Mercenaries paid with our tax dollars opened fire on Iraqi civilians recently. They killed 8 people and shot 13 more.
“They are untouchable,” one private soldier told the Los Angeles Times. “They’ve shot up other private security contractors, Iraqi military, police and civilians.”1Now the Iraqi government has had enough, and has ordered Blackwater to stop work in the country. This morning the Iraqi Prime Minister demanded the U.S. use someone else to guard their VIP’s.2 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has promised an investigation, but that’s not enough.
http://act.truemajorityaction.org/o/2/t/50/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=24Most of Blackwater’s work is guarding officials from the State Department. They are among the most high-profile mercenaries working in Iraq, but hardly the only ones. An astounding 120,000 “private security contractors” are in Iraq, 48,000 of them working as combat soldiers.3 They get paid far more than real soldiers, their deaths are not included in the official casualty counts, and they are essentially accountable to no one, according to state department officials.
This is still America. We can’t hire mercenaries to fire on civilians with no accountability.
Tell Sec. Rice to put an end to it, and follow the Iraqi government’s demand that Blackwater leave the country.
This has to stop,
Ben Kroetz
TrueMajorityACTION.org Online Organizer
1. “U.S. rushes to smooth Iraq’s anger over Blackwater,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2007
2. “Al-Maliki Says Blackwater Should Be Replaced for ‘Criminal Act’,” Bloomberg.com, September 19, 2007
3. U.S. GAO report
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Guest article from HumptyDumpty was pushed
George Bush and other Iraq War supporters have argued that if we withdraw from Iraq the result will be like the killing fields of Cambodia — an odd comparison considering that the US has direct responsibility for that holocaust. Here are the facts:* The killing fields were real. The genocide against their own people was committed by the Khmer Rouge.* The Vietnamese — the Communist Vietnamese — were the people who went in and put a stop to it.* The United States then supported the Khmer Rouge.
Here’s how that came to happen.
The United States got involved in the war in Vietnam in an attempt to keep South Vietnam from going communist. Which it would have if nationwide elections had been held as promised.
Cambodia is next to Vietnam. It was ruled by Prince Sihanouk. He attempted to be neutral. Both sides abused that neutrality.
The North Vietnamese send arms, support and men through Cambodia on the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” to go around South Vietnamese and American forces. They also used Cambodian ports.
The United States, which was not at war with Cambodia, officially or unofficially, secretly sent armed forces into Cambodia to interrupt North Vietnamese use of that route. In 1969, Nixon began a campaign of carpet bombing sections of Cambodia. Ultimately about 750,000 Cambodians were killed by the bombings (though the numbers are hard to verify.)
Dear friend,
If you sent an email in 2003, there’s a good chance your government grabbed a copy of it. That’s because in 2003, the National Security Agency set up a secret, 24-by-48 foot room in a downtown San Francisco telecommunications building to tap into one of the nation’s largest Internet data hubs and illegally retrieve millions of emails and other communications.(1) This is not a conspiracy theory; according to the sworn affidavit of an AT&T technician, this actually happened.
Tomorrow a federal court will hear two lawsuits against the NSA’s unconstitutional “special project.” The arguments will be long and drawn out, but in a sense our own Congress has already made it moot — just before leaving on vacation they voted to make the administration’s spying programs legal.(2)
Congress will re-consider that legal protection in just six months, so we need to show them NOW that this is not the behavior we will accept. No more secret rooms siphoning off our e-mails and telephone calls.
Tell Congress to take back their permission for warrantless spying on Americans
http://act.truemajorityaction.org/o/2/t/1/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=1185
Here’s the text of the petition:
“We are Americans, and in our America we do not torture, we do not imprison people without charge or legal recourse, allow our phones and emails to be tapped without a court order, and above all we do not give any President unchecked power. I pledge to fight to protect and defend the Constitution from assault by any President. I insist that my elected representatives in Congress do the same.”
A memorial service was held Saturday for award-winning writer and peace activist Makoto Oda, who died of stomach cancer on July 30 at age 75.
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe, novelist and playwright Hisashi Inoue, critic Shuichi Kato, and Takako Doi, a former leader of the Social Democratic Party, were among 800 people who gathered at the Aoyama Sogisho funeral hall in Tokyo’s Minato Ward.
Later, about 500 mourners marched to a nearby subway station carrying banners declaring, “We will take on your wishes for anti-war movements” and singing “We Shall Overcome,” a protest song popular in the 1960s.
At the memorial service, philosopher Shunsuke Tsurumi compared Oda’s influence on events to that of John Manjiro, who served as an important bridge between Japan and the United States as Japan opened its doors to the world toward the end of the Edo Period (1603-1867).
Oda formed the Beheiren, an anti-war citizens group, in 1965 with other activists, including Tsurumi, to protest the Vietnam War.
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PRESS Release:
Thursday, April 17,2003
Make Love Not War in San Francisco
from the Butterfly Gardeners Association
On a bright Spring day on a San Francisco nude beach, the latest Baring Witness peace action took place, with over 100 men and women lying naked in the sand to form the words Make Love Not War.
The participants gathered on Baker Beach, near the Golden Gate Bridge as beach-goers and National Park police looked on. After an inspirational ceremony in a circle, the organizers, Alan Moore and Nicole Savage, arranged the men and women into the letters as several photographers and videographers recorded the event.
Moore organized the event with Nicole Savage to occur on Saturday, April 19 to mark the one month anniversary of the US incursion and start of the war in Iraq. Nicole’s website at sfheart.com was the first to chronicle the
‘Naked4Peace’ events that Baring Witnes began.
The organizers said that while the war in Iraq is winding down, there is still a need to head off future military action around the world. Other participants said that the world’s violent history has reached a point where the only sustainable, survivable future is one in which peaceful solutions to political differences are found.
“It’s really not about the war in Iraq, it’s about the fact that the conditions that breed war are still here,” said Alan Moore, director of Musicians & Fine Artists for World Peace, which organized the event with Baring Witness, a peace group based in Marin County. “Our organization is about creating and preserving the peace.”
