President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning

Because the public deserves the truth and whistle-blowers deserve protection.

We are military veterans, journalists, educators, homemakers, lawyers, students, and citizens.

We ask you to consider the facts and free US Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.

As an Intelligence Analyst stationed in Iraq, Pvt. Manning had access to some of America’s dirtiest secrets—crimes such as torture, illegal surveillance, and corruption—often committed in our name.

Manning acted on conscience alone, with selfless courage and conviction, and gave these secrets to us, the public.

“I believed that if the general public had access to the information contained within the[Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy,”

Manning explained to the military court. “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.”

Journalists used these documents to uncover many startling truths. We learned:

• Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus helped support torture in Iraq.
• Deliberate civilian killings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan went unpunished.
• Thousands of civilian casualties were never acknowledged publicly.
• Most Guantanamo detainees were innocent.

For service on behalf of an informed democracy, Manning was sentenced by military judge Colonel Denise Lind to a devastating 35 years in prison.

Government secrecy has grown exponentially during the past decade, but more secrecy does not make us safer when it fosters unaccountability.

Pvt. Manning was convicted of Espionage Act charges for providing WikiLeaks with this information, but  the prosecutors noted that they would have done the same had the information been given to The New York Times. Prosecutors did not show that enemies used this information against the US, or that the releases resulted in any casualties.

Pvt. Manning has already been punished, even in violation of military law.

She has been:

• Held in confinement since May 29, 2010.

• Subjected to illegal punishment amounting to torture for nearly nine months at Quantico Marine Base, Virginia, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Article 13—facts confirmed by both the United Nation’s lead investigator on torture and military judge Col. Lind.

• Denied a speedy trial in violation of UCMJ, Article 10, having been imprisoned for over three years before trial.

• Denied anything resembling a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to change the charge sheet to match evidence presented, and enter new evidence, after closing arguments.

Pvt. Manning believed you, Mr. President, when you came into office promising the most transparent administration in history, and that you would protect whistle-blowers. We urge you to start upholding those promises, beginning with this American prisoner of conscience.

We urge you to grant Pvt. Manning’s petition for a Presidential Pardon.

FIRST& LAST NAME _____________________________________________________________

STREET ADDRESS _____________________________________________________________

CITY, STATE & ZIP _____________________________________________________________

EMAIL& PHONE _____________________________________________________________

Please return to: For more information: www.privatemanning.org

Private Manning Support Network, c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610

********

Markin comments:   

There is no question that now that her trial, if one can called what took place down in Fort Meade a trial in the summer of 2013 rather than a travesty, that a year after her conviction on twenty plus counts and having received an outrageous thirty-five year sentence essentially for telling us the truth about American atrocities and  nefarious actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else the American government can stick its nose that Chelsea Manning's case has dropped from view. Although she occasionally gets an Op/Ed opportunity and has several legal moves going from action to get the  necessary hormonal treatments reflecting her real sexual identity to now preparing the first appeal of her conviction to another military tribunal the popular uproar against her imprisonment has become a hush. While the appeals process may produce some results, perhaps a reduction in sentence, the short way home for her is a presidential pardon right now. I urge everybody to sign on to the Amnesty International petition above to put the pressure on President Barack Obama for clemency.                   

 

I attended some of the sessions of Chelsea Manning’s court-martial in the summer of 2013 and am often asked about what she could expect from the various procedures going forward to try to “spring” her from the clutches of the American government, or as I say whenever I get the chance to not leave “our buddy behind” in the time-honored military parlance. I have usually answered depending on what stage her post-conviction case is in that her sentence was draconian by all standards for someone who did not, although they tried to pin this on her, “aid the enemy.” Certainly Judge Lind though she was being lenient with thirty-five years when the government wanted sixty (and originally more before some of the counts were consolidated). The next step was to appeal, really now that I think about it, a pro forma appeal to the commanding general of the Washington, D.C. military district where the trial was held. There were plenty of grounds to reduce the sentence but General Buchanan backed up his trial judge in the winter of 2014. Leaving Chelsea supporters right now with only the prospect of a presidential pardon to fight for as the court appeals are put together which will take some time.

