Medea Benjamin's Blog, page 20

Op-Ed: Finally, the Backlash Against Drones Takes Flight

By Medea Benjamin and Noor Mir

Rand Paul’s marathon 13-hour filibuster was not the end of the conversation on drones. Suddenly, drones are everywhere, and so is the backlash. Efforts to counter drones at home and abroad are growing in the courts, at places of worship, outside air force bases, inside the UN, at state legislatures, inside Congress–and having an effect on policy.

April marks the national month of uprising against drone warfare. Activists in upstate New York are converging on the Hancock Air National Guard Base where Predator drones are operated. In San Diego, they will take on Predator-maker General Atomics at both its headquarters and the home of the CEO. In D.C., a coalition of national and local organizations are coming together to say no to drones at the White House. And all across the nation—including New York City, New Paltz, Chicago, Tucson and Dayton—activists are planning picket lines, workshops and sit-ins to protest the covert wars. The word has even spread to Islamabad, Pakistan, where activists are planning a vigil to honor victims.

There has been an unprecedented surge of activity in cities, counties and state legislatures across the country aimed at regulating domestic surveillance drones. After a raucous city council hearing in Seattle in February, the Mayor agreed to terminate its drones program and return the city’s two drones to the manufacturer. Also in February, the city of Charlottesville, VA passed a 2-year moratorium and other restrictions on drone use, and other local bills are pending in cities from Buffalo to Ft. Wayne. Simultaneously, bills have been proliferating on the state level. In Florida, a pending bill will require the police to get a warrant to use drones in an investigation; a Virginia statewide moratorium on drones passed both houses and awaits the governor’s signature, and similar legislation in pending in at least 13 other state legislatures.

Responding to the international outcry against drone warfare, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, is conducting an in-depth investigation of 25 drone attacks and will release his report in the Spring. Meanwhile, on March 15, having returned from a visit to Pakistan to meet drone victims and government officials, Emmerson condemned the U.S. drone program in Pakistan, as “it involves the use of force on the territory of another State without its consent and is therefore a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.”

Leaders in the faith-based community broke their silence and began mobilizing against the nomination of John Brennan, with over 100 leaders urging the Senate to reject Brennan. And in an astounding development, The National Black Church Initiative (NBCI), a faith-based coalition of 34,000 churches comprised of 15 denominations and 15.7 million African Americans, issued a scathing statement about Obama’s drone policy, calling it “evil”, “monstrous” and “immoral.” The group’s president, Rev. Anthony Evans, exhorted other black leaders to speak out, saying “If the church does not speak against this immoral policy we will lose our moral voice, our soul, and our right to represent and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

In the past four years the Congressional committees that are supposed to exercise oversight over the drones have been mum. Finally, in February and March, the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee held their first public hearings, and the Constitution Subcommittee will hold a hearing on April 16 on the “constitutional and statutory authority for targeted killings, the scope of the battlefield and who can be targeted as a combatant.” Too little, too late, but at least Congress is  feeling some pressure to exercise its authority.

The specter of tens of thousands of drones here at home when the FAA opens up US airspace to drones by 2015 has spurred new left/right alliances. Liberal Democratic Senator Ron Wyden joined Tea Party’s Rand Paul during his filibuster. The first bipartisan national legislation was introduced by Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., saying drones used by law enforcement must be focused exclusively on criminal wrongdoing and subject to judicial approval, and prohibiting the arming of drones. Similar left-right coalitions have formed at the local level. And speaking of strange bedfellows, NRA president David Keene joined The Nation’s legal affairs correspondent David Cole in an op-ed lambasting the administration for the cloak of secrecy that undermines the system of checks and balances.

While trying to get redress in the courts for the killing of American citizens by drones in Yemen, the ACLU has been stymied by the Orwellian US government refusal to even acknowledge that the drone program exists. But on March 15, in an important victory for transparency, the D.C. Court of Appeals rejected the CIA’s absurd claims that it “cannot confirm or deny” possessing information about the government’s use of drones for targeted killing, and sent the case back to a federal judge.

