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POPSWinter Soldier to be re-Broadcast If you missed this compelling program, listen in sometime. Very moving testimony from the soldiers who were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan by the Bush/Cheney criminals.
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POPSShattering the war consensus: Cindy Sheehan stands up to the crack house crowd
Pelosi, though she is, like the Clintons, sneered at by the thug right (and thereby gains street cred in ultra-liberal San Francisco, the district she represents), has paved the way for Bush's war-funding requests to pass time and again with her political gamesmanship in the House. Among many other acts of accommodation, she was also secretly briefed, along with a few other members of Congress, on CIA torture practices in 2002, and in the spirit of bipartisan amorality saw no problem with it. "This is a progressive, populist campaign. Every day that we exist and bring up these issues is a victory for us," said Sheehan, the grieving mom who became the public face of opposition to the war in Iraq. Now, with a staff of two, she is turning her challenge to that war into a political campaign. To the extent that politics is about winning and losing, yes, hers is probably a lost cause. But I see it as something else. I see it as a clarion stand for principle and rallying point for all w
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POPSSheehan challenges Pelosi for House seat Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said that Pelosi, too, is frustrated with the ongoing war in Iraq but believes that impeachment would be divisive and distract Congress from improving the lives of working families. WTF? If we had impeached the frigggin' criminals, the war could be over!
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POPSAfghanistan-- The "Good Good War" Is A Bad War I had suggested to Marina that we meet in the safety of the Intercontinental Hotel, where foreigners stay in Kabul, but she said no. She had been there once and government agents, suspecting she was Rawa, had arrested her. We met instead at a safe house, reached through contours of bombed rubble that was once streets, where people live like earthquake victims awaiting rescue. The reason the United States gave for invading Afghanistan in October 2001 was "to destroy the infrastructure of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11". The women of Rawa say this is false. In a rare statement on 4 December that went unreported in Britain, they said: "By experience, that the US does not want to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan and work towards the realisation of their economic, political and strategic interests in the region."
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POPSSenator Byrd Wants to End the Occupation: Ask Him to Filibuster the Funding In March of 2003, just prior to the invasion of Iraq, I made a final plea to the administration and my colleagues in Congress to avert a war that I believed would reap sorrowful consequences for our nation. In a speech entitled "We Stand Passively Mute", I expressed my outrage at the fact that the United States Senate -- the world's greatest deliberative body -- stood "for the most part-silent-ominously, dreadfully silent" on this monumental question. Sadly, my worst fears have been realized. The decision to invade Iraq may go down as one of the gravest foreign policy blunders in our nation's history. Yet the war continues. American troop levels are higher than they were the day President Bush flamboyantly swooped onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to declare "Mission Accomplished." Four thousand Americans have now lost their lives, including twenty-three brave West Virginians. Almost thirty-thousand Americans have been wounded in action, many gravely, and c
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POPSThe Costs of Freedom Mrs. Benderman continues her touching account: I know well what freedom costs, and I am willing to pay. In the years before the war I lived a different life – not a military life, but one in which I learned just how little the veterans who served this country really did receive in the way of valid support for what they had given in the name of justice and civic responsibility. People criticized them for having served and others praised them. But few people ever seemed to make the real effort to support the sacrifice the veterans had made to help move us all closer to peace; a peace the veterans stood on the frontlines for, so that those behind the scenes might be able to do the work needed to see that the roots of that peace took hold. I worked to facilitate the care of veterans, World War II, Korea, even those from Viet Nam – I listened to their stories and those of their families. I saw war from the outside looking in. In the last five years, I have come to see the real cost
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POPSUS Police Crack Down on Iraq Rallies It should be 200,000 or 2 million---Where the hell are the people who claim to be against the war? Oh, yeah...too busy to notice there is still a war on. Shame on you who sit by and do nothing. I was out there and I'm half crippled with arthritis and a back that is in constant pain.