No question since her trial, conviction, and draconian sentence of thirty-five years imposed by a vindictive American government heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning’s has fallen off the radar. The incessant news cycle which has a short life cycle covered her case sporadically, covered the verdict, covered the sentencing and with some snickers cover her announcement directly after the sentencing that she wanted to live as her true self, a woman. (A fact that her supporters were aware of prior to the announcement but agreed that the issue of her sexual identity should not get mixed up with her heroic actions.) Since then despite occasional public rallies and actions her case had tended, as most political prisoner cases do, to get caught up in the appeals process and that keeps it out of the limelight.            

On Sunday October 12^th Chelsea Manning was honored and remembered by the Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade with a banner calling for her freedom as they marched in the annual Honk parade which goes through Somerville, Ma into Harvard Square for the Octoberfest. The banner drew applause and return shouts of “Free Chelsea.” The Smedley Butler Brigade continues to stand behind our sister. We will not leave her behind. We also urge everybody to sign the Amnesty International on-line petition calling on President Obama to use his constitutional authority to pardon Chelsea Manning

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/usa-one-year-after-her-conviction-chelsea-manning-must-be-released-2014-07-30  

I got my start in working with anti-war GIs back in the early 1970s after my own military service was over. After my own service I felt a compelling need to fight the monster from the outside after basically fruitless and difficult efforts inside. That work included helping create a couple of GI coffeehouses near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down at Fort Dix in New Jersey in order for GIs to have a “friendly” space in which to think through what they wanted to do in relationship to the military.

Some wanted help to apply for the then tough to get discharge for conscientious objection. Tough because once inside the military, at least this was the way things went, the military argued against the depth of the applying soldier’s convictions and tended to dismiss such applications out of hand. Only after a few civil court cases opened up the application process later when the courts ruled that the military was acting arbitrarily and capriciously in rejecting such applications out of hand did things open up a little in that channel. Others wanted to know their rights against what they were told by their officers and NCOs. But most, the great majority, wanted a place, a non-military place, a non-GI club, where they could get away from the smell, taste and macho talk of war.

Although there are still a few places where the remnants of coffeehouses exist like the classic Oleo Strut down at Fort Hood in Texas the wars of the past decade or so had produced no great GI resistance. There are many reasons for this, mainly the kind of volunteer the military accepts but probably a greater factor is that back then was the dominance of the citizen-soldier, the draftee, in stirring things up, stirring things up inside as a reflection of what was going on out on the streets and on the campuses. I still believe that in the final analysis you have to get to the “cannon fodder,” the grunts, the private soldier if you want to stop the incessant war machine. Check out what happened, for example, on Russian the front when the desperate soldiers left the trenches during 1917 after they got fed up with the Czar and the whole mess.

Everyone who has the least bit of sympathy for the anti-war struggles of the past decade should admire what Chelsea Manning has done by her actions releasing that treasure trove of information about American atrocities in Iraq and elsewhere. She has certainly paid the price for her convictions with a draconian sentence. It is hard to judge how history will record any particular heroic action like hers but if the last real case with which her action can be compared with is a guide, Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers, she should find an honored spot. Moreover Chelsea did that action while in the military which has its own peculiar justice system. Her action, unlike back in Vietnam War times, when the Army was half in mutiny was one of precious few this time out. Now that I think about she does not have to worry about her honored place in history. It is already assured. But just to be on the safe side let’s fight like hell for her freedom. We will not leave our sister Chelsea behind.              

