***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night- Betty Everett’s “It’s In His Kiss”

 

A YouTube film clip of Betty Everett performing her classic, It's In His Kiss.

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I usually like to place song lyrics at the end of sketches as kind of a put paid to the thing but here you need to read the lyrics to get the mood that I am trying to convey.

 

It’s In His Kiss- Betty Everett

Does he love me?

I wanna know!

How can I tell if he loves me so?

(Is it in his eyes?)

Oh no! You need to see!

(Is it in his size?)

Oh no! You make believe!

If you wanna know

If he loves you so

Its in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

(Oh yeah! Or is it in his face?)

no girls! It's just his charms!

(In his warm embrace?)

no girls! That's just his arms!

If you wanna know

If he loves you so

It's in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

yeah!! Its in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

Oh, oh, oh, honey !

Squeeze him tight!

Find out what you wanna know!

promise love, and if it really is,

It's there in his kiss!

(How 'bout the way he acts?)

no no no! That's not the way!

You're not listenin' to all I'm sayin'!

If you wanna know

If he loves you so

It's in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

Oh, yeah! It’s in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

Oh, oh, oh, hold him!

Squeeze him tight!

Find out what you wanna know!

promise love, and if it really is,

well It's there in his kiss!

(How 'bout the way he acts?)

no no no! That's not the way!

You're not listenin' to all I'm sayin'!

If you wanna know

If he loves you so

It's in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

Oh, yeah ! Its in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

mmmm ! Its in his kiss!

(that's where it is)

mmmm is in his kiss

 

Well everyone knows by now that Jenny Dolan and John, John O’Connor, the running back gridiron hero of the North Adamsville football team, the one who almost single-handedly won them their state class championship are postponing their plans to be married now that John has been given a football scholarship to Boston College. See the love-bugs want to wait to see how that pans out, and besides they have each other through thick and thin so to wait is no big deal. But just in case that is not in the cards they are together more these days and so John is not to be seen around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor as much as in his old single days, or even as much as in his “married” days, the days since he and Jennie became an item a couple of years back.

For that matter Frankie Riley, the leader of the pack, hasn’t been seen lately either, ever since his 247th “break-up" with flame, Joanne, Joanne Doyle. That can only mean one thing, old Frankie is out catting around before Joanne reins him in again. And Chrissie knows, Chrissie McNamara knows damn well that Frankie is on the prowl because about twenty minutes after he got his “walking papers” from Joanne this time he was on the phone to Chrissie seeing if she was ‘available.’ “No dice,” said Chrissie and not because she wasn’t interested in Frankie. A lot of girls were, a little. Except “ball and chain” Joanne history meant that this was just Frankie lark time. Besides Chrissie and Joanne had been friends longer than Joanne had known Frankie and Chrissie liked Joanne, which is not what you could say about most girls who knew Joanne. But this is not about Joanne and so it need not be gotten into here.

What needs to be gotten into though is why Chrissie is ambling into Salducci’s Pizza Parlor at ten o’clock at night, a Thursday school night ten o’clock all by herself. Well, it ain’t for the pizza, although the way Tonio, the zen master pizza maker and owner of the parlor, makes those pizza slather and slither is worth coming in for almost any time. And it ain’t for Peter Paul Markin’s company, no way, not for a long time. Peter Paul is “holding down the fort” just now while his “boss” Frankie is, as is already known, out catting around. He probably already has made a note, a mental note, that Frankie for the 27th time has “struck out” with Chrissie and so maybe she wants his company. No way, no way that way, anyway. Peter Paul and Chrissie have gotten friendlier, or Chrissie has, every since Peter Paul started getting into the be-bop folk music scene now growing by leaps and bounds in Boston. They actually went to some coffeehouse over on Joy Street in Boston one night with Frankie and Joanne. The latter pair couldn’t wait to leave (probably because Frankie’s calling card, flannel shirt, jeans, work boots, and yah, midnight sunglasses didn’t raise an eyebrow. Half the guys in the place looked just like him, except maybe the sunglasses). But Chrissie and Peter Paul thought it was fantastic. Just no romance, no way, got it.

