Grassroots Actions for Peace

Learn about the African Great Lakes Initiative

The African Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI) of the Friends Peace Teams strengthens, supports, and promotes peace activities at the grassroots level in the Great Lakes region of Africa (Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda). To this end, AGLI responds to requests from local religious and non-governmental organizations that focus on conflict management, peace building, trauma healing, and reconciliation. AGLI sponsors Peace Teams composed of members from local partners and the international community.  [read more about the AGLI]
Geographical information: [ view region from space ]

By Councilors Chuck Turner, Felix D. Arroyo, Charles C. Yancey, Sam Yoon and Michael Ross.

Resolved, that the Boston City Council supports gatherings such as the one that will take place in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2007 which show the support of the people of this country for policies such as those outlined above. [ View Resolution ]

One hour video

Dr.Helen Caldicott, M.D. is the Founder & President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. She is also the Founder of Physicians for ... all » Social Responsibility. In her unique style, she makes a compelling case against the use of Nuclear Power. She cuts through the rhetoric and tells it as it is. Filmed at UC Berkeley 2003. [  view video ]

Every Little Thing We Do.

Howard Zinn is one of this country's most celebrated historians. His classic work "A People's History of the United States" changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing - selling more copies each successive year. [includes rush transcript]

...
I became friends a few years ago with an Italian war surgeon named Gino Strada. He spent ten years, fifteen years doing surgery on war victims all over the world. And he wrote a book about it, Green Parrots: Diary of a War Surgeon. He said in all the patients that he operated on in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere, 85% of them were civilians, one-third of them, children. If you understand, and if people understand, and if you spread the word of this understanding, that whatever is told to you about war and how we must go to war, and whatever the threat is or whatever the goal is -- a democracy or liberty -- it will always be a war against children. They’re the ones who will die in large numbers.
....

[  read more ]

WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq

The US media is virtually silent on a new scientific study that estimates the Iraqi death toll from the US war at 655,000. The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was posted Wednesday on the web site of the British medical journal, the Lancet. [  read more ]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has written a brilliant new article [ Was the American Election Stolen? ] about the biggest political story in the history of the United States: An American politician illegitimately took the office of president by outright theft and fraud. Although such high crimes and misdemeanors have been rumored in previous elections, none in the history of the republic have been so thoroughly documented. George W. Bush is not the legitimate president of the United States.   [  read more 

In their rush to cover the long-awaited testimony of Valerie Plame, few reporters apparently bothered to stick around the Capitol Hill hearing room yesterday to witness the just as shocking testimony of a much less heralded (and not so attractive) insider named James Knodell. [  read more ]

President Bush is reopening the fight over government support of public television, unveiling a 2007 government fiscal year budget that would cut federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by nearly 25 percent.   [  read the entrie article ]

Four Steps to Sanity in the Middle East

...Once there we recorded 26 hours of interviews with Jacob Rosen, the Israel Ambassador to Jordan, Iraq Members of Parliament, Dulaymi tribal chiefs from Anbar province, the Jordanian Speaker of the House, two Jordanian Parliamentarians, two Lebanese including a Sunni Parliamentarian who flew to Amman to meet us, a Palestinian woman sent by Mustafa Barghuti, who is mediating the creation of a new unity government in Palestine, a group of Iraqi exiles living in Amman, George Hawatmeh, the former editor of the Jordanian Times. I had asked to meet with secular moderate legislators in order to see if there is a consensus on the way forward. I was there to listen.

...What I heard from the Iraqis, Palestinians, Jordanians and Israeli, these four points [see article, ed.] could be the skeleton of the new Democratic majority's plan for going forward in Iraq.   [  read article ]

Catastrophe in the midst of a tragedy

The war in Lebanon between Israel and the Lebanese Muslim Shiite group Hizbullah began on 12th July 2006. By the time a ceasefire halted the fighting five weeks later on 14th August, more than 1,300 people had been killed and thousands more injured on both sides of the border. In addition to the human tragedy, the environment in the Middle East took numerous blows. Friends of the Earth Europe is concerned that a "second round" of fighting could start at any moment. We call for a just and peaceful solution to the issues of the conflict, to prevent more losses of innocent lives and the destruction of the environment in Lebanon and Israel. [  read more ]

The quality of health care should never depend on the color of any American's skin.