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POPSIraq Winter Soldier Hearings: Victory for Independent Media The four days of vets’ testimony revealed the struggle these young Americans are waging to regain their humanity and morality after having been transformed into callous war-fighters who largely dehumanized Iraqis as a people - not just “the enemy” or combatants. An objective observer hearing the testimony would have good reason to wonder if U.S. troops - given the often gratuitous and racist brutality, and the mistreatment of women, children and the elderly — can ever be a solution in Iraq. On panel after panel, the veterans offered heartfelt “apologies to the Iraqi people” for what our country has done to their country. I saw a vet rip up the commendation he’d received from Gen. David Petraeus, denouncing the general as a cheerleader who put his own ambitions above his duty to the troops and to the truth. Many vets called for rapid withdrawal from Iraq and criticized Democratic leaders for prolonging and funding the endless occupation. Ex-Marine Jon Turner, who served two tours
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POPS Celebrating the Anniversary, Mr. Bush? But, a cash cow is a cash cow. Let’s drink to that. And let’s hear it for the never-ending, euphoric ‘progress,’ in your lovely war, George. Let’s not quibble about the lack of water and electricity for the Iraqis, or the devastating shortages of doctors and medical supplies. And, luckily, a blown up bus or marketplace here or there is hardly newsworthy. Not a word in the establishment media about the daily killings or kidnappings you’ve set in motion all these years. Hey, the networks deserve a hand here. Almost three quarters of Americans believe that you’ve caused the deaths of only three thousand American troops. Hard to believe, but they’ve inadvertently written off the lives of a thousand young soldiers and marines. Hell, ignorance is bliss. Party on. And best of all, your coalition of intimidated allies has all but disappeared. Your illegal, immoral and ugly war is largely a private affair now, George. Enjoy. We’d love to see the guest list, George. Surely an annive
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POPS Morford on Useless Drug Wars Damn, there goes my meth supply Thank God for big local drug raids, because now you can't get coke or pot or Ecstasy anymore. Oh wait...the column continues: Is it not brutally true? Is this not pretty much the norm now, the common wisdom, going on nearly 40 years of the modern and abysmal "War on Drugs" and hundreds of billions of dollars spent and countless thousands of lives lost and prisons overflowing, and yet we're a nation that's more illegally drug-happy than ever? Sometimes you just have to ask. Because truly, this grand and insidious "war" must be one of our greatest national embarrassments, an enormous, unspoken failure, far worse in its way than the lost and disgusting war in Iraq, given how it's caused more misery and more pain and more destruction across multiple decades and nations and governments and continues to cost countless billions of dollars and yet has, as all stats and studies reveal, almost zero effect on the overall drug culture of the nation. This w
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POPSSupport the Truth, Not the Troops excellent article and comments..it goes on -- “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Long said. “I made the best decision, I know that. And regardless of what hardships I go through, I could have easily put a family or someone else in that country into way more hardship.” (Hear Robin Long’s interview here: www.couragetoresist.org) Is this the first time you are hearing the story of Robin Long? If so, why do you suppose that is? “Support the troops, not the war.” By now, this phrase has been repeated so often inside the anti-war movement that it is the stuff of cliché. There are many reasons this slogan is misguided, and worse. One of the most immediately obvious of these reasons is that this position—regardless of the intent of the person advocating it—ultimately takes the suffering of the Iraqi and Afghani people out of the equation. A recent article in Revolution newspaper —“The
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POPSDemocrats: Impeach, or Face Humiliation in November Aside from maintaining the sanctity of the Constitution—and holding accountable a criminal Administration—three immediate benefits will accrue: • Exposing and proving the truth will lift the veil of fear the Bush Administration has imposed. • The proven fraudulence of the war will mandate its immediate termination. • John McCain’s candidacy will be destroyed. No one has been a more enthusiastic champion for George Bush’s ”war on terror” than Senator McCain. When it is displayed as appalling deceit, Mr. McCain will be shown a willing accomplice—or a tragic fool—and wholly unfit to be president. But time is short, and the Democratic party is engaged in a civil war. With their demonstrated genius for losing elections, Mr. McCain might well stroll to the presidency. Unless he is proven to be unfit. Democrats, impeach. Or expect to be humiliated.
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POPSThe widespread U.S. military presence in Latin America The premise of the policy, that revving up the Colombian military to fight the guerrillas who protect coca plantations will affect the street price of cocaine, has been thoroughly discredited. So we might ask: Who, besides the corrupt Colombian military, has benefited from the $5.5 billion appropriated for Plan Colombia since 2000? The No. 1 beneficiaries in dollars are the U.S. companies that produce Blackhawk gunships and run the program of chemical warfare in Colombia’s coca fields. These include the companies providing the U.S. government with “services” to aid the Drug War.
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POPSIraqi Women Quietly Endure Horrors of War Zangana also puts into perspective what the number of civilian deaths means in Iraq, which some estimates suggest eclipsed 1 million people. She cites a 2006 report that stated more than 90 women become widows each day. "Since men are the main target of US led troops, militias and death squads…It is women who have come to bury the dead. Baghdad has become a city of bereaved women," writes Zangana. Women are also bearing the brunt of the ongoing refugee crisis. According to an Iraqi Red Crescent report titled "The Internally Displaced People in Iraq" released Jan. 27, there are more than 2 million internally displaced peoples (refugees), while women and children under the age of 12 compose roughly 82 percent of this staggering number. But I would be doing Iraqi women and Zangana's "City of Windows" a disservice by solely focusing on suffering and their role as victims. Because despite the web of destruction, violence and repression Iraqi women face on a daily basis, we must not
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POPSThe War Election "If a steady argument against the war maintains that it was and is wrong -- that it is fundamentally immoral -- that's a tougher sell to the savants of Capitol Hill and an array of corporate-paid journalists. But by taking the political path of least resistance -- by condemning the Iraq war as unwinnable instead of inherently wrong -- more restrained foes of the war helped to prolong the occupation that has inflicted and catalyzed so much carnage. The antiwar movement is now paying a price for political shortcuts often taken in the past several years." This kind of weak, inane groupthink has always bothered me...Like the war would be OK if we were winning....crap.
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POPSRalph Nader Appeals to Disenfranchised Liberals While McCain, Obama and Clinton repeatedly vote for funding the Iraq War, at the same time calling for expanding the war against Afghanistan--a doomed effort that was lost years ago--Nader wants to slash defense spending, the number-one cause of our skyrocketing federal deficit.
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POPSDems: What About the Military Budget? So, rather than artificially reserving a fixed share of our national income for military spending, we should adjust the budget based on a critical assessment of what is actually needed to protect the country. If this debate doesn’t begin during this year’s presidential and congressional elections, it will be that much harder for the next president to rein in our current practice of overspending on the Pentagon.
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