What does have Chrissie’s attention is one James Joseph Kelly, “Fingers Kelly,” who is sitting right next to Peter Paul at the moment. Now Fingers Kelly used to have the moniker of "Five Fingers" Kelly and for the squares out there that meant he was a clip artist and for the real squarey squares that meant he took things from stores…without paying. In other words he swiped things. But a couple of juvenile court appearances and some manhandling by James Joseph Kelly, Sr. shorten his moniker to Fingers, fast. Now what Chrissie wants to talk to Fingers about is why, why just a couple of hours ago, did Fingers state to the best of his recollection that he did not want to see one Christine Anne McNamara on Saturday night. And on that night take her to the annual North Adamsville High School “Hi-Jinx” dance.

Now Fingers, Fingers Kelly, is wise enough to the ways of the world to know that if he doesn’t grab Christine Anne McNamara with both arms when she is “after” him then some other guy (or guys) will be more than happy to do so. See Chrissie, besides being the head cheerleader at North is nothing but a fox. And Frankie, Fingers, hell even Peter Paul know this fact. Tall, brownish blonde hair, a few freckles, nice legs, and a very nice personality (has to be if Peter Paul thinks so) to go with that physical description. And she is interested in lots of things besides corn-ball cheer leading like that folk music stuff that was just mentioned. But Fingers has the freeze on for her.

Fingers is not bad looking, kind of tall, somewhat athletic (you had to be in his former career), not bad to talk to, but is nothing if not just an okay guy. So the number one question, well, really the number two question after how many days will it be before Joanne reins her lover boy, Frankie, in, is why Chrissie is after Fingers so bad. And why Fingers, knowing what he knows about North Adamsville high school guys, is not waiting with bells on to take Chrissie to the dance. Well, you have not been paying attention on that Finger’s part (Chrissie we will get to in a minute). Finger, when he was Five Fingers, always had kale (cash, money, dollars, okay) and was not afraid to spent it. But in his new life as just Fingers he is broke more than not. And see, he cannot go back to the five fingers way of life because one Senior Kelly will bop him good. And old Senior, while we are at it, is not lending sonny boy any dough (kale, okay) after forking put a ton of money to keep one James Joseph Kelly, Junior out of reform school. So that is the skinny, pure and simple. So if you have any loose change hanging around ship it over Finger’s way, and thanks.

Now Chrissie is another matter. As already mentioned Fingers is okay but just okay so it has to be something else. And it ain’t dough (although she does not know that Fingers is broke, totally broke). And it ain’t the no car for a Saturday night date. She said that she would borrow her father’s car. Even Peter Paul is puzzled by this situation and usually he is clueless about such “high” romance. The only thing anybody has come up with is something that people noticed after Chrissie first’s heavy “parking” date (you know what that is right, nobody is that square, kissing and more than kissing) with Fingers (a double date because of Finger’s car-deprivation so it’s not what you think). For a couple of days after that she was all dreamy-faced, all glowy and stuff. Humm.

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Published on Monday, April 28, 2014 by TruthDig.com

The Crime of Peaceful Protest

by Chris Hedges

Occupy Wall Street activists Eric Linkser, center left, and Cecily McMillan, far right, take turns shouting information to fellow protesters preparing to return to Zuccotti Park on Nov. 15, 2011. (Photo: AP/Bebeto Matthews)NEW YORK—Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.

The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan’s lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, “This debate is going to end.” He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said “is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. “I’m totally handicapped,” Stolar lamented to Zweibel.