...What I put forward in 2004 works. It was a good plan then, and it's a good plan now. The proposal I'm going to fight for this year and next year-- and until it gets done -- lives up to that challenge in a sensible, practical, comprehensive way that will cover all Americans with better quality at lower costs by 2012. [  read more ]

Summary: On June 18, The Washington Post published a cable sent from the U.S. Embassy in Iraq that detailed the deteriorating conditions observed in Baghdad in recent months. Despite the clear significance of the document, the media have almost entirely ignored its publication.   [ Read More ]

Enron Lies

By Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com

He's Back: Moyers, not Tomlinson

....
We have it in our power to bring the country into the story. We are public broadcasting, right? We're not congressional broadcasting — that's C-SPAN. We're not the White House network — that's Fox News. We're the only broadcasting operation in the country with the words "public" and "service" in our name. That's our constituency — not the politicians and Washington officials — but the public.

I've been around a long time now. What great company all of you have been. But I really think the best is yet to come. We've never been more needed. Democracy is troubled. Our two parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of Big Money and subservient to Big Media. The majority of the American people don't know where to turn, who to trust. Here we are — with a mandate to put the public first. [  read more ]

Will the major media finally cover the electronic election fraud issue?

Iraq and Washington’s ‘seeds of democracy’

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations General Assembly created a new U.N. human rights body by an overwhelming majority on the 15th, ignoring objections from the United States. [ read more ]

An unclassified draft of a US nuclear doctrine review that spells out conditions under which US commanders might seek approval to use nuclear weapons. [ read more ]

Estabrook Woods

Kucinich: House International Relations Committee Once Again Shuns War Oversight Duties House International Relations Committee Narrowly Rejects Kucinich Resolution of Inquiry On White House Iraq Group (WHIG) [link]

Kucinich Demands IG Investigation Into FBI's Handling Of Investigation Into Forged Niger Documents

04 November, 2005

1 in 4 Iraq Vets Ailing On Return

19 October 2005

These survey results, which have not been publicly released, were provided to USA TODAY by the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine. They offer a window on the war and how the ongoing insurgency has added to the strain on troops.

More at >> USA Today

GAO Report Finds Flaws in Electronic Voting, New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004

Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine

Wed, 17 September 2005
The White House has used all kinds of ingenious machinations to try to conceal its radical agenda from the American people including Orwellian rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act. When they wanted to destroy the air, they called it the Clear Skies Bill

But most insidiously, they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution.

Twenty Things We Now Know Four Years After 9/11

Coalition Builds Momentum on Universal Health Care

...Such a case might be worth consideration if the Bush administration and congressional leaders had demonstrated that they had the integrity, knowledge, foresight, and competence to successfully lead a counterinsurgency war in a complex, fractured society on the far side of the planet. To support the continued prosecution of the Iraq War, however, would require trusting the same politicians who hoodwinked the country into that war in the first place. A growing number of Americans, therefore, have come to recognize that any administration dishonest enough to make the ludicrous pre-war claims of an Iraqi military threat and any Congress that -- through whatever combination of dishonesty or stupidity -- chose to reinforce these false assertions simply cannot be trusted to successfully control the insurgency, extricate the United States from further military involvement, and successfully facilitate Iraq's development as a peaceful, secure, democratic country.  [read more]

(Washington D.C.)- The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of us. The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We can not continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region.

General Casey said in a September 2005 Hearing, "the perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency." General Abizaid said on the same date, "Reducing the size and visibility of the coalition forces in Iraq is a part of our counterinsurgency strategy."

For 2 ½ years I have been concerned about the U.S. policy and the plan in Iraq. I have addressed my concerns with the Administration and the Pentagon and have spoken out in public about my concerns. The main reason for going to war has been discredited. A few days before the start of the war I was in Kuwait—the military drew a red line around Baghdad and said when U.S. forces cross that line they will be attacked by the Iraqis with Weapons of Mass Destruction—but the US forces said they were prepared. They had well trained forces with the appropriate protective gear.

We spend more money on Intelligence than all the countries in the world together, and more on Intelligence than most countries GDP. But the intelligence concerning Iraq was wrong. It is not a world intelligence failure. It is a U.S. intelligence failure and the way that intelligence was misused.

I have been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals almost every week since the beginning of the War. And what demoralizes them is going to war with not enough troops and equipment to make the transition to peace; the devastation caused by IEDs; being deployed to Iraq when their homes have been ravaged by hurricanes; being on their second or third deployment and leaving their families behind without a network of support.

The threat posed by terrorism is real, but we have other threats that cannot be ignored. We must be prepared to face all threats. The future of our military is at risk. Our military and their families are stretched thin. Many say that the Army is broken. Some of our troops are on their third deployment. Recruitment is down, even as our military has lowered its standards. Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing, particularly in health care. Choices will have to be made. We can not allow promises we have made to our military families in terms of service benefits, in terms of their health care, to be negotiated away. Procurement programs that ensure our military dominance cannot be negotiated away. We must be prepared. The war in Iraq has caused huge shortfalls at our bases in the U.S.

