggression against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility whatsoever. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >> On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:43 AM >> To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net >> Cc: Peace >> Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria >> >> https://medium.com/stories-soas/the-war-is-far-from-being-over-in-syri >> a-17937139ac29 >> >> SOAS Syria Society | Feb 12 | The war is far from being over in Syria >> Syrian Corner talks with Gilbert Achcar about recent developments in the Syrian conflict. >> >> Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as well as a well-known author focusing on the Middle East and the Arab World. He met with Syrian Corner during Syria Awareness Week 2018. Achcar posits that the Syrian conflict is far from over and that for Bashar al-Assad to establish a new political framework, an accord between the US and Russia is necessary. Achcar says the role of Iran in a future Syria is one of the key issues at stake, and discusses the Turkish war against the PYD, the regional role of Saudi Arabia, the international peace conferences for Syria, the recent demonstrations in Iran, and the new US foreign policy for the Middle East in the interview [above]. >> >> ### > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 20:41:19 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:41:19 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria In-Reply-To: <2C296E57-C148-4D2C-AE80-45B8B438AC26@illinois.edu> References: <2C296E57-C148-4D2C-AE80-45B8B438AC26@illinois.edu> Message-ID: Thanks Mort. Right. Achcar has the blood of 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians on his hands--and counting. 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: Brussel, Morton K Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 2:38 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: C G Estabrook ; peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria As an aside, I had a falling out with Paul Street because he considered Ashcar his friend when I criticized Street’s reliance on him for interpretation. Ashcar appears in Z-Communications with articles, and is a reason I do not contribute to Albert’s website. Ashcar was one of those who advocated saving Libya from Gaddafi (sp?) by vigorously supporting NATO’s attack on Libya. He’s a phony, and Francis Boyle is right: Ashcar has virtual blood on his hands. —mkb > On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:02 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Obama exterminated 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians. Achcar publicly supported him. 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: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:57 AM > To: 'C G Estabrook' > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria > > I am not going to waste my time reading a warmongering lunatic who has publicly supported Obama's Nuremberg Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity, war crimes and genocide against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility on anything. 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, February 21, 2018 11:55 AM > To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; Peace > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria > > That’s at least a bit overstated, Francis. > > What do you see wrong in this account of the situation in Syria? > > —CGE > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 11:44 AM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: >> >> Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama’s wars of aggression against Libya and Syria. He has no credibility whatsoever. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >> On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:43 AM >> To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net >> Cc: Peace >> Subject: [Peace-discuss] A clear sketch of the war in Syria >> >> https://medium.com/stories-soas/the-war-is-far-from-being-over-in-syr >> i >> a-17937139ac29 >> >> SOAS Syria Society | Feb 12 | The war is far from being over in Syria >> Syrian Corner talks with Gilbert Achcar about recent developments in the Syrian conflict. >> >> Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as well as a well-known author focusing on the Middle East and the Arab World. He met with Syrian Corner during Syria Awareness Week 2018. Achcar posits that the Syrian conflict is far from over and that for Bashar al-Assad to establish a new political framework, an accord between the US and Russia is necessary. Achcar says the role of Iran in a future Syria is one of the key issues at stake, and discusses the Turkish war against the PYD, the regional role of Saudi Arabia, the international peace conferences for Syria, the recent demonstrations in Iran, and the new US foreign policy for the Middle East in the interview [above]. >> >> ### > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From galliher at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 20:46:15 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 14:46:15 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <63A0DA1B-9FA4-405B-97A2-6729CC1CF6E8@illinois.edu> But what’s wrong with this account of the current situation? . Achcar’s character’s not at stake: the truth of what he says is. ...omne verum, a quocumque dicatur [even by a sick joke and a demented fraud], est a spiritu sancto sicut ab infundente naturale lumen et movente ad intelligendum et loquendum veritatem... "Every true thing, by whomever spoken, comes from the holy spirit as bestowing the natural light and moving us to understanding and speaking the truth” (Aquinas, ST IaIIae.q.109.a1ad1) So is it true? > On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:12 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I began writing this book right after Obama/Clinton/KillerKoh murdered Ghadafy and laughed about it. But towards the end of this book I deal with Syria in the Chapter against Responsibility to Protect/Humanitarian Intervention and in the Conclusion. Achcar is a sick joke and a demented fraud! Fab. > Clarity Press, Atlanta 2013, 212 pp., $ 18.95. > > This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened and what went wrong between the United States and Libya from a perspective of a professor of international law. Among the U.S. Empire’s serving international law professors, Francis A. Boyle is an exception among American international law professors, because he offers his legal advice for government of states that are the victims of Western aggression. He has been opposing unlawful policies of states with his only available “weapon”: international law. He could be described as a defender of the downtrodden of the current international system such as the Palestinian people, Libya under Muammar al Gaddafi and others. Beyond that, he has contributed a great deal to the advancement of international law by, inter alia, drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. > Since the early 1980s, Boyle visited Libya numerous times and advised the government on international legal cases. He convinced Gaddafi to sue the United States and the United Kingdom at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the Lockerbie bombing allegations. Before this lawsuit was filed, U. S. President Bush Sr. ordered the Sixth Fleet off the coast of Libya to carry out hostile maneuvers in preparation of another illegal attack as was done by his predecessor Ronald Reagan. After Boyle filed these two lawsuits at the ICJ, Bush ordered U. S. warships to stand down. Boyle also tried to support Gaddafi during the U.S./NATO war of 2011 but to no avail. Gaddafi fought and died for Libya, defending his country against the West like his hero Omar Mukthar had done against the Italian colonizers. > > Francis A. Boyle is a leading American expert in international law that he teaches at the University of Illinois, Campaign. He is also an author of numerous books on American foreign policy, international law and the foundations of the world order. He served on the Board of Director of Amnesty International and as an adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993. This delegation was headed by the highly respected Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi. Boyle was not responsible, however, for Yasser Arafat’s decision to secretly negotiate with Israel in Oslo behind the back of the Palestinian delegation. He bears thus no responsibility for the resulting “Declaration of Principles”, for which the Palestinian people have been paying since then a terrible price. > > In his book, Francis A. Boyle relates the history of U. S. foreign policy towards Libya, starting with the Reagan administration in 1981 till the U.S./NATO war that led to the overthrow of Col. Gaddafi. Before going into nuts and bolts, Boyle criticizes the American political establishment and explains why U. S. domestic and international policies are in a malaise. The reason, as stated by him, lies in the mindset of the American political and intellectual establishment that according to him is strongly influenced by Thomas Hobbes. Although he admits to differences between the views of American lawyers and those of political scientists, the author submits “that both groups essentially endorse [a] Hobbist perspective on the world of international relations and domestic affairs”. This commonly shared Hobbism “has become responsible for many of the major crimes, blunders, and tragedies of contemporary American foreign policy decision-making”. (p.19) > > According to Boyle, Hobbesian power politics contradicts several of the most fundamental principles upon which the United States is apparently founded: the inalienable rights of the individual, peoples’ self-determination, the sovereign equality and independence of states, non-interventionism, respect of international law and organizations, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Although various U. S. administrations “tried to live up to these principles” the net result has been a “counterproductive creation of a series of unmitigated disasters” (p. 30) for the U. S. One of the greatest mistakes has been the subversion of the entire post-World War II international and legal order that the United States helped to construct in 1945. I think that the Bush warriors and the U. S. power elite do not think that their policy was a disaster. > > The author accuses in particular the Reagan and the Bush junior administrations’ policy of double standards. They often “resort to legalistic subterfuges by pleading principles of international law in order to disguise their realpolitik foreign policy decisions”. (p. 31) Although the rules of international law are not a blueprint for reaching all policy objectives, they can still serve as a guideline for decision-makers what they should avoid running into troubles, writes Boyle. > > Boyle’s critic of the American foreign policy towards Libya is based on his functionalist, Fullerian, and anti-Hobbesian framework of analysis for international law and organizations. In two chapters, the author describes the series of conflicts between the U. S. and the Libyan leader over the Gulf of Sidra and the allegations of international terrorism made by the U. S. against Libya during the Reagan presidency. Chapter four contains a description of the Lockerbie bombing allegations and the legal dispute by the U. S. and the United Kingdom against Libya over it. The policies of the subsequent U. S. administrations, beginning with Bush senior, Clinton to Bush junior, which aimed at the control of the Libyan oil fields, so Boyle. > > In 2011, according to Boyle, the neoliberal Obama administration took over Libya’s oil fields under the pretext of the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, illustrating its fraudulent manipulation of international humanitarian law. He debunks not only R2P but also its predecessor “humanitarian intervention” (Serbia) with the standard criteria of international law as an excuse to overthrow unpopular governments in order to replace them with imported U. S. puppets like in Afghanistan or in Kosovo. He argues that all the wars started under a humanitarian pretext resulted in humanitarian catastrophes. > > The author doubts whether the U. S. and NATO will be able to establish a puppet regime in Libya because of “significant residual support for Gaddafi and his Green Revolution” and of the highly volatile political and military situation throughout the country as the killing of the U. S. ambassador in Benghazi has shown. “All the U. S./NATO really care about in Libya is its continued free flow of oil from Eastern Libya organized around Benghazi.” (p.155) The rest of the country can disintegrate into the Sahara as far as the U. S./NATO is concerned. According to Boyle, Obama uses the R2P doctrine in order to destabilize Syria and overthrow the Assad Family regime. > > Boyle even goes so far as claiming that R2P has been used by powerful Western countries to justify wanton military aggression and military occupation of weak countries in the South. This schema is based on racism because the aggression was carried out by “white” people from the North against “colored” people from the South. History teaches us indeed that great powers do not use military force for humanitarian reasons. The U. S. and its major allies have been behind most of the humanitarian atrocities in the modern world. (p. 156) Humanitarian interventionism is only used in a mere “propagandistic sense”. (p. 159) > > The World Court has already rejected R2P/Humanitarian Intervention twice and so did the UN General assembly. Western powers claimed “that there existed supposed principles of customary international law that permitted them to engage in the unilateral threat and use of military force against other states, peoples, and regions of the world. In particular, these alleged ‘principles’ included the so-called doctrines of intervention, protection, and self-help.” (p. 161) These supposed doctrines (R2P/Humanitarian Intervention) were unanimously rejected by the International Court of Justice. The author counters R2P with the rule of law. This doctrine is for him nothing more than “imperialist propaganda for wars of aggression in the name of human rights”. (p. 166) For Boyle, the U. S. and NATO form “the Axis of Genocide”. In this chapter, Boyle gave a damning indictment of the R2P doctrine. Some human rights organizations around the world should rethink their policy of being cheerleaders of a doctrine that serves not the people but only Western neo-imperialism. > > A detailed analysis on the 2011 U. S./NATO war on Libya is given in chapter six. Since 9/11 the U. S. and its allies in Europe and the Middle East have engaged in “unlimited imperialism” and a “global warfare” against Arab, Muslim and African states in order to steal their hydrocarbon resources. (p. 176) “Libya 2011 was a Nuremberg crime against peace perpetrated by the United States, France and Britain that was aided and abetted and facilitated by the NATO Alliance and its other member states.” (p. 185) Accomplice in this international crime was the Arab League. > > The book is a scathing critic of modern Western imperialist policy, especially in its Islamophobic and racist version against the Muslim world that might constitute the only force that has the potential to defeat Western unlimited imperialism. > > > > Francis 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, February 21, 2018 12:59 PM > To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: FW: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order > > Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama exterminating 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians, He has no credibility on anything. If you want to waste your time reading him, go ahead. 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) > > Feed: Peace Palace Library » International law news > Posted on: Thursday, May 16, 2013 8:00 AM > Author: Ingrid Kost > Subject: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order > > This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened and what went wrong between the United States and Libya from a perspective of a professor of international law. > > By Ludwig Watzal > > Source: MWC News > > > View article... > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 21 20:55:20 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:55:20 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order In-Reply-To: <63A0DA1B-9FA4-405B-97A2-6729CC1CF6E8@illinois.edu> References: <63A0DA1B-9FA4-405B-97A2-6729CC1CF6E8@illinois.edu> Message-ID: I for some reason can not access the page, but of what value is what Achcar has to say in relation to the war in Syria not being over. I’ve been saying that for some time, based upon the many voices out there who do not support war and have been saying it for some time. We, some of us, read the NYT’s, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News because we know true information generally exists within the pages for “business interests.” Does Achcar have anything more to say than these publications? > On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:46, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: > > But what’s wrong with this account of the current situation? . > > Achcar’s character’s not at stake: the truth of what he says is. > > ...omne verum, a quocumque dicatur [even by a sick joke and a demented fraud], est a spiritu sancto sicut ab infundente naturale lumen et movente ad intelligendum et loquendum veritatem... > > "Every true thing, by whomever spoken, comes from the holy spirit as bestowing the natural light and moving us to understanding and speaking the truth” (Aquinas, ST IaIIae.q.109.a1ad1) > > So is it true? > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:12 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> I began writing this book right after Obama/Clinton/KillerKoh murdered Ghadafy and laughed about it. But towards the end of this book I deal with Syria in the Chapter against Responsibility to Protect/Humanitarian Intervention and in the Conclusion. Achcar is a sick joke and a demented fraud! Fab. >> Clarity Press, Atlanta 2013, 212 pp., $ 18.95. >> >> This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened and what went wrong between the United States and Libya from a perspective of a professor of international law. Among the U.S. Empire’s serving international law professors, Francis A. Boyle is an exception among American international law professors, because he offers his legal advice for government of states that are the victims of Western aggression. He has been opposing unlawful policies of states with his only available “weapon”: international law. He could be described as a defender of the downtrodden of the current international system such as the Palestinian people, Libya under Muammar al Gaddafi and others. Beyond that, he has contributed a great deal to the advancement of international law by, inter alia, drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. >> Since the early 1980s, Boyle visited Libya numerous times and advised the government on international legal cases. He convinced Gaddafi to sue the United States and the United Kingdom at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the Lockerbie bombing allegations. Before this lawsuit was filed, U. S. President Bush Sr. ordered the Sixth Fleet off the coast of Libya to carry out hostile maneuvers in preparation of another illegal attack as was done by his predecessor Ronald Reagan. After Boyle filed these two lawsuits at the ICJ, Bush ordered U. S. warships to stand down. Boyle also tried to support Gaddafi during the U.S./NATO war of 2011 but to no avail. Gaddafi fought and died for Libya, defending his country against the West like his hero Omar Mukthar had done against the Italian colonizers. >> >> Francis A. Boyle is a leading American expert in international law that he teaches at the University of Illinois, Campaign. He is also an author of numerous books on American foreign policy, international law and the foundations of the world order. He served on the Board of Director of Amnesty International and as an adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993. This delegation was headed by the highly respected Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi. Boyle was not responsible, however, for Yasser Arafat’s decision to secretly negotiate with Israel in Oslo behind the back of the Palestinian delegation. He bears thus no responsibility for the resulting “Declaration of Principles”, for which the Palestinian people have been paying since then a terrible price. >> >> In his book, Francis A. Boyle relates the history of U. S. foreign policy towards Libya, starting with the Reagan administration in 1981 till the U.S./NATO war that led to the overthrow of Col. Gaddafi. Before going into nuts and bolts, Boyle criticizes the American political establishment and explains why U. S. domestic and international policies are in a malaise. The reason, as stated by him, lies in the mindset of the American political and intellectual establishment that according to him is strongly influenced by Thomas Hobbes. Although he admits to differences between the views of American lawyers and those of political scientists, the author submits “that both groups essentially endorse [a] Hobbist perspective on the world of international relations and domestic affairs”. This commonly shared Hobbism “has become responsible for many of the major crimes, blunders, and tragedies of contemporary American foreign policy decision-making”. (p.19) >> >> According to Boyle, Hobbesian power politics contradicts several of the most fundamental principles upon which the United States is apparently founded: the inalienable rights of the individual, peoples’ self-determination, the sovereign equality and independence of states, non-interventionism, respect of international law and organizations, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Although various U. S. administrations “tried to live up to these principles” the net result has been a “counterproductive creation of a series of unmitigated disasters” (p. 30) for the U. S. One of the greatest mistakes has been the subversion of the entire post-World War II international and legal order that the United States helped to construct in 1945. I think that the Bush warriors and the U. S. power elite do not think that their policy was a disaster. >> >> The author accuses in particular the Reagan and the Bush junior administrations’ policy of double standards. They often “resort to legalistic subterfuges by pleading principles of international law in order to disguise their realpolitik foreign policy decisions”. (p. 31) Although the rules of international law are not a blueprint for reaching all policy objectives, they can still serve as a guideline for decision-makers what they should avoid running into troubles, writes Boyle. >> >> Boyle’s critic of the American foreign policy towards Libya is based on his functionalist, Fullerian, and anti-Hobbesian framework of analysis for international law and organizations. In two chapters, the author describes the series of conflicts between the U. S. and the Libyan leader over the Gulf of Sidra and the allegations of international terrorism made by the U. S. against Libya during the Reagan presidency. Chapter four contains a description of the Lockerbie bombing allegations and the legal dispute by the U. S. and the United Kingdom against Libya over it. The policies of the subsequent U. S. administrations, beginning with Bush senior, Clinton to Bush junior, which aimed at the control of the Libyan oil fields, so Boyle. >> >> In 2011, according to Boyle, the neoliberal Obama administration took over Libya’s oil fields under the pretext of the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, illustrating its fraudulent manipulation of international humanitarian law. He debunks not only R2P but also its predecessor “humanitarian intervention” (Serbia) with the standard criteria of international law as an excuse to overthrow unpopular governments in order to replace them with imported U. S. puppets like in Afghanistan or in Kosovo. He argues that all the wars started under a humanitarian pretext resulted in humanitarian catastrophes. >> >> The author doubts whether the U. S. and NATO will be able to establish a puppet regime in Libya because of “significant residual support for Gaddafi and his Green Revolution” and of the highly volatile political and military situation throughout the country as the killing of the U. S. ambassador in Benghazi has shown. “All the U. S./NATO really care about in Libya is its continued free flow of oil from Eastern Libya organized around Benghazi.” (p.155) The rest of the country can disintegrate into the Sahara as far as the U. S./NATO is concerned. According to Boyle, Obama uses the R2P doctrine in order to destabilize Syria and overthrow the Assad Family regime. >> >> Boyle even goes so far as claiming that R2P has been used by powerful Western countries to justify wanton military aggression and military occupation of weak countries in the South. This schema is based on racism because the aggression was carried out by “white” people from the North against “colored” people from the South. History teaches us indeed that great powers do not use military force for humanitarian reasons. The U. S. and its major allies have been behind most of the humanitarian atrocities in the modern world. (p. 156) Humanitarian interventionism is only used in a mere “propagandistic sense”. (p. 159) >> >> The World Court has already rejected R2P/Humanitarian Intervention twice and so did the UN General assembly. Western powers claimed “that there existed supposed principles of customary international law that permitted them to engage in the unilateral threat and use of military force against other states, peoples, and regions of the world. In particular, these alleged ‘principles’ included the so-called doctrines of intervention, protection, and self-help.” (p. 161) These supposed doctrines (R2P/Humanitarian Intervention) were unanimously rejected by the International Court of Justice. The author counters R2P with the rule of law. This doctrine is for him nothing more than “imperialist propaganda for wars of aggression in the name of human rights”. (p. 166) For Boyle, the U. S. and NATO form “the Axis of Genocide”. In this chapter, Boyle gave a damning indictment of the R2P doctrine. Some human rights organizations around the world should rethink their policy of being cheerleaders of a doctrine that serves not the people but only Western neo-imperialism. >> >> A detailed analysis on the 2011 U. S./NATO war on Libya is given in chapter six. Since 9/11 the U. S. and its allies in Europe and the Middle East have engaged in “unlimited imperialism” and a “global warfare” against Arab, Muslim and African states in order to steal their hydrocarbon resources. (p. 176) “Libya 2011 was a Nuremberg crime against peace perpetrated by the United States, France and Britain that was aided and abetted and facilitated by the NATO Alliance and its other member states.” (p. 185) Accomplice in this international crime was the Arab League. >> >> The book is a scathing critic of modern Western imperialist policy, especially in its Islamophobic and racist version against the Muslim world that might constitute the only force that has the potential to defeat Western unlimited imperialism. >> >> >> >> Francis 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, February 21, 2018 12:59 PM >> To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >> Subject: FW: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order >> >> Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama exterminating 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians, He has no credibility on anything. If you want to waste your time reading him, go ahead. 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) >> >> Feed: Peace Palace Library » International law news >> Posted on: Thursday, May 16, 2013 8:00 AM >> Author: Ingrid Kost >> Subject: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order >> >> This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened and what went wrong between the United States and Libya from a perspective of a professor of international law. >> >> By Ludwig Watzal >> >> Source: MWC News >> >> >> View article... >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce372dc2c989b4aa5629308d5796c6fac%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548428987579836&sdata=UpjkuUGxNDQL7%2FZQmBmqKPgP4swq80EBREWXoDG46KU%3D&reserved=0 > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce372dc2c989b4aa5629308d5796c6fac%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548428987579836&sdata=UpjkuUGxNDQL7%2FZQmBmqKPgP4swq80EBREWXoDG46KU%3D&reserved=0 From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 21 21:07:36 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 21:07:36 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Billy Graham: "Prince of War" References: <5a8dbe6c2754e_d153f8d4c44145c382309df@ip-10-0-0-133.mail> 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, February 21, 2018 3:07 PM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: FW: Billy Graham: "Prince of War" and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War." -------------------------- Yeah, that’s the way I remember it too--at the time doing everything humanly possible to prevent and then stop that genocidal war by Bush Sr et al. 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: Institute for Public Accuracy via ActionNetwork.org [mailto:accuracy at accuracy.org] Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 12:46 PM To: francis.a.boyle at gmail.com Subject: Billy Graham: "Prince of War" On the web: Billy Graham: "Prince of War" [On Twitter] CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham's Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece "Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear," published by CounterPunch, which states: "When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. ... "Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, 'puff Graham,' and he was an instant sensation. "Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. "The man who would become known as 'the minister to presidents' offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. 'MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.' ... "Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam -- knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians -- and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War." For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 February 21, 2018 Institute for Public Accuracy 980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Wed Feb 21 21:32:42 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 15:32:42 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <53AE7350-4885-408B-9EDB-76B486515B68@gmail.com> Morgenthau’s character was undoubtedly noble, but nobility doesn’t bestow infallibility (nor inversely, as perhaps in the case of Achcar), as I’m sure you admit. An example: the recent presidential election raised the question of American exceptionalism. Was one candidate (DJT) veering toward isolationism? Or would he (like the other - HRC) proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism? "The debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality ‘realist' school of international relations. Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a 'transcendent purpose' that it 'must defend and promote' throughout the world: 'the establishment of equality in freedom.’ The competing concepts ‘exceptionalism' and ‘isolationism' both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application…” > —CGE > On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: > > I don’t read Vietnam Warmongers either. They revolt me. Dan is an exception because he risked life in prison to end that war. Fab. > > Louis B. Zimmer’s The Vietnam War Debate: Hans J. C and the Attempt to Halt the Drift into Disaster (Lexington Books: 2011). > by > Professor Francis A. Boyle > University of Illinois College of Law > > > Hans Morgenthau was my teacher, mentor and friend. He recommended me for my law professorship. It was my great honor and distinct pleasure to have studied with Morgenthau while he was heroically leading the forces of opposition to the genocidal Vietnam War at great personal cost to himself and his family. Morgenthau’s stellar example of brilliance in the service of courage, integrity and principles has inspired and motivated me now for over four decades. After reading Zimmer’s compelling book, Morgenthau will do the same for you. Zimmer vividly brings back to life Morgenthau, his epic battle against the Vietnam War, and those tumultuous and tragic events that shaped my generation and determined the destinies of two nations only now beginning to reconcile -- a volte-face preternaturally predicted by Morgenthau during the darkest days of the wars. This book is required reading for all those seeking to pursue peace with justice in today’s increasingly troubled and endangered world. Humanity desperately needs more like Morgenthau in order to survive. Zimmer explains why. A real tour de force of engaged historical research and scholarship. > > > 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, February 21, 2018 2:27 PM > To: Karen Aram > Cc: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars > > But is his analysis of the current situation correct, regardless of his past sins and errors? > > I think it’s one of the best I’ve seen. Do you? If not, why not? > > Cogent critics of the Vietnam war, such as Daniel Ellsberg, often began as fervent supporters. > > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:11 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> I just wanted to look him up, and was overwhelmed with the information and critiques of his support for war in both Libya and Syria. >> >> Rather like Louis Proyect, and Ashley Smith, so called socialists, but obviously not. A socialist never supports imperialism. Any suggestion that what took place, before, during or after in Libya as now Syria, to be anything but “imperialism,” is sheer nonsense and propaganda. >> >> >> >>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:01, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> Yeah, Achcar stinks to high heaven. All the Imperialist Warmongers came out of their “Leftist” and “Socialist” closets when it came to Libya and Syria. >>> 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] >>> On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss >>> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 1:47 PM >>> To: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss >>> >>> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle >>> East wars >>> >>> Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. >>> Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars By >>> Alex Lantier >>> 13 August 2013 >>> In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” >>> Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” >>> In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” >>> Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. >>> From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. >>> While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” >>> He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” >>> Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. >>> Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” >>> Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. >>> He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” >>> Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. >>> In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. >>> In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. >>> In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” >>> Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . >>> In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” >>> Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flis >>> ts.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C% >>> 7C105f3d060e25408037b908d579664d15%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa >>> %7C1%7C0%7C636548402633144991&sdata=g1cltBX00McVVOdEAZ%2FbCp5L1uSktDZ >>> INkTaDE24%2F68%3D&reserved=0 >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 Feb 21 21:58:47 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 15:58:47 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: <53AE7350-4885-408B-9EDB-76B486515B68@gmail.com> References: <53AE7350-4885-408B-9EDB-76B486515B68@gmail.com> Message-ID: <7C98BAFE-E669-4501-9C2B-C5AEF30CBEF9@gmail.com> Morgenthau’s character was undoubtedly noble, but nobility doesn’t bestow infallibility (nor inversely, as perhaps in the case of Achcar), as I’m sure you admit. An example: the recent presidential election raised the question of American exceptionalism. Was one candidate (DJT) veering toward isolationism? Or would he (like the other - HRC) proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism? Can the matter be decided by determining which candidate was more noble? Aristotle asked, Would you rather have your sandals made by a good person, or a good cobbler? ==================================================== The [isolationism/exceptionalism] debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality ‘realist' school of international relations. Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a 'transcendent purpose' that it 'must defend and promote' throughout the world: 'the establishment of equality in freedom.’ The competing concepts ‘exceptionalism' and ‘isolationism' both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application... The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others. Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages. At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion — overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery. To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its “transcendent purpose.” But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.” In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively. Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere “blunders” or “innocent naivete” can be charged with “moral equivalence” — of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny. Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers. Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure” — as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses. The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there — even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.” Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens. One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder. That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.” Those still deluded by “abuse of reality” — that is, fact — might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response. She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book “A Dangerous Place,” he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.” And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt — as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years. But that is mere abuse of reality. It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons. Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion and thereby reinforce our basis for further “abuses of reality.” =================================================== On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Boyle, Francis A wrote: I don’t read Vietnam Warmongers either. They revolt me. Dan is an exception because he risked life in prison to end that war. Fab. Louis B. Zimmer’s The Vietnam War Debate: Hans J. C and the Attempt to Halt the Drift into Disaster (Lexington Books: 2011). by Professor Francis A. Boyle University of Illinois College of Law Hans Morgenthau was my teacher, mentor and friend. He recommended me for my law professorship. It was my great honor and distinct pleasure to have studied with Morgenthau while he was heroically leading the forces of opposition to the genocidal Vietnam War at great personal cost to himself and his family. Morgenthau’s stellar example of brilliance in the service of courage, integrity and principles has inspired and motivated me now for over four decades. After reading Zimmer’s compelling book, Morgenthau will do the same for you. Zimmer vividly brings back to life Morgenthau, his epic battle against the Vietnam War, and those tumultuous and tragic events that shaped my generation and determined the destinies of two nations only now beginning to reconcile -- a volte-face preternaturally predicted by Morgenthau during the darkest days of the wars. This book is required reading for all those seeking to pursue peace with justice in today’s increasingly troubled and endangered world. Humanity desperately needs more like Morgenthau in order to survive. Zimmer explains why. A real tour de force of engaged historical research and scholarship. 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, February 21, 2018 2:27 PM To: Karen Aram Cc: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars But is his analysis of the current situation correct, regardless of his past sins and errors? I think it’s one of the best I’ve seen. Do you? If not, why not? Cogent critics of the Vietnam war, such as Daniel Ellsberg, often began as fervent supporters. On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:11 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: I just wanted to look him up, and was overwhelmed with the information and critiques of his support for war in both Libya and Syria. Rather like Louis Proyect, and Ashley Smith, so called socialists, but obviously not. A socialist never supports imperialism. Any suggestion that what took place, before, during or after in Libya as now Syria, to be anything but “imperialism,” is sheer nonsense and propaganda. On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:01, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: Yeah, Achcar stinks to high heaven. All the Imperialist Warmongers came out of their “Leftist” and “Socialist” closets when it came to Libya and Syria. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 1:47 PM To: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars By Alex Lantier 13 August 2013 In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 21 23:24:14 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 23:24:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: <7C98BAFE-E669-4501-9C2B-C5AEF30CBEF9@gmail.com> References: <53AE7350-4885-408B-9EDB-76B486515B68@gmail.com> <7C98BAFE-E669-4501-9C2B-C5AEF30CBEF9@gmail.com> Message-ID: Here is my thoughts on the Achcar article, thank you Carl for posting it on FB: Achcar is and was a war supporter. In this article he refers to the US having boots on the ground fighting ISIS since 2014. The US was not fighting ISIS, we were supporting them. Also, the US was in Syria covertly likely going back to 2011, when Achcar refers to Russians and Iranian involvement predating US. Any assumption that Moscow will agree with the US to insist on Iran leaving Syria is nonsense. The Russians are smarter than that, they know they need to support Iran vs. the US. Syria isn't just about the oil, its about containment of Russia, and Iran is what comes after destruction of Syria. So no matter what this guy has to say, he is obfuscating US imperialism. The US wants partition, and plans to occupy permanently. His suggestions and prognostications are an attempt to make the US look good, and Russia, Iran look bad when they don’t compromise and give in to our demands. On Feb 21, 2018, at 13:58, C G Estabrook > wrote: Morgenthau’s character was undoubtedly noble, but nobility doesn’t bestow infallibility (nor inversely, as perhaps in the case of Achcar), as I’m sure you admit. An example: the recent presidential election raised the question of American exceptionalism. Was one candidate (DJT) veering toward isolationism? Or would he (like the other - HRC) proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism? Can the matter be decided by determining which candidate was more noble? Aristotle asked, Would you rather have your sandals made by a good person, or a good cobbler? ==============================%2F20131006%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cf2739b20638e457a82f408d579764ae9%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548471317799072&sdata=KudQisT0h0vdUemPzh8a0lsDYE%2B%2BPypbMYFA9%2BBqG40%3D&reserved=0>====================== The [isolationism/exceptionalism] debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality ‘realist' school of international relations. Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a 'transcendent purpose' that it 'must defend and promote' throughout the world: 'the establishment of equality in freedom.’ The competing concepts ‘exceptionalism' and ‘isolationism' both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application... The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others. Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages. At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion — overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery. To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its “transcendent purpose.” But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.” In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively. Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere “blunders” or “innocent naivete” can be charged with “moral equivalence” — of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny. Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers. Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure” — as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses. The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there — even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.” Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens. One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder. That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.” Those still deluded by “abuse of reality” — that is, fact — might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response. She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book “A Dangerous Place,” he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.” And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt — as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years. But that is mere abuse of reality. It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons. Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion and thereby reinforce our basis for further “abuses of reality.” =================================================== On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: I don’t read Vietnam Warmongers either. They revolt me. Dan is an exception because he risked life in prison to end that war. Fab. Louis B. Zimmer’s The Vietnam War Debate: Hans J. C and the Attempt to Halt the Drift into Disaster (Lexington Books: 2011). by Professor Francis A. Boyle University of Illinois College of Law Hans Morgenthau was my teacher, mentor and friend. He recommended me for my law professorship. It was my great honor and distinct pleasure to have studied with Morgenthau while he was heroically leading the forces of opposition to the genocidal Vietnam War at great personal cost to himself and his family. Morgenthau’s stellar example of brilliance in the service of courage, integrity and principles has inspired and motivated me now for over four decades. After reading Zimmer’s compelling book, Morgenthau will do the same for you. Zimmer vividly brings back to life Morgenthau, his epic battle against the Vietnam War, and those tumultuous and tragic events that shaped my generation and determined the destinies of two nations only now beginning to reconcile -- a volte-face preternaturally predicted by Morgenthau during the darkest days of the wars. This book is required reading for all those seeking to pursue peace with justice in today’s increasingly troubled and endangered world. Humanity desperately needs more like Morgenthau in order to survive. Zimmer explains why. A real tour de force of engaged historical research and scholarship. 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, February 21, 2018 2:27 PM To: Karen Aram > Cc: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars But is his analysis of the current situation correct, regardless of his past sins and errors? I think it’s one of the best I’ve seen. Do you? If not, why not? Cogent critics of the Vietnam war, such as Daniel Ellsberg, often began as fervent supporters. On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:11 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: I just wanted to look him up, and was overwhelmed with the information and critiques of his support for war in both Libya and Syria. Rather like Louis Proyect, and Ashley Smith, so called socialists, but obviously not. A socialist never supports imperialism. Any suggestion that what took place, before, during or after in Libya as now Syria, to be anything but “imperialism,” is sheer nonsense and propaganda. On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:01, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, Achcar stinks to high heaven. All the Imperialist Warmongers came out of their “Leftist” and “Socialist” closets when it came to Libya and Syria. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 1:47 PM To: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars By Alex Lantier 13 August 2013 In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cf2739b20638e457a82f408d579764ae9%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548471317799072&sdata=HXr08rITW8iz%2FxYKhmpY1Q50yTBpNGRIx4Q%2BCy8e26I%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Wed Feb 21 23:30:20 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 23:30:20 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achtar, article Message-ID: I wish to add, that when I see statements by those concerned with Iranian intervention, I see “USG handwriting” all over it. Iranians have economic problems and some may concern themselves with their military being involved in Syria as a result. However, Syria is a stepping stone to Iran, for the US, so the concern by either Iranians or Americans should be with US foreign policy of intervention in the Middle East. From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 22 00:17:49 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:17:49 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas Message-ID: Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Feb 22 00:31:09 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:31:09 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: <53AE7350-4885-408B-9EDB-76B486515B68@gmail.com> <7C98BAFE-E669-4501-9C2B-C5AEF30CBEF9@gmail.com> Message-ID: I think we should pay attention to what he says, rather than who (we think) he is. We should demand our government withdraw. “...Moscow and Assad proclaim that they are willing to have international observers monitoring new elections. They may be betting on Assad’s victory in free presidential elections today in Syria, because the Assad regime is one bloc whereas the opposition is very much divided. The fact that the opposition is in shambles may give the Assad regime enough confidence to undergo such a scenario. "However, for such a settlement to happen, an international agreement is necessary first. In the Moscow-sponsored Sochi talks, only Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Syrian regime, and a discredited part of the Syrian opposition did participate. In the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, the United States and Europe are involved. I can’t see the US accepting an agreement that does not stipulate the withdrawal of all foreign troops that entered Syria after 2011. In other words, the US would say, “We are willing to leave Syria provided that Iranian forces leave it as well.” That’s why the US is currently sticking to the region east of the Euphrates. Washington’s message to the Russians is: “We will leave Syria to you if you get it rid of the Iranians, otherwise we won’t.” —CGE > On Feb 21, 2018, at 5:24 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Here is my thoughts on the Achcar article, thank you Carl for posting it on FB: > > Achcar is and was a war supporter. In this article he refers to the US having boots on the ground fighting ISIS since 2014. The US was not fighting ISIS, we were supporting them. Also, the US was in Syria covertly likely going back to 2011, when Achcar refers to Russians and Iranian involvement predating US. > > Any assumption that Moscow will agree with the US to insist on Iran leaving Syria is nonsense. The Russians are smarter than that, they know they need to support Iran vs. the US. Syria isn't just about the oil, its about containment of Russia, and Iran is what comes after destruction of Syria. So no matter what this guy has to say, he is obfuscating US imperialism. > The US wants partition, and plans to occupy permanently. > > His suggestions and prognostications are an attempt to make the US look good, and Russia, Iran look bad when they don’t compromise and give in to our demands. > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 13:58, C G Estabrook wrote: >> >> Morgenthau’s character was undoubtedly noble, but nobility doesn’t bestow infallibility (nor inversely, as perhaps in the case of Achcar), as I’m sure you admit. >> >> An example: the recent presidential election raised the question of American exceptionalism. Was one candidate (DJT) veering toward isolationism? Or would he (like the other - HRC) proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism? >> >> Can the matter be decided by determining which candidate was more noble? >> >> Aristotle asked, Would you rather have your sandals made by a good person, or a good cobbler? >> >> ==================================================== >> >> The [isolationism/exceptionalism] debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality ‘realist' school of international relations. Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a 'transcendent purpose' that it 'must defend and promote' throughout the world: 'the establishment of equality in freedom.’ The competing concepts ‘exceptionalism' and ‘isolationism' both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application... >> >> The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others. >> >> Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages. >> >> At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion — overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery. >> >> To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its “transcendent purpose.” >> >> But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.” >> >> In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively. >> >> Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere “blunders” or “innocent naivete” can be charged with “moral equivalence” — of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny. >> >> Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers. >> >> Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure” — as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses. >> >> The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there — even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.” >> >> Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens. >> >> One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder. >> >> That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.” >> >> Those still deluded by “abuse of reality” — that is, fact — might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” >> >> The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response. >> >> She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports. >> >> Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book “A Dangerous Place,” he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.” >> >> And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt — as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years. >> >> But that is mere abuse of reality. >> >> It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons. >> >> Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion and thereby reinforce our basis for further “abuses of reality.” >> =================================================== >> From galliher at illinois.edu Thu Feb 22 00:57:39 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:57:39 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order In-Reply-To: References: <63A0DA1B-9FA4-405B-97A2-6729CC1CF6E8@illinois.edu> Message-ID: <87ACB745-39F9-4820-B5E4-FFF6492CA1B7@illinois.edu> The war is far from being over in Syria – STORIES at SOAS – Medium Syrian Corner talks with Gilbert Achcar about recent developments in the Syrian conflict. Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as well as a well-known author focusing on the Middle East and the Arab World. He met with Syrian Corner during Syria Awareness Week 2018. Achcar posits that the Syrian conflict is far from over and that for Bashar al-Assad to establish a new political framework, an accord between the US and Russia is necessary. Achcar says the role of Iran in a future Syria is one of the key issues at stake, and discusses the Turkish war against the PYD, the regional role of Saudi Arabia, the international peace conferences for Syria, the recent demonstrations in Iran, and the new US foreign policy for the Middle East in the interview below. Assad and Putin recently declared that they have “won the war.” Is the Syrian war over? What will happen to Bashar al-Assad? There is a lot of wishful thinking in such proclamations: battles are still raging in the Idlib region and in East Ghouta. It is true, though, that the regime, backed by Iran and Russia, has now been consolidated and is no longer facing an existential threat. Twice before, it was on the verge of a massive defeat, rescued each time by foreign intervention, first by Iran, then by Russia. As a result, the regime has now the upper hand militarily. But when I say ‘regime,’ I am actually referring to the Russia-Iran-Assad axis, as the Assad regime alone would not have been able to accomplish any of this. Far from it, it would have been defeated a long time ago. Besides, there is still a very large area of Syria out of regime control in the North-East, dominated by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The Syrian-Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) led by the Democratic Union Party (PYD) are the SDF’s backbone. They control a huge part of Syria, comprising the whole area east of the Euphrates to the Turkish and Iraqi borders — and this is where US troops are actually involved on the ground. Two more areas are under control of the YPG and their allies: Manbij, west of the Euphrates, and Afrin where the present Turkish offensive is taking place. Specifically addressing the issue of the YPG: Turkey has started an attack on the YPG-controlled area of Afrin. Does this represent a new escalation of the conflict? Here lies a major contradiction. For many years, Western powers have been following their Turkish ally, a key member of NATO, in labelling the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a terrorist organisation. The Turkish army has engaged in several offensives against the Kurds in Turkey over the years with the support of NATO countries. However, when the United States decided to combat ISIS in both Syria and Iraq in 2014, it did not want to involve US troops on the ground directly in the battle but provided instead air and material support to local forces. Thus, it found that the best possible ally in this battle in Syria from a military perspective would be the Kurdish forces. Washington encouraged the creation of the SDF, with the inclusion of Syrian Arabs mostly belonging to the region now under SDF control, so that the US does not appear as involved in an ethnic fight on the side of the Kurdish minority. Since everybody knows that the PYD/YPG are closely tied to the PKK, this alliance created a political paradox. In fighting ISIS, the US relied on a force that is tied to a political movement officially labelled as ‘terrorist’ by Turkey and its NATO allies, including Washington. Unsurprisingly, this has hugely irritated the Turkish state, outraged at seeing the US cooperating with its public enemy number one. This was made even more acute by the fact that Erdogan had undergone a sharp nationalist shift in 2015 when his party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost the parliamentary majority. This was due to an increase in the votes garnered by a left-wing coalition in which the Kurdish movement played a central role, but it was also due, most importantly, to losing votes to the far-right Turkish nationalists. Faced with this, Erdogan resumed the war on the Kurds after years of making peace with the Kurdish movement, resorting to whipping up Turkish nationalism. The Islamic conservative stance of his discourse did not change, but a new shift occurred in the direction of Turkish nationalism and renewed onslaught on the Kurds. Erdogan organised a second election five months later, in which his party regained a parliamentary majority. Currently the AKP is in alliance with the major far-right Turkish nationalist party. Basically, this stance of Erdogan put him increasingly on a collision course with the US. Tensions with the Obama administration surged. Erdogan bet for a while on the Trump administration — Donald Trump promised to stop supporting the Kurdish forces in Syria. However, the Pentagon contradicted him, for the Kurdish forces have proven that they are excellent fighters and have been instrumental in defeating ISIS. The Pentagon regards the SDF as the main card they hold today in Syria. They know that if they cut ties with the SDF, the Assad regime and Iran-led forces will inevitably try to recover the vast strategic area to the east of the Euphrates. Since the US is determined to contain Iran’s expansion in the region, the Pentagon sees no other option than to provide the Syrian-Kurdish forces and the SDF continued support. This is where the friction lies. Erdogan is currently attacking the Kurdish-majority region of Afrin in North-West Syria. This region did play no role in the fight against ISIS and was thus no concern for the US. No US troops are present there. But Erdogan threatened to turn against Manbij — where the SDF is backed by direct US presence on the ground. Russia greenlighted the Turkish intervention in the Afrin region, withdrawing its own troops from there. Its aim is to thus exacerbate the Turkish-US rift. This whole situation is getting even more complicated, and this is where we can reconnect to the original question: it is far from being over in Syria. Any “mission accomplished,” as Bush announced very carelessly and unwisely soon after the occupation of Iraq and as Putin has proclaimed twice about Syria, is merely wishful thinking. Nothing is solved in Syria. The Assad regime, even with Russia’s support, does not have the capacity to control the country. It needs Iran. Yet, Iran’s presence in Syria is unacceptable for both the US and Israel. Courtesy of syria.liveuamap.com Would Turkey, if it defeats the Kurdish forces, be willing to go as far as to occupy Manbij? It is a very tough nut to crack indeed, and what is happening now is quite telling. It would be quite difficult for Turkish forces to remain in the Afrin region for a long time even if they manage to occupy it, as they would fall under permanent attacks. Moreover, they would be engaged in war on a foreign territory, without the excuse of being invited by the official government unlike Iran’s and Russia’s forces. Erdogan is playing with fire. He has taken a great risk with this operation. Facing discontent even within his own party, he is using this nationalist drive to consolidate his power. But a military setback could cost him a lot. Under what circumstances would Iran leave Syria? Iran would need to be compelled to leave. This could happen if there is a Russian-American agreement, in the form of a United Nations Security Council resolution stipulating that, on the basis of a political agreement that would be reached in Geneva, all foreign troops that entered Syria after 2011 (excluding the Russians who were already in Syria long before that year) should leave the country. It would be difficult for Iran to say “no,” especially if the Syrian regime is part of this deal. Assad would not side with Iran over Moscow if he had to choose. Moscow relies on his regime’s forces on the ground, while Iran is occupying the ground. Tehran would not allow the Syrian regime the same margin of autonomy as Moscow would. Add to that that the Iranian regime is ideologically quite different from the Syrian regime. The Syrian regime has been portrayed by many as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism even though it is propped on the ground by Iran-led Islamic fundamentalist forces. That’s also part of the complexity of this situation. There have been some important demonstrations in Iran since the 28th of December last year. What influence on Iran’s intervention in Syria can they have? Had the movement carried on and continued to expand, it may have created a situation compelling the regime to reconsider its intervention in Syria, which was condemned by the demonstrators. But the movement subsided and was quelled, and the regime is back in control. We see, however, a surge in the tension between the two wings of the regime. The reformist wing represented by Iranian President Rouhani is trying to curtail the hard-line wing of the Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran), arguing that the latter and its foreign interventions are a burden on the Iranian economy. If the social turmoil resumes, things may change, but for now the regime is in full control. Moreover, Syria is an important card in Tehran’s confrontation with the Trump administration, which threatens to cancel the nuclear agreement. Such a move would play into the hands of the hardliners and therefore encourage a continuation of Iran’s expansion as a counter movement to US pressure. Do you think the European Union (EU) should have a bigger role in criticising Turkey for the attack on the Kurds? The EU has failed to act independently of the United States on the global level with regard to political and military issues. It has mostly behaved until now as an auxiliary of the United States. This has become a problem for Europe with the Trump administration because it is the first time that there is a US president who is so much in contrast politically with Europe’s mainstream and so close to Europe’s far right. The Bush administration did have problems with some European governments, such as France’s and Germany’s that stood against the invasion of Iraq due to differing interests. But Tony Blair’s UK government, for instance, was fully involved on the side of Bush. On the Palestine issue, there has been a crystallisation of a different EU opinion, which is why the President of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Mahmoud Abbas, is now attempting to get the Europeans to recognize the Palestinian state. On Iran too, there are open divergences between the Europeans and the Trump administration. The European governments were quite happy with Obama’s policy leading to the nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump considers to be the worst agreement ever concluded by the US. If he does rescind the nuclear agreement, this will create an open crisis in US-European relations. Thus, Palestine and Iran, for the time being, are two contentious issues on which there is a sharp contrast between the US and the EU. The Syrian issue though is not one on which Europe holds views opposed to that of the US. On Syria, the EU has displayed no independent stance to this day. Considering that the conflict is not over, do you think there is any possibility of reconstruction, as Assad is calling for? Again, that is wishful thinking. Russia itself has on several occasions called upon the EU to fund the reconstruction of Syria. They have a lot of nerve because Russia has secured a position whereby, if there were to be a reconstruction of Syria, it would play a key role in it. Moscow would like the Europeans to fund Syria’s reconstruction with Russian companies pocketing the lion’s share of contracts. But this will not happen because the Europeans will not disburse any money without a US green light, which will not be given until Washington is convinced that Iran won’t take advantage of the situation. Under the present conditions, Iran too would necessarily secure a major part of the market. So, reconstruction won’t really be on the agenda until this whole political puzzle is solved. Russia is trying to set a post-war political framework for Syria. They’ve started doing it at the end of 2016, shortly before Trump inaugurated his presidency. They were expecting him to deliver on his promise of new relations with Russia, but for the time being this is not happening as the establishment in Washington reacted with a strongly anti-Russian position. In any event, Trump won’t reach any deal with the Russians unless they agree to stop cooperating with Iran in Syria and push its forces out of the country. For Trump the ideal scenario would be to reach a deal with Putin, entrust the Russians to take care of Syria on the condition that they push Iran out. In exchange for that, the United States could remove sanctions on Russia and give it some concessions in Europe. But this is clearly not on the horizon for now. Do you think any of the talks in Sochi and Geneva will change anything in Syria? These talks are about the conditions of a political settlement. We know more or less what this will look like — a transitional period, a new constitution, new elections, all this with Assad remaining in power and running in a new presidential election — so there’s not much new to be expected in that regard. Moscow and Assad proclaim that they are willing to have international observers monitoring new elections. They may be betting on Assad’s victory in free presidential elections today in Syria, because the Assad regime is one bloc whereas the opposition is very much divided. The fact that the opposition is in shambles may give the Assad regime enough confidence to undergo such a scenario. However, for such a settlement to happen, an international agreement is necessary first. In the Moscow-sponsored Sochi talks, only Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Syrian regime, and a discredited part of the Syrian opposition did participate. In the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, the United States and Europe are involved. I can’t see the US accepting an agreement that does not stipulate the withdrawal of all foreign troops that entered Syria after 2011. In other words, the US would say, “We are willing to leave Syria provided that Iranian forces leave it as well.” That’s why the US is currently sticking to the region east of the Euphrates. Washington’s message to the Russians is: “We will leave Syria to you if you get it rid of the Iranians, otherwise we won’t.” Rouhani, Putin and Erdogan shaking hands in Sochi (November 2017) / Photo: Kremlin (Creative Commons) Trump’s view of the conflict is different from Obama’s. He is trying to isolate Iran and has recognised Jerusalem as capital of the Israeli state. Why are their policies different and what implication will Trump’s policy have for the region? There are different issues here. When it comes to Israel, Trump is catering to a specific audience: the Evangelicals and other Christian Zionists, who constituted a large part of the Republican’s constituency under Bush and are still a major part of Trump’s voter base. Mike Pence, the US Vice President, is representative of this segment. He is outbidding even his own boss in pro-Israeli discourse. Conversely, there is no consensus on this issue within the wider US establishment. Even some people in Trump’s entourage were not happy with his stance on Jerusalem, which is very ideological. The only issue on which there is a consensus in the administration is a tough attitude towards Iran, but this does not even include scrapping the nuclear agreement. Does the Saudi regime still play any decisive role in the Syrian conflict, especially with regard to Iran? Trump very much encouraged the Saudi rulers to escalate hostilities against Iran. They have been very clumsy in the handling of episodes such as that of putting pressure on Qatar or that of the forced resignation of Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, which both ended up in fiasco. The Saudi rulers have no strategy of their own regarding Syria, they align behind the United States. The remnants of the Syrian opposition that are linked to them have been very much weakened. Thus Riyadh’s overall leverage in Syria is much weakened. Its main concern is to contain Iran and roll it back, and for that they can only rely on Washington. ### > On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:55 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I for some reason can not access the page, but of what value is what Achcar has to say in relation to the war in Syria not being over. I’ve been saying that for some time, based upon the many voices out there who do not support war and have been saying it for some time. > > We, some of us, read the NYT’s, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News because we know true information generally exists within the pages for “business interests.” Does Achcar have anything more to say than these publications? > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:46, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> But what’s wrong with this account of the current situation? . >> >> Achcar’s character’s not at stake: the truth of what he says is. >> >> ...omne verum, a quocumque dicatur [even by a sick joke and a demented fraud], est a spiritu sancto sicut ab infundente naturale lumen et movente ad intelligendum et loquendum veritatem... >> >> "Every true thing, by whomever spoken, comes from the holy spirit as bestowing the natural light and moving us to understanding and speaking the truth” (Aquinas, ST IaIIae.q.109.a1ad1) >> >> So is it true? >> >>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:12 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> I began writing this book right after Obama/Clinton/KillerKoh murdered Ghadafy and laughed about it. But towards the end of this book I deal with Syria in the Chapter against Responsibility to Protect/Humanitarian Intervention and in the Conclusion. Achcar is a sick joke and a demented fraud! Fab. >>> Clarity Press, Atlanta 2013, 212 pp., $ 18.95. >>> >>> This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened and what went wrong between the United States and Libya from a perspective of a professor of international law. Among the U.S. Empire’s serving international law professors, Francis A. Boyle is an exception among American international law professors, because he offers his legal advice for government of states that are the victims of Western aggression. He has been opposing unlawful policies of states with his only available “weapon”: international law. He could be described as a defender of the downtrodden of the current international system such as the Palestinian people, Libya under Muammar al Gaddafi and others. Beyond that, he has contributed a great deal to the advancement of international law by, inter alia, drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. >>> Since the early 1980s, Boyle visited Libya numerous times and advised the government on international legal cases. He convinced Gaddafi to sue the United States and the United Kingdom at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the Lockerbie bombing allegations. Before this lawsuit was filed, U. S. President Bush Sr. ordered the Sixth Fleet off the coast of Libya to carry out hostile maneuvers in preparation of another illegal attack as was done by his predecessor Ronald Reagan. After Boyle filed these two lawsuits at the ICJ, Bush ordered U. S. warships to stand down. Boyle also tried to support Gaddafi during the U.S./NATO war of 2011 but to no avail. Gaddafi fought and died for Libya, defending his country against the West like his hero Omar Mukthar had done against the Italian colonizers. >>> >>> Francis A. Boyle is a leading American expert in international law that he teaches at the University of Illinois, Campaign. He is also an author of numerous books on American foreign policy, international law and the foundations of the world order. He served on the Board of Director of Amnesty International and as an adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993. This delegation was headed by the highly respected Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi. Boyle was not responsible, however, for Yasser Arafat’s decision to secretly negotiate with Israel in Oslo behind the back of the Palestinian delegation. He bears thus no responsibility for the resulting “Declaration of Principles”, for which the Palestinian people have been paying since then a terrible price. >>> >>> In his book, Francis A. Boyle relates the history of U. S. foreign policy towards Libya, starting with the Reagan administration in 1981 till the U.S./NATO war that led to the overthrow of Col. Gaddafi. Before going into nuts and bolts, Boyle criticizes the American political establishment and explains why U. S. domestic and international policies are in a malaise. The reason, as stated by him, lies in the mindset of the American political and intellectual establishment that according to him is strongly influenced by Thomas Hobbes. Although he admits to differences between the views of American lawyers and those of political scientists, the author submits “that both groups essentially endorse [a] Hobbist perspective on the world of international relations and domestic affairs”. This commonly shared Hobbism “has become responsible for many of the major crimes, blunders, and tragedies of contemporary American foreign policy decision-making”. (p.19) >>> >>> According to Boyle, Hobbesian power politics contradicts several of the most fundamental principles upon which the United States is apparently founded: the inalienable rights of the individual, peoples’ self-determination, the sovereign equality and independence of states, non-interventionism, respect of international law and organizations, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Although various U. S. administrations “tried to live up to these principles” the net result has been a “counterproductive creation of a series of unmitigated disasters” (p. 30) for the U. S. One of the greatest mistakes has been the subversion of the entire post-World War II international and legal order that the United States helped to construct in 1945. I think that the Bush warriors and the U. S. power elite do not think that their policy was a disaster. >>> >>> The author accuses in particular the Reagan and the Bush junior administrations’ policy of double standards. They often “resort to legalistic subterfuges by pleading principles of international law in order to disguise their realpolitik foreign policy decisions”. (p. 31) Although the rules of international law are not a blueprint for reaching all policy objectives, they can still serve as a guideline for decision-makers what they should avoid running into troubles, writes Boyle. >>> >>> Boyle’s critic of the American foreign policy towards Libya is based on his functionalist, Fullerian, and anti-Hobbesian framework of analysis for international law and organizations. In two chapters, the author describes the series of conflicts between the U. S. and the Libyan leader over the Gulf of Sidra and the allegations of international terrorism made by the U. S. against Libya during the Reagan presidency. Chapter four contains a description of the Lockerbie bombing allegations and the legal dispute by the U. S. and the United Kingdom against Libya over it. The policies of the subsequent U. S. administrations, beginning with Bush senior, Clinton to Bush junior, which aimed at the control of the Libyan oil fields, so Boyle. >>> >>> In 2011, according to Boyle, the neoliberal Obama administration took over Libya’s oil fields under the pretext of the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, illustrating its fraudulent manipulation of international humanitarian law. He debunks not only R2P but also its predecessor “humanitarian intervention” (Serbia) with the standard criteria of international law as an excuse to overthrow unpopular governments in order to replace them with imported U. S. puppets like in Afghanistan or in Kosovo. He argues that all the wars started under a humanitarian pretext resulted in humanitarian catastrophes. >>> >>> The author doubts whether the U. S. and NATO will be able to establish a puppet regime in Libya because of “significant residual support for Gaddafi and his Green Revolution” and of the highly volatile political and military situation throughout the country as the killing of the U. S. ambassador in Benghazi has shown. “All the U. S./NATO really care about in Libya is its continued free flow of oil from Eastern Libya organized around Benghazi.” (p.155) The rest of the country can disintegrate into the Sahara as far as the U. S./NATO is concerned. According to Boyle, Obama uses the R2P doctrine in order to destabilize Syria and overthrow the Assad Family regime. >>> >>> Boyle even goes so far as claiming that R2P has been used by powerful Western countries to justify wanton military aggression and military occupation of weak countries in the South. This schema is based on racism because the aggression was carried out by “white” people from the North against “colored” people from the South. History teaches us indeed that great powers do not use military force for humanitarian reasons. The U. S. and its major allies have been behind most of the humanitarian atrocities in the modern world. (p. 156) Humanitarian interventionism is only used in a mere “propagandistic sense”. (p. 159) >>> >>> The World Court has already rejected R2P/Humanitarian Intervention twice and so did the UN General assembly. Western powers claimed “that there existed supposed principles of customary international law that permitted them to engage in the unilateral threat and use of military force against other states, peoples, and regions of the world. In particular, these alleged ‘principles’ included the so-called doctrines of intervention, protection, and self-help.” (p. 161) These supposed doctrines (R2P/Humanitarian Intervention) were unanimously rejected by the International Court of Justice. The author counters R2P with the rule of law. This doctrine is for him nothing more than “imperialist propaganda for wars of aggression in the name of human rights”. (p. 166) For Boyle, the U. S. and NATO form “the Axis of Genocide”. In this chapter, Boyle gave a damning indictment of the R2P doctrine. Some human rights organizations around the world should rethink their policy of being cheerleaders of a doctrine that serves not the people but only Western neo-imperialism. >>> >>> A detailed analysis on the 2011 U. S./NATO war on Libya is given in chapter six. Since 9/11 the U. S. and its allies in Europe and the Middle East have engaged in “unlimited imperialism” and a “global warfare” against Arab, Muslim and African states in order to steal their hydrocarbon resources. (p. 176) “Libya 2011 was a Nuremberg crime against peace perpetrated by the United States, France and Britain that was aided and abetted and facilitated by the NATO Alliance and its other member states.” (p. 185) Accomplice in this international crime was the Arab League. >>> >>> The book is a scathing critic of modern Western imperialist policy, especially in its Islamophobic and racist version against the Muslim world that might constitute the only force that has the potential to defeat Western unlimited imperialism. >>> >>> >>> >>> Francis 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, February 21, 2018 12:59 PM >>> To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >>> Subject: FW: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order >>> >>> Achcar is a warmongering lunatic who supported Obama exterminating 50,000+ Libyans and 500,000+ Syrians, He has no credibility on anything. If you want to waste your time reading him, go ahead. 