Your phone calls and emails to the Governor and the head of the Illinois National Guard last week helped ensure that our sisters and brothers in the Guard were not deployed against us, and our collective action on the streets of Chicago remained peaceful and disciplined – an expression of our determination to set the record straight on our military service.

. . .

We are most proud of the fact that our action yesterday was a joint event with our sisters in Afghans for Peace. Together, we led a march of thousands as close as we could get to the meeting location of the NATO summit and performed a reconciliation ceremony.

. . .

Read More At: www.ivaw.org/

Cindy Sheehan

For those of you who know me and have been following my story, you know that part of my resistance to the US Empire is my refusal to pay income taxes.

This morning (April 19th), a new episode unfolded in my ongoing struggle with the IRS and the Empire the agency is nestled in.

I was subpoenaed to appear in the 9th Circuit court of the US Federal Court system in Sacramento, California—my state’s capitol.

For background, I have had two meetings with the IRS agent assigned to my case where I expressed to him my unwillingness, due to my principles, to participate in funding a system that commits crimes almost every second of every day. At this point, the IRS is trying to collect 105 grand that it says I owe for the tax years 2005-2006. I first became a war tax refuser in 2005.

My defense is one based on a far superior morality than one practiced by the US government and the fact that my outspokenness against this immorality, and my notoriety in doing so, has put me into a precarious position in a climate where free speech and peaceful protest is being suppressed, sometimes very violently, as we have increasingly witnessed. In the past after about 15 arrests, I have also had many opportunities to appear in court, federal and otherwise, in front of judges who never showed one bit of compassion or sympathy towards the protesters’ first amendment right trumping the governments’ harsh rules and laws profoundly inhibiting those rights.

I have never once “gotten off” using a defense based on the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution.

In that Bill of Rights, there’s an especially pesky little 1st Amendment that says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Yet Congress and other legislative bodies routinely pass these laws prohibiting the free exercise of speech and the right to peaceably assemble and our protests become more and more meaningless as we are pushed farther and farther away from our, for want of a better word, targets. In addition, the police state is increasingly chasing protesters away by tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, sound weaponry and other supposedly “non-lethal” means.

When I decided to be a conscientious objector to war tax, I knew that the consequence could be harassment and/or punishment, but I decided to do it long before I became well known as a gadfly to Empire. I was willing to accept those consequences because I felt that if I were put on trial, the reasons that I don’t fund war crimes would have to also be put on trial, and I think it’s the only way that the illegality of the wars can actually get a hearing.

I have an advisor who is an experienced tax attorney who advises the National War Tax Resister’s Coordinating Committee and he feels that the Empire may be targeting me to get publicity and to intimidate others from taking the same course of action that I actually encourage others to do, so he could inform me as to what usually happens every step of the way, but my case could be “special” and contain many surprises, a few which did occur in court today.

Before I continue, I’d like to say that since I have become an antiwar “criminal,” my respect for the legal profession has grown by leaps and bounds. I have always managed to attract some amazing attorneys to help me in my cases always on a pro bono basis and this case is no exception. My attorney of record in California is San Francisco attorney, Dennis Cunningham, who has been involved in many protest cases and advising us is Peter Goldberger in Pennsylvania. I am so thankful for the help of my attorneys and for the NWRTCC and I honestly don’t know what I would do without their legal help and peer support.

Anyway, there was a pre-hearing rally in Sacramento today and supporters came there from Los Angeles, Ventura, San Jose, San Francisco, Nevada City and Sacramento—we filled the small courtroom after the rally (my pre rally statement is linked here).
After we went through security and had to relinquish cameras and the signs we had pinned to us showing my son’s picture and my picture and NO WAR TAXES printed on top, we went to the courtroom where my hearing was the final one on a short docket of four.

We were arguing that I had a 1st Amendment right to the protest and a 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination and the attorney for the IRS and her buddies that traveled from DC (yes, of course, this is not a political persecution) argued that a “blanket 5th” is not allowed by case law and rulings and she wanted me to be ordered to go to a room in the federal building to answer questions about my “assets.” (My lawyer brilliantly argued that the “secret” agencies already had all that information on me, anyway)—but there was no way that I was going to be blindsided by an unwarranted demand like that and this is where some extraordinary things happened.

Dennis was able to expound at length about our fears of political retribution and my moral opposition to the wars and he was able to iterate that I was against militarism and the huge proportion of our taxes that go towards it. This is what I have always wanted—the position of Peace had its day in court today! I was thrilled beyond belief, but what happened when Dennis finished literally blew me away.

The Magistrate who presided over the hearing, John Moulds, is an older man whom my attorney said has been on the bench for years and years, but is known to be “fair” and not too “excitable.”