The trial of McMillan, 25, is one of the last criminal cases originating from the Occupy protest movement. It is also one of the most emblematic. The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, has relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that come with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment and bars those with such convictions from serving on juries or working for law enforcement. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was not only about battling back against the rise of a corporate oligarchy that has sabotaged our democracy and made war on the poor and the working class. It was also about our right to peaceful protest. The police in cities across the country have been used to short-circuit this right. I watched New York City police during the Occupy protests yank people from sidewalks into the street, where they would be arrested. I saw police routinely shove protesters and beat them with batons. I saw activists slammed against police cars. I saw groups of protesters suddenly herded like sheep to be confined within police barricades. I saw, and was caught up in, mass arrests in which those around me were handcuffed and then thrown violently onto the sidewalk. The police often blasted pepper spray into faces from inches away, temporarily blinding the victims. This violence, carried out against nonviolent protesters, came amid draconian city ordinances that effectively outlawed protest and banned demonstrators from public spaces. It was buttressed by heavy police infiltration and surveillance of the movement. When the press or activists attempted to document the abuse by police they often were assaulted or otherwise blocked from taking photographs or videos. The message the state delivered is clear: Do not dissent. And the McMillan trial is part of the process.
McMillan, who spent part of her childhood living in a trailer park in rural Texas and who now is a graduate student at The New School for Social Research in New York, found herself with several hundred other activists at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan in March 2012 to mark the six-month anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street. The city, fearing the re-establishment of an encampment, deployed large numbers of police officers to clear the park just before midnight of that March 17. The police, heavily shielded, stormed into the gathering in fast-moving lines. Activists were shoved, hit, knocked to the ground. Some ran for safety. More than 100 people were arrested on the anniversary. After the violence, numerous activists would call the police aggression perhaps the worst experienced by the Occupy movement. In the mayhem McMillan—whose bruises were photographed and subsequently were displayed to Amy Goodman on the “Democracy Now!” radio, television and Internet program—was manhandled by a police officer later identified as Grantley Bovell. [Click here to see McMillan interviewed on “Democracy Now!” She appears in the last 10 minutes of the program.]

Bovell, who was in plainclothes and who, according to McMillan, did not identify himself as a policeman, allegedly came up from behind and grabbed McMillan’s breast—a perverse form of assault by New York City police that other female activists, too, suffered during Occupy protests. McMillan’s elbow made contact with his face, just below the eye, in what she says appeared to be a reaction to the grope; she says she has no memory of the incident. By the end of the confrontation she was lying on the ground bruised, beaten and convulsing. She was taken to a hospital emergency room, where police handcuffed her to a bed.

Had McMillan not been an Occupy activist, the trial that came out of this beating would have been about her receiving restitution from New York City for police abuse. Instead, she is charged with felony assault in the second degree and facing up to seven years in prison. She is expected to take the witness stand this week.

McMillan’s journey from a rural Texas backwater to a courtroom in New York is a journey of political awakening. Her parents, divorced when she was small, had little money. At times she lived with her mother, who had jobs at a Dillard’s department store, as an accountant for a pool hall and later, after earning a degree, as a registered nurse doing shifts of 60 to 70 hours in hospitals and nursing homes. There were also painful stretches of unemployment. Her mother, from Mexico, was circumspect about revealing her ethnicity in the deeply white conservative community, one in which blacks and other minorities were not welcome. She never taught her son and daughter Spanish. As a girl McMillan saw her mother struggle with severe depression and, in one terrifying instance, taken to a hospital after she passed out from an overdose of prescription pills. For periods, McMillan, her brother and her mother survived on welfare, and they moved often; she attended 13 schools, including five high schools. Her father worked at a Domino’s Pizza shop, striving in vain to become a manager.

Racism was endemic in the area. There was a sign in the nearby town of Vidor, not far from the Louisiana state line, that read: “If you are dark get out before dark.” It had replaced an earlier sign that said: “Don’t let the sun set on your ass nigger.”

The families around the McMillans struggled with all the problems that come with poverty—alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic and sexual violence and despair. Cecily’s brother is serving a seven-year sentence for drug possession in Texas.