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) >>> >>> Feed: Peace Palace Library » International law news >>> Posted on: Thursday, May 16, 2013 8:00 AM >>> Author: Ingrid Kost >>> Subject: Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order >>> >>> This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened and what went wrong between the United States and Libya from a perspective of a professor of international law. >>> >>> By Ludwig Watzal >>> >>> Source: MWC News >>> >>> >>> View article... >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>> https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce372dc2c989b4aa5629308d5796c6fac%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548428987579836&sdata=UpjkuUGxNDQL7%2FZQmBmqKPgP4swq80EBREWXoDG46KU%3D&reserved=0 >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce372dc2c989b4aa5629308d5796c6fac%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548428987579836&sdata=UpjkuUGxNDQL7%2FZQmBmqKPgP4swq80EBREWXoDG46KU%3D&reserved=0 > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 22 01:21:19 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 01:21:19 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM To: Peace Discuss Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From galliher at illinois.edu Thu Feb 22 02:25:05 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:25:05 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Come on, Karen. The important question is, What is the government we’re responsible for doing in Syria? Not whether Gilbert is among the blessed. I think he’s helpful on that point. > On Feb 21, 2018, at 1:47 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. > Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars > By Alex Lantier > 13 August 2013 > In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” > Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” > In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” > Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. > From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. > While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” > He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” > Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. > Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” > Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. > He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” > Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. > In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. > In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. > In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” > Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . > In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” > Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From naiman at justforeignpolicy.org Thu Feb 22 02:38:51 2018 From: naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (Robert Naiman) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:38:51 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: "However, for such a settlement to happen, an international agreement is necessary first. In the Moscow-sponsored Sochi talks, only Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Syrian regime, and a discredited part of the Syrian opposition did participate." Discredited among whom? Who elected Gilbert Achcar to decide who is a "discredited part of the Syrian opposition"? On what basis has he decided that are they "discredited"? Because they are willing to engage with the Syrian government? Is that the working definition of "discredited" for Gilbert Achcar? What is the moral or legal basis for that? Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 Senate: Wield the Constitution to Stop Saudi Starvation of Yemeni Children https://www.change.org/p/senate-invoke-war-powers-to-stop-saudi-from-starving-yemeni-kids On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 8:25 PM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > Come on, Karen. The important question is, What is the government we’re > responsible for doing in Syria? > > Not whether Gilbert is among the blessed. I think he’s helpful on that > point. > > > > On Feb 21, 2018, at 1:47 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > > > Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any > other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been > blown. > > Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars > > By Alex Lantier > > 13 August 2013 > > In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” > credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New > Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive > Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” > > Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within > the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a > leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed > were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war > propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, > Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been > grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in > the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of > Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” > > In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the > “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of > ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not > waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I > really stood for.” > > Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political > support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be > allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly > supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and > French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the > deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. > > From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in > promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war > constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In > March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution > 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the > war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime > from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. > > While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the > resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But > given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have > resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence > of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can > reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles > oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” > > He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, > but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that > had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called > NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy > advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad > coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different > attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” > > Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of > imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil > fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and > wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge > regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main > proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. > > Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan > opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s > April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising > to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, > is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons > to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi > turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” > > Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air > strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya > harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal > columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 > sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia > over Kosovo. > > He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an > aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the > air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared > to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance > at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry > they have consistently and insistently requested?” > > Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a > layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of > imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also > as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence > personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to > minimize popular opposition to them. > > In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his > October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the > opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised > Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk > provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm > opposition forces. > > In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC > and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It > led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed > over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. > > In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I > took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was > actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order > to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my > contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” > > Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he > had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article > published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA > reposted the article, including on its English language web site, > International Viewpoint . > > In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the > Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, > Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and > abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee > (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most > prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan > Ghalioun.” > > Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective > record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the > internet. > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 Thu Feb 22 02:44:26 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 02:44:26 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: #yiv5411014567 #yiv5411014567 -- _filtered #yiv5411014567 {panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;} _filtered #yiv5411014567 {font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;} _filtered #yiv5411014567 {panose-1:2 11 10 4 2 1 2 2 2 4;}#yiv5411014567 #yiv5411014567 p.yiv5411014567MsoNormal, #yiv5411014567 li.yiv5411014567MsoNormal, #yiv5411014567 div.yiv5411014567MsoNormal {margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;font-size:12.0pt;}#yiv5411014567 a:link, #yiv5411014567 span.yiv5411014567MsoHyperlink {color:#0563C1;text-decoration:underline;}#yiv5411014567 a:visited, #yiv5411014567 span.yiv5411014567MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:#954F72;text-decoration:underline;}#yiv5411014567 span.yiv5411014567textexposedshow {}#yiv5411014567 span.yiv5411014567EmailStyle18 {color:#1F497D;font-weight:bold;}#yiv5411014567 .yiv5411014567MsoChpDefault {font-size:10.0pt;} _filtered #yiv5411014567 {margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;}#yiv5411014567 div.yiv5411014567WordSection1 {}#yiv5411014567 Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on  how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net]On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM To: Peace Discuss Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas   Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy.  I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran."  Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 22 03:17:04 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 21:17:04 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://chomsky.info/20100525/] > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM > To: Peace Discuss > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > > > > Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. > > > > > I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." > > > > > Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. > > _______________________________________________ > 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 From galliher at illinois.edu Thu Feb 22 03:27:05 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 21:27:05 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <615CB4A0-6F0C-4E92-8DF5-7C47DACD65F5@illinois.edu> An anti-Russian account that names some of the players: . > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:38 PM, Robert Naiman via Peace-discuss wrote: > > "However, for such a settlement to happen, an international agreement is necessary first. In the Moscow-sponsored Sochi talks, only Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Syrian regime, and a discredited part of the Syrian opposition did participate." > > Discredited among whom? Who elected Gilbert Achcar to decide who is a "discredited part of the Syrian opposition"? On what basis has he decided that are they "discredited"? Because they are willing to engage with the Syrian government? Is that the working definition of "discredited" for Gilbert Achcar? What is the moral or legal basis for that? > > Robert Naiman > > > On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 8:25 PM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Come on, Karen. The important question is, What is the government we’re responsible for doing in Syria? > Not whether Gilbert is among the blessed. I think he’s helpful on that point. > > > > On Feb 21, 2018, at 1:47 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown. > > Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars > > By Alex Lantier > > 13 August 2013 > > In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.” > > Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.” > > In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.” > > Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. > > From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi. > > While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.” > > He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” > > Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi. > > Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.” > > Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. > > He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?” > > Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them. > > In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces. > > In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. > > In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).” > > Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint . > > In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.” > > Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet. > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Peace-discuss mailing list > > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 22 04:02:06 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 04:02:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: <53AE7350-4885-408B-9EDB-76B486515B68@gmail.com> <7C98BAFE-E669-4501-9C2B-C5AEF30CBEF9@gmail.com> Message-ID: Exactly, we should demand our government withdraw. Is that what Achtar is suggesting? One might get that impression, but at what cost? Why should the Russians or Syrians believe the US given the number of times we have broken cease fires. The suggestion that the US will leave Syria if Iran leaves, is nonsense, and what about Israel will they leave Syria if Iran leaves? I see this as a ploy to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran. > On Feb 21, 2018, at 16:31, C G Estabrook wrote: > > I think we should pay attention to what he says, rather than who (we think) he is. We should demand our government withdraw. > > “...Moscow and Assad proclaim that they are willing to have international observers monitoring new elections. They may be betting on Assad’s victory in free presidential elections today in Syria, because the Assad regime is one bloc whereas the opposition is very much divided. The fact that the opposition is in shambles may give the Assad regime enough confidence to undergo such a scenario. > > "However, for such a settlement to happen, an international agreement is necessary first. In the Moscow-sponsored Sochi talks, only Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Syrian regime, and a discredited part of the Syrian opposition did participate. In the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, the United States and Europe are involved. I can’t see the US accepting an agreement that does not stipulate the withdrawal of all foreign troops that entered Syria after 2011. In other words, the US would say, “We are willing to leave Syria provided that Iranian forces leave it as well.” That’s why the US is currently sticking to the region east of the Euphrates. Washington’s message to the Russians is: “We will leave Syria to you if you get it rid of the Iranians, otherwise we won’t.” > > —CGE > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 5:24 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> Here is my thoughts on the Achcar article, thank you Carl for posting it on FB: >> >> Achcar is and was a war supporter. In this article he refers to the US having boots on the ground fighting ISIS since 2014. The US was not fighting ISIS, we were supporting them. Also, the US was in Syria covertly likely going back to 2011, when Achcar refers to Russians and Iranian involvement predating US. >> >> Any assumption that Moscow will agree with the US to insist on Iran leaving Syria is nonsense. The Russians are smarter than that, they know they need to support Iran vs. the US. Syria isn't just about the oil, its about containment of Russia, and Iran is what comes after destruction of Syria. So no matter what this guy has to say, he is obfuscating US imperialism. >> The US wants partition, and plans to occupy permanently. >> >> His suggestions and prognostications are an attempt to make the US look good, and Russia, Iran look bad when they don’t compromise and give in to our demands. >> >> >>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 13:58, C G Estabrook wrote: >>> >>> Morgenthau’s character was undoubtedly noble, but nobility doesn’t bestow infallibility (nor inversely, as perhaps in the case of Achcar), as I’m sure you admit. >>> >>> An example: the recent presidential election raised the question of American exceptionalism. Was one candidate (DJT) veering toward isolationism? Or would he (like the other - HRC) proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism? >>> >>> Can the matter be decided by determining which candidate was more noble? >>> >>> Aristotle asked, Would you rather have your sandals made by a good person, or a good cobbler? >>> >>> ==================================================== >>> >>> The [isolationism/exceptionalism] debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality ‘realist' school of international relations. Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a 'transcendent purpose' that it 'must defend and promote' throughout the world: 'the establishment of equality in freedom.’ The competing concepts ‘exceptionalism' and ‘isolationism' both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application... >>> >>> The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others. >>> >>> Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages. >>> >>> At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion — overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery. >>> >>> To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its “transcendent purpose.” >>> >>> But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.” >>> >>> In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively. >>> >>> Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere “blunders” or “innocent naivete” can be charged with “moral equivalence” — of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny. >>> >>> Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers. >>> >>> Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure” — as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses. >>> >>> The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there — even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.” >>> >>> Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens. >>> >>> One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder. >>> >>> That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.” >>> >>> Those still deluded by “abuse of reality” — that is, fact — might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” >>> >>> The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response. >>> >>> She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports. >>> >>> Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book “A Dangerous Place,” he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.” >>> >>> And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt — as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years. >>> >>> But that is mere abuse of reality. >>> >>> It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons. >>> >>> Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion and thereby reinforce our basis for further “abuses of reality.” >>> =================================================== >>> > From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Feb 22 04:10:14 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 22:10:14 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: <53AE7350-4885-408B-9EDB-76B486515B68@gmail.com> <7C98BAFE-E669-4501-9C2B-C5AEF30CBEF9@gmail.com> Message-ID: ================================ Noam Chomsky on Syria: October 27, 2016 Q: Is there any hope for working with Russia on this? NC: There may be some hopes. In the case of Syria, there's simply no alternative (no realistic alternative, short of destroying Syria) to having some kind of transitional government with Assad certainly involved, maybe in power. It's ugly, but there's no alternative. My good friend [Gilbert Achcar] has an article in The Nation [that] says -- although he wrote it right before the cease-fire -- that the cease-fire will never last, because as long as Assad remains in power, the opposition will continue to fight until the death of Syria. So he says we have to do something to get Assad out of power, but that can't be done. That's the problem. ================================= Gilbert Achcar on Syria: September 19, 2016 “The Syrian Truce and Obama’s Exit Strategy.” Without an agreement for Assad to step down and allow a transition toward a pluralist government, no cease-fire stands a chance. As almost everybody can now tell, the new cease-fire agreement on Syria is doomed to break down, as would any such agreement that does not settle the core political problem of the crisis. Of course, even a respite that doesn’t last is better than nothing at all (although the truce has so far been very disappointing with regard to humanitarian relief). But short of an agenda that includes a comprehensive agreement for Bashar al-Assad to step down and allow a transition toward a pluralist government, no cease-fire stands a chance in that war-torn country. Were the mainstream opposition to accept a diktat for a sellout, it would be rapidly outflanked by the fighters, for whom anything less than the Assad clan’s departure from power would be tantamount to accepting that hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed, and still more maimed, and huge swaths of the country turned to rubble, for nothing. For a truce to lead to the kind of compromise that underpins a genuine peace, there must be strong incentives among all parties to the conflict. The lack of such incentives is precisely why the Oslo Accords, signed in Washington 23 years ago, failed to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict: Those accords were predicated on the postponement of decisions on all crucial issues, including the fate of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. The result was predictable: Israel actually consolidated its grip over the West Bank in the aftermath of the accords, provoking increased Palestinian resentment and an eventual collapse of the “peace process.” Without a balance of military forces on the ground in Syria, which would compel the Assad regime and its Iranian backers to seek real compromise, a genuine political settlement is not possible. We have nearly the opposite: A Syrian regime, emboldened by Iranian and Russian support, that boasts about reconquering the whole country. As testified by the key protagonists, the issue of creating such a balance of forces—especially by providing the Syrian opposition with anti-aircraft missiles capable of limiting the Syrian regime’s use of air power, its main weapon of large-scale destruction—has been the principal bone of contention on Syria within the Obama administration since 2012. The fact that this issue is still divisive is attested by the Pentagon’s reluctance to greenlight the agreement negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry. It was reported (leaked, that is) that US military planners had no confidence that the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers would comply with a cease-fire geared toward compromise. In addition, the Pentagon is unwilling to share military data on the Syrian opposition with its Russian counterpart for fear it might be used to further bombard the former. And they are right to be suspicious. Kerry has already deserved a place in history as an outstanding embodiment of diplomatic naïveté, i.e. his belief in the ability to solve conflicts through negotiations that are not backed by action on the ground (what was aptly described in the Financial Times as his “boundless confidence in his ability to solve problems if he can only bring the concerned parties together in one room”), and his amazingly wishful thinking with regard to Moscow’s willingness to help the United States out of the Syrian predicament. It is most unlikely, however, that Barack Obama—who can hardly be suspected of ingenuousness—shares his secretary of state’s idiosyncrasies. The US president has stubbornly refused to change his attitude on Syria over the past four years despite overwhelming evidence that it was allowing the conflict to degenerate into a catastrophe for the Syrian people and one more major disaster for US foreign policy, after Afghanistan and Iraq. In so doing, Obama has only managed to convince a major part of Arab public opinion that the United States, which invaded Iraq and bombed Libya for incomparably less than what has been unfolding in Syria over the past five years, cares only about oil-rich countries. If anyone in the region had any illusion about the democratic and humanitarian pretexts invoked by Washington in previous wars, they have lost them completely by now. As Anthony Cordesman, one of the most astute observers of the military-political situation in the Middle East, recently observed, the US president is now entirely focused on an “exit strategy”—not an exit from the Syrian crisis, though, but his own exit from office. [Gilbert AchcarGilbert Achcar is a professor at SOAS, University of London. His many books include The Clash of Barbarisms (2002, 2006); Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky (2007); The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2010); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013); and, most recently, Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016).] ### > On Feb 21, 2018, at 10:02 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Exactly, we should demand our government withdraw. Is that what Achtar is suggesting? One might get that impression, but at what cost? Why should the Russians or Syrians believe the US given the number of times we have broken cease fires. The suggestion that the US will leave Syria if Iran leaves, is nonsense, and what about Israel will they leave Syria if Iran leaves? I see this as a ploy to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran. > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 16:31, C G Estabrook wrote: >> >> I think we should pay attention to what he says, rather than who (we think) he is. We should demand our government withdraw. >> >> “...Moscow and Assad proclaim that they are willing to have international observers monitoring new elections. They may be betting on Assad’s victory in free presidential elections today in Syria, because the Assad regime is one bloc whereas the opposition is very much divided. The fact that the opposition is in shambles may give the Assad regime enough confidence to undergo such a scenario. >> >> "However, for such a settlement to happen, an international agreement is necessary first. In the Moscow-sponsored Sochi talks, only Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Syrian regime, and a discredited part of the Syrian opposition did participate. In the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, the United States and Europe are involved. I can’t see the US accepting an agreement that does not stipulate the withdrawal of all foreign troops that entered Syria after 2011. In other words, the US would say, “We are willing to leave Syria provided that Iranian forces leave it as well.” That’s why the US is currently sticking to the region east of the Euphrates. Washington’s message to the Russians is: “We will leave Syria to you if you get it rid of the Iranians, otherwise we won’t.” >> >> —CGE >> >>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 5:24 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> Here is my thoughts on the Achcar article, thank you Carl for posting it on FB: >>> >>> Achcar is and was a war supporter. In this article he refers to the US having boots on the ground fighting ISIS since 2014. The US was not fighting ISIS, we were supporting them. Also, the US was in Syria covertly likely going back to 2011, when Achcar refers to Russians and Iranian involvement predating US. >>> >>> Any assumption that Moscow will agree with the US to insist on Iran leaving Syria is nonsense. The Russians are smarter than that, they know they need to support Iran vs. the US. Syria isn't just about the oil, its about containment of Russia, and Iran is what comes after destruction of Syria. So no matter what this guy has to say, he is obfuscating US imperialism. >>> The US wants partition, and plans to occupy permanently. >>> >>> His suggestions and prognostications are an attempt to make the US look good, and Russia, Iran look bad when they don’t compromise and give in to our demands. >>> >>> >>>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 13:58, C G Estabrook wrote: >>>> >>>> Morgenthau’s character was undoubtedly noble, but nobility doesn’t bestow infallibility (nor inversely, as perhaps in the case of Achcar), as I’m sure you admit. >>>> >>>> An example: the recent presidential election raised the question of American exceptionalism. Was one candidate (DJT) veering toward isolationism? Or would he (like the other - HRC) proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism? >>>> >>>> Can the matter be decided by determining which candidate was more noble? >>>> >>>> Aristotle asked, Would you rather have your sandals made by a good person, or a good cobbler? >>>> >>>> ==================================================== >>>> >>>> The [isolationism/exceptionalism] debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality ‘realist' school of international relations. Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a 'transcendent purpose' that it 'must defend and promote' throughout the world: 'the establishment of equality in freedom.’ The competing concepts ‘exceptionalism' and ‘isolationism' both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application... >>>> >>>> The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others. >>>> >>>> Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages. >>>> >>>> At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion — overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery. >>>> >>>> To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its “transcendent purpose.” >>>> >>>> But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.” >>>> >>>> In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively. >>>> >>>> Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere “blunders” or “innocent naivete” can be charged with “moral equivalence” — of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny. >>>> >>>> Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers. >>>> >>>> Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure” — as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses. >>>> >>>> The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there — even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.” >>>> >>>> Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens. >>>> >>>> One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder. >>>> >>>> That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.” >>>> >>>> Those still deluded by “abuse of reality” — that is, fact — might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” >>>> >>>> The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response. >>>> >>>> She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports. >>>> >>>> Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book “A Dangerous Place,” he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.” >>>> >>>> And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt — as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years. >>>> >>>> But that is mere abuse of reality. >>>> >>>> It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons. >>>> >>>> Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion and thereby reinforce our basis for further “abuses of reality.” >>>> =================================================== >>>> >> > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 22 04:27:10 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 04:27:10 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: <53AE7350-4885-408B-9EDB-76B486515B68@gmail.com> <7C98BAFE-E669-4501-9C2B-C5AEF30CBEF9@gmail.com> Message-ID: His reference to “the opposition” is misleading, it implies they are “Syrians” fighting Assad. They are ISIS, the Free Syrian Army, and Al Nusra, or whatever they call themselves now. Achtar attempts to legitimize them by referring to them as the “opposition.” Because Chomsky refers to him as “my friend” Achtar has credibility? Regime change is the goal of the US, so obvious when Achtar wrote the below, as quoted by Chomsky. And, as Chomsky says, “that can’t be done.” So now Achtar wants to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran, by suggesting the US will leave if the Iranians leave. The US has only since Trump came into power, admitted being in Syria, as if they went in due to what, the Iranians? And, what about Israel, will they leave? > On Feb 21, 2018, at 20:10, C G Estabrook wrote: > > ================================ > Noam Chomsky on Syria: October 27, 2016 > > Q: Is there any hope for working with Russia on this? > > NC: There may be some hopes. In the case of Syria, there's simply no alternative (no realistic alternative, short of destroying Syria) to having some kind of transitional government with Assad certainly involved, maybe in power. It's ugly, but there's no alternative. My good friend [Gilbert Achcar] has an article in The Nation [that] says -- although he wrote it right before the cease-fire -- that the cease-fire will never last, because as long as Assad remains in power, the opposition will continue to fight until the death of Syria. So he says we have to do something to get Assad out of power, but that can't be done. That's the problem. > > ================================= > Gilbert Achcar on Syria: September 19, 2016 > > “The Syrian Truce and Obama’s Exit Strategy.” Without an agreement for Assad to step down and allow a transition toward a pluralist government, no cease-fire stands a chance. > > As almost everybody can now tell, the new cease-fire agreement on Syria is doomed to break down, as would any such agreement that does not settle the core political problem of the crisis. Of course, even a respite that doesn’t last is better than nothing at all (although the truce has so far been very disappointing with regard to humanitarian relief). > > But short of an agenda that includes a comprehensive agreement for Bashar al-Assad to step down and allow a transition toward a pluralist government, no cease-fire stands a chance in that war-torn country. Were the mainstream opposition to accept a diktat for a sellout, it would be rapidly outflanked by the fighters, for whom anything less than the Assad clan’s departure from power would be tantamount to accepting that hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed, and still more maimed, and huge swaths of the country turned to rubble, for nothing. > > For a truce to lead to the kind of compromise that underpins a genuine peace, there must be strong incentives among all parties to the conflict. The lack of such incentives is precisely why the Oslo Accords, signed in Washington 23 years ago, failed to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict: Those accords were predicated on the postponement of decisions on all crucial issues, including the fate of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. The result was predictable: Israel actually consolidated its grip over the West Bank in the aftermath of the accords, provoking increased Palestinian resentment and an eventual collapse of the “peace process.” > > Without a balance of military forces on the ground in Syria, which would compel the Assad regime and its Iranian backers to seek real compromise, a genuine political settlement is not possible. We have nearly the opposite: A Syrian regime, emboldened by Iranian and Russian support, that boasts about reconquering the whole country. As testified by the key protagonists, the issue of creating such a balance of forces—especially by providing the Syrian opposition with anti-aircraft missiles capable of limiting the Syrian regime’s use of air power, its main weapon of large-scale destruction—has been the principal bone of contention on Syria within the Obama administration since 2012. The fact that this issue is still divisive is attested by the Pentagon’s reluctance to greenlight the agreement negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry. > > It was reported (leaked, that is) that US military planners had no confidence that the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers would comply with a cease-fire geared toward compromise. In addition, the Pentagon is unwilling to share military data on the Syrian opposition with its Russian counterpart for fear it might be used to further bombard the former. And they are right to be suspicious. Kerry has already deserved a place in history as an outstanding embodiment of diplomatic naïveté, i.e. his belief in the ability to solve conflicts through negotiations that are not backed by action on the ground (what was aptly described in the Financial Times as his “boundless confidence in his ability to solve problems if he can only bring the concerned parties together in one room”), and his amazingly wishful thinking with regard to Moscow’s willingness to help the United States out of the Syrian predicament. > > It is most unlikely, however, that Barack Obama—who can hardly be suspected of ingenuousness—shares his secretary of state’s idiosyncrasies. The US president has stubbornly refused to change his attitude on Syria over the past four years despite overwhelming evidence that it was allowing the conflict to degenerate into a catastrophe for the Syrian people and one more major disaster for US foreign policy, after Afghanistan and Iraq. In so doing, Obama has only managed to convince a major part of Arab public opinion that the United States, which invaded Iraq and bombed Libya for incomparably less than what has been unfolding in Syria over the past five years, cares only about oil-rich countries. If anyone in the region had any illusion about the democratic and humanitarian pretexts invoked by Washington in previous wars, they have lost them completely by now. As Anthony Cordesman, one of the most astute observers of the military-political situation in the Middle East, recently observed, the US president is now entirely focused on an “exit strategy”—not an exit from the Syrian crisis, though, but his own exit from office. > > [Gilbert AchcarGilbert Achcar is a professor at SOAS, University of London. His many books include The Clash of Barbarisms (2002, 2006); Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky (2007); The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2010); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013); and, most recently, Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016).] > > ### > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 10:02 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> Exactly, we should demand our government withdraw. Is that what Achtar is suggesting? One might get that impression, but at what cost? Why should the Russians or Syrians believe the US given the number of times we have broken cease fires. The suggestion that the US will leave Syria if Iran leaves, is nonsense, and what about Israel will they leave Syria if Iran leaves? I see this as a ploy to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran. >> >> >>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 16:31, C G Estabrook wrote: >>> >>> I think we should pay attention to what he says, rather than who (we think) he is. We should demand our government withdraw. >>> >>> “...Moscow and Assad proclaim that they are willing to have international observers monitoring new elections. They may be betting on Assad’s victory in free presidential elections today in Syria, because the Assad regime is one bloc whereas the opposition is very much divided. The fact that the opposition is in shambles may give the Assad regime enough confidence to undergo such a scenario. >>> >>> "However, for such a settlement to happen, an international agreement is necessary first. In the Moscow-sponsored Sochi talks, only Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Syrian regime, and a discredited part of the Syrian opposition did participate. In the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, the United States and Europe are involved. I can’t see the US accepting an agreement that does not stipulate the withdrawal of all foreign troops that entered Syria after 2011. In other words, the US would say, “We are willing to leave Syria provided that Iranian forces leave it as well.” That’s why the US is currently sticking to the region east of the Euphrates. Washington’s message to the Russians is: “We will leave Syria to you if you get it rid of the Iranians, otherwise we won’t.” >>> >>> —CGE >>> >>>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 5:24 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >>>> >>>> Here is my thoughts on the Achcar article, thank you Carl for posting it on FB: >>>> >>>> Achcar is and was a war supporter. In this article he refers to the US having boots on the ground fighting ISIS since 2014. The US was not fighting ISIS, we were supporting them. Also, the US was in Syria covertly likely going back to 2011, when Achcar refers to Russians and Iranian involvement predating US. >>>> >>>> Any assumption that Moscow will agree with the US to insist on Iran leaving Syria is nonsense. The Russians are smarter than that, they know they need to support Iran vs. the US. Syria isn't just about the oil, its about containment of Russia, and Iran is what comes after destruction of Syria. So no matter what this guy has to say, he is obfuscating US imperialism. >>>> The US wants partition, and plans to occupy permanently. >>>> >>>> His suggestions and prognostications are an attempt to make the US look good, and Russia, Iran look bad when they don’t compromise and give in to our demands. >>>> >>>> >>>>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 13:58, C G Estabrook wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Morgenthau’s character was undoubtedly noble, but nobility doesn’t bestow infallibility (nor inversely, as perhaps in the case of Achcar), as I’m sure you admit. >>>>> >>>>> An example: the recent presidential election raised the question of American exceptionalism. Was one candidate (DJT) veering toward isolationism? Or would he (like the other - HRC) proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism? >>>>> >>>>> Can the matter be decided by determining which candidate was more noble? >>>>> >>>>> Aristotle asked, Would you rather have your sandals made by a good person, or a good cobbler? >>>>> >>>>> ==================================================== >>>>> >>>>> The [isolationism/exceptionalism] debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality ‘realist' school of international relations. Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a 'transcendent purpose' that it 'must defend and promote' throughout the world: 'the establishment of equality in freedom.’ The competing concepts ‘exceptionalism' and ‘isolationism' both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application... >>>>> >>>>> The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others. >>>>> >>>>> Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages. >>>>> >>>>> At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion — overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery. >>>>> >>>>> To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its “transcendent purpose.” >>>>> >>>>> But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.” >>>>> >>>>> In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively. >>>>> >>>>> Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere “blunders” or “innocent naivete” can be charged with “moral equivalence” — of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny. >>>>> >>>>> Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers. >>>>> >>>>> Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure” — as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses. >>>>> >>>>> The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there — even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.” >>>>> >>>>> Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens. >>>>> >>>>> One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder. >>>>> >>>>> That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.” >>>>> >>>>> Those still deluded by “abuse of reality” — that is, fact — might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” >>>>> >>>>> The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response. >>>>> >>>>> She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports. >>>>> >>>>> Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book “A Dangerous Place,” he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.” >>>>> >>>>> And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt — as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years. >>>>> >>>>> But that is mere abuse of reality. >>>>> >>>>> It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons. >>>>> >>>>> Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion and thereby reinforce our basis for further “abuses of reality.” >>>>> =================================================== >>>>> >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cc4ff84ec76e44779fb3808d579aa2eaa%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548694179294063&sdata=Q9nfPQyZlYFQQtJWBS7fndztou1m1z0RuwMoby32OYw%3D&reserved=0 From r-szoke at illinois.edu Thu Feb 22 04:42:29 2018 From: r-szoke at illinois.edu (Szoke, Ron) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 04:42:29 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Next Tuesday: Fundraiser for Courage Connection! References: Message-ID: <160B58E9-986A-4C9B-981F-AC9DCDEBF023@illinois.edu> Begin forwarded message: From: CU Indivisible > Subject: Next Tuesday: Fundraiser for Courage Connection! Date: February 21, 2018 at 6:48:12 PM CST To: Ron Szoke > We're hosting a fundraiser to benefit Courage Connection Tuesday February 27th at 7pm. We'll be showing the documentary "Jackson" at the Art Theater here in Champaign. We're very excited to be able to raise money for this incredibly deserving local organization, that provides services and shelter to victims of domestic abuse. The film Jackson documents the struggles women in Mississippi face in trying to access abortion services, and puts into context the broader battle over reproductive rights in America today. We wanted to bring this film to our community to remind ourselves why it is we're fighting. Though things are comparatively good here in IL on this issue, these rights can so easily be taken away. We want this event to be a success and we need YOUR help in getting the word out. You can do that a couple different ways: Buy a ticket (100% of proceeds go to Courage Connection) and tell your friends why you bought one. Explain why this issue is important to you, and why they should join you at the event. You can purchase a ticket from the event page itself: https://www.facebook.com/events/396962477410883/ or from the Eventbrite website: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jackson-the-documentary-screening-and-fundraiser-tickets-42410751700 Please also share the information about this event! We're hoping to have lots of people show up to learn about abortion rights and support this important local group. -- [https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0ByEqgY0fDID4czdmTnVKWlppNFE&revid=0ByEqgY0fDID4aGdicllLVkJ5VWdsL3RrQnZFeHNTekEydExRPQ] If you no longer wish to receive these emails, please reply with "unsubscribe" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From naiman at justforeignpolicy.org Thu Feb 22 05:42:29 2018 From: naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (Robert Naiman) Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2018 23:42:29 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: <53AE7350-4885-408B-9EDB-76B486515B68@gmail.com> <7C98BAFE-E669-4501-9C2B-C5AEF30CBEF9@gmail.com> Message-ID: Some Syrians are indeed opposed to the Syrian government, and that is surely normal, why not? But why should it be considered Satanic for Syrians opposed to the Syrian government to be willing to engage with the Syrian government? Palestinians who are willing to engage with the Israeli government are considered exemplary. Why should Syrians who are opposed to the Syrian government who are willing to engage with the Syrian government be *ipso facto* "discredited"? Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 Senate: Wield the Constitution to Stop Saudi Starvation of Yemeni Children https://www.change.org/p/senate-invoke-war-powers-to-stop-saudi-from-starving-yemeni-kids On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 10:27 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > His reference to “the opposition” is misleading, it implies they are > “Syrians” fighting Assad. They are ISIS, the Free Syrian Army, and Al > Nusra, or whatever they call themselves now. Achtar attempts to legitimize > them by referring to them as the “opposition.” > > Because Chomsky refers to him as “my friend” Achtar has credibility? > Regime change is the goal of the US, so obvious when Achtar wrote the > below, as quoted by Chomsky. And, as Chomsky says, “that can’t be done.” > > So now Achtar wants to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran, by > suggesting the US will leave if the Iranians leave. The US has only since > Trump came into power, admitted being in Syria, as if they went in due to > what, the Iranians? And, what about Israel, will they leave? > > > > > > On Feb 21, 2018, at 20:10, C G Estabrook wrote: > > > > ================================ > > Noam Chomsky on Syria: October 27, 2016 > > > > Q: Is there any hope for working with Russia on this? > > > > NC: There may be some hopes. In the case of Syria, there's simply no > alternative (no realistic alternative, short of destroying Syria) to having > some kind of transitional government with Assad certainly involved, maybe > in power. It's ugly, but there's no alternative. My good friend [Gilbert > Achcar] has an article in The Nation [that] says -- although he wrote it > right before the cease-fire -- that the cease-fire will never last, because > as long as Assad remains in power, the opposition will continue to fight > until the death of Syria. So he says we have to do something to get Assad > out of power, but that can't be done. That's the problem. > > > > ================================= > > Gilbert Achcar on Syria: September 19, 2016 > > > > “The Syrian Truce and Obama’s Exit Strategy.” Without an agreement for > Assad to step down and allow a transition toward a pluralist government, no > cease-fire stands a chance. > > > > As almost everybody can now tell, the new cease-fire agreement on Syria > is doomed to break down, as would any such agreement that does not settle > the core political problem of the crisis. Of course, even a respite that > doesn’t last is better than nothing at all (although the truce has so far > been very disappointing with regard to humanitarian relief). > > > > But short of an agenda that includes a comprehensive agreement for > Bashar al-Assad to step down and allow a transition toward a pluralist > government, no cease-fire stands a chance in that war-torn country. Were > the mainstream opposition to accept a diktat for a sellout, it would be > rapidly outflanked by the fighters, for whom anything less than the Assad > clan’s departure from power would be tantamount to accepting that hundreds > of thousands of Syrians were killed, and still more maimed, and huge swaths > of the country turned to rubble, for nothing. > > > > For a truce to lead to the kind of compromise that underpins a genuine > peace, there must be strong incentives among all parties to the conflict. > The lack of such incentives is precisely why the Oslo Accords, signed in > Washington 23 years ago, failed to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict: > Those accords were predicated on the postponement of decisions on all > crucial issues, including the fate of Israeli settlements in Palestinian > territories occupied in 1967. The result was predictable: Israel actually > consolidated its grip over the West Bank in the aftermath of the accords, > provoking increased Palestinian resentment and an eventual collapse of the > “peace process.” > > > > Without a balance of military forces on the ground in Syria, which would > compel the Assad regime and its Iranian backers to seek real compromise, a > genuine political settlement is not possible. We have nearly the opposite: > A Syrian regime, emboldened by Iranian and Russian support, that boasts > about reconquering the whole country. As testified by the key protagonists, > the issue of creating such a balance of forces—especially by providing the > Syrian opposition with anti-aircraft missiles capable of limiting the > Syrian regime’s use of air power, its main weapon of large-scale > destruction—has been the principal bone of contention on Syria within the > Obama administration since 2012. The fact that this issue is still divisive > is attested by the Pentagon’s reluctance to greenlight the agreement > negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry. > > > > It was reported (leaked, that is) that US military planners had no > confidence that the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers would > comply with a cease-fire geared toward compromise. In addition, the > Pentagon is unwilling to share military data on the Syrian opposition with > its Russian counterpart for fear it might be used to further bombard the > former. And they are right to be suspicious. Kerry has already deserved a > place in history as an outstanding embodiment of diplomatic naïveté, i.e. > his belief in the ability to solve conflicts through negotiations that are > not backed by action on the ground (what was aptly described in the > Financial Times as his “boundless confidence in his ability to solve > problems if he can only bring the concerned parties together in one room”), > and his amazingly wishful thinking with regard to Moscow’s willingness to > help the United States out of the Syrian predicament. > > > > It is most unlikely, however, that Barack Obama—who can hardly be > suspected of ingenuousness—shares his secretary of state’s idiosyncrasies. > The US president has stubbornly refused to change his attitude on Syria > over the past four years despite overwhelming evidence that it was allowing > the conflict to degenerate into a catastrophe for the Syrian people and one > more major disaster for US foreign policy, after Afghanistan and Iraq. In > so doing, Obama has only managed to convince a major part of Arab public > opinion that the United States, which invaded Iraq and bombed Libya for > incomparably less than what has been unfolding in Syria over the past five > years, cares only about oil-rich countries. If anyone in the region had any > illusion about the democratic and humanitarian pretexts invoked by > Washington in previous wars, they have lost them completely by now. As > Anthony Cordesman, one of the most astute observers of the > military-political situation in the Middle East, recently observed, the US > president is now entirely focused on an “exit strategy”—not an exit from > the Syrian crisis, though, but his own exit from office. > > > > [Gilbert AchcarGilbert Achcar is a professor at SOAS, University of > London. His many books include The Clash of Barbarisms (2002, 2006); > Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy, co-authored with > Noam Chomsky (2007); The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of > Narratives (2010); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab > Uprising (2013); and, most recently, Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab > Uprising (2016).] > > > > ### > > > > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 10:02 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > >> > >> Exactly, we should demand our government withdraw. Is that what Achtar > is suggesting? One might get that impression, but at what cost? Why should > the Russians or Syrians believe the US given the number of times we have > broken cease fires. The suggestion that the US will leave Syria if Iran > leaves, is nonsense, and what about Israel will they leave Syria if Iran > leaves? I see this as a ploy to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran. > >> > >> > >>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 16:31, C G Estabrook > wrote: > >>> > >>> I think we should pay attention to what he says, rather than who (we > think) he is. We should demand our government withdraw. > >>> > >>> “...Moscow and Assad proclaim that they are willing to have > international observers monitoring new elections. They may be betting on > Assad’s victory in free presidential elections today in Syria, because the > Assad regime is one bloc whereas the opposition is very much divided. The > fact that the opposition is in shambles may give the Assad regime enough > confidence to undergo such a scenario. > >>> > >>> "However, for such a settlement to happen, an international agreement > is necessary first. In the Moscow-sponsored Sochi talks, only Russia, > Turkey, Iran, the Syrian regime, and a discredited part of the Syrian > opposition did participate. In the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, the United > States and Europe are involved. I can’t see the US accepting an agreement > that does not stipulate the withdrawal of all foreign troops that entered > Syria after 2011. In other words, the US would say, “We are willing to > leave Syria provided that Iranian forces leave it as well.” That’s why the > US is currently sticking to the region east of the Euphrates. Washington’s > message to the Russians is: “We will leave Syria to you if you get it rid > of the Iranians, otherwise we won’t.” > >>> > >>> —CGE > >>> > >>>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 5:24 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > >>>> > >>>> Here is my thoughts on the Achcar article, thank you Carl for posting > it on FB: > >>>> > >>>> Achcar is and was a war supporter. In this article he refers to the > US having boots on the ground fighting ISIS since 2014. The US was not > fighting ISIS, we were supporting them. Also, the US was in Syria covertly > likely going back to 2011, when Achcar refers to Russians and Iranian > involvement predating US. > >>>> > >>>> Any assumption that Moscow will agree with the US to insist on Iran > leaving Syria is nonsense. The Russians are smarter than that, they know > they need to support Iran vs. the US. Syria isn't just about the oil, its > about containment of Russia, and Iran is what comes after destruction of > Syria. So no matter what this guy has to say, he is obfuscating US > imperialism. > >>>> The US wants partition, and plans to occupy permanently. > >>>> > >>>> His suggestions and prognostications are an attempt to make the US > look good, and Russia, Iran look bad when they don’t compromise and give in > to our demands. > >>>> > >>>> > >>>>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 13:58, C G Estabrook > wrote: > >>>>> > >>>>> Morgenthau’s character was undoubtedly noble, but nobility doesn’t > bestow infallibility (nor inversely, as perhaps in the case of Achcar), as > I’m sure you admit. > >>>>> > >>>>> An example: the recent presidential election raised the question of > American exceptionalism. Was one candidate (DJT) veering toward > isolationism? Or would he (like the other - HRC) proudly carry the banner > of exceptionalism? > >>>>> > >>>>> Can the matter be decided by determining which candidate was more > noble? > >>>>> > >>>>> Aristotle asked, Would you rather have your sandals made by a good > person, or a good cobbler? > >>>>> > >>>>> ============================== protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchomsky.info% > 2F20131006%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cf2739b20638e457a82f408d579764ae9% > 7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548471317799072&sdata= > KudQisT0h0vdUemPzh8a0lsDYE%2B%2BPypbMYFA9%2BBqG40%3D&reserved=0 > >====================== > >>>>> > >>>>> The [isolationism/exceptionalism] debate is narrower than it may > seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was > expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant > no-sentimentality ‘realist' school of international relations. Throughout > his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and > present in that it has a 'transcendent purpose' that it 'must defend and > promote' throughout the world: 'the establishment of equality in freedom.’ > The competing concepts ‘exceptionalism' and ‘isolationism' both accept this > doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its > application... > >>>>> > >>>>> The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer > afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by > others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the > New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near > exclusive hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own > interests in our devotion to the needs of others. > >>>>> > >>>>> Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages. > >>>>> > >>>>> At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, > bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly > seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and > subversion — overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious > dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international > agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery. > >>>>> > >>>>> To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A > serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its > “transcendent purpose.” > >>>>> > >>>>> But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error > of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It > is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual > historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.” > >>>>> > >>>>> In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally > understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that > is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it > can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith > is adopted reflexively. > >>>>> > >>>>> Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s > U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect > criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere > “blunders” or “innocent naivete” can be charged with “moral equivalence” — > of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the > current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect > power from scrutiny. > >>>>> > >>>>> Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the > journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the > significance of history for policy makers. > >>>>> > >>>>> Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political > persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating > intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free > rein to operate devoid of political pressure” — as we carried out our > mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three > countries and leaving millions of corpses. > >>>>> > >>>>> The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because > of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there — even as he > escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, > the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.” > >>>>> > >>>>> Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans > adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But > the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens. > >>>>> > >>>>> One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of > our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating > on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper > issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder. > >>>>> > >>>>> That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American > strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign > service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American > forces.” > >>>>> > >>>>> Those still deluded by “abuse of reality” — that is, fact — might > recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of > aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those > burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials > sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s > judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only > from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated > evil of the whole.” > >>>>> > >>>>> The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha > Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In “A Problem from > Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Power writes about the crimes of > others and our inadequate response. > >>>>> > >>>>> She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven > decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East > Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports. > >>>>> > >>>>> Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the > time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book “A Dangerous > Place,” he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. “utterly > ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, > because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.” > >>>>> > >>>>> And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to > the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military > equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and > continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal > actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a > halt — as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years. > >>>>> > >>>>> But that is mere abuse of reality. > >>>>> > >>>>> It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right > to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and > reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons. > >>>>> > >>>>> Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the > religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion > and thereby reinforce our basis for further “abuses of reality.” > >>>>> =================================================== > >>>>> > >>> > >> > >> _______________________________________________ > >> Peace-discuss mailing list > >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > >> https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url= > https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo% > 2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cc4ff84ec76e44779fb3808d579aa2eaa% > 7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548694179294063&sdata= > Q9nfPQyZlYFQQtJWBS7fndztou1m1z0RuwMoby32OYw%3D&reserved=0 > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 22 12:37:05 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 12:37:05 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars In-Reply-To: References: <53AE7350-4885-408B-9EDB-76B486515B68@gmail.com> <7C98BAFE-E669-4501-9C2B-C5AEF30CBEF9@gmail.com> Message-ID: Yes, and it is the Syrian people who should decide whether Assad stays or goes. It’s not a decision to be made by the US, or our proxy’s. On Feb 21, 2018, at 21:42, Robert Naiman > wrote: Some Syrians are indeed opposed to the Syrian government, and that is surely normal, why not? But why should it be considered Satanic for Syrians opposed to the Syrian government to be willing to engage with the Syrian government? Palestinians who are willing to engage with the Israeli government are considered exemplary. Why should Syrians who are opposed to the Syrian government who are willing to engage with the Syrian government be ipso facto "discredited"? Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1 Senate: Wield the Constitution to Stop Saudi Starvation of Yemeni Children https://www.change.org/p/senate-invoke-war-powers-to-stop-saudi-from-starving-yemeni-kids On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 10:27 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: His reference to “the opposition” is misleading, it implies they are “Syrians” fighting Assad. They are ISIS, the Free Syrian Army, and Al Nusra, or whatever they call themselves now. Achtar attempts to legitimize them by referring to them as the “opposition.” Because Chomsky refers to him as “my friend” Achtar has credibility? Regime change is the goal of the US, so obvious when Achtar wrote the below, as quoted by Chomsky. And, as Chomsky says, “that can’t be done.” So now Achtar wants to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran, by suggesting the US will leave if the Iranians leave. The US has only since Trump came into power, admitted being in Syria, as if they went in due to what, the Iranians? And, what about Israel, will they leave? > On Feb 21, 2018, at 20:10, C G Estabrook > wrote: > > ================================ > Noam Chomsky on Syria: October 27, 2016 > > Q: Is there any hope for working with Russia on this? > > NC: There may be some hopes. In the case of Syria, there's simply no alternative (no realistic alternative, short of destroying Syria) to having some kind of transitional government with Assad certainly involved, maybe in power. It's ugly, but there's no alternative. My good friend [Gilbert Achcar] has an article in The Nation [that] says -- although he wrote it right before the cease-fire -- that the cease-fire will never last, because as long as Assad remains in power, the opposition will continue to fight until the death of Syria. So he says we have to do something to get Assad out of power, but that can't be done. That's the problem. > > ================================= > Gilbert Achcar on Syria: September 19, 2016 > > “The Syrian Truce and Obama’s Exit Strategy.” Without an agreement for Assad to step down and allow a transition toward a pluralist government, no cease-fire stands a chance. > > As almost everybody can now tell, the new cease-fire agreement on Syria is doomed to break down, as would any such agreement that does not settle the core political problem of the crisis. Of course, even a respite that doesn’t last is better than nothing at all (although the truce has so far been very disappointing with regard to humanitarian relief). > > But short of an agenda that includes a comprehensive agreement for Bashar al-Assad to step down and allow a transition toward a pluralist government, no cease-fire stands a chance in that war-torn country. Were the mainstream opposition to accept a diktat for a sellout, it would be rapidly outflanked by the fighters, for whom anything less than the Assad clan’s departure from power would be tantamount to accepting that hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed, and still more maimed, and huge swaths of the country turned to rubble, for nothing. > > For a truce to lead to the kind of compromise that underpins a genuine peace, there must be strong incentives among all parties to the conflict. The lack of such incentives is precisely why the Oslo Accords, signed in Washington 23 years ago, failed to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict: Those accords were predicated on the postponement of decisions on all crucial issues, including the fate of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. The result was predictable: Israel actually consolidated its grip over the West Bank in the aftermath of the accords, provoking increased Palestinian resentment and an eventual collapse of the “peace process.” > > Without a balance of military forces on the ground in Syria, which would compel the Assad regime and its Iranian backers to seek real compromise, a genuine political settlement is not possible. We have nearly the opposite: A Syrian regime, emboldened by Iranian and Russian support, that boasts about reconquering the whole country. As testified by the key protagonists, the issue of creating such a balance of forces—especially by providing the Syrian opposition with anti-aircraft missiles capable of limiting the Syrian regime’s use of air power, its main weapon of large-scale destruction—has been the principal bone of contention on Syria within the Obama administration since 2012. The fact that this issue is still divisive is attested by the Pentagon’s reluctance to greenlight the agreement negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry. > > It was reported (leaked, that is) that US military planners had no confidence that the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers would comply with a cease-fire geared toward compromise. In addition, the Pentagon is unwilling to share military data on the Syrian opposition with its Russian counterpart for fear it might be used to further bombard the former. And they are right to be suspicious. Kerry has already deserved a place in history as an outstanding embodiment of diplomatic naïveté, i.e. his belief in the ability to solve conflicts through negotiations that are not backed by action on the ground (what was aptly described in the Financial Times as his “boundless confidence in his ability to solve problems if he can only bring the concerned parties together in one room”), and his amazingly wishful thinking with regard to Moscow’s willingness to help the United States out of the Syrian predicament. > > It is most unlikely, however, that Barack Obama—who can hardly be suspected of ingenuousness—shares his secretary of state’s idiosyncrasies. The US president has stubbornly refused to change his attitude on Syria over the past four years despite overwhelming evidence that it was allowing the conflict to degenerate into a catastrophe for the Syrian people and one more major disaster for US foreign policy, after Afghanistan and Iraq. In so doing, Obama has only managed to convince a major part of Arab public opinion that the United States, which invaded Iraq and bombed Libya for incomparably less than what has been unfolding in Syria over the past five years, cares only about oil-rich countries. If anyone in the region had any illusion about the democratic and humanitarian pretexts invoked by Washington in previous wars, they have lost them completely by now. As Anthony Cordesman, one of the most astute observers of the military-political situation in the Middle East, recently observed, the US president is now entirely focused on an “exit strategy”—not an exit from the Syrian crisis, though, but his own exit from office. > > [Gilbert AchcarGilbert Achcar is a professor at SOAS, University of London. His many books include The Clash of Barbarisms (2002, 2006); Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky (2007); The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2010); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013); and, most recently, Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016).] > > ### > > >> On Feb 21, 2018, at 10:02 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: >> >> Exactly, we should demand our government withdraw. Is that what Achtar is suggesting? One might get that impression, but at what cost? Why should the Russians or Syrians believe the US given the number of times we have broken cease fires. The suggestion that the US will leave Syria if Iran leaves, is nonsense, and what about Israel will they leave Syria if Iran leaves? I see this as a ploy to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran. >> >> >>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 16:31, C G Estabrook > wrote: >>> >>> I think we should pay attention to what he says, rather than who (we think) he is. We should demand our government withdraw. >>> >>> “...Moscow and Assad proclaim that they are willing to have international observers monitoring new elections. They may be betting on Assad’s victory in free presidential elections today in Syria, because the Assad regime is one bloc whereas the opposition is very much divided. The fact that the opposition is in shambles may give the Assad regime enough confidence to undergo such a scenario. >>> >>> "However, for such a settlement to happen, an international agreement is necessary first. In the Moscow-sponsored Sochi talks, only Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Syrian regime, and a discredited part of the Syrian opposition did participate. In the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, the United States and Europe are involved. I can’t see the US accepting an agreement that does not stipulate the withdrawal of all foreign troops that entered Syria after 2011. In other words, the US would say, “We are willing to leave Syria provided that Iranian forces leave it as well.” That’s why the US is currently sticking to the region east of the Euphrates. Washington’s message to the Russians is: “We will leave Syria to you if you get it rid of the Iranians, otherwise we won’t.” >>> >>> —CGE >>> >>>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 5:24 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>>> >>>> Here is my thoughts on the Achcar article, thank you Carl for posting it on FB: >>>> >>>> Achcar is and was a war supporter. In this article he refers to the US having boots on the ground fighting ISIS since 2014. The US was not fighting ISIS, we were supporting them. Also, the US was in Syria covertly likely going back to 2011, when Achcar refers to Russians and Iranian involvement predating US. >>>> >>>> Any assumption that Moscow will agree with the US to insist on Iran leaving Syria is nonsense. The Russians are smarter than that, they know they need to support Iran vs. the US. Syria isn't just about the oil, its about containment of Russia, and Iran is what comes after destruction of Syria. So no matter what this guy has to say, he is obfuscating US imperialism. >>>> The US wants partition, and plans to occupy permanently. >>>> >>>> His suggestions and prognostications are an attempt to make the US look good, and Russia, Iran look bad when they don’t compromise and give in to our demands. >>>> >>>> >>>>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 13:58, C G Estabrook > wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Morgenthau’s character was undoubtedly noble, but nobility doesn’t bestow infallibility (nor inversely, as perhaps in the case of Achcar), as I’m sure you admit. >>>>> >>>>> An example: the recent presidential election raised the question of American exceptionalism. Was one candidate (DJT) veering toward isolationism? Or would he (like the other - HRC) proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism? >>>>> >>>>> Can the matter be decided by determining which candidate was more noble? >>>>> >>>>> Aristotle asked, Would you rather have your sandals made by a good person, or a good cobbler? >>>>> >>>>> ==================================================== >>>>> >>>>> The [isolationism/exceptionalism] debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality ‘realist' school of international relations. Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a 'transcendent purpose' that it 'must defend and promote' throughout the world: 'the establishment of equality in freedom.’ The competing concepts ‘exceptionalism' and ‘isolationism' both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application... >>>>> >>>>> The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others. >>>>> >>>>> Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages. >>>>> >>>>> At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion — overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery. >>>>> >>>>> To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its “transcendent purpose.” >>>>> >>>>> But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.” >>>>> >>>>> In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively. >>>>> >>>>> Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere “blunders” or “innocent naivete” can be charged with “moral equivalence” — of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny. >>>>> >>>>> Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers. >>>>> >>>>> Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure” — as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses. >>>>> >>>>> The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there — even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.” >>>>> >>>>> Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens. >>>>> >>>>> One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder. >>>>> >>>>> That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.” >>>>> >>>>> Those still deluded by “abuse of reality” — that is, fact — might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” >>>>> >>>>> The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response. >>>>> >>>>> She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports. >>>>> >>>>> Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book “A Dangerous Place,” he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.” >>>>> >>>>> And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt — as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years. >>>>> >>>>> But that is mere abuse of reality. >>>>> >>>>> It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons. >>>>> >>>>> Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion and thereby reinforce our basis for further “abuses of reality.” >>>>> =================================================== >>>>> >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cc4ff84ec76e44779fb3808d579aa2eaa%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636548694179294063&sdata=Q9nfPQyZlYFQQtJWBS7fndztou1m1z0RuwMoby32OYw%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 22 12:53:22 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 12:53:22 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Taliban's Call for Talks/The Real News Message-ID: What's Behind the Taliban's Call for Talks? The Taliban's letter, which urged the American people to pressure Trump to begin peace talks, is "more of a reflection of internal Taliban politics than a very meaningful and sincere request to talk," says Thomas Johnson, former advisor to NATO forces in Afghanistan. TRNN ________________________________ biography Thomas H. Johnson is a Research Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, California). He has conducted research and published widely on Afghanistan and South Asia for three decades. In 2009, he served as the Senior Political and Counterinsurgency Advisor to Gen. Jonathan Vance, Commander of Canadian Forces in Afghanistan (Task Force Kandahar). ________________________________ transcript [http://therealnews.com/media/trn_2018-02-01/tjohnson0221afghanistan-240.jpg]AARON MATÉ: It's The Real News. I'm Aaron Maté. Afghanistan is facing one of the bloodiest phases of its more than 16-year war. Three attacks on the capital, Kabul, recently killed over 150 people in just 10 days. The Associated Press reports that Afghan officials are carrying out at least two tracks of back channel talks with the Taliban. Just last week, the Taliban published an open letter urging Americans to pressure President Trump to begin peace talks. This came after President Trump said the U.S. will not negotiate. DONALD TRUMP: When we see what they're doing and the atrocities that they're committing, and killing their own people, and those people are women and children, many many women and children that are totally innocent, it is horrible. There's no talking to the Taliban. We don't want to talk to the Taliban. We're going to finish what we have to finish. What nobody else has been able to finish, we're going to be able to do it. AARON MATÉ: The Pentagon says it has about 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, and there are plans for another 1,000 troops later on this spring, so war is very much on the table. Thomas Johnson is a research professor of national security affairs at the Naval post graduate school in Monterey, California, former advisor to NATO forces in Afghanistan, and the author of Taliban Narratives, the Use and Power of Stories in the Afghanistan Conflict. Welcome, Professor Johnson. Let's start with this recent letter from the Taliban. Over 2,000 words telling the American people that if President Trump continues with his current strategy, it will be more bloodshed along the lines that they've seen for the past 16 years. Your thoughts on this unusual overture we saw from the Taliban last week? THOMAS JOHNSON: I don't give it much credence. I think that it's disingenuous in many respects. The only type of talks that can be successful in Afghanistan in my opinion are Afghan to Afghan. I think that the recent letter is more of a reflection of internal disputes between the Afghans in South Asia, or the Taliban in South Asia and the Talibans that are in their office in Qatar. They're more moderate. I don't give a lot of credence. I mean, Mullah Omar suggested 16 years ago that he would never sincerely negotiate with the U.S. until all foreign forces left the country. The letter suggests that the first thing they want to talk about is foreigners leaving the country. But I think that if you read the letter carefully, I think there's a number of different indications within the letter that seem disingenuous to me. I think it's more reflection of internal Taliban politics than a true letter to the American people. Like I said, I mean the only real negotiations that can ever be meaningful are Afghan to Afghan. Not the Taliban to the United States. AARON MATÉ: You know, on that point about Mullah Omar, there was a piece in the New York Times in December 2016 called "How Peace Between Afghanistan and the Taliban Foundered." It talked about the Taliban's attempt to reach out to the U.S. through a Norwegian diplomat with the blessing directly from Mullah Omar, but that was rebuffed by the Obama administration. I'm wondering, did that possibly signify an evolution in Mullah Omar's position, and a willingness to engage seriously with the U.S.? THOMAS JOHNSON: Well, there has been an evolution. Steve Coll in his brilliant new book, Directorate S, suggests the numerous attempts that were taking place in the 2008 to 2011, 2012 period. But they never resulted in anything sincere. I think a lot of it were for symbolic reasons. I think that the Taliban were playing us to try to get certain people released from Gitmo. That was always a prerequisite of many negotiations. Of course, when we exchanged [Bowe] Bergdahl with five Taliban commanders, I think that's what they were really after. I've never been very impressed with the sincerity of the Taliban asking for negotiations because I've never seen anything sincerely come out of them, so I think the letter is more of a reflection of internal Taliban politics than a very meaningful and sincere request to talk. AARON MATÉ: Let me ask you this because we often forget this part of the history, but it's interesting. Right after 9/11, the Taliban made overtures that it would be willing to consider handing over Bin Laden if the U.S. could present evidence of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Was that sincere? THOMAS JOHNSON: I think that that was. I think that one of the things that many Americans don't realize is that, and it almost sounds like an oxymoron, but when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, there was a whole series of leaders in the Taliban that were considered, at least in relative terms, moderate. Many of these moderate Taliban recognized that Bin Laden was not given over. That it was going to mean the end of their regime. But Mullah Omar looked at it a different way. I think that there were cultural nuances involved in Omar's suggestions that he would never turn over Bin laden. You've got to also remember that Bin Laden, who came to Afghanistan in 2006 actually, after a couple years, swore allegiance to Mullah Omar. But I don't necessarily think that Mullah Omar's position of not turning over Bin Laden was reflective of the entire leadership of the organization. There were moderates that recognized that this was the only way that they were going to survive as an entity. AARON MATÉ: All right. Let's turn back to the present. As I mentioned, you had these waves of bombings in Kabul recently, killing over 150 people, the Taliban responsible for at least the majority of those deaths. What is the current U.S. strategy right now? THOMAS JOHNSON: I'm not sure we have a strategy. If you take a look at recent statistics, we've flown more air sorties, we dropped more bombs in the last six months than we have since 2014. I challenge anyone to tell me, suggest historical insurgency that's been one purely by air power. I don't think that we have a real strategy. I think that we're putting in 15,000 men. That's complimented by maybe 25,000 contractors. But if we think that 15,000 men are going to be able to do what 152,000 NATO soldiers couldn't do over an extended period of time, I think that we're basically kidding ourselves. I think that we're in a holding pattern. I think that Trump's quote strategy was basically an attempt to make sure that the war's not lost under his watch. Now, that's somewhat cynical, but I just don't see what 15,000 soldiers are going to be able to do that 152,000 NATO soldiers could not do over an extended period of time. This over reliance on air power I find very disturbing, because like I said, insurgencies, especially rural insurgencies, are not won by air power. They're won by people on the ground, in the villages, making the insurgence irrelevant. You don't make insurgents irrelevant by dropping bombs. AARON MATÉ: What signs are you picking up from the U.S. military and officials in the government, and their sense of how it's going there? You recently had this controversy where the inspector general for Afghan reconstruction accused the Pentagon of censoring the publication of vital data on the progress, or lack thereof, of U.S. forces there. THOMAS JOHNSON: Well let me tell you three key indicators that I think that we should all understand. In November of last year, the New York Times published an article that suggested that from now on, all Afghan national defense and security force casualties would be classified. The Pentagon went along with this. Now, the special ... The inspector general for Afghan reconstruction a couple of weeks ago put out a report. They couldn't even get the number of districts that were leaning to or were under the control of the Taliban. The day after they released the report, the Pentagon came back and said that "Oh, it was mislabeled. It wasn't really classified." The BBC that day had published a notion that around 75% of the Afghan districts were either leaning towards the Taliban, or were under their control. Now, I think that's an overstatement, I think it's more between 45 and 50, but the mere fact that the United States was classifying information on casualties and information on the number of districts under the control of the Taliban -- which everybody admits the Taliban control more land now than they have since 2001 -- is very telling. The other thing that I think is very telling is that we've lost over 2400 people in Afghanistan. That's killed in action. The casualty, the actual terrible casualties that we've had and the injuries are much, much higher. After spending that type of blood, we've also spend treasure of probably $1 trillion is a good estimate. American convoys can't even travel in the capital city, downtown Kabul. When civilians come in to work at the State Department and the embassy in Kabul, they have to take a five minute helicopter ride over to the embassy compounds. I mean, I think that's a real indicator of the terrible situation that presently exists in Afghanistan, that after all the blood and treasure we've spent, Americans can't even travel in the capital city. AARON MATÉ: Finally, Professor Johnson, for your book, Taliban Narratives: The Use and Power of Stories in the Afghanistan Conflict, you collected different chronicles from Afghan civilians. Their perspective on the state of their country today. What did you learn there about the prospects for peace? The prospects of an internal settlement of that Afghan to Afghan conflict that we began the conversation by talking about? THOMAS JOHNSON: Well let me make a couple points relative to that. If you take a look at the intrastate conflicts since World War II, I would argue that be they wars of national liberation, be they insurgency, be they civil wars, these have basically been wars of narratives supported by stories, because as Matsya Tung said, especially with an insurgency, an insurgency is like fish swimming in water. Of course, the metaphor is the fish are the insurgents and the people are the water. Narratives and stories are very important to be able to get the message across to the people, which are absolutely critical in an insurgency and a counter-insurgency. After seven or eight years of field research, collecting literally thousands of pieces of IO or cy-op artifacts by the Taliban, I found out that they told the story that resonated with the rural Afghan. The tropes might be untrue, but they resonated. The United States and Kabul on the other hand, had no stories, no narratives or stories that resonated. If you consider that we basically occupied the country from 2001 to 2014, you better have a pretty good answer when an Afghan comes up to you and says, "Why are you in the country?" We literally didn't. Let me tell you a story. In 2009, I gave a keynote speech at a conference with many of the leaders of American information operations and psychological operations attending. After I gave my keynote speech, I asked the audience, that was maybe 50 to 75 people in total, "Tell me the three themes that you're going to project this next year." I believe it was 2009. The room went silent. I recognized at that time that this war was not winnable. This war has been winnable militarily, but it could've been won if we could've gained the trust and confidence of the Afghan people. There we've just done a tremendously terrible job. That's what my book basically focuses on. It focuses on how the Taliban, the stories they told the try to win over the population support, and the lack of stories that the United States and even Kabul told, which had a very detrimental impact on this conflict. AARON MATÉ: Thomas Johnson, research professor of national security affairs at the Naval post graduate school. Former advisor to NATO forces in Afghanistan, and the author of Taliban Narratives, the Use and Power of Stories in the Afghanistan Conflict. Professor Johnson, thank you. THOMAS JOHNSON: It's been my pleasure. Thank you very much. AARON MATÉ: Thank you for joining us on The Real News. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Thu Feb 22 14:19:06 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 14:19:06 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> Thanks. Ha-ass is particularly and seamlessly glib, well-facilitated by the film's narrator, Michael Moynihan. It's a remarkable deluge of propaganda with high production values, Riefenstahlian (sp) in its own way. On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎17‎:‎08‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook wrote: [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://chomsky.info/20100525/] > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on  how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM > To: Peace Discuss > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > >  > > Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. > > > > > I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." > > > > > Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Thu Feb 22 14:33:39 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 14:33:39 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: The fact that Haas, and his cohorts are reaching mainstream Americans, those that read magazines like “Time” for news, because they aren’t online, is more disturbing to me than that awful VDO or book he has done. Time is one of those publications available in doctor and dental offices. On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:19, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Thanks. Ha-ass is particularly and seamlessly glib, well-facilitated by the film's narrator, Michael Moynihan. It's a remarkable deluge of propaganda with high production values, Riefenstahlian (sp) in its own way. On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎17‎:‎08‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook > wrote: [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://chomsky.info/20100525/] > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > > Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM > To: Peace Discuss > > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > > > > Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. > > > > > I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." > > > > > Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. > > _______________________________________________ > 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C68b0b8e5a2d04e89a11408d579ff5e4b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549060056353553&sdata=5cyyGhA6Sg9xodvEaU89XVvitEv6C8uZJlpaiSB%2F4sQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Thu Feb 22 14:36:11 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 08:36:11 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: WORLD LABOR HOUR SATURDAY FEBRUARY 24th In-Reply-To: <004c01d3abea$67e1e1f0$37a5a5d0$@comcast.net> References: <004c01d3abea$67e1e1f0$37a5a5d0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: <005701d3abea$8a258cd0$9e70a670$@comcast.net> WORLD LABOR HOUR SATURDAY FEBRUARY 24th 11 AM - 1 PM U.S. Central Time 104.5 FM and webcasting LIVE worldwide at ; www.wrfu.net Tune in to THE WORLD LABOR HOUR this Saturday Feb. 24th from 11AM - 1 PM Central time. The contract bargaining team of the GEO Graduate Employees Union at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign will be discussing their pending strike due to begin Monday Feb. 26th. Tune in after the World Labor Hour for " NOT ANOTHER SPORTS SHOW " - a radical look at sports, with Host Fellow Worker Neil Parthun. WRFU - Radio Free Urbana - Listener supported corporate free radio -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 22 14:49:09 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 14:49:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I have not wasted my time on Haas either. But right now there is a propaganda push for war against Iran from the usual sources. I suspect Haas is 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: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 8:34 AM To: David Green Cc: Peace Discuss Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas The fact that Haas, and his cohorts are reaching mainstream Americans, those that read magazines like “Time” for news, because they aren’t online, is more disturbing to me than that awful VDO or book he has done. Time is one of those publications available in doctor and dental offices. On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:19, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Thanks. Ha-ass is particularly and seamlessly glib, well-facilitated by the film's narrator, Michael Moynihan. It's a remarkable deluge of propaganda with high production values, Riefenstahlian (sp) in its own way. On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎17‎:‎08‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook > wrote: [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://chomsky.info/20100525/] > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > > Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM > To: Peace Discuss > > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > > > > Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. > > > > > I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." > > > > > Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. > > _______________________________________________ > 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C68b0b8e5a2d04e89a11408d579ff5e4b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549060056353553&sdata=5cyyGhA6Sg9xodvEaU89XVvitEv6C8uZJlpaiSB%2F4sQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 22 15:03:16 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 15:03:16 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Absolutely, hence his line in the Time article referring to the Korean threat of nuclear war, and the potential one from Iran, is a definite sign that Haas, as President of the CFR and his colleagues are part of it. The CFR comprises about 5,000 people, but its the small click in charge, that make the decisions. They represent corporate America, both Kissinger and Bryzinski, came through the CFR. Kissinger began as a student in the “50’s” having written a paper supporting CFR goals. Thus rising through the ranks to a position of power. According to Pepe Escobar Kissinger is a puppet they present to the public, when wishing to provide a veneer of “respectability” as an elder statesman. “Respectability” for the architect of our bombing Cambodia? On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:49, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: I have not wasted my time on Haas either. But right now there is a propaganda push for war against Iran from the usual sources. I suspect Haas is 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: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 8:34 AM To: David Green > Cc: Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas The fact that Haas, and his cohorts are reaching mainstream Americans, those that read magazines like “Time” for news, because they aren’t online, is more disturbing to me than that awful VDO or book he has done. Time is one of those publications available in doctor and dental offices. On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:19, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Thanks. Ha-ass is particularly and seamlessly glib, well-facilitated by the film's narrator, Michael Moynihan. It's a remarkable deluge of propaganda with high production values, Riefenstahlian (sp) in its own way. On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎17‎:‎08‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook > wrote: [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://chomsky.info/20100525/] > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > > Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM > To: Peace Discuss > > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > > > > Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. > > > > > I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." > > > > > Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. > > _______________________________________________ > 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C68b0b8e5a2d04e89a11408d579ff5e4b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549060056353553&sdata=5cyyGhA6Sg9xodvEaU89XVvitEv6C8uZJlpaiSB%2F4sQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 22 15:07:29 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 15:07:29 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Yes well as I said before I deliberately went through the exact same PHD Program at Harvard that produced Kissinger and Brzezinski before me. They gave me Kissinger’s Old Office at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. So I don’t waste my time reading petty warmongers like Ackar and Haas. 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: Thursday, February 22, 2018 9:03 AM To: Boyle, Francis A Cc: David Green ; Peace Discuss Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas Absolutely, hence his line in the Time article referring to the Korean threat of nuclear war, and the potential one from Iran, is a definite sign that Haas, as President of the CFR and his colleagues are part of it. The CFR comprises about 5,000 people, but its the small click in charge, that make the decisions. They represent corporate America, both Kissinger and Bryzinski, came through the CFR. Kissinger began as a student in the “50’s” having written a paper supporting CFR goals. Thus rising through the ranks to a position of power. According to Pepe Escobar Kissinger is a puppet they present to the public, when wishing to provide a veneer of “respectability” as an elder statesman. “Respectability” for the architect of our bombing Cambodia? On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:49, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: I have not wasted my time on Haas either. But right now there is a propaganda push for war against Iran from the usual sources. I suspect Haas is 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: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 8:34 AM To: David Green > Cc: Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas The fact that Haas, and his cohorts are reaching mainstream Americans, those that read magazines like “Time” for news, because they aren’t online, is more disturbing to me than that awful VDO or book he has done. Time is one of those publications available in doctor and dental offices. On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:19, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Thanks. Ha-ass is particularly and seamlessly glib, well-facilitated by the film's narrator, Michael Moynihan. It's a remarkable deluge of propaganda with high production values, Riefenstahlian (sp) in its own way. On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎17‎:‎08‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook > wrote: [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://chomsky.info/20100525/] > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > > Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM > To: Peace Discuss > > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > > > > Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. > > > > > I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." > > > > > Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. > > _______________________________________________ > 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C68b0b8e5a2d04e89a11408d579ff5e4b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549060056353553&sdata=5cyyGhA6Sg9xodvEaU89XVvitEv6C8uZJlpaiSB%2F4sQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Thu Feb 22 15:15:44 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 09:15:44 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <28134A4B-EF09-4D1C-B402-E890D7AD6983@gmail.com> Maybe, if we saved all this time by not reading and discussing people like Haass [sic] and Achcar, we should open a club or coffee-shop for discussion. (We could call it 'AWARENESS’?) I have in mind the late British comedian Peter Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in London 1961, said it was to be a satirical venue modelled on "those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War." It certainly seems worthwhile to work against the “propaganda push for war” (which includes the notion that, if we can just get rid of Trump, everything will be ducky). —CGE > On Feb 22, 2018, at 8:49 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I have not wasted my time on Haas either. But right now there is a propaganda push for war against Iran from the usual sources. I suspect Haas is part of it. > > Fab > > > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 8:34 AM > To: David Green > Cc: Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > > The fact that Haas, and his cohorts are reaching mainstream Americans, those that read magazines like “Time” for news, because they aren’t online, is more disturbing to me than that awful VDO or book he has done. > > Time is one of those publications available in doctor and dental offices. > > On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:19, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Thanks. Ha-ass is particularly and seamlessly glib, well-facilitated by the film's narrator, Michael Moynihan. It's a remarkable deluge of propaganda with high production values, Riefenstahlian (sp) in its own way. > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎17‎:‎08‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook wrote: > > > [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] > > ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? > > You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. > > There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. > > In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. > > Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. > > There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. > > Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. > > To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. > > So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. > > What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. > > Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://chomsky.info/20100525/] > > > > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. > > > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > > > Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. Fab. > > > > Francis A. Boyle > > > > > > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM > > To: Peace Discuss > > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > > > > > > > > Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. > > > > > > > > > > I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." > > > > > > > > > > Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Peace-discuss mailing list > > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss > > > __ From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Feb 22 15:32:14 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 15:32:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: <28134A4B-EF09-4D1C-B402-E890D7AD6983@gmail.com> References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> <28134A4B-EF09-4D1C-B402-E890D7AD6983@gmail.com> Message-ID: I’m sure most of us have better things to do than squabble over “who is right and who is wrong” I know I do. End of conversation. > On Feb 22, 2018, at 07:15, C G Estabrook wrote: > > Maybe, if we saved all this time by not reading and discussing people like Haass [sic] and Achcar, we should open a club or coffee-shop for discussion. (We could call it 'AWARENESS’?) > > I have in mind the late British comedian Peter Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in London 1961, said it was to be a satirical venue modelled on "those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War." > > It certainly seems worthwhile to work against the “propaganda push for war” (which includes the notion that, if we can just get rid of Trump, everything will be ducky). > > > > —CGE > > >> On Feb 22, 2018, at 8:49 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> I have not wasted my time on Haas either. But right now there is a propaganda push for war against Iran from the usual sources. I suspect Haas is part of it. >> >> Fab >> >> >> From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 8:34 AM >> To: David Green >> Cc: Peace Discuss >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas >> >> The fact that Haas, and his cohorts are reaching mainstream Americans, those that read magazines like “Time” for news, because they aren’t online, is more disturbing to me than that awful VDO or book he has done. >> >> Time is one of those publications available in doctor and dental offices. >> >> On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:19, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> Thanks. Ha-ass is particularly and seamlessly glib, well-facilitated by the film's narrator, Michael Moynihan. It's a remarkable deluge of propaganda with high production values, Riefenstahlian (sp) in its own way. >> >> On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎17‎:‎08‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook wrote: >> >> >> [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] >> >> ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? >> >> You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. >> >> There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. >> >> In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. >> >> Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. >> >> There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. >> >> Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. >> >> To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. >> >> So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. >> >> What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. >> >> Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchomsky.info%2F20100525%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce79657ff3ebb43c2ef2108d57a0726b9%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549093492179705&sdata=oqRtkkpyvpBIU6t3qA8TGuuIejBqahLffu%2BPmEFu3VI%3D&reserved=0] >> >> >>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. >>> >>> On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> >>> Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. Fab. >>> >>> Francis A. Boyle >>> >>> >>> From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss >>> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM >>> To: Peace Discuss >>> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas >>> >>> >>> >>> Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce79657ff3ebb43c2ef2108d57a0726b9%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549093492179705&sdata=K78EfWP3bY2U5t%2B%2BUu94AaPxE8N2aG9QWFycUzFMugE%3D&reserved=0 >> >>> __ From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 22 16:11:57 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 16:11:57 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: For what it is worth: When I was working on my PHD in political science at Harvard specializing in international relations a la Kissinger I did have and read a subscription to the Council on Foreign Relations publication Foreign Affairs. But eventually CFR and FA were hijacked completely by the NeoCon warmongers. So I dropped my subscription. Total waste of money and time. I do have the Law Library route me a copy. But it is rare that I read anything in there. Just a Gang of NeoCon Warmongers a la Haas. 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, February 22, 2018 9:07 AM To: 'Karen Aram' Cc: David Green ; Peace Discuss Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas Yes well as I said before I deliberately went through the exact same PHD Program at Harvard that produced Kissinger and Brzezinski before me. They gave me Kissinger’s Old Office at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. So I don’t waste my time reading petty warmongers like Ackar and Haas. 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: Thursday, February 22, 2018 9:03 AM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas Absolutely, hence his line in the Time article referring to the Korean threat of nuclear war, and the potential one from Iran, is a definite sign that Haas, as President of the CFR and his colleagues are part of it. The CFR comprises about 5,000 people, but its the small click in charge, that make the decisions. They represent corporate America, both Kissinger and Bryzinski, came through the CFR. Kissinger began as a student in the “50’s” having written a paper supporting CFR goals. Thus rising through the ranks to a position of power. According to Pepe Escobar Kissinger is a puppet they present to the public, when wishing to provide a veneer of “respectability” as an elder statesman. “Respectability” for the architect of our bombing Cambodia? On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:49, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: I have not wasted my time on Haas either. But right now there is a propaganda push for war against Iran from the usual sources. I suspect Haas is 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: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 8:34 AM To: David Green > Cc: Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas The fact that Haas, and his cohorts are reaching mainstream Americans, those that read magazines like “Time” for news, because they aren’t online, is more disturbing to me than that awful VDO or book he has done. Time is one of those publications available in doctor and dental offices. On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:19, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Thanks. Ha-ass is particularly and seamlessly glib, well-facilitated by the film's narrator, Michael Moynihan. It's a remarkable deluge of propaganda with high production values, Riefenstahlian (sp) in its own way. On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎17‎:‎08‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook > wrote: [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://chomsky.info/20100525/] > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > > Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM > To: Peace Discuss > > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > > > > Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. > > > > > I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." > > > > > Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. > > _______________________________________________ > 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C68b0b8e5a2d04e89a11408d579ff5e4b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549060056353553&sdata=5cyyGhA6Sg9xodvEaU89XVvitEv6C8uZJlpaiSB%2F4sQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Thu Feb 22 16:22:44 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 16:22:44 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: And remember I did go to the University of Chicago as an undergrad—the Home of the Straussian NeoCon Warmongers. So I know them when I see them. 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, February 22, 2018 10:12 AM To: 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'David Green' ; 'Peace Discuss' Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas For what it is worth: When I was working on my PHD in political science at Harvard specializing in international relations a la Kissinger I did have and read a subscription to the Council on Foreign Relations publication Foreign Affairs. But eventually CFR and FA were hijacked completely by the NeoCon warmongers. So I dropped my subscription. Total waste of money and time. I do have the Law Library route me a copy. But it is rare that I read anything in there. Just a Gang of NeoCon Warmongers a la Haas. 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, February 22, 2018 9:07 AM To: 'Karen Aram' > Cc: David Green >; Peace Discuss > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas Yes well as I said before I deliberately went through the exact same PHD Program at Harvard that produced Kissinger and Brzezinski before me. They gave me Kissinger’s Old Office at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. So I don’t waste my time reading petty warmongers like Ackar and Haas. 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: Thursday, February 22, 2018 9:03 AM To: Boyle, Francis A > Cc: David Green >; Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas Absolutely, hence his line in the Time article referring to the Korean threat of nuclear war, and the potential one from Iran, is a definite sign that Haas, as President of the CFR and his colleagues are part of it. The CFR comprises about 5,000 people, but its the small click in charge, that make the decisions. They represent corporate America, both Kissinger and Bryzinski, came through the CFR. Kissinger began as a student in the “50’s” having written a paper supporting CFR goals. Thus rising through the ranks to a position of power. According to Pepe Escobar Kissinger is a puppet they present to the public, when wishing to provide a veneer of “respectability” as an elder statesman. “Respectability” for the architect of our bombing Cambodia? On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:49, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: I have not wasted my time on Haas either. But right now there is a propaganda push for war against Iran from the usual sources. I suspect Haas is 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: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 8:34 AM To: David Green > Cc: Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas The fact that Haas, and his cohorts are reaching mainstream Americans, those that read magazines like “Time” for news, because they aren’t online, is more disturbing to me than that awful VDO or book he has done. Time is one of those publications available in doctor and dental offices. On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:19, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Thanks. Ha-ass is particularly and seamlessly glib, well-facilitated by the film's narrator, Michael Moynihan. It's a remarkable deluge of propaganda with high production values, Riefenstahlian (sp) in its own way. On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎17‎:‎08‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook > wrote: [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://chomsky.info/20100525/] > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: > > > Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM > To: Peace Discuss > > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > > > > Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. > > > > > I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." > > > > > Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. > > _______________________________________________ > 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C68b0b8e5a2d04e89a11408d579ff5e4b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549060056353553&sdata=5cyyGhA6Sg9xodvEaU89XVvitEv6C8uZJlpaiSB%2F4sQ%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Thu Feb 22 17:46:10 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 17:46:10 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas In-Reply-To: <28134A4B-EF09-4D1C-B402-E890D7AD6983@gmail.com> References: <734500364.2416141.1519267466349@mail.yahoo.com> <398583982.2649908.1519309146475@mail.yahoo.com> <28134A4B-EF09-4D1C-B402-E890D7AD6983@gmail.com> Message-ID: <247753473.2815341.1519321570150@mail.yahoo.com> Perhaps we could meet and discuss this segment from Monty Python: monty python football | | | | | | | | | | | monty python football monty python guyswith their crazy ideas | | | On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎15‎:‎48‎ ‎AM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook wrote: Maybe, if we saved all this time by not reading and discussing people like Haass [sic] and Achcar, we should open a club or coffee-shop for discussion. (We could call it 'AWARENESS’?) I have in mind the late British comedian Peter Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in London 1961, said it was to be a satirical venue modelled on "those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War." It certainly seems worthwhile to work against the “propaganda push for war” (which includes the notion that, if we can just get rid of Trump, everything will be ducky). —CGE > On Feb 22, 2018, at 8:49 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > I have not wasted my time on Haas either. But right now there is a propaganda push for war against Iran from the usual sources. I suspect Haas is part of it. >  > Fab >  >  > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 8:34 AM > To: David Green > Cc: Peace Discuss > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas >  > The fact that Haas, and his cohorts are reaching mainstream Americans, those that read magazines like “Time” for news, because they aren’t online, is more disturbing to me than that awful VDO or book he has done. >  > Time is one of those publications available in doctor and dental offices. >  > On Feb 22, 2018, at 06:19, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: >  > Thanks. Ha-ass is particularly and seamlessly glib, well-facilitated by the film's narrator, Michael Moynihan. It's a remarkable deluge of propaganda with high production values, Riefenstahlian (sp) in its own way. >  > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎09‎:‎17‎:‎08‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook wrote: >  >  > [It’s ‘Haass,’ I think - HA-ASS…] > > ...Western Europe was part of the Grand Area [that the US planned at the outset of WWII to control after the war], but it was always understood that, sooner or later, Europe might pursue an independent path - perhaps following the Gaullist vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals - and something had to be done to prevent that. Well, a number of things were done. One of them was called NATO. One of its main purposes is to ensure that Europe will be contained within a US-run military alliance. That leads to consequences right up to the moment. This concern that Europe might become independent is sometimes tinged with a certain degree of contempt. Just a few days ago, in fact, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main government foreign relations group, Richard Haass, wrote an article called, “Good-bye Europe.” Europe, he says, is no longer a high-ranking power in international affairs and the reason is it’s not violent enough. It’s refusing to provide troops to control the world at an adequate level so, “Good-bye Europe”. It can sink into oblivion. No one really believes that but that’s in the background. Well, throughout the sort of official version of this whole period is called the Cold War. So what was the Cold War? > > You can look at ideology or you can look at facts, at events. The events of the Cold War are very clear. The primary events of the Cold War were regular intervention and subversion within the Grand Area, always with the justification that we were defending ourselves from what John F. Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to control the world, so that’s why we have to intervene. The Russians did the same thing in their smaller domains. In fact, the Cold War was pretty much a tacit compact between the big super power and the little super power in which each one was pretty much free to do what it wanted in its own domains, Russia in Eastern Europe, the US everywhere else, appealing to the threat of the enemy. Sometimes it got out of control and came very close to terminal nuclear war but, basically, that was the Cold War structure. > > There’s another principle which ought to be borne in mind which is one of the major operative principles in world affairs right up to the present and that is what we might call the Mafia principle. International affairs are run very much like the Mafia. The Godfather does not permit disobedience. That’s actually fairly explicit in the Grand Area planning although not in exactly those words. > > In the Grand Area, the US was to have “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy” while ensuring “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. That’s the Mafia principle. Actually, that’s the Iranian threat. They’re trying to exercise sovereignty and that’s not permitted under the Mafia principle. You can’t permit independence. You must have obedience, and it’s understandable. If somebody is disobedient, maybe some small country or, in the Mafia, some small storekeeper, if they get away with it, others may get the idea that they can do it too and pretty soon you have what Henry Kissinger called a virus that spreads contagion. If a virus might spread contagion, you have to kill the virus and inoculate everyone else by imposing brutal dictatorships and so on. That’s a core part of Cold War history. If you look at it closely, you see that that’s what it amounted to. > > Well meanwhile, the Grand Area was becoming more diversified. In 1950, at the end of the Second World War, the United States literally had half the world’s wealth and unimaginable security and power. By 1970, that had reduced to about 25% of the world’s wealth, which is still colossal but far less than 50%. The industrial countries had reconstructed and decolonization had taken place. The world was becoming what was called tri-polar. The US-centered North American system, Europe based primarily on Germany and France, and the Japan-centered developing Northeast Asian economy. Today [2010] it’s gotten more diversified. The structure is becoming more complex and much harder to control. Latin America, for the first time in its history, is moving towards a degree of independence. There are south/south contacts developing. Thus China now is Brazil’s leading trading partner. Also, China is intruding into the crucial Middle East region and contracting and taking the oil. > > There’s a lot of discussion these days in foreign policy circles about a shift in power in the global system with China and India becoming the new great powers. That’s not accurate. They are growing and developing but they’re very poor countries. They have enormous internal problems. There is, however, a global shift of power: it’s from the global workforce to private capital. There’s an Asian production center with China at the heart of it, largely an assembly plant for the surrounding more advanced Asian countries — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea — which produce sophisticated technology, and parts and components, and send them to China where they’re assembled and sent out to the United States and Europe. US corporations are doing the same thing. They produce high technology exports to China where they are assembled and you buy them at home as an iPod or a computer, something like that. They’re called Chinese exports but that’s quite misleading. You can see it very clearly if you look at the actual statistics. So there’s a lot of concern about the US debt. Well actually, most of the US debt is held by Japan not by China. There’s concern about the trade deficit. We purchase so much more from China than we export to them. Meanwhile the trade deficit with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is going down. The reason is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and so forth are providing materials to China for them to assemble. These are counted in the United States as imports from China, but that’s completely misleading. It’s the Asian production center which is developing and US corporations and regional advanced economies are deeply involved in it. Meanwhile the share of wealth of the workforce globally is declining. In fact, it is declining even faster in China, relative to the economy, than it is elsewhere. So when we look at the world realistically, there is a global shift of power but it’s not a shift to the Chinese/Indian power displacing the United States. It’s a shift from working people all over the world to transnational capital. They are enriching themselves. It’s essentially an old story but it’s taking new forms with the availability of the global workforce. Capital is mobile and labor is not. It has obvious consequences. > > Now all of this is fine for financial institutions, and corporate managers, and CEOs. and retail chains, but it is very harmful to populations. That’s part of the reason for many significant social problems inside the United States. I don’t have time to go into them. > > To get some real insight into global policy one place to look is at Grand Area planning during the Second World War and its implementation. Another place to look is at the end of the Cold War. > > So what happened at the end of the Cold War? In 1989 when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more Cold War. What happened? The president of the United States at the time was George Bush, the first George Bush. and the Bush Administration immediately produced new plans to deal with the post-Cold War system. The plans, in brief, were that everything would remain as it was before but with new pretexts. So there still has to be a huge military force but not to defend ourselves against the Russians, because they are gone. Rather now, it was to defend ourselves — I’m quoting — against the “technological sophistication” of third world powers. You’re not supposed to laugh. That’s what we need a huge military force for and, if you’re a well educated person, following Orwell’s principle, do not laugh. Say, “Yes, we need to defend ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers,” It was necessary to maintain what’s called the “defense industrial base.” That’s a euphemism for high tech industry. High tech industry does not develop simply by free market principles. The corporate system can provide for more consumer choice but high tech develops substantially in the state sector: computers, the Internet, and so on. It’s commonly been done under the pretext of defense. But with the Cold War over, we still have to maintain the “defense industrial base.” That is the state goal: is supporting high tech industry. > > What about intervention forces? Well, the major intervention forces are in the Middle East where the energy resources are. The post-Cold War plans said that we must maintain these intervention forces directed at the Middle East, and then came an interesting phrase: where the serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” The problems, in other words, were not caused by the Russians. So in other words, quietly, we have been lying to you for 50 years but now the clouds have lifted and we have to tell the truth, in part at least. The problem was not the Russians all along. It was what is called radical nationalism, independent nationalism, which is seeking to exercise sovereignty and control their own resources. Now, that’s intolerable all over the world because of the Mafia principle. You can’t allow that. That’s still there so we still need the intervention forces. Same in Latin America, same everywhere even though there are no Russians. > > Well, what about NATO? That’s an interesting case. If you believed anything you read during the Cold War years, you would have concluded that NATO should have disappeared. NATO was supposed to be there to protect Europe from the Russian hordes. OK? No more Russian hordes. What happens to NATO? Well, what happened to NATO was that it expanded. It’s expanding more right now. The details are fairly well known. They’re well studied by good scholarship. Gorbachev, the Russian Premier, made a remarkable concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s quite remarkable. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia twice in a century. Now, he was allowing it to rearm in a military alliance with the United States. Of course there was a quid pro quo. He thought that there was an agreement that NATO would become a more political organization. In fact, he was promised that by the Bush administration. NATO would be more of a political organization and it would not expand “one inch to the East.” That was the phrase that was used. It would not expand into East Germany or certainly not beyond. Well, Gorbachev was na•ve. He accepted that agreement. He didn’t realize that the Bush administration had not put it into writing. It was just a verbal agreement, a gentleman’s agreement, and, if you have any sense, you don’t make gentlemen’s agreements with violent super powers. Gorbachev was quite upset when he discovered that the agreement was worthless. When NATO began immediately to expand into the East, he brought up the agreement and Washington pointed out that there’s nothing on paper, which is true. There was nothing on paper. It was a gentleman’s agreement. NATO expanded to the East. It expanded into East Germany very quickly and, in the Clinton years, it expanded even further into Eastern Europe … later much more. By now, the secretary general of NATO explains that NATO must expand further still. NATO must take responsibility for controlling the entire global energy system, that means pipelines, sea lanes, and sources. Just a few weeks ago, there was an international meeting headed by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton. They issued plans called NATO 2020 and they said NATO must be prepared to operate far beyond its borders without limit, meaning it must become a worldwide US military intervention force. So that’s NATO, no longer there to defend ourselves from the Russians but their real purpose is to control the whole world… [https://chomsky.info/20100525/] > > > > On Feb 21, 2018, at 8:44 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > The "documentary" A World in Disarray is a product of Hass's book, produced by Vice and available on YouTube; Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Robbie Martin recently discussed the neocon coming out of Vice in relation to the film. > > > > On ‎Wednesday‎, ‎February‎ ‎21‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎21‎:‎41‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > > > Haas was at Harvard the same time I was there. He was not going to go anywhere in the academic world. So he took a job with Bush Sr advising him on  how to inflict his genocidal war against Iraq. Another Failed Academic. Fab. > > > > Francis A. Boyle > >  > > > > From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > > Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:18 PM > > To: Peace Discuss > > Subject: [Peace-discuss] Time magazine propaganda, by Richard Haas > > > >  > > > > Another article in Time magazine, was written by Richard Haas, the President of the “Council on Foreign Relations." For anyone not familiar with the CFR, they are "Wall Streets Think Tank," and there is a book by that name, written by Lawrence Shoup. I highly recommend it, for insight into who and what is behind US foreign policy. > > > > > > > > > > I wondered why this person in charge of the most powerful advisory to the White House, would be writing for Time. His article deals with the global elite, Davos and Trump, as if he is not one of the most powerful of the global elite. My eyes glazed over when reading it, until I reached one paragraph in which he recommends the EU and nations within, “moving away from Brussels to govern and control their own borders, etc.” "to meet the existing North Korean nuclear threat and the potential one from Iran." > > > > > > > > > > Such chilling propaganda is promoted by all main stream media, which leads me to believe unless one has access to technology, and even then, its difficult wading through the garbage, to seek truth, there is little hope for real understanding of that which is taking place. > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 Feb 22 18:43:06 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 18:43:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] =?utf-8?q?_Overthrowing_Syrian_govt_is_aim_of_Wes?= =?utf-8?q?t=E2=80=99s_proposed_UN_resolution_=E2=80=93_Lavrov?= Message-ID: © Abdalrhman Ismail / Reuters * 268 * * * * * * The real goal of the West-brokered UN Security Council resolution on Syria is to put the blame on Damascus for everything and provide cover for militants, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. The authors of the resolution on humanitarian issues in Syria, which is to be discussed at the UNSC meeting on Thursday evening, want to “shift the focus" from the peace process "to blaming the Syrian government in order to promote ‘plan B,’ namely overthrowing the regime in violation of resolution 2257,” Lavrov said at a news conference in Belgrade. READ MORE: US stance on East Ghouta shows ‘egregious double standards’ – senior Russian diplomat If the US continues to ignore Russia’s position, Moscow will have no other choice than to infer that the authors of the initiative “again want to put the blame on Damascus and provide cover for militant groups,” the minister added. Russia is also preparing a resolution on humanitarian issues in Syria, amid concerns over the escalating violence in the country. Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, has seen a new wave of clashes between Syrian government forces and both rebel and Islamist factions operating in the area. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 23 02:45:54 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 02:45:54 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham Message-ID: Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report: Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, rabidly anti-working class warmonger. CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” [Image may contain: one or more people, suit and text] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Fri Feb 23 04:05:50 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 04:05:50 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> Graham's biographer has an article on Counterpunch. Graham's evangelical roots were in L.A., which explains why the LA Times of my youth carried such elaborate coverage of his mega-rallies at the Coliseum, 100,000 capacity at that time. Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear | | | | | | | | | | | Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he in... | | | On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎46‎:‎22‎ ‎PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report:  Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, rabidly anti-working class warmonger. CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” _______________________________________________ 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 Fri Feb 23 12:38:03 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 12:38:03 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham In-Reply-To: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> References: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: One might think we’re being cruel to criticize the newly departed, but when we’ve lived with these false images throughout our lives, it’s important to uncloak the truth. The media and establishment present us with false gods. On Feb 22, 2018, at 20:05, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Graham's biographer has an article on Counterpunch. Graham's evangelical roots were in L.A., which explains why the LA Times of my youth carried such elaborate coverage of his mega-rallies at the Coliseum, 100,000 capacity at that time. Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he in... On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎46‎:‎22‎ ‎PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report: Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, rabidly anti-working class warmonger. CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” [Image may contain: one or more people, suit and text] _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C3e9b76b31ef14c3154fa08d57a72ec6b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549556360920771&sdata=lkRQLXBRpbA8rxjtsQgxH1tZaKby2oLLzllQleKJXqc%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Feb 23 13:36:58 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 13:36:58 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham In-Reply-To: References: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: With due respect to you, I have no sympathy for warmongers. I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent and stop that Bush Sr war against Iraq while he was giving his Blessings to Bush exterminating 25,000 civilians in the Iraqi Cities by carpet bombing. I had to get my wife and kids out of town. Let him rot in the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno reserved for warmongers! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 6:38 AM To: David Green Cc: Peace-discuss List Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham One might think we’re being cruel to criticize the newly departed, but when we’ve lived with these false images throughout our lives, it’s important to uncloak the truth. The media and establishment present us with false gods. On Feb 22, 2018, at 20:05, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Graham's biographer has an article on Counterpunch. Graham's evangelical roots were in L.A., which explains why the LA Times of my youth carried such elaborate coverage of his mega-rallies at the Coliseum, 100,000 capacity at that time. Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he in... On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎46‎:‎22‎ ‎PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report: Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, rabidly anti-working class warmonger. CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” [Image may contain: one or more people, suit and text] _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C3e9b76b31ef14c3154fa08d57a72ec6b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549556360920771&sdata=lkRQLXBRpbA8rxjtsQgxH1tZaKby2oLLzllQleKJXqc%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Feb 23 14:01:06 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 14:01:06 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham References: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Before that war began, US Air Force General Horner publicly stated that the bombing campaign of the Iraqi Cities would be modeled on the bombing campaign of Dresden. Bush’s own Episcopal Bishop refused to pray with him at the White House the night Bush commenced that bombing campaign that exterminated 25,000 Iraqis. So Bush asked Billie and Billie was happy to kiss a certain part of Bush’s anatomy and give his Blessings and Imprimatur to this outright genocide in front of the American People on TV: Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching Off To War! The Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno is too good for Billie. 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, February 23, 2018 7:37 AM To: 'Karen Aram' ; David Green Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham With due respect to you, I have no sympathy for warmongers. I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent and stop that Bush Sr war against Iraq while he was giving his Blessings to Bush exterminating 25,000 civilians in the Iraqi Cities by carpet bombing. I had to get my wife and kids out of town. Let him rot in the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno reserved for warmongers! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 6:38 AM To: David Green > Cc: Peace-discuss List > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham One might think we’re being cruel to criticize the newly departed, but when we’ve lived with these false images throughout our lives, it’s important to uncloak the truth. The media and establishment present us with false gods. On Feb 22, 2018, at 20:05, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Graham's biographer has an article on Counterpunch. Graham's evangelical roots were in L.A., which explains why the LA Times of my youth carried such elaborate coverage of his mega-rallies at the Coliseum, 100,000 capacity at that time. Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he in... On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎46‎:‎22‎ ‎PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report: Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, rabidly anti-working class warmonger. CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” [Image may contain: one or more people, suit and text] _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C3e9b76b31ef14c3154fa08d57a72ec6b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549556360920771&sdata=lkRQLXBRpbA8rxjtsQgxH1tZaKby2oLLzllQleKJXqc%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 23 14:21:56 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 14:21:56 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham In-Reply-To: References: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: To be clear, no disrespect taken, I agree one hundred per cent. My comment was made for those on this list who don’t know or may have been blinded by the government and media propaganda over the years. May he and others like him, burn in hell. On Feb 23, 2018, at 06:01, Boyle, Francis A > wrote: Before that war began, US Air Force General Horner publicly stated that the bombing campaign of the Iraqi Cities would be modeled on the bombing campaign of Dresden. Bush’s own Episcopal Bishop refused to pray with him at the White House the night Bush commenced that bombing campaign that exterminated 25,000 Iraqis. So Bush asked Billie and Billie was happy to kiss a certain part of Bush’s anatomy and give his Blessings and Imprimatur to this outright genocide in front of the American People on TV: Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching Off To War! The Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno is too good for Billie. 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, February 23, 2018 7:37 AM To: 'Karen Aram' >; David Green > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham With due respect to you, I have no sympathy for warmongers. I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent and stop that Bush Sr war against Iraq while he was giving his Blessings to Bush exterminating 25,000 civilians in the Iraqi Cities by carpet bombing. I had to get my wife and kids out of town. Let him rot in the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno reserved for warmongers! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 6:38 AM To: David Green > Cc: Peace-discuss List > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham One might think we’re being cruel to criticize the newly departed, but when we’ve lived with these false images throughout our lives, it’s important to uncloak the truth. The media and establishment present us with false gods. On Feb 22, 2018, at 20:05, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Graham's biographer has an article on Counterpunch. Graham's evangelical roots were in L.A., which explains why the LA Times of my youth carried such elaborate coverage of his mega-rallies at the Coliseum, 100,000 capacity at that time. Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he in... On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎46‎:‎22‎ ‎PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report: Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, rabidly anti-working class warmonger. CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” [Image may contain: one or more people, suit and text] _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C3e9b76b31ef14c3154fa08d57a72ec6b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549556360920771&sdata=lkRQLXBRpbA8rxjtsQgxH1tZaKby2oLLzllQleKJXqc%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rwhelbig at gmail.com Fri Feb 23 14:32:40 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 06:32:40 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham In-Reply-To: References: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: FAB, where exactly is this quote that you claim to exist - I rather doubt that anyone would model any bombing campaign on the attack on Dresden, but that is what gets lots of people to suck up to you. I wish that you would have to present information subject to the penalty of perjury and that when it does not measure up to being verified fact that you were hit with a year in jail, the penalty for perjury. Then you might lie less than currently. Here is a pretty well written article about General Horner based on interviews with him - I am sure that none of you like the source since it is not ultra left, but it probably is pretty factually accurate http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Magazine%20Documents/2016/March%202016/0316gulf.pdf Roger On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 6:01 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > *Before that war began, US Air Force General Horner publicly stated that > the bombing campaign of the Iraqi Cities would be modeled on the bombing > campaign of Dresden. Bush’s own Episcopal Bishop refused to pray with him > at the White House the night Bush commenced that bombing campaign that > exterminated 25,000 Iraqis. So Bush asked Billie and Billie was happy to > kiss a certain part of Bush’s anatomy and give his Blessings and Imprimatur > to this outright genocide in front of the American People on TV: Onward > Christian Soldiers, Marching Off To War!* > > *The Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno is too good for Billie. Fab.* > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.* > > *Champaign IL 61820 USA* > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only*) > > > > *From:* Boyle, Francis A > *Sent:* Friday, February 23, 2018 7:37 AM > *To:* 'Karen Aram' ; David Green < > davegreen84 at yahoo.com> > *Cc:* Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> > *Subject:* RE: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham > > > > *With due respect to you, I have no sympathy for warmongers. I was doing > everything humanly possible to prevent and stop that Bush Sr war against > Iraq while he was giving his Blessings to Bush exterminating 25,000 > civilians in the Iraqi Cities by carpet bombing. I had to get my wife and > kids out of town. Let him rot in the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno > reserved for warmongers! Fab.* > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.* > > *Champaign IL 61820 USA* > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only*) > > > > *From:* Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net > ] *On Behalf Of *Karen Aram via > Peace-discuss > *Sent:* Friday, February 23, 2018 6:38 AM > *To:* David Green > *Cc:* Peace-discuss List > *Subject:* Re: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham > > > > One might think we’re being cruel to criticize the newly departed, but > when we’ve lived with these false images throughout our lives, it’s > important to uncloak the truth. The media and establishment present us with > false gods. > > > > > > On Feb 22, 2018, at 20:05, David Green via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > > > Graham's biographer has an article on Counterpunch. Graham's evangelical > roots were in L.A., which explains why the LA Times of my youth carried > such elaborate coverage of his mega-rallies at the Coliseum, 100,000 > capacity at that time. > > > > Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear > > > > Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear > > Billy Graham left behind a United States government in which religion > plays a far greater role than before he in... > > > > > > > > > > > > On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎46‎:‎22‎ ‎PM, Karen Aram via > Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > > > Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report: > > Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, > rabidly anti-working class warmonger. > > CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com > > Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for > a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the > Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham > succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an > organization that is said to have touched more people than any other > Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth > hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a > mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his > son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … > > “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing > magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread > his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth > at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, > ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. > > “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry > Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between > Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist > Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce > concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were > enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, > alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. > > “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered > his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded > South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS > PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH > COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART > OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … > > “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every > president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, > pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in > the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas > MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far > as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill > upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next > to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” > > [image: Image may contain: one or more people, suit and text] > > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url= > https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo% > 2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C3e9b76b31ef14c3154fa08d57a72ec6b% > 7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549556360920771&sdata= > lkRQLXBRpbA8rxjtsQgxH1tZaKby2oLLzllQleKJXqc%3D&reserved=0 > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Fri Feb 23 14:52:50 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 08:52:50 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham In-Reply-To: References: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <81AC4E2A-681E-43FF-B15B-776110478C89@gmail.com> It’s a fair question, but one has no reason to doubt the Pentagon’s drive for “full spectrum dominance” and how much that needs to be opposed, particularly today as the war party works hysterically against Trump’s inchoate isolationist impulses. > On Feb 23, 2018, at 8:32 AM, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss wrote: > > FAB, where exactly is this quote that you claim to exist - I rather doubt that anyone would model any bombing campaign on the attack on Dresden, but that is what gets lots of people to suck up to you. I wish that you would have to present information subject to the penalty of perjury and that when it does not measure up to being verified fact that you were hit with a year in jail, the penalty for perjury. Then you might lie less than currently. > > Here is a pretty well written article about General Horner based on interviews with him - I am sure that none of you like the source since it is not ultra left, but it probably is pretty factually accurate > http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Magazine%20Documents/2016/March%202016/0316gulf.pdf > > Roger > > > On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 6:01 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: > Before that war began, US Air Force General Horner publicly stated that the bombing campaign of the Iraqi Cities would be modeled on the bombing campaign of Dresden. Bush’s own Episcopal Bishop refused to pray with him at the White House the night Bush commenced that bombing campaign that exterminated 25,000 Iraqis. So Bush asked Billie and Billie was happy to kiss a certain part of Bush’s anatomy and give his Blessings and Imprimatur to this outright genocide in front of the American People on TV: Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching Off To War! > > The Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno is too good for Billie. 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, February 23, 2018 7:37 AM > To: 'Karen Aram' ; David Green > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham > > > > With due respect to you, I have no sympathy for warmongers. I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent and stop that Bush Sr war against Iraq while he was giving his Blessings to Bush exterminating 25,000 civilians in the Iraqi Cities by carpet bombing. I had to get my wife and kids out of town. Let him rot in the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno reserved for warmongers! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 6:38 AM > To: David Green > Cc: Peace-discuss List > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham > > > > One might think we’re being cruel to criticize the newly departed, but when we’ve lived with these false images throughout our lives, it’s important to uncloak the truth. The media and establishment present us with false gods. > > > > > > On Feb 22, 2018, at 20:05, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > Graham's biographer has an article on Counterpunch. Graham's evangelical roots were in L.A., which explains why the LA Times of my youth carried such elaborate coverage of his mega-rallies at the Coliseum, 100,000 capacity at that time. > > > > Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear > > > > Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear > Billy Graham left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he in... > > > > > > > > > > > > On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎46‎:‎22‎ ‎PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > > > > Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report: > Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, rabidly anti-working class warmonger. > CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com > Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … > “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. > “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. > “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … > “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” > > > From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 23 14:58:39 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 14:58:39 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham In-Reply-To: References: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: The question maybe a fair one, but Roger’s statement: “but that is what gets lots of people to suck up to you. I wish that you would have to present information subject to the penalty of perjury and that when it does not measure up to being verified fact that you were hit with a year in jail, the penalty for perjury. Then you might lie less than currently.” proves that he is not concerned with truth, he is only concerned with vilifying those that attempt to present it. Why we have someone so intent on trolling and supporting war, the military, and making such immature accusations as he does, defies all logic. On Feb 23, 2018, at 06:32, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss > wrote: FAB, where exactly is this quote that you claim to exist - I rather doubt that anyone would model any bombing campaign on the attack on Dresden, but that is what gets lots of people to suck up to you. I wish that you would have to present information subject to the penalty of perjury and that when it does not measure up to being verified fact that you were hit with a year in jail, the penalty for perjury. Then you might lie less than currently. Here is a pretty well written article about General Horner based on interviews with him - I am sure that none of you like the source since it is not ultra left, but it probably is pretty factually accurate http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Magazine%20Documents/2016/March%202016/0316gulf.pdf Roger On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 6:01 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Before that war began, US Air Force General Horner publicly stated that the bombing campaign of the Iraqi Cities would be modeled on the bombing campaign of Dresden. Bush’s own Episcopal Bishop refused to pray with him at the White House the night Bush commenced that bombing campaign that exterminated 25,000 Iraqis. So Bush asked Billie and Billie was happy to kiss a certain part of Bush’s anatomy and give his Blessings and Imprimatur to this outright genocide in front of the American People on TV: Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching Off To War! The Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno is too good for Billie. 