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Anti-Warrers:
In this update:
- Alumni join Grinnell DC Protest contingent
- Ideas for an anti-war banner?
- Regional Conference set for Feb. 8 & 9th
- Trent Lott ...
- Dec. 19th Presentation in Fairfield, IA
- What companies will profit from war? (a sampling)
- Poetic echoes from Nazi Germany?
- LOTS OF Interesting NEWS to read over break
- Next Meeting: Tuesday after break @ 9 ARH 120
******** Alumni join Grinnell DC Protest contingent **********
After sending out an invitation through the Alumni office, we've already
begun to receive responses from Grinnell alumni in the DC area who are
interested in marching under a Grinnell banner ! If you know anyone in
the DC area, Grinnell alumns or not, who might be interested in joining
with those from Grinnell who will be marching in DC January 18th, have
them email antiwar@grinnell.edu
More on the protest: www.InternationalAnswer.org
******** Ideas for an anti-war banner? *******
If you've got some ideas for slogans or general suggestions, contact
banner- master-extraordinaire Liz Mallott [mallotte]
********* Regional Conference set for Feb. 8 & 9th ********
Can anyone go? If so contact Eli Zigas [zigaseli]
See attached for more info.
Due to the abhorrent nature of the potential U.S.-led war on Iraq,
several campus-based organizations across the Midwest are holding
W.A.R.P.-Con. (War Ain't Right People-Conference/Concert), a region-wide
conference and concert intended to promote educational inquiry and
active resistance to aggressive and unjustifiable international policies
being carried out by the U.S. and its allies. W.A.R.P.-Con. will be
held Saturday and Sunday, February 8th and 9th, 2003, at the University
of Minnesota Campus, Minneapolis, MN at Coffman Student Union.
Educational forums will be during the daytime Saturday and are set to
include a teach-in by "The Coup" (a politically vocal hip-hop group). A
performance by "The Coup" will then be held at First Ave. that night.
Sunday will be a voting session in which one delegate from each
attending student organization can vote on resolutions pertaining to
coordinated action.
*************** Trent Lott ... *********************
Should Black American's be asked to die for Trent Lott's America?
From Truemajority.org
http://emailimages.ctsg.com/blsp/trentad1.pdf (or attached)
********* Dec 19th Presentation in Fairfield, IA ************
From Nancy from People for Peace in Fairfield IA.
People for Peace is sponsoring a special presentation at the Fairfield
Public Library on Thursday, December 19th at 7:45pm by Jeffrey Weiss,
who is the peace education director of the Iowa office of the American
Friends Service Committee. Jeffrey is an adjunct professor in political
science at Des Moines Area Community College and has been the peace
education director in the Iowa office for 3 years.
It should be a lively discussion and a you-don't-want-to-miss event. All
are welcome.
Keep up the good work.
PEACE,
Nancy Gibson [nancynatural@lisco.com]
******* What Companies will Profit from War? ********
What companies will profit from war?
Check out a five company portfolio:
http://www.dack.com/war/portfolio/
********** Poetic Echoes from Nazi Germany **********
Then They Came for Me*
By Stephen F. Rohde, Esq.**
First they came for the Muslims, and I didn't speak up because I
wasn't a Muslim.
Then they came to detain immigrants indefinitely solely upon the
certification of the Attorney General, and I didn't speak up because I
wasn't an immigrant.
Then they came to eavesdrop on suspects consulting with their
attorneys, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a suspect.
Then they came to prosecute non-citizens before secret military
commissions, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a non-citizen.
Then they came to enter homes and offices for unannounced "sneak
and peek" searches, and I didn't speak up because I had nothing to
hide.
Then they came to reinstate Cointelpro and resume the infiltration
and surveillance of domestic religious and political groups, and I
didn't speak up because I had stopped participating in any groups.
Then they came for anyone who objected to government policy
and I didn't speak up because I didn't pay much attention to government
policy.
Then they came for me. By that time no one was left to speak up.
*Minor revisions by C.Li
**Stephen Rohde, a constitutional lawyer and President of
the ACLU of Southern California, is indebted to the
inspiration of Rev. Martin Niemoller (1937).