“I grew up around the violence of poverty,” she told me as she lit another cigarette while I interviewed her Thursday night in an apartment in Harlem. She smoked nearly nonstop during our conversation. “It was normative.”

Her parents worked hard to fit into the culture of rural Texas. She said she competed as a child in a beauty pageant called Tiny Miss Valentines of Texas. She was on a cheerleading team. She ran track.

“My parents tried,” McMillan said. “They wanted to give us everything. They wanted us to have a lifestyle we could be proud of. My parents, because we were ... at times poor, were ashamed of who we were. I asked my mother to buy Tommy Hilfiger clothes at the Salvation Army and cut off the insignias and sew them onto my old clothes. I was afraid of being made fun of at school. My mother got up at 5 in the morning before work and made us pigs in a blanket, putting the little sausages into croissants. She wanted my brother and myself to be proud of her. She really did a lot with so very little.”

McMillan spent most of her summers with her paternal grandparents in Atlanta. They opened her to another world. She attended a Spanish-language camp. She went to blues and jazz festivals. She attended a theater summer camp called Seven Stages that focused on cultural and political perspectives. When she was a teenager she wrote collective theater pieces, including one in which she wore the American flag as a burka and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a character dressed as Darth Vader walked onto the stage. “My father was horrified,” she said. “He walked out of the theater.”

As a 13-year-old she was in a play called “I Hate Anne Frank.” “It was about American sensationalism,” she said. “It asked how the entire experience of the Holocaust could be turned for many people into a girl’s positive narrative, a disgusting false optimism. It was not well received.”

Art, and especially theater, awakened her to the realities endured by others, from Muslims in the Middle East to the black underclass in the United States. And, unlike in the Texas towns where she grew up, she made black friends in Atlanta. She began to wonder about the lives of the African-Americans who lived near her in rural Texas. What was it like for them? How did they endure racism? Did black women suffer the way her mother suffered? She began to openly question and challenge the conventions and assumptions of the white community around her. She read extensively, falling in love with the work of Albert Camus.

“I would miss bus stops because I would be reading ‘The Stranger’ or ‘The Plague,’ ” she said. “Existentialism to me was beautiful. It said the world is shit. It said this is the lot humanity is given. But human beings have to try their best. They swim and they swim and they swim against the waves until they can’t swim any longer. You can choose to view these waves as personal attacks against you and give up, or you can swim. And Camus said you should not sell out for a lifeboat. These forces are impersonal. They are structural. I learned from Camus how to live and how to die with dignity.”

She attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., under a scholarship. After graduating, she worked as a student teacher in inner-city schools in Chicago. She joined the Young Democratic Socialists. She enrolled at The New School for Social Research in New York City in the fall of 2011 to write a master’s thesis on Jane Addams, Hull House and the settlement movement. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began in the city six days after she arrived at the school. She said that at first she was disappointed with the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park. She felt it lacked political maturity. She had participated in the political protests in Madison, Wis., in early 2011, and the solidarity of government workers, including police, that she saw there deeply influenced her feelings about activism. She came away strongly committed to nonviolence.

“Police officers sat down to occupy with us,” she said of the protests in Madison. “It was unprecedented. We were with teachers, the fire department, police and students. You walked around saying thank you to the police. You embraced police. [But then] I went to Occupy in New York and saw drum circles and people walking around naked. There was yoga. I thought, what is this? I thought for many protesters this was just some social experiment they would go back to their academic institutions and write about. Where I come from people are hungry. Women are getting raped. Fathers and stepfathers beat the shit out of children. People die. ... Some people would rather not live.”