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, February 23, 2018 7:37 AM To: 'Karen Aram' >; David Green > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham With due respect to you, I have no sympathy for warmongers. I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent and stop that Bush Sr war against Iraq while he was giving his Blessings to Bush exterminating 25,000 civilians in the Iraqi Cities by carpet bombing. I had to get my wife and kids out of town. Let him rot in the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno reserved for warmongers! 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 6:38 AM To: David Green > Cc: Peace-discuss List > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham One might think we’re being cruel to criticize the newly departed, but when we’ve lived with these false images throughout our lives, it’s important to uncloak the truth. The media and establishment present us with false gods. On Feb 22, 2018, at 20:05, David Green via Peace-discuss > wrote: Graham's biographer has an article on Counterpunch. Graham's evangelical roots were in L.A., which explains why the LA Times of my youth carried such elaborate coverage of his mega-rallies at the Coliseum, 100,000 capacity at that time. Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear Billy Graham left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he in... On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎46‎:‎22‎ ‎PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report: Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, rabidly anti-working class warmonger. CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” [Image may contain: one or more people, suit and text] _______________________________________________ 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://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C3e9b76b31ef14c3154fa08d57a72ec6b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549556360920771&sdata=lkRQLXBRpbA8rxjtsQgxH1tZaKby2oLLzllQleKJXqc%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cd7fa5842165f4940e1ae08d57aca5a3c%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549931866894586&sdata=vSkyKaBUU44c2VhmUbntMyJCwpag%2FwDOn3jgjCxPsho%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Feb 23 15:03:38 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 15:03:38 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: U.S. War Crimes During the First Persian Gulf War (1991) In-Reply-To: <918F11F0D707A9458876C1B112320C54047D6144@quoll.law.uiuc.edu> References: <918F11F0D707A9458876C1B112320C54047D6144@quoll.law.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: For full documentation with footnotes etc see Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time, Thundersmouth Press. 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 [mailto:FBOYLE at law.illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 5:12 PM To: Killeacle Subject: U.S. War Crimes During the First Persian Gulf War (1991) United States War Crimes During the First Persian Gulf War On February 27, 1992 Albany Law School in Albany, N.Y. convened a Symposium on the subject of "International War Crimes: The Search for Justice." The Symposium organizers invited the author to come in for the express purpose of arguing the case against the Bush Sr. administration for committing international crimes during their Gulf War I against Iraq, and then to debate this position with the other Symposium speakers, who were law professors or lawyers. The Symposium proceedings were taped for later broadcast by C-SPAN: Introduction 1. For the past year I have been working with the International Commission of Inquiry into United States war crimes that were committed during the Persian Gulf War. This Commission has conducted the largest independent worldwide investigation of war crimes in history. Since last May, the Commission has held thirty hearings across the United States and in twenty countries across five continents to expose the war crimes that the United States government inflicted upon the people and State of Iraq. 2. On Saturday, February 29, 1992 in New York City, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium, the Commission will publicly present its evidence before an International War Crimes Tribunal consisting of distinguished jurists and human rights activists drawn from around the world. In the brief space that has been allotted to me, I would like to present the basic gist of the charges that will be brought before the Tribunal against President George Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, Secretary of State Jim Baker, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, National Security Assistant Brent Scowcroft, CIA Director William Webster, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, General Norman Schwarzkopf, and other members of the High Command of the United States military establishment who launched and waged this brutal, inhumane, and criminal war. Hereinafter, these individuals will be collectively referred to as the Defendants. The Charges 3. The international crimes that have been charged and will be proved against these Defendants consist principally of the three Nuremberg Offenses: the Nuremberg Crime Against Peace, that is, waging an aggressive war and a war in violation of international treaties and agreements; Nuremberg Crimes Against Humanity; and Nuremberg War Crimes. In addition, these Defendants also committed grievous war crimes by wantonly violating the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare of 1907; the Declaration of London on Sea Warfare of 1909; the Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare of 1923; the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional Protocols of 1977; and the international crime of genocide against the people of Iraq as defined by the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 as well as by the United States' own Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987, 18 U.S.C. §1901. Finally, and most heinously of all, these Defendants actually perpetrated a Nuremberg Crime against their own troops when they forced them to take experimental biological weapons vaccines without their informed consent in gross violation of the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation that has been fully subscribed to by the United States government. Universal Jurisdiction 4. These international crimes create personal criminal responsibility on the part of all these Defendants that warrant their prosecution under basic norms of customary international law, treaties, and statutes in any state of the world community that obtains jurisdiction over them for the rest of their lives. We believe that the International War Crimes Tribunal will produce a Judgment that can be put into the hands of every government in the world with the injunction that should any of these Defendants ever appear within their territorial jurisdiction, they must be apprehended and prosecuted for the commission of the specified international crimes. Like unto pirates, these Defendants are hostes humani generis-the enemies of all humankind! The Historical Origins of the War 5. I do not have the time in this brief presentation to analyze the entire history of illegal U.S. military interventionism into the Middle East-especially the Persian Gulf region-and in particular its divide-and-conquer (divide et impera) policies. Suffice it to say here that the "immediate cause" of the United States war to destroy Iraq and take over the Arab oil fields in the Persian Gulf goes back to the 1973 Arab oil boycott of Europe. The Arab oil states imposed the boycott in solidarity with those Arab states that were then attempting to reclaim their lands that had been illegally stolen from them by Israel in 1967. The Arab oil boycott brought Europe to its knees. Subsequently, Arab oil states were able to increase the price of oil to a point of economic fairness that would enable them to provide for the basic human needs of their own Peoples. 6. But the success of the Arab oil boycott led several prominent U.S. government officials in the Nixon administration, and especially Henry Kissinger, to publicly threaten that the United States government would prepare itself to seize the Arab oil fields in order to prevent something like the boycott from ever happening again. This illegal governmental threat was stated openly, publicly, and repeatedly during the course of the Nixon administration, the Ford administration, the Carter administration, and the Reagan administration. The Bush administration would finally be the one to carry this threat out-but only after a decade of active preparations. The Rapid Deployment Force 7. During the course of the Carter administration, the United States government obtained authorization from Congress to set up, arm, equip, and supply the so-called Rapid Deployment Force (RDF), whose primary mission was to seize and steal the Arab oil fields of the Persian Gulf region. So the planning and preparations for the U.S. war against Iraq go all the way back to the so-called "liberal" Carter administration-at the very least. The United States foreign policy establishment consists of liberal imperialists, reactionary imperialists, and middle-of-the-road imperialists. But they all share in common a firm belief in America's "Manifest Destiny" to rule the world. 8. For the next decade, the Pentagon obtained a new generation of high-technology conventional weapons possessing massive destructive power and lethality; the logistical support network necessary to convey a force of 500,000 soldiers over to the Persian Gulf region within six months; and base access rights and facilities for that purpose throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Working in conjunction with its de facto allies in the region such as Egypt and Israel, the Pentagon stockpiled enormous quantities of weapons, equipment, and supplies in the immediate vicinity of the Persian Gulf as a prelude to military intervention. Hence, the United States government had been planning, preparing, and conspiring to seize and steal the Persian Gulf oil fields for over a decade. United States War Plans Against Iraq[i] 9. Sometime after the termination of the Iraq-Iran War in the summer of 1988, the Pentagon proceeded to revise its outstanding war plans for U.S. military intervention into the Persian Gulf region in order to destroy Iraq. Defendant Schwarzkopf was put in charge of this revision. In early 1990, Defendant Schwarzkopf informed the Senate Armed Services Committee of this new military strategy in the Gulf allegedly designed to protect U.S. access to and control over Gulf oil in the event of regional conflicts. In October 1990, Defendant Powell referred to the new military plan developed in 1989. After the war, Defendant Schwarzkopf referred to eighteen months of planning for the campaign-a campaign whose public rationale was based on the illegal invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, which occurred on August 2, 1990. 10. Sometime in late 1989 or early 1990, the Pentagon's war plan for destroying Iraq and stealing Persian Gulf oil fields was put into motion. At that time, Defendant Schwarzkopf was named the Commander of the so-called U.S. Central Command-which was the re-named version of the Rapid Deployment Force-for the purpose of carrying out the war plan that he had personally developed and supervised. During January of 1990, massive quantities of United States weapons, equipment, and supplies were sent to Saudi Arabia in order to prepare for the war against Iraq, again prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. 11. Pursuant to this war plan, Defendant Webster and the CIA assisted and directed Kuwait in its actions of violating OPEC oil production agreements to undercut the price of oil for the purpose of debilitating Iraq's economy; in extracting excessive and illegal amounts of oil from pools it shared with Iraq; in demanding immediate repayment of loans Kuwait had made to Iraq during the Iraq-Iran War; and in breaking off negotiations with Iraq over these disputes. The Defendants intended to provoke Iraq into aggressive military actions against Kuwait that they knew could be used to justify U.S. military intervention into the Persian Gulf for the purpose of destroying Iraq and taking over Arab oil fields. To be sure, the recitation of these facts is not intended to justify the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. "Green Light" to Invade Kuwait 12. The Defendants showed absolutely no opposition to Iraq's increasing threats against Kuwait. Indeed, when Saddam Hussein requested U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to explain State Department testimony in Congress about Iraq's threats against Kuwait, she assured him that the United States considered the dispute to be a regional concern, and that it would not intervene militarily. In other words, the United States government gave Saddam Hussein what amounted to a "green light" to invade Kuwait. 13. This reprehensible behavior was similar to that of the Carter administration during September of 1980, when United States government officials gave Saddam Hussein the "green light" to invade Iran and thus commence the tragic Iraq-Iran War.[ii] A decade later, Saddam Hussein simply surmised that he had been given yet another "green light" by the United States government to commit overt aggression against surrounding states. Only this time, the Defendants knowingly intended to lead Iraq into a provocation that could be used to justify intervention and warfare by United States military forces for the real purpose of destroying Iraq as a military power and seizing Arab oil fields in the Persian Gulf. Bush Is the Bigger War Criminal 14. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait without significant resistance. The Kuwaiti government itself estimated that approximately 300 people were killed as a result of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and a few hundred more as a result of the military occupation. By comparison, Defendant Bush's invasion of Panama in December of 1989 took between 2,000 and 4,000 Panamanian lives, and the United States government is still covering up the actual death toll. Defendant Bush killed more innocent people in Panama than Saddam Hussein did in Kuwait. 15. Defendant Bush's invasion of Panama was even more illegal, reprehensible, and criminal than Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. The world must never forget that the first step in the construction of Bush's "New World Order" was his illegal invasion of Panama and the murder of thousands of completely innocent Panamanian civilians. America's self-anointed policeman in the Persian Gulf had the blood of the Panamanian People on his hands. Bush's Perversion of the Constitution 16. Pursuant to the Pentagon's war plan for destroying Iraq and stealing Persian Gulf oil fields-and without consultation or communication with Congress-Defendant Bush initially ordered 40,000 U.S. military personnel into the Persian Gulf region during the first week of August 1990. He lied to the American people and Congress when he stated that his acts were purely defensive. Right from the very outset of this crisis-and even beforehand-Defendant Bush fully intended to go to war against Iraq and to seize the Arab oil fields in the Persian Gulf. Defendant Bush deliberately misled, deceived, concealed and made false representations to the Congress to prevent its free deliberation and informed exercise of legislative power. 17. Defendant Bush intentionally usurped Congressional power, ignored its authority, and failed and refused to consult with the Congress. He individually ordered a naval blockade against Iraq-itself an act of war-without approval by Congress or the U.N. Security Council. Defendant Bush waited until after the November 1990 elections to publicly announce his earlier order sending more than 200,000 additional military personnel to the Persian Gulf for offensive purposes without seeking the approval of Congress. Pursuant to the Pentagon's war plan, Defendant Bush switched U.S. forces from a defensive position and capability to an offensive capacity for aggression against Iraq without consultation with, and contrary to assurances given to, Congress and the American people. 18. On the very eve of the war, Defendant Bush then strong-armed legislation through Congress that approved enforcement of U.N. resolutions vesting absolute discretion in any nation, providing no guidelines, and requiring no reporting to the United Nations. Defendant Bush demonstrated, through the prior planning above indicated, the intention to destroy the armed forces and civilian infrastructure of Iraq. Those acts were undertaken to provide an international legal cover, under the pretext of responding to an act of aggression, for the commission of a Nuremberg Crime Against Peace and war crimes. This conduct violated the Constitution and Laws of the United States and especially the War Powers Clause found in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the U.S. War Powers Act of 1973, 87 Stat. 555, and the United Nations Charter, which is the "Supreme Law of the Land" under Article 6 of the Constitution. For this reason alone, Defendant Bush and his co-conspirators committed "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" that warrant their impeachment, conviction, removal from office, and criminal prosecution. Bush's Mad Rush to War 19. While concealing his true intentions, Bush continued the military buildup of U.S. forces from August into January 1991 for the purpose of attacking and destroying Iraq. Bush pressed the military to expedite preparations and to commence the war against Iraq before military conditions were optimum for domestic political purposes so that the war would not interfere with his presidential reelection campaign. Indeed, the entire timing, conduct and duration of the war were planned so as to promote Defendant Bush's reelection prospects. But as a direct result of Defendant Bush's mad rush to war, United States military personnel suffered needless casualties. Defendant Bush has continued to lie and cover up to the American people and Congress the true nature and extent of U.S. casualties during the Persian Gulf War. Bush Corrupted the United Nations 20. Defendant Bush repeatedly coerced the members of the United Nations Security Council into adopting an unprecedented series of resolutions that culminated in his securing authority for any nation to use "all necessary means" to enforce these resolutions. To secure these votes in the Security Council, Defendant Bush paid multi-billion-dollar bribes; offered arms for regional wars; threatened and carried out economic retaliation; illegally forgave multi-billion-dollar loans; offered diplomatic relations despite human rights violations; and in other ways corruptly exacted votes. This illegal activity subverted and perverted the very purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter itself found in articles 1 and 2 thereof. Bush Circumvented and Violated Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter 21. In his mad rush to war, Defendant Bush caused the United Nations to completely bypass Chapter VI of the U.N. Charter that mandates the pacific settlement of international disputes. Defendant Bush consistently rejected and ridiculed all of Iraq's efforts to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the dispute. Defendant Bush proudly boasted that there would be no negotiation, no compromise, no face-saving, etc. 22. Defendant Bush's successful attempt to subvert every effort for negotiating a peaceful resolution of this dispute violated the solemn obligation mandating the peaceful resolution of international disputes found in article 2, paragraph 3 of the United Nations Charter; in article 33, paragraph 1 of the United Nations Charter; and in article 2 of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. Just like the Nazi war criminals before him, Defendant Bush pursued recourse to war as an instrument of his national policy and for the solution of international controversies in violation of article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Just as the Nazi war criminals had done by invading Poland in September of 1939, these Defendants perpetrated a Nuremberg Crime Against Peace in their decision to go to war against Iraq with the intent to seize and steal the oil resources of the Persian Gulf. The Conduct of the War Itself 23. Obviously, in the brief space that has been allotted to me, there is no way that I could adequately describe all of the atrocities and war crimes that were committed by these Defendants and their Agents during the course of their actual conduct of military hostilities against the People and State of Iraq. These matters have been covered in great detail during the course of the public investigations and hearings conducted around the world by the Commission during the past year. The results of this work will be presented to the members of the International War Crimes Tribunal for their consideration and adjudication. Nonetheless, I will provide you here with a succinct account of the major categories of war crimes committed by these Defendants during the course of their criminal war against Iraq. Bush Ordered the Destruction of Facilities Essential to Civilian Life and Economic Productivity Throughout Iraq. 24. Systematic aerial and missile bombardment of Iraq was ordered to begin at 6:30 p.m. E.S.T. January 16, 1991, in order to be reported on prime time TV. The bombing continued for 42 days. It met no resistance from Iraqi aircraft and no effective anti-aircraft or anti-missile ground fire. Iraq was basically defenseless. 25. Most of the targets were civilian facilities. The United States intentionally bombed and destroyed centers for civilian life, commercial and business districts, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, shelters, residential areas, historical sites, private vehicles and civilian government offices. In aerial attacks, including strafing, over cities, towns, the countryside and highways, United States aircraft bombed and strafed indiscriminately. The purpose of these attacks was to destroy life and property, and generally to terrorize the civilian population of Iraq. The net effect was the summary execution and indiscriminate corporal punishment of men, women and children, young and old, rich and poor, of all nationalities and religions. 26. As a direct result of this bombing campaign against civilian life, at least 25,000 men, women and children were killed. The Red Crescent Society of Jordan estimated 113,000 civilian dead, 60% of them children, the week before the end of the war. According to the Nuremberg Charter, this "wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages" is a Nuremberg War Crime. 27. The intention and effort of this bombing campaign against civilian life and facilities was to systematically destroy Iraq's infrastructure leaving it in a pre-industrial condition. The U.S. assault left Iraq in near apocalyptic conditions as reported by the first United Nations observers after the war. As a direct, intentional and foreseeable result of this anti-civilian destruction, over one hundred thousand people have died after the war from dehydration, dysentery, diseases, and malnutrition caused by impure water, inability to obtain effective medical assistance and debilitation from hunger, shock, cold and stress. More will die until potable water, sanitary living conditions, adequate food supplies and other necessities are provided. Yet Defendant Bush continues to impose punitive economic sanctions against the people of Iraq in order to prevent this from happening. The United States Intentionally Bombed and Destroyed Defenseless Iraqi Military Personnel; Used Excessive Force; Killed Soldiers Seeking to Surrender and in Disorganized Individual Flight, Often Unarmed and Far from Any Combat Zones; Randomly and Wantonly Killed Iraqi Soldiers; and Destroyed Material After the Cease-Fire. 28. In the first hours of the aerial and missile bombardment, the United States destroyed most military communications and began the systematic killing of Iraqi soldiers who were incapable of defense or escape, and the destruction of military equipment. The U.S. bombing campaign killed tens of thousands of defenseless soldiers, cut off from most of their food, water and other supplies, and left them in desperate and helpless disarray. Defendant Schwarzkopf placed Iraqi military casualties at over 100,000. Large numbers of these soldiers were "out of combat" and therefore not legitimate targets for military attack. 29. When it was determined that the civilian economy and the military were sufficiently destroyed, the U.S. ground forces moved into Kuwait and Iraq attacking disoriented, disorganized, fleeing Iraqi forces wherever they could be found, killing thousands more and destroying any equipment found. In one particularly shocking maneuver, thousands of Iraqi soldiers were needlessly and illegally buried alive. This wholesale slaughter of Iraqi soldiers continued even after and in violation of the so-called cease-fire. 30. The Defendants' intention was not to remove Iraq's presence from Kuwait. Rather, their intention was to destroy Iraq. The disproportion in death and destruction inflicted on a defenseless enemy exceeded 1000 to one. The Defendants conducted this genocidal war against the male population of Iraq for the express purpose of making sure that Iraq could not raise a substantial military force for at least another generation. The United States Used Prohibited Weapons Capable of Mass Destruction and Inflicting Indiscriminate Death and Unnecessary Suffering Against Both Military and Civilian Targets. 31. Fuel air explosives were used against troops in place, civilian areas, oil fields and fleeing civilians and soldiers on two stretches of highway between Kuwait and Iraq. One seven mile stretch called the "Highway of Death" was littered with hundreds of vehicles and thousands of dead. All were fleeing to Iraq for their lives. Thousands were civilians of all ages, including Kuwaitis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Jordanians and other nationalities. 32. Napalm was used against civilians and military personnel, as well as to start fires. Oil well fires in both Iraq and Kuwait were intentionally started by U.S. aircraft dropping napalm and other heat intensive devices. 33. Cluster bombs and anti-personnel fragmentation bombs were used in Basra, and other cities and towns, against the civilian convoys of fleeing vehicles and against military units. 34. "Superbombs" were dropped on hardened shelters with the intention of assassinating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein-a war crime in its own right. The United States Intentionally Attacked Installations in Iraq Containing Dangerous Substances and Forces in Violation of Article 56 of Geneva Protocol I of 1977. 35. The U.S. intentionally bombed alleged nuclear sites, chemical plants, dams and other "dangerous forces." The U.S. knew such attacks could cause the release of dangerous forces from such installations and consequently severe losses among the civilian population. While some civilians were killed in such attacks, there are no reported cases of consequent severe losses. Presumably, lethal nuclear materials, and dangerous chemical and biological warfare substances, were not present at the sites bombed. The United States Waged War on the Environment. 36. Before the war started, the Pentagon had developed computer models that accurately predicted the environmental catastrophe that would occur should the United States go to war against Iraq. These Defendants went to war anyway knowing full well what the consequences of such an environmental disaster would be. Attacks by U.S. aircraft caused much if not all of the worst oil spills in the Gulf. Aircraft and helicopters dropped napalm and fuel-air explosives on oil wells, storage tanks and refineries, causing oil fires throughout Iraq and many, if not most, of the oil well fires in Iraq and Kuwait. Defendant Bush Encouraged and Aided Shiite Muslims and Kurds to Rebel Against the Government of Iraq Causing Fratricidal Violence, Emigration, Exposure, Hunger and Sickness and Thousands of Deaths. After the Rebellion Failed, the U.S. Invaded and Occupied Parts of Iraq Without Lawful Authority in Order to Increase Division and Hostilities Within Iraq. 37. Without authority from the U.S. Congress or the United Nations, Defendant Bush encouraged and aided rebellion against Iraq, failed to protect the warring parties, encouraged mass migration of whole populations placing them in jeopardy from the elements, hunger and disease. After much suffering and many deaths, Defendant Bush then without authority used U.S. military forces to distribute aid at and near the Turkish border, ignoring the often greater suffering among refugees in Iran. He then arbitrarily set up bantustan-like settlements for Kurds in Iraq and demanded that Iraq pay for U.S. costs. When Kurds chose to return to their homes in Iraq, he moved U.S. troops further into northern Iraq against the will of the government and without any legal authority to do so. As Defendant Baker correctly put it when he visited the area, these atrocities constituted a Nuremberg "crime against humanity." Although he was referring to the culpability of Saddam Hussein, Baker effectively condemned the relevant members of the Bush Sr. administration under international criminal law as "aiders and abettors" to a Nuremberg crime against humanity. Defendant Bush Intentionally Deprived the Iraqi People of Essential Medicines, Potable Water, Food and Other Necessities. 38. A major component of the assault on Iraq was the systematic deprivation of essential human needs and services, to terrorize and break the will of the Iraqi people, to destroy their economic capability, and to reduce their numbers and weaken their health. Towards those ends, the Defendants: -- imposed and enforced embargoes preventing the shipment of needed medicines, water purifiers, infant milk formula, food and other supplies; -- froze funds of Iraq and forced other nations to do so, depriving Iraq of the ability to purchase needed medicines, food and other supplies; -- prevented international organizations, governments and relief agencies from providing needed supplies and obtaining information concerning such needs; -- failed to assist or meet urgent needs of huge refugee populations and interfered with efforts of others to do so, etc; -- the intentional bombing of the water treatment plants, despite their awareness of the likely resultant spread of diseases from drinking non-potable water. As a direct result of these cruel and inhuman acts, thousands of people died, many more suffered illnesses and permanent injury. For these actions, the Defendants are guilty of Nuremberg Crimes Against Humanity and the Crime of Genocide as recognized by international law and U.S. domestic law. Defendant Bush, Having Destroyed Iraq's Economic Base, Demands Reparations Which Will Permanently Impoverish Iraq and Threaten Its People with Famine and Epidemic. 39. Defendant Bush seeks to force Iraq to pay for damages to Kuwait largely caused by the U.S. and even to pay U.S. costs for its violation of Iraqi sovereignty in occupying northern Iraq to further manipulate the Kurdish population there. Such reparations are neo-colonial means of expropriating Iraq's oil, natural resources, and human labor. Meanwhile, the United States government dominates and controls the respective governments and oil resources of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. 40. The United States government has successfully carried out its longstanding threat and war plan to seize and steal the oil resources of the Persian Gulf for its own benefit. The United States now either directly or indirectly controls the natural energy resources that fuel the economies of Europe and Japan. Acting with their de facto allies in Israel and Great Britain, the Defendants are today seeking to consolidate their control over the entire Middle East in a blatant bid to establish worldwide hegemony. Bush's "New World Order" 41. Today, the government in the United States of America constitutes an international criminal conspiracy under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles that is legally identical to the Nazi government in World War II Germany. The Defendants' wanton extermination of approximately 250,000 people in Iraq provides definitive proof of the validity of this Nuremberg Proposition for the entire world to see. Indeed, Defendant Bush's so-called New World Order sounds and looks strikingly similar to the New Order proclaimed by Adolph Hitler over fifty years ago. You do not build a real New World Order with stealth bombers, Abrams tanks, and tomahawk cruise missiles. For their own good and the good of all humanity, the American people must condemn and repudiate Defendant Bush and his grotesque vision of a New World Order that is constructed upon warfare, bloodshed, violence and criminality. Impeachment 42. All of these aforementioned international crimes constitute "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" as defined by the Article 2, Section 4 of the United States Constitution and therefore warrant the impeachment, conviction, and removal from office of Defendants Bush, Quayle, Baker, Cheney, Powell, and Scowcroft. In regard to this matter, Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas has already introduced an Impeachment Resolution into the House of Representatives, that is numbered House Resolution 86, calling for the impeachment and removal from office of these Defendants because they have committed these international crimes and also because they have subverted and perverted constitutional government in America "to the manifest injury of the people of the United States." A Special Prosecutor 43. These Defendants must be impeached by the House, tried and convicted by the Senate, and removed from office. Thereafter, we believe that the Commission of Inquiry and the International War Crimes Tribunal will have produced sufficient evidence to trigger the application of the Ethics in Government Act, 28 U.S.C. §591 et seq., that would lead to the appointment of an Independent Counsel (i.e., Special Prosecutor) to investigate and prosecute these high-ranking officials for the wholesale violation of federal criminal laws in their decision to launch and wage this criminal war against the people and State of Iraq. We fully intend to see Bush, Baker, Cheney, Quayle, Scowcroft, Webster, Powell, Schwarzkopf and the rest of the U.S. High Command sitting in jail for the rest of their natural lives. Conclusion 44. Make no mistake about it: The very nature, future and existence of the American Republic depends upon the success of these endeavors. Today, the battle begins for the hearts and minds of the American People between the Warmongers and the Peacemakers. We ask all of you to join us in this legal campaign and moral crusade to reclaim for the United States of America a democratic government with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution both at home and abroad. Notes Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (voice) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ ________________________________ [i] See Ramsey Clark, Planning U.S. Dominion over the Gulf, in his The Fire This Time 3-37 (1992). See also Ramsey Clark & Others, War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq (Maisonneuve Press: 1992). [ii]. See Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time 23-24 (1992); Hamdi A. Hassan, The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait 37, 47-51 (1999); The Glaspie-Hussein Transcript, Beyond the Storm 391-96 (Phyllis Bennis & Michel Moushabeck eds. 1991). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Fri Feb 23 15:12:42 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 09:12:42 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham In-Reply-To: References: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Naturally we wish our political opponents to be polite - and we take their scorn as an attempt to make up for the weakness of their arguments […]. But the question remains. > On Feb 23, 2018, at 8:58 AM, Karen Aram wrote: > > The question maybe a fair one, but Roger’s statement: > > “but that is what gets lots of people to suck up to you. I wish that you would have to present information subject to the penalty of perjury and that when it does not measure up to being verified fact that you were hit with a year in jail, the penalty for perjury. Then you might lie less than currently.” > > proves that he is not concerned with truth, he is only concerned with vilifying those that attempt to present it. Why we have someone so intent on trolling and supporting war, the military, and making such immature accusations as he does, defies all logic. > > On Feb 23, 2018, at 06:32, > > Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> FAB, where exactly is this quote that you claim to exist - I rather doubt that anyone would model any bombing campaign on the attack on Dresden, but that is what gets lots of people to suck up to you. I wish that you would have to present information subject to the penalty of perjury and that when it does not measure up to being verified fact that you were hit with a year in jail, the penalty for perjury. Then you might lie less than currently. >> >> Here is a pretty well written article about General Horner based on interviews with him - I am sure that none of you like the source since it is not ultra left, but it probably is pretty factually accurate >> http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Magazine%20Documents/2016/March%202016/0316gulf.pdf >> >> Roger >> >> >> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 6:01 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> Before that war began, US Air Force General Horner publicly stated that the bombing campaign of the Iraqi Cities would be modeled on the bombing campaign of Dresden. Bush’s own Episcopal Bishop refused to pray with him at the White House the night Bush commenced that bombing campaign that exterminated 25,000 Iraqis. So Bush asked Billie and Billie was happy to kiss a certain part of Bush’s anatomy and give his Blessings and Imprimatur to this outright genocide in front of the American People on TV: Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching Off To War! >> >> The Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno is too good for Billie. Fab. >> >> >> >> Francis A. Boyle >> >> >> From: Boyle, Francis A >> Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 7:37 AM >> To: 'Karen Aram' ; David Green >> Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >> Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham >> >> >> >> With due respect to you, I have no sympathy for warmongers. I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent and stop that Bush Sr war against Iraq while he was giving his Blessings to Bush exterminating 25,000 civilians in the Iraqi Cities by carpet bombing. I had to get my wife and kids out of town. Let him rot in the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno reserved for warmongers! Fab. >> >> >> >> Francis A. Boyle >> >> >> From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 6:38 AM >> To: David Green >> Cc: Peace-discuss List >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham >> >> >> >> One might think we’re being cruel to criticize the newly departed, but when we’ve lived with these false images throughout our lives, it’s important to uncloak the truth. The media and establishment present us with false gods. >> >> >> >> >> >> On Feb 22, 2018, at 20:05, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> >> >> Graham's biographer has an article on Counterpunch. Graham's evangelical roots were in L.A., which explains why the LA Times of my youth carried such elaborate coverage of his mega-rallies at the Coliseum, 100,000 capacity at that time. >> >> >> >> Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear >> >> >> >> Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear >> Billy Graham left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he in... >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎46‎:‎22‎ ‎PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> >> >> >> >> Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report: >> Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, rabidly anti-working class warmonger. >> CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com >> Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … >> “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. >> “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. >> “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … >> “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” >> From rwhelbig at gmail.com Fri Feb 23 15:15:50 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 07:15:50 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: FW: U.S. War Crimes During the First Persian Gulf War (1991) In-Reply-To: References: <918F11F0D707A9458876C1B112320C54047D6144@quoll.law.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: Ramsey Clark has gotten lost in search of the truth as well - Here is quote from the reference I provided - At Camp David, Horner briefed Bush on air options. “That went pretty well because nobody knew anything,” Horner said.* Bush said his objectives were to limit loss of life, both Iraqi and allied. * *This absolutely does not square with your claim about a Dresden like campaign - Where is your quote from the Clark book -* *I am not about to buy a book to find out what you claim is true - you find open source material that anyone can read for free - I have gotten another book from libraries by Clark's organization and it is full of false and misleading information - so I do not consider him to be a credible source - that's sad because he should be, but he seems to let campaigners put his name on stuff without his really checking the facts - * *Roger* On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 7:03 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > *For full documentation with footnotes etc see Ramsey Clark, The Fire This > Time, Thundersmouth Press. Fab.* > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.* > > *Champaign, IL 61820 USA* > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only)* > > > > *From:* Boyle, Francis [mailto:FBOYLE at law.illinois.edu] > *Sent:* Sunday, January 16, 2011 5:12 PM > *To:* Killeacle > *Subject:* U.S. War Crimes During the First Persian Gulf War (1991) > > > > *United States War Crimes During the First > Persian Gulf War* > > > *On February 27, 1992 Albany Law School in Albany, N.Y. convened a > Symposium on the subject of “International War Crimes: The Search for > Justice.” The Symposium organizers invited the author to come in for the > express purpose of arguing the case against the Bush Sr. administration for > committing international crimes during their Gulf War I against Iraq, and > then to debate this position with the other Symposium speakers, who were > law professors or lawyers. The Symposium proceedings were taped for later > broadcast by C-SPAN:* Introduction > > 1. For the past year I have been working with the International > Commission of Inquiry into United States war crimes that were committed > during the Persian Gulf War. This Commission has conducted the largest > independent *worldwide* investigation of war crimes in history. Since > last May, the Commission has held thirty hearings across the United States > and in twenty countries across five continents to expose the war crimes > that the United States government inflicted upon the people and State of > Iraq. > > > > 2. On Saturday, February 29, 1992 in New York City, at the Martin Luther > King, Jr. Auditorium, the Commission will publicly present its evidence > before an International War Crimes Tribunal consisting of distinguished > jurists and human rights activists drawn from around the world. In the > brief space that has been allotted to me, I would like to present the basic > gist of the charges that will be brought before the Tribunal against > President George Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, Secretary of State Jim > Baker, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, National Security Assistant Brent > Scowcroft, CIA Director William Webster, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of > Staff General Colin Powell, General Norman Schwarzkopf, and other members > of the High Command of the United States military establishment who > launched and waged this brutal, inhumane, and criminal war. Hereinafter, > these individuals will be collectively referred to as the Defendants. > > > The Charges > > > > 3. The international crimes that have been charged and will be *proved *against > these Defendants consist principally of the three Nuremberg Offenses: the > Nuremberg Crime Against Peace, that *is,* waging an aggressive war and a > war in violation of international treaties and agreements; Nuremberg Crimes > Against Humanity; and Nuremberg War Crimes. In addition, these Defendants > also committed grievous war crimes by wantonly violating the Hague > Regulations on Land Warfare of 1907; the Declaration of London on Sea > Warfare of 1909; the Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare of 1923; the Four > Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional Protocols of 1977; and > the international crime of *genocide* against the *people* of Iraq as > defined by the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of > the Crime of Genocide of 1948 as well as by the United States' own Genocide > Convention Implementation Act of 1987, 18 U.S.C. §1901. Finally, and most > heinously of all, these Defendants actually perpetrated a Nuremberg Crime > against their own troops when they forced them to take experimental > biological weapons vaccines without their informed consent in gross > violation of the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation that has been > fully subscribed to by the United States government. > Universal Jurisdiction > > 4. These international crimes create personal criminal responsibility on > the part of all these Defendants that warrant their prosecution under basic > norms of customary international law, treaties, and statutes in any state > of the world community that obtains jurisdiction over them for the rest of > their lives. We believe that the International War Crimes Tribunal will > produce a Judgment that can be put into the hands of every government in > the world with the injunction that should any of these Defendants ever > appear within their territorial jurisdiction, they must be apprehended and > prosecuted for the commission of the specified international crimes. Like > unto pirates, these Defendants are *hostes humani generis*—the enemies of > all humankind! > > > > *The Historical Origins of the War* > > 5. I do not have the time in this brief presentation to analyze the > entire history of illegal U.S. military interventionism into the Middle > East—especially the Persian Gulf region—and in particular its > divide-and-conquer (*divide et impera*) policies. Suffice it to say here > that the "immediate cause" of the United States war to destroy Iraq and > take over the Arab oil fields in the Persian Gulf goes back to the 1973 > Arab oil boycott of Europe. The Arab oil states imposed the boycott in > solidarity with those Arab states that were then attempting to reclaim > their *lands *that had been illegally stolen from *them *by Israel in > 1967. The Arab oil boycott brought Europe to its knees. Subsequently, > Arab oil states were able to increase the price of oil to a point of > economic fairness that would enable them to provide for the basic human > needs of their own Peoples. > > > > 6. But the success of the Arab oil boycott led several prominent U.S. > government officials in the Nixon administration, and especially Henry > Kissinger, to publicly threaten that the United States government would > prepare itself to seize the Arab oil fields in order to prevent something > like the boycott from ever happening again. This illegal governmental > threat was stated openly, publicly, and repeatedly during the course of the > Nixon administration, the Ford administration, the Carter administration, > and the Reagan administration. The Bush administration would finally be > the one to carry this threat *out—but *only after a decade of active > preparations. > > > The Rapid Deployment Force > > > > 7. During the course of the Carter administration, the United States > government obtained authorization from Congress to set up, arm, equip, and > supply the so-called Rapid Deployment Force (RDF), whose primary mission > was to seize and steal the Arab oil fields of the Persian Gulf region. So > the planning and preparations for the U.S. war against Iraq go all the way > back to the so-called "liberal" Carter administration—at the very least. > The United States *foreign policy establishment* consists of liberal > imperialists, reactionary imperialists, and middle-of-the-road > imperialists. But they all share in common a firm belief in America's > "Manifest Destiny" to rule the world. > > > > 8. For the next decade, the Pentagon obtained a new generation of > high-technology conventional weapons possessing massive destructive power > and lethality; the logistical support network necessary to convey a force > of 500,000 soldiers over to the Persian Gulf region within six months; and > base access rights and facilities for that purpose throughout Africa, the > Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Working in conjunction with its de facto > allies in the region such as Egypt and Israel, the Pentagon stockpiled > enormous quantities of weapons, equipment, and supplies in the immediate > vicinity of the Persian Gulf as a prelude to military intervention. Hence, > the United States government had been planning, preparing, and conspiring > to seize and steal the Persian Gulf oil fields for over a decade. > > > United States War Plans Against Iraq[i] > <#m_-8443876270727123466_m_-4550340583556382906__edn1> > > 9. Sometime after the termination of the Iraq-Iran War in the summer of > 1988, the Pentagon proceeded to revise its outstanding war plans for U.S. > military intervention into the Persian Gulf region in order to destroy > Iraq. Defendant Schwarzkopf was put in charge of this revision. *In* > early 1990, Defendant Schwarzkopf informed the Senate Armed Services > Committee of this new military strategy in the Gulf allegedly designed to > protect U.S. access to and control over Gulf oil in the event of regional > conflicts. In October 1990, Defendant Powell referred to the new military > plan developed in 1989. After the war, Defendant Schwarzkopf referred to > eighteen months of planning for the campaign*—a campaign whose public > rationale was based on the illegal invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, which > occurred on August 2, 1990.* > > > > 10. Sometime in late 1989 or early 1990, the Pentagon's war plan for > destroying Iraq and stealing Persian Gulf oil fields was put into motion. > At that time, Defendant Schwarzkopf was named the Commander of the > so-called U.S. Central Command—which was the re-named version of the Rapid > Deployment Force—for the purpose of carrying out the war plan that he had > personally developed and supervised. During January of 1990, massive > quantities of United States weapons, equipment, and supplies were sent to > Saudi Arabia in order to prepare for the war against Iraq, *again prior > to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.* > > > > 11. Pursuant to this war plan, Defendant Webster and the CIA assisted and > directed Kuwait in its actions of violating OPEC oil production agreements > to undercut the price of oil for the purpose of debilitating Iraq's > economy; in extracting excessive and illegal amounts of oil from pools it > shared with Iraq; in demanding immediate repayment of loans Kuwait had made > to Iraq during the Iraq-Iran War; and in breaking off negotiations with > Iraq over these disputes. The Defendants intended to provoke Iraq into > aggressive military actions against Kuwait that they knew could be used to > justify U.S. military intervention into the Persian Gulf for the purpose of > destroying Iraq *and* taking over Arab oil fields. *To be sure, the > recitation of these facts is not intended to justify the Iraqi invasion of > Kuwait. * > The U.S. "Green Light" to Invade Kuwait > > > > 12. The Defendants showed absolutely no opposition to Iraq's increasing > threats against Kuwait. Indeed, when Saddam Hussein requested U.S. > Ambassador April Glaspie to explain State Department testimony in Congress > about Iraq's threats against Kuwait, she assured him that the United States > considered the dispute to be a regional concern, and that it would not > intervene militarily. In other words, the United States government gave > Saddam Hussein what amounted to a "green light" to invade Kuwait. > > > > 13. This reprehensible behavior was similar to that of the Carter > administration during September of 1980, when United States government > officials gave Saddam Hussein the "green light" to invade Iran and thus > commence the tragic Iraq-Iran War.[ii] > <#m_-8443876270727123466_m_-4550340583556382906__edn2> A decade later, > Saddam Hussein simply surmised that he had been given yet another "green > light" by the United States government to commit overt aggression against > surrounding states. Only this time, the Defendants knowingly intended to > lead Iraq into a provocation that could be used to justify intervention and > warfare by United States military forces for the real purpose of destroying > Iraq as a military power and seizing Arab oil fields in the Persian Gulf. > > > Bush Is the Bigger War Criminal > > > > 14. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait without > significant resistance. The Kuwaiti government itself estimated that > approximately 300 people were killed as a result of Iraq's invasion of > Kuwait, and a few hundred more as a result of the military occupation. By > comparison, Defendant Bush's invasion of Panama in December of 1989 took > between 2,000 and 4,000 Panamanian lives, and the United States government > is still covering up the actual death toll. Defendant Bush killed more > innocent people in Panama than Saddam Hussein did in Kuwait. > > > > 15. Defendant Bush's invasion of Panama was even more illegal, > reprehensible, and criminal than Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. The > world must never forget that the first step in the construction of Bush's > "New World Order" was his illegal invasion of Panama and the murder of > thousands of completely innocent Panamanian civilians. America's > self-anointed policeman in the Persian Gulf had the blood of the Panamanian > People on his hands. > > > Bush's Perversion of the Constitution > > 16. Pursuant to the Pentagon's war plan for destroying Iraq and stealing > Persian Gulf oil fields—and without consultation or communication with > Congress—Defendant Bush initially ordered 40,000 U.S. military personnel > into the Persian Gulf region during the first week of August 1990. He lied > to the American people and Congress when he stated that his acts were > purely defensive. Right from the very outset of this crisis—and even > beforehand—Defendant Bush fully intended to go to war against Iraq and to > seize the Arab oil fields in the Persian Gulf. Defendant Bush deliberately > misled, deceived, concealed and made false representations to the Congress > to prevent its free deliberation and informed exercise of legislative power. > > > > 17. Defendant Bush intentionally usurped Congressional power, ignored its > authority, and failed and refused to consult with the Congress. He > individually ordered a naval blockade against Iraq—itself an act of > war—without approval by Congress or the U.N. Security Council. Defendant > Bush waited until after the November 1990 elections to publicly announce > his earlier order sending more than 200,000 additional military personnel > to the Persian Gulf for offensive purposes without seeking the approval of > Congress. Pursuant to the Pentagon's war plan, Defendant Bush switched > U.S. forces from a defensive position and capability to an offensive > capacity for aggression against Iraq without consultation with, and > contrary to assurances given to, Congress and the American people. > > > > 18. On the very eve of the war, Defendant Bush then strong-armed > legislation through Congress that approved enforcement of U.N. resolutions > vesting absolute discretion in any nation, providing no guidelines, and > requiring no reporting to the United Nations. Defendant *Bush > demonstrated, through the prior planning above indicated, the intention to *destroy > the armed forces and civilian infrastructure of Iraq. Those acts were > undertaken to *provide an international legal cover, under the pretext of > responding to an act of aggression, for the commission of* a Nuremberg > Crime Against Peace and war crimes. This conduct violated the Constitution > and Laws of the United States and especially the War Powers Clause found in > Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the U.S. War Powers Act of 1973, > 87 Stat. 555, and the United Nations Charter, which is the "Supreme Law of > the Land" under Article 6 of the Constitution. For this reason alone, > Defendant Bush and his co-conspirators committed "High Crimes and > Misdemeanors" that warrant their impeachment, conviction, removal from > office, and criminal prosecution. > > > Bush's Mad Rush to War > > 19. While concealing his true intentions, Bush continued the military > buildup of U.S. forces from August into January 1991 for the purpose of > attacking and destroying Iraq. Bush pressed the military to expedite > preparations and to commence the war against Iraq before military > conditions were optimum for domestic political purposes so that the war > would not interfere with his presidential reelection campaign. Indeed, the > entire timing, conduct and duration of the war were planned so as to > promote Defendant Bush's reelection prospects. But as a direct result of > Defendant Bush's mad rush to war, United States military personnel suffered > needless casualties. Defendant Bush has *continued to lie and cover up *to > the American people and Congress the true nature and extent of U.S. > casualties during the Persian Gulf War. > > > Bush Corrupted the United Nations > > 20. Defendant Bush repeatedly coerced the members of the United Nations > Security Council into adopting an unprecedented series of resolutions that > culminated in his securing authority for any nation to use "all necessary > means" to enforce these resolutions. To secure these votes in the Security > Council, Defendant Bush paid multi-billion-dollar bribes; offered arms for > regional wars; threatened and carried out economic retaliation; illegally > forgave multi-billion-dollar loans; offered diplomatic relations despite > human rights violations; and in other ways corruptly exacted votes. This > illegal activity subverted and perverted the very purposes and principles > of the United Nations Charter itself found in articles 1 and 2 thereof. > > > Bush Circumvented and Violated Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter > > 21. In his mad rush to war, Defendant Bush caused the United Nations to > completely bypass Chapter VI of the U.N. Charter that mandates the pacific > settlement of international disputes. Defendant Bush consistently rejected > and ridiculed all of Iraq's efforts to negotiate a peaceful resolution of > the dispute. Defendant Bush proudly boasted that there would be no > negotiation, no compromise, no face-saving, etc. > > 22. Defendant Bush's successful attempt to subvert every effort for > negotiating a peaceful resolution of this dispute violated the solemn > obligation mandating the peaceful resolution of international disputes > found in article 2, paragraph 3 of the United Nations Charter; in article > 33, paragraph 1 of the United Nations Charter; and in article 2 of the > Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. Just like the Nazi war criminals before him, > Defendant Bush pursued recourse to war as an instrument of his national > policy and for the solution of international controversies in violation of > article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Just as the Nazi war criminals *had > done* by invading Poland in September of 1939, these Defendants > perpetrated a Nuremberg Crime Against Peace in their decision to go to war > against Iraq *with the intent* to seize and steal the oil resources of > the Persian Gulf. > > > The Conduct of the War Itself > > 23. Obviously, in the brief space that has been allotted to me, there is > no way that I could adequately describe all of the atrocities and war > crimes that were committed by these Defendants and their Agents during the > course of their actual conduct of military hostilities against the People > and State of Iraq. These matters have been covered in great detail during > the course of the public investigations and hearings conducted around the > world by the Commission during the past year. The results of this work > will be presented to the members of the International War Crimes Tribunal > for their consideration and adjudication. Nonetheless, I will provide you > here with a succinct account of the major categories of war crimes > committed by these Defendants during the course of their criminal war > against Iraq. > > > > *Bush Ordered the Destruction of Facilities Essential to Civilian Life and > Economic Productivity Throughout Iraq.* > > > > 24. Systematic aerial and missile bombardment of Iraq was ordered to > begin at 6:30 p.m. E.S.T. January 16, 1991, in order to be reported on > prime time TV. The bombing continued for 42 days. It met no resistance > from Iraqi aircraft and no effective anti-aircraft or anti-missile ground > fire. Iraq was basically defenseless. > > > > 25. Most of the targets were civilian facilities. The United States > intentionally bombed and destroyed centers for civilian life, commercial > and business districts, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, shelters, > residential areas, historical sites, private vehicles and civilian > government offices. In aerial attacks, including strafing, over cities, > towns, the countryside and highways, United States aircraft bombed and > strafed indiscriminately. The purpose of these attacks was to destroy life > and property, and generally to terrorize the civilian population of Iraq. > The net effect was the summary execution and *indiscriminate* corporal > punishment of men, women and children, young and old, rich and poor, of all > nationalities and religions. > > > > 26. As a direct result of this bombing campaign against civilian life, at > least 25,000 men, women and children were killed. The Red Crescent Society > of Jordan estimated 113,000 civilian dead, 60% of them children, the week > before the end of the war. According to the Nuremberg Charter, this > "wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages" is a Nuremberg War Crime. > > > > 27. The intention and effort of this bombing campaign against civilian > life and facilities was to systematically destroy Iraq's infrastructure > leaving it in a pre-industrial condition. The U.S. assault left Iraq in > near apocalyptic conditions as reported by the first United Nations > observers after the war. As a direct, intentional and foreseeable result > of this anti-civilian destruction, over one hundred thousand people have > died after the war from dehydration, dysentery, diseases, and malnutrition > caused by impure water, inability to obtain effective medical assistance > and debilitation from hunger, shock, cold and stress. More will die until > potable water, sanitary living conditions, adequate food supplies and other > necessities are provided. Yet Defendant Bush continues to impose punitive > economic sanctions against the people of Iraq in order to prevent this from > happening. > > > > *The United States Intentionally Bombed and Destroyed Defenseless Iraqi > Military Personnel; Used Excessive Force; Killed Soldiers Seeking to > Surrender and in Disorganized Individual Flight, Often Unarmed and Far from > Any Combat Zones; Randomly and Wantonly Killed Iraqi Soldiers; and > Destroyed Material After the Cease-Fire.* > > > > 28. In the first hours of the aerial and missile bombardment, the United > States destroyed most military communications and began the systematic > killing of Iraqi soldiers who were incapable of defense or escape, and the > destruction of military equipment. The U.S. bombing campaign killed tens > of thousands of defenseless soldiers, cut off from most of their food, > water and other supplies, and left them in desperate and helpless > disarray. Defendant Schwarzkopf placed Iraqi military casualties at over > 100,000. Large numbers of these soldiers were "out of combat" and > therefore not legitimate targets for military attack. > > > > 29. When it was determined that the civilian economy and the military > were sufficiently destroyed, the U.S. ground forces moved into Kuwait and > Iraq attacking disoriented, disorganized, fleeing Iraqi forces wherever > they could be found, killing thousands more and destroying any equipment > found. In one particularly shocking maneuver, thousands of Iraqi soldiers > were needlessly and illegally buried alive. This wholesale slaughter of > Iraqi soldiers continued even after and in violation of the so-called > cease-fire. > > > > 30. The Defendants' intention was not to remove Iraq's presence from > Kuwait. Rather, their intention was to destroy Iraq. The disproportion in > death and destruction inflicted on a defenseless enemy exceeded 1000 to > one. The Defendants conducted this genocidal war against the male > population of Iraq for the express purpose of making sure that Iraq could > not raise a substantial military force for at least another generation. > > > > *The United States Used Prohibited Weapons Capable of Mass Destruction and > Inflicting Indiscriminate Death and Unnecessary Suffering Against Both > Military and Civilian Targets.* > > > > 31. Fuel air explosives were used against troops in place, civilian > areas, oil fields and fleeing civilians and soldiers on two stretches of > highway between Kuwait and Iraq. One seven mile stretch called the > "Highway of Death" was littered with hundreds of vehicles and thousands of > dead. All were fleeing to Iraq for their lives. Thousands were civilians > of all ages, including Kuwaitis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Jordanians and other > nationalities. > > > > 32. Napalm was used against civilians and military personnel, as well as > to start fires. Oil well fires in both Iraq and Kuwait were intentionally > started by U.S. aircraft dropping napalm and other heat intensive devices. > > > > 33. Cluster bombs and anti-personnel fragmentation bombs were used in > Basra, and other cities and towns, against the civilian convoys of fleeing > vehicles and against military units. > > > > 34. "Superbombs" were dropped on hardened shelters with the intention of > assassinating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein—a war crime in its own right. > > > > The United States Intentionally Attacked Installations in Iraq Containing > Dangerous Substances and Forces in Violation of Article 56 of Geneva > Protocol I of 1977. > > > > 35. The U.S. intentionally bombed alleged nuclear sites, chemical plants, > dams and other “dangerous forces.” The U.S. knew such attacks could cause > the release of dangerous forces from such installations and consequently > severe losses among the civilian population. While some civilians were > killed in such attacks, there are no reported cases of consequent severe > losses. Presumably, lethal nuclear materials, and dangerous chemical and > biological warfare substances, were not present at the sites bombed. > > > > *The United States Waged War on the Environment.* > > 36. Before the war started, the Pentagon had developed computer models > that accurately predicted the environmental catastrophe that would occur > should the United States go to war against Iraq. These Defendants went to > war anyway knowing full well what the consequences of such an environmental > disaster would be. Attacks by U.S. aircraft caused much if not all of the > worst oil spills in the Gulf. Aircraft and helicopters dropped napalm and > fuel-air explosives on oil wells, storage tanks and refineries, causing oil > fires throughout Iraq and many, if not most, of the oil well fires in Iraq > and Kuwait. > > > > *Defendant Bush Encouraged and Aided Shiite Muslims and Kurds to Rebel > Against the Government of Iraq Causing Fratricidal Violence, Emigration, > Exposure, Hunger and Sickness and Thousands of Deaths. After the Rebellion > Failed, the U.S. Invaded and Occupied Parts of Iraq Without Lawful > Authority in Order to Increase Division and Hostilities Within Iraq*. > > > > 37. Without authority from the U.S. Congress or the United Nations, > Defendant Bush encouraged and aided rebellion against Iraq, failed to > protect the warring parties, encouraged mass migration of whole populations > placing them in jeopardy from the elements, hunger and disease. After much > suffering and many deaths, Defendant Bush then without authority used U.S. > military forces to distribute aid at and near the Turkish border, ignoring > the often greater suffering among refugees in Iran. He then arbitrarily > set up *bantustan-*like settlements for Kurds in Iraq and demanded *that* > Iraq pay for U.S. costs. When Kurds chose to return to their homes in > Iraq, he moved U.S. troops further into northern Iraq against the will of > the government and without any legal authority to do so. As Defendant > Baker correctly put it when he visited the area, these atrocities > constituted a Nuremberg "crime against humanity." *Although he was > referring to the culpability of Saddam Hussein, Baker effectively condemned > the relevant members of the Bush Sr. administration under international > criminal law as “aiders and abettors” to a Nuremberg crime against > humanity.* > > > > Defendant Bush Intentionally Deprived the Iraqi People of Essential > Medicines, Potable Water, Food and Other Necessities. > > > > 38. A major component of the assault on Iraq was the systematic > deprivation of essential human needs and services, to terrorize and break > the will of the Iraqi people, to destroy their economic capability, and to > reduce their numbers and weaken their health. Towards those ends, the > Defendants: > > > > -- imposed and enforced embargoes preventing the shipment of needed > medicines, water purifiers, infant milk formula, food and other supplies; > > > > -- froze funds of Iraq and forced other nations to do so, depriving > Iraq of the ability to purchase needed medicines, food and other supplies; > > > > -- prevented international organizations, governments and relief > agencies from providing needed supplies and obtaining information > concerning such needs; > > > > -- failed to assist or meet urgent needs of huge refugee populations > and interfered with efforts of others to do so, etc; > > -- the intentional bombing of the water treatment plants, despite > their awareness of the likely resultant spread of diseases from drinking > non-potable water. > > As a direct result of these cruel and inhuman acts, thousands of people > died, many more suffered illnesses and permanent injury. For these > actions, the Defendants are guilty of Nuremberg Crimes Against Humanity and > the Crime of Genocide as recognized by international law and U.S. domestic > law. > > > > Defendant Bush, Having Destroyed Iraq's Economic Base, Demands Reparations > Which Will Permanently Impoverish Iraq and Threaten Its People with Famine > and Epidemic. > > > > 39. Defendant Bush seeks to force Iraq to pay for damages to Kuwait > largely caused by the U.S. and even to pay U.S. costs for its violation of > Iraqi sovereignty in occupying northern Iraq to further manipulate the > Kurdish population there. Such reparations are neo-colonial means of > expropriating Iraq's oil, natural resources, and human labor. Meanwhile, > the United States government dominates and controls the respective > governments and oil resources of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, the > United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. > > > > 40. The United States government has successfully carried out its > longstanding threat and war plan to seize and steal the oil resources of > the Persian Gulf for its own benefit. The United States now *either > directly or indirectly* controls the natural energy resources that fuel > the economies of Europe and Japan. Acting with their de facto allies in > Israel and Great Britain, the Defendants are today *seeking to* > consolidate their control over the entire Middle East in a blatant bid to > establish worldwide hegemony. > > > Bush's "New World Order" > > > > 41. Today, the government in the United States of America constitutes an > international criminal conspiracy under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and > Principles that is legally identical to the Nazi government in World War II > Germany. The Defendants' wanton extermination of approximately 250,000 > people in Iraq provides definitive proof of the validity of this Nuremberg > Proposition for the entire world to see. Indeed, Defendant Bush's > so-called New World Order sounds and looks strikingly similar to the New > Order proclaimed by Adolph Hitler over fifty years ago. You do not build a > *real* New World Order with stealth bombers, Abrams tanks, and tomahawk > cruise missiles. For their own good and the good of all humanity, the > American people must condemn and repudiate Defendant Bush and his grotesque > vision of a New World Order that is constructed upon warfare, bloodshed, > violence and criminality. > > > Impeachment > > 42. All of these aforementioned international crimes > constitute "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" as defined by the Article 2, > Section 4 of the United States Constitution and therefore warrant the > impeachment, conviction, and removal from office of Defendants Bush, > Quayle, Baker, Cheney, Powell, and Scowcroft. In regard to this matter, > Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas has already introduced an Impeachment > Resolution into the House of Representatives, that is numbered House > Resolution 86, calling for the impeachment and removal from office of these > Defendants because they have committed these international crimes and also > because they have subverted and perverted constitutional government in > America "to the manifest injury of the people of the United States." > > > A Special Prosecutor > > > > 43. These Defendants must be impeached by the House, tried and convicted > by the Senate, and removed from office. Thereafter, we believe that the > Commission of Inquiry and the International War Crimes Tribunal will have > produced sufficient evidence to trigger the application of the Ethics in > Government Act, 28 U.S.C. §591 et seq., that would lead to the appointment > of an Independent Counsel (i.e., Special Prosecutor) to investigate and > prosecute these high-ranking officials for the wholesale violation of > federal criminal laws in their decision to launch and wage this criminal > war against the people and State of Iraq. We fully intend to see Bush, > Baker, Cheney, Quayle, Scowcroft, Webster, Powell, Schwarzkopf and the rest > of the U.S. High Command sitting in jail for the rest of their natural > lives. > > > Conclusion > > 44. Make no mistake about it: The very nature, future and existence of > the American Republic depends upon the success of these endeavors. Today, > the battle begins for the hearts and minds of the American People between > the Warmongers and the Peacemakers. We ask all of you to join us in this > legal campaign and moral crusade to *reclaim for* the United States of > America a democratic government with a commitment to the Rule of Law and > the Constitution both at home and abroad. > > Notes > > > > > > Francis A. Boyle > > Law Building > > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > > Champaign, IL 61820 USA > > 217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (voice) > > 217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax) > > (personal comments only) > > > > > ------------------------------ > > ------------------------------ > > *[i]* <#m_-8443876270727123466_m_-4550340583556382906__ednref1>* > See Ramsey Clark, Planning U.S. Dominion over the Gulf, in his The Fire > This Time 3-37 (1992). See also Ramsey Clark & Others, War Crimes: A > Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq (Maisonneuve Press: 1992). > * > > *[ii]* <#m_-8443876270727123466_m_-4550340583556382906__ednref2>*. > See Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time 23-24 (1992); Hamdi A. Hassan, The > Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait 37, 47-51 (1999); The Glaspie-Hussein Transcript, > Beyond the Storm 391-96 (Phyllis Bennis & Michel Moushabeck eds. 1991).* > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Fri Feb 23 15:16:28 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 15:16:28 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham In-Reply-To: References: <768812612.3140637.1519358750167@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Point well taken: “we take their scorn as an attempt to make up for the weakness of their arguments.” Thats when we know we’ve won the argument, when they have to resort to personal attacks. On Feb 23, 2018, at 07:12, C G Estabrook wrote: > > > Naturally we wish our political opponents to be polite - and we take their scorn as an attempt to make up for the weakness of their arguments […]. > > But the question remains. > > >> On Feb 23, 2018, at 8:58 AM, Karen Aram wrote: >> >> The question maybe a fair one, but Roger’s statement: >> >> “but that is what gets lots of people to suck up to you. I wish that you would have to present information subject to the penalty of perjury and that when it does not measure up to being verified fact that you were hit with a year in jail, the penalty for perjury. Then you might lie less than currently.” >> >> proves that he is not concerned with truth, he is only concerned with vilifying those that attempt to present it. Why we have someone so intent on trolling and supporting war, the military, and making such immature accusations as he does, defies all logic. >> >> On Feb 23, 2018, at 06:32, >> >> Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> FAB, where exactly is this quote that you claim to exist - I rather doubt that anyone would model any bombing campaign on the attack on Dresden, but that is what gets lots of people to suck up to you. I wish that you would have to present information subject to the penalty of perjury and that when it does not measure up to being verified fact that you were hit with a year in jail, the penalty for perjury. Then you might lie less than currently. >>> >>> Here is a pretty well written article about General Horner based on interviews with him - I am sure that none of you like the source since it is not ultra left, but it probably is pretty factually accurate >>> https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.airforcemag.com%2FMagazineArchive%2FMagazine%2520Documents%2F2016%2FMarch%25202016%2F0316gulf.pdf&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cb0b92c931ba64f6bbbdd08d57acfe56d%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549955673062551&sdata=7t%2FkbKvSyWNTA7JcO4Gjs2Mo%2B08HvCeJi7hqX%2Fu5%2B4Y%3D&reserved=0 >>> >>> Roger >>> >>> >>> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 6:01 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> Before that war began, US Air Force General Horner publicly stated that the bombing campaign of the Iraqi Cities would be modeled on the bombing campaign of Dresden. Bush’s own Episcopal Bishop refused to pray with him at the White House the night Bush commenced that bombing campaign that exterminated 25,000 Iraqis. So Bush asked Billie and Billie was happy to kiss a certain part of Bush’s anatomy and give his Blessings and Imprimatur to this outright genocide in front of the American People on TV: Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching Off To War! >>> >>> The Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno is too good for Billie. Fab. >>> >>> >>> >>> Francis A. Boyle >>> >>> >>> From: Boyle, Francis A >>> Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 7:37 AM >>> To: 'Karen Aram' ; David Green >>> Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) >>> Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham >>> >>> >>> >>> With due respect to you, I have no sympathy for warmongers. I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent and stop that Bush Sr war against Iraq while he was giving his Blessings to Bush exterminating 25,000 civilians in the Iraqi Cities by carpet bombing. I had to get my wife and kids out of town. Let him rot in the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno reserved for warmongers! Fab. >>> >>> >>> >>> Francis A. Boyle >>> >>> >>> From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss >>> Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 6:38 AM >>> To: David Green >>> Cc: Peace-discuss List >>> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Billy Graham >>> >>> >>> >>> One might think we’re being cruel to criticize the newly departed, but when we’ve lived with these false images throughout our lives, it’s important to uncloak the truth. The media and establishment present us with false gods. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> On Feb 22, 2018, at 20:05, David Green via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> Graham's biographer has an article on Counterpunch. Graham's evangelical roots were in L.A., which explains why the LA Times of my youth carried such elaborate coverage of his mega-rallies at the Coliseum, 100,000 capacity at that time. >>> >>> >>> >>> Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear >>> >>> >>> >>> Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear >>> Billy Graham left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he in... >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎22‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎46‎:‎22‎ ‎PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report: >>> Somebody should tell the truth about Billy Graham. He was a racist, rabidly anti-working class warmonger. >>> CECIL BOTHWELL, cecil at braveulysses.com >>> Bothwell wrote the biography The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. He just wrote the piece “Billy Graham and the Gospel of Fear,” published by CounterPunch, which states: “When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III. … >>> “Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, ‘puff Graham,’ and he was an instant sensation. >>> “Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow [Time/Life] publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.C. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham’s marketability and Time and Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham. >>> “The man who would become known as ‘the minister to presidents’ offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. ‘MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN.’ … >>> “Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God’s approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general’s plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam — knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians — and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War.” From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 23 15:20:55 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 15:20:55 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: FW: U.S. War Crimes During the First Persian Gulf War (1991) In-Reply-To: References: <918F11F0D707A9458876C1B112320C54047D6144@quoll.law.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: Roger, In reference to your comment below: " I have gotten another book from libraries by Clark’s organization and it is full of false and misleading information. " Please provide the name of the book, and that which you claim to be “false and misleading information." On Feb 23, 2018, at 07:15, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss > wrote: Ramsey Clark has gotten lost in search of the truth as well - Here is quote from the reference I provided - At Camp David, Horner briefed Bush on air options. “That went pretty well because nobody knew anything,” Horner said. Bush said his objectives were to limit loss of life, both Iraqi and allied. This absolutely does not square with your claim about a Dresden like campaign - Where is your quote from the Clark book - I am not about to buy a book to find out what you claim is true - you find open source material that anyone can read for free - I have gotten another book from libraries by Clark's organization and it is full of false and misleading information - so I do not consider him to be a credible source - that's sad because he should be, but he seems to let campaigners put his name on stuff without his really checking the facts - Roger On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 7:03 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: For full documentation with footnotes etc see Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time, Thundersmouth Press. 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 [mailto:FBOYLE at law.illinois.edu] Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 5:12 PM To: Killeacle > Subject: U.S. War Crimes During the First Persian Gulf War (1991) United States War Crimes During the First Persian Gulf War On February 27, 1992 Albany Law School in Albany, N.Y. convened a Symposium on the subject of “International War Crimes: The Search for Justice.” The Symposium organizers invited the author to come in for the express purpose of arguing the case against the Bush Sr. administration for committing international crimes during their Gulf War I against Iraq, and then to debate this position with the other Symposium speakers, who were law professors or lawyers. The Symposium proceedings were taped for later broadcast by C-SPAN: Introduction 1. For the past year I have been working with the International Commission of Inquiry into United States war crimes that were committed during the Persian Gulf War. This Commission has conducted the largest independent worldwide investigation of war crimes in history. Since last May, the Commission has held thirty hearings across the United States and in twenty countries across five continents to expose the war crimes that the United States government inflicted upon the people and State of Iraq. 2. On Saturday, February 29, 1992 in New York City, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium, the Commission will publicly present its evidence before an International War Crimes Tribunal consisting of distinguished jurists and human rights activists drawn from around the world. In the brief space that has been allotted to me, I would like to present the basic gist of the charges that will be brought before the Tribunal against President George Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, Secretary of State Jim Baker, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, National Security Assistant Brent Scowcroft, CIA Director William Webster, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, General Norman Schwarzkopf, and other members of the High Command of the United States military establishment who launched and waged this brutal, inhumane, and criminal war. Hereinafter, these individuals will be collectively referred to as the Defendants. The Charges 3. The international crimes that have been charged and will be proved against these Defendants consist principally of the three Nuremberg Offenses: the Nuremberg Crime Against Peace, that is, waging an aggressive war and a war in violation of international treaties and agreements; Nuremberg Crimes Against Humanity; and Nuremberg War Crimes. In addition, these Defendants also committed grievous war crimes by wantonly violating the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare of 1907; the Declaration of London on Sea Warfare of 1909; the Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare of 1923; the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional Protocols of 1977; and the international crime of genocide against the people of Iraq as defined by the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 as well as by the United States' own Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987, 18 U.S.C. §1901. Finally, and most heinously of all, these Defendants actually perpetrated a Nuremberg Crime against their own troops when they forced them to take experimental biological weapons vaccines without their informed consent in gross violation of the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation that has been fully subscribed to by the United States government. Universal Jurisdiction 4. These international crimes create personal criminal responsibility on the part of all these Defendants that warrant their prosecution under basic norms of customary international law, treaties, and statutes in any state of the world community that obtains jurisdiction over them for the rest of their lives. We believe that the International War Crimes Tribunal will produce a Judgment that can be put into the hands of every government in the world with the injunction that should any of these Defendants ever appear within their territorial jurisdiction, they must be apprehended and prosecuted for the commission of the specified international crimes. Like unto pirates, these Defendants are hostes humani generis—the enemies of all humankind! The Historical Origins of the War 5. I do not have the time in this brief presentation to analyze the entire history of illegal U.S. military interventionism into the Middle East—especially the Persian Gulf region—and in particular its divide-and-conquer (divide et impera) policies. Suffice it to say here that the "immediate cause" of the United States war to destroy Iraq and take over the Arab oil fields in the Persian Gulf goes back to the 1973 Arab oil boycott of Europe. The Arab oil states imposed the boycott in solidarity with those Arab states that were then attempting to reclaim their lands that had been illegally stolen from them by Israel in 1967. The Arab oil boycott brought Europe to its knees. Subsequently, Arab oil states were able to increase the price of oil to a point of economic fairness that would enable them to provide for the basic human needs of their own Peoples. 6. But the success of the Arab oil boycott led several prominent U.S. government officials in the Nixon administration, and especially Henry Kissinger, to publicly threaten that the United States government would prepare itself to seize the Arab oil fields in order to prevent something like the boycott from ever happening again. This illegal governmental threat was stated openly, publicly, and repeatedly during the course of the Nixon administration, the Ford administration, the Carter administration, and the Reagan administration. The Bush administration would finally be the one to carry this threat out—but only after a decade of active preparations. The Rapid Deployment Force 7. During the course of the Carter administration, the United States government obtained authorization from Congress to set up, arm, equip, and supply the so-called Rapid Deployment Force (RDF), whose primary mission was to seize and steal the Arab oil fields of the Persian Gulf region. So the planning and preparations for the U.S. war against Iraq go all the way back to the so-called "liberal" Carter administration—at the very least. The United States foreign policy establishment consists of liberal imperialists, reactionary imperialists, and middle-of-the-road imperialists. But they all share in common a firm belief in America's "Manifest Destiny" to rule the world. 8. For the next decade, the Pentagon obtained a new generation of high-technology conventional weapons possessing massive destructive power and lethality; the logistical support network necessary to convey a force of 500,000 soldiers over to the Persian Gulf region within six months; and base access rights and facilities for that purpose throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Working in conjunction with its de facto allies in the region such as Egypt and Israel, the Pentagon stockpiled enormous quantities of weapons, equipment, and supplies in the immediate vicinity of the Persian Gulf as a prelude to military intervention. Hence, the United States government had been planning, preparing, and conspiring to seize and steal the Persian Gulf oil fields for over a decade. United States War Plans Against Iraq[i] 9. Sometime after the termination of the Iraq-Iran War in the summer of 1988, the Pentagon proceeded to revise its outstanding war plans for U.S. military intervention into the Persian Gulf region in order to destroy Iraq. Defendant Schwarzkopf was put in charge of this revision. In early 1990, Defendant Schwarzkopf informed the Senate Armed Services Committee of this new military strategy in the Gulf allegedly designed to protect U.S. access to and control over Gulf oil in the event of regional conflicts. In October 1990, Defendant Powell referred to the new military plan developed in 1989. After the war, Defendant Schwarzkopf referred to eighteen months of planning for the campaign—a campaign whose public rationale was based on the illegal invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, which occurred on August 2, 1990. 10. Sometime in late 1989 or early 1990, the Pentagon's war plan for destroying Iraq and stealing Persian Gulf oil fields was put into motion. At that time, Defendant Schwarzkopf was named the Commander of the so-called U.S. Central Command—which was the re-named version of the Rapid Deployment Force—for the purpose of carrying out the war plan that he had personally developed and supervised. During January of 1990, massive quantities of United States weapons, equipment, and supplies were sent to Saudi Arabia in order to prepare for the war against Iraq, again prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. 11. Pursuant to this war plan, Defendant Webster and the CIA assisted and directed Kuwait in its actions of violating OPEC oil production agreements to undercut the price of oil for the purpose of debilitating Iraq's economy; in extracting excessive and illegal amounts of oil from pools it shared with Iraq; in demanding immediate repayment of loans Kuwait had made to Iraq during the Iraq-Iran War; and in breaking off negotiations with Iraq over these disputes. The Defendants intended to provoke Iraq into aggressive military actions against Kuwait that they knew could be used to justify U.S. military intervention into the Persian Gulf for the purpose of destroying Iraq and taking over Arab oil fields. To be sure, the recitation of these facts is not intended to justify the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. "Green Light" to Invade Kuwait 12. The Defendants showed absolutely no opposition to Iraq's increasing threats against Kuwait. Indeed, when Saddam Hussein requested U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to explain State Department testimony in Congress about Iraq's threats against Kuwait, she assured him that the United States considered the dispute to be a regional concern, and that it would not intervene militarily. In other words, the United States government gave Saddam Hussein what amounted to a "green light" to invade Kuwait. 13. This reprehensible behavior was similar to that of the Carter administration during September of 1980, when United States government officials gave Saddam Hussein the "green light" to invade Iran and thus commence the tragic Iraq-Iran War.[ii] A decade later, Saddam Hussein simply surmised that he had been given yet another "green light" by the United States government to commit overt aggression against surrounding states. Only this time, the Defendants knowingly intended to lead Iraq into a provocation that could be used to justify intervention and warfare by United States military forces for the real purpose of destroying Iraq as a military power and seizing Arab oil fields in the Persian Gulf. Bush Is the Bigger War Criminal 14. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait without significant resistance. The Kuwaiti government itself estimated that approximately 300 people were killed as a result of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and a few hundred more as a result of the military occupation. By comparison, Defendant Bush's invasion of Panama in December of 1989 took between 2,000 and 4,000 Panamanian lives, and the United States government is still covering up the actual death toll. Defendant Bush killed more innocent people in Panama than Saddam Hussein did in Kuwait. 15. Defendant Bush's invasion of Panama was even more illegal, reprehensible, and criminal than Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. The world must never forget that the first step in the construction of Bush's "New World Order" was his illegal invasion of Panama and the murder of thousands of completely innocent Panamanian civilians. America's self-anointed policeman in the Persian Gulf had the blood of the Panamanian People on his hands. Bush's Perversion of the Constitution 16. Pursuant to the Pentagon's war plan for destroying Iraq and stealing Persian Gulf oil fields—and without consultation or communication with Congress—Defendant Bush initially ordered 40,000 U.S. military personnel into the Persian Gulf region during the first week of August 1990. He lied to the American people and Congress when he stated that his acts were purely defensive. Right from the very outset of this crisis—and even beforehand—Defendant Bush fully intended to go to war against Iraq and to seize the Arab oil fields in the Persian Gulf. Defendant Bush deliberately misled, deceived, concealed and made false representations to the Congress to prevent its free deliberation and informed exercise of legislative power. 17. Defendant Bush intentionally usurped Congressional power, ignored its authority, and failed and refused to consult with the Congress. He individually ordered a naval blockade against Iraq—itself an act of war—without approval by Congress or the U.N. Security Council. Defendant Bush waited until after the November 1990 elections to publicly announce his earlier order sending more than 200,000 additional military personnel to the Persian Gulf for offensive purposes without seeking the approval of Congress. Pursuant to the Pentagon's war plan, Defendant Bush switched U.S. forces from a defensive position and capability to an offensive capacity for aggression against Iraq without consultation with, and contrary to assurances given to, Congress and the American people. 18. On the very eve of the war, Defendant Bush then strong-armed legislation through Congress that approved enforcement of U.N. resolutions vesting absolute discretion in any nation, providing no guidelines, and requiring no reporting to the United Nations. Defendant Bush demonstrated, through the prior planning above indicated, the intention to destroy the armed forces and civilian infrastructure of Iraq. Those acts were undertaken to provide an international legal cover, under the pretext of responding to an act of aggression, for the commission of a Nuremberg Crime Against Peace and war crimes. This conduct violated the Constitution and Laws of the United States and especially the War Powers Clause found in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the U.S. War Powers Act of 1973, 87 Stat. 555, and the United Nations Charter, which is the "Supreme Law of the Land" under Article 6 of the Constitution. For this reason alone, Defendant Bush and his co-conspirators committed "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" that warrant their impeachment, conviction, removal from office, and criminal prosecution. Bush's Mad Rush to War 19. While concealing his true intentions, Bush continued the military buildup of U.S. forces from August into January 1991 for the purpose of attacking and destroying Iraq. Bush pressed the military to expedite preparations and to commence the war against Iraq before military conditions were optimum for domestic political purposes so that the war would not interfere with his presidential reelection campaign. Indeed, the entire timing, conduct and duration of the war were planned so as to promote Defendant Bush's reelection prospects. But as a direct result of Defendant Bush's mad rush to war, United States military personnel suffered needless casualties. Defendant Bush has continued to lie and cover up to the American people and Congress the true nature and extent of U.S. casualties during the Persian Gulf War. Bush Corrupted the United Nations 20. Defendant Bush repeatedly coerced the members of the United Nations Security Council into adopting an unprecedented series of resolutions that culminated in his securing authority for any nation to use "all necessary means" to enforce these resolutions. To secure these votes in the Security Council, Defendant Bush paid multi-billion-dollar bribes; offered arms for regional wars; threatened and carried out economic retaliation; illegally forgave multi-billion-dollar loans; offered diplomatic relations despite human rights violations; and in other ways corruptly exacted votes. This illegal activity subverted and perverted the very purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter itself found in articles 1 and 2 thereof. Bush Circumvented and Violated Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter 21. In his mad rush to war, Defendant Bush caused the United Nations to completely bypass Chapter VI of the U.N. Charter that mandates the pacific settlement of international disputes. Defendant Bush consistently rejected and ridiculed all of Iraq's efforts to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the dispute. Defendant Bush proudly boasted that there would be no negotiation, no compromise, no face-saving, etc. 22. Defendant Bush's successful attempt to subvert every effort for negotiating a peaceful resolution of this dispute violated the solemn obligation mandating the peaceful resolution of international disputes found in article 2, paragraph 3 of the United Nations Charter; in article 33, paragraph 1 of the United Nations Charter; and in article 2 of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. Just like the Nazi war criminals before him, Defendant Bush pursued recourse to war as an instrument of his national policy and for the solution of international controversies in violation of article 1 of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Just as the Nazi war criminals had done by invading Poland in September of 1939, these Defendants perpetrated a Nuremberg Crime Against Peace in their decision to go to war against Iraq with the intent to seize and steal the oil resources of the Persian Gulf. The Conduct of the War Itself 23. Obviously, in the brief space that has been allotted to me, there is no way that I could adequately describe all of the atrocities and war crimes that were committed by these Defendants and their Agents during the course of their actual conduct of military hostilities against the People and State of Iraq. These matters have been covered in great detail during the course of the public investigations and hearings conducted around the world by the Commission during the past year. The results of this work will be presented to the members of the International War Crimes Tribunal for their consideration and adjudication. Nonetheless, I will provide you here with a succinct account of the major categories of war crimes committed by these Defendants during the course of their criminal war against Iraq. Bush Ordered the Destruction of Facilities Essential to Civilian Life and Economic Productivity Throughout Iraq. 24. Systematic aerial and missile bombardment of Iraq was ordered to begin at 6:30 p.m. E.S.T. January 16, 1991, in order to be reported on prime time TV. The bombing continued for 42 days. It met no resistance from Iraqi aircraft and no effective anti-aircraft or anti-missile ground fire. Iraq was basically defenseless. 25. Most of the targets were civilian facilities. The United States intentionally bombed and destroyed centers for civilian life, commercial and business districts, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, shelters, residential areas, historical sites, private vehicles and civilian government offices. In aerial attacks, including strafing, over cities, towns, the countryside and highways, United States aircraft bombed and strafed indiscriminately. The purpose of these attacks was to destroy life and property, and generally to terrorize the civilian population of Iraq. The net effect was the summary execution and indiscriminate corporal punishment of men, women and children, young and old, rich and poor, of all nationalities and religions. 26. As a direct result of this bombing campaign against civilian life, at least 25,000 men, women and children were killed. The Red Crescent Society of Jordan estimated 113,000 civilian dead, 60% of them children, the week before the end of the war. According to the Nuremberg Charter, this "wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages" is a Nuremberg War Crime. 27. The intention and effort of this bombing campaign against civilian life and facilities was to systematically destroy Iraq's infrastructure leaving it in a pre-industrial condition. The U.S. assault left Iraq in near apocalyptic conditions as reported by the first United Nations observers after the war. As a direct, intentional and foreseeable result of this anti-civilian destruction, over one hundred thousand people have died after the war from dehydration, dysentery, diseases, and malnutrition caused by impure water, inability to obtain effective medical assistance and debilitation from hunger, shock, cold and stress. More will die until potable water, sanitary living conditions, adequate food supplies and other necessities are provided. Yet Defendant Bush continues to impose punitive economic sanctions against the people of Iraq in order to prevent this from happening. The United States Intentionally Bombed and Destroyed Defenseless Iraqi Military Personnel; Used Excessive Force; Killed Soldiers Seeking to Surrender and in Disorganized Individual Flight, Often Unarmed and Far from Any Combat Zones; Randomly and Wantonly Killed Iraqi Soldiers; and Destroyed Material After the Cease-Fire. 28. In the first hours of the aerial and missile bombardment, the United States destroyed most military communications and began the systematic killing of Iraqi soldiers who were incapable of defense or escape, and the destruction of military equipment. The U.S. bombing campaign killed tens of thousands of defenseless soldiers, cut off from most of their food, water and other supplies, and left them in desperate and helpless disarray. Defendant Schwarzkopf placed Iraqi military casualties at over 100,000. Large numbers of these soldiers were "out of combat" and therefore not legitimate targets for military attack. 29. When it was determined that the civilian economy and the military were sufficiently destroyed, the U.S. ground forces moved into Kuwait and Iraq attacking disoriented, disorganized, fleeing Iraqi forces wherever they could be found, killing thousands more and destroying any equipment found. In one particularly shocking maneuver, thousands of Iraqi soldiers were needlessly and illegally buried alive. This wholesale slaughter of Iraqi soldiers continued even after and in violation of the so-called cease-fire. 30. The Defendants' intention was not to remove Iraq's presence from Kuwait. Rather, their intention was to destroy Iraq. The disproportion in death and destruction inflicted on a defenseless enemy exceeded 1000 to one. The Defendants conducted this genocidal war against the male population of Iraq for the express purpose of making sure that Iraq could not raise a substantial military force for at least another generation. The United States Used Prohibited Weapons Capable of Mass Destruction and Inflicting Indiscriminate Death and Unnecessary Suffering Against Both Military and Civilian Targets. 31. Fuel air explosives were used against troops in place, civilian areas, oil fields and fleeing civilians and soldiers on two stretches of highway between Kuwait and Iraq. One seven mile stretch called the "Highway of Death" was littered with hundreds of vehicles and thousands of dead. All were fleeing to Iraq for their lives. Thousands were civilians of all ages, including Kuwaitis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Jordanians and other nationalities. 32. Napalm was used against civilians and military personnel, as well as to start fires. Oil well fires in both Iraq and Kuwait were intentionally started by U.S. aircraft dropping napalm and other heat intensive devices. 33. Cluster bombs and anti-personnel fragmentation bombs were used in Basra, and other cities and towns, against the civilian convoys of fleeing vehicles and against military units. 34. "Superbombs" were dropped on hardened shelters with the intention of assassinating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein—a war crime in its own right. The United States Intentionally Attacked Installations in Iraq Containing Dangerous Substances and Forces in Violation of Article 56 of Geneva Protocol I of 1977. 35. The U.S. intentionally bombed alleged nuclear sites, chemical plants, dams and other “dangerous forces.” The U.S. knew such attacks could cause the release of dangerous forces from such installations and consequently severe losses among the civilian population. While some civilians were killed in such attacks, there are no reported cases of consequent severe losses. Presumably, lethal nuclear materials, and dangerous chemical and biological warfare substances, were not present at the sites bombed. The United States Waged War on the Environment. 36. Before the war started, the Pentagon had developed computer models that accurately predicted the environmental catastrophe that would occur should the United States go to war against Iraq. These Defendants went to war anyway knowing full well what the consequences of such an environmental disaster would be. Attacks by U.S. aircraft caused much if not all of the worst oil spills in the Gulf. Aircraft and helicopters dropped napalm and fuel-air explosives on oil wells, storage tanks and refineries, causing oil fires throughout Iraq and many, if not most, of the oil well fires in Iraq and Kuwait. Defendant Bush Encouraged and Aided Shiite Muslims and Kurds to Rebel Against the Government of Iraq Causing Fratricidal Violence, Emigration, Exposure, Hunger and Sickness and Thousands of Deaths. After the Rebellion Failed, the U.S. Invaded and Occupied Parts of Iraq Without Lawful Authority in Order to Increase Division and Hostilities Within Iraq. 37. Without authority from the U.S. Congress or the United Nations, Defendant Bush encouraged and aided rebellion against Iraq, failed to protect the warring parties, encouraged mass migration of whole populations placing them in jeopardy from the elements, hunger and disease. After much suffering and many deaths, Defendant Bush then without authority used U.S. military forces to distribute aid at and near the Turkish border, ignoring the often greater suffering among refugees in Iran. He then arbitrarily set up bantustan-like settlements for Kurds in Iraq and demanded that Iraq pay for U.S. costs. When Kurds chose to return to their homes in Iraq, he moved U.S. troops further into northern Iraq against the will of the government and without any legal authority to do so. As Defendant Baker correctly put it when he visited the area, these atrocities constituted a Nuremberg "crime against humanity." Although he was referring to the culpability of Saddam Hussein, Baker effectively condemned the relevant members of the Bush Sr. administration under international criminal law as “aiders and abettors” to a Nuremberg crime against humanity. Defendant Bush Intentionally Deprived the Iraqi People of Essential Medicines, Potable Water, Food and Other Necessities. 38. A major component of the assault on Iraq was the systematic deprivation of essential human needs and services, to terrorize and break the will of the Iraqi people, to destroy their economic capability, and to reduce their numbers and weaken their health. Towards those ends, the Defendants: -- imposed and enforced embargoes preventing the shipment of needed medicines, water purifiers, infant milk formula, food and other supplies; -- froze funds of Iraq and forced other nations to do so, depriving Iraq of the ability to purchase needed medicines, food and other supplies; -- prevented international organizations, governments and relief agencies from providing needed supplies and obtaining information concerning such needs; -- failed to assist or meet urgent needs of huge refugee populations and interfered with efforts of others to do so, etc; -- the intentional bombing of the water treatment plants, despite their awareness of the likely resultant spread of diseases from drinking non-potable water. As a direct result of these cruel and inhuman acts, thousands of people died, many more suffered illnesses and permanent injury. For these actions, the Defendants are guilty of Nuremberg Crimes Against Humanity and the Crime of Genocide as recognized by international law and U.S. domestic law. Defendant Bush, Having Destroyed Iraq's Economic Base, Demands Reparations Which Will Permanently Impoverish Iraq and Threaten Its People with Famine and Epidemic. 39. Defendant Bush seeks to force Iraq to pay for damages to Kuwait largely caused by the U.S. and even to pay U.S. costs for its violation of Iraqi sovereignty in occupying northern Iraq to further manipulate the Kurdish population there. Such reparations are neo-colonial means of expropriating Iraq's oil, natural resources, and human labor. Meanwhile, the United States government dominates and controls the respective governments and oil resources of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. 40. The United States government has successfully carried out its longstanding threat and war plan to seize and steal the oil resources of the Persian Gulf for its own benefit. The United States now either directly or indirectly controls the natural energy resources that fuel the economies of Europe and Japan. Acting with their de facto allies in Israel and Great Britain, the Defendants are today seeking to consolidate their control over the entire Middle East in a blatant bid to establish worldwide hegemony. Bush's "New World Order" 41. Today, the government in the United States of America constitutes an international criminal conspiracy under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles that is legally identical to the Nazi government in World War II Germany. The Defendants' wanton extermination of approximately 250,000 people in Iraq provides definitive proof of the validity of this Nuremberg Proposition for the entire world to see. Indeed, Defendant Bush's so-called New World Order sounds and looks strikingly similar to the New Order proclaimed by Adolph Hitler over fifty years ago. You do not build a real New World Order with stealth bombers, Abrams tanks, and tomahawk cruise missiles. For their own good and the good of all humanity, the American people must condemn and repudiate Defendant Bush and his grotesque vision of a New World Order that is constructed upon warfare, bloodshed, violence and criminality. Impeachment 42. All of these aforementioned international crimes constitute "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" as defined by the Article 2, Section 4 of the United States Constitution and therefore warrant the impeachment, conviction, and removal from office of Defendants Bush, Quayle, Baker, Cheney, Powell, and Scowcroft. In regard to this matter, Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas has already introduced an Impeachment Resolution into the House of Representatives, that is numbered House Resolution 86, calling for the impeachment and removal from office of these Defendants because they have committed these international crimes and also because they have subverted and perverted constitutional government in America "to the manifest injury of the people of the United States." A Special Prosecutor 43. These Defendants must be impeached by the House, tried and convicted by the Senate, and removed from office. Thereafter, we believe that the Commission of Inquiry and the International War Crimes Tribunal will have produced sufficient evidence to trigger the application of the Ethics in Government Act, 28 U.S.C. §591 et seq., that would lead to the appointment of an Independent Counsel (i.e., Special Prosecutor) to investigate and prosecute these high-ranking officials for the wholesale violation of federal criminal laws in their decision to launch and wage this criminal war against the people and State of Iraq. We fully intend to see Bush, Baker, Cheney, Quayle, Scowcroft, Webster, Powell, Schwarzkopf and the rest of the U.S. High Command sitting in jail for the rest of their natural lives. Conclusion 44. Make no mistake about it: The very nature, future and existence of the American Republic depends upon the success of these endeavors. Today, the battle begins for the hearts and minds of the American People between the Warmongers and the Peacemakers. We ask all of you to join us in this legal campaign and moral crusade to reclaim for the United States of America a democratic government with a commitment to the Rule of Law and the Constitution both at home and abroad. Notes Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (voice) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) ________________________________ ________________________________ [i] See Ramsey Clark, Planning U.S. Dominion over the Gulf, in his The Fire This Time 3-37 (1992). See also Ramsey Clark & Others, War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq (Maisonneuve Press: 1992). [ii]. See Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time 23-24 (1992); Hamdi A. Hassan, The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait 37, 47-51 (1999); The Glaspie-Hussein Transcript, Beyond the Storm 391-96 (Phyllis Bennis & Michel Moushabeck eds. 1991). _______________________________________________ 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://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C9d803aa5acf1424835c808d57ad068be%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636549957891653676&sdata=qjkBN0MEbDN4ZQkQ1iBsrvMD0uiDoUFpTbwTVf2uRak%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 23 15:26:09 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 15:26:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FB Message-ID: Oh oh, I’ve been blocked from FB, no message it just went blank and won’t let me back in. Must be something I said this morning in reference to peoples postings coming up blank. Or the recent posting from the WSWS.ORG I just posted. From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Feb 23 19:27:26 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 19:27:26 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Poems Against the Empire In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Facing 5 years, we got her out of Leavenworth in 8 months-and adopted a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International. See my book Destroying World Order on how we did 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 [mailto:support at lists.aals.org] Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2017 9:39 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: [SECTNS.aals] - Poems Against the Empire [cid:image003.jpg at 01D32F3D.89377560] ________________________________ Attachment Links: image003.jpg (124 k) Site Links: View post online View mailing list online Start new thread via email Unsubscribe from this mailing list Manage your subscription This email has been sent to: fboyle at illinois.edu This list is a forum for the exchange of points of view. Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of the group associated with the list and do not necessarily represent the position of the Association of American Law Schools. Use of this email content is governed by the terms of service at: https://connect.aals.org/p/cm/ld/fid=280 ________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 124563 bytes Desc: image003.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Feb 23 19:28:11 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 19:28:11 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Media Monitors reviews Boyle/Destroying World Order References: <3C9010C6652AB645BC025F2372A86BB224AB3C67@mail.law.uiuc.edu> 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: Clarity Press, Inc. [mailto:clarity at islandnet.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 6:32 PM To: fboyle at law.uiuc.edu Subject: Media Monitors reviews Boyle/Destroying World Order "Not surprisingly, the mainstream American media did not give Boyle's book anything near the coverage it deserves. But one day, his expert witness testimony, along with others, could be used in a court of law, or by historians, to identify who is/was behind this pure evil. It may take years, but that day will surely come.." Mohamed Elmasry, Professor of Engineering, Media Monitors Network, January 11, 2006. For the full article, go to www.mediamonitors.net DESTROYING WORLD ORDER: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11 by Francis A. Boyle Since the war in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Americans have been surprised to learn that much of the world now views the United States itself as a major threat to global peace. American international legal expert Francis A. Boyle examines the imperial dimensions of U.S. policy in the Middle East, past and present, which may help to account for these views. [http://www.bookmasters.com/clarity/images/b0024.jpg]Boyle's hard-hitting analysis reveals a history of American intervention which has led to havoc in the region and destabilization of the international system as a whole. He examines U.S. assistance to Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war, U.S. conduct of the 1990 Persian Gulf War and the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in relation to their violation of the of the laws of neutrality, humanitarian law, the laws of war--and the law of the U.S. Constitution. By the presidency of George W. Bush, U.S. policy had evolved to a public assertion of the right to preemptive strike, and its actual implementation. The concluding chapter provides a guide to impeaching President George W. Bush for lying in leading the nation to war. ABOUT FRANCIS A. BOYLE Francis A. Boyle is a leading American professor, practitioner and advocate of international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He served as Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign and is author of, inter alia, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations 1898-1921, and The Bosnian People Charge Genocide. Francis A. Boyle holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University. CLARITY PRESS, INC. http://www.claritypress.com ISBN: 0-932863-40-X Paper $14.95 2004 Table of contents, synopsis and reviews available at: http://www.bookmasters.com/clarity/b0024.htm Available from: SCB Distributors,15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA. 90248 victor at scbdistributors.com Toll-free 800-729-6423* Tel: 1-310-532-9400 * Fax: 1-310-532-7001 or through www.amazon.com<%20http:/whatcounts.com/t?ctl=108AC39:3E1524B> or Ingram or Fernwood Books in Canada. Lindsay at fernwoodbooks.ca To remove: clarity at islandnet.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Feb 23 20:27:49 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 20:27:49 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Message from Senator Richard J. Durbin References: Message-ID: One out of three is better than nothing: February 23, 2018 Ms. Karen Aram 803 East Green Street Urbana, IL 61802-3411 Dear Ms. Aram: Thank you for contacting me about President Trump's Nuclear Posture Review. I appreciate hearing from you and share your concerns. In early February 2018, the Pentagon released the Nuclear Posture Review, which called for the development of a lower yield option for ballistic and cruise missiles launched from submarines. These lower yield options would have a less powerful explosive capacity than our current nuclear arsenal. The Nuclear Posture Review also said nuclear weapons could be used to respond to extreme circumstances, including non-nuclear attacks. One of the most dangerous threats facing our nation today is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. I believe the sole purpose of our nuclear arsenal should be to deter any nuclear attack against the United States. Broadening the set of circumstances in which we might use nuclear weapons to include non-nuclear attacks, as President Trump's Nuclear Posture Review does, runs the risk of increasing the likelihood of a devastating nuclear conflict. Other countries may decide to develop similar low yield options that could lead to another arms race, the likes of which we haven't seen since the Cold War. On January 29, 2018, I joined several of my colleagues in sending a letter to President Trump expressing concerns about developing new and low-yield nuclear weapons. These weapons are unnecessary to maintaining deterrence and destabilize the international order. Developing such weapons is also fiscally irresponsible. It will cost up to $1.7 trillion with inflation over the next 30 years to modernize, sustain, and operate our existing nuclear triad. Developing even more weapons will increase this cost exponentially with potentially minimal gain. America's interests are often best served when we use diplomacy and other alternatives to war or force to solve conflict. Rather than spending more money creating unnecessary weapons, we should invest in our diplomatic corps who are our first line of defense in international conflict. We must continue to work with the international community to combat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and secure all vulnerable nuclear material. I will keep your concerns about President Trump's Nuclear Posture Review in mind as the Senate addresses issues regarding our nation's nuclear arsenal. Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to keep in touch. Sincerely, [https://outreach.senate.gov/iqextranet/Customers/SenDurbin/Sen_Signature.PNG] Richard J. Durbin United States Senator RJD/jw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Fri Feb 23 22:44:29 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 22:44:29 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Media Monitors reviews Boyle/Destroying World Order References: <3C9010C6652AB645BC025F2372A86BB224AB3C67@mail.law.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: Francis Boyle offers expert's analysis of Iraq war as "Pure Evil" By Mohamed Elmasry - Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 0 124 Share on Facebook Tweet on Twitter [https://mediamonitors.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/103-1024x727.jpg] President George W. Bush continues to staunchly defend his war against Iraq, in which more than 2,000 Americans and more than 30,000 Iraqis have been killed - with fatality numbers on both sides still going nowhere but up. Iraq has become nothing less than a very expensive made-in-America killing field, in which every death - whether Iraqi, American, or Coalition - has cost U.S. taxpayers more than 2 million dollars. That's 2 million, per person, totaling 200 billion dollars so far. Moreover, during 34 months of occupation, the U.S. has not built even one more university, school, hospital, bridge, factory, or road. Nor have any massive scholarship programs been established at American universities to help educate deserving Iraqi students in engineering, medicine, business, and other vital infrastructural professions. In the meantime, there is no public accounting to explain where billions of Iraqi oil dollars have been spent, and on whom. Wars, death, destruction, human misery and loss of personal security are all misfortunes that people of good faith try to avoid or lesson among their fellow humans - but when these misfortunes become pure evil, it is more often than not in the context of planned aggression, such as the American campaign against Iraq. For an excellent account of how this aggression came into being, the people who made it possible, and why, I strongly recommend you read Francis A. Boyle's book "Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11." [1] This expertly-written book even includes a guide to impeaching George W. Bush! In fact, Boyle's book and his testimony against GWB are extraordinary; this is because Boyle comes with credentials unmatched by any of his critics. He is not only a leading American expert in international law and a human rights activist (a former board member of Amnesty International, 1988-1992); he is also a distinguished professor with volumes of publications to his credit, who teaches international law at the University of Illinois. Boyle holds a Doctor of Laws, as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard. He is definitely not to be dismissed lightly. "It is now a matter of public record that immediately after being inaugurated as president in January 2001, George Bush, Jr., Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld, and his pro-Israeli 'Neoconservative' Deputy Paul Wolfowitz began to plot, plan, scheme, and conspire to wage a war of aggression against Iraq," Boyle writes. "Later, they manipulated the tragic events of September 11 in order to provide a pretext for doing so. The fact that Iraq had nothing at all to do with September 11 or supporting Al-Qaeda - as the CIA itself advised - made no difference to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their Undersecretary of War Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, and the numerous other pro-Israeli Neo-Cons inhabiting the Bush, Jr. administration." Not surprisingly, the mainstream American media did not give Boyle's book anything near the coverage it deserves. But one day, his expert witness testimony, along with others, could be used in a court of law, or by historians, to identify who is/was behind this pure evil. It may take years, but that day will surely come. Boyle recalls his student days at the University of Chicago (he earned his A.B. there in 1971) and how Professor Leo Strauss, who taught political philosophy, trained an entire generation of students "to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians." "Years later, the University of Chicago became the 'brains' behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft police state," Boyle writes. "Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the U of C in 1967. Many of his lawyers at the Bush Jr. Department of Justice are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka 'Feddies'), which originated in part at the U of C. Feddies wrote the USA Patriot Act (USAPA) and the draft for USAPA II, which constitute the blueprint for establishing an American police state." Boyle continues that, according to Bush, he hired 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration and they "intentionally took offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria and the Palestinians. Most of the Straussian Neo-Cons in the Bush Jr. administration and elsewhere are Israel-firsters: what is 'good' for Israel is by definition 'good' for the United States - making it questionable sometimes whether even the notion of 'dual loyalties' accurately expresses the extent of diluted loyalty to true American interests and values." Boyle's book was published in 2004, and although still timely, it merits a new updated edition in which this most credible author can give more of his expert witness testimony on recent findings that Bush ordered spying on American citizens - but "only 500 of them," according to the President of the supposed "Free World." Note: [1]. "Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11" by Francis A. Boyle http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/093286340X/mmn-20/ Francis 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, February 23, 2018 1:28 PM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: FW: Media Monitors reviews Boyle/Destroying World Order Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Clarity Press, Inc. [mailto:clarity at islandnet.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 6:32 PM To: fboyle at law.uiuc.edu Subject: Media Monitors reviews Boyle/Destroying World Order "Not surprisingly, the mainstream American media did not give Boyle's book anything near the coverage it deserves. But one day, his expert witness testimony, along with others, could be used in a court of law, or by historians, to identify who is/was behind this pure evil. It may take years, but that day will surely come.." Mohamed Elmasry, Professor of Engineering, Media Monitors Network, January 11, 2006. For the full article, go to www.mediamonitors.net DESTROYING WORLD ORDER: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11 by Francis A. Boyle Since the war in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Americans have been surprised to learn that much of the world now views the United States itself as a major threat to global peace. American international legal expert Francis A. Boyle examines the imperial dimensions of U.S. policy in the Middle East, past and present, which may help to account for these views. [http://www.bookmasters.com/clarity/images/b0024.jpg]Boyle's hard-hitting analysis reveals a history of American intervention which has led to havoc in the region and destabilization of the international system as a whole. He examines U.S. assistance to Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war, U.S. conduct of the 1990 Persian Gulf War and the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in relation to their violation of the of the laws of neutrality, humanitarian law, the laws of war--and the law of the U.S. Constitution. By the presidency of George W. Bush, U.S. policy had evolved to a public assertion of the right to preemptive strike, and its actual implementation. The concluding chapter provides a guide to impeaching President George W. Bush for lying in leading the nation to war. ABOUT FRANCIS A. BOYLE Francis A. Boyle is a leading American professor, practitioner and advocate of international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He served as Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign and is author of, inter alia, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations 1898-1921, and The Bosnian People Charge Genocide. Francis A. Boyle holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University. CLARITY PRESS, INC. http://www.claritypress.com ISBN: 0-932863-40-X Paper $14.95 2004 Table of contents, synopsis and reviews available at: http://www.bookmasters.com/clarity/b0024.htm Available from: SCB Distributors,15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA. 90248 victor at scbdistributors.com Toll-free 800-729-6423* Tel: 1-310-532-9400 * Fax: 1-310-532-7001 or through www.amazon.com<%20http:/whatcounts.com/t?ctl=108AC39:3E1524B> or Ingram or Fernwood Books in Canada. Lindsay at fernwoodbooks.ca To remove: clarity at islandnet.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 148316 bytes Desc: image003.jpg URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Sat Feb 24 00:07:07 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 18:07:07 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: How to help U of I Graduate Employee Worker's strike in Urbana-Champaign Message-ID: <016a01d3ad03$6a882210$3f986630$@comcast.net> https://www.facebook.com/uigeo/photos/a.179022809397.123245.171984109397/101 55633511729398/?type=3 &ifg=1 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sat Feb 24 09:27:44 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 09:27:44 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: From Billie Graham--America's Pastor:"Onward Christian Soldiers" 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, February 24, 2018 3:26 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: From Billie Graham--America's Pastor:"Onward Christian Soldiers" Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) (personal comments only) From: Francis Boyle via YouTube [mailto:noreply at youtube.com] Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2018 3:24 AM To: Boyle, Francis A > Subject: Francis Boyle sent you a video: "Onward Christian Soldiers" [https://s.ytimg.com/yt/img/email/digest/email_header.png] [https://yt3.ggpht.com/-w4phvYGWivc/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/_Vq2X19VNEk/s50-c-k-no-mo-rj-c0xffffff/photo.jpg] Francis Boyle has shared a video with you on YouTube [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tsbAba0qLHI/mqdefault.jpg] Onward Christian Soldiers by SwordOfTheChrist Onward Christian Soldiers Marching off to War!! Help center • Report spam ©2018 YouTube, LLC 901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA 94066, USA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Feb 24 14:10:38 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 14:10:38 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: "Chicago Anti-War Coalition " Demonstration on April 21st. References: Message-ID: In solidarity with other peace/anti-war groups holding rally’s/demonstrations across the nation on April 24th,, the “Chicago Anti-War Coalition” will be holding their demonstration on the weekend of the 21st. Please see below: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: End Wars Home Abroad - ver 02.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 53999 bytes Desc: End Wars Home Abroad - ver 02.pdf URL: From r-szoke at illinois.edu Sat Feb 24 17:36:05 2018 From: r-szoke at illinois.edu (Szoke, Ron) Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 17:36:05 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Next Tuesday: Fundraiser for Courage Connection! References: <160B58E9-986A-4C9B-981F-AC9DCDEBF023@illinois.edu> Message-ID: From: CU Indivisible > Subject: Next Tuesday: Fundraiser for Courage Connection! Date: February 21, 2018 at 6:48:12 PM CST We're hosting a fundraiser to benefit Courage Connection Tuesday February 27th at 7pm. We'll be showing the documentary "Jackson" at the Art Theater here in Champaign. We're very excited to be able to raise money for this incredibly deserving local organization, that provides services and shelter to victims of domestic abuse. The film Jackson documents the struggles women in Mississippi face in trying to access abortion services, and puts into context the broader battle over reproductive rights in America today. We wanted to bring this film to our community to remind ourselves why it is we're fighting. Though things are comparatively good here in IL on this issue, these rights can so easily be taken away. We want this event to be a success and we need YOUR help in getting the word out. You can do that a couple different ways: Buy a ticket (100% of proceeds go to Courage Connection) and tell your friends why you bought one. Explain why this issue is important to you, and why they should join you at the event. You can purchase a ticket from the event page itself: https://www.facebook.com/events/396962477410883/ or from the Eventbrite website: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jackson-the-documentary-screening-and-fundraiser-tickets-42410751700 Please also share the information about this event! We're hoping to have lots of people show up to learn about abortion rights and support this important local group. -- [https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0ByEqgY0fDID4czdmTnVKWlppNFE&revid=0ByEqgY0fDID4aGdicllLVkJ5VWdsL3RrQnZFeHNTekEydExRPQ] If you no longer wish to receive these emails, please reply with "unsubscribe" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sat Feb 24 20:22:56 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 14:22:56 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News from Neptune on UPTV 2/23/18 In-Reply-To: <2DD76F8E-7A32-405D-A2F7-717EFEF83A7C@gmail.com> References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> <2DD76F8E-7A32-405D-A2F7-717EFEF83A7C@gmail.com> Message-ID: <67C825D4-1B4D-4B77-BD24-537F22BF9A10@gmail.com> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VRUwSXSPZo Our guest is Professor Jo Thomas, former New York Times reporter, in a discussion of the current film 'The Post,' about the publication of the 'Pentagon Papers' in the midst of the Vietnam War. ### -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Feb 24 21:17:14 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 21:17:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News from Neptune on UPTV 2/23/18 In-Reply-To: <67C825D4-1B4D-4B77-BD24-537F22BF9A10@gmail.com> References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> <2DD76F8E-7A32-405D-A2F7-717EFEF83A7C@gmail.com> <67C825D4-1B4D-4B77-BD24-537F22BF9A10@gmail.com> Message-ID: Watching now, excellent discussion. Jo is correct, there is too much out there flooding people with that which passes for news. For the average person, not obsessed with geo political affairs, its quite confusing. David reflects my views in relation to how many, and what news sources, I care to consider, narrowing it down to only those few trusted sources, over time. I will reconsider my opinion and see the film “The Post.” On Feb 24, 2018, at 12:22, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VRUwSXSPZo Our guest is Professor Jo Thomas, former New York Times reporter, in a discussion of the current film 'The Post,' about the publication of the 'Pentagon Papers' in the midst of the Vietnam War. ### _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ca6ea60bc1bd345004bf608d57bc472bb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636551006026370313&sdata=tkp1jHLhLo9KKkrdzt57MwRtJVF8BQ4MYaTamPN3b9U%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Sat Feb 24 21:20:52 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 15:20:52 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News from Neptune on UPTV 2/23/18 In-Reply-To: References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> <2DD76F8E-7A32-405D-A2F7-717EFEF83A7C@gmail.com> <67C825D4-1B4D-4B77-BD24-537F22BF9A10@gmail.com> Message-ID: <3CCC214C-0D8C-4CA2-AD5C-331D668F9179@gmail.com> Film is worth seeing, not only for the questions it raises. I am concerned about who’ll make the news ‘manageable.’ I think I know. > On Feb 24, 2018, at 3:17 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Watching now, excellent discussion. > > Jo is correct, there is too much out there flooding people with that which passes for news. For the average person, not obsessed with geo political affairs, its quite confusing. > > David reflects my views in relation to how many, and what news sources, I care to consider, narrowing it down to only those few trusted sources, over time. > > I will reconsider my opinion and see the film “The Post.” > > >> On Feb 24, 2018, at 12:22, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: >> >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VRUwSXSPZo >> >> Our guest is Professor Jo Thomas, former New York Times reporter, in a discussion of the current film 'The Post,' about the publication of the 'Pentagon Papers' in the midst of the Vietnam War. >> >> ### >> _______________________________________________ >> Peace-discuss mailing list >> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ca6ea60bc1bd345004bf608d57bc472bb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636551006026370313&sdata=tkp1jHLhLo9KKkrdzt57MwRtJVF8BQ4MYaTamPN3b9U%3D&reserved=0 > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 24 21:28:02 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 21:28:02 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News from Neptune on UPTV 2/23/18 In-Reply-To: <3CCC214C-0D8C-4CA2-AD5C-331D668F9179@gmail.com> References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> <2DD76F8E-7A32-405D-A2F7-717EFEF83A7C@gmail.com> <67C825D4-1B4D-4B77-BD24-537F22BF9A10@gmail.com> <3CCC214C-0D8C-4CA2-AD5C-331D668F9179@gmail.com> Message-ID: Exactly, we know, what the answer is to that. It needs to be recognized, as awful as the Trump administration is, with the policies being implemented, i’s simply the continuation of policy’s planned some time ago, not just last year. Had Trump not been elected they might not have occurred so obviously and on steroids as they are now, but we were headed in this direction all along. On Feb 24, 2018, at 13:20, C G Estabrook > wrote: Film is worth seeing, not only for the questions it raises. I am concerned about who’ll make the news ‘manageable.’ I think I know. On Feb 24, 2018, at 3:17 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Watching now, excellent discussion. Jo is correct, there is too much out there flooding people with that which passes for news. For the average person, not obsessed with geo political affairs, its quite confusing. David reflects my views in relation to how many, and what news sources, I care to consider, narrowing it down to only those few trusted sources, over time. I will reconsider my opinion and see the film “The Post.” On Feb 24, 2018, at 12:22, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VRUwSXSPZo Our guest is Professor Jo Thomas, former New York Times reporter, in a discussion of the current film 'The Post,' about the publication of the 'Pentagon Papers' in the midst of the Vietnam War. ### _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ca6ea60bc1bd345004bf608d57bc472bb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636551006026370313&sdata=tkp1jHLhLo9KKkrdzt57MwRtJVF8BQ4MYaTamPN3b9U%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 24 21:34:03 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 15:34:03 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News from Neptune on UPTV 2/23/18 In-Reply-To: References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> <2DD76F8E-7A32-405D-A2F7-717EFEF83A7C@gmail.com> <67C825D4-1B4D-4B77-BD24-537F22BF9A10@gmail.com> <3CCC214C-0D8C-4CA2-AD5C-331D668F9179@gmail.com> Message-ID: The NYT and WaPo are worse propaganda sluices now than they were during Vietnam. “Professional” journalists are calling for internet sites to conform to that model - to prevent "confusion." > On Feb 24, 2018, at 3:28 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Exactly, we know, what the answer is to that. > > It needs to be recognized, as awful as the Trump administration is, with the policies being implemented, i’s simply the continuation of policy’s planned some time ago, not just last year. Had Trump not been elected they might not have occurred so obviously and on steroids as they are now, but we were headed in this direction all along. > > >> On Feb 24, 2018, at 13:20, C G Estabrook > wrote: >> >> Film is worth seeing, not only for the questions it raises. >> >> I am concerned about who’ll make the news ‘manageable.’ I think I know. >> >> >>> On Feb 24, 2018, at 3:17 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>> >>> Watching now, excellent discussion. >>> >>> Jo is correct, there is too much out there flooding people with that which passes for news. For the average person, not obsessed with geo political affairs, its quite confusing. >>> >>> David reflects my views in relation to how many, and what news sources, I care to consider, narrowing it down to only those few trusted sources, over time. >>> >>> I will reconsider my opinion and see the film “The Post.” >>> >>> >>>> On Feb 24, 2018, at 12:22, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: >>>> >>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VRUwSXSPZo >>>> >>>> Our guest is Professor Jo Thomas, former New York Times reporter, in a discussion of the current film 'The Post,' about the publication of the 'Pentagon Papers' in the midst of the Vietnam War. >>>> >>>> ### >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Peace-discuss mailing list >>>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >>>> https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ca6ea60bc1bd345004bf608d57bc472bb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636551006026370313&sdata=tkp1jHLhLo9KKkrdzt57MwRtJVF8BQ4MYaTamPN3b9U%3D&reserved=0 >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> 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 Sat Feb 24 22:42:08 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 22:42:08 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News from Neptune on UPTV 2/23/18 In-Reply-To: References: <65EB2F0D-30FC-476A-8348-B7AB71488747@gmail.com> <2DD76F8E-7A32-405D-A2F7-717EFEF83A7C@gmail.com> <67C825D4-1B4D-4B77-BD24-537F22BF9A10@gmail.com> <3CCC214C-0D8C-4CA2-AD5C-331D668F9179@gmail.com> Message-ID: Definitely, “Professional journalists” or Professional Gov. mouthpieces?” Or those who simply focus on domestic issues, never connecting the dots in relation to foreign policy. On Feb 24, 2018, at 13:34, C G Estabrook > wrote: The NYT and WaPo are worse propaganda sluices now than they were during Vietnam. “Professional” journalists are calling for internet sites to conform to that model - to prevent "confusion." On Feb 24, 2018, at 3:28 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Exactly, we know, what the answer is to that. It needs to be recognized, as awful as the Trump administration is, with the policies being implemented, i’s simply the continuation of policy’s planned some time ago, not just last year. Had Trump not been elected they might not have occurred so obviously and on steroids as they are now, but we were headed in this direction all along. On Feb 24, 2018, at 13:20, C G Estabrook > wrote: Film is worth seeing, not only for the questions it raises. I am concerned about who’ll make the news ‘manageable.’ I think I know. On Feb 24, 2018, at 3:17 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Watching now, excellent discussion. Jo is correct, there is too much out there flooding people with that which passes for news. For the average person, not obsessed with geo political affairs, its quite confusing. David reflects my views in relation to how many, and what news sources, I care to consider, narrowing it down to only those few trusted sources, over time. I will reconsider my opinion and see the film “The Post.” On Feb 24, 2018, at 12:22, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss > wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VRUwSXSPZo Our guest is Professor Jo Thomas, former New York Times reporter, in a discussion of the current film 'The Post,' about the publication of the 'Pentagon Papers' in the midst of the Vietnam War. ### _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ca6ea60bc1bd345004bf608d57bc472bb%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636551006026370313&sdata=tkp1jHLhLo9KKkrdzt57MwRtJVF8BQ4MYaTamPN3b9U%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 25 16:07:57 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 16:07:57 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Who is financing the attack on public-sector unions? References: Message-ID: [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/01e57658-61dd-452f-93fe-8f537c2c2f75.png] EPI News—Our most important stories this week [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/bfd32f1f-efb9-491e-9aba-faee4dda8c46.jpg] A handful of powerful organizations are financing an attack on unions’ ability to represent workers The upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME Council 31—and previous cases challenging unions’ right to collect “fair share” fees from nonmembers—have been financed by a small group of foundations with ties to the largest and most powerful corporate lobbies. A new report by EPI’s Celine McNicholas and Zane Mokhiber identifies those foundations and argues that a political system dominated by moneyed interests leaves working people with little power if they do not have an effective way to pool their resources. The decision in Janus will determine the future of effective unions, democratic decision-making in the workplace, and the preservation of good, middle-class jobs in public employment. Read the report » Share this report: A handful of powerful organizations are financing an attack on unions’ ability to represent workers. [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-light-facebook-48.png] Share [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-light-twitter-48.png] Tweet EPI’s examination of work hours reveals two labor markets, as more workers fall further behind In a new report, EPI’s Valerie Wilson and Janelle Jones examine how trends in annual work hours among prime-age workers since 1979 diverge along the lines of gender, race, and class. They find that prime-age adults (ages 25–54) are increasingly separating into two groups: those who are employed and working more hours than ever before, and those growing number who have fallen out of the labor market—or cannot get into it at all. Read the report » AAPI women make 88 cents on the dollar relative to white men February 22, 2018, marks Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) women’s equal pay day, which calls attention to the pay disparity between AAPI women and white men. In a new infographic, EPI shows that the average AAPI woman is paid only 88 cents for every dollar a white man is paid. View the infographic » From the EPI blog * Sen. Hatch’s H-1B bill and other guestworker proposals should be kept out of Senate immigration debate By Daniel Costa * Senate must pass legislation this week to legalize DREAMers but avoid unnecessary immigration enforcement measures and green card reductions By Daniel Costa * The Trump administration’s infrastructure plan remains empty talk and will be paid for by cuts to programs that help working people By Hunter Blair * No, the stock market isn’t throwing a tantrum because the economy is “overstimulated” By Josh Bivens * Increased U.S. trade deficit in 2017 illustrates dangers of ignoring the overvalued dollar By Robert E. Scott * EPI responds to Amazon’s claims that their fulfillment centers raise local employment By Ben Zipperer EPI in the news [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/00378d8c-db3b-4b1d-bad7-74318e35d9a1.png] The Washington Post quoted EPI’s Heidi Shierholz on why workers shouldn’t fear automation. “There will be people who get hurt by automation, but we have zero evidence it will actually reduce the overall number of jobs in the economy,” said Shierholz. | GOP Senator Suggests We Need Fewer Immigrants Because Robots Are Coming » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/e7f0c116-b90f-4a53-a9e5-9a0dfbd9421d.png] CBS Moneywatch featured EPI’s statement encouraging the Commerce Department to take long overdue action to protect U.S. steel and aluminum production by imposing strong restrictions on imports of steel and aluminum products. | Proposed U.S. Crackdown on Aluminum, Steel Imports Roils Stocks » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/ad2b0688-9abf-4611-b247-a4327b00e110.jpg] Politico cited EPI research on wage theft by employers, who steal more than $15 billion a year from workers through minimum wage violations. | Behind the Minimum Wage Fight, a Sweeping Failure to Enforce the Law » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/0603013c-deca-4328-9747-d6d681ea208c.gif] In a feature about the right-wing campaign against unions, In These Timescited EPI research showing that while average unionized workers make 20 percent more than other workers, only 6.5 percent of private-sector workers and 34.4 percent of public-sector workers are unionized. This decline has “tracked the decline of the American middle class,” the article said. | Behind Janus: Documents Reveal 15-Year Conspiracy to Kill Public-Sector Unions » Share this newsletter: EPI News—Who is financing the attack on public-sector unions? [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-light-facebook-48.png] Share [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-light-twitter-48.png] Tweet [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-light-forwardtofriend-48.png] Forward Donate to EPI [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-facebook-48.png] Facebook [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-twitter-48.png] Twitter [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-link-48.png] epi.org View this email in your browser | Unsubscribe from this list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Feb 25 16:08:48 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 16:08:48 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] =?utf-8?q?Fwd=3A_West_Virginia_teachers_take_a_st?= =?utf-8?q?and_=E2=80=93_SEP_Newsletter?= References: <380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5.2cb7388bc9.20180225160131.fbbfa9f4e5.316873db@mail26.sea31.mcsv.net> Message-ID: The 2018 Winter Olympic Games opened in South Korea last Friday under the official theme of “peace,” with a ceremony that included a choreographed candlelight depiction of a white dove and a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Such bromides should not be taken seriously. The reality is that not since the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany have the games been held under such an immediate threat of war. View this email in your browser [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/56c0471b-a650-4887-b620-7bd723295460.png] [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/04cb516e-e9ce-42a8-9ddc-14228a9996ad.jpeg] West Virginia teachers take a stand By Joseph Kishore More than 20,000 teachers and public school employees in West Virginia are taking a courageous stand in defense of their interests and those of the entire working class. On Friday, teachers completed the second day of a strike that has shut down schools in all 55 counties in the state. The teachers have defied threats of injunctions, fines and even imprisonment from government officials, who have declared any strike action illegal. The American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV) and the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) announced on Friday that what was originally announced as a two-day strike will be extended by at least one day, to Monday. The decision of the unions to continue the strike reflects their nervousness over the prospect of the teachers’ anger erupting outside of their control, connecting with the opposition of teachers throughout the country and developing into a political movement against both the Democratic and Republican parties. The walkouts began largely spontaneously, with local strikes centered in the southern coal mining counties, culminating in a mass demonstration in Charleston last weekend. It was then that the unions announced the two-day strike as a means of letting off steam while they continued discussions with lawmakers. Read more » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/b2cf4cf7-d573-4221-969c-23786edd9568.png]Trump uses Australian PM’s visit to threaten North Korea By Peter Symonds US President Donald Trump on Friday exploited a joint press conference at the White House with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to once again menace North Korea with crippling economic sanctions and a military onslaught. Trump’s comments come as the Winter Olympics in South Korea are about to close and the US and South Korea prepare for massive joint war games in April. Speaking just hours after the announcement of tough new sanctions on North Korea, Trump warned: “If the sanctions don’t work we’ll have to go to phase two, and phase two may be a very rough thing.” While not specifying what “phase two” might involve, he said it could be “very, very unfortunate for the world.” Trump and his top officials have repeatedly warned that military action will be necessary if North Korea does not capitulate to US demands to abandon its nuclear arsenal and submit to an intrusive inspection regime. CIA director Mike Pompeo declared, in late January, that North Korea was “a handful of months” away from having a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile—something Washington has indicated is a red line for war. Read more » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/dc97961c-6e8c-4a32-9ff0-e81f53916001.jpg]The Parkland shooting: Why are mass killings so common in the United States? By Eric London On February 14, an American horror story played out in southeastern Florida when 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 people, including 14 students. In April 1999, the country was stunned by the mass killing of 13 students and teachers at Columbine High School in Colorado by two students, who then committed suicide. In the course of the past 20 years, eruptions of homicidal violence have become almost commonplace, and the death tolls resulting from such incidents have in many cases far exceeded the terrible loss of life at Columbine. The 2017 attack in Las Vegas resulted in 58 deaths. The 2016 attack at the Pulse nightclub in Florida left 49 dead. The 2014 shooting in San Bernardino cost the lives of 14 people. The 2012 assault at Sandy Hook Elementary School claimed 28 lives. The attack on an audience at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, also in 2012, took 12 lives. The shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in 2009 resulted in 13 deaths. The killings are not only deadlier than in 1999. Such incidents occur much more frequently. Mass killings involving more than four deaths take place every 16 days in the US, 10 times more frequently than in the period between 1982 and 2011, when the average time between mass killings was 200 days. Read more » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/4c1124e7-dfd1-4ce9-8397-b8f123d6d0d2.png] Four months since the death of a young Ford worker Still no serious investigation into death of Jacoby Hennings By Jerry White Last Tuesday marked four months since the death of Jacoby Marquis Hennings, a 21-year-old temporary part-time worker who police say took his own life at Ford’s Woodhaven Stamping Plant, just outside Detroit, on the morning of October 20, 2017. There are growing calls from family, friends and autoworkers throughout the Detroit area for a serious investigation of the still unknown circumstances surrounding the tragedy. Jacoby was a well-loved and popular young man, who had, as his parents described, an infectious optimism. Why would such a young worker kill himself? The Woodhaven Police Department closed its investigation less than 24 hours after the shooting, declaring it a suicide. However, the official report from the Woodhaven Police Department, obtained by the World Socialist Web Site, leaves many critical questions unanswered. Read more » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/f9ef70ad-7b39-4d15-94e8-cb43b50f1e25.jpg]The Russian meddling fraud: Weapons of mass destruction revisited By Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore Fifteen years ago, on February 5, 2003, against the backdrop of worldwide mass demonstrations in opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq, then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell argued before the United Nations that the government of Saddam Hussein was rapidly stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction,” which Iraq, together with Al Qaeda, was planning to use against the United States. The editorial board of the New York Times—whose reporter Judith Miller was at the center of the Bush administration’s campaign of lies—declared one week later that there “is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors.” Subsequent developments would prove who was lying. The Bush administration and its media accomplices conspired to drag the US into a war that led to the deaths of more than one million people—a colossal crime for which no one has yet been held accountable. Fifteen years later, the script has been pulled from the closet and dusted off. This time, instead of “weapons of mass destruction,” it is “Russian meddling in the US elections.” Once again, assertions by US intelligence agencies and operatives are treated as fact. Once again, the media is braying for war. Once again, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the American government—which intervenes in the domestic politics of every state on the planet and has been relentlessly expanding its operations in Eastern Europe—are ignored. Read more » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/380cabff931cd452085b8d4a5/images/52811f03-3f12-45a5-bce1-27289e30cb96.jpg]Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther: A hollow “defining moment” cloaked in identity politics By Nick Barrickman Audiences worldwide have been subjected to yet another installment in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” superhero film series. The latest film is Black Panther (directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan and Lupita Nyong’o), based on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s 1966 comic book character of the same name. The film has been overwhelmingly hailed as a “defining moment” in African American and movie history for featuring an almost entirely all-black cast, directed by an African American director, with a screenplay by black writers (Coogler and Joe Robert Cole). Such praise, however, only testifies to the general degradation of art, culture and film criticism in contemporary America. The film’s supposed achievements do not save it from being a vacuous work, which does not withstand a moment of serious reflection. Read more » [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 Socialist Equality Party | socialequality.com Articles: Copyright © 2017 wsws.org, All rights reserved. unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Sun Feb 25 16:37:44 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 16:37:44 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Fwd: Who is financing the attack on public-sector unions? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: You will note for the record that I publicly denounced the Trump Henchman before the Trump/KillerKoh College of Law whose Trump Department of Injustice Office gratuitously entered this case against Organized Labor and Public Sector Unions before the US Supreme Court. Fab Ed Norton Professor of Law Trump/KillerKoh 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: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2018 10:08 AM To: Peace-discuss Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Who is financing the attack on public-sector unions? [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/01e57658-61dd-452f-93fe-8f537c2c2f75.png] EPI News—Our most important stories this week [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/bfd32f1f-efb9-491e-9aba-faee4dda8c46.jpg] A handful of powerful organizations are financing an attack on unions’ ability to represent workers The upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME Council 31—and previous cases challenging unions’ right to collect “fair share” fees from nonmembers—have been financed by a small group of foundations with ties to the largest and most powerful corporate lobbies. A new report by EPI’s Celine McNicholas and Zane Mokhiber identifies those foundations and argues that a political system dominated by moneyed interests leaves working people with little power if they do not have an effective way to pool their resources. The decision in Janus will determine the future of effective unions, democratic decision-making in the workplace, and the preservation of good, middle-class jobs in public employment. Read the report » Share this report: A handful of powerful organizations are financing an attack on unions’ ability to represent workers. [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-light-facebook-48.png] Share [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-light-twitter-48.png] Tweet EPI’s examination of work hours reveals two labor markets, as more workers fall further behind In a new report, EPI’s Valerie Wilson and Janelle Jones examine how trends in annual work hours among prime-age workers since 1979 diverge along the lines of gender, race, and class. They find that prime-age adults (ages 25–54) are increasingly separating into two groups: those who are employed and working more hours than ever before, and those growing number who have fallen out of the labor market—or cannot get into it at all. Read the report » AAPI women make 88 cents on the dollar relative to white men February 22, 2018, marks Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) women’s equal pay day, which calls attention to the pay disparity between AAPI women and white men. In a new infographic, EPI shows that the average AAPI woman is paid only 88 cents for every dollar a white man is paid. View the infographic » From the EPI blog * Sen. Hatch’s H-1B bill and other guestworker proposals should be kept out of Senate immigration debate By Daniel Costa * Senate must pass legislation this week to legalize DREAMers but avoid unnecessary immigration enforcement measures and green card reductions By Daniel Costa * The Trump administration’s infrastructure plan remains empty talk and will be paid for by cuts to programs that help working people By Hunter Blair * No, the stock market isn’t throwing a tantrum because the economy is “overstimulated” By Josh Bivens * Increased U.S. trade deficit in 2017 illustrates dangers of ignoring the overvalued dollar By Robert E. Scott * EPI responds to Amazon’s claims that their fulfillment centers raise local employment By Ben Zipperer EPI in the news [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/00378d8c-db3b-4b1d-bad7-74318e35d9a1.png] The Washington Post quoted EPI’s Heidi Shierholz on why workers shouldn’t fear automation. “There will be people who get hurt by automation, but we have zero evidence it will actually reduce the overall number of jobs in the economy,” said Shierholz. | GOP Senator Suggests We Need Fewer Immigrants Because Robots Are Coming » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/e7f0c116-b90f-4a53-a9e5-9a0dfbd9421d.png] CBS Moneywatch featured EPI’s statement encouraging the Commerce Department to take long overdue action to protect U.S. steel and aluminum production by imposing strong restrictions on imports of steel and aluminum products. | Proposed U.S. Crackdown on Aluminum, Steel Imports Roils Stocks » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/ad2b0688-9abf-4611-b247-a4327b00e110.jpg] Politico cited EPI research on wage theft by employers, who steal more than $15 billion a year from workers through minimum wage violations. | Behind the Minimum Wage Fight, a Sweeping Failure to Enforce the Law » [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/ec2361f981a14ee1d45cccaa9/images/0603013c-deca-4328-9747-d6d681ea208c.gif] In a feature about the right-wing campaign against unions, In These Timescited EPI research showing that while average unionized workers make 20 percent more than other workers, only 6.5 percent of private-sector workers and 34.4 percent of public-sector workers are unionized. This decline has “tracked the decline of the American middle class,” the article said. | Behind Janus: Documents Reveal 15-Year Conspiracy to Kill Public-Sector Unions » Share this newsletter: EPI News—Who is financing the attack on public-sector unions? [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-light-facebook-48.png] Share [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-light-twitter-48.png] Tweet [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-light-forwardtofriend-48.png] Forward Donate to EPI [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-facebook-48.png] Facebook [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-twitter-48.png] Twitter [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/color-link-48.png] epi.org View this email in your browser | Unsubscribe from this list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Feb 25 18:56:32 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 18:56:32 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Lee Camp connects the dots with mainstream media..... References: <2ab5175e797cf44579dae2f21.24d5dd889d.20180225165920.04ca6a40b7.f5a96c57@mail199.atl221.rsgsv.net> Message-ID: A “do not" miss this one: From: Lee Camp > Subject: Connecting the dots with the mainstream media Date: February 25, 2018 at 08:59:33 PST View this email in your browser New Redacted Tonight on the collusion between the mainstream media and war profiteers. Click here to watch. I also cover why exactly we will never have universal healthcare, good big bank regulations, or an end to war. If you think what I say in this episode is important, please share it, leave a comment, become part of the conversation! Thank you and keep fighting, Lee [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-dark-facebook-48.png] Share [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-dark-twitter-48.png] Tweet [https://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/icons/social-block-v2/outline-dark-forwardtofriend-48.png] Forward 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 karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Feb 25 19:18:52 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 19:18:52 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: #SundayWire LIVE Coming Up @RadioACR @21WIRE #Ghouta #NikkiHaley #SPLC #NRA #CNN and more... References: <8e2046b867880f405f4203dc4.8a1ecf423b.20180225160359.900c838a94.722525cf@mail18.atl111.rsgsv.net> Message-ID: Worth a listen, especially the second one down, Iran’s FM Zarif. related to Israel Begin forwarded message: From: 21st Century Wire > Subject: #SundayWire LIVE Coming Up @RadioACR @21WIRE #Ghouta #NikkiHaley #SPLC #NRA #CNN and more... Date: February 25, 2018 at 08:04:14 PST Reply-To: 21st Century Wire > [Facebook] [Twitter] [https://gallery.mailchimp.com/8e2046b867880f405f4203dc4/images/704576da-c0d0-4b42-b9bf-a9bfa2e921dd.png] [Shout] [YouTube] [SoundCloud] [RSS] Daily updates for 21stCenturyWire.com subscribers View this email in your browser [21st Century Wire] Your Daily Dose of Truth. Curated by 21st Century Wire [SUNDAY WIRE LIVE] Top Stories Henningsen on UN Ceasefire: ‘Nikki Haley has no idea what she’s talking about with Syria’ Patrick Henningsen | This latest UN performance demonstrates that neither the US Coalition, nor the terrorist groups it backs in Syria, will ever abide by international law. Read on » Iran FM Zarif: ‘Israel’s Myth of Invincibility Has Crumbled’ Munich Security Conference | The Iranian foreign minister delivers a ground-breaking speech in Munich. Read on » NRA Spokeswoman to CNN: ‘Many in the media like the ratings aspect of mass shootings’ 21WIRE | Do many in the media like the ratings mass shootings bring to their networks? It's a fair question. Read on » GLOBAL MEDIA MAFIA: Their Plan to Kill Off Free Thought by Patrick Henningsen in New Dawn Magazine [New Dawn Magazine] Featured @21WIRE WMD America: Inside the Pentagon’s Global Bioweapons Industry and more... [SYRIA: The Guardian Journalist who takes ‘Afternoon Tea’ with ISIS and Survives.] [‘The Golden Age of Stupid’ with guests Mike Robinson, Marwa Osman] [Britain, Christopher Steele, Were the Real Foreign Influence in 2016 Election] [Follow the Money: A Guide to Top Anti-Russia US Think Tanks and Their Operatives] [WMD America: Inside the Pentagon’s Global Bioweapons Industry] We Need Your Support! [21st Century Wire Investigative Fund] 21st Century Wire Investigative Fund This fund supports our investigative news coverage, research and studio time for the Sunday Wire radio show. We need your help to get back to the Middle East.Thank you! The Sunday Wire with Patrick Henningsen – On-Demand Episode #222: ‘The Golden Age of Stupid’ with guests Mike Robinson, Marwa Osman Sunday Wire Archives [The Sunday Wire LIVE with Patrick Henningsen] LISTEN LIVE: SUNDAYS @ 5PM UK Time, 12PM EST (US), 9AM PST (US) on Alternate Current Radio [Now on Podomatic] [Available on iTunes] Thank you for subscribing to our website updates at http://21stcenturywire.com. We value our community of readers and hope you are enjoying these updates. Our mailing address is: 21Wire Media P.O. Box 410654 Kansas City, MO 64141 Add us to your address book unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences [21st Century Wire] COPYRIGHT © 2009-2018 · 21WIRE MEDIA · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WORLDWIDE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bjornsona at ameritech.net Sun Feb 25 22:52:52 2018 From: bjornsona at ameritech.net (bjornsona at ameritech.net) Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 16:52:52 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] new location today? Message-ID: Meeting today Sunday Feb. 25 in Urbana or at new location, Harvest Market upstairs? TySent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone View this email in your browser New Redacted Tonight on the collusion between the mainstream media and war profiteers. Click here to watch.  I also cover why exactly we will never have universal healthcare, good big bank regulations, or an end to war.  If you think what I say in this episode is important, please share it, leave a comment, become part of the conversation! Thank you and keep fighting, Lee Share Tweet Forward 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 galliher at illinois.edu Mon Feb 26 01:12:11 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 19:12:11 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] [Peace] Monday at CPL 7 PM: Young Dems IL-13 Forum: Foreign Policy & Immigration In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: AWARE should be there, to ask whom to vote for in order to withdraw US troops (and weapons) from the Mideast. Probably not a Democrat. It will have to be write-ins, if there are no third-party candidates. —CGE > On Feb 25, 2018, at 6:22 PM, Robert Naiman via Peace wrote: > > https://www.facebook.com/events/150847422295729/ > > I'm going to ask about unconstitutional war; in particular, about unauthorized US participation in the catastrophic Saudi war in Yemen; and who will pledge to support invocation of the War Powers Resolution to end U.S. participation in unconstitutional wars. > > === > > Robert Naiman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Mon Feb 26 03:39:56 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 21:39:56 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] new location today? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: First meeting at the new location - Harvest Market mezzanine - will be next Sunday, March 4. "AWARE, the ‘Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort’ of Champaign-Urbana , meets every Sunday evening from 5 to 6pm in the coffee shop (upstairs, in the large 2nd floor room) at the Harvest Market grocery store (2029 South Neil Street, Champaign); see . The meeting is open to all who oppose U.S. wars and wish to build an anti-war movement.}” —CGE > On Feb 25, 2018, at 4:52 PM, bjornsona--- via Peace-discuss wrote: > > > Meeting today Sunday Feb. 25 in Urbana or at new location, Harvest Market upstairs? Ty > Sent from my LG Phoenix 2, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone > From fboyle at illinois.edu Mon Feb 26 13:41:15 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2018 13:41:15 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: College of LAS Events: Boycott, Divest, Sanction: Stopping Zionist Genocide Against the Palestinians 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: Monday, February 26, 2018 7:40 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: College of LAS Events: Boycott, Divest, Sanction: Stopping Zionist Genocide Against the Palestinians http://calendars.illinois.edu/detail/1249?eventId=33301244 From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Tue Feb 27 02:20:27 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2018 20:20:27 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Blaming Russia is more denial Message-ID: <018401d3af71$8860d910$99228b30$@comcast.net> Trump is a lunatic, but he is another symptom, another tumor rather than the actual cancer The Republican and Democratic establishment is still in denial over how it was a lunatic won the presidency. The guy had record high unfavorables and record low trustworthy ratings. But he convinced enough people that he was a business guru and could deliver much-needed jobs, after an economic recovery that largely left out the working class. What matters now is accountability, which means focusing on what happened, focusing on how the establishment lost. Blaming Russia is more denial DoJ is still M I A Nearly 200 million Americans across all 50 states are exposed to unsafe levels of chromium-6 a heavy metal known to cause cancer, no prosecution ://www.theguardian.com/.../chromium-6-erin-brockovich... -Wall Street bankers commit fraud leading to massive bail out, no prosecutions. http://origin-nyi.thehill.com/.../247093-warren-mccain... -HSBC launders hundreds of millions of cartel money, no prosecution. http://www.rollingstone.com/.../outrageous-hsbc... -Top counterterrorism official admits war crimes going all the way up to the commander-in-chief, no prosecutions http://m.democracynow.org/web_exclusives/2161 -Wells Fargo opens fraudulent accounts, no prosecution. http://money.cnn.com/.../wells-fargo-fake-account.../ -While other countries embrace globalization and strengthen their middle class, data shows America's working class is collapsing http://www.marketwatch.com/.../income-share-of-bottom-50... -Government officials try to cover up the poisoning of Flint Michigan children, no prosecution. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3RX8NIxTce4 -"Halliburton loophole" inserted into 2005 energy bill, allowing town after town across America to be poisoned, as reported by Erin Brockovich, no prosecution http://www.truth-out.org/.../21828-time-to-end-the-cheney... -North Dakota uses militarized police to arrest and charge journalist Amy Goodman with inciting a riot for trying to report on water protectors, no prosecution. https://www.thenation.com/.../amy-goodman-is-facing.../ Harvard business professor explains the economic crimes against the middle class, what's left of it, that it's far worse than most of us believe https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM Find out if you live near toxic waste http://time.com/.../superfund-sites-toxic-waste-locations/ -Children poisoned by lead tainted water in Michigan http://www.detroitnews.com/.../epa-stayed.../78719620/ -Valeant raises price on lead poisoning drug 2700% after Flints criminal disaster https://www.statnews.com/.../valeant-drug-prices-lead.../ -Pesticides driving bees to extinction https://independentaustralia.net/.../epa-confirms... -Dupont knowingly poisons our water, spreading cancer http://www.nytimes.com/.../the-lawyer-who-became-duponts... -Hydraulic fracturing turns Oklahoma into the earthquake nightmare http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/induced/ -Unprecedented gas leak in California town makes neighborhood uninhabitable http://m.csmonitor.com/.../Huge-gas-leak-undermines... -Neighborhood explodes in flames, killing eight, due to poorly maintained gas lines http://www.mercurynews.com/.../pge-found-guilty-on-six.../ -Oil companies allowed to inject toxic waste into California aquifers https://www.propublica.org/.../ca-halts-injection... -Drinking water tainted with chemical byproduct http://www.cbsnews.com/.../wilmington-nc-cape-fear-river.../ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cgestabrook at gmail.com Tue Feb 27 04:07:07 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2018 22:07:07 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Anti-war candidate for Congress in March 14 primary Message-ID: <97BDB787-2531-434A-9445-BF4B3C5A44AC@gmail.com> There's only one anti-war candidate running for Congress in this district - David Gill. AWAREists would find him worth a vote in the March 14 primary. For my sins (it's Lent), I went to the 'Champaign Co. Young Dems IL-13 Forum on Foreign Policy & Immigration' tonight. Amidst the blather, I had a 50-year flashback: not the chemical kind some friends suffered in 1968, but a political recrudescence of what one heard about Vietnam 50 years ago. There of the four candidates said just what Democrats said about SE Asia then, but now about SW Asia. (One even boasted of his participation in US war crimes, from Yugoslavia to the Mideast, as a "naval intelligence" officer.) The exception was David Gill. In answer to a question (from me), he forthrightly said he supported withdrawal of US troops and weapons from the Mideast and N. Africa. The other three said they didn’t. —CGE From galliher at illinois.edu Tue Feb 27 04:54:30 2018 From: galliher at illinois.edu (Carl G. Estabrook) Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2018 22:54:30 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Blaming Russia is more denial In-Reply-To: <018401d3af71$8860d910$99228b30$@comcast.net> References: <018401d3af71$8860d910$99228b30$@comcast.net> Message-ID: <59FEAA9C-7012-46D2-9EFC-27969342A58A@illinois.edu> Yes. Trump won because Obama voters, especially in the Midwest, stayed home and didn’t vote for HRC. See >. Why? (1) war (their kids had gone to the military when there were no jobs in Obamatime); and (2) ‘populism' (the US middle-class - even the well to do - saw that their prosperity and life chances fell short of those of their parents, after 40 years of increasing and accelerating inequality). —CGE > On Feb 26, 2018, at 8:20 PM, David Johnson via Peace-discuss wrote: > > Trump is a lunatic, but he is another symptom, another tumor rather than the actual cancer > The Republican and Democratic establishment is still in denial over how it was a lunatic won the presidency. The guy had record high unfavorables and record low trustworthy ratings. But he convinced enough people that he was a business guru and could deliver much-needed jobs, after an economic recovery that largely left out the working class. > What matters now is accountability, which means focusing on what happened, focusing on how the establishment lost. Blaming Russia is more denial... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 27 11:56:42 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 11:56:42 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A major issue of concern for all Message-ID: After 17 years we have invaded and murdered millions, destroying 7 nations, with our wars of imperialism and hegemony. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, plus Pakistan, and we now threaten North Korea, and all those in Asia with our nuclear weapons. We have set up military bases across the continent of Africa, and we’re on the verge of doing the same in our quest for regime change in Venezuela, as we did in El Salvador, and Nicaragua in the 80’s. To the rest of the world, there is no anti-war movement in America, its considered dead, we need to prove them wrong, we need to prove we do care about the lives of others. The lack of appropriate healthcare, with costs bankrupting many, the lack of jobs, or a decent minimum wage is a severe threat to millions within our own nation. Add to this the recent tax increase for most working people in the US, providing a huge bonus for the wealthy, with plans to destroy Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, and more millions going to create more weapons of death, we are marching to the precipice of doom. Here in Champaign, a couple hours drive south of Chicago, the University Graduate Employees Organization is on strike, for the rights of not just themselves, but for future generations.They have refused to capitulate to an Administration that takes home in addition to six figure salaries, bonuses in the hundreds of thousands. All these young grad employees are asking for is a “contract” “tuition wavers” given they are paid below COL for this community. Instead the Provost wants to increase fees and force graduate employees to pay out of pocket to serve the students. The GEO have been asking nicely, and gotten no where, they have attempted to negotiate, while being rudely rejected at every turn, they have been offered tuition wavers for themselves now, but not for future workers. They have stood strong, on behalf of the future. Some of us within the community join them on the picket lines daily, in solidarity, because we know this is just the beginning of the crushing of public unions across the nation. We know that being “nice” gets us no where with those who are so lacking in humanity and concern for human rights, that we must take action. Nonviolent action, but strong unrelenting action as was done in the sixties and seventies. Our leaders eventually did listen to us then, we may not be so lucky now, but with climate change on our doorstep, and no action preventing it from further destruction, we cannot compromise. From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 27 12:08:45 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 12:08:45 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Blaming Russia is more denial In-Reply-To: <018401d3af71$8860d910$99228b30$@comcast.net> References: <018401d3af71$8860d910$99228b30$@comcast.net> Message-ID: David, The information and links below are unbelievable, thank you. The information and links you have provided below are incredible. Some of us had no idea.On Feb 26, 2018, at 18:20, David Johnson via Peace-discuss > wrote: Trump is a lunatic, but he is another symptom, another tumor rather than the actual cancer The Republican and Democratic establishment is still in denial over how it was a lunatic won the presidency. The guy had record high unfavorables and record low trustworthy ratings. But he convinced enough people that he was a business guru and could deliver much-needed jobs, after an economic recovery that largely left out the working class. What matters now is accountability, which means focusing on what happened, focusing on how the establishment lost. Blaming Russia is more denial DoJ is still M I A Nearly 200 million Americans across all 50 states are exposed to unsafe levels of chromium-6 a heavy metal known to cause cancer, no prosecution ://www.theguardian.com/.../chromium-6-erin-brockovich... -Wall Street bankers commit fraud leading to massive bail out, no prosecutions. http://origin-nyi.thehill.com/.../247093-warren-mccain... -HSBC launders hundreds of millions of cartel money, no prosecution. http://www.rollingstone.com/.../outrageous-hsbc... -Top counterterrorism official admits war crimes going all the way up to the commander-in-chief, no prosecutions http://m.democracynow.org/web_exclusives/2161 -Wells Fargo opens fraudulent accounts, no prosecution. http://money.cnn.com/.../wells-fargo-fake-account.../ -While other countries embrace globalization and strengthen their middle class, data shows America's working class is collapsing http://www.marketwatch.com/.../income-share-of-bottom-50... -Government officials try to cover up the poisoning of Flint Michigan children, no prosecution. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3RX8NIxTce4 -"Halliburton loophole" inserted into 2005 energy bill, allowing town after town across America to be poisoned, as reported by Erin Brockovich, no prosecution http://www.truth-out.org/.../21828-time-to-end-the-cheney... -North Dakota uses militarized police to arrest and charge journalist Amy Goodman with inciting a riot for trying to report on water protectors, no prosecution. https://www.thenation.com/.../amy-goodman-is-facing.../ Harvard business professor explains the economic crimes against the middle class, what's left of it, that it's far worse than most of us believe https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM Find out if you live near toxic waste http://time.com/.../superfund-sites-toxic-waste-locations/ -Children poisoned by lead tainted water in Michigan http://www.detroitnews.com/.../epa-stayed.../78719620/ -Valeant raises price on lead poisoning drug 2700% after Flints criminal disaster https://www.statnews.com/.../valeant-drug-prices-lead.../ -Pesticides driving bees to extinction https://independentaustralia.net/.../epa-confirms... -Dupont knowingly poisons our water, spreading cancer http://www.nytimes.com/.../the-lawyer-who-became-duponts... -Hydraulic fracturing turns Oklahoma into the earthquake nightmare http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/induced/ -Unprecedented gas leak in California town makes neighborhood uninhabitable http://m.csmonitor.com/.../Huge-gas-leak-undermines... -Neighborhood explodes in flames, killing eight, due to poorly maintained gas lines http://www.mercurynews.com/.../pge-found-guilty-on-six.../ -Oil companies allowed to inject toxic waste into California aquifers https://www.propublica.org/.../ca-halts-injection... -Drinking water tainted with chemical byproduct http://www.cbsnews.com/.../wilmington-nc-cape-fear-river.../ _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7C0d30f512ce8e4e85caae08d57d88bf6c%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636552948627865868&sdata=2rceqPuUvYQ3so0419VdKped0gyFDVPhnl8XlBd8eAA%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Feb 27 12:47:26 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 12:47:26 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] A major issue of concern for all In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: GEO and Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.... 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 Karen Aram via Peace Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 6:36 AM To: peace Subject: [Peace] Fwd: A major issue of concern for all > After 17 years we have invaded and murdered millions, destroying 7 nations, with our wars of imperialism and hegemony. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, plus Pakistan, and we now threaten North Korea, and all those in Asia with our nuclear weapons. We have set up military bases across the continent of Africa, and we’re on the verge of doing the same in our quest for regime change in Venezuela, as we did in El Salvador, and Nicaragua in the 80’s. > > To the rest of the world, there is no anti-war movement in America, its considered dead, we need to prove them wrong, we need to prove we do care about the lives of others. > > The lack of appropriate healthcare, with costs bankrupting many, the lack of jobs, or a decent minimum wage is a severe threat to millions within our own nation. > Add to this the recent tax increase for most working people in the US, providing a huge bonus for the wealthy, with plans to destroy Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, and more millions going to create more weapons of death, we are marching to the precipice of doom. > > Here in Champaign, a couple hours drive south of Chicago, the University Graduate Employees Organization is on strike, for the rights of not just themselves, but for future generations.They have refused to capitulate to an Administration that takes home in addition to six figure salaries, bonuses in the hundreds of thousands. All these young grad employees are asking for is a “contract” “tuition wavers” given they are paid below COL for this community. Instead the Provost wants to increase fees and force graduate employees to pay out of pocket to serve the students. > > The GEO have been asking nicely, and gotten no where, they have attempted to negotiate, while being rudely rejected at every turn, they have been offered tuition wavers for themselves now, but not for future workers. They have stood strong, on behalf of the future. > > Some of us within the community join them on the picket lines daily, in solidarity, because we know this is just the beginning of the crushing of public unions across the nation. We know that being “nice” gets us no where with those who are so lacking in humanity and concern for human rights, that we must take action. Nonviolent action, but strong unrelenting action as was done in the sixties and seventies. Our leaders eventually did listen to us then, we may not be so lucky now, but with climate change on our doorstep, and no action preventing it from further destruction, we cannot compromise. > > _______________________________________________ Peace mailing list Peace at lists.chambana.net https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Feb 27 14:14:33 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 14:14:33 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazoo: 2 Law Deans Dog and Pony Show for Chief Illiniwak Message-ID: OK. Chancellor Jones is bringing in on April 17 two Establishmentarian Law Deans who are going to argue that Chief Illiniwak is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It will be a real dog-and-pony show. These 2 Law Deans know absolutely nothing at all about the tremendous psychological harm that Chief Illiniwak has inflicted upon our Native American Students, Faculty, Staff and Community Members. I doubt very seriously they will even bother to meet with any of them to hear them out. Just an Administration set-up for Chief Illiniwak. 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 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 Feb 27 14:28:45 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 08:28:45 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Message-ID: <004801d3afd7$467182f0$d35488d0$@comcast.net> Hey everyone, Look what I found this morning. An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years by DAVE LINDORFF https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/27/washington-has-engaged-in-informatio n-warfare-including-fake-news-and-trolling-for-years/ Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years www.counterpunch.org The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed Facebook Twitter Google+ Reddit Email https://uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/dropzone /2017/09/atoa-print-icon.png The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed in social media to mislead and incite Americans against each other, might lead one think, like Sen John McCain, that we are practically at war with Russia. Yet it's all actually pretty silly. After all, our own government has been playing this game for decades, both abroad, and also right here inside the "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave" and against us American citizens. I know. I was a victim of such an attack, though initially, I didn't realize what was happening. Back on August 25, 2005, I published a piece in In These Times titled Radioactive Wounds of War about the devastating damage caused by the US military's use of depleted uranium weapons in its brutal assault leveling Fallujah, the Iraqi city of 300,000 people that was destroyed by US marines in 2004 as retribution for the killing of four US contractors by the Iraqi insurgents who at the time controlled the city, and for their humiliating defeat of a smaller Marine assault on the city earlier in the year. At the time I was and had been a contributing editor at ITT, a publication for which I had written regularly since it was founded back in 1978, and was listed on its masthead as such. As I recount in an article published in Counterpunch on November 19, 2005, titled R.I.P In These Times, the left-liberal news magazine had been promptly bombarded with letters criticizing my article after it came out. The critiques were not about the main topic of the article, which was evidence discovered in medical studies done on returning Iraq veterans from a unit of New York National Guard soldiers, funded by the New York Daily News and reported on by Juan Gonzalez, which had found evidence of exposure to depleted uranium dust that was causing serious health damage in these soldiers, and even birth defects in their young children. Those findings were undeniable. What attracted the critical mail, which would now be called trolling, was my reporting on how much-depleted uranium weapons had been dumped on Iraq by invading and occupying US forces. Based on my research into reports, mostly by European sources, I had written in that article: U.S. forces first used DU in the 1991 Gulf War, when some 300 tons of depleted uranium-the waste product of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities-were used in tank shells and shells fired by A-10 jets. A lesser amount was deployed by US and NATO forces during the Balkans conflict. But in the current wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq, DU has become the weapon of choice, with more than 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan and more than 3,000 tons used in Iraq. And while DU was fired mostly in the desert during the Gulf War, in the current war in Iraq, most of DU munitions are exploding in populated urban areas. The Pentagon has expanded DU beyond tank and A-10 shells, for use in bunker-busting bombs, which can spew out more than half a ton of DU in one explosion, in anti-personnel bomblets, and even in M-16 and pistol shells. The military loves DU for its unique penetration capability-it cuts through steel or concrete like they're butter. In later years, I've done more reporting on the US military's use of depleted uranium, which the Pentagon loves because of its unique ability to penetrate even thick solid steel tank armor and reinforced concrete bunkers with ease, bursting into intense flame on impact and spreading super toxic uranium oxide dust in the aftermath. There is no dispute about the use of these weapons by US forces. But in 2005, the Pentagon was fighting a brutal rear-guard battle to claim the stuff is safe and at the same time that it was not being used in populated urban areas. Both claims were official lies. Particularly active and voluble in this letter-writing campaign to ITT targeting my article, all of which correspondence was posted on the ITT website, were people like Jack Cohen-Joppe, retired Air Force Col. Roger Helbig, and US Army Col. Rick Thomas. I could never figure out what Cohen-Joppe's motivation was, or who if anyone is behind him. A self-described opponent of nuclear weapons and especially nuclear power, Cohen-Joppe, from Tucson AZ, has for some reason had what I have described as an "Ahab-like obsession" with attempting to debunk claims of US depleted-uranium weapons, although such use has been admitted by the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Helbig and Thomas appear to have more sinister connections to the Pentagon. Both show up in troll campaigns whenever articles about depleted uranium weapons appear. They also have had a years-long campaign to smear and discredit one of the main whistleblowers about DU, Dr. Doug Rocke, a former Army Captain who conducted a Pentagon study on the safety (lack of safety) of DU weapons, and who also ran a campaign to decontaminate sites in Kuwait where DU weapons had been used, scattering toxic uranium oxide dust. For example, Helbig has claimed Rocke was never ranked higher than Lieutenant, and that he never ran a DU study or worked on decontamination after the Gulf War. Yet I was shown documents by Rocke showing his recommendation for promotion to Captain, and commending him for his study and his work in Kuwait. Their attack on my ITT article was a success, in large part because of the cowardice and lack of principle of ITT's editor, Joel Bleifus. As I wrote in my Counterpunch article, Bleifus ran Cohen-Joppe's letter criticizing my article in a subsequent issue of the magazine without warning me and giving me an opportunity to respond to his fact-free criticism. This despite it being standard policy at ITT for its writers to get a chance to respond to any such published letters in the same issue. When I complained, I was eventually allowed to write a letter of response, but Bleifus cut it and added a note of his own saying he didn't agree with my response. It was shabby behavior of the worst sort, and also in retrospect a huge embarrassment to Bleifus and In These Times, as more and more evidence has come out of the dreadful multi-generational impact of the US military's use of DU weapons all over Iraq, including in its cities. But more important than ITT's lack of courage and principle was the success of the Pentagon's fake news and trolling campaign, in this case in defense of its grotesque DU weapons: as a matter of principle I had to tell ITT to take my name off their masthead, and said I would never write for such a crappy publication again. I'm confident enough in the quality of my work to say that this was totally In These Times' loss, not mine. But it's also the Pentagon's victory. And make no mistake: the Pentagon has long been in the business of producing fake news and of trolling letters to the editor pages as a way of manipulating the news to its own advantage. Check out these stories: Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi Pentagon Paid for Fake 'Al Qaeda' Videos Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law Pentagon Contractor Admits to Attacks on Journalists Pentagon Ramping Up Public Relations Offensive Revealed: US Spy Program that Manipulates Social Media US Media Knew Kosovo Kosovo Official Reports Were Propaganda Of course, official government propaganda - that is the production of what is now called "fake news" and the employment of an army of paid Pentagon "trolls" or "sock puppets" to undermine journalists and their supporters online - has continued. In fact, back during the heat of the Iraq occupation and the Bush/Cheney administration's efforts to lay the groundwork for a police state spying system, I heard from someone at CommonDreams.org that that organization, concerned by the number of trolls who were clogging up their comment section after articles they ran, did an investigation of the ISPs of the trolls and discovered that many of them were originating in the Department of Defense. There were plans to write an expose of this activity, but to the best of my knowledge, no such article ever ran. The most recent egregious effort in that vein was the successful promotion of what appears to have been a Pentagon effort in which the Washington Post obligingly published a screaming page-one headline touting a list of 200 online sites, most of them American, said to be tools of, or "useful idiots" supporting Russian propaganda. The shadowy organization behind that list, called PropOrNot, was allowed to remain anonymous, both in terms of its personnel and its financing, but I was able to determine that at least one participant, whose "analysis" of an article of mine in this publication, reprinted in Counterpunch, was so "appallingly pro-Russian" that it proved Counterpunch itself was a "pro-Russian" publication. The author or the review of my piece, Joel Harding, I discovered after a little research, had been a high-ranking member of the Army's Stratcom headquarters based at Ft. Detrick outside of Washington, DC. This is where the military's Cyberspace Command is based - Harding's area of expertise. Here's my expose about the Pentagon's role in that pathetic effort by the Washington Post to return us to the McCarthy era of blacklists and reputation assassination: Is the Pentagon Behind the Washington Post's McCarthyite Hit on Independent Alternative Journalism? I have no doubt that Russia engaged in some attempts at using Social Media to sow confusion and conflict in the US during the last election, and during the current divisive Trump presidency, nor do I doubt that Russia will make similar efforts going forward during the next two election cycles in 2018 and 2020. But it's worth recalling that the US has been doing exactly the same thing. As Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey admitted in an interview on Fox TV recently, the US has regularly interfered in at least 81 countries' elections. Included in those efforts, which also included overthrowing elected governments in places like Guatemala, Iran and Chile, was a major US covert and overt campaign that helped the epically corrupt Russian leader Boris Yeltsin win re-election in 2012. Americans need to take a deep breath. What is happening currently, with Russia putting out fake news on US social media platforms, is not any different from what the Pentagon, and no doubt other US government organizations are doing and have been doing for decades to corruptly influence public opinion. Much of it, like buying ads, is not even illegal, at least for foreign private entities. It should be illegal for US government departments. We're living in complicated times, where it's not enough any longer to just watch or read the news put out by once-respected mainstream news sources. We know that they've all become incredibly corrupted by their near monopoly status in most markets, their vulnerability to government pressure, and by reporters' loss of professionalism in the face of increasing job insecurity. Citizens need to become much more critical in their evaluation of news, to turn to multiple sources including non-mainstream and foreign news media, and to understand that in many cases what is being presented as objective news is actually little more than government propaganda. We have to develop this ability to think and evaluate for ourselves, because it's clear things are only going to get worse. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 256 bytes Desc: not available URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Feb 27 14:28:57 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 14:28:57 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] News Gazoo: 2 Law Deans Dog and Pony Show for Chief Illiniwak Message-ID: Just to show you how worthless and useless and what a ConJob and Stall Job this dog and pony show by two law deans over Chief Illiniwak really is. Years ago we already had a well-publicized debate over Chief Illiniwak by two law professors over here at the College of Law. When I criticized the law professor defending Chief Illiniwak, he compared me to Hitler. Fab. 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 and 2017 Homecomings in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaigns, 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. [cid:image002.jpg at 01D3AFA4.F8032790] Francis 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, February 27, 2018 8:15 AM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: News Gazoo: 2 Law Deans Dog and Pony Show for Chief Illiniwak OK. Chancellor Jones is bringing in on April 17 two Establishmentarian Law Deans who are going to argue that Chief Illiniwak is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It will be a real dog-and-pony show. These 2 Law Deans know absolutely nothing at all about the tremendous psychological harm that Chief Illiniwak has inflicted upon our Native American Students, Faculty, Staff and Community Members. I doubt very seriously they will even bother to meet with any of them to hear them out. Just an Administration set-up for Chief Illiniwak. 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 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 53126 bytes Desc: image002.jpg URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Feb 27 15:32:34 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 15:32:34 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. In-Reply-To: <004801d3afd7$467182f0$d35488d0$@comcast.net> References: <004801d3afd7$467182f0$d35488d0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: Yeah, as I have repeatedly said before Roger is a Mole for "military intelligence"-an oxymoron to be sure, especially when it comes to Roger. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Johnson via Peace-discuss Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:29 AM To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Hey everyone, Look what I found this morning. An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years by DAVE LINDORFF https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/27/washington-has-engaged-in-information-warfare-including-fake-news-and-trolling-for-years/ Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years www.counterpunch.org The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail[https://uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/dropzone/2017/09/atoa-print-icon.png] The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed in social media to mislead and incite Americans against each other, might lead one think, like Sen John McCain, that we are practically at war with Russia. Yet it's all actually pretty silly. After all, our own government has been playing this game for decades, both abroad, and also right here inside the "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave" and against us American citizens. I know. I was a victim of such an attack, though initially, I didn't realize what was happening. Back on August 25, 2005, I published a piece in In These Times titled Radioactive Wounds of War about the devastating damage caused by the US military's use of depleted uranium weapons in its brutal assault leveling Fallujah, the Iraqi city of 300,000 people that was destroyed by US marines in 2004 as retribution for the killing of four US contractors by the Iraqi insurgents who at the time controlled the city, and for their humiliating defeat of a smaller Marine assault on the city earlier in the year. At the time I was and had been a contributing editor at ITT, a publication for which I had written regularly since it was founded back in 1978, and was listed on its masthead as such. As I recount in an article published in Counterpunch on November 19, 2005, titled R.I.P In These Times, the left-liberal news magazine had been promptly bombarded with letters criticizing my article after it came out. The critiques were not about the main topic of the article, which was evidence discovered in medical studies done on returning Iraq veterans from a unit of New York National Guard soldiers, funded by the New York Daily News and reported on by Juan Gonzalez, which had found evidence of exposure to depleted uranium dust that was causing serious health damage in these soldiers, and even birth defects in their young children. Those findings were undeniable. What attracted the critical mail, which would now be called trolling, was my reporting on how much-depleted uranium weapons had been dumped on Iraq by invading and occupying US forces. Based on my research into reports, mostly by European sources, I had written in that article: U.S. forces first used DU in the 1991 Gulf War, when some 300 tons of depleted uranium-the waste product of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities-were used in tank shells and shells fired by A-10 jets. A lesser amount was deployed by US and NATO forces during the Balkans conflict. But in the current wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq, DU has become the weapon of choice, with more than 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan and more than 3,000 tons used in Iraq. And while DU was fired mostly in the desert during the Gulf War, in the current war in Iraq, most of DU munitions are exploding in populated urban areas. The Pentagon has expanded DU beyond tank and A-10 shells, for use in bunker-busting bombs, which can spew out more than half a ton of DU in one explosion, in anti-personnel bomblets, and even in M-16 and pistol shells. The military loves DU for its unique penetration capability-it cuts through steel or concrete like they're butter. In later years, I've done more reporting on the US military's use of depleted uranium, which the Pentagon loves because of its unique ability to penetrate even thick solid steel tank armor and reinforced concrete bunkers with ease, bursting into intense flame on impact and spreading super toxic uranium oxide dust in the aftermath. There is no dispute about the use of these weapons by US forces. But in 2005, the Pentagon was fighting a brutal rear-guard battle to claim the stuff is safe and at the same time that it was not being used in populated urban areas. Both claims were official lies. Particularly active and voluble in this letter-writing campaign to ITT targeting my article, all of which correspondence was posted on the ITT website, were people like Jack Cohen-Joppe, retired Air Force Col. Roger Helbig, and US Army Col. Rick Thomas. I could never figure out what Cohen-Joppe's motivation was, or who if anyone is behind him. A self-described opponent of nuclear weapons and especially nuclear power, Cohen-Joppe, from Tucson AZ, has for some reason had what I have described as an "Ahab-like obsession" with attempting to debunk claims of US depleted-uranium weapons, although such use has been admitted by the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Helbig and Thomas appear to have more sinister connections to the Pentagon. Both show up in troll campaigns whenever articles about depleted uranium weapons appear. They also have had a years-long campaign to smear and discredit one of the main whistleblowers about DU, Dr. Doug Rocke, a former Army Captain who conducted a Pentagon study on the safety (lack of safety) of DU weapons, and who also ran a campaign to decontaminate sites in Kuwait where DU weapons had been used, scattering toxic uranium oxide dust. For example, Helbig has claimed Rocke was never ranked higher than Lieutenant, and that he never ran a DU study or worked on decontamination after the Gulf War. Yet I was shown documents by Rocke showing his recommendation for promotion to Captain, and commending him for his study and his work in Kuwait. Their attack on my ITT article was a success, in large part because of the cowardice and lack of principle of ITT's editor, Joel Bleifus. As I wrote in my Counterpunch article, Bleifus ran Cohen-Joppe's letter criticizing my article in a subsequent issue of the magazine without warning me and giving me an opportunity to respond to his fact-free criticism. This despite it being standard policy at ITT for its writers to get a chance to respond to any such published letters in the same issue. When I complained, I was eventually allowed to write a letter of response, but Bleifus cut it and added a note of his own saying he didn't agree with my response. It was shabby behavior of the worst sort, and also in retrospect a huge embarrassment to Bleifus and In These Times, as more and more evidence has come out of the dreadful multi-generational impact of the US military's use of DU weapons all over Iraq, including in its cities. But more important than ITT's lack of courage and principle was the success of the Pentagon's fake news and trolling campaign, in this case in defense of its grotesque DU weapons: as a matter of principle I had to tell ITT to take my name off their masthead, and said I would never write for such a crappy publication again. I'm confident enough in the quality of my work to say that this was totally In These Times' loss, not mine. But it's also the Pentagon's victory. And make no mistake: the Pentagon has long been in the business of producing fake news and of trolling letters to the editor pages as a way of manipulating the news to its own advantage. Check out these stories: Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi Pentagon Paid for Fake 'Al Qaeda' Videos Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law Pentagon Contractor Admits to Attacks on Journalists Pentagon Ramping Up Public Relations Offensive Revealed: US Spy Program that Manipulates Social Media US Media Knew Kosovo Kosovo Official Reports Were Propaganda Of course, official government propaganda - that is the production of what is now called "fake news" and the employment of an army of paid Pentagon "trolls" or "sock puppets" to undermine journalists and their supporters online - has continued. In fact, back during the heat of the Iraq occupation and the Bush/Cheney administration's efforts to lay the groundwork for a police state spying system, I heard from someone at CommonDreams.org that that organization, concerned by the number of trolls who were clogging up their comment section after articles they ran, did an investigation of the ISPs of the trolls and discovered that many of them were originating in the Department of Defense. There were plans to write an expose of this activity, but to the best of my knowledge, no such article ever ran. The most recent egregious effort in that vein was the successful promotion of what appears to have been a Pentagon effort in which the Washington Post obligingly published a screaming page-one headline touting a list of 200 online sites, most of them American, said to be tools of, or "useful idiots" supporting Russian propaganda. The shadowy organization behind that list, called PropOrNot, was allowed to remain anonymous, both in terms of its personnel and its financing, but I was able to determine that at least one participant, whose "analysis" of an article of mine in this publication, reprinted in Counterpunch, was so "appallingly pro-Russian" that it proved Counterpunch itself was a "pro-Russian" publication. The author or the review of my piece, Joel Harding, I discovered after a little research, had been a high-ranking member of the Army's Stratcom headquarters based at Ft. Detrick outside of Washington, DC. This is where the military's Cyberspace Command is based - Harding's area of expertise. Here's my expose about the Pentagon's role in that pathetic effort by the Washington Post to return us to the McCarthy era of blacklists and reputation assassination: Is the Pentagon Behind the Washington Post's McCarthyite Hit on Independent Alternative Journalism? I have no doubt that Russia engaged in some attempts at using Social Media to sow confusion and conflict in the US during the last election, and during the current divisive Trump presidency, nor do I doubt that Russia will make similar efforts going forward during the next two election cycles in 2018 and 2020. But it's worth recalling that the US has been doing exactly the same thing. As Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey admitted in an interview on Fox TV recently, the US has regularly interfered in at least 81 countries' elections. Included in those efforts, which also included overthrowing elected governments in places like Guatemala, Iran and Chile, was a major US covert and overt campaign that helped the epically corrupt Russian leader Boris Yeltsin win re-election in 2012. Americans need to take a deep breath. What is happening currently, with Russia putting out fake news on US social media platforms, is not any different from what the Pentagon, and no doubt other US government organizations are doing and have been doing for decades to corruptly influence public opinion. Much of it, like buying ads, is not even illegal, at least for foreign private entities. It should be illegal for US government departments. We're living in complicated times, where it's not enough any longer to just watch or read the news put out by once-respected mainstream news sources. We know that they've all become incredibly corrupted by their near monopoly status in most markets, their vulnerability to government pressure, and by reporters' loss of professionalism in the face of increasing job insecurity. Citizens need to become much more critical in their evaluation of news, to turn to multiple sources including non-mainstream and foreign news media, and to understand that in many cases what is being presented as objective news is actually little more than government propaganda. We have to develop this ability to think and evaluate for ourselves, because it's clear things are only going to get worse. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 256 bytes Desc: image001.png URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Feb 27 16:06:09 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 16:06:09 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: News Gazoo: 2 Law Deans Dog and Pony Show for Chief Illiniwak In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Also, to the best of my knowledge these 2 Law Deans have no expertise in the Field of International Human Rights Law, including and especially the basic human rights of Native Americans. Just a dog and pony show sponsored by the Administration to delay the elimination of Chief Illiniwak and all of its accouterments so that the Administration can milk the Illiniwak Nation Alumni for all they are worth during their new Capital Campaign. And it is a total disgrace that these two law deans would come onto our campus and interject themselves adversely into our Campaign to get rid of Illiniwakism on our campus and in our community. Fab [cid:image002.jpg at 01D3AFB2.923DF5D0] Francis 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, February 27, 2018 8:15 AM To: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: News Gazoo: 2 Law Deans Dog and Pony Show for Chief Illiniwak OK. Chancellor Jones is bringing in on April 17 two Establishmentarian Law Deans who are going to argue that Chief Illiniwak is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It will be a real dog-and-pony show. These 2 Law Deans know absolutely nothing at all about the tremendous psychological harm that Chief Illiniwak has inflicted upon our Native American Students, Faculty, Staff and Community Members. I doubt very seriously they will even bother to meet with any of them to hear them out. Just an Administration set-up for Chief Illiniwak. 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 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 53329 bytes Desc: image002.jpg URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 27 16:15:55 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 16:15:55 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. In-Reply-To: References: <004801d3afd7$467182f0$d35488d0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: Damn, you were right. I missed this one, just thought he was an old “military supporter.” Until his last personal attack on you, then I did suspect it must be true. This article is proof. On Feb 27, 2018, at 07:32, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, as I have repeatedly said before Roger is a Mole for “military intelligence”—an oxymoron to be sure, especially when it comes to Roger. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Johnson via Peace-discuss Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:29 AM To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Hey everyone, Look what I found this morning. An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years by DAVE LINDORFF https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/27/washington-has-engaged-in-information-warfare-including-fake-news-and-trolling-for-years/ Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years www.counterpunch.org The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed in social media to mislead and incite Americans against each other, might lead one think, like Sen John McCain, that we are practically at war with Russia. Yet it’s all actually pretty silly. After all, our own government has been playing this game for decades, both abroad, and also right here inside the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” and against us American citizens. I know. I was a victim of such an attack, though initially, I didn’t realize what was happening. Back on August 25, 2005, I published a piece in In These Times titled Radioactive Wounds of War about the devastating damage caused by the US military’s use of depleted uranium weapons in its brutal assault leveling Fallujah, the Iraqi city of 300,000 people that was destroyed by US marines in 2004 as retribution for the killing of four US contractors by the Iraqi insurgents who at the time controlled the city, and for their humiliating defeat of a smaller Marine assault on the city earlier in the year. At the time I was and had been a contributing editor at ITT, a publication for which I had written regularly since it was founded back in 1978, and was listed on its masthead as such. As I recount in an article published in Counterpunch on November 19, 2005, titled R.I.P In These Times, the left-liberal news magazine had been promptly bombarded with letters criticizing my article after it came out. The critiques were not about the main topic of the article, which was evidence discovered in medical studies done on returning Iraq veterans from a unit of New York National Guard soldiers, funded by the New York Daily News and reported on by Juan Gonzalez, which had found evidence of exposure to depleted uranium dust that was causing serious health damage in these soldiers, and even birth defects in their young children. Those findings were undeniable. What attracted the critical mail, which would now be called trolling, was my reporting on how much-depleted uranium weapons had been dumped on Iraq by invading and occupying US forces. Based on my research into reports, mostly by European sources, I had written in that article: U.S. forces first used DU in the 1991 Gulf War, when some 300 tons of depleted uranium–the waste product of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities–were used in tank shells and shells fired by A-10 jets. A lesser amount was deployed by US and NATO forces during the Balkans conflict. But in the current wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq, DU has become the weapon of choice, with more than 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan and more than 3,000 tons used in Iraq. And while DU was fired mostly in the desert during the Gulf War, in the current war in Iraq, most of DU munitions are exploding in populated urban areas. The Pentagon has expanded DU beyond tank and A-10 shells, for use in bunker-busting bombs, which can spew out more than half a ton of DU in one explosion, in anti-personnel bomblets, and even in M-16 and pistol shells. The military loves DU for its unique penetration capability–it cuts through steel or concrete like they’re butter. In later years, I’ve done more reporting on the US military’s use of depleted uranium, which the Pentagon loves because of its unique ability to penetrate even thick solid steel tank armor and reinforced concrete bunkers with ease, bursting into intense flame on impact and spreading super toxic uranium oxide dust in the aftermath. There is no dispute about the use of these weapons by US forces. But in 2005, the Pentagon was fighting a brutal rear-guard battle to claim the stuff is safe and at the same time that it was not being used in populated urban areas. Both claims were official lies. Particularly active and voluble in this letter-writing campaign to ITT targeting my article, all of which correspondence was posted on the ITT website, were people like Jack Cohen-Joppe, retired Air Force Col. Roger Helbig, and US Army Col. Rick Thomas. I could never figure out what Cohen-Joppe’s motivation was, or who if anyone is behind him. A self-described opponent of nuclear weapons and especially nuclear power, Cohen-Joppe, from Tucson AZ, has for some reason had what I have described as an “Ahab-like obsession” with attempting to debunk claims of US depleted-uranium weapons, although such use has been admitted by the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Helbig and Thomas appear to have more sinister connections to the Pentagon. Both show up in troll campaigns whenever articles about depleted uranium weapons appear. They also have had a years-long campaign to smear and discredit one of the main whistleblowers about DU, Dr. Doug Rocke, a former Army Captain who conducted a Pentagon study on the safety (lack of safety) of DU weapons, and who also ran a campaign to decontaminate sites in Kuwait where DU weapons had been used, scattering toxic uranium oxide dust. For example, Helbig has claimed Rocke was never ranked higher than Lieutenant, and that he never ran a DU study or worked on decontamination after the Gulf War. Yet I was shown documents by Rocke showing his recommendation for promotion to Captain, and commending him for his study and his work in Kuwait. Their attack on my ITT article was a success, in large part because of the cowardice and lack of principle of ITT’s editor, Joel Bleifus. As I wrote in my Counterpunch article, Bleifus ran Cohen-Joppe’s letter criticizing my article in a subsequent issue of the magazine without warning me and giving me an opportunity to respond to his fact-free criticism. This despite it being standard policy at ITT for its writers to get a chance to respond to any such published letters in the same issue. When I complained, I was eventually allowed to write a letter of response, but Bleifus cut it and added a note of his own saying he didn’t agree with my response. It was shabby behavior of the worst sort, and also in retrospect a huge embarrassment to Bleifus and In These Times, as more and more evidence has come out of the dreadful multi-generational impact of the US military’s use of DU weapons all over Iraq, including in its cities. But more important than ITT’s lack of courage and principle was the success of the Pentagon’s fake news and trolling campaign, in this case in defense of its grotesque DU weapons: as a matter of principle I had to tell ITT to take my name off their masthead, and said I would never write for such a crappy publication again. I’m confident enough in the quality of my work to say that this was totally In These Times’ loss, not mine. But it’s also the Pentagon’s victory. And make no mistake: the Pentagon has long been in the business of producing fake news and of trolling letters to the editor pages as a way of manipulating the news to its own advantage. Check out these stories: Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law Pentagon Contractor Admits to Attacks on Journalists Pentagon Ramping Up Public Relations Offensive Revealed: US Spy Program that Manipulates Social Media US Media Knew Kosovo Kosovo Official Reports Were Propaganda Of course, official government propaganda — that is the production of what is now called “fake news” and the employment of an army of paid Pentagon “trolls” or “sock puppets” to undermine journalists and their supporters online — has continued. In fact, back during the heat of the Iraq occupation and the Bush/Cheney administration’s efforts to lay the groundwork for a police state spying system, I heard from someone at CommonDreams.org that that organization, concerned by the number of trolls who were clogging up their comment section after articles they ran, did an investigation of the ISPs of the trolls and discovered that many of them were originating in the Department of Defense. There were plans to write an expose of this activity, but to the best of my knowledge, no such article ever ran. The most recent egregious effort in that vein was the successful promotion of what appears to have been a Pentagon effort in which the Washington Post obligingly published a screaming page-one headline touting a list of 200 online sites, most of them American, said to be tools of, or “useful idiots” supporting Russian propaganda. The shadowy organization behind that list, called PropOrNot, was allowed to remain anonymous, both in terms of its personnel and its financing, but I was able to determine that at least one participant, whose “analysis” of an article of mine in this publication, reprinted in Counterpunch, was so “appallingly pro-Russian” that it proved Counterpunch itself was a “pro-Russian” publication. The author or the review of my piece, Joel Harding, I discovered after a little research, had been a high-ranking member of the Army’s Stratcom headquarters based at Ft. Detrick outside of Washington, DC. This is where the military’s Cyberspace Command is based — Harding’s area of expertise. Here’s my expose about the Pentagon’s role in that pathetic effort by the Washington Post to return us to the McCarthy era of blacklists and reputation assassination: Is the Pentagon Behind the Washington Post’s McCarthyite Hit on Independent Alternative Journalism? I have no doubt that Russia engaged in some attempts at using Social Media to sow confusion and conflict in the US during the last election, and during the current divisive Trump presidency, nor do I doubt that Russia will make similar efforts going forward during the next two election cycles in 2018 and 2020. But it’s worth recalling that the US has been doing exactly the same thing. As Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey admitted in an interview on Fox TV recently, the US has regularly interfered in at least 81 countries’ elections. Included in those efforts, which also included overthrowing elected governments in places like Guatemala, Iran and Chile, was a major US covert and overt campaign that helped the epically corrupt Russian leader Boris Yeltsin win re-election in 2012. Americans need to take a deep breath. What is happening currently, with Russia putting out fake news on US social media platforms, is not any different from what the Pentagon, and no doubt other US government organizations are doing and have been doing for decades to corruptly influence public opinion. Much of it, like buying ads, is not even illegal, at least for foreign private entities. It should be illegal for US government departments. We’re living in complicated times, where it’s not enough any longer to just watch or read the news put out by once-respected mainstream news sources. We know that they’ve all become incredibly corrupted by their near monopoly status in most markets, their vulnerability to government pressure, and by reporters’ loss of professionalism in the face of increasing job insecurity. Citizens need to become much more critical in their evaluation of news, to turn to multiple sources including non-mainstream and foreign news media, and to understand that in many cases what is being presented as objective news is actually little more than government propaganda. We have to develop this ability to think and evaluate for ourselves, because it’s clear things are only going to get worse. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce6a98b29a397442a829508d57df7752b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553424127209817&sdata=wsNBf5cqm%2Bp2kMkz4KE6dy6w4RqL1H8FV2zos%2Ba3KK0%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Tue Feb 27 16:37:01 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 16:37:01 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] U of I Campus Today Message-ID: “I’ve never seen it so empty of students and classes," said many on the picket lines. From fboyle at illinois.edu Tue Feb 27 16:59:24 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 16:59:24 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Upcoming International Law Conference 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 Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 10:58 AM To: sectns.aals at lists.aals.org Subject: FW: Upcoming International Law Conference Christopher Greenwood A War Criminal who gave Tony Blair the proverbial "Green Light" to invade Iraq in 2003 and for that reason was not re-elected to the World Court by the UN General Assembly and for that reason Britain no longer has a British National on the World Court-to the best of my knowledge unprecedented in the history of the World Court going back to 1921 not to have a British National on there. QED. Greenwood to jail! Hey! Hey! AALS Say! How many kids! Did you kill today! In Iraq! Hey! Hey! ASIL Say! How many kids! Did you kill today! In Iraq! 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: Milena Sterio [mailto:support at lists.aals.org] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 10:50 AM To: sectil.annc at lists.aals.org Subject: [SECTIL.annc] - Upcoming International Law Conference Dear Colleagues: The International Section of the American Association of Law Schools is proud to be a cooperating organization of the American Society of International Law's (ASIL) 112th Annual Meeting, "International Law in Practice," to take place in Washington, DC, April 4-7, 2018. Featured speakers will include Judge Joan E. Donoghue, International Court of Justice; Sir Christopher Greenwood, former International Court of Justice; Meg Kinnear, secretary-general, International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes; and Peter Trooboff, senior counsel, Covington and Burling LLP. There will be more than 40 substantive panels following seven different tracks on topics of international dispute resolution; criminal law, human rights, and migration; international law and domestic law; armed conflict, use of force, and terrorism; environment, territory, sea, and space; international business; and global governance and international organizations. The program also includes multiples receptions and networking opportunities as well as separately ticketed luncheons. To view the full program and to register for the conference, visit www.asil.org/am. There is a discounted rate for government, international organization, and NGO lawyers, and non-ASIL member registrants also receive a year's complimentary membership in the Society. Contact services at asil.org with any questions. Best, Milena, AALS International Law Section Chair Milena Sterio Professor of Law & Associate Dean for Academic Enrichment Cleveland-Marshall College of Law 2121 Euclid Ave, LB 131 Cleveland, OH 44115 216-687-3852 m.sterio at csuohio.edu ________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Tue Feb 27 20:33:47 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 14:33:47 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Appeal for support for the Graduate Employees Union Strike Message-ID: <015501d3b00a$46c60360$d4520a20$@comcast.net> I just arrived home from the University of Illinois Graduate Employees Union ( GEO ) strike rally in Urbana-Champaign IL.. They really know how to do a rally. Drums, horns, chanting, singing, and lots of great speakers. I could hear them from over two blocks away as I approached. This is day 2 of their strike and when I picketed with them yesterday, the university quad area where most of the buildings where classes are held, was empty of the usual large crowds of students going to and from classes. Only hundreds of chanting graduate students picketing in front of various buildings in groups of ten to fifteen and in excess of 50 in front of some buildings. This strike is getting attention from all over the U.S. because of what is at stake. The outcome of this strike will set a precedent that will have repercussions not just for Graduate students across the U.S., but also for other public sector Unions at the University of Illinois and across the country as well as all Unions nationwide. The main issue is tuition waivers. The U of I Admin. wants to have sole discretion as to who gets tuition waivers as opposed to being stipulated in the Union contract that requires it for ALL graduate students, as has been the case since the founding of the GEO Union in 2002. That is the big issue, but also a raise in pay to slightly above the federal minimum wage and more of their healthcare costs being paid by the University. Last year their health insurance increased by 25 %. This strike may last longer than the 2009 strike that lasted only 2-days, since it appears that the U of I Admin is emboldened by both the Trump Admin in D.C., Illinois Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, and the upcoming Janus decision. If the U of I gets their way and tuition waivers will no longer be specified in the Union contract, then the Union will eventually die. In effect an attempt at Union busting. The Graduate Union members I spoke with are prepared for however long it takes because they realize that not only will this destroy their Union but it will also make the University unaffordable for most of them, who are primarily from Working class families. If any of you individually and/or your Union Local can donate to their strike fund please do so at ; http://www.uigeo.org/ As soon as you pull up the web page the donate button is in the right hand corner Thanks in Solidarity David Johnson World Labor Hour Radio 104.5 FM ( www.wrfu.net ) Urbana- Champaign, IL. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rwhelbig at gmail.com Wed Feb 28 02:11:57 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 18:11:57 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. In-Reply-To: References: <004801d3afd7$467182f0$d35488d0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: And have any of you actually checked the accuracy of this article - NO, I am sure that you have not. Boyle has had close association with Douglas Lind Rokke, who has created quite a fake persona. I am the only person who has ever used the Freedom of Information Act to dig into that. Roger W Helbig On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 8:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > Damn, you were right. > > I missed this one, just thought he was an old “military supporter.” Until > his last personal attack on you, then I did suspect it must be true. This > article is proof. > > > On Feb 27, 2018, at 07:32, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < > peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > > *Yeah, as I have repeatedly said before Roger is a Mole for “military > intelligence”—an oxymoron to be sure, especially when it comes to Roger. > Fab.* > > *Francis A. Boyle* > *Law Building* > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.* > *Champaign, IL 61820 USA* > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > *(personal comments only)* > > *From:* Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net > ] *On Behalf Of *David Johnson > via Peace-discuss > *Sent:* Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:29 AM > *To:* peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > *Subject:* [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war > / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. > > *Hey everyone,* > *Look what I found this morning.* > *An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace > Discuss list troll Roger Helbig.* > > > *Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and > Trolling, for Years > * > by DAVE LINDORFF > > > https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/27/washington-has- > engaged-in-information-warfare-including-fake-news-and-trolling-for-years/ > > > Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and > Trolling, for Years > > > www.counterpunch.org > > > The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals > about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news > being placed > > > > Facebook > > Twitter > > Google+ > > Reddit > > Email > > > > > The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals > about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news > being placed in social media to mislead and incite Americans against each > other, might lead one think, like Sen John McCain, that we are practically > at war with Russia. Yet it’s all actually pretty silly. After all, our own > government has been playing this game for decades, both abroad, and also > right here inside the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” and against > us American citizens. > > I know. I was a victim of such an attack, though initially, I didn’t > realize what was happening. > Back on August 25, 2005, I published a piece in *In These Times* titled Radioactive > Wounds of War > about > the devastating damage caused by the US military’s use of depleted uranium > weapons in its brutal assault leveling Fallujah, the Iraqi city of 300,000 > people that was destroyed by US marines in 2004 as retribution for the > killing of four US contractors by the Iraqi insurgents who at the time > controlled the city, and for their humiliating defeat of a smaller Marine > assault on the city earlier in the year. > At the time I was and had been a contributing editor at *ITT*, a > publication for which I had written regularly since it was founded back in > 1978, and was listed on its masthead as such. > As I recount in an article published in *Counterpunch* on November 19, > 2005, titled R.I.P In These Times > , > the left-liberal news magazine had been promptly bombarded with letters > criticizing my article after it came out. The critiques were not about the > main topic of the article, which was evidence discovered in medical studies > done on returning Iraq veterans from a unit of New York National Guard > soldiers, funded by the New York Daily News and reported on by Juan > Gonzalez, which had found evidence of exposure to depleted uranium dust > that was causing serious health damage in these soldiers, and even birth > defects in their young children. Those findings were undeniable. What > attracted the critical mail, which would now be called trolling, was my > reporting on how much-depleted uranium weapons had been dumped on Iraq by > invading and occupying US forces. > Based on my research into reports, mostly by European sources, I had > written in that article: > *U.S. forces first used DU in the 1991 Gulf War, when some 300 tons of > depleted uranium–the waste product of nuclear power plants and weapons > facilities–were used in tank shells and shells fired by A-10 jets. A lesser > amount was deployed by US and NATO forces during the Balkans conflict. But > in the current wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq, DU has become the > weapon of choice, with more than 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan and more > than 3,000 tons used in Iraq. And while DU was fired mostly in the desert > during the Gulf War, in the current war in Iraq, most of DU munitions are > exploding in populated urban areas.* > *The Pentagon has expanded DU beyond tank and A-10 shells, for use in > bunker-busting bombs, which can spew out more than half a ton of DU in one > explosion, in anti-personnel bomblets, and even in M-16 and pistol shells. > The military loves DU for its unique penetration capability–it cuts through > steel or concrete like they’re butter.