Most Democrats have been all too willing to let President Obama carry on with his lethal drones, but on March 11, Congresswoman Barbara Lee and seven colleagues issued a letter to President Obama calling on him to publicly disclose the legal basis for drone killings, echoing a call that emerged in the Senate during the John Brennan hearing. The letter also requested a report to Congress with details about limiting civilian casualties by signature drone strikes, compensating innocent victims, and restructuring the drone program “within the framework of international law.”

There have even been signs of discontent within the military. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had approved a ludicrous high-level military medal that honored military personnel far from the battlefield, like drone pilots, due to their “extraordinary direct impacts on combat operations.” Moreover, it ranked above the Bronze Star, a medal awarded to troops for heroic acts performed in combat. Following intense backlash from the military and veteran community, as well as a push from a group of bipartisan senators, new Defense Secretary Senator Chuck Hagel decided to review the criteria for this new “Distinguished Warfare” medal.

Remote-control warfare is bad enough, but what is being developed is warfare by “killer robots” that don’t even have a human in the loop. A campaign against fully autonomous warfare will be launched this April at the UK’s House of Commons by human rights organizations, Nobel laureates and academics, many of whom were involved in the successful campaign to ban landmines. The goal of the campaign is to ban killer robots before they are used in battle.

Throughout the US–and the world–people are beginning to wake up to the danger of spy and killer drones. Their actions are already having an impact in forcing the Administration to share memos with Congress, reduce the number of strikes and begin a process of taking drones out of the hands of the CIA.

Medea Benjamin is author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. Noor Mir is the Drone Campaign Coordinator at CODEPINK.

 

April Days of Action in San Diego, 4th-7th

San Diego Actions>>

 

Can’t make it to San Diego? Consider coming to another one of the No Drones actions throughout April around the country, or organize your own!

Thursday, April 4

San Diego Veterans for Peace demonstration at General Atomics Production Site

When: 3 pm

Where: General Atomics Production Facility, 14200 Kirkham Way, Poway, CA

San Diego Veterans for Peace will hold a demonstration at the General Atomics Predator drones manufacturing facility along. Assemble at General Atomics Way and Kirkham Way, Poway.  Contact Dave Patterson, dpatterson998@yahoo.com or 760-207-9139

Overpass Light Brigade Action

When: 7 pm

Where: Clairemont Drive bridge over the I-5.

Park at Mission Bay Visitors Center, west of overpass.  Volunteers are needed to hold letters.   Contact  chrisw51@sbcglobal.net or https://www.facebook.com/events/545596298813433/?fref=ts

Friday, April 5

CODEPINK Actions against General Atomics and Northrop Grumman

8 am: Demonstration and die-in at the home of James Neal Blue, General Atomics CEO, 9756 La Jolla Farms Road, La Jolla, CA. Contact Medea Benjamin at (415) 235.6517.

10 am – noon: Protest at General Atomics Headquarters, 3550 General Atomics Ct., San Diego, CA

CODEPINK Action against Northrop Grumman

When: 4 pm – 6 pm

Where: Northrop Grumman headquarters, 9356 Spectrum Center Blvd and Ruffin Rd., San Diego, CA Demonstration and bannering. Please wear black! Contact nodrones@prcsd.org

6:30 pm – 9:30 p.m.: Assembly with dinner, socializing, and more. Location TBA. Contact:  info@sdcpj.org

7-8 pm: Overpass Light Brigade Action, Volunteers needed! Location TBA.  Contact chrisw51@sbcglobal.net

Saturday, April 6

Women Occupy Demonstration At Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum

When: 1-3 pm

Where: 910 N Harbor Dr., San Diego, CA

Join Women Occupy at a demonstration at the Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum. Please wear black. Contact Martha Sullivan, marthasullivan@mac.com or 858-945-6273

Dinner and Speakers’ Forum

When: 6:00 p.m, dinner from 7-9 pm

Where: Church of the Brethren, 3850 Westgate Pl., San Diego 92105.