**************** News Digest ***********************
- War and Peace News in Review (attached)
- NY Times Op-Ed, Bill Keller, The Selective Conscience (see below)
- Guardian : Increased US bombing in Iraq "no-fly" zones
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,853260,00.html
- Guardian: Jonathan Raban - Analysis of past/present politics of middle
east http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4564981,00.html.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Bill Keller, The Selective Conscience @@@@@@@@
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/14/opinion/14KELL.html
NY Times
December 14, 2002
The Selective Conscience
By BILL KELLER
n the theater of totalitarianism, Saddam Hussein's Iraq is Grand
Guignol. The testimony of victims who have lived to talk is replete with
accounts of prisoners hung by the arms until their muscles rip, raw
voltage applied to genitalia, suspects slowly dipped in vats of acid.
When the jailers tire of tormenting the body they go after the soul.
They will bring in a wife or daughter and rape her again and again
before your eyes. They will bring in your little girl and methodically
crush the bones in her feet. They will behead a mother in front of her
children. And let us not forget the thousands of Iraqis gassed like
insects for the crime of being Kurds, or the countless victims who have
simply vanished forever.
What does any of this have to do with whether we go to war?
That question causes no end of anguish among the people who labor to
expose abuses in places like Iraq. Officials at Amnesty International,
long a prime source of these repellant accounts, grow indignant when
they hear their exposés repeated by George Bush or Tony Blair, men whose
motives they regard as impure.
"This selective attention to human rights is nothing but a cold and
calculated manipulation of the work of human rights activists," declared
Irene Kahn, the secretary general of Amnesty, among whose worldwide
membership humanism coexists with a considerable pacifism.
This high-minded quandary reached a sort of apotheosis in a Time
magazine interview with Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector
turned antiwar crusader. Mr. Ritter, one of the few outsiders to have
visited a notorious children's prison in Iraq, was asked what he had
seen. "Actually I'm not going to describe what I saw there," he said,
"because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who
would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace."
Ah.
Not all humanitarians are so squeamish. Horrified by Somalia, Bosnia and
Rwanda, some human rights advocates have come slowly and grudgingly to
the use of force. While Amnesty International has never favored military
intervention, American-based Human Rights Watch will support it to stop
a slaughter in progress — a standard established amid great internal
strife after Serbian massacres in Bosnia. The group's position on
invading Iraq now is hardly pacifist. "We don't object to people using
military force to go after very bad guys," said Kenneth Roth, the
executive director. "We just don't advocate it."
You would, however, find among the group's activists and supporters a
powerful mistrust of President Bush's motivation when he talks about
systematic torture and Saddam's chemical attacks on his own people.
Officially, formally, Saddam's depravity is not relevant to the question
of whether America will lead a military effort to oust him. The question
of invasion — officially, formally — is all about ridding Iraq of
nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and the means to deliver them.
But the barbarity of the regime is subtext to everything. It animates
the moralist faction within the administration, apparently including Mr.
Bush, whose revulsion at the misery of Iraq seems genuine enough to me.
Saddam's cruelties also touch a little on two central questions about
any exercise against Iraq: What's the evidence that Saddam is a real
threat? (Any leader who encourages the torture of children as a
mechanism of control is probably never going to become a good neighbor.)
How will Iraqis react to an invasion? (Many of them with an outpouring
of relief, wouldn't you think?)
Saddam's mistreatment of his people is an important factor, too, because
it has helped confound liberals who otherwise have doubts about the war.
As George Packer pointed out in this paper's magazine last Sunday, the
sheer awfulness of Saddam makes it hard to muster an antiwar movement.
Caution on Iraq puts liberals in the "unsettling position of defending a
status quo they despise."
One liberal who has settled this dilemma in favor of war is Bob Kerrey,
the former senator and current president of the New School University.
Mr. Kerrey, citing not Iraq's arsenal but its atrocities, has signed up
with a committee of neoconservatives who support the liberation of Iraq.
His argument is actually more complicated than I can do justice to here,
but it is explicitly driven by the impulse to do good rather than the
impulse to defend ourselves. He is a humanitarian hawk. Naturally Mr.
