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Readings 2005

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  • U.S. Airstrikes Take Toll on Civilians – Ellen Knickmeyer
    U.S. Marine airstrikes targeting insurgents sheltering in Iraqi residential neighborhoods are killing civilians as well as guerrillas in far western Iraq, according to Iraqi townspeople and officials and the U.S. military. – Washington Post, December 24, 2005

  • Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – John Perkins with Amy Goodman
    John Perkins is a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay, and then take over their economies. – Democracy Now!, November 9, 2004

  • Iraq as a Killing Ground – Michael Schwartz
    Because the military has continued to release limited amounts of information, the story of the air campaign has simply been missing in action. – Tomdispatch.com, Dec. 2005

  • A Veteran's Iraq Message Upsets Army Recruiters – Monica Davey, The New York Times
    On the storefront next door to the Duluth Army recruiting station is a message posted in bold black letters. "Remember the Fallen Heroes," the sign reads, and then it ticks off the number of American troops killed and wounded in Iraq, and the days since this war began. – t r u t h o u t, December 27, 2005

  • Brass Tacks – Tara McKelvey
    There has been a pattern of disregard for the niceties of evidence collection, storage and processing--as well as the handling of witnesses--in dozens of cases in which detainees have died in US custody. – The Nation, December 26, 2005

  • Up in the Air – Seymour M. Hersh
    A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls. – The New Yorker, December 5, 2005

  • If America Left Iraq – Nir Rosen
    At some point—whether sooner or later—U.S. troops will leave Iraq. I have spent much of the occupation reporting from Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the country, and I can tell you that a growing majority of Iraqis would like it to be sooner. – The Atlantic Monthly, December 2005

  • Art, truth and politics – Harold Pinter
    In his video-taped Nobel acceptance speech, Harold Pinter excoriated a 'brutal, scornful and ruthless' United States. This is the full text of his address – The Guardian, December 8, 2005

  • Silence on Suffering – Gary A. Haugen
    President Bush faces a defining question of morality on which he has yet to receive any discernible guidance from the faith-based coalition that helped put him in office. The question: whether it is ever right for Americans to inflict cruel and degrading treatment on suspected terrorist detainees. – Christianity Today Magazine, October 17, 2005

  • Deconstructing Cheney – James Carroll, Boston Globe
    The Indictment of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States. – Common Dreams, November 7, 2005

  • Remittances Are Effective Weapon Against Poverty – Norman Lamont, The Financial Times
    The World Bank drew attention to the money flow from immigrants back to their countries of origin. The amount of money transferred annually is between two and three times the level of development aid from rich to poor countries. – Yale GlobalOnline, November 18, 2005

  • Why John Murtha Is Right! – Larry Johnson, Booman Tribune
    John Murtha's courageous call for American troops to leave Iraq is the right policy at the right time. The Bush chickenhawks already are impugning Murtha's patriotism, but when you have a purple heart and a silver star compared to a President with a spotty attendance record with the National Guard and a V.P. with 5 deferments, that dog don't hunt. – t r u t h o u t, November 18, 2005

  • Torture in Our Name – Ray McGovern
    Seldom have moral lines been so clearly drawn as they are on the issue of torture - the morality of which, until recently, was not controversial. I thought we knew, as a country, where we stood on torture. – t r u t h o u t, November 4, 2005

  • Continuing to Repudiate International Law, Rumsfeld Rejects UN Access to Guantanamo – Jim Lobe
    Amid growing concern over the fate and conditions of inmates engaged in a lengthy hunger strike at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he would not permit UN investigators to interview detainees there. – Foreign Policy In Focus, November 3, 2005

  • CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons – Dana Priest
    The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement. – Washington Post, November 2, 2005

  • The Costs of War At Walter Reed – Stewart Nusbaumer, Intervention Magazine
    Inside Walter Reed Army Hospital is the horrible reality of the Iraq War, a reality that few Americans see. I see soldiers with leg braces and neck supports, soldiers with faces slashed by bombs and stitched up by doctors. Soldiers with legs terribly mangled, soldiers with no legs. – Veterans for Common Sense, October 22, 2005

  • Two Years Before 9/11, Candidate Bush was Already Talking Privately About Attacking Iraq – Russ Baker, GNN.tv
    "He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999. He said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." – Common Dreams, October 28, 2004

