Category: Peace Movement

Vets for Peace gathered and bannered at Horton Plaza March 19th, 2009 … 6 yrs and counting ..

Veterans For Peace will be hosting a rally & protest on the exact date of the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, on March 19th, 2009 4:30pm to 7:00pm at Horton Plaza. This will be from 4:30pm to 7:00pm, and will be held near the NBC 7/39 studios. We will have banners & signs, and hope to get some media attention.

It may be true, as someone has suggested, that young people of Ocean Beach today have no idea of the on-going, daily tension between the police and the youth of OB a generation ago. Things are taken for granted.

Take the concept of police review, of the idea that civilians with some authority review the activities of police officers through an independent process. Heh? What’s the big deal? you ask. Of course, there should be some sort of civilian monitoring of and control on how police act and behave toward citizens.

In my earlier post, I described how all hell broke loose 35 years ago on February 22, 1974. It was the day that Pete Mahone tried to commit suicide by cop – a guy many of us active in OB’s progressive community knew. The subsequent armed take-over of Ocean Beach by the San Diego Police in response to the shooting led to an outrage among residents, an outrage that manifested itself into a campaign for human rights and reforms in police practices – a campaign that eventually did win some changes.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced today that he is lifting a 1991 ban on news coverage of the return of the remains of fallen service members to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, although he will leave the decision about press coverage up to the family of the dead.

The controversial ban on photography and other media coverage of the solemn return of flag-draped coffins — upheld by both Republican and Democratic administrations — has generated lawsuits as well as conflicting emotions on the part of military familiies.

Blackwater Worldwide is abandoning its tarnished brand name as it tries to shake a reputation battered by oft-criticised work in Iraq, renaming its family of two dozen businesses under the name Xe. The parent company’s new name is pronounced like the letter z.

Blackwater Lodge & Training Centre – the subsidiary that conducts much of the company’s overseas operations and domestic training – has been renamed US Training Centre Inc., the company said today.

by Gregg Robinson

These are going to be tough times for the anti-war movement. With a popular Democrat in the White House and depression economics on the front pages, it is going to be hard to turn out people for anti-war demonstrations. Most people’s attention is going to be on their pocket books and their sympathy for Obama is going to mean they are unlikely to demonstrate against a war that he is making attempts to “carefully” end. For these reasons the anti-war movement cannot afford to be easily distracted.

It is now a commonplace — as a lead article in the New York Times’s Week in Review pointed out recently — that Afghanistan is “the graveyard of empires.” Given Barack Obama’s call for a greater focus on the Afghan War (“we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq…”), and given indications that a “surge” of U.S. troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan’s dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation, and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration’s policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into “Obama’s War.”

On Tuesday, February, 10th, San Diego students need you support. Please come to the School Board meeting, where youth of conscience throughout the school district will be demanding that shooting ranges be eliminated from our school campuses. Several new Board members have been elected and they might listen to reason…or at least, to their students and supporters. The gathering at the Education Center, 4100 Normal Street, San Diego, will begin at 4 p.m.

Late last night (Feb. 10th) around 9pm, in a 3-2 vote, the School Board of the San Diego Unified School District voted to removed JROTC shooting ranges from district high school campuses.

Congratulations are due the Education Not Arms Coalition which has been fighting this for a year and to the 150 students from Lincoln, Mission Bay and other high schools who were at the school district offices and board meeting today for over 6 hours.

Karl Rove’s recent remarks to a cheering crowd at the University of Miami should remind us that right wing efforts tocontinue the barbarism of the Bush years will not disappear any time soon. Chelsea Isaacs recently wrote about Rove’s comments in the Miami Hurricane:
“One year from now, Gitmo won’t be closed,” Rove said. “If it is, there will be an uproar in the U.S. about where to put these people.” Interrogation tactics used by the CIA during Bush’s term in office were not torturous, Rove said, but he did not deny that the CIA strongly pressed terrorists for vital information. “You bet we squeeze them for information,” Rove said. “If we hadn’t, those same terrorists could have executed their plans to kill, and (people) would be asking why Bush didn’t protect American soldiers’ lives.”

Antiwar activists have taken up the cause of an Army deserter who was deported from Canada and is now being held at the brig at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. Two dozen members of Military Families Speak Out and San Diego Veterans for Peace protested Tuesday [Jan. 13,2009] afternoon outside the base in support of Robin Long, a onetime Army private who was sentenced in August to 15 months behind bars and a dishonorable discharge.

The activists support Long’s view that the Iraq war is illegal and say his sentence is particularly cruel because it could prevent him from returning to his sick girlfriend and their 2-year-old son in Canada. Canadian law makes it difficult for convicted felons to enter Canada.