The Magistrate said that he read all of our motions and he looked me right in the eyes from across the room and with great emotion in his voice he said, “It strikes me as a civilized way to protest uncivilized acts.” (Reuters) I actually started to cry because it was such a beautiful thing to say in such a loving way and I can’t ever recall anyone in the government and/or establishment that has ever genuinely acknowledged my pain and practically admitted that what happened to Casey and my family was disordered. Oh, many democrats pretended that they were sorry for my pain, but they were only doing it for crass political gain—and when the republicans acknowledged it, they were “thanking” me for my son’s brave service to the country—I don’t know which approach was worse, but I felt no compassion until today.

Then the lady from DC said that she could “sympathize with conscientious objectors” but “losing a son” was no excuse to “break the law with impunity.” What’s the empire’s excuse for breaking the law with impunity in many ways on every day?

Dennis and I agreed to meet with the IRS at a future date so I could do a line by line 5th amendment claim to each question and the lady from DC requested that the magistrate order me to comply and show up for the meeting and he said something like, “I want the parties to talk, this hearing is over and I have 45 days to make a ruling one way or the other on your motion—I may, or I may not.” According to Peter, this is also something unprecedented.
I came away feeling very energized and encouraged by today’s proceedings and if the Empire wants to make someone cower before them in fear to intimidate others, they picked the wrong person. Even if the magistrate hadn’t been so favorable to our side, I still would feel triumphant.

The fissures of imperial overreach and excess are widening and the Empire is being exposed for the ridiculous bully it really is.

No Empire lasts forever and the terribly destructive nature of ours requires us to help its inevitable collapse. I am doing everything I can in my own small ways with all the courage I can muster and I appreciate all the support and help I get along the way.

READ ORIGINAL POST AT:

http://cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com/2012/04/peace-has-day-in-court-cindy-sheehan.html

WH Okays OKs Military Detention of Terrorism Suspects

The White House is signing off on a controversial new law that would authorize the U.S. military to arrest and indefinitely detain alleged al Qaeda members or other terrorist operatives captured on American soil. . .

The detainee provisions are just one part of the annual NDAA authorizing $662 billion in federal defense spending next year. …

Obama Had Indefinite Detention Inserted Into NDAA

There Goes the Republic

By Robert Scheer

Once again the gods of war have united our Congress like nothing else. Unable to agree on the minimal spending necessary to save our economy, schools, medical system or infrastructure, the cowards who mislead us have retreated to the irrationalities of what George Washington in his farewell address
condemned as “pretended patriotism.” . . . Read More… View on YouTube… Read More… ]]> http://so-cal-war-tax-resist.com/blog/2011/12/15/ndaa/feed/ 0 http://so-cal-war-tax-resist.com/blog/2010/04/06/u-s-apache-helicopter-killing-civilians-in-iraq/ http://so-cal-war-tax-resist.com/blog/2010/04/06/u-s-apache-helicopter-killing-civilians-in-iraq/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:37:37 +0000 Alex http://so-cal-war-tax-resist.com/blog/?p=109 Wikileaks is a website launched in December 2006 that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents from governments and other organizations, while preserving the anonymity of its sources. A senior military official confirmed to the Associated Press that this video showing the murder of two Reuters journalists in 2007 is authentic. As the Huffington Posts’s Dan Froomkin reported yesterday, the video shows “a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.”

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald makes the important point that this is not an aberration in these dirty wars. “It’s the opposite: it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that’s rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we’re seeing it on video not because it’s rare, but because it just so happened… to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed.”

As part of an effort to extend the military’s “warrior culture” to unmanned planes, the Air Force is overhauling how it trains the crews that operate its rapidly growing fleet of Predators, Reapers and other remotely piloted aircraft.

The changes in training will affect hundreds of personnel who fly the unmanned aircraft remotely over war zones from distant bases and control their powerful cameras and targeting systems.

The effort is part of a move by the Air Force to put as much emphasis on drones as it does on traditional fighters and bombers, officials said.
. . .
The new training is a mix of the technical — details about the radar, camera and laser systems — and what Allen calls “infusing the Air Force warrior culture” into the job.

“They need to understand the battle space. They need to understand working with a crew,” Allen said. “This is absolutely flying a vehicle, and we want someone dedicated to this duty.”
. . .
“You do not want to feel you are not in the actual fight,” said Airman Paul South, 20, of East Smithfield, Pa., a member of the first class of new sensor trainees. “You are in the fight, and you need to realize what is on the line every time you are doing your job.”

Click Here to Read More …

Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an “arc of instability” caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just “small wars in the midst of a big one.”

Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared war would entangle 20 future presidential terms stretching far into the future of voters not yet born. The American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches 5,000, with the number of wounded a multiple many times greater. Including the American dead from 9/11, that’s 8,000 dead so far in the first decade of the Long War. And if the American armed forces are stretched thin today, try to conceive of seven more decades of combat.