  • A Constitutional Disaster – Chip Pitts
    The USA Patriot Act's renewal is now almost a fait accompli. The House and Senate have separately voted to approve the law with only minor changes, and the final conference committee action and vote is expected within the next week or so. None of the provisions of the law that were slated to sunset now appear likely to do so. – The Nation, October 21, 2005

  • IAEA, ElBaradei Share Nobel Peace Prize – Fred Barbash and Dafna Linzer, The Washington Post
    Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog agency he heads, won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Peace. ElBaradei, whose ouster was sought by the Bush administration, is a longstanding critic of the president's decision to go to war in Iraq. – truthout.org, October 7, 2005

  • No Place for a Poet at a Banquet of Shame – Sharon Olds
    For reasons she describes in this article, the poet Sharon Olds, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, declined to attend the National Book Festival in Washington, which, coincidentally or not, took place September 24, the day of an antiwar mobilization in the capital. – The Nation, October 10, 2005

  • Iraq in America: At the Front of Nowhere at All – Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com
    New Orleans is not the only toxic sludge pool in sight. Let's not forget the toxic sludge pool of Bush administration policy which came so clearly into view as Katrina ripped the scrim off our society, revealing an Iraqi-style reality here at home. – Common Dreams, September 5, 2005

  • 16 to 25? Pentagon Has Your Number, and More – Damien Cave, The New York Times
    The Defense Department and a private contractor have been building an extensive database of 30 million 16-to-25-year-olds, combining names with Social Security numbers, grade-point averages, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. – Veterans for Common Sense, June 24, 2005

  • Who's Next? – Karen Houppert
    Army recruiters are ordered to approach tenth, eleventh and twelfth graders--repeatedly, and use tactics that target increasingly younger students. – The Nation, Sept. 12, 2005

  • The War Prayer – Mark Twain, Harper's Monthly
    Outraged by American military intervention in the Phillipines, Mark Twain wrote this and sent it to Harper's Bazaar, March 1905. This women's magazine rejected it for being too radical, and it wasn't published until after Mark Twain's death, when World War I made it even more timely. Libertystory.net, first published November 1916.

  • Proposal Would Restore Privacy Rights Surrendered to the Military – Rick Jahnkow
    Rep. Michael Honda, D-CA, has introduced legislation that would require written permission from a parent before any secondary school could release a student's name, address and phone number to military representatives. – Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft, May-June 2005

  • The Unfeeling President – E.L. Doctorow
    I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear. – The East Hampton (NY) Star, Sept. 9, 2004

  • Who We Are – Bob Herbert, The New York Times
    Three Republican senators are giving the White House fits with their attempt to get legislation approved that would expressly prohibit cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. – truthout, August 1, 2005

  • Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs – Josh White
    On Nov. 26, 2003, a U.S. Army interrogator and a military guard grabbed a green sleeping bag, stuffed Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush inside, wrapped him in an electrical cord, laid him on the floor and began to go to work. Again. It was inside the sleeping bag that the 56-year-old detainee took his last breath, through broken ribs. – Washington Post, August 3, 2005

  • Above the Rule of Law – Sidney Blumenthal, the Guardian
    Almost every significant aspect of the investigation to bring the London terrorists to justice is the opposite of Bush's "war on terrorism". From the leading role of Scotland Yard to the close cooperation with police, the British effort is at odds with the US operation directed by the Pentagon. – Common Dreams, August 5, 2005

  • Photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Gensuikin
    The Hiroshima Meteorological Observatory reported that just after the flash, black smoke rose from the ground reaching an altitude of several thousand meters, and covered the whole city. When the fireball disappeared, the angry clouds rose and reached an altitude of 8,000 meters in 5 minutes after the explosion. – Japan Congress Against A- and H-Bombs (GENSUIKIN)

  • The Roots of Prisoner Abuse – The New York Times Editorial
    The White House blocked a Senate vote on a measure sponsored by a half-dozen Republicans that would prohibit cruel, degrading or inhumane treatment of prisoners. – t r u t h o u t, July 30, 2005

  • The Logic of Suicide Terrorism – Scott McConnell and Robert Pape
    Pape has found that the most common American perceptions about who the terrorists are and what motivates them are off by a wide margin. In his office is the world’s largest database of information about suicide terrorists. It’s the occupation, not the fundamentalism. – The American Conservative, July 18, 2005