“At first I looked at the occupiers and thought they were so bourgeois,” she went on. “I thought they were trying to dress down their class by wearing all black. I was disgusted. But in the end I was wrong. I wasn’t meeting them where they were. These were kids, some of whom had been to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, [who] were the jewels of their family’s legacy. They were doing something radical. They had never been given the opportunity to have their voices heard, to have their own agency. They weren’t clowns like I first thought. They were really brave. We learned to have conversations. And that was beautiful. And these people are my friends today.”

She joined Occupy Wall Street’s Demands Working Group, which attempted to draw up a list of core demands that the movement could endorse. She continued with her academic work at The New School for Social Research. She worked part time. She was visiting her grandmother, who was terminally ill in Atlanta, in November 2011 when the police cleared out the Zuccotti Park encampment. When she returned to the New School she took part in the occupation of school buildings, but some occupiers trashed the property, leading to a bitter disagreement between her and other activists. Radical elements in the movement who supported the property destruction held a “shadow trial” and condemned her as a “bureaucratic provocateur.”

“I started putting together an Affinity Group after the New School occupation,” she said. “I realized there was a serious problem between anarchists and socialists and democratic socialists. I wanted, like Bayard Rustin, to bring everyone together. I wanted to repair the fractured left. I wanted to build coalitions.”

McMillan knows that the judge in her trial—who in one comment on the lawyers’ judge-rating website The Robing Room is called “a prosecutor with a robe”—has stacked the deck against her.

The British newspaper The Guardian reported that Bovell, the policeman who McMillan says beat her, has been investigated at least twice by the internal affairs department of the New York City Police Department. In one of these cases, Bovell and his partner were sued for allegedly using an unmarked police car to strike a 17-year-old fleeing on a dirt bike. The teenager said his nose was broken, two teeth were knocked out and his forehead was lacerated. The case was settled out of court for a substantial amount of money. The officer was also captured on a video that appeared to show him kicking a suspect on the floor of a Bronx grocery.

In addition, Bovell was involved in a ticket-fixing scandal in his Bronx precinct.

Austin Guest, 33, a graduate of Harvard University who was arrested at Zuccotti Park on the night McMillan was assaulted, is suing Bovell for allegedly intentionally banging his head on the internal stairs of an MTA bus that took him and other activists in for processing.

The judge has ruled that Bovell’s involvement in the cases stemming from the chasing of the youth on the dirt bike and the Guest arrest cannot be presented as evidence in the McMillan case.

The corporate state, which has proved utterly incapable of addressing the grievances and injustices endured by the underclass, is extremely nervous about the mass movements that have swept the country in recent years. And if protests erupt again—as I think they will—the state hopes it will have neutralized much of the potential leadership. Being an activist in peaceful mass protest is the only real “crime” McMillan has committed. 

“Everyone should come and sit through this trial to see the facade that we call democracy,” she said. “The resources one needs to even remotely have a chance in this system are beyond most people. Thank God I went to college and graduate school. Thank God Marty and Rebecca are my lawyers. Thank God I am an organizer and have some agency. I wait in line every day to go to court. I read above my head the words that read something like ‘Justice Is the Foundation of Democracy.’ And I wonder if this is ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ People of color, people who are poor, the people where I come from, do not have a chance for justice. Those people have no choice but to plea out. They can never win in court. I can fight it. This makes me a very privileged person. It is disgusting to think that this is what our democracy has come to. I am heartbreakingly sad for our country.”

© 2014 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

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Alfred, Sunday I was in Syracuse, NY for a mass protest against drones, and of the outrageous "orders of protection" granted by a local judge against specific protesters, aimed at keeping them away from Hanock Air Force Base, from where drone operations in Afghanistan are piloted.  We began at Tucker Missionary Baptist Church with almost 500 as Cornel West spoke about poverty, racism and drones.  "How does virtue stand up to brute force?" he asked, quoting WEB Dubois?  One way Cornel answered is that we cannot allow the victims of US imperialism to be invisible. We left the church and gathered in a parking lot adjacent to the base, but out of sightline of the base, because more than 40 people subject to the orders of protection were warned they would be arrested if they approached the base -- or even if they could be seen from the base!  Rae Kramer, one of those under the orders, spoke about years of work in supporting victims of domestic violence, the very women for whom "orders of protection" were created in response to advocates' struggle.  Ironically, those actual orders are often violated, or unenforced.  But to use the same framework to cast political protesters as a danger to the commander of the base is an outrageous attack on the free speech and assembly rights of the people who are risking their freedom to stop US drone war through holding signs on public property. Most of the focus on yesterday's protest, though, was on past victims, and possible targets of the US drone war.  We head this message from Afghanistan: Last year, Raz Mohammad, a young man from MaidanShahr, Wardak Provice, Afghanistan, submitted a request for an Order of Protection for his family and community after his young brother-in-law was killed in a drone strike. Raz said: “On Friday,the 30th of May, 2008 my brother-in-law was killed by a drone, along with four of his friends. My brother-in-law was a student and was innocent. Accountability from the U.S. military for this incident was non-existent. This incident created a situation which was beyond imagination. It affected the minds of my sister and all members of my family. When my nephew was 5 years old, he asked his mother, “Where is father?” My sister replied, “Your father was killed by a computer.” These negative effects on all of us persist till today. I am worried for my family and the people of MaidanShahr. I request that the U.S. courts protect my sister, my family and my village. I wish that U.S. will be able to save all humanity from drones.”     **Translated by Hakim Young World Can't Wait was there with a model Reaper drone (the same model piloted from Hancock AFB computers).  There were hundreds of photos of past and potential vicitms from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen & Somalia, carried in a solemn procession which ended in a "free speech zone" behind barricades.  The military filmed us from every direction, erected a tower 35' above the gathering, where shooters were posted, and lined up armed guards on hits perimeter.  While we read our own "orders of protection" for the victims of their base.  "NO MORE inappropriate touching" of children and people by the U.S! Dear Spain: Please do what the U.S. won’t. Prosecute Torture. A Spanish judge has just decided to proceed with a case against Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. The Spanish legislature can be expected to try to block the case, unless perhaps they hear our voices loudly and clearly enough. We began this effort in 2011, visiting Spanish embassies, generating media and placing advertisements in Spain, and communicating our appreciation for Spanish efforts to prosecute U.S. torturers. Now we need another big push. Please sign this letter now, and we will deliver it to Spain: To the people of Spain From the people of the United States of America and allies abroad We are writing to thank you and to ask for your support as your courts consider cases to bring American officials to justice for the crime of torture. A Spanish judge, acting under international law, will soon decide whether to investigate U.S. officials' roles in authorizing torture. We hope you agree that such cases must go forward, despite pressure from the Obama administration to drop them. The organizations signing this letter represent hundreds of thousands in the American public who believe the U.S. government must be held to the same rule of law as other countries. We are profoundly disappointed that our own government refuses to prosecute former officials, despite open admissions and government documents showing that they approved torture. It will take a public show of support for the case to withstand pressures from Washington. WikiLeaks cables show the extremes to which U.S. officials have gone to thwart any attempt by Spain or other countries to uphold justice. We applaud the courage shown by Spanish officials who insist on giving priority to the rule of law. Despite earlier assertions by President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that waterboarding is torture, former President George W. Bush has publicly stated that he authorized waterboarding and added proudly that he would do it again. In a TV interview aired on November 8, 2010, Bush said he considered waterboarding