* > In later years, I’ve done more reporting on the US military’s use of > depleted uranium, which the Pentagon loves because of its unique ability to > penetrate even thick solid steel tank armor and reinforced concrete bunkers > with ease, bursting into intense flame on impact and spreading super toxic > uranium oxide dust in the aftermath. There is no dispute about the use of > these weapons by US forces. But in 2005, the Pentagon was fighting a brutal > rear-guard battle to claim the stuff is safe and at the same time that it > was not being used in populated urban areas. Both claims were official lies. > > Particularly active and voluble in this letter-writing campaign to ITT > targeting my article, all of which correspondence was posted on the ITT > website, were people like Jack Cohen-Joppe, retired Air Force Col. Roger > Helbig, and US Army Col. Rick Thomas. > > I could never figure out what Cohen-Joppe’s motivation was, or who if > anyone is behind him. A self-described opponent of nuclear weapons and > especially nuclear power, Cohen-Joppe, from Tucson AZ, has for some reason > had what I have described as an “Ahab-like obsession” with attempting to > debunk claims of US depleted-uranium weapons, although such use has been > admitted by the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Helbig and Thomas appear to have more > sinister connections to the Pentagon. Both show up in troll campaigns > whenever articles about depleted uranium weapons appear. They also have had > a years-long campaign to smear and discredit one of the main whistleblowers > about DU, Dr. Doug Rocke, a former Army Captain who conducted a Pentagon > study on the safety (lack of safety) of DU weapons, and who also ran a > campaign to decontaminate sites in Kuwait where DU weapons had been used, > scattering toxic uranium oxide dust. For example, Helbig has claimed Rocke > was never ranked higher than Lieutenant, and that he never ran a DU study > or worked on decontamination after the Gulf War. Yet I was shown documents > by Rocke showing his recommendation for promotion to Captain, and > commending him for his study and his work in Kuwait. > Their attack on my ITT article was a success, in large part because of the > cowardice and lack of principle of ITT’s editor, Joel Bleifus. As I wrote > in my Counterpunch article, Bleifus ran Cohen-Joppe’s letter criticizing my > article in a subsequent issue of the magazine without warning me and giving > me an opportunity to respond to his fact-free criticism. This despite it > being standard policy at ITT for its writers to get a chance to respond to > any such published letters in the same issue. When I complained, I was > eventually allowed to write a letter of response, but Bleifus cut it and > added a note of his own saying he didn’t agree with my response. It was > shabby behavior of the worst sort, and also in retrospect a huge > embarrassment to Bleifus and *In These Times*, as more and more evidence > has come out of the dreadful multi-generational impact of the US military’s > use of DU weapons all over Iraq, including in its cities. > But more important than ITT’s lack of courage and principle was the > success of the Pentagon’s fake news and trolling campaign, in this case in > defense of its grotesque DU weapons: as a matter of principle I had to tell > ITT to take my name off their masthead, and said I would never write for > such a crappy publication again. I’m confident enough in the quality of my > work to say that this was totally *In These Times’* loss, not mine. But > it’s also the Pentagon’s victory. > > And make no mistake: the Pentagon has long been in the business of > producing fake news and of trolling letters to the editor pages as a way of > manipulating the news to its own advantage. > > Check out these stories: > Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi > > Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos > > Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law > > Pentagon Contractor Admits to Attacks on Journalists > > Pentagon Ramping Up Public Relations Offensive > > Revealed: US Spy Program that Manipulates Social Media > > US Media Knew Kosovo Kosovo Official Reports Were Propaganda > > Of course, official government propaganda — that is the production of what > is now called “fake news” and the employment of an army of paid Pentagon > “trolls” or “sock puppets” to undermine journalists and their supporters > online — has continued. > > In fact, back during the heat of the Iraq occupation and the Bush/Cheney > administration’s efforts to lay the groundwork for a police state spying > system, I heard from someone at CommonDreams.org > that that organization, concerned by the number of trolls who were clogging > up their comment section after articles they ran, did an investigation of > the ISPs of the trolls and discovered that many of them were originating in > the Department of Defense. There were plans to write an expose of this > activity, but to the best of my knowledge, no such article ever ran. > The most recent egregious effort in that vein was the successful promotion > of what appears to have been a Pentagon effort in which the *Washington > Post* obligingly published a screaming page-one headline touting a list > of 200 online sites, most of them American, said to be tools of, or “useful > idiots” supporting Russian propaganda. The shadowy organization behind that > list, called PropOrNot, was allowed to remain anonymous, both in terms of > its personnel and its financing, but I was able to determine that at least > one participant, whose “analysis” of an article of mine in this > publication, reprinted in Counterpunch, was so “appallingly pro-Russian” > that it proved Counterpunch itself was a “pro-Russian” publication. The > author or the review of my piece, Joel Harding, I discovered after a little > research, had been a high-ranking member of the Army’s Stratcom > headquarters based at Ft. Detrick outside of Washington, DC. This is where > the military’s Cyberspace Command is based — Harding’s area of expertise. > > Here’s my expose about the Pentagon’s role in that pathetic effort by the > Washington Post to return us to the McCarthy era of blacklists and > reputation assassination: > Is the Pentagon Behind the Washington Post’s McCarthyite Hit on > Independent Alternative Journalism? > > I have no doubt that Russia engaged in some attempts at using Social Media > to sow confusion and conflict in the US during the last election, and > during the current divisive Trump presidency, nor do I doubt that Russia > will make similar efforts going forward during the next two election cycles > in 2018 and 2020. But it’s worth recalling that the US has been doing > exactly the same thing. As Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey admitted in > an interview on Fox TV recently > , > the US has regularly interfered in at least 81 countries’ elections. > Included in those efforts, which also included overthrowing elected > governments in places like Guatemala, Iran and Chile, was a major US covert > and overt campaign that helped the epically corrupt Russian leader Boris > Yeltsin win re-election in 2012. > > Americans need to take a deep breath. What is happening currently, with > Russia putting out fake news on US social media platforms, is not any > different from what the Pentagon, and no doubt other US government > organizations are doing and have been doing for decades to corruptly > influence public opinion. Much of it, like buying ads, is not even illegal, > at least for foreign private entities. It should be illegal for US > government departments. > > We’re living in complicated times, where it’s not enough any longer to > just watch or read the news put out by once-respected mainstream news > sources. We know that they’ve all become incredibly corrupted by their near > monopoly status in most markets, their vulnerability to government > pressure, and by reporters’ loss of professionalism in the face of > increasing job insecurity. Citizens need to become much more critical in > their evaluation of news, to turn to multiple sources including > non-mainstream and foreign news media, and to understand that in many cases > what is being presented as objective news is actually little more than > government propaganda. > > We have to develop this ability to think and evaluate for ourselves, > because it’s clear things are only going to get worse. > > _______________________________________________ > Peace-discuss mailing list > Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net > https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url= > https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo% > 2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce6a98b29a397442a829508d57df7752b% > 7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553424127209817&sdata= > wsNBf5cqm%2Bp2kMkz4KE6dy6w4RqL1H8FV2zos%2Ba3KK0%3D&reserved=0 > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 28 02:23:42 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 02:23:42 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. In-Reply-To: References: <004801d3afd7$467182f0$d35488d0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: For sure. Doug and I helped defend Phil Berrigan and the DU Plowshares free of charge along with Ramsey Clark. Roger trashed us. 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:12 PM To: Karen Aram Cc: Boyle, Francis A ; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. And have any of you actually checked the accuracy of this article - NO, I am sure that you have not. Boyle has had close association with Douglas Lind Rokke, who has created quite a fake persona. I am the only person who has ever used the Freedom of Information Act to dig into that. Roger W Helbig On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 8:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Damn, you were right. I missed this one, just thought he was an old “military supporter.” Until his last personal attack on you, then I did suspect it must be true. This article is proof. On Feb 27, 2018, at 07:32, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, as I have repeatedly said before Roger is a Mole for “military intelligence”—an oxymoron to be sure, especially when it comes to Roger. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Johnson via Peace-discuss Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:29 AM To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Hey everyone, Look what I found this morning. An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years by DAVE LINDORFF https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/27/washington-has-engaged-in-information-warfare-including-fake-news-and-trolling-for-years/ Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years www.counterpunch.org The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed in social media to mislead and incite Americans against each other, might lead one think, like Sen John McCain, that we are practically at war with Russia. Yet it’s all actually pretty silly. After all, our own government has been playing this game for decades, both abroad, and also right here inside the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” and against us American citizens. I know. I was a victim of such an attack, though initially, I didn’t realize what was happening. Back on August 25, 2005, I published a piece in In These Times titled Radioactive Wounds of War about the devastating damage caused by the US military’s use of depleted uranium weapons in its brutal assault leveling Fallujah, the Iraqi city of 300,000 people that was destroyed by US marines in 2004 as retribution for the killing of four US contractors by the Iraqi insurgents who at the time controlled the city, and for their humiliating defeat of a smaller Marine assault on the city earlier in the year. At the time I was and had been a contributing editor at ITT, a publication for which I had written regularly since it was founded back in 1978, and was listed on its masthead as such. As I recount in an article published in Counterpunch on November 19, 2005, titled R.I.P In These Times, the left-liberal news magazine had been promptly bombarded with letters criticizing my article after it came out. The critiques were not about the main topic of the article, which was evidence discovered in medical studies done on returning Iraq veterans from a unit of New York National Guard soldiers, funded by the New York Daily News and reported on by Juan Gonzalez, which had found evidence of exposure to depleted uranium dust that was causing serious health damage in these soldiers, and even birth defects in their young children. Those findings were undeniable. What attracted the critical mail, which would now be called trolling, was my reporting on how much-depleted uranium weapons had been dumped on Iraq by invading and occupying US forces. Based on my research into reports, mostly by European sources, I had written in that article: U.S. forces first used DU in the 1991 Gulf War, when some 300 tons of depleted uranium–the waste product of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities–were used in tank shells and shells fired by A-10 jets. A lesser amount was deployed by US and NATO forces during the Balkans conflict. But in the current wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq, DU has become the weapon of choice, with more than 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan and more than 3,000 tons used in Iraq. And while DU was fired mostly in the desert during the Gulf War, in the current war in Iraq, most of DU munitions are exploding in populated urban areas. The Pentagon has expanded DU beyond tank and A-10 shells, for use in bunker-busting bombs, which can spew out more than half a ton of DU in one explosion, in anti-personnel bomblets, and even in M-16 and pistol shells. The military loves DU for its unique penetration capability–it cuts through steel or concrete like they’re butter. In later years, I’ve done more reporting on the US military’s use of depleted uranium, which the Pentagon loves because of its unique ability to penetrate even thick solid steel tank armor and reinforced concrete bunkers with ease, bursting into intense flame on impact and spreading super toxic uranium oxide dust in the aftermath. There is no dispute about the use of these weapons by US forces. But in 2005, the Pentagon was fighting a brutal rear-guard battle to claim the stuff is safe and at the same time that it was not being used in populated urban areas. Both claims were official lies. Particularly active and voluble in this letter-writing campaign to ITT targeting my article, all of which correspondence was posted on the ITT website, were people like Jack Cohen-Joppe, retired Air Force Col. Roger Helbig, and US Army Col. Rick Thomas. I could never figure out what Cohen-Joppe’s motivation was, or who if anyone is behind him. A self-described opponent of nuclear weapons and especially nuclear power, Cohen-Joppe, from Tucson AZ, has for some reason had what I have described as an “Ahab-like obsession” with attempting to debunk claims of US depleted-uranium weapons, although such use has been admitted by the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Helbig and Thomas appear to have more sinister connections to the Pentagon. Both show up in troll campaigns whenever articles about depleted uranium weapons appear. They also have had a years-long campaign to smear and discredit one of the main whistleblowers about DU, Dr. Doug Rocke, a former Army Captain who conducted a Pentagon study on the safety (lack of safety) of DU weapons, and who also ran a campaign to decontaminate sites in Kuwait where DU weapons had been used, scattering toxic uranium oxide dust. For example, Helbig has claimed Rocke was never ranked higher than Lieutenant, and that he never ran a DU study or worked on decontamination after the Gulf War. Yet I was shown documents by Rocke showing his recommendation for promotion to Captain, and commending him for his study and his work in Kuwait. Their attack on my ITT article was a success, in large part because of the cowardice and lack of principle of ITT’s editor, Joel Bleifus. As I wrote in my Counterpunch article, Bleifus ran Cohen-Joppe’s letter criticizing my article in a subsequent issue of the magazine without warning me and giving me an opportunity to respond to his fact-free criticism. This despite it being standard policy at ITT for its writers to get a chance to respond to any such published letters in the same issue. When I complained, I was eventually allowed to write a letter of response, but Bleifus cut it and added a note of his own saying he didn’t agree with my response. It was shabby behavior of the worst sort, and also in retrospect a huge embarrassment to Bleifus and In These Times, as more and more evidence has come out of the dreadful multi-generational impact of the US military’s use of DU weapons all over Iraq, including in its cities. But more important than ITT’s lack of courage and principle was the success of the Pentagon’s fake news and trolling campaign, in this case in defense of its grotesque DU weapons: as a matter of principle I had to tell ITT to take my name off their masthead, and said I would never write for such a crappy publication again. I’m confident enough in the quality of my work to say that this was totally In These Times’ loss, not mine. But it’s also the Pentagon’s victory. And make no mistake: the Pentagon has long been in the business of producing fake news and of trolling letters to the editor pages as a way of manipulating the news to its own advantage. Check out these stories: Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law Pentagon Contractor Admits to Attacks on Journalists Pentagon Ramping Up Public Relations Offensive Revealed: US Spy Program that Manipulates Social Media US Media Knew Kosovo Kosovo Official Reports Were Propaganda Of course, official government propaganda — that is the production of what is now called “fake news” and the employment of an army of paid Pentagon “trolls” or “sock puppets” to undermine journalists and their supporters online — has continued. In fact, back during the heat of the Iraq occupation and the Bush/Cheney administration’s efforts to lay the groundwork for a police state spying system, I heard from someone at CommonDreams.org that that organization, concerned by the number of trolls who were clogging up their comment section after articles they ran, did an investigation of the ISPs of the trolls and discovered that many of them were originating in the Department of Defense. There were plans to write an expose of this activity, but to the best of my knowledge, no such article ever ran. The most recent egregious effort in that vein was the successful promotion of what appears to have been a Pentagon effort in which the Washington Post obligingly published a screaming page-one headline touting a list of 200 online sites, most of them American, said to be tools of, or “useful idiots” supporting Russian propaganda. The shadowy organization behind that list, called PropOrNot, was allowed to remain anonymous, both in terms of its personnel and its financing, but I was able to determine that at least one participant, whose “analysis” of an article of mine in this publication, reprinted in Counterpunch, was so “appallingly pro-Russian” that it proved Counterpunch itself was a “pro-Russian” publication. The author or the review of my piece, Joel Harding, I discovered after a little research, had been a high-ranking member of the Army’s Stratcom headquarters based at Ft. Detrick outside of Washington, DC. This is where the military’s Cyberspace Command is based — Harding’s area of expertise. Here’s my expose about the Pentagon’s role in that pathetic effort by the Washington Post to return us to the McCarthy era of blacklists and reputation assassination: Is the Pentagon Behind the Washington Post’s McCarthyite Hit on Independent Alternative Journalism? I have no doubt that Russia engaged in some attempts at using Social Media to sow confusion and conflict in the US during the last election, and during the current divisive Trump presidency, nor do I doubt that Russia will make similar efforts going forward during the next two election cycles in 2018 and 2020. But it’s worth recalling that the US has been doing exactly the same thing. As Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey admitted in an interview on Fox TV recently, the US has regularly interfered in at least 81 countries’ elections. Included in those efforts, which also included overthrowing elected governments in places like Guatemala, Iran and Chile, was a major US covert and overt campaign that helped the epically corrupt Russian leader Boris Yeltsin win re-election in 2012. Americans need to take a deep breath. What is happening currently, with Russia putting out fake news on US social media platforms, is not any different from what the Pentagon, and no doubt other US government organizations are doing and have been doing for decades to corruptly influence public opinion. Much of it, like buying ads, is not even illegal, at least for foreign private entities. It should be illegal for US government departments. We’re living in complicated times, where it’s not enough any longer to just watch or read the news put out by once-respected mainstream news sources. We know that they’ve all become incredibly corrupted by their near monopoly status in most markets, their vulnerability to government pressure, and by reporters’ loss of professionalism in the face of increasing job insecurity. Citizens need to become much more critical in their evaluation of news, to turn to multiple sources including non-mainstream and foreign news media, and to understand that in many cases what is being presented as objective news is actually little more than government propaganda. We have to develop this ability to think and evaluate for ourselves, because it’s clear things are only going to get worse. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce6a98b29a397442a829508d57df7752b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553424127209817&sdata=wsNBf5cqm%2Bp2kMkz4KE6dy6w4RqL1H8FV2zos%2Ba3KK0%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 28 02:28:16 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 20:28:16 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. In-Reply-To: References: <004801d3afd7$467182f0$d35488d0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: Jonathan Ebel, one of the Democratic candidates for Congress in our district (IL-13) boasts of his career in 'naval intelligence’ [sic] and his involvement in US war crimes from Yugoslavia to the Mideast. I happy to say that there is one (only one) anti-war candidate in the Democratic primary on March 20: David Gill. —CGE > On Feb 27, 2018, at 8:11 PM, Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss wrote: > > And have any of you actually checked the accuracy of this article - NO, I am sure that you have not. Boyle has had close association with Douglas Lind Rokke, who has created quite a fake persona. I am the only person who has ever used the Freedom of Information Act to dig into that. > > Roger W Helbig > > > On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 8:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote: > Damn, you were right. > > I missed this one, just thought he was an old “military supporter.” Until his last personal attack on you, then I did suspect it must be true. This article is proof. > > >> On Feb 27, 2018, at 07:32, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss wrote: >> >> Yeah, as I have repeatedly said before Roger is a Mole for “military intelligence”—an oxymoron to be sure, especially when it comes to Roger. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Johnson via Peace-discuss >> Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:29 AM >> To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net >> Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. >> >> Hey everyone, >> Look what I found this morning. >> An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. >> >> >> Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years >> by DAVE LINDORFF >> >> https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/27/washington-has-engaged-in-information-warfare-including-fake-news-and-trolling-for-years/ >> Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years >> www.counterpunch.org >> The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed >> >> >> >> FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail >> The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed in social media to mislead and incite Americans against each other, might lead one think, like Sen John McCain, that we are practically at war with Russia. Yet it’s all actually pretty silly. After all, our own government has been playing this game for decades, both abroad, and also right here inside the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” and against us American citizens. >> >> I know. I was a victim of such an attack, though initially, I didn’t realize what was happening. >> >> Back on August 25, 2005, I published a piece in In These Times titled Radioactive Wounds of War about the devastating damage caused by the US military’s use of depleted uranium weapons in its brutal assault leveling Fallujah, the Iraqi city of 300,000 people that was destroyed by US marines in 2004 as retribution for the killing of four US contractors by the Iraqi insurgents who at the time controlled the city, and for their humiliating defeat of a smaller Marine assault on the city earlier in the year. >> At the time I was and had been a contributing editor at ITT, a publication for which I had written regularly since it was founded back in 1978, and was listed on its masthead as such. >> As I recount in an article published in Counterpunch on November 19, 2005, titled R.I.P In These Times, the left-liberal news magazine had been promptly bombarded with letters criticizing my article after it came out. The critiques were not about the main topic of the article, which was evidence discovered in medical studies done on returning Iraq veterans from a unit of New York National Guard soldiers, funded by the New York Daily News and reported on by Juan Gonzalez, which had found evidence of exposure to depleted uranium dust that was causing serious health damage in these soldiers, and even birth defects in their young children. Those findings were undeniable. What attracted the critical mail, which would now be called trolling, was my reporting on how much-depleted uranium weapons had been dumped on Iraq by invading and occupying US forces. >> Based on my research into reports, mostly by European sources, I had written in that article: >> U.S. forces first used DU in the 1991 Gulf War, when some 300 tons of depleted uranium–the waste product of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities–were used in tank shells and shells fired by A-10 jets. A lesser amount was deployed by US and NATO forces during the Balkans conflict. But in the current wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq, DU has become the weapon of choice, with more than 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan and more than 3,000 tons used in Iraq. And while DU was fired mostly in the desert during the Gulf War, in the current war in Iraq, most of DU munitions are exploding in populated urban areas. >> The Pentagon has expanded DU beyond tank and A-10 shells, for use in bunker-busting bombs, which can spew out more than half a ton of DU in one explosion, in anti-personnel bomblets, and even in M-16 and pistol shells. The military loves DU for its unique penetration capability–it cuts through steel or concrete like they’re butter. >> In later years, I’ve done more reporting on the US military’s use of depleted uranium, which the Pentagon loves because of its unique ability to penetrate even thick solid steel tank armor and reinforced concrete bunkers with ease, bursting into intense flame on impact and spreading super toxic uranium oxide dust in the aftermath. There is no dispute about the use of these weapons by US forces. But in 2005, the Pentagon was fighting a brutal rear-guard battle to claim the stuff is safe and at the same time that it was not being used in populated urban areas. Both claims were official lies. >> Particularly active and voluble in this letter-writing campaign to ITT targeting my article, all of which correspondence was posted on the ITT website, were people like Jack Cohen-Joppe, retired Air Force Col. Roger Helbig, and US Army Col. Rick Thomas. >> >> I could never figure out what Cohen-Joppe’s motivation was, or who if anyone is behind him. A self-described opponent of nuclear weapons and especially nuclear power, Cohen-Joppe, from Tucson AZ, has for some reason had what I have described as an “Ahab-like obsession” with attempting to debunk claims of US depleted-uranium weapons, although such use has been admitted by the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Helbig and Thomas appear to have more sinister connections to the Pentagon. Both show up in troll campaigns whenever articles about depleted uranium weapons appear. They also have had a years-long campaign to smear and discredit one of the main whistleblowers about DU, Dr. Doug Rocke, a former Army Captain who conducted a Pentagon study on the safety (lack of safety) of DU weapons, and who also ran a campaign to decontaminate sites in Kuwait where DU weapons had been used, scattering toxic uranium oxide dust. For example, Helbig has claimed Rocke was never ranked higher than Lieutenant, and that he never ran a DU study or worked on decontamination after the Gulf War. Yet I was shown documents by Rocke showing his recommendation for promotion to Captain, and commending him for his study and his work in Kuwait. >> >> Their attack on my ITT article was a success, in large part because of the cowardice and lack of principle of ITT’s editor, Joel Bleifus. As I wrote in my Counterpunch article, Bleifus ran Cohen-Joppe’s letter criticizing my article in a subsequent issue of the magazine without warning me and giving me an opportunity to respond to his fact-free criticism. This despite it being standard policy at ITT for its writers to get a chance to respond to any such published letters in the same issue. When I complained, I was eventually allowed to write a letter of response, but Bleifus cut it and added a note of his own saying he didn’t agree with my response. It was shabby behavior of the worst sort, and also in retrospect a huge embarrassment to Bleifus and In These Times, as more and more evidence has come out of the dreadful multi-generational impact of the US military’s use of DU weapons all over Iraq, including in its cities. >> But more important than ITT’s lack of courage and principle was the success of the Pentagon’s fake news and trolling campaign, in this case in defense of its grotesque DU weapons: as a matter of principle I had to tell ITT to take my name off their masthead, and said I would never write for such a crappy publication again. I’m confident enough in the quality of my work to say that this was totally In These Times’ loss, not mine. But it’s also the Pentagon’s victory. >> And make no mistake: the Pentagon has long been in the business of producing fake news and of trolling letters to the editor pages as a way of manipulating the news to its own advantage. >> >> Check out these stories: >> >> Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi >> Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos >> Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law >> Pentagon Contractor Admits to Attacks on Journalists >> Pentagon Ramping Up Public Relations Offensive >> Revealed: US Spy Program that Manipulates Social Media >> US Media Knew Kosovo Kosovo Official Reports Were Propaganda >> Of course, official government propaganda — that is the production of what is now called “fake news” and the employment of an army of paid Pentagon “trolls” or “sock puppets” to undermine journalists and their supporters online — has continued. >> In fact, back during the heat of the Iraq occupation and the Bush/Cheney administration’s efforts to lay the groundwork for a police state spying system, I heard from someone at CommonDreams.org that that organization, concerned by the number of trolls who were clogging up their comment section after articles they ran, did an investigation of the ISPs of the trolls and discovered that many of them were originating in the Department of Defense. There were plans to write an expose of this activity, but to the best of my knowledge, no such article ever ran. >> >> The most recent egregious effort in that vein was the successful promotion of what appears to have been a Pentagon effort in which the Washington Post obligingly published a screaming page-one headline touting a list of 200 online sites, most of them American, said to be tools of, or “useful idiots” supporting Russian propaganda. The shadowy organization behind that list, called PropOrNot, was allowed to remain anonymous, both in terms of its personnel and its financing, but I was able to determine that at least one participant, whose “analysis” of an article of mine in this publication, reprinted in Counterpunch, was so “appallingly pro-Russian” that it proved Counterpunch itself was a “pro-Russian” publication. The author or the review of my piece, Joel Harding, I discovered after a little research, had been a high-ranking member of the Army’s Stratcom headquarters based at Ft. Detrick outside of Washington, DC. This is where the military’s Cyberspace Command is based — Harding’s area of expertise. >> Here’s my expose about the Pentagon’s role in that pathetic effort by the Washington Post to return us to the McCarthy era of blacklists and reputation assassination: >> >> Is the Pentagon Behind the Washington Post’s McCarthyite Hit on Independent Alternative Journalism? >> I have no doubt that Russia engaged in some attempts at using Social Media to sow confusion and conflict in the US during the last election, and during the current divisive Trump presidency, nor do I doubt that Russia will make similar efforts going forward during the next two election cycles in 2018 and 2020. But it’s worth recalling that the US has been doing exactly the same thing. As Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey admitted in an interview on Fox TV recently, the US has regularly interfered in at least 81 countries’ elections. Included in those efforts, which also included overthrowing elected governments in places like Guatemala, Iran and Chile, was a major US covert and overt campaign that helped the epically corrupt Russian leader Boris Yeltsin win re-election in 2012. >> Americans need to take a deep breath. What is happening currently, with Russia putting out fake news on US social media platforms, is not any different from what the Pentagon, and no doubt other US government organizations are doing and have been doing for decades to corruptly influence public opinion. Much of it, like buying ads, is not even illegal, at least for foreign private entities. It should be illegal for US government departments. >> >> We’re living in complicated times, where it’s not enough any longer to just watch or read the news put out by once-respected mainstream news sources. We know that they’ve all become incredibly corrupted by their near monopoly status in most markets, their vulnerability to government pressure, and by reporters’ loss of professionalism in the face of increasing job insecurity. Citizens need to become much more critical in their evaluation of news, to turn to multiple sources including non-mainstream and foreign news media, and to understand that in many cases what is being presented as objective news is actually little more than government propaganda. >> >> We have to develop this ability to think and evaluate for ourselves, because it’s clear things are only going to get worse. >> >> From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 28 02:35:22 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 02:35:22 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. References: <004801d3afd7$467182f0$d35488d0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: Phil and the Depleted Uranium Plowshares started out facing 40 years. After a Kangaroo Court proceeding, Phil and the DU Plowshares got 2 years—Thanks to Doug, Ramsey Clark and me. Roger trashed us. 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: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:24 PM To: 'Roger Helbig' ; Karen Aram Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. For sure. Doug and I helped defend Phil Berrigan and the DU Plowshares free of charge along with Ramsey Clark. Roger trashed us. 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:12 PM To: Karen Aram > Cc: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. And have any of you actually checked the accuracy of this article - NO, I am sure that you have not. Boyle has had close association with Douglas Lind Rokke, who has created quite a fake persona. I am the only person who has ever used the Freedom of Information Act to dig into that. Roger W Helbig On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 8:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Damn, you were right. I missed this one, just thought he was an old “military supporter.” Until his last personal attack on you, then I did suspect it must be true. This article is proof. On Feb 27, 2018, at 07:32, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, as I have repeatedly said before Roger is a Mole for “military intelligence”—an oxymoron to be sure, especially when it comes to Roger. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Johnson via Peace-discuss Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:29 AM To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Hey everyone, Look what I found this morning. An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years by DAVE LINDORFF https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/27/washington-has-engaged-in-information-warfare-including-fake-news-and-trolling-for-years/ Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years www.counterpunch.org The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed in social media to mislead and incite Americans against each other, might lead one think, like Sen John McCain, that we are practically at war with Russia. Yet it’s all actually pretty silly. After all, our own government has been playing this game for decades, both abroad, and also right here inside the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” and against us American citizens. I know. I was a victim of such an attack, though initially, I didn’t realize what was happening. Back on August 25, 2005, I published a piece in In These Times titled Radioactive Wounds of War about the devastating damage caused by the US military’s use of depleted uranium weapons in its brutal assault leveling Fallujah, the Iraqi city of 300,000 people that was destroyed by US marines in 2004 as retribution for the killing of four US contractors by the Iraqi insurgents who at the time controlled the city, and for their humiliating defeat of a smaller Marine assault on the city earlier in the year. At the time I was and had been a contributing editor at ITT, a publication for which I had written regularly since it was founded back in 1978, and was listed on its masthead as such. As I recount in an article published in Counterpunch on November 19, 2005, titled R.I.P In These Times, the left-liberal news magazine had been promptly bombarded with letters criticizing my article after it came out. The critiques were not about the main topic of the article, which was evidence discovered in medical studies done on returning Iraq veterans from a unit of New York National Guard soldiers, funded by the New York Daily News and reported on by Juan Gonzalez, which had found evidence of exposure to depleted uranium dust that was causing serious health damage in these soldiers, and even birth defects in their young children. Those findings were undeniable. What attracted the critical mail, which would now be called trolling, was my reporting on how much-depleted uranium weapons had been dumped on Iraq by invading and occupying US forces. Based on my research into reports, mostly by European sources, I had written in that article: U.S. forces first used DU in the 1991 Gulf War, when some 300 tons of depleted uranium–the waste product of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities–were used in tank shells and shells fired by A-10 jets. A lesser amount was deployed by US and NATO forces during the Balkans conflict. But in the current wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq, DU has become the weapon of choice, with more than 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan and more than 3,000 tons used in Iraq. And while DU was fired mostly in the desert during the Gulf War, in the current war in Iraq, most of DU munitions are exploding in populated urban areas. The Pentagon has expanded DU beyond tank and A-10 shells, for use in bunker-busting bombs, which can spew out more than half a ton of DU in one explosion, in anti-personnel bomblets, and even in M-16 and pistol shells. The military loves DU for its unique penetration capability–it cuts through steel or concrete like they’re butter. In later years, I’ve done more reporting on the US military’s use of depleted uranium, which the Pentagon loves because of its unique ability to penetrate even thick solid steel tank armor and reinforced concrete bunkers with ease, bursting into intense flame on impact and spreading super toxic uranium oxide dust in the aftermath. There is no dispute about the use of these weapons by US forces. But in 2005, the Pentagon was fighting a brutal rear-guard battle to claim the stuff is safe and at the same time that it was not being used in populated urban areas. Both claims were official lies. Particularly active and voluble in this letter-writing campaign to ITT targeting my article, all of which correspondence was posted on the ITT website, were people like Jack Cohen-Joppe, retired Air Force Col. Roger Helbig, and US Army Col. Rick Thomas. I could never figure out what Cohen-Joppe’s motivation was, or who if anyone is behind him. A self-described opponent of nuclear weapons and especially nuclear power, Cohen-Joppe, from Tucson AZ, has for some reason had what I have described as an “Ahab-like obsession” with attempting to debunk claims of US depleted-uranium weapons, although such use has been admitted by the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Helbig and Thomas appear to have more sinister connections to the Pentagon. Both show up in troll campaigns whenever articles about depleted uranium weapons appear. They also have had a years-long campaign to smear and discredit one of the main whistleblowers about DU, Dr. Doug Rocke, a former Army Captain who conducted a Pentagon study on the safety (lack of safety) of DU weapons, and who also ran a campaign to decontaminate sites in Kuwait where DU weapons had been used, scattering toxic uranium oxide dust. For example, Helbig has claimed Rocke was never ranked higher than Lieutenant, and that he never ran a DU study or worked on decontamination after the Gulf War. Yet I was shown documents by Rocke showing his recommendation for promotion to Captain, and commending him for his study and his work in Kuwait. Their attack on my ITT article was a success, in large part because of the cowardice and lack of principle of ITT’s editor, Joel Bleifus. As I wrote in my Counterpunch article, Bleifus ran Cohen-Joppe’s letter criticizing my article in a subsequent issue of the magazine without warning me and giving me an opportunity to respond to his fact-free criticism. This despite it being standard policy at ITT for its writers to get a chance to respond to any such published letters in the same issue. When I complained, I was eventually allowed to write a letter of response, but Bleifus cut it and added a note of his own saying he didn’t agree with my response. It was shabby behavior of the worst sort, and also in retrospect a huge embarrassment to Bleifus and In These Times, as more and more evidence has come out of the dreadful multi-generational impact of the US military’s use of DU weapons all over Iraq, including in its cities. But more important than ITT’s lack of courage and principle was the success of the Pentagon’s fake news and trolling campaign, in this case in defense of its grotesque DU weapons: as a matter of principle I had to tell ITT to take my name off their masthead, and said I would never write for such a crappy publication again. I’m confident enough in the quality of my work to say that this was totally In These Times’ loss, not mine. But it’s also the Pentagon’s victory. And make no mistake: the Pentagon has long been in the business of producing fake news and of trolling letters to the editor pages as a way of manipulating the news to its own advantage. Check out these stories: Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law Pentagon Contractor Admits to Attacks on Journalists Pentagon Ramping Up Public Relations Offensive Revealed: US Spy Program that Manipulates Social Media US Media Knew Kosovo Kosovo Official Reports Were Propaganda Of course, official government propaganda — that is the production of what is now called “fake news” and the employment of an army of paid Pentagon “trolls” or “sock puppets” to undermine journalists and their supporters online — has continued. In fact, back during the heat of the Iraq occupation and the Bush/Cheney administration’s efforts to lay the groundwork for a police state spying system, I heard from someone at CommonDreams.org that that organization, concerned by the number of trolls who were clogging up their comment section after articles they ran, did an investigation of the ISPs of the trolls and discovered that many of them were originating in the Department of Defense. There were plans to write an expose of this activity, but to the best of my knowledge, no such article ever ran. The most recent egregious effort in that vein was the successful promotion of what appears to have been a Pentagon effort in which the Washington Post obligingly published a screaming page-one headline touting a list of 200 online sites, most of them American, said to be tools of, or “useful idiots” supporting Russian propaganda. The shadowy organization behind that list, called PropOrNot, was allowed to remain anonymous, both in terms of its personnel and its financing, but I was able to determine that at least one participant, whose “analysis” of an article of mine in this publication, reprinted in Counterpunch, was so “appallingly pro-Russian” that it proved Counterpunch itself was a “pro-Russian” publication. The author or the review of my piece, Joel Harding, I discovered after a little research, had been a high-ranking member of the Army’s Stratcom headquarters based at Ft. Detrick outside of Washington, DC. This is where the military’s Cyberspace Command is based — Harding’s area of expertise. Here’s my expose about the Pentagon’s role in that pathetic effort by the Washington Post to return us to the McCarthy era of blacklists and reputation assassination: Is the Pentagon Behind the Washington Post’s McCarthyite Hit on Independent Alternative Journalism? I have no doubt that Russia engaged in some attempts at using Social Media to sow confusion and conflict in the US during the last election, and during the current divisive Trump presidency, nor do I doubt that Russia will make similar efforts going forward during the next two election cycles in 2018 and 2020. But it’s worth recalling that the US has been doing exactly the same thing. As Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey admitted in an interview on Fox TV recently, the US has regularly interfered in at least 81 countries’ elections. Included in those efforts, which also included overthrowing elected governments in places like Guatemala, Iran and Chile, was a major US covert and overt campaign that helped the epically corrupt Russian leader Boris Yeltsin win re-election in 2012. Americans need to take a deep breath. What is happening currently, with Russia putting out fake news on US social media platforms, is not any different from what the Pentagon, and no doubt other US government organizations are doing and have been doing for decades to corruptly influence public opinion. Much of it, like buying ads, is not even illegal, at least for foreign private entities. It should be illegal for US government departments. We’re living in complicated times, where it’s not enough any longer to just watch or read the news put out by once-respected mainstream news sources. We know that they’ve all become incredibly corrupted by their near monopoly status in most markets, their vulnerability to government pressure, and by reporters’ loss of professionalism in the face of increasing job insecurity. Citizens need to become much more critical in their evaluation of news, to turn to multiple sources including non-mainstream and foreign news media, and to understand that in many cases what is being presented as objective news is actually little more than government propaganda. We have to develop this ability to think and evaluate for ourselves, because it’s clear things are only going to get worse. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce6a98b29a397442a829508d57df7752b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553424127209817&sdata=wsNBf5cqm%2Bp2kMkz4KE6dy6w4RqL1H8FV2zos%2Ba3KK0%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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: -------------- 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 Wed Feb 28 02:38:59 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 02:38:59 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. In-Reply-To: References: <004801d3afd7$467182f0$d35488d0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: I’m sorry Roger, if the Counterpunch article didn’t blow your cover, your going after the defenders of innocent anti-war priests, certainly does it. Consider yourself toast. On Feb 27, 2018, at 18:35, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Phil and the Depleted Uranium Plowshares started out facing 40 years. After a Kangaroo Court proceeding, Phil and the DU Plowshares got 2 years—Thanks to Doug, Ramsey Clark and me. Roger trashed us. 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: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:24 PM To: 'Roger Helbig' >; Karen Aram > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. For sure. Doug and I helped defend Phil Berrigan and the DU Plowshares free of charge along with Ramsey Clark. Roger trashed us. 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:12 PM To: Karen Aram > Cc: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. And have any of you actually checked the accuracy of this article - NO, I am sure that you have not. Boyle has had close association with Douglas Lind Rokke, who has created quite a fake persona. I am the only person who has ever used the Freedom of Information Act to dig into that. Roger W Helbig On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 8:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Damn, you were right. I missed this one, just thought he was an old “military supporter.” Until his last personal attack on you, then I did suspect it must be true. This article is proof. On Feb 27, 2018, at 07:32, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, as I have repeatedly said before Roger is a Mole for “military intelligence”—an oxymoron to be sure, especially when it comes to Roger. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Johnson via Peace-discuss Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:29 AM To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Hey everyone, Look what I found this morning. An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years by DAVE LINDORFF https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/27/washington-has-engaged-in-information-warfare-including-fake-news-and-trolling-for-years/ Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years www.counterpunch.org The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed in social media to mislead and incite Americans against each other, might lead one think, like Sen John McCain, that we are practically at war with Russia. Yet it’s all actually pretty silly. After all, our own government has been playing this game for decades, both abroad, and also right here inside the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” and against us American citizens. I know. I was a victim of such an attack, though initially, I didn’t realize what was happening. Back on August 25, 2005, I published a piece in In These Times titled Radioactive Wounds of War about the devastating damage caused by the US military’s use of depleted uranium weapons in its brutal assault leveling Fallujah, the Iraqi city of 300,000 people that was destroyed by US marines in 2004 as retribution for the killing of four US contractors by the Iraqi insurgents who at the time controlled the city, and for their humiliating defeat of a smaller Marine assault on the city earlier in the year. At the time I was and had been a contributing editor at ITT, a publication for which I had written regularly since it was founded back in 1978, and was listed on its masthead as such. As I recount in an article published in Counterpunch on November 19, 2005, titled R.I.P In These Times, the left-liberal news magazine had been promptly bombarded with letters criticizing my article after it came out. The critiques were not about the main topic of the article, which was evidence discovered in medical studies done on returning Iraq veterans from a unit of New York National Guard soldiers, funded by the New York Daily News and reported on by Juan Gonzalez, which had found evidence of exposure to depleted uranium dust that was causing serious health damage in these soldiers, and even birth defects in their young children. Those findings were undeniable. What attracted the critical mail, which would now be called trolling, was my reporting on how much-depleted uranium weapons had been dumped on Iraq by invading and occupying US forces. Based on my research into reports, mostly by European sources, I had written in that article: U.S. forces first used DU in the 1991 Gulf War, when some 300 tons of depleted uranium–the waste product of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities–were used in tank shells and shells fired by A-10 jets. A lesser amount was deployed by US and NATO forces during the Balkans conflict. But in the current wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq, DU has become the weapon of choice, with more than 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan and more than 3,000 tons used in Iraq. And while DU was fired mostly in the desert during the Gulf War, in the current war in Iraq, most of DU munitions are exploding in populated urban areas. The Pentagon has expanded DU beyond tank and A-10 shells, for use in bunker-busting bombs, which can spew out more than half a ton of DU in one explosion, in anti-personnel bomblets, and even in M-16 and pistol shells. The military loves DU for its unique penetration capability–it cuts through steel or concrete like they’re butter. In later years, I’ve done more reporting on the US military’s use of depleted uranium, which the Pentagon loves because of its unique ability to penetrate even thick solid steel tank armor and reinforced concrete bunkers with ease, bursting into intense flame on impact and spreading super toxic uranium oxide dust in the aftermath. There is no dispute about the use of these weapons by US forces. But in 2005, the Pentagon was fighting a brutal rear-guard battle to claim the stuff is safe and at the same time that it was not being used in populated urban areas. Both claims were official lies. Particularly active and voluble in this letter-writing campaign to ITT targeting my article, all of which correspondence was posted on the ITT website, were people like Jack Cohen-Joppe, retired Air Force Col. Roger Helbig, and US Army Col. Rick Thomas. I could never figure out what Cohen-Joppe’s motivation was, or who if anyone is behind him. A self-described opponent of nuclear weapons and especially nuclear power, Cohen-Joppe, from Tucson AZ, has for some reason had what I have described as an “Ahab-like obsession” with attempting to debunk claims of US depleted-uranium weapons, although such use has been admitted by the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Helbig and Thomas appear to have more sinister connections to the Pentagon. Both show up in troll campaigns whenever articles about depleted uranium weapons appear. They also have had a years-long campaign to smear and discredit one of the main whistleblowers about DU, Dr. Doug Rocke, a former Army Captain who conducted a Pentagon study on the safety (lack of safety) of DU weapons, and who also ran a campaign to decontaminate sites in Kuwait where DU weapons had been used, scattering toxic uranium oxide dust. For example, Helbig has claimed Rocke was never ranked higher than Lieutenant, and that he never ran a DU study or worked on decontamination after the Gulf War. Yet I was shown documents by Rocke showing his recommendation for promotion to Captain, and commending him for his study and his work in Kuwait. Their attack on my ITT article was a success, in large part because of the cowardice and lack of principle of ITT’s editor, Joel Bleifus. As I wrote in my Counterpunch article, Bleifus ran Cohen-Joppe’s letter criticizing my article in a subsequent issue of the magazine without warning me and giving me an opportunity to respond to his fact-free criticism. This despite it being standard policy at ITT for its writers to get a chance to respond to any such published letters in the same issue. When I complained, I was eventually allowed to write a letter of response, but Bleifus cut it and added a note of his own saying he didn’t agree with my response. It was shabby behavior of the worst sort, and also in retrospect a huge embarrassment to Bleifus and In These Times, as more and more evidence has come out of the dreadful multi-generational impact of the US military’s use of DU weapons all over Iraq, including in its cities. But more important than ITT’s lack of courage and principle was the success of the Pentagon’s fake news and trolling campaign, in this case in defense of its grotesque DU weapons: as a matter of principle I had to tell ITT to take my name off their masthead, and said I would never write for such a crappy publication again. I’m confident enough in the quality of my work to say that this was totally In These Times’ loss, not mine. But it’s also the Pentagon’s victory. And make no mistake: the Pentagon has long been in the business of producing fake news and of trolling letters to the editor pages as a way of manipulating the news to its own advantage. Check out these stories: Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law Pentagon Contractor Admits to Attacks on Journalists Pentagon Ramping Up Public Relations Offensive Revealed: US Spy Program that Manipulates Social Media US Media Knew Kosovo Kosovo Official Reports Were Propaganda Of course, official government propaganda — that is the production of what is now called “fake news” and the employment of an army of paid Pentagon “trolls” or “sock puppets” to undermine journalists and their supporters online — has continued. In fact, back during the heat of the Iraq occupation and the Bush/Cheney administration’s efforts to lay the groundwork for a police state spying system, I heard from someone at CommonDreams.org that that organization, concerned by the number of trolls who were clogging up their comment section after articles they ran, did an investigation of the ISPs of the trolls and discovered that many of them were originating in the Department of Defense. There were plans to write an expose of this activity, but to the best of my knowledge, no such article ever ran. The most recent egregious effort in that vein was the successful promotion of what appears to have been a Pentagon effort in which the Washington Post obligingly published a screaming page-one headline touting a list of 200 online sites, most of them American, said to be tools of, or “useful idiots” supporting Russian propaganda. The shadowy organization behind that list, called PropOrNot, was allowed to remain anonymous, both in terms of its personnel and its financing, but I was able to determine that at least one participant, whose “analysis” of an article of mine in this publication, reprinted in Counterpunch, was so “appallingly pro-Russian” that it proved Counterpunch itself was a “pro-Russian” publication. The author or the review of my piece, Joel Harding, I discovered after a little research, had been a high-ranking member of the Army’s Stratcom headquarters based at Ft. Detrick outside of Washington, DC. This is where the military’s Cyberspace Command is based — Harding’s area of expertise. Here’s my expose about the Pentagon’s role in that pathetic effort by the Washington Post to return us to the McCarthy era of blacklists and reputation assassination: Is the Pentagon Behind the Washington Post’s McCarthyite Hit on Independent Alternative Journalism? I have no doubt that Russia engaged in some attempts at using Social Media to sow confusion and conflict in the US during the last election, and during the current divisive Trump presidency, nor do I doubt that Russia will make similar efforts going forward during the next two election cycles in 2018 and 2020. But it’s worth recalling that the US has been doing exactly the same thing. As Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey admitted in an interview on Fox TV recently, the US has regularly interfered in at least 81 countries’ elections. Included in those efforts, which also included overthrowing elected governments in places like Guatemala, Iran and Chile, was a major US covert and overt campaign that helped the epically corrupt Russian leader Boris Yeltsin win re-election in 2012. Americans need to take a deep breath. What is happening currently, with Russia putting out fake news on US social media platforms, is not any different from what the Pentagon, and no doubt other US government organizations are doing and have been doing for decades to corruptly influence public opinion. Much of it, like buying ads, is not even illegal, at least for foreign private entities. It should be illegal for US government departments. We’re living in complicated times, where it’s not enough any longer to just watch or read the news put out by once-respected mainstream news sources. We know that they’ve all become incredibly corrupted by their near monopoly status in most markets, their vulnerability to government pressure, and by reporters’ loss of professionalism in the face of increasing job insecurity. Citizens need to become much more critical in their evaluation of news, to turn to multiple sources including non-mainstream and foreign news media, and to understand that in many cases what is being presented as objective news is actually little more than government propaganda. We have to develop this ability to think and evaluate for ourselves, because it’s clear things are only going to get worse. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce6a98b29a397442a829508d57df7752b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553424127209817&sdata=wsNBf5cqm%2Bp2kMkz4KE6dy6w4RqL1H8FV2zos%2Ba3KK0%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cc38c165e77b74d9b223908d57e53fe15%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553821572195193&sdata=2rJlPwrU9W2xp7OBrhMHlXrXCw2nCvwvE%2BWKjU1pzj0%3D&reserved=0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 28 02:44:04 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 02:44:04 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. References: <004801d3afd7$467182f0$d35488d0$@comcast.net> Message-ID: As a result of our Defense of Phil Berrigan and the DU Plowshares, Phil was able to die peacefully at home from cancer surrounded by his Family and his Friends rather than rotting away in some Federal Hell Hole. Roger Trashed us. 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: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:35 PM To: 'Roger Helbig' ; 'Karen Aram' Cc: 'Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net)' Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Phil and the Depleted Uranium Plowshares started out facing 40 years. After a Kangaroo Court proceeding, Phil and the DU Plowshares got 2 years—Thanks to Doug, Ramsey Clark and me. Roger trashed us. 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: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:24 PM To: 'Roger Helbig' >; Karen Aram > Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. For sure. Doug and I helped defend Phil Berrigan and the DU Plowshares free of charge along with Ramsey Clark. Roger trashed us. 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:12 PM To: Karen Aram > Cc: Boyle, Francis A >; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. And have any of you actually checked the accuracy of this article - NO, I am sure that you have not. Boyle has had close association with Douglas Lind Rokke, who has created quite a fake persona. I am the only person who has ever used the Freedom of Information Act to dig into that. Roger W Helbig On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 8:15 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss > wrote: Damn, you were right. I missed this one, just thought he was an old “military supporter.” Until his last personal attack on you, then I did suspect it must be true. This article is proof. On Feb 27, 2018, at 07:32, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Yeah, as I have repeatedly said before Roger is a Mole for “military intelligence”—an oxymoron to be sure, especially when it comes to Roger. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Johnson via Peace-discuss Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:29 AM To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net Subject: [Peace-discuss] An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Hey everyone, Look what I found this morning. An article that mentions are favorite pro-war / pro-Pentagon Peace Discuss list troll Roger Helbig. Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years by DAVE LINDORFF https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/27/washington-has-engaged-in-information-warfare-including-fake-news-and-trolling-for-years/ Washington has Engaged in Information Warfare, Including Fake News and Trolling, for Years www.counterpunch.org The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail The howling in government and the corporate media and among many liberals about an alleged Russian information war, with bots, trolls and fake news being placed in social media to mislead and incite Americans against each other, might lead one think, like Sen John McCain, that we are practically at war with Russia. Yet it’s all actually pretty silly. After all, our own government has been playing this game for decades, both abroad, and also right here inside the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” and against us American citizens. I know. I was a victim of such an attack, though initially, I didn’t realize what was happening. Back on August 25, 2005, I published a piece in In These Times titled Radioactive Wounds of War about the devastating damage caused by the US military’s use of depleted uranium weapons in its brutal assault leveling Fallujah, the Iraqi city of 300,000 people that was destroyed by US marines in 2004 as retribution for the killing of four US contractors by the Iraqi insurgents who at the time controlled the city, and for their humiliating defeat of a smaller Marine assault on the city earlier in the year. At the time I was and had been a contributing editor at ITT, a publication for which I had written regularly since it was founded back in 1978, and was listed on its masthead as such. As I recount in an article published in Counterpunch on November 19, 2005, titled R.I.P In These Times, the left-liberal news magazine had been promptly bombarded with letters criticizing my article after it came out. The critiques were not about the main topic of the article, which was evidence discovered in medical studies done on returning Iraq veterans from a unit of New York National Guard soldiers, funded by the New York Daily News and reported on by Juan Gonzalez, which had found evidence of exposure to depleted uranium dust that was causing serious health damage in these soldiers, and even birth defects in their young children. Those findings were undeniable. What attracted the critical mail, which would now be called trolling, was my reporting on how much-depleted uranium weapons had been dumped on Iraq by invading and occupying US forces. Based on my research into reports, mostly by European sources, I had written in that article: U.S. forces first used DU in the 1991 Gulf War, when some 300 tons of depleted uranium–the waste product of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities–were used in tank shells and shells fired by A-10 jets. A lesser amount was deployed by US and NATO forces during the Balkans conflict. But in the current wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq, DU has become the weapon of choice, with more than 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan and more than 3,000 tons used in Iraq. And while DU was fired mostly in the desert during the Gulf War, in the current war in Iraq, most of DU munitions are exploding in populated urban areas. The Pentagon has expanded DU beyond tank and A-10 shells, for use in bunker-busting bombs, which can spew out more than half a ton of DU in one explosion, in anti-personnel bomblets, and even in M-16 and pistol shells. The military loves DU for its unique penetration capability–it cuts through steel or concrete like they’re butter. In later years, I’ve done more reporting on the US military’s use of depleted uranium, which the Pentagon loves because of its unique ability to penetrate even thick solid steel tank armor and reinforced concrete bunkers with ease, bursting into intense flame on impact and spreading super toxic uranium oxide dust in the aftermath. There is no dispute about the use of these weapons by US forces. But in 2005, the Pentagon was fighting a brutal rear-guard battle to claim the stuff is safe and at the same time that it was not being used in populated urban areas. Both claims were official lies. Particularly active and voluble in this letter-writing campaign to ITT targeting my article, all of which correspondence was posted on the ITT website, were people like Jack Cohen-Joppe, retired Air Force Col. Roger Helbig, and US Army Col. Rick Thomas. I could never figure out what Cohen-Joppe’s motivation was, or who if anyone is behind him. A self-described opponent of nuclear weapons and especially nuclear power, Cohen-Joppe, from Tucson AZ, has for some reason had what I have described as an “Ahab-like obsession” with attempting to debunk claims of US depleted-uranium weapons, although such use has been admitted by the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Helbig and Thomas appear to have more sinister connections to the Pentagon. Both show up in troll campaigns whenever articles about depleted uranium weapons appear. They also have had a years-long campaign to smear and discredit one of the main whistleblowers about DU, Dr. Doug Rocke, a former Army Captain who conducted a Pentagon study on the safety (lack of safety) of DU weapons, and who also ran a campaign to decontaminate sites in Kuwait where DU weapons had been used, scattering toxic uranium oxide dust. For example, Helbig has claimed Rocke was never ranked higher than Lieutenant, and that he never ran a DU study or worked on decontamination after the Gulf War. Yet I was shown documents by Rocke showing his recommendation for promotion to Captain, and commending him for his study and his work in Kuwait. Their attack on my ITT article was a success, in large part because of the cowardice and lack of principle of ITT’s editor, Joel Bleifus. As I wrote in my Counterpunch article, Bleifus ran Cohen-Joppe’s letter criticizing my article in a subsequent issue of the magazine without warning me and giving me an opportunity to respond to his fact-free criticism. This despite it being standard policy at ITT for its writers to get a chance to respond to any such published letters in the same issue. When I complained, I was eventually allowed to write a letter of response, but Bleifus cut it and added a note of his own saying he didn’t agree with my response. It was shabby behavior of the worst sort, and also in retrospect a huge embarrassment to Bleifus and In These Times, as more and more evidence has come out of the dreadful multi-generational impact of the US military’s use of DU weapons all over Iraq, including in its cities. But more important than ITT’s lack of courage and principle was the success of the Pentagon’s fake news and trolling campaign, in this case in defense of its grotesque DU weapons: as a matter of principle I had to tell ITT to take my name off their masthead, and said I would never write for such a crappy publication again. I’m confident enough in the quality of my work to say that this was totally In These Times’ loss, not mine. But it’s also the Pentagon’s victory. And make no mistake: the Pentagon has long been in the business of producing fake news and of trolling letters to the editor pages as a way of manipulating the news to its own advantage. Check out these stories: Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law Pentagon Contractor Admits to Attacks on Journalists Pentagon Ramping Up Public Relations Offensive Revealed: US Spy Program that Manipulates Social Media US Media Knew Kosovo Kosovo Official Reports Were Propaganda Of course, official government propaganda — that is the production of what is now called “fake news” and the employment of an army of paid Pentagon “trolls” or “sock puppets” to undermine journalists and their supporters online — has continued. In fact, back during the heat of the Iraq occupation and the Bush/Cheney administration’s efforts to lay the groundwork for a police state spying system, I heard from someone at CommonDreams.org that that organization, concerned by the number of trolls who were clogging up their comment section after articles they ran, did an investigation of the ISPs of the trolls and discovered that many of them were originating in the Department of Defense. There were plans to write an expose of this activity, but to the best of my knowledge, no such article ever ran. The most recent egregious effort in that vein was the successful promotion of what appears to have been a Pentagon effort in which the Washington Post obligingly published a screaming page-one headline touting a list of 200 online sites, most of them American, said to be tools of, or “useful idiots” supporting Russian propaganda. The shadowy organization behind that list, called PropOrNot, was allowed to remain anonymous, both in terms of its personnel and its financing, but I was able to determine that at least one participant, whose “analysis” of an article of mine in this publication, reprinted in Counterpunch, was so “appallingly pro-Russian” that it proved Counterpunch itself was a “pro-Russian” publication. The author or the review of my piece, Joel Harding, I discovered after a little research, had been a high-ranking member of the Army’s Stratcom headquarters based at Ft. Detrick outside of Washington, DC. This is where the military’s Cyberspace Command is based — Harding’s area of expertise. Here’s my expose about the Pentagon’s role in that pathetic effort by the Washington Post to return us to the McCarthy era of blacklists and reputation assassination: Is the Pentagon Behind the Washington Post’s McCarthyite Hit on Independent Alternative Journalism? I have no doubt that Russia engaged in some attempts at using Social Media to sow confusion and conflict in the US during the last election, and during the current divisive Trump presidency, nor do I doubt that Russia will make similar efforts going forward during the next two election cycles in 2018 and 2020. But it’s worth recalling that the US has been doing exactly the same thing. As Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey admitted in an interview on Fox TV recently, the US has regularly interfered in at least 81 countries’ elections. Included in those efforts, which also included overthrowing elected governments in places like Guatemala, Iran and Chile, was a major US covert and overt campaign that helped the epically corrupt Russian leader Boris Yeltsin win re-election in 2012. Americans need to take a deep breath. What is happening currently, with Russia putting out fake news on US social media platforms, is not any different from what the Pentagon, and no doubt other US government organizations are doing and have been doing for decades to corruptly influence public opinion. Much of it, like buying ads, is not even illegal, at least for foreign private entities. It should be illegal for US government departments. We’re living in complicated times, where it’s not enough any longer to just watch or read the news put out by once-respected mainstream news sources. We know that they’ve all become incredibly corrupted by their near monopoly status in most markets, their vulnerability to government pressure, and by reporters’ loss of professionalism in the face of increasing job insecurity. Citizens need to become much more critical in their evaluation of news, to turn to multiple sources including non-mainstream and foreign news media, and to understand that in many cases what is being presented as objective news is actually little more than government propaganda. We have to develop this ability to think and evaluate for ourselves, because it’s clear things are only going to get worse. _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.chambana.net%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fpeace-discuss&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ce6a98b29a397442a829508d57df7752b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553424127209817&sdata=wsNBf5cqm%2Bp2kMkz4KE6dy6w4RqL1H8FV2zos%2Ba3KK0%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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: -------------- 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 Wed Feb 28 02:57:38 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 02:57:38 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [NYTr] Phil Berrigan's Final Warning In-Reply-To: <20071006065017.6d45450e@viola.tamara-b.org> References: <20071006065017.6d45450e@viola.tamara-b.org> Message-ID: Roger trashed us all in support of Depleted Uranium. 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: nytr-bounces at blythe-systems.com [mailto:nytr-bounces at blythe-systems.com] On Behalf Of All the News That Doesn't Fit Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2007 5:50 AM To: NYTr Subject: [NYTr] Phil Berrigan's Final Warning Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit VIDEO Link sent by Francis A Boyle - Oct 5, 2007 Phil Berrigan's Final Warning On March 19, 2002, Phil Berrigan warned about the dangers of the Bush-Cheney Gang. He said, "The times ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyHabFrICz4 * ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us Our main website: http://www.blythe.org List Archives: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ Subscribe: http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================= From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 28 04:02:11 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 04:02:11 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: [NYTr] Phil Berrigan's Final Warning In-Reply-To: References: <20071006065017.6d45450e@viola.tamara-b.org> Message-ID: Yeah sure. Phil Berrigan, Ramsey Clark, Doug Rokke, Dr Helen Caldicott, Dr Rosalie Bertell and I have no idea what we are talking about. 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: Roger Helbig [mailto:rwhelbig at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 9:22 PM To: Boyle, Francis A Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: [NYTr] Phil Berrigan's Final Warning And Berrigan believed Rokke who is a consummate liar. I presume none of you actually know what DU is or how much of it you take into your own body every day! It is naturally occurring Uranium-238 and it occurs everywhere on the planet. What does not occur everywhere is economically mineable Uranium ore with enough U-235 to merit the cost of its being separated from the 99% U-238. I suggest each of you go ask the Geology Department what your local U-238 mineral content is. It is there, right in your own backyard. Just because an idol like Berrigan said something does not make it true. There is no doctrine of infallibilty. That's your problem FAB, you not only believe liars, you amplify their lies and spread them even further. Roger W Helbig https://engage.illinois.edu/entry/2378#contact is map, phone number and e-mail right there in Champaign - go ask them about Uranium in Illinois Every one of you inhales, drinks in and ingests a fraction of a microgram (one-millionth of a gram) of U-238 every single day of your life - so does every other human being who is, ever was, and ever will be so long as humanity lives on Planet Earth. On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 6:57 PM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: Roger trashed us all in support of Depleted Uranium. 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: nytr-bounces at blythe-systems.com [mailto:nytr-bounces at blythe-systems.com] On Behalf Of All the News That Doesn't Fit Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2007 5:50 AM To: NYTr > Subject: [NYTr] Phil Berrigan's Final Warning Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit VIDEO Link sent by Francis A Boyle - Oct 5, 2007 Phil Berrigan's Final Warning On March 19, 2002, Phil Berrigan warned about the dangers of the Bush-Cheney Gang. He said, "The times ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyHabFrICz4 * ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us Our main website: http://www.blythe.org List Archives: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ Subscribe: http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================= _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 28 12:52:54 2018 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (Karen Aram) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 12:52:54 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Thursdays Program References: <9548D5C5-9206-4521-AB94-1A9B8A59DAE1@hotmail.com> Message-ID: [http://calendars.illinois.edu/eventImage/3094/33301244/large.png?rn=0228T065024] Boycott, Divest, Sanction: Stopping Zionist Genocide Against the Palestinians Event Type Lecture Topics human rights, international, palestine, social justice Sponsor Students for Justice in Palestine Date Mar 1, 2018 6:00 pm Views 29 Originating Calendar Asian American Studies Come hear from University of Illinois College of Law professor Francis Boyle as he speaks to the grave injustice that is the treatment of the Palestinian people both within the West Bank and Gaza, as well as within Israel proper. His areas of expertise include Constitutional Law, Human Rights, Jurisprudence, and U.S. Foreign Affairs. You wouldn’t want to miss this opportunity to hear from a man whose served as counsel to the Palestinian Authority and various other countries in the International Criminal Court. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 28 12:57:30 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 12:57:30 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: "The Dirty War" In-Reply-To: <3C9010C6652AB645BC025F2372A86BB206D7EDA0@mail.law.uiuc.edu> References: <3C9010C6652AB645BC025F2372A86BB206D7EDA0@mail.law.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: I served as a Consultant on this investigative documentary and appear in it. It established that Depleted Uranium Munitions are a causative factor in the Gulf War Syndrome.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 [mailto:FBOYLE at LAW.UIUC.EDU] Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 8:22 AM To: 'AALS Section on Minority Grps. mailing list' ('AALS Section on Minority Grps. mailing list') Cc: AALS Human Rights Subject: "The Dirty War" Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954(voice) 217-244-1478(fax) fboyle at law.uiuc.edu -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis [mailto:fboyle at LAW.UIUC.EDU] Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 8:21 AM To: Cc: * All Faculty Subject: [uiuc-sfp] "The Dirty War" Importance: High On Tuesday October 29 from 3-4pm in Room A, I will be showing the British TV documentary "The Dirty War." Produced by Independent Television Network TV 4 in Britain, "The Dirty War" documents the existence of the Gulf War Syndrome--a fact admitted by a Spokesperson for the UK Ministry of Defense after this documentary was shown to front page headlines in Britain. Today, over 100,000 US Gulf War Veterans suffer from the Gulf War Syndrome, and over 10,000 have died. Many of their spouses and afterborn children have contracted it, as have even health care workers treating these U.S. Veterans. Yet the Pentagon still denies that there is such a thing as the Gulf War Syndrome and has prevented these U.S. Gulf War Vets from getting proper medical treatment. For those who still might support the planned Bush Jr. War against Iraq for Oil, come and see what happened to those US and UK soldiers who fought the Bush Sr. War against Iraq for Oil in 1991. All are invited to attend. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954(voice) 217-244-1478(fax) fboyle at law.uiuc.edu Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT [http://us.a1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/a/ya/yahoo_geocities/lrec2b_1_01.jpg] [http://us.a1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/a/ya/yahoo_geocities/lrec2d_2_02.gif] ----------------------------------------------------------------- DISCLAIMER: All opinions posted on this mailing list are the sole property of the respective author, and do not necessarily represent the views of Students for Palestine. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rwhelbig at gmail.com Wed Feb 28 13:12:17 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 05:12:17 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: FW: "The Dirty War" In-Reply-To: References: <3C9010C6652AB645BC025F2372A86BB206D7EDA0@mail.law.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: Since I forgot that he through this out to you too! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Roger Helbig Date: Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 5:11 AM Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: "The Dirty War" To: "Boyle, Francis A" And how did it do this - and if you were a consultant, I doubt it was very high quality investigative reporting - more campaigning than reporting - the difference between me and you is that I tell the truth and if I learn that I am wrong, I will admit it - you are like Trump, easily buy into lies and create your own and hang out with liars - you have no real sense of conscience, just pretend to Roger W Helbig Really would love to meet you in court, but it has to be in Northern California - then we will see who actually prevails when actual evidence has to be presented! On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 4:57 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss < peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote: > *I served as a Consultant on this investigative documentary and appear in > it. It established that Depleted Uranium Munitions are a causative factor > in the Gulf War Syndrome.fab* > > > > *Francis A. Boyle* > > *Law Building* > > *504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.* > > *Champaign IL 61820 USA* > > *217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954> (phone)* > > *217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478> (fax)* > > *(personal comments only*) > > > > *From:* Boyle, Francis [mailto:FBOYLE at LAW.UIUC.EDU] > *Sent:* Friday, October 25, 2002 8:22 AM > *To:* 'AALS Section on Minority Grps. mailing list' ('AALS Section on > Minority Grps. mailing list') > *Cc:* AALS Human Rights > *Subject:* "The Dirty War" > > > > > > > > > > Francis A. Boyle > > Law Building > > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > > Champaign, IL 61820 USA > > 217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954>(voice) > > 217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478>(fax) > > fboyle at law.uiuc.edu > > > > -----Original Message----- > *From:* Boyle, Francis [mailto:fboyle at LAW.UIUC.EDU ] > *Sent:* Friday, October 25, 2002 8:21 AM > *To:* > *Cc:* * All Faculty > *Subject:* [uiuc-sfp] "The Dirty War" > *Importance:* High > > On Tuesday October 29 from 3-4pm in Room A, I will be showing the British > TV documentary "The Dirty War." Produced by Independent Television Network > TV 4 in Britain, "The Dirty War" documents the existence of the Gulf War > Syndrome--a fact admitted by a Spokesperson for the UK Ministry of Defense > after this documentary was shown to front page headlines in Britain. Today, > over 100,000 US Gulf War Veterans suffer from the Gulf War Syndrome, and > over 10,000 have died. Many of their spouses and afterborn children > have contracted it, as have even health care workers treating these > U.S. Veterans. Yet the Pentagon still denies that there is such a thing as > the Gulf War Syndrome and has prevented these U.S. Gulf War Vets from > getting proper medical treatment. For those who still might support the > planned Bush Jr. War against Iraq for Oil, come and see what happened to > those US and UK soldiers who fought the Bush Sr. War against Iraq for Oil > in 1991. All are invited to attend. > > > > fab > > > > > > Francis A. Boyle > > Law Building > > 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. > > Champaign, IL 61820 USA > > 217-333-7954 <(217)%20333-7954>(voice) > > 217-244-1478 <(217)%20244-1478>(fax) > > fboyle at law.uiuc.edu > > > > > > > > *Yahoo! Groups Sponsor* > > ADVERTISEMENT > > > > > > > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > DISCLAIMER: All opinions posted on this mailing list are the sole > property of the respective author, and do not necessarily represent > the views of Students for Palestine. > > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service > . > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Feb 28 13:26:14 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 13:26:14 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: FW: "The Dirty War" In-Reply-To: References: <3C9010C6652AB645BC025F2372A86BB206D7EDA0@mail.law.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: …the existence of the Gulf War Syndrome--a fact admitted by a Spokesperson for the UK Ministry of Defense after this documentary was shown to front page headlines in Britain…. Tell that to the UK Ministry of Defense that admitted there was such a thing as The Gulf War Syndrome after our expose came out to front page headlines all over Britain. 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2018 7:12 AM To: Peace-discuss Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: FW: "The Dirty War" Since I forgot that he through this out to you too! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Roger Helbig > Date: Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 5:11 AM Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: "The Dirty War" To: "Boyle, Francis A" > And how did it do this - and if you were a consultant, I doubt it was very high quality investigative reporting - more campaigning than reporting - the difference between me and you is that I tell the truth and if I learn that I am wrong, I will admit it - you are like Trump, easily buy into lies and create your own and hang out with liars - you have no real sense of conscience, just pretend to Roger W Helbig Really would love to meet you in court, but it has to be in Northern California - then we will see who actually prevails when actual evidence has to be presented! On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 4:57 AM, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss > wrote: I served as a Consultant on this investigative documentary and appear in it. It established that Depleted Uranium Munitions are a causative factor in the Gulf War Syndrome.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 [mailto:FBOYLE at LAW.UIUC.EDU] Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 8:22 AM To: 'AALS Section on Minority Grps. mailing list' ('AALS Section on Minority Grps. mailing list') > Cc: AALS Human Rights > Subject: "The Dirty War" Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954(voice) 217-244-1478(fax) fboyle at law.uiuc.edu -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis [mailto:fboyle at LAW.UIUC.EDU] Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 8:21 AM To: Cc: * All Faculty Subject: [uiuc-sfp] "The Dirty War" Importance: High On Tuesday October 29 from 3-4pm in Room A, I will be showing the British TV documentary "The Dirty War." Produced by Independent Television Network TV 4 in Britain, "The Dirty War" documents the existence of the Gulf War Syndrome--a fact admitted by a Spokesperson for the UK Ministry of Defense after this documentary was shown to front page headlines in Britain. Today, over 100,000 US Gulf War Veterans suffer from the Gulf War Syndrome, and over 10,000 have died. Many of their spouses and afterborn children have contracted it, as have even health care workers treating these U.S. Veterans. Yet the Pentagon still denies that there is such a thing as the Gulf War Syndrome and has prevented these U.S. Gulf War Vets from getting proper medical treatment. For those who still might support the planned Bush Jr. War against Iraq for Oil, come and see what happened to those US and UK soldiers who fought the Bush Sr. War against Iraq for Oil in 1991. All are invited to attend. fab Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954(voice) 217-244-1478(fax) fboyle at law.uiuc.edu Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT [http://us.a1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/a/ya/yahoo_geocities/lrec2b_1_01.jpg] [http://us.a1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/a/ya/yahoo_geocities/lrec2d_2_02.gif] ----------------------------------------------------------------- DISCLAIMER: All opinions posted on this mailing list are the sole property of the respective author, and do not necessarily represent the views of Students for Palestine. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. _______________________________________________ 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 Feb 28 13:43:26 2018 From: cgestabrook at gmail.com (C G Estabrook) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 07:43:26 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] AWARE on the Air, Tuesday 27 February Message-ID: <1C29B2D6-95D9-48FD-8DB9-DD2F7A07F5A0@gmail.com> > Good evening and welcome to AWARE on the Air, presented by members and friends of AWARE, the “anti-war anti-racism effort,” a local Champaign-Urbana peace group. I’m Carl Estabrook. We are recording this at noon on Tuesday, February 27, in the studios of Urbana Public Television, Urbana, Illinois. Our subject is the wars the US government is waging around the world, and the racism we display to those we’re killing, in accord with the Latin proverb, ‘Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris” - “It’s human nature to hate those you have injured.” At this moment the US is making war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, & Yemen - principally to control the flow of oil out of the Mideast and North Africa, which the US uses as a weapon against its economic rivals from Germany to China. Thousands of U.S. troops are killing people in these countries, although most Americans are barely aware of it. ~ More than a quarter of a million US troops are stationed in a thousand US bases on foreign soil, most of them ringing Russia and China. ~ The 70,000-members of the U.S. ‘Special Operations Command’ are active in three-quarters of the countries of the world. Their activities include kidnapping (‘rendition’), torture, and murder. As the rest of the world recognizes - but Americans don’t - they are nothing less than American death squads. The rest of the world recognizes that the US today is what ML King called it long ago, the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” - an international criminal surpassing all others. But most Americans don’t know that, protected as they are by government and media propaganda. What we do here at AWARE ON THE AIR is talk about US war-making. ### -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rwhelbig at gmail.com Wed Feb 28 15:17:24 2018 From: rwhelbig at gmail.com (Roger Helbig) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 07:17:24 -0800 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Philip Berrigan forward to Boyle Book Message-ID: Berrigan had a good heart but a defective sense of fact - the following illustrates this - I found it looking for Boyle's participation in the trial about the damage to the Maryland ANG A-10s where supposedly wanted to use Douglas Lind Rokke as a witness. I know Rokke to be a liar who has knowingly used a forged document to make false claims about depleted uranium. Rokke may have even created the forged document; I expect that he knows who did create it. http://www.jonahhouse.org/archive/Forward.htm He seems to idolize Boyle as having no axe to grind when Boyle is constantly grinding axes. If as Boyle claims, US had been preparing for war in Afghanistan for years, why is it that they had no one who spoke Pashtun to go there after 9/11? If you are preparing for war in a foreign country, the first thing you do is accurate map it, the second is get native speakers to teach you the language - we had neither in September 2001. Bush's Administration was surprised. The former Clinton Administration was much less so. How will the American people respond when they understand that their government is nakedly lawless before its own law? There is, for example, the war in Afghanistan. I wrote the following from federal prison in Elkton, OH after the awful events of September 11, 2001: By all definitions, presence in a penal dumpster restricts one. Having no resource for research, I must rely on friends for analyses of current events. Articles by Francis Boyle, Stan Goff, and John Pilger struck chords in me. They appeared true and plausible. Furthermore, none of the three has a hidden agenda, an axe to grind. Boyle estimates that the war in Afghanistan was at least four years in preparation, and that around September 11th, the U.S., U.K. and NATO had 60,000 troops on maneuvers in the mid-East and South Asia, with adequate naval support. He comments: "September 11th was pretext, trigger, or both!" The Bush family is steeped in oil; there is no disguising that. Nor can one ignore the fact that the Bin Laden family was in "business" with the elder Bush. Bush's Administration is all oil, excepting Powell, who is military and weathervane, quick to adjust to the White Man's wind. After the Taliban chased the Russians, its leaders were wined and dined in Houston by Unocal, a Texas oil company. The deal was to make Afghanistan an American oil colony, where Afghans would protect and profit from pipelines run through Afghanistan from the Caspian Basin, the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world. The Afghans turned down the deal. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fboyle at illinois.edu Wed Feb 28 15:41:10 2018 From: fboyle at illinois.edu (Boyle, Francis A) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 15:41:10 +0000 Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Philip Berrigan forward to Boyle Book In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: What follows is a forward to one of Francis A. Boyle's book. It was written while Phil was in prison for the Prince of Peace Plowshares. FOREWORD by Philip Berrigan #14850-056 Federal Correctional Institution at Petersburg 1996-1997 Federal Correctional Institution at Elkton 2001 My suspicions about human law go back 30 years. They began with the trial of The Baltimore 4 following Dr. King's assassination in April, 1968. Our effort, in October 1967, was one of many raids on Selective Service -- some say over 100 -- both standby and covert. In the Baltimore 4 trial, the federal judge enforced a narrow focus -- did we do the resistance act we admitted doing against the genocidal debacle in Southeast Asia? He suppressed "why" we did it, except by our testimony, which the prosecutor dismissed contemptuously as misguided, even adolescent. But no expert testimony reached the jury about search and destroy operations, napalm, cluster bomb units, Agent Orange, Phoenix Program assassinations, millions of Indochinese dead, the risks of nuclear war against China and the Soviet Union. I witnessed for the first time an American Court fabricating a legal railroad -- what we call a kangaroo court. On reflection it was pitiful -- a court exposing itself like an exhibitionist snatching his raincoat open. But despite the shameful (and shameless) spectacle, the judge initiated a pattern scrupulously followed for 30 years, departing again from the initial concept of The Founders -- protection of the people against the government and powerful. The judge did the exact opposite -- he protected the government and military against the people. Such legal machinations are insidious -- they effectively strip people of any non-violent redress against "their" government. We should recall that Thoreau called legal dissent "consent" since he apparently believed that tolerating legal dissent by the regime strengthened its credibility (and injustice). In brief, the government imposes an enormously effective deterrent -- "break the law and you'll go to prison!" As the years passed and my arrests mounted, setting up a revolving door between prison and "minimum security," I feverishly researched material on law and the judiciary. I read Thomas Merton who likened the legality of Christ's execution -- "we have a law and according to this law he must die" (Jn 19:7) -- to the legality of nuclear war (Hiroshima and Nagasaki and subsequent doomsday adventures). This time, Merton wrote, the death sentence is passed on humankind, The Body of Christ. I read further, discovering that the Bible gave human law ample treatment. 1st Samuel 8th chapter, for example, exposes the State as a public, bureaucratic rebellion against God. But how do you distinguish between the State and its law -- Saul's law, Nero's law, Clinton's law? Philosophers of the law don't try, because they are the same thing. One can't imagine the State without its law, or the law without a patron State. They are identities. Therefore, the law, like the State is inherently flawed and violent -- its function to legalize a rebellious State. Can it even -- in cases of conscience -- offer non-violent redress? One can question that. Further on still, I reviewed Paul's Letter to the Galatians -- his most sustained indictment of human law. (Some claim that Paul in Galatians was attacking Mosaic Law. Others reject that as superficial -- he was indicting all law.) Paul argued that the law reduced Christ to a curse, necessary to redeem us from the law. The genesis of the State then, ancient or modern, is rejection of God, rebellion against God. "They have not rejected you [Samuel], they have rejected me as their King." (1 Sam. 8:7) And God instructs Samuel to tell the elders what a human King, Leader, Premier, Fuhrer, Prime Minister, President would cost the people -- sons for the military, daughters as domestics, crushing taxes, fields, vineyards and flocks confiscated, servants seized, slavery the final, tragic culmination. As the ruling hierarchy told Pilate: "We have no King but Caesar." (John 19:15) Paul equates the law with sin and death -- sin because law has nothing to say to sins of omission, and death because most will draw their morality from the law. The morality of most Americans is legalized. To become "law abiding" is to fear the penalties of the law, to become house-broken, domesticated. Morality limited by the boundaries of the law is spiritual death. Scholars speculate that the law and its courts (not the prisons) are social yardsticks -- in fact, condensations or crystalizations of the society as a whole. What of imperial America? What do the courts condense and symbolize -- war, profit, corporatism, contempt of the Poor, guns (nuclear and others) domestic violence, racism, discrimination against women, war against the children. The priorities of the empire are so implanted in the courts that arguably, they cannot accord justice to non-violent resisters. Just as the government by itself is helpless to disarm. Enter Francis Boyle and international law. The U.N. Charter, the Nuremberg Statutes, the Geneva Conventions, the World Court Decision of 1996, ruling that the "threat or use of nuclear weapons is illegal." Francis Boyle is perhaps the most competent and impassioned advocate of international law in the U.S. He has as well, noble colleagues like Ramsey Clark, Peter Weiss and Richard Falk. Critics of international law tend to dismiss it as toothless, or for some of the reasons argued above. But I tend to support it, and to revere excellent lawyers like Boyle, Clark et al. And I contend that my apparent inconsistency evaporates when one reflects that international law is stateless, and therefore, escapes the moral contamination of nation/state law. Secondly, it coincides in most aspects with the justice of divine law. One can test it for example, against the summation of "the law and the prophets" -- ("Love your neighbor as you love yourself."). Finally, international law is a curb on the lawlessness and derangement of nuclear club members, especially the U.S. They have all freely agreed to become signatories, agreeing also to the superseding nature of international law, and its binding power over every court in the land. Like all bodies of thought truthful enough to threaten the empire, international law endures an enormous weight of institutional suppression. How will the American people respond when they understand that their government is nakedly lawless before its own law? There is, for example, the war in Afghanistan. I wrote the following from federal prison in Elkton, OH after the awful events of September 11, 2001: By all definitions, presence in a penal dumpster restricts one. Having no resource for research, I must rely on friends for analyses of current events. Articles by Francis Boyle, Stan Goff, and John Pilger struck chords in me. They appeared true and plausible. Furthermore, none of the three has a hidden agenda, an axe to grind. Boyle estimates that the war in Afghanistan was at least four years in preparation, and that around September 11th, the U.S., U.K. and NATO had 60,000 troops on maneuvers in the mid-East and South Asia, with adequate naval support. He comments: "September 11th was pretext, trigger, or both!" The Bush family is steeped in oil; there is no disguising that. Nor can one ignore the fact that the Bin Laden family was in "business" with the elder Bush. Bush's Administration is all oil, excepting Powell, who is military and weathervane, quick to adjust to the White Man's wind. After the Taliban chased the Russians, its leaders were wined and dined in Houston by Unocal, a Texas oil company. The deal was to make Afghanistan an American oil colony, where Afghans would protect and profit from pipelines run through Afghanistan from the Caspian Basin, the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world. The Afghans turned down the deal. We intend now to construct a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean for the Asian market. Niaz Naik, a Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was warned by senior American officials as early as mid July that hostilities in Afghanistan would commence in mid October, as reported by the BBC. We need to explode two premises upon which the Bush Administration bases this war: - that the war is a response to the attacks of September 11th - that those attacks were conceived, organized and enacted by Afghans. Neither premise holds water. Our leaders intend not just to colonize Afghanistan, but Russia as well, which is a dominant military and economic rival in South Asia. The oil goes east to the Indian Ocean and west to Western Europe through Kosovo. NATO, a force projection of the U.S., inches toward Russia along the 40th parallel, with an American base already in Uzbekistan. Four independent republics of the defunct USSR, cluster around Afghanistan - Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakkstan. From dominating these, the U.S. and NATO plans to reduce Russia to a huge client. In this volatile area, six members of the nuclear club pursue their fierce and often unilateral directions - the U.S., Russia, Britain, India, Pakistan and China. Pathological nationalism at best. No one in the national media has had the integrity to scrutinize George W. Bush's conduct on September 11th. Four airliners are hijacked in less than half an hour - unprecedented!. All four are tracked by FAA radar. At 8:45 a.m. the first plane crashes into the World Trade Center. No one notifies the commander-in-chief. At 9:03 the second plane slams into the World Trade Center and Andrew Card whispers the news to Bush; he does nothing. At 9:35, the third plane crashes into the Pentagon. No one does anything; no one issues orders; no one scrambles the Air Force. Bush doesn't even leave the Florida elementary school to call an emergency meeting. Was Bush - and his coterie - grossly negligent or deep into criminal conspiracy? Given the military buildup in the mid-East and South Asia, it seems safe to conclude that the Administration orchestrated a gigantic swindle on people at home and abroad - namely, the war against terrorism, Al Quaeda, and Osama Bin Laden. By shifting blame, Bush also shifted attention to an administration notable for its bumbling and myopia. Suddenly he had no problems of legitimacy, or recession, or world-wide resistance to globalization, and could, with impunity, silence dissent with an anti-terrorist bill. September 11th raked many a Bush chestnut out of the fire. Our bombing goes on relentlessly in Afghanistan, pulverizing a poverty-stricken country, decimating its people, creating tens of thousands of refugees. Food relief is negligible - the bombing has driven out Oxfam and other agencies. In the 8th chapter of John's Gospel, Jesus links lying and murder and identifies both with Satanism. That is to say, the mass murder of war is always justified by lying. Watch Bush's lips - if he reflects on the war, know that he is lying. Lawyers should take strict notice of this book. Hopefully, they will respond two ways: begin to educate themselves on this law of the U.S., and secondly, join and/or defend resisters to these hellish weapons. I have known lawyers who for years, resisted nuclear weapons and went to prison. Other lawyers gave strenuous defense to resisters pro bono. They rearranged their priorities, concluding that their humanity and religion were immeasurably more important than their law. This title does much to suggest to me the broad impact of Francis Boyle's work. He teaches international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign. Not many law colleges boast such a course, and fewer still have such a professor to teach it. Secondly, he has written several books on international law -- all given authority by teaching and courtroom test. Next, Francis Boyle is one of those rare Christians who understand the critical significance of Plowshares, i.e., based on Isaiah's prophecy of disarmament, reinforced further by the Sermon on the Mount. He recognizes that these Scriptures, as the Word of God, have the potential to bring the nuclear club to heal, suddenly disarming its nuclear weaponry. As long as there is a remnant of Christians, faithful, free and daring enough to take hammers and blood in hand to invade the hellholes and disarm the First Strike obscenities, The Word has flesh that will threaten the Killing Machines of the World. Lastly, Francis Boyle is, like Ramsey Clark, a legal globetrotter, who responds to critical need everywhere -- South Africa, Hawaii, the Middle East, Germany. This book could restore some dignity to a profession jaded by greed, corruption and the politics of ward heelers. Talk to The Poor and to the crooks of the Superrich about their lawyers. The Poor will tell you that their lawyers have learned to draw blood from stones. The Superrich will tell you that if their lawyers must bring their cases to court, they consider it an insult and a failure. Francis Boyle is a lawyer of the quality of Thomas More or Gandhi. I treasure him as fellow Christian, friend and brother. PHILIP BERRIGAN Biographical sketch * Catholic priest married to Elizabeth McAlister. * Three children: Frida 27, Jerome 26, Kathleen 20 – all dedicated to nonviolent resistance and to justice and peace. * Lives at Jonah House, a nonviolent resistance community in Baltimore, MD. All our eight adult members are Plowshares veterans save one, and, by definition, veterans of prison as well. * Began nonviolent resistance to U.S. wars in 1966, breaking laws legalizing the Vietnam war. In the last 35 years imprisoned nearly 1/3 of the time or 11 years. Newly home from federal prison, being released on December 14, 2001. * Participated in six Plowshares witnesses, all disarmaments of first strike nuclear weapons. (Plowshares takes its authority and inspiration from Isaiah 2:4 where the prophet explains that those who beat swords into plowshares, abolishing war as institution and politic are beloved of God.) * Published eight books, invariably about nonviolent issues and war and peace. * Lectured on modern war and peace, nuclearism and interventionary war in most of the American States, and across Canada and Western Europe. * With Daniel Berrigan, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize at least six times. Francis 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-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Roger Helbig via Peace-discuss Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2018 9:17 AM To: Peace-discuss Subject: [Peace-discuss] Philip Berrigan forward to Boyle Book Berrigan had a good heart but a defective sense of fact - the following illustrates this - I found it looking for Boyle's participation in the trial about the damage to the Maryland ANG A-10s where supposedly wanted to use Douglas Lind Rokke as a witness. I know Rokke to be a liar who has knowingly used a forged document to make false claims about depleted uranium. Rokke may have even created the forged document; I expect that he knows who did create it. http://www.jonahhouse.org/archive/Forward.htm He seems to idolize Boyle as having no axe to grind when Boyle is constantly grinding axes. If as Boyle claims, US had been preparing for war in Afghanistan for years, why is it that they had no one who spoke Pashtun to go there after 9/11? If you are preparing for war in a foreign country, the first thing you do is accurate map it, the second is get native speakers to teach you the language - we had neither in September 2001. Bush's Administration was surprised. The former Clinton Administration was much less so. How will the American people respond when they understand that their government is nakedly lawless before its own law? There is, for example, the war in Afghanistan. I wrote the following from federal prison in Elkton, OH after the awful events of September 11, 2001: By all definitions, presence in a penal dumpster restricts one. Having no resource for research, I must rely on friends for analyses of current events. Articles by Francis Boyle, Stan Goff, and John Pilger struck chords in me. They appeared true and plausible. Furthermore, none of the three has a hidden agenda, an axe to grind. Boyle estimates that the war in Afghanistan was at least four years in preparation, and that around September 11th, the U.S., U.K. and NATO had 60,000 troops on maneuvers in the mid-East and South Asia, with adequate naval support. He comments: "September 11th was pretext, trigger, or both!" The Bush family is steeped in oil; there is no disguising that. Nor can one ignore the fact that the Bin Laden family was in "business" with the elder Bush. Bush's Administration is all oil, excepting Powell, who is military and weathervane, quick to adjust to the White Man's wind. After the Taliban chased the Russians, its leaders were wined and dined in Houston by Unocal, a Texas oil company. The deal was to make Afghanistan an American oil colony, where Afghans would protect and profit from pipelines run through Afghanistan from the Caspian Basin, the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world. The Afghans turned down the deal. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001.txt URL: From davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net Wed Feb 28 20:02:23 2018 From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net (David Johnson) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 14:02:23 -0600 Subject: [Peace-discuss] Seeing Yugoslavia through a dark glass Message-ID: <013801d3b0cf$0c857cb0$25907610$@comcast.net> Lengthy but well worth the read -The intentional destabilization and destruction of Yugoslavia by the U.S. and NATO. Seeing Yugoslavia through a dark glass By Diana Johnstone, CovertAction Quarterly, Fall 1998 Politics, Media and the Ideology of Globalization Years of experience in and out of both mainstream and alternative media have made me aware of the power of the dominant ideology to impose certain interpretations on international news. During the cold War, most world news for American consumption had to be framed as part of the Soviet-U.S. contest. Since then, a new ideological bias frames the news. The way the violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia has been reported is the most stunning example. I must admit that it took me some time to figure this out, even though I had a long-standing interest in and some knowledge of Yugoslavia. I spent time there as a student in 1953, living in a Belgrade dormitory and learning the language. In 1984., in a piece for "In These Times", I warned that extreme decentralization, conflicting economic interests between the richer and poorer regions, austerity policies imposed by the IMF, and the decline of universal ideals were threatening Yugoslavia with "re-Balkanization" in the wake of Tito's death and desanctification. "Local ethnic interests are reasserting themselves". I wrote, "The danger is that these rival local interests may become involved in the rivalries of outside powers. This is how the Balkans in the past were a powder keg of world war." Writing this took no special clairvoyance. The danger of Yugoslavia's disintegration was quite obvious to all serious observers well before Slobodan Milosevic arrived on the scene. As the country was torn apart in the early nineties, I was unable to keep up with all that was happening. In those years, my job as press officer for the Greens in the European Parliament left me no time to investigate the situation myself. Aware that there were serious flaws in the way media and politicians were reacting. I wrote an article warning against combating "nationalism" by taking sides for one nationalism against another, and against judging a complex situation by analogy with totally different times and places. "Every nationalism stimulates others". I noted, "Historical analogies should be drawn with caution and never allowed to obscure the facts." However, there was no stopping the tendency to judge the Balkans, about which most people knew virtually nothing, by analogy with Hitler Germany, about which people at least imagined they knew a lot, and which enabled analysis to be rapidly abandoned in favour of moral certitude and righteous indignation. However, it was only later, when I was able to devote considerable time to my own research, that I realized the extent of the deception-which is in large part self-deception. I mention all this to stress that I understand the immense difficulty of gaining a clear view of the complex situation in the Balkans. The history of the region and the interplay of internal political conflicts and external influences would be hard to grasp even without propaganda distortions. Nobody can be blamed for being confused. Moreover, by now, many people have invested so much emotion in a one-sided view of the situation that they are scarcely able to consider alternative interpretations. It is not necessarily because particular journalists or media are "alternative" that they are free from the dominant interpretation and the dominant world view. In fact, in the case of the Yugoslav tragedy, the irony is that "alternative" or "left" activists and writers have - frequently taken the lead in likening the Serbs, the people who most wanted to continue to live in multi-cultural Yugoslavia, to Nazi racists, and in calling for military intervention on behalf of ethnically defined secessionist movements11 "Ethnically defined" because, despite the argument accepted by the international community that it was the Republics that could invoke the right to secede, all the political arguments surrounding recognition of independent Slovenia and Croatia dwelt on the right of Slovenes and Croats as such to self-determination.-all supposedly in the name of "multi-cultural Bosnia", a country which, unlike Yugoslavia, would have to be built from scratch by outsiders. The Serbs and Yugoslavia Like other Christian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, the Serbs were heavily taxed and denied ownership of property of political power reserved for Muslims. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Serb farmers led a revolt that spread to Greece. The century-long struggle put an end to the Ottoman Empire. The Habsburg monarchy found it natural that when one empire receded, another should advance, and sought to gain control over the lands lost to the Ottoman Turks. Although Serbs had rallied to the Habsburgs in earlier wars against the Turks, Serbia soon appeared to Vienna as the main obstacle to its own expansion into the Balkans. By the end of the nineteenth century, Vienna was seeking to fragment the Serb-inhabited lands to prevent what it named "Greater Serbia", taking control of Bosnia-Herzegovina and fostering the birth of Albanian nationalism (as converts to Islam, Albanian feudal chieftains enjoyed privileges under the Ottoman Empire and combated the Christian liberation movements). Probably because they had been deprived of full citizens rights under the Ottoman Turks, and because their own society of farmers and traders was relatively egalitarian, Serb political leaders throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were extremely receptive to the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. While all the other liberated Balkan nations imported German princelings as their new kings, the Serbs promoted their own pig farmers into a dynasty, one of whose members translated John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" into Serbian during his student days. Nowhere in the Balkans did Western progressive ideas exercise such attraction as in Serbia, no doubt due to the historic circumstances of the country's emergence from four hundred years of subjugation. Meanwhile, intellectuals in Croatia, a province of the Austro- Hungarian Empire increasingly rankling under subordination to the Hungarian nobility, initiated the Yugoslav movement for cultural, and eventually political, unification of the South Slav peoples, notably the Serbs and Croats, separated by history and religion (the Serbs having been converted to Christianity by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Croats by the Roman Catholic Church) but united by language. The idea of a "Southslavia" was largely inspired by the national unification of neighbouring Italy, occurring around the same time. In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seized the pretext of the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand to declare war and crush Serbia once and for all. When Austria-Hungary lost the world war it had thus initiated, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia chose to unite with Serbia in a single kingdom. This decision enabled both Slovenia and Croatia to go from the losing to the winning side in World War I, thereby avoiding war reparations and enlarging their territory, notably on the Adriatic coast, and the expense of Italy. The joint Kingdom was renamed "Jugoslavia" in 1929. The conflicts between Croats and Serbs that plagued what is called "the first Yugoslavia" were described by Rebecca West in her celebrated book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in 1941. In April 1941., Serb patriots in Belgrade led a revolt against an accord reached between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. This led to Nazi bombing of Belgrade, a German invasion, creation of an independent fascist state of Croatia (including Bosnia-Herzegovina), and attachment of much of the Serbian province of Kosovo to Albania, then a puppet of Mussolini's Italy. The Croatian Ustashe undertook a policy of genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies within the territory of their "Greater Croatia", while the Germans raised 55 divisions among the Muslims of Bosnia and Albania. In Serbia itself, the German occupants announced that one hundred Serbian hostages would be executed for each German killed by resistance fighters. The threat was carried out. As a result, the royalist Serbian resistance (the first guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe) led by Draza Mihailovic adopted a policy of holding off attacks on the Germans in expectation of an Allied invasion. The Partisans, led by Croatian communist Josip Broz Tito, adopted a more active strategy of armed resistance, which made considerable gains in the predominantly Serb border regions of Croatia and Bosnia and won support from Churchill for its effectiveness. A civil war developed between Mihailovic's "Chetniks" and Tito's Partisans-which was also a civil war between Serbs, since Serbs were the most numerous among the Partisans. These divisions between Serbs-torn between Serbian and Yugoslav identity-have never been healed and help explain the deep confusion among Serbs during the breakup of Yugoslavia. After World War II, the new Communist Yugoslavia tried to build "brotherhood and unity" on the myth that all the peoples had contributed equally to liberation from fascism. Mihailovic was executed, and school children in post-war Yugoslavia learned more about the "fascist" nature of his Serbian nationalist Chetniks than they did about Albanian and bosnian Muslims who had volunteered for the 55, or even about the killing of Serbs in the Jasenovac death camp run by Ustashe in Western Bosnia. After the 1948 break with Moscow, the Yugoslav communist leadership emphasized its difference from the Soviet bloc by adopting a policy of "self-management", supposed to lead by fairly rapid stages to the "withering away of the State". "Tito repeatedly revised the Constitution to strengthen local authorities, while retaining final decision-making power for himself. When he died in 1980, he thus left behind a hopelessly complicated system that could not work without his arbitration". Serbia in particular was unable to enact vitally necessary reforms because its territory had been divided up, with two "autonomous provinces," Vojvodina and Kosovo, able to veto measures taken by Serbia, while Serbia could not intervene in their affairs. In the 1980's, the rise in interest rates and unfavourable world trade conditions dramatically increased the foreign debt Yugoslavia (like many "third world" countries) had been encouraged to run up thanks to its standing in the West as a socialist country not belonging to the Soviet bloc. The IMF arrived with its familiar austerity measures, which could only be taken by a central government. The leaders of the richer republics -Slovenia and Croatia-did not want to pay for the poorer ones. Moreover, in all former socialist countries, the big political question is privatization of State and Social property, and local communist leaders in Slovenia and Croatia could expect to get a greater share for themselves within the context of division of Yugoslavia into separate little states. At that stage, a gradual, negotiated dismantling of Yugoslavia into smaller States was not impossible. It would have entailed reaching agreement on division of assets and liabilities, and numerous adjustments to take into account conflicting interests. If pursued openly, however, it might have encountered popular opposition-after all, very many people, perhaps a majority, enjoyed being citizens of a large country with an enviable international reputation. What would have been the result of a national referendum on the question of preservation of Yugoslavia? None was ever held. The first multiparty elections in postwar Yugoslavia were held in 1990, not nationwide in all of Yugoslavia, but separately by each Republic-a method which in itself reinforces separatist power elites. Sure of the active sympathy of Germany, Austria, and the Vatican, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia, prepared the fait accompli22Recognition of the internal administrative borders between the republics as "inviolable" international borders was in effect legal trick, contrary to international law, which turned the Yugoslav army into an "aggressor" within the boundaries its soldiers had sworn to defend and which transformed the Serbs within Croatia and Bosnia, who opposed secession from their country -Yugoslavia, into secessionists. This recognition flagrantly violated the principles of the 1975 Final Act (known as the Helsinki Accords) of the Conference on, now organisation for, Security and Cooperation in Europe, notably the territorial integrity of states and nonintervention in internal affairs. Truncated Yugoslavia was thereupon expelled from the OSCI in 1992. sparing its other members from having to hear Belgrade's point of view. Indeed, the sanctions against Yugoslavia covered culture and sports, thus eliminating for several crucial years any opportunity for Serbian Yugoslavs to take part in international forums and events where the one-sided view of "the Serbs" presented by their adversaries might have been challenged. of unilateral, unnegotiated secession, proclaimed in 1991. Such secession was illegal, under Yugoslav and international law, and was certain to precipitate civil war. The key role of German (and Vatican) support was to provide rapid international recognition of the new independent republics, in order to transform Yugoslavia into an "aggressor on its own territory". Political Motives The political motives that launched the anti-Serb propaganda campaign are obvious enough. Claiming that it was impossible to stay in Yugoslavia because the Serbs were so oppressive was the pretext for the nationalist leaders in Slovenia and Croatia to set up their own little statelets which, thanks to early and strong German support, could "jump the queue" and get into the richmen's European club ahead of the rest of Yugoslavia. The terrible paradox is that very many people, in the sincere desire to oppose racism and aggression, have in fact contributed to demonizing an entire people, the Serbs, thereby legitimizing both ethnic separatism and the new role of NATO as occupying power in the Balkans on behalf of a theoretical "international community". Already in the 1980's, Croatian and ethnic Albanian separatist lobbies had stepped up their efforts to win support abroad, notably in Germany and the United States33In Washington, the campaign on behalf of Albanian separatists in Kosovo was spearheaded by Representative Joe Dio Gaurdi of New York, who after loosing his congressional seat in 1988 has continued his lobbying for the cause. An early and influential convert to the cause was Senator Robert Dole. In Germany, the project for the political unification of all Croatian nationalists, but communists and Ustashe, with aim of seceding and establishing "Greater Croatia" was followed closely and sympathetically by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, West Germany's CIA, which hoped to gain its own sphere of influence on the Adriatic from the breakup of Yugoslavia. The nationalist unification which eventually brought former communist general Franjo Tudjman to power in Zagreb with the support of the Ustashe diaspora, got seriously under way after Tito's death in 1980, during the years when Bonn's current foreign minister Claus Kinkel, was heading the BND. See Erich Schmidt-Echboom, Der Schattenkrieger: Klaus Kinkel und der BND (Dusseldorf; ECON Verlag, 1995) , by claiming to be oppressed by Serbs, citing "evidence" that, insofar as it had any basis in truth, referred to the 1920-1941 Yugoslav Kingdom, not to the very different post-World War II Yugoslavia. The current campaign to demonize the Serbs began in July 1991 with a virulent barrage of articles in the German media, led by the influential conservative newspaper, the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (FAZ). In almost daily columns, FAZ editor Johann Georg Reismuller justified the freshly, and illegally, declared "independence" of Slovenia and Croatia by describing "Yugo- Serbs" as essentially Oriental "militarist Bolsheviks" who have "no place in the European Community". Nineteen months after German reunification, and for the first time since Hitler's defeat in 1945, German media resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of the pre-war propaganda against the Jews". This German propaganda binge was the signal that times had changed seriously. Only a few years earlier, a seemingly broad German peace movement had stressed the need to put an end to "enemy stereotypes" (Feindbilder). Yet the sudden ferocious emergence of the enemy stereotype of "the Serbs" did not shock liberal of left Germans, who were soon repeating it themselves. It might seem that the German peace movement had completed its historic mission once its contribution to altering the image of Germany had led Gorbachev to endorse reunification. The least one can say is that the previous efforts at reconciliation with peoples who suffered from Nazi invasion stopped short when it same to the Serbs. In the Bundestag, German Green leader Joschka Fisher pressed for disavowal of "pacifism" in order to "combat Auschwitz", thereby equating Serbs with Nazis. In a heady mood of self- righteous indignation, German politicians across the board joined in using Germany's past guilt as a reason, not for restraint, as had been the logic up until reunification, but on the contrary, for "bearing their share of the military burden". In the name of human rights, the Federal Republic of Germany abolished its ban on military operations outside the NATO defensive area. Germany could once again be a "normal" military power-thanks to the "Serb threat". The near unanimity was all the more surprising in that the "enemy stereotype" of the Serb had been dredged up from the most belligerent German nationalism of the past. "Serbien muss sterbien" (a play on the word sterben, to die), meaning "Serbia must die" was a famous popular war cry of World War I. Serbs had been singled out for slaughter during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. One would have thought that the younger generation of Germans, seemingly so sensitive to the victims of Germany's aggressive past, would have at least urged caution. Very few did. On the contrary, what occurred in Germany was a strange sort of mass transfer of Nazi identity, and guilt, to the Serbs. In the case of the Germans, this can be seen as a comforting psychological projection which served to give Germans a fresh and welcome sense of innocence in the face of the new "criminal" people, the Serbs, But the hate campaign against Serbs, started in Germany, did not stop there. Elsewhere, the willingness to single out one of the Yugoslav peoples as the villain calls for other explanations. Media Momentum >From the start, foreign reporters were better treated in Zagreb and in Ljubljana, whose secessionist leaders understood the prime importance of media images in gaining international support, than in Belgrade. The Albanian secessionists in Kosovo or "Kosovars"44Albanians in Albania and in Yugoslavia call themselves "Shqiptare" but recently have objected to being called that by others. "Albanians" is an old and accepted term. Especially when addressing international audiences in the context of the separatist cause. Kosovo Albanians prefer to call themselves "Kosovars", which has political implications. Logically, the term should apply to all inhabitants of the province of Kosovo, regardless of ethnic identity, but by appropriating it for themselves alone, the Albanian "Kosovars" imply that Serbs and other non-Albanians are intruders. This is similar to the Muslim parties appropriation of the term "Bosniak" which implies that the Muslim population of Bosnia-Herzegovina is more indigenous than the Serbs and Croats, which makes no sense, since the Bosnian Muslims are simply Serbs and Croats who converted to Islam after the Ottoman conquest. , the Croatian secessionists and the Bosnian Muslims hired an American public relations firm, Ruder Finn, to advance their causes by demonizing the Serbs55The role of the Washington public relations firm, Ruder Finn, is by now well-known, but seems to have raised few doubts as to the accuracy of the anti-Serb propaganda it successfully diffused.. Ruder Finn deliberately targeted certain publics, notably the American Jewish community, with a campaign likening Serbs to Nazis. Feminists were also clearly targeted by the Croatian nationalist campaign directed out of Zagreb to brand Serbs as rapists66No one denies that many rapes occurred during the civil war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, or that rape is a serious violation of human rights. So is war, for that matter. From the start, however, inquiry into rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina focused exclusively on accusations that Serbs were raping Muslim women as part of a deliberate strategy. The most inflated figures, freely extricated by multiplying the number of known cases by large factors, were readily accepted by the media and international organizations. No interest was shown in detailed and documented reports of rapes of Serbian women by Muslims or Croats. The late Nora Beloff, former chief political correspondent of the "London Observer", described her own search in verification of the rape charges in a letter to "The Daily Telegraph" (January 19, 1993). The British Foreign Office conceded that the rape figures being handled about were really uncorroborated and referred her to the Danish government, then chairing the European Union. Copenhagen agreed that the reports were unsubstantiated, but kept repeating them. Both said that the EU has taken up the "rape atrocity" issue at its December 1992 Edinburgh Summit exclusively on the basis of a German initiative. In turn, Fran Wild, in charge of the Bosnian Desk in the German Foreign Ministry, told Ms. Beloff that the material on Serb rapes came partly from the Izetbegovic government and partly from the Catholic charity Caritas in Croatia. No effort had been made to seek corroboration from more impartial sources.. The Yugoslav story was complicated; anti-Serb stories had the advantage of being simple and available, and they provided an easy- to-use moral compass by designating the bad guys. As the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina got under way in mid-1992, American journalists who repeated unconfirmed stories of Serbian atrocities could count on getting published with a chance of a Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting was shared between the two authors of the most sensational "Serb atrocity stories" of the year: Roy Gutman of "Newsday" and John Burns of the "New York Times". In both cases, the prize-winning articles were based on hearsay evidence of dubious credibility. Gutman's articles, mostly based on accounts by Muslim refugees in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, were collected in a book rather misleadingly entitled "A Witness to Genocide", although in fact he had been a "witness" to nothing of the sort, His allegations that Serbs were running "death camps" were picked up by Ruder Finn and widely diffused, notably to Jewish organizations. Burns's story was no more than an interview with a mentally deranged prisoner in a Sarajevo jail, who confessed to crimes some of which have been since proved never to have been committed. On the other hand, there was no market for stories by a journalist who discovered that reported Serbian "rape camps" did not exist (German TV reporter Martin Lettmayer), or who included information about Muslim or Croat crimes against Serbs (Belgian journalist Georges Berghezan for one). It became increasingly impossible to challenge the dominant interpretation in major media. Editors naturally prefer to keep the story simple: one villain, and as much blood as possible. Moreover, after the German government forced the early recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence, other Western powers lined up opportunistically with the anti-Serb position. The United States soon moved aggressively into the game by picking its own client state - Muslim Bosnia-out of the ruins. Foreign news has always ben much easier to distort than domestic news. Television coverage simply makes the distortion more convincing. TV crews sent into strange places about which they know next to nothing, send back images of violence that give millions of viewers the impression that "everybody knows what is happening". Such an impression is worse than plain ignorance. Today, worldwide media such as CNN openly put pressure on governments to respond to the "public opinion" which the media themselves create. Christine Amanpour tells the U.S. and the European Union what they should be doing in Bosnia; to what extent this is coordinated with U.S. agencies is hard to tell. Indeed, the whole question of which tail wags the dog is wide open. Do media manipulate government, does government manipulate media, or are influential networks manipulating both? Many officials of Western governments complain openly or privately of being forced into unwise policy decisions by "the pressure of public opinion", meaning the media. A particularly interesting testimony in this regard is that of Otto von Habsburg, the extremely active and influential octogenarian heir to the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, today a member of the European Parliament from Bavaria, who has taken a great and one might say paternal interest in the cause of Croatian independence. "If Germany recognized Slovenia and Croatia so rapidly", Habsburg told the Bonn correspondent of the French daily "Figaro"; "even against the will of (then German foreign minister) Hans-Dietrich Genscher who did not want to take that step, its because the Bonn government was subjected to an almost irresistible pressure of public opinion. In this regard, the German press rendered a very great service, in particular the 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung' and Carl Gustav Strohm, that great German journalist who works for Die Welt". Still, the virtually universal acceptance of a one-sided view of Yugoslavia's collapse cannot be attributed solely to political designs or to sensationalist manipulation of the news by major media. It also owes a great deal to the ideological uniformity prevailing among educated liberals who have become the consensual moral conscience in Northwestern Euro-American society since the end of the Cold War. Down with the State This ideology is the expression in moralistic terms of the dominant project for reshaping the world since the United States emerged as sole superpower after the defeat of communism and collapse of the Soviet Union. United States foreign policy for over a century has been dictated by a single overriding concern: to open world markets to American capital and American enterprise. Today this project is triumphant as "economic globalization". Throughout the world, government policies are judged, approved or condemned decisively not by their populations but by "the markets" meaning the financial markets. Foreign investors, not domestic voters, decide policy. The International Monetary Fund and other such agencies are there to help governments adjust their policies and their societies to market imperatives. The shift of decision-making power away from elected governments, which is an essential aspect of this particular "economic globalization", is being accompanied by an ideological assault on the nation-state as a political community exercising sovereignty over a defined territory. For all its shortcomings, the nation-state is still the political level most apt to protect citizens' welfare and the environment from the destructive expansion of global markets. Dismissing the nation-state as an anachronism, or condemning it as a mere expression of "nationalist" exclusivism, overlooks and undermines its long-standing legitimacy as the focal point of democratic development, in which citizens can organize to define and defend their interests. The irony is that many well-intentioned idealists are unwittingly helping to advance this project by eagerly promoting its moralistic cover a theoretical global democracy that should replace attempts to strengthen democracy at the supposedly obsolete nation-state level. Within the United States, the link between anti-nation-state ideology and economic globalization is blurred by the double standard of U.S. leaders who do not hesitate to invoke the supremacy of U.S. "national interest" over the very international institutions they promote in order to advance economic globalization. This makes it seem that such international institutions are a serious obstacle to U.S. global power rather than its expression. However, the United States has the overall military and political power to design and control key international institutions (e.g., the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia), as well as to undermine those it dislikes (UNESCO when it was attempting to promote liberation of media from essentially American control) or to flout international law with impunity (notably in its Central American "backyard"). Given the present relationship of forces, weakening less powerful nation-states cannot strengthen international democracy, but simply tighten the grip of transnational capital and the criminal networks that flourish in an environment of lawless acquisition. There is no real contradiction between asserting the primacy of U.S. interests and blasting the nation-state barriers that might allow some organized defense of the interests of other peoples. But impressed by the apparent contradiction, some American liberals are comforted in their belief that nationalism is the number one enemy of mankind, whereas anything that goes against it is progressive. Indeed, an important asset of the anti-nation-state ideology is its powerful appeal to many liberals and progressives whose internationalism has been disoriented by the collapse of any discernable socialist alternative to capitalism and by the disarray of liberation struggles in the South of the planet. In the absence of any clear analysis of the contemporary world, the nation-state is readily identified as the cause of war, oppression, and violations of human rights. In short, the only existing context for institutionalized democracy is demonized as the mere expression of a negative, exclusive ideology, "nationalism". This contemporary libertarian view overlooks both the persistence of war in the absence of strong States and the historic function of the nation-state as framework for the social pact embodied in democratic forms of legislative decision-making. Condemnation of the nation-state in a structuralist rather than historical perspective produces mechanical judgments. What is smaller than the nation-state, or what transcends the nation-state, must be better. On the smaller scale, "identities" of all kinds, or "regions", generally undefined, are automatically considered more promising by much of the current generation. On the larger scale, the hope for democracy is being transferred to the European Union, or to international NGOs, or to theoretical institutions such as the proposed International Criminal Court. In the enthusiasm for an envisaged global utopia, certain crucial questions are being neglected, notably: who will pay for all this? How? Who will enforce which decisions? Until such practical matters are cleared up, brave new institutions such as the I.C.C. risk being no more than further instruments of selective intervention against weaker countries. But the illusion persists that structures of international democracy can be built over the heads of States that are not themselves genuinely supportive of such democracy. The simplistic interpretation of the Yugoslav crisis as Serbian "aggression" against peaceful multi-cultural Europe, is virtually unassailable, because it is not only credible according to this ideology but seems to confirm it. It was this ideology that made it possible for the Croatian, Slovenian, and Albanian secessionists and their supporters in Germany and the United States in particular to portray the Yugoslav conflict as the struggle of "oppressed little nations" to free themselves from aggressive Serbian nationalism. In fact, those "little nations" were by no means oppressed in Yugoslavia. Nowhere in the world were and are the cultural rights of national minorities so extensively developed as in Yugoslavia (including the small Yugoslavia made up of Serbia and Montenegro). Politically, not only was Tito himself a Croat and his chief associate, Edvard Kardelj, a Slovene, but a "national key" quotasystem was rigorously applied to all top posts in the Federal Administration and Armed Forces. The famous "self-management socialism" gave effective control over economic enterprises to Slovenians in Slovenia, Croatians in Croatia, and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The economic gap between the parts of Yugoslavia which had previously belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that is, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia's northern province of Vojvodina, on the one hand, and the parts whose development had been retarded by Ottoman rule (central Serbia, the Serbian province of Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia) continued to widen throughout both the first and second Yugoslavia. The secession movement in Slovenia was a typical "secession of the rich from the poor" (comparable to Umberto Bossi's attempt to detach rich northern Italy form the rest of the country, in order to avoid paying taxes for the poor South). In Croatia, this motivation was combined with the comeback of Ustashe elements which had gone into exile after World War II. The nationalist pretext of "oppression" is favoured by the economic troubles of the 1980's, which led leaders in each Republic to shun the others, and to overlook the benefits of the larger Federal market for all the Republics. The first and most virulent nationalist movements arose in Croatia and Kosovo, where separatism had been favoured by Axis occupation of the Balkans in World War II. It is only in the 1980's that a much milder Serbian nationalist reaction to economic troubles provided the opportunity for all the others to pinpoint the universal scapegoat: Serbian nationalism. Western public opinion, knowing little of Yugoslavia and thinking in terms of analogies with more familiar situations, readily sympathized with Slovenian and Croatian demands for independence. In reality, international law interprets "self- determination" as the right to secede and form an independent State only in certain (mostly colonial) circumstances, none of which applied to Slovenia and Croatia77See: Barbara Delcouri & Olivier Carten, Ex-Yougoslavie: Droit International, Politique et Ideologies (Brussels: Editions Bruylam, Editions de l'Universite de Bruxelles, 1997). The authors, specialists in international law at the Free University of Brussels, point out that there was no basis under international law for the secession of the Yugoslav Republics. The principle of "self-determination" was totally inapplicable in those cases.. All these fact were ignored by international media. Appeals to the dominant anti-State ideology led to frivolous acceptance in the West of the very grave act of accepting the unnegotiated breakup of an existing nation. Yugoslavia, by interpreting ethnic secession as a proper form of "self-determination", which it is not. There is no parallel in recent diplomatic annals for such an irresponsible act, and as a precedent it can only promise endless bloody conflict around the world. The New World Order In fact, the break-up of Yugoslavia has served to discredit and further weaken the United Nations, while providing a new role for an expending NATO. Rather than strengthening international order, it has helped shift the balance of power within the international order toward the dominant nation-states, the United States and Germany. If somebody had announced in 1989 that, well, the Berlin Wall has come down, now Germany can unite and send military forces back into Yugoslavia-and what is more in order to enforce a partition of the country along similar lines to those it imposed when it occupied the country in 1941-well, quite a number of people might have raised objections. However, that is what has happened, and many of the very people might who have been expected to object most strongly to what amounts to the most significant act of historical revisionism since World War II have provided the ideological cover and excuse. Perhaps dazed by the end of the Cold War, much of what remains of the left in the early nineties abandoned its critical scrutiny of the geostrategic Realpolitik underlying great power policies in general and U.S. policy in particular and seemed to believe that the world henceforth was determined by purely moral considerations. This has much to do with the privatization of "the left" in the past twenty years or so. The United States has led the way in this trend. Mass movements aimed at overall political action have declined, while single-issue movements have managed to continue. The single-issue movements in turn engender non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which, because of the requirements of fund- raising, need to adapt their causes to the mood of the times, in other words, to the dominant ideology to the media. Massive fund-raising is easiest for victims, using appeals to sentiment rather than to reason. Greenpeace has found that it can raise money more easily for baby seals than for combatting the development of nuclear weapons. This fact of life steers NGO activity in certain directions, away from political analysis toward sentiment. On another level, the NGOs offer idealistic internationalists a rare opportunity to intervene all around the world in matters of human rights and human welfare. And herein lies a new danger. Just as the "civilizing mission" of bringing Christianity to the heathen provided a justifying pretext for imperialist conquest of Asia and Africa in the past, today the protection of "human rights" may be the cloak for a new type of imperialist military intervention worldwide. Certainly, human rights are an essential concern of the left. Moreover, many individuals committed to worthy causes have turned to NGOs as the only available alternative to the decline of mass movements-a decline over which they have no control. Even a small NGO addressing a problem is no doubt better than nothing at all. The point is that great vigilance is needed, in this as in all other endeavours, to avoid letting good intentions be manipulated to serve quite contrary purposes. In a world now dedicated to brutal economic rivalry, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, human rights abuses can only increase. From this vast array of mans inhumanity to man, Western media and governments are unquestionably more concerned about human rights abuses that obstruct the penetration of transnational capitalism, to which they are organically linked, than about, say, the rights of Russian miners who have not been paid for a year. Media and government selectivity not only encourages humanitarian NGOs to follow their lead in focusing on certain countries and certain types of abuses, the case-by-case approach also distracts from active criticism of global economic structures that favour the basic human rights abuse of a world split between staggering wealth and dire poverty. Cuba is not the only country whose "human rights" may be the object of extraordinary concern by governments trying to replace local rulers with more compliant defenders of transnational interests. Such a motivation can by no means be ruled out in the case of the campaign against Serbia. In such situations, humanitarian NGOs risk being cast in the role of the missionaries of the past-sincere, devoted people who need to be "protected", this time by NATO military forces. The Somali expedition provided a rough rehearsal (truly scandalous if examined closely) for this scenario. On a much larger scale, first Bosnia, then Kosovo, provide a vast experimental terrain for cooperation between NGOs and NATO. There is urgent need to take care to preserve genuine and legitimate efforts on behalf of human rights from manipulation in the service of other political ends. This is indeed a delicate challenge. NGOs and NATO, hand in hand In former Yugoslavia, and especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Western NGOs have found a justifying role for themselves alongside NATO. They gain funding and prestige from the situation. Local employees of Western NGOs gain political and financial advantages over other local people, and "democracy" is not the peoples choice but whatever meets with approval of outside donors. This breeds arrogance among the outside benefactors, and cynicism among local people, who have the choice between opposing the outsiders or seeking to manipulate them. It is an unhealthy situation, and some of the most self-critical are aware of the dangers. Perhaps the most effectively arrogant NGO in regard to former Yugoslavia is the Vienna office of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki. On September 18, 1997, that organization issued a long statement announcing in advance that the Serbian elections to be held three days later "will be neither free nor fair." This astonishing intervention was followed by a long list of measures that Serbia and Yugoslavia must carry out or else", and that the international community must take to discipline Serbia and Yugoslavia. These demands indicated an extremely broad interpretation of obligatory standards of "human rights" as applied to Serbia, although not, obviously, to everybody else, since they included new media laws drafted "in full consultation with the independent media in Yugoslavia" as well as permission meanwhile to all "unlicensed but currently operating radio and television stations to broadcast without interference"88Some 400 radio and television stations have been operating in Yugoslavia with temporary licenses or none at all. The vast majority are in Serbia, a country of less than ten million inhabitants on a small territory of only 54.872 square miles. Human Rights Watch/Helsinki concluded by calling on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to "deny Yugoslavia readmission to the OSCE until there are concrete improvements in the country's human rights record, including respect for freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and minority rights, as well as cooperation with the International Criminal Tribuna for the former Yugoslavia". As for the demand to "respect freedom of the press," one may wonder what measures would satisfy HRW, in light of the fact that press freedom already exists in Serbia to an extent well beyond that in many other countries not being served with such an ultimatum. There exist in Serbia quite a range of media devoted to attacking the government, not only in Serbo-Croatian, but also in Albanian. As of one 1998, there were 2.319 print publications and 101 radio and television stations in Yugoslavia, over twice the number that existed in 1992. Belgrade alone has 14 daily newspapers. The state-supported national dailies have a joint circulation of 180.000 compared to around 350.000 for seven leading opposition dailies". Moreover, the judiciary in Serbia is certainly no less independent than in Croatia or Muslim Bosnia, and most certainly much more so. As for "minority rights," it would be hard to find a country anywhere in the world where they are better protected in both theory and practice than in Yugoslavia99Serbia is constitutionally defined as the nation of all its citizens, and not "of the Serbs" (in contrast to constitutional provisions of Croatia and Macedonia, for instance). In addition, the 1992 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) as well as the Serbian Constitution guarantee extensive rights to national minorities, notably the right to education in their own mother tongue, the right to information media in their own language, and the right to use their own language in proceedings before a tribunal of other authority. These rights are not merely formal, but are effectively respected as is shown by, for instance, the satisfaction of the 400,000-strong Hungarian minority and the large number of newspapers published by national minorities in Albanian, Hungarian and other languages. Romani (Gypsies) are by all accounts better treated in Yugoslavia than elsewhere in the Balkans. Serbia has a large Muslim population of varied nationalities, including refugees from Bosnia and a native Serb population of converts to Islam in Southeastern Kosovo, known as Goranci, whose religious rights national level. The only democracy it reorganizes is that of the "international community", which is summoned to act according to the recommendations of Human Rights Watch. This "international community", the IC, is in reality no democracy. Its decisions are formally taken at NATO meetings. The IC is not even a "community"; the initials could more accurately stand for "imperialist condominium", a joint exercise of domination by the former imperialist powers, torn apart and weakened by two World Wars, now brought together under U.S. domination with NATO as their military arm. Certainly there are frictions between the members of this condominium, but so long as their rivalries can be played out within the IC, the price will be paid by smaller and weaker countries. Media attention to conflicts in Yugoslavia is sporadic, dictated by Great Power interests, lobbies, and the institutional ambitions of "non-governmental organizations"-often linked to powerful governments-whose competition with each other for financial support provides motivation for exaggerating the abuses they specialize in denouncing. Yugoslavia, a country once known for its independent approach to socialism and international relations, economically and politically by far the most liberal country in Eastern Central Europe, has already been torn apart by Western support to secessionist movements: What is left is being further reduced to an ungovernable chaos by a continuation of the same process. The emerging result is not a charming bouquet of independent little ethnic democracies, but rather a new type of joint colonial rule by the IC enforced by NATO. Diana Johnstone was the European editor of In These Times from 1979 to 1990, and press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament from 1990 to 1996. She is the author of The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe in America's World (London/New York, Versa Schucken, 1984) and is currently working on a book on the former Yugoslavia. This article is an expended version of a talk given on May 25, 1998, at an international conference on media held in Athens, Greece. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From davegreen84 at yahoo.com Wed Feb 28 22:44:40 2018 From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com (David Green) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 22:44:40 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace-discuss] Letter to the editor References: <233226654.6461706.1519857880056.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <233226654.6461706.1519857880056@mail.yahoo.com> 'Dreamers' being treated like slaves Wed, 02/28/2018   I have read with interest News-Gazette coverage of support for immigrant "Dreamers," especially concerning the self-described Jewish progressive organization Bend the Arc: their conversation with Rodney Davis, trip to Washington, local march, etc. Certainly, Dreamers deserve a clear and efficient path to citizenship. Nevertheless, their plight is politically and morally exploited by both supporters and detractors. At a fundamental level, this narrowly construed issue ignores the "bipartisan" corporate/neoliberal policy context of globalization, the need for cheap immigrant labor, and the concurrent outsourcing of American industry, leading to bigoted liberal/elitist denigration of so-called "deplorables." Specifically, Democratic Party support for North America Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s (Bill Clinton/Gore) devastated both American factory workers and Mexican small industry and farmers, contributing to the origins of Dreamers' now-sympathetic plight. Analogously, there are those liberals and so-called progressives who claim to support refugees while not opposing ongoing American wars at the root of their victimization. And there are those self-described Jewish progressives who support the Dreamers but are silent regarding Palestinian refugees and African refugees in Israel, the latter being persecuted by Israeli authorities in ways that are not sufficiently photogenic for a News-Gazette article. Moreover, the Dreamers have become a "model" immigrant minority, providing a contrast that is historically familiar whether in terms of immigration status, race, or ethnicity. Anis Shivani writes on Counterpunch: "What exactly is a Dreamer? A Dreamer is the postmodern version of a slave, embodying the pliant immigrant we seem most comfortable with, expected to be grateful for grudging symbols of identity." David Green DAVID GREEN Champaign -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: