Save the Date!
100 days to go before the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC September 3-6. Start making plans now to join us in protest there.
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Dear Supporter,
One of the joys of traveling to speak is meeting the people at the other end of e-mail, as I did in Madison this past weekend at the Veterans for Peace Memorial Day commemoration. In addition to putting up a “Memorial Mile” of thousands of tombstones marking U.S. deaths in Iraq & Afghanistan, they had an anti-war contingent in the official city parade where they reported strong crowd support. At the afternoon commemoration, they made a point of reading names of Afghans killed in the U.S. War on Afghanistan.
Yesterday in Madison, and before that, over more than a week of protesting NATO in Chicago, I heard similar responses from people working against U.S. wars when I asked what questions they encounter from the public. We find lots of people against the war in Afghanistan, but not willing to criticize the Democrats, or Obama, for expanding it. One woman said “I need help answering when people say ‘Give Obama more time.’”
One way to go at that question is to challenge people to look at what the Obama administration has done. In April 2010, the Crimes are Crimes No Matter Who Does Them statement began that work:
 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.
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report makes the point that Obama is not the “lesser of 2 evils,” but “the more effective evil.” Revolution provided concrete examples of Six Ways Obama has been Worse than Bush, including assassinations on Presidential order; blaming youth for their own oppression; threatening war on Iran; more deportations of immigrants; escalating drone war and persecuting whistle-blowers.
Supporters of Obama, and opponents of a Republican president are being won over to the crimes carried on from the Bush regime, and we have to be a lot more vocal and visible in pointing them out. More verbal ammunition, from Glenn Greenwald, writing in particular about John Brennan:
Remember in the Bush era when little things like the Patriot Act and warrantless eavesdropping and military commissions were the Radical and Lawless Assaults Trampling on Our Constitution and Our Values? Now, all those things are completely normalized — controversies over those policies are like quaint and obsolete relics of a more innocent era — and we now have things like unelected Death Sentence Czars instead.
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Above, graduates stand and turn their backs in protest against John Brennan
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See warcriminalswatch.org for reports from students, video and more photos of the protest against John Brennan's commencement address May 19. From two of the graduates, who helped organized the protest:
Students... handed out 1,000 orange ribbons to students, alumni, family, and friends of the Fordham community. And during Mr. Brennan's address, 10 to 15 people stood and turned their backs, including one Fordham family of four.
A new film project has been launched by director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Jumper, Swingers, and more) working with the ACLU and the PEN American Center "that examines the human cost of America's post-9/11 torture program." In it, prominent actors, writers, and performers together with ordinary readers document the torture apparatus that still hasn't been dismantled. See: reckoningwithtorture.org.
World Can't Wait encourages participation in this important project. Find out how to submit your own recording here. Be sure to let us know and send us a link to your submission too!
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