 

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

 

********

***Some Guys Get The Tough Breaks- George Raft’s Invisible Stripes

DVD Review

From The Pen of Frank Jackman 

Back in his corner boy days in the early 1960s, that corner being located in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street in North Adamsville Frankie Riley, the acknowledged schoolboy king of that corner, used to regal the rest of us with his sad sack stories about guys he (and we) knew from the neighborhoods who bought the ticket, took the big step-off to the state pen, to Walpole, Concord, or Norfolk depending on what they had for space, and how bad the guy have screwed up, and how many times. One guy, Spike Wallace, a big tough guy whose name was well known to the assembled gathering had already been in Concord for a nickel for an armed robbery he carried out single-handedly (two years off for good time, first serious offense, although he had an arm’s length list of juvenile and petty adult offenses, money offenses like purse snatching, larceny, auto thief, a few con games with some rubes in Gloversville). Despite that good time prison hardened Spike on the inside, made him more determined than ever in his career path figuring that if he had been smarter he would have shot the gas station attendant whom he robbed and who identified him at trial and be done with it. Not that he was afraid to use a gun, had been a shoot ‘em up guy on a couple of occasions that he never got caught on. But here is where Spike kind of ran out of luck when the deal went down because no sooner had he gotten out of stir than he was picked up for his part in the South Shore National Bank heist, the heist where an overeager bank guard was wounded and in no time they traced the bullet to a gun Spike was known to use (he was crazy for this old Colt .45 and refused to ditch it and thus the ease of the pick-up). So Spike will be doing the next ten to twenty washing floors for the state.
Another guy, Slippery Samson, a good guy just a couple of years older than us who I knew in junior high, hung around with for a while and did a couple of small goofy capers with, you know, clipping stuff from stores, stealing milk money from younger kids, and then kind of lost track of, was beginning his career for the state, or getting ready to if the judge and jury in the matter had any say about the question for a short dough stick up of the Esso gas station over on Wayland Street. The funny thing about Slippery was that he could have, should have gotten away clean, should have been sitting over on Carson Beach in Southie drinking his beer from a brown-bagged can but somebody, some guy from the corner boy crowd at Harry’s Variety (one of Red Crowley’s rough crew boys whom we kept clear of under all conditions and kept clear of Harry’s too just in case Red didn’t like our faces one day and wanted to do something about it), dimed on him after Slippery had taken the guy’s girl from him one heavy-drinking night and he was sore enough to break the code. That guy was dog meat once things settled, not from Slippery who was kind of a lone wolf and didn’t have guys to back him up, but Red who probably chain whipped his ass just for breaking the code, his corner boy or not.
Some nights Frankie would have no new guy from the neighborhoods to talk about, no new guy who didn’t get a break, or who should have beaten some rap except this, that or the other thing happened to block his path and keep him off the streets. On those nights, some of them anyway, some night when some frail hadn’t busted one of us up, we weren’t talking about lack of dough and maybe how to get some quick, or daydreaming about some grandiose caper, Frankie would fill up the time giving us his take on some movie he had seen up at the Strand Theater in Adamsville Square. Now the reason I mention the Strand is because they were then strictly a re-run operation and what they re-ran to keep expenses down was black and white movies that with everything in color nobody but solemn, serious, what did Frankie call them, call himself, oh yeah, an aficionado, wanted to watch black and white films. But see Frankie was crazy for them not so much that they were not in color as that some of the greatest gangster movies ever made were done in black and white. You know Edward G. Robinson, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney and plenty of rough looking guys who had supporting roles. So one night, one Saturday night if I recall, Frankie was telling us about this film he had taken his sweetie, Joanne, to on the previous Friday night at the Strand, Invisible Stripes, starring George Raft and Humphrey Bogart. (By the way Joanne hated the Strand, hated the stink of the place from winos and junkies who stayed there all day since they didn’t mind seeing the same film about six times as long as they could come out off the street and nobody bothered them there, hated black and white films, said they depressed her, hated old time gangster movies worst with the random violence and piled up bodies, but she loved Frankie against all reason, had since sixth grade, and so there you have it.)                     