Forum with Medea Benjamin (CodePink), Pedro Rios (AFSC), and others. Contact:  carolj@prcsd.org. There will also be an Overpass Light Brigade Action at the same time and location. Contact: chrisw51@sbcglobal.net

Sunday, April 7

General Assembly and Workshops

When: Saturday, April 6, 9:30 am to 3 pm

Where: Location TBA

Workshops include: Israel, Drones and Elbit System, Using New Media, The Changing Face of Empire and Resolutions Against Drones. Contact: info@sdcpj.org

Know and no drones by taking action this April, and stay updated closer to the date!

Love,

CODEPINK 

Iraq, We’re Sorry

By Pat Taub

In 2005 I joined a peace protest in Washington, where we marched for an end to the Iraq war.  One image I will never forget is that of a tall, robust middle-aged man draped in an American flag on which he had written with a black magic marker, “Iraq, we’re sorry.”  I went up to him, telling him how moved I was by his gesture.  With tear-filled eyes, he responded,  “I didn’t know what else to do.”

On the tenth anniversary of the Iraqi war, Americans have good reason to feel even sadder and more remorseful than the flag draped man at the Washington Monument did eight years ago. The list of US war crimes is staggering, probably no where as heinous as in Fallujah where the heavy pelting of white phosphorous bombs account for birth defects that medical experts claim are 14 times worse than the birth defects caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Babies born with two heads, multiple limbs and organs outside their bodies are not uncommon in Fallujah.

A recent study released by Al Jazeera reports that the majority of Iraqis feel like their lives were better under Saddam than they are today. Iraqis point to their crumbling infra-structure, sectarian violence and limited access to jobs and health care as just a few examples of how their lives have worsened.

Samar, age 5, after seeing her parents killed by US troops

For those of us who are troubled by what our country has perpetuated in Iraq, there is something we can do to show Iraqis that not all Americans are indifferent to their plight.  Taking a lead from Dennis Kucinich, the former Congressman from Ohio, and Kathy Kelly, the American peace worker who was living in Iraq during “shock and awe,” we can organize a movement to hold Truth and Reconciliation trials, modeled on those in South Africa, where perpetrators of war crimes had to face their victims and ask for forgiveness.

It will be a long uphill struggle to convince the US government of the merits of restorative justice, but local communities can take up the cause without delay.  They can stage mock trials, like the women did at the 1995 UN Women’s Conference in Beijing where female victims of rape in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Palestine testified before a large international delegation of women, describing the atrocities they experienced.  Local communities could gather stories from torture victims, mothers in Fallujah, displaced Iraqis, and children, now young men and women, who were forced to grow up in neighborhoods marked by days and nights of bombings.  We can hear these stories in an audience of neighbors, bearing witness and perhaps writing to specific Iraqi individuals and families to ask forgiveness.

Another way to reach out to Iraqis is to get involved with the new organization, Right to Heal (righttoheal.org), founded on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war to assist American military veterans of Iraq to receive the financial and emotional support to which they are entitled.  A program within Right to Heal is a joint venture led by an Iraqi female activist, Yanar Muhmmed and Maggie Martin, an American veteran of Iraq.  Their stated intention is to provide services for women in Iraq where the war has taken a particularly heavy toll: young women unable to find jobs in a dwindling job market who turn to sex trafficking; young mothers raising children with birth defects; women with breast cancer, which has risen exponentially due to chemical residue from American bombs.

To quote Dennis Kucinich, “After a decade of war .   .   . we must create a culture of peace.”  The time for atonement is now.

Iraqi women & children fleeing American bombs

 

At Senate Hearing, Drone Lobbyist Says Drone Too “Hostile” A Word, CODEPINK peace activist arrested for talking to lobbyist

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Medea Benjamin, (415) 235-6517

Alli McCracken, (860) 575-5692

March 20, 2013

At Senate Hearing, Drone Lobbyist Says Drone Too “Hostile” A Word, CODEPINK peace activist arrested for talking to lobbyist

 Washington, DC– The CODEPINK team expresses its deepest regrets that the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on March 20th invited Michael Toscano, CEO of AUVSI (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International) as a witness for what otherwise had the potential to be a productive session about domestic drones and privacy issues. While witnesses Amie Stepanovich, attorney at Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Ryan Calo, Assistant Professor at Washington University School of Law, represented more nuanced positions, “Toscano’s appearance in Congress seemed to be part of a PR campaign to promote domestic drones without  a real debate about the risks associated with their use,”  said CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin, author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.

Before the hearing had begun, 24-year-old CODEPINK National Coordinator Alli McCracken, who recently returned from Pakistan meeting with drone victims, approached Toscano at the witness table, asking him “How does it feel to profit from killer drones?” McCracken was promptly arrested by Capitol Hill Police. McCracken commented upon her release from the police station, “I am appalled that a man who profits handsomely from the killer and spy drone industry is being pandered to by our Congress.”

During his testimony, Toscano cautioned against the use of the word “drone,” stating that it “carried with it a hostile connotation.” He followed by preaching the economic benefits of a drone program, saying that the industry is “poised to help create 70,000 new jobs and $13.6 billion in economic impact in the first three years following the integration of unmanned aircraft into national airspace.” Throughout the hearing, Toscano dodged questions about serious privacy concerns about drones, returning constantly to the economic benefits.

“The fact that Toscano started his statement by declaring that the word ‘drone’ was too ‘hostile’ is ironic because AUVSI lobbies for organizations such as General Atomics that produce killer drones,” said CODEPINK anti-drone campaign coordinator Noor Mir.  “Even though witness Amie Stepanovich brought up the real threat of drones being used by corporations for stalking, nobody acknowledged that the AUVSI also lobbies for Lockheed Martin, which proudly announced the  ‘Stalker’ drone at the 2012 AUVSI conference. Surely, ‘hostile connotations’ rightfully apply to drones that ‘stalk’ and kill their targets,” Mir added.

Perhaps next time the Senate Judiciary Committee will think twice before inviting a man who once drew an analogy between deaths associated with car crashes and civilian casualties of drone strikes, stating that “car crashes kill 35,000 people a year, but we don’t talk about banning cars” in an interview with Salon. “A man with that sort of logical fallacy should not be deemed a credible Congressional witness,” said Benjamin.

##

10 years later, U.S. veterans and Iraqis demand the Right to Heal

Marking the 10th anniversary of the “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq, U.S. Veterans, Iraqi human rights organizations and their allies launched the Right to Heal initiative today in front of the White House.

Speakers, which included both U.S. veterans and Iraqis, focused on the rights of everyone on all sides of this conflict, especially women, to heal. One in three women in the U.S. military are sexually assaulted, and women face discrimination in filing for disability when they return home. Many Iraq veterans enlisted during peacetime, or were misled by our government with lies about weapons of mass destruction. These lies have cost the lives of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis alike. Survivors continue to live with Post-Traumatic Stress, Traumatic Brain Injury, and Sexual Trauma. In Iraq, depleted uranium and other chemical weapons have increased the rates of birth defects and cancer. The war has destroyed much of the infrastructure and many Iraqis are without water or electricity. While US officials used the rhetoric of women’s liberation to justify the invasion, women’s rights in Iraq have suffered a major blow due to the war.

Everyone deserves a chance to heal from this war that our government led us into. We must demand full health care and services for veterans, and reparations for Iraq proportional to the amount of damage we have caused. We cannot undo our crimes, but we can take the steps to make amends.

Finally, as talk increases about war with Iran, let us do everything we can to prevent more devastation. We have the opportunity now to prevent these same mistakes and atrocities from happening again. Please, contact your senators now and urge them to commit to diplomacy.

Pinkspired

I stepped into the CODEPINK office in LA exactly three weeks after stepping off a plane from France, where I had spent the last four months. I hadn’t payed attention to any American news in all that time, so it’s safe to say I was a little fuzzy on the issues. No matter, I jumped right in, and was soon following current events and learning to do everything from working the store, to Twitter, to handing out flyers.

A couple weeks later, I had my first experience doing an event that I had helped organize – One Billion Rising. After our final dance in front of an elementary school on Abbot Kinney, I gave the balloons I had been carrying all day to the security guard there, who had been our most entertained audience member. I will never forget how touched and excited by this gift he was. I thought how much happiness and hope CODEPINK must have spread over the years if something as seemingly insignificant as pink balloons could bring this much joy. His smile inspired me, and I never wanted to stop.

