Debra Sweet: Doing All We Can to Repudiate the Bush Program

Monday, 05 May 2008 13:07

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.Debra Sweet, Director

Presentation at World Can't Wait National Meeting May 3, 2008

About six weeks ago, Bush got approval and funding from the Congress for a secret directive authorizing a range of operations, including assassinations, against the Iranian government. According to Andrew Cockburn on May 2, the area "covers actions across a huge geographic area - from Lebanon to Afghanistan - but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines - up to and including the assassination of targeted officials" A Marine amphibious force, originally due to leave San Diego for the Persian Gulf in mid June, has had its sailing date abruptly moved up to May 4." That's tomorrow. It"ll take them about a month to get there.

This preparation is real, the threat of a new attack must be taken extremely seriously - and there is NO opposition to this coming from within the halls of power or from the democratic presidential contenders. Hillary has officially threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran and Obama's only objection was that "using words like obliterate doesn't actually produce good results" I think the Iranians can be confident that I [too] will respond forcefully." Vanity Fair wrote a month ago that the only thing standing between the US and an attack on Iran was General Fallon - and just days later he was forced to resign

World Can't Wait Plans in 5 key areas:

1. Step up our efforts to prevent an attack by the Bush regime on Iran.

We think of 71 million people, a huge portion of them under thirty years old, sitting in the cross hairs of a military commanded by someone who believes he's on a mission from God. We have to take responsibility to prevent an attack on Iran, and if it does happen, to send a message to the world that we oppose it. Specific plans:

Hold meetings and forums everywhere schools are still in session this month.
Organize Emergency response networks to act in case of a US bombing of Iran.
Get out a basic fact sheet which the whole movement can use.
Promote the film "Iran Is Not the Problem ."
Spread the model of the Chicago City Council resolution against the US attacking Iran.

Above all, let no one say that we stood by wondering why and how to act.

2. Plan Protests at the Democratic National Convention August 25-29 Denver

What if people came forward and put out a political pole in opposition to the Democratic convention in August? What if THIS was the new terms of things? The Democratic nominee in 2008 will not speak for us. We have to challenge their accommodation to the Bush program.

World Can't Wait is endorsing the ReCreate 68 coalition, and forming our own working group for Denver.

3. Join the Battle to get John Yoo Fired, Disbarred and Prosecuted for the Torture Memos as a way of stopping the TORTUREState:

We are joining the demand made by The National Lawyers Guild that John C. Yoo be fired from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school, disbarred from the practice of law, and prosecuted for war crimes. John Yoo is a war criminal. This isn't about Berkeley-it's about humanity. Specifically World Can't Wait is:

Working with the NLG and representatives of other groups and professors in Berkeley to make it a hotbed of protest against torture, holding programs, protests, and giving many ways for people to weigh in so that a different standard is set in society, and especially at the law school.
Organizing a campaign of letters and statements aimed at the UC administration, taking the battle to other law schools and the one million lawyers in the U.S., as well as to the wider public through a billboard in Berkeley, mass postcard distribution at law schools, film showings and letters to the editor at law journals and in newspapers.

4. STOP Military RECRUITMENT

World Can't Wait believes the slogan "Support the troops" does much damage, and that the war can't be stopped if we place more value on American lives than Iraqi lives. As the protesters in Berkeley ask, "What are they recruiting FOR?" The troops are being recruited into an institution waging an unjust war, trained and ordered to carry out war crimes. Everyone in the US military has the responsibility to decide where they stand, just as Americans do when their government is waging an unjust war, and refuse to commit such crimes.

Youth have started self-organizing protests at military recruiting offices in response to hearing about the battle to close down the Marine recruiters in Berkeley. We will help others spread this, while keeping focus on Berkeley.

5. Declare it Now! Spread the Resistance - Wear Orange Daily.

Orange has become widely identified with opposition to torture and the Bush regime. In all our actions, and daily, we will look for ways to make this sentiment visible, including working with performers and people of conscience who wear orange publicly as a way of encouraging millions to do so.

Presentation to World Can't Wait National Meeting 5-3-08

The Bush program is still shaping the world - and everything they have put in place for the last seven years is what is setting the stage and the terms for all of official politics today.

As we said in January, "George Bush is unrelenting in his determination to drive the savageness of his agenda into the next administration". Politics as usual will not meet the enormity of the damage that has been done. Can the world wait? Hell, no! And do we still need to bring to a halt this whole program and direction? Hell, YES!

