Frequently Asked Questions (scroll down for article archives and further resources)

"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 worldcantwait.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..." -Debra Sweet, Director of World Can't Wait

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Torture + Silence = Complicity!

Act Now to Stop Torture!

Has Obama put an end to torture, rendition, and indefinite detention? Facts you need to know:

1. Obama admits Bush officials tortured, but refuses to prosecute them.

Cheney has bragged about authorizing water boarding of detainees. In January 2009, Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, that he believed water boarding was torture. Torture is a violation of Geneva Conventions. The Obama administration is, therefore, not only morally, but legally, required to prosecute Bush Regime officials for torture.

2. Under Obama, the U.S. is still holding detainees without charges or trial.

During the campaign Obama declared habeas corpus to be “the foundation of Anglo-American law.”Habeas corpus is your right to challenge your detention. It is a 900-year- old right. Without habeas corpus there are no restraints on a government’s powers to detain and punish.

Contrary to his rhetoric, the Obama administration is continuing the Bush Regime’s policies of denying prisoners habeas corpus rights and has even adopted the same arguments made by Bush. In February 2009, the Obama administration declared in Federal Court that it would not grant habeas corpus rights to detainees in U.S. custody in Bagram, Afghanistan.

In March 2009 Obama’s Justice Department claimed that Guantanamo prisoners who were detained before June 2008 had no habeas corpus rights. On May 21, 2010 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the Obama administration, holding that three prisoners who are being held by the U. S. at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan cannot challenge their detention in U.S. courts.

3. Don’t be fooled just because Obama isn’t using the term “enemy combatant”

The Obama administration will no longer use the term “enemy combatant,” but it’s a change in name only: in the same court filing in which it made this announcement, Obama’s Justice Department made clear that it would continue to detain prisoners at Guantanamo without charge. As the NY Times put it:

“[T]he [Obama] Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.”

Meanwhile, Obama’s executive orders do not ban indefinite detention. In addition, at his confirmation hearing, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder said: “There are possibly many other people who are not going to be able to be tried but who nevertheless are dangerous to this country… We’re going to have to try to figure out what we do with them.” Holder suggested prisoners could be detained for the length of their war of terror which, as we know, has no set end point.

4. Guantanamo is still open. The prison at Bagram is growing and torture is being committed.

According to Reuters, abuse of prisoners worsened shortly after the election of Obama:

“Abuses began to pick up in December 2008 after Obama was elected, human rights lawyer Ahmed Ghappour told Reuters. He cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-forcefeeding detainees who are on hunger strike.”

Earlier this year Scott Horton reported in Harper’s Magazine on three murders of detainees in 2006 at Guantanamo that the military tried to cover up as suicides. More is coming out about torture at Bagram Detention Center in Afghanistan. Recently Andy Worthington reported on the detention and torture of three teenagers in his article, “Torture and the ‘Black’Prison,” or What Obama is Doing at Bagram (Part One).”

On June 7, 2010 Chris Floyd of Empire Burlesque wrote that under the Bush Regime medical personnel experimented on detainees to prove that the techniques used did not constitute torture. The chilling history of Nazi medical experimentation on those in concentration camps lurks in this revelation. (http://chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/1976- echoes-of-mengele-medical-experiments-torture-and- continuity-in-the-american-gulag.html)

This is a violation of Geneva Conventions and there is evidence that these experiments are going on under Obama.

During his confirmation hearing, new CIA director Leon Panetta made it clear the Obama administration will continue rendition. Rendition is the practice of kidnapping somebody in one country and shipping them to another country for detention. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), said “Rendition is a violation of sovereignty. It’s a kidnapping. It’s force and violence…Once you open the door to rendition, you’re opening the door, essentially, to a lawless world.”

Obama supporters have attempted to draw the distinction between this practice and “extraordinary rendition,” defined as the practice of transferring somebody to another country knowing that they will be tortured. During his confirmation hearing, Leon Panetta said that under the Bush administration, “There were efforts by the CIA to seek and to receive assurances that those individuals would not be mistreated.” So Panetta is embracing the practices of the Bush Regime by continuing rendition!

Panetta then added, “I will seek the same kind of assurances that those individuals will not be mistreated.” (emphasis added)

Articles on Torture and Detention:

Know Your Rights!

Also see:

Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the Homeland (a joint project of the ACLU of Massachusetts and Truthout)

Occupy Wall St. and Everywhere to Stop U.S. Wars for Empire!