legal "because the lawyer said it was legal." Waterboarding and other forms of torture were banned by the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the United States in 1994. If international law is to serve any useful purpose, other countries must condemn violations "by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment," in the words of the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg. We sincerely hope that the citizens of Spain and its judiciary will dispel the notion that any country is above the law. Sign this petition. International Lawyers Seek Justice for Iraqis Dahr Jamail writes: International lawyers and activists converged at a conference titled The Iraq Commission, in Brussels, Belgium, April 16 and 17, with the primary aim of bringing to justice government officials who are guilty of war crimes in Iraq. "Within a few days of this, a lawless atmosphere developed within my unit,” Ross Caputi, a former marine who took part in the brutal November 2004 siege of Fallujah told the Iraq Commission. "There was a lot of looting going on. I saw people searching the pockets of the dead resistance fighters for money. Some people were mutilating corpses." Ross Caputi served in the US military, from 2003 to 2006, and participated in the massive military siege of Fallujah in November 2004. (Photo: Dahr Jamail) ...Ross Caputi spoke at length about the war crimes and atrocities he witnessed during the November 2004 US military siege of Fallujah. He went on to explain that he and his fellow soldiers were not told that US military personnel, who were manning the checkpoints that surrounded Fallujah, were not allowing any "military-aged males" to flee the city, despite a lack of evidence proving they may have been resistance fighters. "This contributed to the indiscriminate nature of the operation," Caputi said, of the siege that, according to the Iraqi Fallujah-based human rights and environmental NGO Conservation Center of Environmental and Reserves in Fallujah, resulted in approximately 5,000 residents being killed, at least 60 percent of them civilians. "We called in airstrikes and used tanks and bulldozers in residential neighborhoods," Caputi told a silent audience populated by many Iraqis. "There could have been civilians trying to hide out in their homes, but we never took any precautions to make sure there wasn't. We simply fired wherever we thought there were combatants." Caputi told of a tactic used called "reconnaissance by fire," which is, as he explained, "when you fire somewhere, into a building for example, to see if any combatants are there. This tactic is obviously indiscriminate, but we never even considered the possibility that there might be civilians in these houses that we were firing into." "I even saw a unit bulldozing an entire neighborhood, one house after another without checking to see if anyone was inside," Caputi, who has since founded the Justice for Fallujah project, added. Caputi went on to tell of the use of the restricted weapon white phosphorous in civilian areas, as well as another incident: "When a 10-year-old boy was bunkered inside a house with two resistance fighters. We demolished the house on top of all three of them." He concluded his remarks by telling the audience his life since that time has been about "finding and facing the truth" and working to make amends to the people of Fallujah... Continue reading... Share this message: World Can't Wait Conversations: 10pm Eastern / 7pm Pacific May 1: Discussion among activists on key issues World Can't Wait is acting on: prosecution of war crimes, closure of Guantanamo, recent drone strikes in Yemen, and the wave of deportations by the current president & Deporter in Chief. On May 15: Conversation with Carlos Warner, a federal defender and attorney for Guantanamo prisoners, as we prepare for protests May 23 to Close Guantanamo NOW. REGISTER for conference calls.         — CALENDAR — Tues April 29 Berkeley CA Ground the Drones World Can't Wait will display a 1/5-scale replica of Obama's 'Reaper' drone outside Berkeley City Hall in support of Peace and Justice Commission provisions to outlaw'extrajudicial targeted killings of foreign nationals and U.S. citizens, militarization of local police agencies,' and vast surveillance of billions of people. 'Old' City Hall 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. WayBerkeley, CA 5:00 pm Sat May 3 Ft. Meade Maryland NSA Action Against Killer Drones 1:00 pmDirections The National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance is organizing an action against drones at the NSA. All are welcome. There will be an opportunity to risk arrest, but also other opportunities if you are not risking arrest. If you considering risking arrest, please contact joyfirst5@gmail.com Tuesday May 6 New Brunswick NJ Protest Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers 5:30 pm Teach-in protesting invite to Condoleezza Rice to give the Rutgers University Commencement on May 18.  Rutgers University Student Activities Center, New Brunswick, NJ, followed by a screening of the Academy Award winning documentary, "Taxi to The Dark Side." Details here. Cheers to Rutgers University Faculty for opposing honors for Condoleezza Rice (more here). MORE EVENTS Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can't Wait

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