The costs are unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit spending of recent years, yield “virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors,” according to a New York Times budget analysis in February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today’s younger generation of resources for their future.

Click Here to Read More …

Administration officials announced last night that the President, in tomorrow’s State of the Union address, will propose a multi-year freeze on certain domestic discretionary spending programs. This is an “initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit,” officials told The New York Times.

But the freeze is more notable for what it excludes than what it includes. For now, it does not include the largest domestic spending programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And all “security-related programs” are also exempted from the freeze, which means it does not apply to military spending, the intelligence budget, the Surveillance State, or foreign military aid. As always, the notion of decreasing the deficit and national debt through reductions in military spending is one of the most absolute Washington taboos. What possible rationale is there for that?

The facts about America’s bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known. The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the world combined, and spends roughly six times more than the second-largest spender, China. Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously. That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus expanding the already-vast gap between our expenditures and the world’s. As one “defense” spending watchdog group put it: “The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six ‘rogue’ states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion.”

Original Article URL:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/01/26/defense

So you thought the Pentagon was already big enough? Well, what do you know, especially with the price of the American military slated to grow by at least 25% over the next decade?
. . .
The tired peace dividend tug boat left the harbor two decades ago, dragging with it laughable hopes for universal health care and decent public education. Now, the mighty USS War Dividend is preparing to set sail. The economic weather reports may be lousy and the seas choppy, but one thing is guaranteed: that won’t stop it.

The United States, of course, long ago captured first prize in the global arms race. It now spends as much as the next 14 countries combined, even as the spending of our rogue enemies and former enemies — Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria — much in the headlines for their prospective armaments, makes up a mere 1% of the world military budget. Still, when you’re a military superpower focused on big-picture thinking, there’s no time to dawdle on the details.

And be reasonable, who could expect the U.S. to fight two wars and maintain more than 700 bases around the world for less than the $704 billion we’ll shell out to the Pentagon in 2010? But here’s what few Americans grasp and you aren’t going to read about in your local paper either: according to Department of Defense projections, the baseline military budget — just the bare bones, not those billions in war-fighting extras — is projected to increase by 2.5% each year for the next 10 years. In other words, in the next decade the basic Pentagon budget will grow by at least $133.1 billion, or 25%.
. . .
Read More at:
www.tomdispatch.com/post/175129/jo_comerford_three_cheers_for_the_war_dividend

War is Not a Video Game
by David Sirota

I’m a video game geek, so as I sat through movie previews a few weeks ago, I was sure I was watching Nintendo ads.

There on the cinema’s screen was a super-sleek plane flying over a moonscape while communicating with an orbiting satellite. In the next moment, a multicolored topographical map, orders being barked — and in my own mind, memories of “Call of Duty” graphics. And then, finally, two guys in front of a computer console, and the jarring punch line: “It’s not science fiction; it’s what we do every day,” said the bold type, followed by a U.S. Air Force symbol.

Before giving the audience a chance to digest the slogan, it was onto another montage, this one of helicopters and explosions with 1970s music playing in the background. A preview for a Steve McQueen-themed game, I thought. Then, though, the familiar kicker: “The drones fight terrorism and protect America, and in the process, they keep the front lines unmanned,” said the voiceover, adding, “This isn’t science fiction; this is life in the United States Navy.”

. . .

More broadly, the American psyche’s slow progress toward an increasingly peaceful disposition could be stunted by the propaganda’s powerful paradox: While sanitizing ads play to the country’s growing disgust with militarism, they could ultimately lead us to be more supportive of militarism. How? By convincing us that violence can be just another innocuous expression of adolescent technophilia.

If we end up thinking that, we will have once again forgotten what all wars, even the justifiable ones, always are: lamentable human tragedies.

Sheehan returns to rebuke Obama

OAK BLUFFS, Massachusetts — After spending weeks dogging George W. Bush’s presidential vacations, anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan is now trying to make life uncomfortable for President Barack Obama.

Sheehan used to pitch a peace camp near Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, becoming a symbol of the anti-war movement after her son Casey died in action in Iraq.

On Thursday, she and a band of anti-war protesters turned up outside the media center used by journalists covering Obama’s vacation on the well-heeled east coast resort island of Martha’s Vineyard.

“The reason I am here is because … even though the facade has changed in Washington DC, the policies are still the same,” Sheehan told a handful of journalists, against a backdrop of her “Camp Casey” banner.

She told US peace activists to wake up and protest Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and complained that despite the president’s anti-war stance, US troops remained in Iraq.

“We have to realize, it is not the president who is power, it is not the party that is in power it is the system that stays the same, no matter who is in charge.”

“We are here to make the wars unpopular again,” she said.