  • Badr to Worse – Spencer Ackerman, New Republic
    Iraq's newly appointed prime minister announced that nine prominent militia groups--commanding 100,000 fighters between them--had agreed to disband... Almost a year later, Iraq's newly elected leaders annulled Kelly's work. – Ocnus.Net, July 3, 2005

  • The Recruitment Minefield – Bill Bigelow
    Critical literacy activities can protect students against predatory military recruiting... Last October, more than three months after his discharge, the government extended Santiago's termination date—to December 24, 2031. Yes, 2031; it's not a misprint. – Rethinking Schools, Spring 2005

  • Statement Of Amnesty International – Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director
    We have documented that the use of torture and ill treatment is widespread and that the US government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of this odious human rights violation. – Amnesty International USA, May 25, 2005

  • The Other Bomb Drops – Jeremy Scahill
    They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility... But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002... – The Nation, June 1, 2005

  • Teens who experience violence likely to be violent – Charnicia E. Huggins, Reuters Health eMedicine
    New study findings provide scientific proof for what some have already deduced: teens exposed to violence are more likely than their peers to become involved in violence in the future. – Science, May 27, 2005

  • Galloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of Statement
    "Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. And neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf." – Times Online (UK), May 17, 2005

  • Bill Moyers Responds to CPB's Tomlinson Charges of Liberal Bias: "We Were Getting it Right, But Not Right Wing"
    In his first public address since leaving PBS six months ago, journalist Bill Moyers responds to charges by Kenneth Tomlinson - the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - of liberal bias and revelations that Tomlinson hired a consultant to monitor the political content of Moyers' PBS show "Now." – Democracy Now! May 16th, 2005

  • Bush asked to explain UK war memo – CNN
    You saw it on ParkPeace first: The Downing Street Memo that said "intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support the Iraq war in mid-2002. – CNN.com, May 12, 2005

  • The Unreported Vietnam-Iraq Parallel – Danny Schechter
    A BBC story by Matt Frei reports, "Thirty years after the end of the war, Vietnam continues to divide and haunt America far more than the country that lost 50 times as many people." – Common Dreams, May 1, 2005

  • A moral war over weapons – Jeremy Iggers, StarTribune
    The following news item seemed like good material for columns about the ethics of civil disobedience and corporate responsibility: On July 30, four peace activists, including Mike Miles, Green Party candidate for Congress from Luck, Wis., were arrested for trespassing at the headquarters of Alliant Techsystems in Edina... – Circle Vision, August 21, 2004

  • From Magna Carta to Abu Ghraib – Michael Ratner
    Detention, Summary Trial, Disappearances and Torture in America – I find myself fighting for very basic, fundamental human rights. Among them are the right not to be tortured, the right not to be detained indefinitely, the right not to be disappeared, and the right to be tried in a regular tribunal and not before some kind of secret, makeshift court. – Z-Net, March 22, 2005

  • Army Recruiters Say They Feel Pressure to Bend Rules – Damien Cave, New York Times
    The two recruiters wasted no time signing him up, even after the man's parents told them he had bipolar disorder - a diagnosis that would disqualify him. – Refuse & Resist, May 3, 2005

  • Striking a Blow for Dissent – Robyn E. Blumner, St. Petersburg Times
    Joseph Mayer, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, fought as a soldier for this nation but then was denied its freedoms because of a police department that viewed political protest as something to be squashed. – Common Dreams, May 1, 2005

  • Mother's Day Proclamation – Julia Ward Howe
    Mother's Day was originally started after the Civil War, as a protest to the carnage of that war, by women who had lost their sons. Here is the original Mother's Day Proclamation from 1870. – Canadian Centres for Teaching Peace

  • Open Letter to Howard Dean – Tom Hayden
    "Now that we're there, we're there and we can't get out," Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean said. But the question facing us today is who will speak for Americans against the Iraq war? – The Nation BLOG, April 28, 2005

  • Do You Know Enough to Enlist? – American Friends Service Committee
    Military recruiters and ads promise: Job training...money for college.. ..adventure...leadership skills and more... Before you join, take a good look at what you're getting into.

