We Are Not Your Soldiers
In March We Are Not Your Soldiers presenters spoke remotely at three alternative NYC high schools, a NYC middle school and to Spanish-dominant bilingual high school students in Philadelphia. A co-teacher at one of the NYC high schools wrote following Will's talk:
Thank you so much for your visit and your presentation today! I can't tell you how valuable of an experience that was for our students. We have been discussing and debriefing since you left. You touched on many issues we have been discussing in class, and your personal experience as a veteran adds so much that we can not. You had a huge impact on our students, and I can't thank you enough for that. We appreciate you taking the time to be with us and share some of your experiences today.
Both are worse
At age 14, I decided the Democrats were the "war party," having only looked at WWII and the wars on Korea and Vietnam. Then R. Nixon and H. Kissinger considered using nukes to hold onto Vietnam and threaten China, and I was persuaded the Republicans are every bit as bad.
Since 2005, every time I write to World Can't Wait supporters about how dangerous the party in power is, I get responses saying, essentially - wait, the other party is worse!
How does the U.S. identify war crimes?
While the victims of U.S. wars are nameless, U.S. media is 24/7 on the tragic death Russia is bringing to Ukraine. Children, pregnant women, elderly have all died there, just as they have in Yemen by the Saudis with U.S. weapons, as they died in Libya by U.S./NATO forces.
Sudan's Struggle
Introducing a new blog by Carol Dudek: In the fall of 2019, we cheered on the great outpouring of mass protest which brought down the 30-year president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. The determined, outraged, participation of women was especially decisive in forcing his resignation.
But last October, the military staged a coup to remove the interim government which succeeded al-Bashir. An intense 5-month battle has ensued in the streets, with people coming back time after time even though the military has killed many hundreds.
What about the interests of humanity?
People have written us with a legit point: People around the globe have suffered historically from reactionary violence backed by the U.S. and its allies - right now in Yemen for instance - but these aggressive acts get mostly ignored by U.S. politicians and press, while the Russian attack on Ukraine is 24/7 news. But then, no one has proved that the U.S. isn't #1 in hypocrisy.
Don't support either "side" in this
This war is dangerous for humanity and the planet! We shouldn't support either "side."
It's no exaggeration to say that the showdown between Russia and the U.S./NATO bloc has profound dangers for the people of Ukraine. Millions are already facing death and displacement from the immediate incursion of the Russian military. Russia doesn't want NATO at its borders in its mission to control Eastern Europe.
Many hundreds of millions more are endangered by the U.S. missile launchers recently installed in Poland and Romania, on the border of Russia. These are MK 41's, the same weapon the U.S. used thousands of times on people of Iraq, Syria and Yugoslavia. The U.S. wants to encircle Russia with NATO countries in its mission to maintain imperialist dominance.
Stealing from Afghanistan's people
I have such a vivid memory of a long-planned anti-globilization movement protest in Washington DC in late September 2001. Lots of people didn't come; those that did acted in the face of bellicose USA! USA! jingoism emanating from The White House a week before the US invaded Afghanistan.
Bread & Puppet Theater organized a procession of 20 foot tall puppets of women carrying children's bodies, moving slowly, dramatically collapsing to a drumbeat every block or so to convey the message that innocent people will die. It was breathtaking in its reality, and residents of DC stared, captured by the spectacle, as I was.
That nightmare has come true, and worse. After the U.S. spent $300 million per day to dominate Afghanistan, the Biden administration has "withheld" -- called by normal people "stolen" -- $7 billion in Afghan funds held in the U.S.
Call of the Ban Killer Drones Campaign: No armed drones for the German Military
Action month is January, 2022 in the run-up to the vote at the 47th Federal Delegates Conference of the Green Party on 28/29 January 2022 on the possible arming of German military (Bundeswehr) drones.
While the use of armed drones is proliferating around the world, led by the United States and its allies, Germany, almost alone among the industrialized nations, has not added lethally armed drones to its arsenal. Ironically, after last year’s elections when the long standing conservative coalition that governed Germany lost power, leaders of the new coalition of liberal parties made a move to arm their country’s drones. In a coalition agreement at the end of November 2021, the party leaders of the Social Democrat Party SPD, the Green Party and the Free Democrat Party FPD, stated: “Subject to binding and transparent conditions and taking ethical and security aspects into account, we will therefore enable the arming of Bundeswehr (German military) drones during this legislative period.”
Close Guantanamo Now! 20 Years Too Long! Join us January 11 to demand Close Guantanamo Now
Tuesday January 11 4:00 - 6:00 pm
New York Public Library steps, 5th Avenue @ 41st Street
Facebook event: organizations invited to sign on.
Initiated by World Can't Wait. Co-sponsored by War Criminals Watch, NYC War Resisters League, Witness Against Torture, NYC-DSA Anti-War Working, Brooklyn for Peace, Granny Peace Brigade NYC and Peace Action New York State Group. (list in formation).
Confirmed Speakers: Guantanamo attorney Nancy Hollander; Seth Farber, attorney & writer; Debra Sweet for World Can't Wait; Jeremy Varon, Activist & Professor of History.
U.S. actions at this camp are war crimes in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and international law.
Airstrikes allowed America to wage war with minimal risk to its troops.
“No civilian presence”
For Ali Fathi Zeidan and his extended family, West Mosul was in 2016 still the best of many bad options. Their longtime home in a nearby village, Wana, had been taken by ISIS, then retaken by Kurdish pesh merga forces, and — as if that were not enough — it stood just seven miles below the crumbling Mosul Dam, which engineers had long warned might soon collapse, creating a deluge that would kill everyone in its path. The family had avoided the camps for internally displaced people, where they would have faced a constant risk of separation, and found their way instead to the city, to a grimy industrial neighborhood called Yabisat. They moved into a storage facility, divided it up into separate rooms, brought in a water tank, built a kitchen and a bathroom. Though ISIS had taken Mosul, parts of the city were still relatively safe. Now it was home.
The Civilian Casualty Files: Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns Of Failure In Deadly Airstrikes
Azmat Kahn | December 20, 2021
Forward by Debra Sweet:
An extraordinary - as in the top half of the front page, and 5 full inside pages, with photos - investigation series of U.S. military-caused civilian deaths began in The New York Times this weekend.
Readers of this newsletter, which began in 2005, will know that the series headline "Hidden Files Bare Military Failures in Deadly Strikes," fails to convey the fact that failure to protect non-combatants is built in to the unjust, illegitimate, immoral and imperialist wars the U.S. wages.
But it's important to read and digest this series in print, interactive digital and audio formats. If you can't access The New York Times series, scroll down below.
The Times ran journalist Azmat Khan's second piece in the series, "The Human Toll of America's Air Wars."
In the first piece, Khan states:
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