A few days later, I flew to DC, and my two and a half weeks there went by in what felt like two seconds. I was so busy with actions – darting off to the White House one day, off to the Pakistani embassy the next, and constantly in and out of the Senate Hart Building. I barely had time to think before I found myself dressed up revolutionary-era clothes or a settlement and walking up to Dianne Feinstein and other congress people.

I thrived on this direct action. I was living and breathing the issues, and it was hard to believe that just a month before I had been completely out of the loop. There is nothing more satisfying than driving home after a long day of chanting and marching in the streets, utterly exhausted but incredibly happy because today my voice was heard.

I’m sure I have learned more life lessons and valuable skills working alongside Jodie and Medea during my internship at CODEPINK than I could have learned anywhere else in this short amount of time. Some words of wisdom that really stuck are, “First you educate, then you inspire, then you activate.” This has been my experience at CODEPINK. They not only gave me the best activist’s education I could ask for, inspired me no end, and let me be part of so many awesome actions, but they also gave me the tools to educate, inspire, and activate others.

I have met so many strong and amazing people at CODEPINK, many of whom have become role models. As I continue to meet people throughout my life I will tell them all my stories of the exciting protests. I will tell them how fun it was to hold hands with Palestinian college students and dance to debka music in front of the AIPAC meeting.

I will tell them what it was like to lie on the floor of Feinstein’s office covered by a bloody sheet, listening to Tighe’s drone impression. I will tell them my love of making visuals and how I would look up from a banner to find that two hours had gone by and my hands were covered in paint. I will talk endlessly about my internship at CODEPINK because it has changed who I am.

Getting Through Security: Visit To Sen. Angus King

We arrived a few minutes early for our staff meeting at Maine’s new senator Angus King’s office in Augusta, the state capital. The federal building has a metal detector and about seven middle aged guards at the door, and it took us considerably longer than we had planned to pass through security.

My friend Abby Shahn had to remove her belt, shoes, and get wanded by a metal detector.

I had to drink the water from my water bottle in front of the one female guard, to prove that it was actually water. No, she was not kidding.

Marge Kilkelly — who was a Democratic legislator in Maine before becoming senior policy advisor to Angus — was in state for the congressional recess week, and she said it took her a really long time to get through security, too.

Apparently the guards at the federal building have been told to give the order that no one is supposed to photograph “a guard doing his (sic) work.” An aggressive older man ordered me to erase the photo I took of Abby getting wanded, and I did it because 1) I wanted to get to my appointment and 2) apparently the guards did not realize that when someone holds a pink rectangle up in the air, she is also taking a picture. So we still got the clandestine photos above.

We did our meeting, which we had requested soon after Angus got elected in November, by presenting a lot of information we thought might lead Angus to conclude that riding the “stop war spending, it’s bankrupting the Treasury” platform might be a path to public acclaim.

Some info was to show that the will of the people of Maine is overwhelmingly in favor of low spending on “defense”( Penny Poll article  from the Kennebec Journal). National Priorities project trade offs and charts showed that the federal government is seriously out of whack, currently spending 57% of the discretionary budget on military. We also left behind a case study of Bring Our War $$ Home campaign as a coalition effort in Maine and in many other parts of the U.S. and articles about the U.S. Conference of Mayors resolution pleading with the federal government to spend less on wars, and more investing in the cities where people live.

We had printed a copy of the Pollin & Pelletier report “The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending,” which refutes the claim that military spending is a good jobs program. I consider this the clincher because it refutes the b.s. that is always trotted out when there are threatened cuts to the Pentagon budget: But we will lose jobs locally if this funding is cut! Read the report to find out why investment in several other ways produces far more jobs — more than twice as many, in some cases.

It fell to Codepink associate Pat Taub to get down to business on drones. Since Angus had made a splash in the news asking a few pointed questions about drones of John Brennan, nominee for CIA director. He had also suggested a special court to review the extrajudicial assassination plans, but only those targeting Americans, so Pat had brought Desmond Tutu’s op-ed calling for a respect for all the humans on the planet. She had much documentation of the effects of drone strikes, including photographs, and a copy of Medea Benjamin’s book Drone Warfare, which is well-researched and current.

