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Author Jeremy Scahill Examines the Ugly Reality
By Jay Powell / San Diego Free Press
Thursday night, Jeremy Scahill, author of “Blackwater” gave a preview of his new book “Dirty Wars” to a full house at Hoover High School auditorium in City Heights a community that is home to many refugees from countries torn by war.
The Campaign to Get Big Corporations Out of Our Constitution and Big Money Out of Our Elections The OB Rag…
“If we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress”
By Gabrielle Giffords / New York Times / April 17, 2013
SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.
Don’t Miss this Event!
XL Pipeline Protest
April 17, 2013 11:30 – 12:30
Silver Strand Blvd & Coronado Bay Rd, Coronado
Join organizes for a press conference and protest outside the Loew’s Coronado Bay Resort where the American Petroleum Industry (API), the primary trade association of the oil and gas industry, will be holding its annual Pipeline Conference.
They will be there to say that climate change demands an end to the fossil fuel industry’s “business as usual” and to call on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline. They”ll also draw attention to the recent tar sands spill in Arkansas, and the surprising revelation that tar sands are already being brought by train to Los Angeles for refining.
Recently, the OB Rag ran a readers’ poll on the use of drones by the US government either in America and/or abroad. The results of the week-long poll are in: 82% of respondents oppose the use of drones in the United States.
36% of the respondents replied that they are okay with the use of the unmanned flying vessels in other countries by our government. 17% indicated that they are okay with their use in America.
45% of the 108 readers who responded specifically feel that the use of drones in America is unconstitutional or that they should not be used in our country. Another 37% replied that they specifically opposed their use overseas as well.
26% said that their use in America is “absolutely unconstitutional”. Another 19% were okay with their use in hunting down terrorists abroad, but opposed their deployment here in this country.
From San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice /April 3, 2013
“National Anti-Drone Days of Action” from April 4 through 7 in San Diego start a month of protests across the United States against the policy and practice of drone warfare and secret surveillance.
Local and national organizations are coordinating a series of events to increase the attention to why drone killings and surveillance are bad practice and policy for the United States.
San Diego’s “Anti-Drone Days” is not one, but a series of events (see listing).
San Diego is where these protests will start based on the region’s role as the “national capital” of military drone production. Killer and surveillance drones pour out of San Diego at increasing rates, matched by the rise in deaths and dismemberment from US strikes across the globe.
Most of this production is tied to two corporate contracting giants — Northrop Grumman and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which is headquartered in San Diego.
To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young
Originally posted at Truthdig.com
I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
Newly-released tapes record LBJ saying Nixon committed treason.
By Eric Brown / International Business Times / March 17 2013
Newly released tapes recorded during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency have confirmed long-held rumors that in 1968, then-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon worked to sabotage Vietnam War peace talks.
The LBJ tapes were recently declassified and released by the Johnson library in Austin, Texas. According to the BBC’s summary of the tapes, not only did Nixon possibly commit treason, but LBJ knew about it and decided not to expose him in the closing days of an election that Nixon barely won.
By Robert Scheer / truthdig – Nation of Change / March 20, 2013
It is a staple of our widely trumpeted Judeo-Christian heritage that the acknowledgment of sin is a prelude to redemption. So how is it that there is no palpable sense of soul searching associated with the 10th anniversary of a war based on officially concocted lies and a policy of torture? It is because the presumption of a unique American claim to an original and enduring innocence perseveres, no matter the death and destruction.
Indeed, some of our most celebrated publicists defined moral deceit as virtue in justifying the Iraq War. “As far as I am concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in April 2003, when U.N. inspectors had clearly established that the proclaimed basis for invading Iraq was a lie. “Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue).”
Ten years of lying about the Iraq war has to stop now – immediately. The government – our government – lied to us, the America people, about the reasons they said it was necessary to go to war with Iraq – a country that was not threatening us. One decade ago to this day, their lies produced action: the “shock and awe” “bunker-busters” unleashed on the capital of Iraq, March 19th, 2003.
They lied to cover up their invasion of Iraq a decade ago to this day.
And now ten years later, after more than 4400 Americans killed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, 30,000 Americans injured, after we have spent over $3 Trillion dollars, we have come to the realization that, if America is to be honest with itself, we must now demand that someone be held accountable for these lies and the wastes of lives and resources.
By Marjorie Cohn, 2007
According to sources inside the administration, George W. Bush was planning to invade Iraq and remove its government well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Such an invasion violates the UN Charter, which the United States signed in 1945 after the bloodiest conflict in history. The Charter permits countries to use military force against another country only in self-defense or with Security Council permission. But the evidence indicates that the U.S.-led invasion satisfied neither condition and is therefore a war of aggression, which constitutes a Crime Against Peace – exactly the kind of war the Charter was meant to prevent.
Charlie Rose of CBS This Morning (on Tuesday 2/12/13) dragged former VP Dick Cheney out of mothballs to provide a pulpit for his opinions on National Defense and Obama’s ‘plans’ for the military. I know Cheney’s credibility in this area is non-existent so I was left to speculate why CBS would give this fossil a stage? Shared interests?
Cheney talked about Obama intentions to do “serious damage to the military”. He would like us to think John Brennan for CIA and Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense are the issues. I think not.
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