  • Allure of the blank slate – Naomi Klein
    From Aceh to Haiti, a predatory form of disaster capitalism is reshaping societies to its own design. The White House created the office of reconstruction and stabilisation. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate "post-conflict" plans for up to 25 countries that are not, as yet, in conflict. – The Guardian, April 18, 2005

  • Noted Activist for War Victims Killed in Car Bomb Attack – Charles Burress, The San Francisco Chronicle
    Marla Ruzicka, 28, founder of CIVIC -- Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict -- died with her driver on the Baghdad Airport road when a suicide bomber attacked. They were traveling "to visit an Iraqi child injured by a bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent victims of this war." – t r u t h o u t, April 18, 2005

  • The Return of the Draft – Tim Dickinson
    Uncle Sam wants you. He needs you. He'll bribe you to sign up. He'll strong-arm you to re-enlist. And if that's not enough, he's got a plan to draft you. – Rolling Stone, January 2005

  • No More Nuclear Hypocrisy: Defending the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty – Joseph Gerson
    Both presidential candidates warned that the greatest potential threat to our security is non-state terrorists gaining access to nuclear weapons. This is not what the rest of the world believes. – Peacework, American Friends Service Committee, March 2005

  • What's Going On? – Paul Krugman, The New York Times
    Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself. – Truthout, March 29, 2005

  • An Excerpt from God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It – Jim Wallis
    In an attempt to identify a unifying Christian response to the current political situation, Wallis, founder and editor of Sojourners magazine, argues that the Left has ignored and dismissed the value of religion in politics, while the Right has interpreted it too narrowly. – Sojourners Magazine, February 2005

  • The New Face of Protest? – Karen Houppert
    Antiwar activists are determined to make the military a major pillar of the movement, both by homing in on the military's faltering campaign to recruit new soldiers, and by embracing antiwar troops. – The Nation. March 9, 2005

  • Outsourcing torture – Bob Herbert, The New York Times
    Extraordinary rendition is the name that's been given to the US policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. – International Herald Tribune, February 12, 2005

  • Heads roll at Veterans Administration – Bob Nichols
    Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter charged that the reason Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi stepped down was the growing scandal surrounding the use of uranium munitions in the Iraq War. – San Francisco Bay View, March 30, 2005

  • In Vermont, a Town-Meeting revolt over Iraq war – Sara B. Miller
    Only a handful of the more than 200,000 men and women who have been deployed to Iraq come from this sleepy whistle-stop. But everyone seems to know someone who has served, even died, there: a friend's husband, a neighbor, the son of the town clerk's best friend. – The Christian Science Monitor, February 28, 2005

  • Military Recruiters Have Unrivaled Access to Schools – Michael Berg, The State (South Carolina)
    Should parents have the right to choose to protect a child from being targeted by military recruiters in school? Is it an inherent part of public school education to be pressured to sign an irrevocable contract and join the U.S. armed forces? – Common Dreams, February 23, 2005

  • Shelter Under the Anti-war Umbrella – David Solnit
    A call to the U.S. anti-war movement: it is possible for us to promote a people power strategic framework that makes our various efforts and campaigns complementary and cumulative. – AlterNet, February 18, 2005

  • Building A Bridge to Iraq – Sami Rasouli
    Sami Rasouli was the owner of Sinbad's Restaurant, a pioneer in introducing Middle Eastern culture to the Twin Cities area. Sami has left his business and hopes to be of some help to his countrymen during the US occupation of Iraq. This report is about his trip to Ain At tammer, written by a woman who accompanied him, Dr. Eman. – St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church, January 13, 2005

  • The Coming Wars – Seymour M. Hersh
    The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control... – The New Yorker, January 17, 2005

  • Beyond Elections: Dr. King's Teachings on Strategy and Tactics – Paul Rockwell
    There is no greater strategist in American history, no teacher more relevant to our post-election malaise, than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King was more than a moral visionary; he was a creative tactician. All of us-especially leaders of the peace movement-have much to learn from King's teachings on strategy and tactics. – CommonDreams.org, January 11, 2005

  • US Military Personnel Growing Critical of the War in Iraq – Georg Mascolo and Siegesmund von Ilsemann
    Military officials are telling Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that more troops are needed to prevail over the insurgents. Recruitment is down and more reservists and members of the National Guard are being sent to Baghdad. – DER SPIEGEL, March, 2005