Frankie said it was funny how he didn’t like the guy George Raft played from the start, Clift, since the opening scenes had him and the guy Humphrey Bogart played, Chuck, getting ready to leave the big house at Sing Sing after doing their time. In the inevitable last meeting with the warden Clift spent his time fawning all over him saying that he would follow the straight and narrow now, that he had seen the error of his ways, that he had learned his lesson about staying on the right side of the law and all that blather that would sicken even the most naïve corner boy. Jack Slack corner boys were by no means the toughest, far from it, since Red Crowley’s corner boys were real menaces to society but we still imbibed all the old corner boy attitudes, especially the ban against sucking up to authority figures, unless you were conning them for the greater good.
Chuck, in contrast, knew the score, knew that it was every man for himself in this wicked old world, and knew that he was on borrowed time anyway, knew he was a dead man walking so he told the warden to save all the pretty speeches, to spare him all the goodie bullshit, and save the good words for the Sunday school boys. So Frankie’s money was flat-out on Chuck to go out blazing, especially in the 1930s when the streets were mean at best, meaner than usual what with everybody scraping for dough, and the prison system was set up as just a warehouse for “dead men walking.” So the tale was set early on, the good con-bad con duel that would drive most of the movie.  
Here is another funny thing though Frankie said as the plot moved along that he got to liking Clift better (although Clift did have his sappy moments around his mother, but a lot of guys are like that, keeping the lid on as Frankie told everybody he had to do with his own steely-eyed Irish “don’t air your dirty linen in public” mother). Frankie still though Clift was foolish to think he could become a regular citizen but he really did take a beating from society once he got on the outside. First off he lost his fickle girlfriend who didn’t want to hang around with an ex-con, saw no future in staying knee-deep in the tenements which appeared to be Clift’s fate. Truth, Frankie said, she probably had some other Johnny on the hook, probably was going between the sheets with some other guy the first day Clift hit the big house, although she swore she hadn’t, had been true blue but Clift could not have been that trusting no matter how bad he wanted to have those white picket fence dreams. The dame thing as Frankie said he knew from the Frankie-Joanne battles could really throw a guy off since half of what guys did things for, illegal things, was to keep some frail in clover so he felt Clift really did catch a tough break there. Then he lost a succession of lower and lower skilled jobs due to his status as an ex-con even though a condition of parole was to be employed, or else. Then when he did look like he was going to survive in the employed world even if on cheap street he got picked up and falsely accused of being the finger man for a robbery at the place where he worked. On top of that his younger brother, played by William Holden, was getting ready to chuck the nine to five life, started to see some value in Clift’s old lifestyle, started to see he had to take what he needed from wherever he could get it, and from whoever he could get it from so he and his girl could get off the dime on cheap street. Clift freaked out when that issue came to a head, when younger brother made more sense that Clift’s taking the guff from society. So Clift went looking for his old pal, Chuck.
Of course Chuck, having no illusions about society’s attitudes toward ex-cons and itchy for dough had gone back to robbing banks and other such places where dough is, or stealing stuff you can get dough for. Chuck had legendary bank robber Willie Sutton’s attitude. Sutton a personal hero of Frankie’s as he made clear almost every time he talked gangster movies since he famously said when he asked by the coppers why he robbed banks he said that was because that was where the dough was. Smart boy, and Chuck was smart to follow that advice. And so Clift bought into the operations with him, and wound up doing pretty good at it for a guy who wanted to go on the straight and narrow. But he started to buckle under when he had enough dough to put younger brother right.
Frankie said even though it bothered him naturally no film, black and white or color, could let guys do robberies, shoot up a few places, nick a few coppers, public or private, and not pay any price, no, just can’t be done. So naturally, after the younger brother had been falsely implicated in a robbery after Clift had called the robbery business quits, there has to be a final confrontation between the cops and the bad guys, bad guys losing, losing fatally including Clift. Frankie said when the deal went down, when the die was cast, Clift went out kind of righteous, went out better than that sniveling stuff with the warden at the beginning of the film. And maybe thinking about Slippery, and maybe about us too, Frankie said guys like Clift never drew a blessed break in this wicked old world. Amen, brother.            

