[Peace] Sat 11/7, 2-4pm: monthly peace demonstration, Main & Neil, downtown Champaign

[Stuart Levy]

Hello all,

Please join AWARE as we demonstrate for peace, tomorrow afternoon,
Saturday, Nov. 7th, from 2:00 - 4:00pm, at the corner of Main and Neil
in downtown Champaign.  Bring a sign, carry one of ours, or just hang out.


This month we'll have a flyer about the "SOA": School of the Americas
at Fort Benning, GA, nicknamed the School of Assassins and renamed WHINSEC,
which trains military personnel from across Latin America, and has trained
some of the worst human rights abusers around.  SOA graduates were involved
in the recent Honduran coup.  The annual demonstration to call for the SOA
to be shut down will be later this month, Nov. 20-22nd.

Why (else) do this?

Our increasingly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan grind
onward, killing and wounding and displacing ever more people, with too much
of the media debate asking how quickly the US should add another 40 thousand
troops in Afghanistan, not on how quickly our military can be removed,
let alone whether they should have been sent there at all, nor why.  

We hear too little about the human costs of these wars, but some of the effects
come home to us.  More of our soldiers are being killed, and veterans' suicide
rates are rising.  And the costs in money, direct and indirect, are enormous.
We can find better ways to spend a few hundred billion dollars per year,
and without using them to recapitalize gambling bankers either.

Our political, economic and military support for Israel continues,
hardly affected by their outright refusal to cease enlarging settlements
on confiscated Palestinian land, or even to acknowledge the war crimes
documented in Richard Goldstone's recent report.

Our current Administration follows in the footsteps of the previous one,
claiming unlimited state secrets' rights against revealing any information
about torture the US has committed, or -- just last week -- against court
review of the widespread warrantless wiretapping program, which is illegal
on its face.

People are weary of the wars.  We need to encourage them to speak out.
Please join us on Saturday.