This is a time for moral clarity and fearless determination. The horrors that we came together to stop are not over - and we can't be over either.

We need to come out of this meeting with strategic thinking and strategic plans to bring this whole direction to a halt. We need to sound the alarm and mobilize people to act decisively against an attack on Iran. We have proposals to discuss, new people to hear from, and decisions to make.

In the 7 "Your Government" statements in Our Call to Drive Out the Bush regime, we correctly identified the trajectory the regime was headed on. If anything, it's gone further than many who signed our Call expected.

The Democrats have been accomplices in much of this, from voting in their majority for every single fund request from Bush to kill Iraqi civilians, re-authorizing the USA PATRIOT Act, passing the Military Commissions Act which stripped habeas corpus and legalized torture, to approving two Supreme Court justices who have already tipped the Supreme Court further in favor of corporate rights over persons, white supremacy over the goal of desegregation, and upheld the first ban on abortion.

World Can't Wait doesn't have a position against voting, and we know many supporters will vote for Democrats, third parties and independents, in the hope of change. Some of those candidates, if they won the presidency, would have different policies. But lets be scientific about this -- none of us, including the candidates -- has any idea who is going to be selected in November. It is wrong to assume that a Democrat is going to follow Bush as president.

And even if it did, the 2008 Democratic nominee will not speak for us. The Democrats" track record for the last seven years - and the actual platforms of those running for president - make clear that the basic direction set under Bush is not going away unless it is stopped by the people, through massive political resistance, through society-wide disaffection, and through a historic struggle to change the course of history. This is why we came together. This remains true today. And, perhaps contrary to surface appearances and cynical assumptions, this is still eminently possible.

Which party just presided over passing the BIGGEST military budget EVER?

The fourth vote for funding the Iraq occupation since the Democrats have controlled Congress. Nancy Pelosi got guns for butter. She put the screws to the Out of Iraq Caucus, and got the votes for the war because she threw in a little health care for veterans, and promised to employ people, giving Bush more money than he even asked for.

How is this any better than what Hitler did? He gave the veterans and unemployed people work when the economy was terrible, and they went along with him. No, fighting for healthcare today is NOT opposition to an unjust and genocidal occupation - stopping this war is still on US.

And how the hell did Clinton's threat to obliterate Iran get over? She actually said that Iran should know we could "totally obliterate them." This is the kind of thing that should call forward massive protests, outraged walk-outs, and vocal repudiation by many in the public sphere. The fact that this didn't happen says a lot about what we must transform.

Elaine Brower and I were reading the transcript of the last Clinton-Obama debate in Pennsylvania, called the "compassion forum". She wrote me, "What a load of shit. What does "walk the walk of faith" have to do with being president? This is a huge disaster and a problem. We must address this somehow. How do you use the word "obliterate" on one day and then use faith, religion and God on the other and get away with it? Or maybe it DOES GO HAND IN HAND, and we have identified for real the new crusades."

Obama says the US has to keep the "strongest military in the world," and his campaign acknowledges that he would have to increase the numbers of private contractors like Blackwater in Iraq to do so, and add 100,000 troops to the U.S. military. The 1996 Solomon Amendment, which both Obama and Clinton recently voiced upport of, provides for the Secretary of Defense to deny federal funding to institutions of higher learning if they prohibit or prevent ROTC or military recruitment on campus. That's the kind of politics being defined by and allowed by the political process. These politics are about suppressing any actions of the people that might meaningfully stop this war. But the Vermont Law School defied this - they refused this hush money, giving up a million in federal funds because they won't let the recruiters on campus. This shows it is possible for people to take this stand on principle - but it is UP AGAINST THE WHOLE POLITICAL FRAMEWORK, democrat and republican right now, and it is on US to spread this in ways that could be tremendously powerful.

Obama or Clinton talk about beginning to withdraw troops in 60 days, and many mistakenly believe this is about ending the war. In reality it only reshapes the war in the service of a broader reach for empire - so they can conduct greater military activity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and potentially Iran and other countries. The differences among all the candidates are taking place within very narrow margins: every potential president is pledged to use military force against al-Qaeda, Iran, and Afghanistan, and to an unbending alliance with Israel.

Torture

Our call to Drive Out the Bush Regime said "that which you do not resist and mobilize to stop you will learn - or be forced - to accept." The national discourse on torture bears this out.

What part of the structure of secret detentions, destruction of habeas corpus, "enhanced" interrogation methods will go away when Bush leaves office? The whole apparatus has been given a new legal justification from the Justice Department: even if particular methods or practices are illegal on international law, that's irrelevant because the president of the U.S. has the authority to override those laws based on the US national interest, as he/she defines it.

Over the last few weeks, it's come out that the top 6 Bush regime officials met in the White House to plan discuss specific torture techniques for how the CIA and military would interrogate specific detainees in Guantanamo. VP "Dick" Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, John Ashcroft, George Tenet and Condoleezza Rice all sat down at a table DOZENS OF TIMES and discussed methods of torture - one official reported they practically choreographed the crimes against humanity that have been institutionalized in secret prisons and military detention around the world. They know - and we should too - how potentially damning this revelation is, if people act on it -- Ashcroft himself expressed concern back in 2002 that their involvement at that level of planning could get them in trouble if it were found out.

That's why the Military Commissions Act was written with retroactive immunity for anyone carrying out or ordering enhanced interrogation techniques. It's why Cheney and Ashcroft are not allowing their underlings, and refusing themselves, to answer Congressional subpoenas. John Yoo won't go either, but we"ll get to him in a minute. The mainstream media is beginning to talk about "war crimes" prosecutions and international law as if there might be a problem for the Bush regime. (See the Phillippe Sands article, "Green Light" in Vanity Fair)

If anyone acts like they don't know their government is torturing people on a widespread and systematic scale, they are choosing NOT to know. We have to continue to lead people to act against this - going out to people, into classes, to institutions, and on worldcan'twait.org. Too many people have learned to accept this, there is not nearly enough opposition to the revelations about these top level torture meetings - but this is something that can change quickly if a beginning core acts with moral clarity, something I will discuss plans around in a minute.

To give a sense of how potentially volatile this is, listen to this one story. Six detainees from Guantanamo are to be tried in military commissions under the threat of death. A few months ago Col. Morris Davis, who was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions, quit in protest. He says that for several years he was a proponent of the military commissions, as opposed to trying those charged in civilian courts. Then he was told by someone above him in the chain of command that "no acquittals will be allowed." This is on top of the fact that civilian lawyers trying to defend these six detainees can barely talk to their clients and have to leave all the pertinent legal filings locked in the hands of the military. Morris correctly concludes that there is no due process for those on trial. He has now agreed to testify for the defense, a situation he could never have imagined. This torture - along with the resistance to it even inside the military -- is going on NOW.

Want to talk about a fascist remaking of society? How about the Christian fundamentalist takeover of the US military? General Robert Caslen was the star of a scandal in 2006, where it came out that he was recruiting other officers in the Pentagon to join God's Army. In early May 2008 he was promoted. "Brigadier General Robert Caslen has retained his position as the President of a virulently fundamentalist Christian organization devoted to gaining unconstitutional control of the U.S. armed forces"The OCF's asserted purpose is to have 'Christian officers exercise biblical leadership to raise up a godly army'. One of its official study guides makes clear that OCF's aim is to 'not allow the opposition, all of which is spearheaded by Satan, to prevent us from reclaiming territory for Christ in the military.'"

Bring the Bush program to a halt.

Now is NOT the time to trim our sails or our expectations, waiting for a better wind to carry us. This is the not the time to close up shop, not the time to erase your email list, as I hear the Not in Our Name project did recently when they shut down the organization. It's not the time to refuse to hold protests, with the reasoning that protests would hurt the Democrat's chances of winning the White House. United for Peace & Justice is still asking people to write to Congress".as if they don't know already what the people think.

While the world is paying a terrible price for the fact that the American people have not yet driven out this regime and its program, for the fact that we have not yet succeeded in the mission of our Call - it would be a terrible mistake to think we haven't had a huge impact and that there is not a lot that we must build on now.

We have repeated refused to accept the stultifying, deadening political terms - and through doing so, in the face of controversy and opposition, we have repeatedly helped to set DIFFERENT AND MUCH BETTER TERMS. Since October, at our last major national meeting, we set out to BE the resistance, and this has clarified things for lots of people. We also set to spread orange in opposition to the Bush regime. This has yet to catch on on a truly societal scale, but orange is now widely identified with stopping torture.