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-

Dear friends Please attend this important trial if you can. Thanks Payday

THUR 11 Dec. – The judge is still summing up the case.  He will cover crucial medical evidence tomorrow (Friday), starting from 10am.  The jury is likely to go out some time Monday.  Please come, especially if you haven’t been yet; help fill the gallery, support the family and bear witness to this very important trial. We also highlighted Jimmy Mubenga at the fantastic London Die-in for Eric Garner, choked to death by New York police. G4S Guards on Trial for the death of Jimmy Mubenga   10am,  Court 16 Central Crown Court (Old Bailey) London EC4M 7EH Nr. St Paul’s tube The trial of the three guards who restrained Mr Mubenga on board a British Airways flight is likely to finish next week. Closing arguments are expected to start Monday. The jury is likely to go out Wednesday and we urge all who can to come and bear witness in the final days of the trial.   A member of the All African Women’s Group (a self-help group of asylum seekers) from the Congo who has attended regularly said: “Witnesses describe Jimmy calling out “I can’t breathe”, and asking for help but he didn’t get it. What happened to Jimmy can happen to any of us anywhere, unless justice is done.” Women of Colour Global Women’s Strike, which has helped co-ordinate a rota of people to go to the trial, says: "We are attending the trial to support Mr Mubenga’s family and to demonstrate to all that Jimmy’s life mattered. 827 people have died in police custody since 2004 many of them people of colour. It is women – mothers, sisters, daughters, wives – who are left to pick up the pieces, defend our loved ones and are at the forefront of campaigns for justice. From London to Ferguson, New York to Gaza, as long as money is poured into privatised/militarised police forces, prioritising profit over life, all our lives are on the line." 0207 482 2496                 globalwomenstrike.net   To check hearing times: Crown Court 0207 248 3277 or via their website

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-

A Society of Captives

Email    Print    Share

Share on reddit

Posted on Dec 7, 2014

By Chris Hedges

  Protesters conduct a “die-in” Dec. 6 at Grand Central Station in New York City as police watch. The demonstration opposed a grand jury’s decision not to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner. AP/John Minchillo

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to launch a pilot program in New York City to place body cameras on police officers and conduct training seminars to help them reduce their adrenaline rushes and abusive language, along with the establishment of a less stringent marijuana policy, are merely cosmetic reforms. The killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island was, after all, captured on video. These proposed reforms, like those out of Washington, D.C., fail to address the underlying cause of poverty, state-sponsored murder and the obscene explosion of mass incarceration—the rise of the corporate state and the death of our democracy. Mass acts of civil disobedience, now being carried out across the country, are the only mechanism left that offers hope for systematic legal and judicial reform. We must defy the corporate state, not work with it.
The legal system no longer functions to protect ordinary Americans. It serves our oligarchic, corporate elites. These elites have committed $26 billion in financial fraud. They loot the U.S. Treasury, escape taxation, drive down wages, break unions, pillage pension funds, gut regulation and oversight, destroy public institutions including public schools and social assistance programs, wage endless and illegal wars to swell the profits of arms merchants, and—yes—authorize police to murder unarmed black men.
Police and national intelligence and security agencies, which carry out wholesale surveillance against the population and serve as the corporate elite’s brutal enforcers, are omnipotent by intention. They are designed to impart fear, even terror, to keep the population under control. And until the courts and the legislative bodies give us back our rights—which they have no intention of doing—things will only get worse for the poor and the rest of us. We live in a post-constitutional era.