...this movement faces a true crossroads. Will it be dispersed, driven into the margins, or co-opted? Or will it come back stronger? This question now poses itself, extremely sharply.

We in The World Can't Wait express our enthusiastic solidarity with the morally and physically courageous youth of Occupy Wall Street and all others now forming occupations in their cities. They have not resigned themselves to accepting the way the world is, but are boldly exposing the towering crimes and audacious lies of this nation’s financial and political elites. They are righteously demanding that it all end and in doing so, enduring brutal attacks by police and the corporate media’s malign neglect.

These actions are an extremely welcome development and a gust of fresh air in the suffocating and poisonous atmosphere that the major parties, the Tea Partiers, and their billionaire sponsors have been propagating and imposing, in this, the "land of the free."

We call on all people to stand with these path-blazing youth and those oppressed by our government, here and around the world. Put your energies, your funds, your thoughts, and your bodies on the line to give voice to the most exploited, ignored, and oppressed who have suffered under the U.S. government's economic, military, and social crimes here and around the globe. 

The future is unwritten, which one we get us up to us.

Flier: Occupy Wall St. and Everywhere to End US Wars for Empire

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More materials

Articles:

IRAN: Who is the real threat?

Test your knowledge, take the World Can't Wait quiz!

"The World Can’t Wait organizes people living in the United States to repudiate and stop the fascist direction initiated by the Bush Regime, including: the murderous, unjust and illegitimate occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; the global “war of terror” of torture, rendition and spying; and the culture of bigotry, intolerance and greed."

-from World Can't Wait's mission statement adopted 2009

Included within the fascist direction that we work to reverse is the "culture of bigotry, intolerance and greed." Here we answer some frequently asked questions on our support for immigrant rights:

Doesn't "illegal" mean illegal?

No human being can be illegal. Laws change and can be just or unjust, and we are not bound by whatever is "on the books" at any given moment. Torture has been legalized, but we will not stop protesting and resisting this crime against humanity until torture stops being carried out in our names. Would the invasion of Iraq be any more acceptable if it was technically legal? While slavery is now illegal, it was once the law of the land. It is unethical to silence our opposition to discrimination against immigrants, documented or undocumented, because of whatever laws are instituted.

Why are you opposed to Arizona's new law, SB1070?

This law is a serious step in a fascist direction, and differs from all other state laws. It states that law enforcement must ask for proof of citizenship or residency from anyone they "suspect" is illegal. This means racial profiling on a massive scale, as anyone brown-skinned can expect to be questioned and potentially detained any time they leave the house. This law discriminates against all Latinos; but even worse, further isolates and marginalizes undocumented immigrants who live in fear of being suddenly separated from their families, imprisoned, and deported. For more read Arizona's anti-Immigrant Law is Inhumane & Illegitimate. However, Arizona is not the only problem. For an idea of the suffering imposed on immigrants detained in other parts of the US by the federal government, see Letters from an Immigrant Detainee.

But don't illegal immigrants drive down wages, drain the economy and social services?

These are the main talking points which have snookered people. However, they are factually untrue. In fact, there is no correlation between wages going down and immigrants. In addition, immigrants have contributed  billions of dollars in Social Security and Medicare, without ever hoping to draw these benefits themselves. Their input has even been factored into government budgets - budgets which, by design, require their input without benefit in order to work! See the New York Times: Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions
and Cost of Illegal Immigration May Be Less Than Meets the Eye

But if that's not true, why do I hear it so often? How could so many people be wrong?

Well, have you ever heard the term "scapegoating?" There's no denying the global economy is seriously unsteady and people are being affected by it in the US. But that is what you have to look at: the global economy. Recent immigration from Mexico, for instance, cannot be separated from the effect that NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) has had on Mexico's industry and agriculture (Download Oxfam report). Markets flooded with US-subsidized corn imports have driven many Mexican farmers out of business and off their land, while factories once set up by US corporations have closed down in search of even cheaper labor in China or other places in Asia. The economic forces affecting people's livelihoods, whether here or in other parts of the world, are guided by profitability and greed, not by immigrants seeking a better life for themselves or their families through low-paying jobs here.

"If the immigrant pickers did not come north across the border, the strawberries would."

-from the New York Times

You have to look deeper to discover what is really at work here. Protesters marching in Arizona recently carried a banner that said: “There is no problem with immigration; there is a problem with capitalism."

Get involved in the movement to stop military recruiters: wearenotyoursoldiers.org

Abortion, Morality and the Liberation of Women is now available on YouTube.

"The World Can’t Wait organizes people living in the United States to repudiate and stop the fascist direction initiated by the Bush Regime, including: the murderous, unjust and illegitimate occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; the global “war of terror” of torture, rendition and spying; and the culture of bigotry, intolerance and greed."

-from World Can't Wait's mission statement adopted 2009

To understand the Tea Party and other movements representing the "Culture of Bigotry" also see these topics:

Immigrants

Theocracy

Reproductive Rights

Real History Lessons

What You Can Do Now

• Find a local World Can’t Wait chapter

• Volunteer for World Can’t Wait

• Bring the We Are Not Your Soldiers Tour to your school

• Join the campaign to Fire John Yoo

• Protest the war criminals when they come to your community; join War Criminals Watch

• Sustain World Can’t Wait, and support this movement

• Contact the national office or sign up for the e-newsletter

For More Than Ten Years the Richest Country in the World Has Been "At War" With the Poorest Country in the World

Find out more about covert drone warfare and the unjust, immoral occupation of Afghanistan:

WikiLeaks has released some of the most damning evidence yet against the ongoing occuptions in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Must read: US Response to Wikileaks: Diplomacy as Another Means of Warfare

Defend Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

Open Letter in Defence of WikiLeaks’ Right to Publish.

Manning: a Tale of Liberty Lost in America

Click for more info on:

Guantánamo Files | Cablegate | Collateral Murder Video | Iraq War Diary | Afghan War Diary

Followers of Glenn Beck have described themselves as "students of history" and "historians." Everyone who opposes Beck's racist, reactionary agenda needs to know and bring out the real history of the U.S. and the world in order to, and as part of, politically opposing this agenda.

Why donate to publish this statement?

Miller Francis, former writer for Rolling Stone, sent this quote from Bertolt Brecht to explain why he donated:

"Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons."

Crimes Are Crimes - No Matter Who Does Them

Intro October 2010:  On the ninth anniversary of America's longest war, the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq remain bloody, employing more contractors, while drones rain death upon Pakistan.

In the months since this statement was written, US courts have ruled that innocents who have been tortured may not sue, while the Obama administration defends those who directed that torture be used.

When leaking evidence of war crimes is criminalized, remaining silent is a crime.

It has become common knowledge that Barack Obama has openly ordered the assassination of an American citizen, Anwar al-Aulaki. Without trial or other judicial proceeding, the administration has simply put him on the to-be-killed list.*

Whistleblowers in the military leaked a video showing U.S. troops firing on an unarmed party of Iraqis in 2007, including two journalists, and then firing on those who attempted to rescue them, including two children. As ugly as this video of the killing of 12 Iraqis was, the chatter recorded from the helicopter cockpit was even more monstrous. The Pentagon says that there would be no charges against these soldiers; and the media absolves them of blame. “They were under stress,” the story goes; “Our brave men and women must be supported.” Meanwhile, those who leaked and publicized the video came under government surveillance and are targeted as “national security” threats.

The Pentagon acknowledged, after denials, a massacre near the city of Gardez, Afghanistan, on February 12, 2010. 5 people were killed, including two pregnant women, leaving 16 children motherless. The U.S. military first said the two men killed were insurgents, and the women, victims of a family “honor killing,” but the Afghan government accepts the eyewitness reports that U.S. Special Forces killed the men, (a police officer and lawyer) and the women, and then dug their own bullets out of the women’s bodies to destroy evidence. Top U.S. military officials have now admitted that U.S. soldiers killed the family in their house.

Just weeks earlier, a story broken in Harper’s by Scott Horton carried news that three supposed suicides of detainees in Guantánamo in 2006 were not suicides, but possible homicides carried out by American personnel. This passed almost without comment.**

In some respects, this is worse than Bush. First, because Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of “terrorism,” merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly. Second, Obama says that the government can detain you indefinitely, even if you have been exonerated in a trial, and he has publicly floated the idea of “preventive detention." Third, the Obama administration, in expanding the use of unmanned drone attacks, argues that the U.S. has the authority under international law to use such lethal force and extrajudicial killing in sovereign countries with which it is not at war.

Such measures by Bush were widely considered by liberals and progressives to be outrages and were roundly, and correctly, protested. But those acts which may have been construed (wishfully or not) as anomalies under the Bush regime, have now been consecrated into “standard operating procedure” by Obama, who claims, as did Bush, executive privilege and state secrecy in defending the crime of aggressive war.

Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute any members of the Bush regime who are responsible for war crimes, including some who admitted to waterboarding and other forms of torture, thereby making their actions acceptable for him or any future president, Democrat or Republican.

End the complicity of silence.

* On 9/24/10 the Justice Department asserted that “state secrets” bar any examination of Obama’s order.

** On 9/29/10 a U.S. federal court dismissed a suit by the victims’ families on grounds of “national security.”

The war in Libya growing more illegal by the day

The illegal war in Libya

Corporate Media’s Capital Crimes Against Libya – and Humanity

McKinney Fact-Finders Show Libyan Deaths, Injuries Not “Propaganda”

Apartheid, Sand Nigger Style: The Tunisian Model for a New Colonialism in Libya?

Veterans for Peace: Statement on Military Intervention in Libya

History shows us that this type of intervention rarely goes without blowback and unintended consequences, perhaps with a $1.4 trillion deficit and a domestic budget in crisis our best outcome would be to support peaceful alternatives and not add to the violence of a Libyan civil war at all.

Phyllis Bennis: U.K. Sends Troops into Libya as International Coalition Expands Mission to Include Regime Change (Democracy Now! Interview April 19, 2011)

Debra Sweet:  This is no "Humanitarian Intervention" in Libya

Flier: Are the U.S. Wars on the Middle East wrong because they cost so much?

Margaret Kimberley: Obama, Libya, and Our Challenge: the True Anti-War Movement Must Reawaken

Revolution Newspaper: True Stories of U.S. "Humanitarian" Intervention

William Blum: Barack "I'd kill for a peace prize" Obama

Jill McLaughlin: Don’t be Confused: U.S. “Intervention” in Libya is Immoral and Illegitimate Too

Sunsara Taylor (video): No Good Can Come from U.S. Led Intervention in Libya!

Kathleen Barry: Libyan Liberation – Is There Another Way?

Middle East Research and Information Project: Of Principle and Peril

Watch: Left Forum Panel on Resisting War with Pardiss Kebriaei, Matthis Chiroux, Eric Stoner and Debra Sweet

Hamid Dabashi: Moral bankruptcy in Libya war

The use of Predator and Reaper drones (unmanned flying vehicles that are often armed with video-guided missiles) by the US military and CIA is a largely untold story of the "Global War on Terror / Global Contingency Operation" - yet has caused thousands of deaths in Pakistan and Afghanistan, many of whom are women and children.

NO U.S. Bombing of Syria! No Matter If Congress Says It's Legal — It's Unjust, Immoral & Illegitimate

FIND or ORGANIZE a protest near you

Learn more about the US' recent (and more distant) history of unjust wars and occupations, carried out in the name of “humanitarian concerns” and “national interests:”

Afghanistan  | Covert Drone War  | Iraq  | Libya

Barack Obama is selling the planned US Cruise missile bombing of Syria as a “humanitarian” act in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack.

Bombing Syria will kill more civilians, polarize the situation further, and invite even more intervention and weapons into the country, making it more likely that the civil war could expand into an extremely dangerous regional conflagration. Moreover, launching an attack on a country that isn’t threatening yours is the supreme international war crime.

The bloody Syrian civil war – where big powers are funding both sides – has already killed 100,000.  Atrocities have been committed by both the Assad government and the mixed group of pro-Western and Islamic Fundamentalist opposition.  None of the warring parties offer a future for the 23 million Syrians, many who are refugees from U.S. and Israeli wars on Iraq and Palestine.

This planned U.S. airstrike on Syrian is already unpopular, but that doesn’t mean Obama won’t do it.  The British Parliament, which George Bush bullied into supporting the US war on Iraq, said “no” to bombing Syria, and the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll shows only 9% of those polled favor U.S. military intervention.  

Obama is now amping up his argument, demanding Congressional approval for his planned attack, bowing to some pressure that he include them.  But the Obama administration says even if Congress doesn’t endorse his plans, he won’t be bound by their vote. His argument for intervention is directed at other countries governments, at pressuring Congress to come along, and at you, to go along with the war crimes he plans.

People in this country have to get visibly and loudly into the streets in protest; on the airwaves, on the Internet, and everywhere, to denounce this coming attack.

No, not in our name! Humanity and the planet come first. No to U.S. planetary domination.

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