Buy one for your senator.

We also shared a copy of NYU/Stanford law school report “Living Under Drones” a most substantial refutation of the claim that drones are in Angus’ words a “humane” weapon as currently used by the U.S.

Abby, going as usual to the heart of the matter, wanted to ask: How can the people’s voices can be heard in government? She observed that this has consistently failed to happen. She has a long memory so she started back at Vietnam naming all the wars people haven’t wanted that the U.S. has waged anyway. (A large campaign contribution would no doubt amplify the people’s voices just like it does for corporations.) I wondered aloud who Angus would be representing in Congress: the people of Maine, or General Dynamics?

Then we all talked about energy policy and we found out that because Maine is so dependent on heating oil, Angus favors natural gas as a “transitional fuel” and that he favors FRACKING!!!!!

Objections to the folly of polluting ground water were waved away by Marge with the mantra “transitional fuel.”

We pointed out that we had been in “transition” since Jimmy Carter wore that cardigan and turned down the thermostat in the White House, which was so long ago it was the first presidential election where I was old enough to vote. Also that there is vast hydropower leaving the state on long distance lines, leaking energy as it goes, for the profit of wealthy people, while the Mainers whose rivers were dammed to make the electricity do not benefit from it. Also that many of us heat with renewables, use solar energy, and want to see sustainable sources like tidal and geothermal and wind explored.

As we were leaving I thanked Marge because she had supported all middle school kids and teachers in Maine getting laptops through a learning technology grant when she was in the state legislature and Angus was governor. Amazingly enough, this program is still in place years later, and it did revolutionize middle school. (It didn’t solve the equity problem, though, because the local school districts were supposed to fund the high school end of the program, and if they were poor, fagedaboudit.)

In the absence of meaningful congressional oversight of the executive branch waging wars both overt and covert, it is hard to justify teaching kids about checks and balances as if they actually existed. I probably shouldn’t have said that because it’s one more black mark in my file.

I know many will think we were fools to waste our time and probably get iris scanned and who knows what else to meet with a representative of a broken government that no longer represents the people. We are all grandmothers and idealistic and we did once believe in the democracy we supposedly lived in. We’re worried about the future for our grandchildren, like pretty much everybody is nowadays. So we visit our senators. But since money equals political speech, and we don’t leave behind a big fat check, it mostly amounts to going through the motions.

We do it because you still can. That is, if you can get past Homeland Security.

Codepink associates with Angus King’s senior policy advisor Marge Kilkelly in Augusta today.

Who are those two Afghan children?

by Hakim and the Afghan Peace Volunteers

March 3, 2013

http://youtu.be/VW43_Y2qkWw

Two young Afghan boys herding cattle in Uruzgan Province of Afghanistan were mistakenly killed by NATO forces yesterday.

They were seven and eight years old.

Our globe, approving of ‘necessary or just war’, thinks, “We expect this to happen occasionally.”

Some say, “We’re sorry.”

Therefore today, with sorrow and rage, we the Afghan Peace Volunteers took our hearts to the streets.

We went with two cows, remembering that the two children were tending to their cattle on their last day.

We are those two children.

We want to be human again.

Don’t we see it? Don’t we hear it?

All of nature, the cows, the grass, the hills and the songs, crave for us to be human again.

We want to get out of our seats of pride and presumption, and give a cry of resistance.

We want the world to hear us, the voice of the thundering masses.

“We’re so tired of war.”

“Children shouldn’t have to live or die this way.”

“This hurts like mad, like the mad hurt of seeing a child being caned while he’s crying from hunger.”

“We have woken up, and we detest the method of mutual killing in war that the leaders of the world have adopted.”

We say, with due respect to the leaders, but with no respect for their or any act of violence, “We are very wrong. You are very wrong.”

“We cannot go on resolving conflicts this warring way.”

Unless we see the cattle’s submission upon being blown up to pieces, and understand the momentary surprise of the seven year old listening to music on his radio, and empathize with the eight year old who had taken responsibility for the seven year old, and weep torrentially with the mother of the children, we are at risk of losing everything we value within ourselves.

Hearing the NATO commander General Joseph Dunford say that they’re sorry makes us angry; we don’t want to hear it.

We don’t want ‘sorry-s’. We want an end to all killing. We want to live without war.

We want all warriors to run back anxiously to their own homes, and fling their arms around their sons and daughters, their grandsons and grand-daughters, and say, “We love you and will never participate in the killing of any child or human being again.”

In the days to come, we’ll remember the distraught mother and family of the two children.

We know they won’t eat, or feel like breathing or living. They will remember, yet not want to remember.

Their mother will feel like giving away tens of thousands of cows just so she can touch her two children’s faces again. No, she’ll not only touch their faces, she will shower them with the hugs and kisses only mothers can give.

Do not insult her grief or her poverty by giving her monetary compensation for her children.

If they were alive, they would say along with their mother, “We are not goods.”

We went out there with our hearts and two cows this morning. We stood in front of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, next to a trash-lined river no one wants to clean up, and we began to feel human again.

We had begun to cry for our world.

CODEPINK Anti-Drone Week of Action: February 19 – 23

In light of the decision to delay John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA Director and the call by Congress for the administration to release the missing legal opinions about targeted killings, CODEPINK is organizing a week of actions to show the growing opposition to killer drones and doubts about John Brennan.

Tuesday, February 19, noon, White House:

CODEPINK is starting the week by highlighting “Terror Tuesday,” the shocking weekly meeting at the White House where President Obama and John Brennan compile “kill lists” of suspected terrorists and play prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. Visuals include a physical replica of the kill list and a large model drone.

Wednesday, February 20, noon, Atrium of the Senate Hart Building:

Human rights activists will denounce the covert drone program with compelling visuals, and will visit Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office to demand an accounting of civilian casualties caused by CIA drones.

Thursday, February 21, noon, Department of Justice (Constitution Ave between 9th and 10th Street):

CODEPINK will bring a giant replica of the US Constitution to the Justice Department, demanding that the Justice Department start respecting the Constitution. They will expose the illegality of drone strikes and pressure for the public release of all legal opinions on targeted killing. CODEPINK will also deliver a petition to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Friday, February 22, 3pm, Pakistani Embassy, 3517 International Ct NW:

CODEPINK will join members of the Pakistani community at the Pakistani Embassy for a vigil to mourn the death of innocent victims of drone strikes.

“Finally, more and more Americans are waking up to the fact that our drones have been killing thousands of people who we can’t even identify, fueling new recruits for extremists groups and jeopardizing our national security,” says CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin. “If we have any sense of morality, if we care about international law, if we believe in the values of a democratic society, we have to speak out against the monstrous killer drone program that John Brennan has concocted.”

 

Murdering in the Name of War

By Christopher Dorner

“We’re going to go forward with the plan”

Said the understandably upset man

“Seven of the burners deployed,

And we have a fire”- and Dorner is destroyed.

Yet we must fully realize

That war is what we must despise

Dorner declared war on the LAPD

An institution with a corrupt history

And in short order managed

To inflict horrific collateral damage

By blowing several people away

And striking terror into the heart of LA

For the declaration of war ends compassion

And leads to the deaths of the innocent civilian

And justifies atrocities beyond imagination

Using the latest weapons of annihilation

Douhet, Dorner, Brevic and McVay

All had the same message to say:

That they were are at war and justified in killing

Innocents in a manner quite chilling

Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo we see

Were followed shortly by Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

Where the instantaneous mushroom cloud flash

Converted hundreds of thousands into carbonized ash

The president has assumed the right

In the name of the global terror war fight

To engage in signature strikes beyond imagination

Where those killed are terrorists by definition

These examples all have a common thread-

That war leaves predominantly innocents dead

And that actions by individuals are considered psychotic

But sanctioned by states no matter how despotic.

War and violence is what we must fight

For all peoples of the earth have the right

To live in the future their peaceful tomorrows

Without war’s unending and devastating sorrows

HP Charman MD 2-16-2013