Even though people said, "you shouldn't do that", we stepped in to the debate over whether waterboarding is torture, and did public, professionally acted demonstrations of what the technique is, starting in November, the day the new attorney general was being questioned in Congress. Would anyone have a visual of waterboarding if we hadn't done this?

Two years ago people were stepping over us as we knelt on the ground in orange jumpsuits and hoods. Today, torture became a featured subject at the Academy Awards, seen by one billion people, when Taxi to the Dark Side won, and its director spoke out. Professional associations like the American Psychological Association are divided over participation in torture. There was a crisis among the writers of the TV show "24" which made torture acceptable. Something is shifting in public sentiment - and we must push this further.

On Thursday 29 ports were shut down by the International Longshore Workers Union. Hundreds of cranes and trucks motionless; no cargo going out for 8 hours in an operation that runs 24/7. 25,000 workers didn't work. I think we in World Can't Wait WAY underestimated the importance of their action. But THIS action was noticed in the mainstream media. In an election year when everyone was telling you not to do this, port workers take a day off. This is rather extraordinary, and tells us something about the reservoir of opposition among the people that you don't see if you"re just counting bodies at a protest.

This reservoir of opposition is, I believe, a big reason the 2008 campaign started so early, all the way back in 2006.

This a fight by those who rule over us to keep people focused on their political terms and their political framework - rather than jumping out in opposition to this whole direction. But some people keep jumping out of it. The Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War did direct action during Eastern Mass by the Catholic cardinal in Chicago. They went right among the people, with a controversial and morally clear die-in calling for the war to end. World Can't Wait went in front of the White House on the fifth anniversary of the war, and the police did everything possible to prevent crime scene tape from being tied on the White House fence. Orange made it into the Oscars, when worn by Paul Haggis, and Alex Gibney, who directed the winning film, "Taxi to the Dark Side."

If it weren't for us going out ahead of where people are at, changing the discourse, publishing ads in the New York Times, pulling the celebrity voices of conscience together, the discourse on war crimes and torture would not have developed as it has. This is something we should not lose sight of, and should step up with great determination.

Three years ago, we set out to meet a great need. We have not been able to achieve the level of mass resistance and public repudiation needed to drive out the Bush Regime. Bush and Cheney could still be driven out - the whole world knows they"ve done way more than enough for that. But we should be talking about the fascist remaking that has happened in the service of war for empire, and that all this needs to be brought to a halt.

So what if this is a 15 round fight? So what if it has gone into double overtime for you basketball fans? We are still in this fight, the people still need us to win this fight, and there is still time on the clock and many potential teammates of ours sitting on the bench.

The fact that the reservoir of people who hate all this have not yet acted in a large enough number to stop this does NOT mean that it can't happen. It's just wrong philosophically. But we have learned that we have not just let people know there is a movement, but make the argument WHY this is the only way that things will change.

We need to bring forward the vision of a different dynamic and draw people into this. Instead of the elections setting the terms for millions"where increasingly, people find themselves settling for less and less of what they started out wanting, the action of the people at certain moments can set the terms. Rev. Lennox Yearwood talks about the "lunch counter moment" when the four black college students sat down at a "whites only" segregated drugstore in Greensboro North Carolina and galvanize a huge movement against segregation.

They had right on their side, moral clarity, and determination that they just weren't going to accept Jim Crow anymore. And their actions, in a time as politically charged as that was, changed the standard for everyone else. This had an electrifying and multiplying effect.

These times are even more charged and there is even more at stake.

Our moment is: The Bush regime or anyone else who wants to be "commander-in-chief" has no right to recruit, invade, and occupy. They are wrong to torture, justify it, and lie about it.

We have set out to RESIST and MOBILZE TO STOP all this. We"re choosing to put our energies in places where we can change the terms, to go out and win in some key concentrated arenas. We must fight these to win and fight in such a way that even if we don't win each of these we create conditions where people draw the right lessons and come back with even more determination and perseverance.

All these elements should be taken up as part of and in the service of establishing a different dynamic, a dynamic where people are increasingly stepping out in independent political action, drawing clear dividing lines against war crimes and crimes against humanity, setting new terms and stopping this whole direction, bringing this whole program to a halt. The world has indeed waited too long.

World Can't Wait Plans in 5 key areas: