A 9/11 Conspiracy Theory

The Day Collusion Died

Obama's Legacy

Pity the Sad Legacy of Barack Obama
by Cornel West

(This was published over two years ago, but it is still a very good reminder of what happened during Obama’s term in office. - dancewater)

Instead, most well-paid pundits on TV and radio celebrated the Obama brand. And most black spokespeople shamelessly defended Obama’s silences and crimes in the name of racial symbolism and their own careerism. How hypocritical to see them now speak truth to white power when most went mute in the face of black power. Their moral authority is weak and their newfound militancy is shallow. 

The gross killing of US citizens with no due process after direct orders from Obama was cast aside by neoliberal supporters of all colors. And Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling and other truth-tellers were demonized just as the crimes they exposed were hardly mentioned.

The president’s greatest legislative achievement was to provide healthcare for over 25 million citizens, even as another 20 million are still uncovered. But it remained a market-based policy, created by the conservative Heritage Foundation and first pioneered by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.

Obama’s lack of courage to confront Wall Street criminals and his lapse of character in ordering drone strikes unintentionally led to rightwing populist revolts at home and ugly Islamic fascist rebellions in the Middle East. And as deporter-in-chief – nearly 2.5 million immigrants were deported under his watch – Obama policies prefigure Trump’s barbaric plans.

The rest of the article is here.

Lee Camp sums up what WikiLeaks revealed

Honest Government Ad

Wars and Climate Chaos

Whitewater falls in NC

STOPPING WARS IS ESSENTIAL FOR STOPPING CLIMATE CHANGE 

By Elaine Graham-Leigh

The US military admits to getting through 395,000 barrels of oil every day, including jet fuel consumption which makes it the single largest consumer in the world. This is an astonishing figure which is nevertheless likely to be a considerable underestimate. Once all the oil use from military contractors, weapons manufacturing and all those secret bases and operations that get missed out of the official figures are factored in, the real daily usage is likely to be closer to a million barrels. As even supporters of the military admit, ‘vast swathes of our military are big carbon emitters – tanks, jeeps, Humvees, jet planes’, as Steven Groves from the Heritage Foundation put it in 2015. To put the figures into perspective, US military personnel on active service make up around 0.0002% of the world’s population, but are part of a military system which generates around 5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Much of these emissions are from the military infrastructure that the US maintains around the world. The environmental cost of war itself is considerably higher. It has been estimated that the Iraq war between 2003 and 2007 accounted for 141 million metric tonnes of CO2, more than 60% of all the countries in the world.

The environmental damage caused by war is not limited, of course, to climate change. The effects of nuclear bombing and nuclear testing, the use of Agent Orange, depleted uranium and other toxic chemicals, as well as land mines and unexploded ordinance lingering in conflict zones long after the war has moved on, have earned the US military a deserved reputation as ‘the greatest single assault on the environment.’ It has been estimated that 20% of all environmental degradation around the world is due to military and related activities, much of which of course has involved the US and the UK.

The rest of the article is here.

Russia gate in three minutes

A Global Security System from World Beyond War

From Voices for Creative Nonviolence

From Voices for Creative NonViolence

The statement below was issued by the seven Kings Bay Plowshares activists now awaiting trial for their April 4, 2018 action symbolically disarming the nuclear weapons arsenal based at the Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia.

PRESS RELEASE:

For Immediate Release

www.twitter.com/kingsbayplow7      

kingsbayploweshares7.org

Feb. 4, 2019

After U.S. INF Withdrawal, Plowshares Activists, Facing Years in Prison, Warn of Nuclear Peril

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 released the following statement on Monday: “On Friday, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the landmark Intermediate Range Nuclear Missile Treaty (INF). ‘There is a real and present danger that this action will provoke a renewed nuclear arms race and brings us closer to nuclear war,’ says Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day and co-defendant of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.”

The seven Catholic defendants are “charged with three federal felonies and one misdemeanor for their actions in going onto the Naval Base at Kings Bay Georgia and symbolically disarming the massive amount of nuclear weapons at that base.” The group states that their actions are “to make real the prophet Isaiah’s command to ‘beat swords into plowshares.’” The seven are: Martha Hennessy, Mark Colville, Clare Grady, Jesuit Fr. Stephen Kelly, Patrick O’Neill, Carmen Trotta and Elizabeth McAlister (the widow of Philip Berrigan). 

The group’s statement continued: “This is not the first failure by the U.S. to either endorse or abide by treaties which would reduce the threat posed by the mere possession of weapons of mass destruction. The crucial Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1996, and has been ratified by 166 countries, but the U.S. is not among them. In 2001, President George W Bush formally withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) signed with the U.S.S.R. in 1972. We must worry that the U.S. will next quit the New START Treaty signed with Russia in 2010; such an action would erase a legally binding, verifiable agreement capping the number of strategic nuclear warheads possessed by the nuclear powers.”

Since 1980 Plowshares has been a movement of nonviolent symbolic direct actions disarming nuclear weapons on at least 100 separate occasions.

Most recently, on April 4, 2018, seven Plowshares activists entered the Kings Bay nuclear submarine base, in Georgia for a nonviolent symbolic disarmament action. The base is homeport to six U.S. nuclear ballistic missile submarines, each armed with 16 Trident II missiles. The Kings Bay Plowshares 7, all devout Catholics, now face up to 25 years in federal prison. Their trial in Southern Georgia federal court may begin in March or April. As in previous acts of civil resistance and conscience, the defendants seek to expose the illegality and immorality of Trident’s omnicidal nuclear weapons.

The INF Treaty is a highly imperfect shield against the growing nuclear arsenals festering in nine countries. What will help to ensure human survival is the moral conviction of people willing to undertake symbolic acts as one way to chart other roads leading to a disarmed world.  

With actions such as Kings Bay Plowshares 7 and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, also known as ICAN (the 2017 Nobel Prize winner), which is promoting the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, this nation could pull back from the brink of omnicide.

“Pulling out of the INF Treaty was an unconscionable and reckless act on the part of the Trump administration,” said Kings Bay Plowshares defendant, Patrick O’Neill. “Such unilateral action involving weapons of mass destruction only serve to put our planet at greater risk for the use of nuclear weapons, which could end the human experiment.”

From Veterans For Peace

The People Have the Need to Know
Veterans For Peace Stands with Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange

Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are both in jail right now.  They are being persecuted by the very elite who are pursuing regime change wars around the globe and who do not want the people to know the truth about what they are up to. 

Curiously, Assange has been charged with conspiring with Chelsea Manning to break into a classified Army computer in 2010. Regardless of the questionable allegations that WikiLeaks collaborated with Trump and the Russians to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, WikiLeaks did a great service by publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes  The charges against Assange go back nine years to when Chelsea Manning provided WikiLeaks with the “Collateral Murder” video and the Army’s daily after action reports from Iraq and Afghanistan.  That is what the U.S. government is choosing to focus on, at least initially.

What Chelsea Manning released through WikiLeaks was evidence of the routine killing of civilians by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the routine cover-up of these war crimes. The Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diaries also revealed that military and civilian leaders were lying to the U.S. people when they presented rosy assessments of the progress of those wars. If more people had paid attention to these revelations, many thousands of lives could have been saved.

One of the most moving aspects of Manning’s court martial testimony in 2013 was her explanation as to why she released the so-called “Collateral Murder” video, which shows the gunning down in Baghdad of two Reuters journalists and bystanders by American soldiers in a US Apache helicopter. Manning described being deeply troubled by the video, especially the crew’s “lack of concern for human life” and lack of “concern for injured children at the scene.”

Chelsea explained her own motivation:

“I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan. It might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day.... I felt I accomplished something that would allow me to have a clear conscience.”

Chelsea Manning is a hero to Veterans For Peace for releasing documents that the public had every right to see.  Julian Assange is a hero to Veterans For Peace for providing a platform for whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning.  Both Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange should be celebrated.  They should be up for the Nobel Peace Prize and for awards in journalism and courageous truth-telling.  Instead they are being persecuted by the very warmongers who continue to lie about the wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Somalia, and who are now promoting regime change wars with Venezuela and Iran.

Now is the time to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.  We will not be distracted by murky rumors or character assassination in the mainstream media. We will join emergency protests, initiate our own protests, contact our Congressional representatives, write letters to the editor, and more.

In defending these two courageous individuals, Veterans For Peace is also defending the people’s right to know. And we are defending journalists’ right to publish the truth, no matter how inconvenient to the elites who seek to dominate the globe. If the first casualty of war is truth, then the telling the truth is also an antidote to war.

The Democratic Party

This came from Facebook. I wonder who the DNC will pick for the next Democratic candidate for president. Hope they pick a good one. Don't know why anyone would bother to vote in the Democratic primaries since they were rigged in 2016 and the DNC does not intend to refrain from doing that again in 2020. They are proud that they rigged the primaries and said they will do it again.

Comments by Dancewater

From Rep. Meadows email: "As many of you know, several of my colleagues and I have been deeply involved in making sure we get to the bottom of how exactly the Mueller probe started. Americans deserve to know the truth. Remember: the Russian dossier was fake, the FISA system was rampantly abused, the ‘intelligence’ used by the Department of Justice and FBI was biased and inaccurate, and DOJ and FBI executives used leaks and the media to peddle the collusion conspiracy theory all along."

And it is going to be pursued and pursued and pursued during the 2019 - 2020 election cycle by the Republicans. Our never ending election cycle......

As David Swanson said, the Democrats picked the one candidate that could lose to Trump and then picked the one issue that would blow up on them in the next election. And the Obama administration DOJ, FBI and CIA have a lot to answer for, not to mention the DNC and Clinton campaign. Probably charges are going to come their way. Maybe Clapper will finally go to jail. He belongs there for lying under oath to Congress many years ago, but Obama DOJ did nothing about that.

And of course, our corporate media will pay no price at all for all this bullshit. Maddow alone has made millions peddling this garbage.

And meanwhile, a real journalist, Assange, is in prison for publishing the truth. And Manning is in prison again for leaking the truth. They should be celebrated heroes not in prison. They should be the ones on our TVs. But that would be like hoping the Democratic party members would actually read the leaked DNC and Podesta emails. Just not going to happen - I guess because the American people would rather stay stupid and not think at all.

Remember Obama

This came from Facebook. Amazing what evil this man got away with - and even got awards for, like the Nobel Peace Prize, where he argued that violence and war is sometimes necessary for peace in the acceptance speech! And he holds a record: only US President at war for every single day of his two-term presidency. The only one!

Obama disgusts me.

General Smedley Comment

This came from Facebook.

Advice from The Beatles

This came from Facebook. No idea who made it.

‘Every War Is a War Against Children’

Yemeni children cover their ears as Saudi-allied planes bomb residential neighborhoods, April 2015. (Photo: Felton Davis)

We, in the United States, have yet to realize both the futility and immense consequences of war even as we develop, store, sell, and use hideous weapons. The number of children killed is rising.

Article by Kathy Kelly.

At 9:30 in the morning of March 26, the start of the fifth year of the Saudi-led coalition war against Yemen, the entrance to a rural hospital in the northwest part of the country was teeming as patients waited to be seen and employees arrived at work. Suddenly, missiles from an airstrike hit the hospital, killing seven people, four of them children.

Jason Lee of Save the Children, told The New York Times that the Saudi-led coalition, now in its fifth year of waging war in Yemen, knew the coordinates of the hospital and should have been able to avoid the strike. He called what happened “a gross violation of humanitarian law.”

The day before, Save the Children reported that air raids carried out by the Saudi-led coalition have killed at least 226 Yemeni children and injured 217 more in just the last twelve months. “Of these children,” the report noted, “210 were inside or close to a house when their lives were torn apart by bombs that had been sold to the coalition by foreign governments.”

Last year, an analysis issued by Save the Children estimated that 85,000 children under age five have likely died from starvation or disease since the Saudi-led coalition’s 2015 escalation of the war in Yemen.

“Children who die in this way suffer immensely as their vital organ functions slow down and eventually stop,” said Tamer Kirolos, Save the Children’s Country Director in Yemen. “Their immune systems are so weak they are more prone to infections with some too frail to even cry. Parents are having to witness their children wasting away, unable to do anything about it.” Kirolos and others who have continuously reported on the war in Yemen believe these deaths are entirely preventable. 

The rest of the article is here.

Letter written by Bayard Rustin

BUILDING PEACE ENDING DISCRIMINATION

The following letter was written by Bayard Rustin in 1943. AFSC is fortunate to have a copy in its archives, which you can find on our website. “Letter to His Draft Board” was republished in the book Black Fire (Quaker Press of Friends General Conference) in 2011, and last year, Quaker Press published a children’s book about Bayard Rustin entitled, Bayard Rustin: Invisible Activist, co-written by Jacqueline Houtman, Walter Naegle, and Michael Long.

Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and was taught Quaker faith and practice by his grandparents, Julia and Janifer Rustin. Rustin began his life of social justice activism at an early age and had to navigate the challenges of being an openly gay black man, a conscientious objector, and a former communist. Rustin advised Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., worked with A. Philip Randolph, and organized numerous marches, sit-ins, and boycotts. He was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, a founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and a co-founder of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Today, we honor the lasting influence of his courageous life (Black Fire, 151-152). Queries for worship and discussion can be found at the bottom of the page. – Greg Elliott

*******************

Local Board No. 63

2050 Amsterdam Avenue

New York, NY

Gentlemen:

Bayard Rustin (Chicago Urban League Records, University of Illinois at Chicago Library)

For eight years I have believed war to be impractical and a denial of our Hebrew-Christian tradition. The social teachings of Jesus are: (1) Respect for personality; (2) Service the “summum bonum” [Latin: “the highest good”] (3) Overcoming evil with good; and (4) The brotherhood of man. These principles as I see it are violated by participation in war.

Believing this, and having before me Jesus’ continued resistance to that which he considered evil, I was compelled to resist war by registering as a Conscientious Objector in October 1940.

However, a year later, September 1941, I became convinced that conscription as well as war equally is inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus. I must resist conscription also.

On Saturday, November 13, 1943, I received from you an order to report for a physical examination to be taken Tuesday, November 16 at eight o’clock in the evening. I wish to inform you that I cannot voluntarily submit to an order springing from the Selective Service and Training Act for War.

There are several reasons for this decision, all stemming from the basic spiritual truth that men are brothers in the sight of God:

1) War is wrong. Conscription is a concomitant of modern war. Thus, conscription for so vast an evil as war is wrong.

2) Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe, but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed.

Today I feel that God motivates me to use my whole being to combat by non-violent means the ever-growing racial tension in the United States; at the same time the State directs that I shall do its will; which of these dictates can I follow—that of God or that of the State? Surely, I must at all times attempt to obey the law of the State. But when the will of God and the will of the State conflict, I am compelled to follow the will of God. If I cannot continue in my present vocation, I must resist.

3) The Conscription Act denies brotherhood—most basic New Testament teaching. Its design and purpose is to set men apart—German against American, American against Japanese. Its aim springs from a moral impossibility that ends justify means, that from unfriendly acts a new and friendly world can emerge.

In practice further, it separates black from white—those supposedly struggling for a common freedom. Such a separation also is based on the moral error that racism can overcome racism, that evil can produce good, that men virtually in slavery can struggle for a freedom they are denied. This means that I must protest racial discrimination in the armed forces, which is not only morally indefensible but also in clear violation of the Act. This does not, however, imply that I could have a part in conforming to the Act if discrimination were eliminated.

Segregation, separation, according to Jesus, is the basis of continuous violence. It was such an observation which encouraged him to teach, “It has been said to you in the olden times that thou shalt not kill, but I say unto you, do not call a man a fool”—and he might have added: “For if you do call him such, you automatically separate yourself from him and violence begins.” That which separates man from his brother is evil and must be resisted.

I admit my share of guilt for having participated in the institutions and ways of life which helped bring fascism and war. Nonetheless, guilty as I am, I now see as did the Prodigal Son that it is never too late to refuse longer to remain in a non-creative situation. It is always timely and virtuous to change—to take in all humility a new path.

Though joyfully following the will of God, I regret that I must break the law of the State. I am prepared for whatever may follow.

I herewith return the material you have sent me, for conscientiously I cannot hold a card in connection with an act I no longer feel able to accept and abide by.

Today I am notifying the Federal District Attorney of my decision and am forwarding to him a copy of this letter.

I appreciate now as in the past your advice and consideration, and trust that I shall cause you no anxiety in the future. I want you to know I deeply respect you for executing your duty to God and country in these difficult times in the way you feel you must. I remain

Sincerely yours,

Bayard Rustin

Russia gate in 3 minutes