Kerrey's stance has roused the doctrinaire claque in his traditionally
leftist student body to demand he resign.
I don't entirely buy Mr. Kerrey's argument. The view I've expressed in
this space is that Saddam's appetite for a nuclear weapon makes him a
grave danger, that containment is ultimately a sucker's game, and that
Mr. Bush is right to prepare for war — purposefully but patiently,
hoping it will be unnecessary, and aiming to act as part of an aggrieved
world rather than a posse of one. To my mind the sadistic practices of
the Iraqi police state, and the more genocidal impulses — now
successfully held in check by American and British air patrols — may be
ample cause to indict Saddam as a war criminal, but they are not in
themselves enough to launch an invasion. Nonetheless, Mr. Kerrey should
be applauded for the valor of his convictions, which is at least as rare
among college presidents as it is among elected officials.
Why, aside from their roots in the Vietnam antiwar movement, are human
rights activists not more open to the idea that America can use its
unmatched muscle for good? In large part because Republican
administrations — in truth, Democratic ones as well — have paid human
rights little more than lip service, and little even of that.
Samantha Power, who documented America's long indifference to the most
extreme form of abuse — genocide — in her harrowing book "A Problem From
Hell," points out that Presidents Reagan and Bush Senior were worse than
silent when Saddam was at his most genocidal. During the so-called Anfal
campaign of 1987-88, when tens of thousands of Kurds were slaughtered in
mass executions or fumigated with lethal gases, the U.S. regarded Iraq
as a bulwark against Iran. Even after the gas attacks were documented
the U.S. continued to ladle out credits for Iraq to buy American grain
and manufactured goods. Ms. Power's reporting turned up one State
Department document that concluded, with spine-tingling diplomatic
detachment, "Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many
respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of
Iraq." Human rights activists know their cause has perennially been
"aside."
The Bush administration's enthusiasm for human rights would be more
believable if it were less selectively applied. That does not mean we
should ostracize countries whose cooperation we need in the war on
terror — Pakistan, Indonesia, Uzbekistan and others — for their flagrant
violations of basic human liberty. Despite what the purists say,
engagement is sometimes a more effective weapon than sanctions. The
critical thing is that fostering civilized behavior should be a priority
up front in the design of our foreign policy, not an afterthought, a sop
to bleeding hearts, or a pretext for something else.
If the time comes when we attempt to overthrow the ruling order in Iraq,
the administration could allay the misgivings of humanitarians by
demonstrating some sensitivity in how we do it. Even Iraqis who secretly
yearn for our help must worry about civilian casualties, about vicious
factional reprisals and about a new regime staffed by some of the very
thugs who have participated in Saddam's chamber of horrors. In
Afghanistan, a demonstration project in building democracy is endangered
because we have abandoned much of the country to the warlords.
One big reason for the credibility gap is that promoting human rights,
even more than promoting American security, depends on the cooperation
of those bothersome multinational institutions this administration seems
to loathe. Here's a test case to watch. The administration says it wants
Saddam charged for his crimes by an ad hoc international tribunal. Good
idea. If — as Human Rights Watch proposes — such a court has broad
jurisdiction over atrocities committed in Iraq, not just license to try
Saddam Hussein, it will send a strong message to opposition forces to
forgo bloody reprisals during a coming war. Few expect such
sophistication from an administration that recoils from the very idea of
international justice — but let's see.
Finally, promoting freedom abroad will ring a little false as long as
the administration is so often, so instinctively, scornful of freedom at
home. The automatic recourse to preventive lockup, the lack of
confidence in the criminal justice system, the casual regard for privacy
and presumption of innocence, the obsessive secrecy — you don't have to
be a libertarian to wonder how dearly this administration cherishes the
values it promises to export.
****************************************
Random Note for the day:
The results of the Homeland Security Act/ You get special attention
because you are in the anti-war movement:
http://users.chartertn.net/tonytemplin/fbi_eyes/
***********************************************************
The Anti-War Update and Digest is published by:
--Eli Zigas
antiwar@grinnell.edu
Norris 1st
X 4039
To subscribe or unsubscribe, contact me.
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