Much of our ground equipment is worn out and in need of either serious overhaul or replacement. George Washington said, "To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace." We must rebuild our Army. Our deficit is growing out of control. The Director of the Congressional Budget Office recently admitted to being "terrified" about the budget deficit in the coming decades. This is the first prolonged war we have fought with three years of tax cuts, without full mobilization of American industry and without a draft. The burden of this war has not been shared equally; the military and their families are shouldering this burden.

Our military has been fighting a war in Iraq for over two and a half years. Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty. Our military captured Saddam Hussein, and captured or killed his closest associates. But the war continues to intensify. Deaths and injuries are growing, with over 2,079 confirmed American deaths. Over 15,500 have been seriously injured and it is estimated that over 50,000 will suffer from battle fatigue. There have been reports of at least 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths.

I just recently visited Anbar Province Iraq in order to assess the conditions on the ground. Last May 2005, as part of the Emergency Supplemental Spending Bill, the House included the Moran Amendment, which was accepted in Conference, and which required the Secretary of Defense to submit quarterly reports to Congress in order to more accurately measure stability and security in Iraq. We have now received two reports. I am disturbed by the findings in key indicator areas. Oil production and energy production are below pre-war levels. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by the security situation. Only $9 billion of the $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. Unemployment remains at about 60 percent. Clean water is scarce. Only $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects has been spent. And most importantly, insurgent incidents have increased from about 150 per week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of attacks going down over time and with the addition of more troops, attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revelations at Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled. An annual State Department report in 2004 indicated a sharp increase in global terrorism.

I said over a year ago, and now the military and the Administration agrees, Iraq can not be won "militarily." I said two years ago, the key to progress in Iraq is to Iraqitize, Internationalize and Energize. I believe the same today. But I have concluded that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is impeding this progress.

Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists. I believe with a U.S. troop redeployment, the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted shows that over 80% of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45% of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis.

I believe before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice that the United States will immediately redeploy. All of Iraq must know that Iraq is free. Free from United States occupation. I believe this will send a signal to the Sunnis to join the political process for the good of a "free" Iraq.

My plan calls:

To immediately redeploy U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces.
To create a quick reaction force in the region.
To create an over- the- horizon presence of Marines.
To diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq

This war needs to be personalized. As I said before I have visited with the severely wounded of this war. They are suffering.

Because we in Congress are charged with sending our sons and daughters into battle, it is our responsibility, our OBLIGATION to speak out for them. That's why I am speaking out.

Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME.

Burning the Law in a Riot of Treason

Dashed Hopes - Part B

"Impeachment May Well Be the Only Remedy"

Impeachment Is Not Off the Table

This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio; (2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people's trust in our democracy. These changes should include putting in place more specific federal protections for federal elections, particularly in the areas of audit capability for electronic voting machines and casting and counting of provisional ballots, as well as other needed changes to federal and state election laws. [ read more ]

Representative Dennis Kucinich's Statement on Depleted Uranium

National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive

Already this Congress, Kucinich and Conyers have introduced HR 808 and HR 676 — two bills that directly relate to the events of Blacksburg.

HR 808, legislation to establish a Department of Peace and Nonviolence, addresses the issue of domestic violence, gang violence, and violence in the schools, which is reflected in the current homicide rates. HR 808 has 62 cosponsors.
“The bill provides hope for a transformation through education of our children in principles of nonviolence and support for existing community groups and professionals whose dedication would be empowered by a national commitment to peace and nonviolence,” Kucinich said.

A recent study indicates that many perpetrators of murder had histories of mental illness. The lack of parity for mental healthcare remains one of the most serious deficiencies in healthcare in the United States – the system has long been lacking in substantive support of mental health. HR 676, Medicare for All, would establish a universal not-for-profit healthcare system, which would provide full and comprehensive mental healthcare. More than 14,000 physicians support HR 676 and it is cosponsored by 63 Members of Congress.

Kucinich is currently drafting legislation that would ban the purchase, sale, transfer, or possession of handguns by civilians. A gun buy-back provision will be included in the bill.

“America is being engulfed in violence every day. Let’s show them we have the wisdom and the courage to come from our hearts to meet this challenge,” Kucinich said.

[  read more ]

These two bills: HR 808 and HR 676 deserve serious consideration and enactment if we truly wish to attain peace and justice in our world - [ed.]

The war in Iraq needs to wind down, and Congressman Dennis Kucinich has a 12 point plan to charter a new course for the United States and the world.
"A war without reason, without conscious, without international law"
See the YouTube video, Play Video

In late September, it was reported that the National Intelligence Estimate for April said the war in Iraq is creating more terrorists: "A large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists ... are increasing in both number and in geographic distribution. If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide."

The administration has released