Advertisement

Square, Site wide

Corporations have captured every major institution, including the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government, and deformed them to exclusively serve the demands of the market. They have, in the process, demolished civil society. Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” warned that without heavy government regulation and oversight, unfettered and unregulated capitalism degenerates into a Mafia capitalism and a Mafia political system. A self-regulating market, Polanyi writes, turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities. This ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The ecosystem and human beings become objects whose worth is determined solely by the market. They are exploited until exhaustion or collapse occurs. A society that no longer recognizes that the natural world and life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves. This is what we are undergoing. Literally.
As in every totalitarian state, the first victims are the vulnerable, and in the United States this means poor people of color. In the name of the “war on drugs” or the necessity of enforcing immigration laws, those trapped in our urban internal colonies are effectively stripped of their rights. Police, who arrest some 13 million people a year—1.6 million of them on drug charges and half of those on marijuana counts—were empowered by the “war on drugs” to carry out random searches and sweeps with no probable cause. They take DNA samples from many whom they arrest to build a nationwide database that includes both the guilty and the innocent. And they charge each of the sampled arrestees $50 for DNA processing. They confiscate cash, cars, homes and other possessions based on allegations of illegal drug activity and use the proceeds to swell police budgets. They impose fines in poor neighborhoods for absurd offenses—riding a bicycle on a sidewalk or not having an ID—to fleece the poor or, if they cannot pay, toss them into jail. And before deporting undocumented workers the state levels fines, often in the thousands of dollars, on those being held by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in order to empty their pockets before they are shipped out. Prisoners locked in cages often spend decades attempting to pay off thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands, in court fines from the paltry $28 a month they earn in prison jobs; the government, to make sure it gets its money, automatically deducts a percentage each month from their prison paychecks. It is a vast extortion racket run against the poor by the corporate state, which also makes sure that the interest rates of mortgages, car loans, student loans and credit card loans are set at predatory levels.
Since 1980 the United States has constructed the world’s largest prison system, populated with 2.3 million inmates, 25 percent of the world’s prison population. Police, to keep the system filled with bodies, have had most legal constraints on their behavior removed. They serve as judge and jury on the streets of American cities. Such expansion of police powers is “a long step down the totalitarian path,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas warned in 1968. The police, who are often little more than predatory, armed gangs in inner-city neighborhoods, arbitrarily decide who lives, who dies and who spends years in prison. They rarely fight crime or protect the citizen. They round up human beings like cattle to meet arrest quotas, the prerequisite for receiving federal cash in the “drug war.” Because many crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The arrested are acutely aware they have no chance—97 percent of all federal cases and 94 percent of all state cases are resolved by guilty pleas rather than trials. An editorial in The New York Times said that the pressure employed by state and federal prosecutors to make defendants accept guilty pleas—an action that often includes waiving the right to appeal to a higher court—is “closer to coercion” than to bargaining. There are always police informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police. And, as we saw after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and after the killing of Garner, the word of police officers and prosecutors, whose loyalty is to the police, is law.

1   2   NEXT PAGE >>>

The World As It Is:

Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

A collection of Truthdig Columns
by Chris Hedges

Keep up with Chris Hedges’ latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges.

TAGS: aclu bill de blasio capitalism chris hedges corporate state corporatism eric garner ferguson jim crow karl polanyi matt taibbi michael brown police brutality racism surveillance war on drugs

Related Entries

• 

  Ferguson Is Baghdad Is New York Is Kabul

• 

  Black Bodies, Broken Worlds and a Post-Tax Society

• 

  Ferguson Protesters Named Runners-Up for Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ Issue

• 

  Don’t Expect Supreme Court Action on the Senate’s Torture

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power

In Boston

 

THE WARS ABROAD, THE WARS AT HOME

$585 billion for the Pentagon, loosening of bank regulation, allowing for pension cuts, increasing the power of Big Money in elections, and – you had to read the Israeli press to learn this – boosting aid to Israel by another $600 million, on top of the “regular” annual US aid of $3.1 billion. . .

 

Martin Luther King: “The bombs that are falling [overseas] are exploding in our cities”

 

Saturday, December 13

MILLIONS MARCH BOSTON

12:00pm - 4:00pm, Massachusetts State House

CALL TO ACTION:
On Saturday, Dec. 13, people from Oakland to NYC will mobilize for the MILLIONS MARCH: DAY OF ANGER. This is a call continue the struggle against police violence and for justice. Boston, let's join the call- we fight for Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and the victims of police violence right here in this city!
We March Together, As One. #BLACKLIVESMATTER
BOSTON IS FERGUSON. FERGUSON IS BOSTON.

 

On The Parliamentary Front Against The American Middle East Wars

---

Dear Al,
When the United States decides to drop bombs on people in another country, our leaders say it’s regrettable but necessary.  In recent conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, these actions were presented as vital to the deposition of corrupt and villainous leaders. Yet, in each case, we have learned that bombing brought on deeper consequences: the deployment of soldiers, destruction of vital infrastructure, and high civilian casualties.  As a result, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya all have become horribly worse off after US military "solutions", while  Somalia, Yeman, and Syria are all being threatened with ruin.  The U.S. has once again chosen bombing as its first course of action in the fight against ISIS.  It is important that the peace movement be here and able to tell our people and leaders to tell the truth.

Make a tax-deductible donation today, so we can continue this important work!

Doing the same thing over again hoping for a different result is insanity! Despite such disastrous outcomes in the past, our country’s foreign policy continues to rely on military solutions in the interest of the many corporations, contractors, and politicians invested in the sustained global dominance of the United States.  What we desperately need instead is a foreign policy that benefits all of us.  Over the past year, Massachusetts Peace Action convened a group of veteran activists, scholars and students to answer the question of what a Foreign Policy for All would look like.  We grounded our search in five core values: democracy, cooperation, justice, human rights and sustainability.   We identified thirteen policy pillars, including:
• Strengthen International Law: Reform the United Nations and embrace global law;
• Non-intervention: Renounce preemptive strikes; 
• Nuclear disarmament: Negotiate elimination of weapons worldwide;
• Climate justice: Make global green development a top priority; and
• Demilitarization: Cut U.S. military spending in half.

We held a ground-breaking conference last month in Cambridge that drew over 300 people to hear Noam Chomsky, Bill Fletcher, Phyllis Bennis and Stephen Kinzer and to participate in 15 small group discussions and follow-on work.  We believe that the Foreign Policy for All can serve as a counter-weight to the military-first solutions favored by our leaders. It offers voters and elected officials a vision of how the U.S. could play a positive, peaceful role in the world.  The full Foreign Policy for All document is available online.  You can send us your comments here.
Your tax-deductible donations are appreciated and crucial for our continued development.


In order to successfully share our work with a wider audience, we need to refine it, explain it, and promote it in a big way.  To do that, we need your financial support. Can you make a tax-deductible gift to the Massachusetts Peace Action Education Fund today?  Your gift will underwrite follow-up workshops around the state next year to build on the momentum of the November conference. It will pay for printing and postage to get copies of the next version of the plan to lawmakers, journalists and policy makers. It will allow our staff and volunteers to travel across the state, building support in dialogue with citizen groups, editorialists and others who shape public opinion.  You can donate online  and through mail.  The important thing is that you give today, before year’s end, so you can take advantage of the tax benefits and so that in 2015 we can do the important work to bring about a true Foreign Policy for All.

Thank you for making it possible! Cole Harrison Executive Director P.S. We need your support. Donate today!

---

Join Massachusetts Peace Action - or renew your membership today!  
Dues are $40/year for an individual, $65 for a family, or $10 for student/unemployed/low income.  Members vote for leadership and endorsements, receive newsletters and discounts on event admissions.  Donate now and you will be a member in good standing through December 2015!  Your financial support makes this work possible!

Massachusetts Peace Action, 11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-354-2169  • info@masspeaceaction.org • Follow us on Facebook or Twitter
Click here to unsubscribe