Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 25. Oktober 2004 / Time Line October 25, 2004
Version 3.510/25/2004
Protesters Make Their Case Outside Court
by Mike Kalil
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8862~2490291,00.html
© New England Newspapers, Inc.
West Brattleboro, Vermont - Just because the court says the area
protesters who were arrested for invading the local National Guard
office can't claim defense of necessity, doesn't mean they can't
try to prove it anyway.
Expert witnesses spoke Sunday during "Bearing Witness: The
Unauthorized Testimony of the Peace Guard" in defense of the eight
area protesters who demonstrated in the National Guard office as
the Iraq war loomed. The protesters say their action was out of
necessity -- similar to breaking into a burning house to save a
life.
Sunday's event was a chance to present what won't be allowed in
court.
Testimony broke out in song, and attendees were subject to
sing-a-long. Sunny Miller, executive director of Traprock Peace
Center in western Massachusetts, kicked off her talk on the dangers
of depleted uranium munitions with a peace chant.
"Peace is like a flower unfolding -- the way I see it," she
said.
Demonstrating in the office, the protesters say, was an attempt to
prevent casualties that the Iraq war would bring on. The Windham
District Court says differently: the protesters faced no emergency,
and cannot reasonably claim their actions would prevent harm to
anyone.
Calling themselves the Peace Guard, the group of protesters will be
tried Thursday, in US District Court in Brattleboro, for criminal
trespass. Since the arrests, one man, Erik Schickedanz of Guilford,
had the charge against him dropped, and another protester, Kenny
West of Brattleboro, will be tried separately on a different
date.
"It's kind of a mixed feeling," said protestor Laura White, of
Williamsville, of the upcoming trial.
On Sunday, experts laid out reasons why their defense is valid at
the Village Meeting House, saying the Iraq war could not have
caused anything but harm to U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The
audience included Socialist Vice Presidential Mary Alice Herbert of
Putney, and Peter Diamondstone, Vermont's Liberty Union candidate
for governor.
Michael True, a professor at Assumption College in Worcester,
Massachusetts, went through the history of civil disobedience,
laying the claim that it is necessary for change. Cherie Rankin, a
former Red Cross volunteer who served as a civilian in the Vietnam
war, spoke of atrocities, dodgy recruiting methods and sexual
assaults against men and women.
"Atrocities happen all the time in wars," Rankin said. "Nobody is
prepared for that."
She said new soldiers are transformed through war. At first, the
men can be clean cut and shaven and give good eye contact. That
persona shifts from what they witness, making it no longer possible
for them to look a person in the eye.
The teenagers who are recruited are vulnerable, needy and lack a
sense of belonging, she said. A good chunk of them are poor or
minorities or both, she said, and military recruiters exploit
that.
Chris Doucot, a Hartford Catholic Worker who has traveled to Iraq,
said the country has given up on the United States, saying the
sense of "good will" he saw before the war has been depleted. Some
Iraqis thought the United States would enter the country, remove
Saddam Hussein and repair everything that Americans had destroyed
for over a decade.
The last time he was in Iraq was in February, he said, and he has
no plans to go back. Before the war, he said, he didn't feel in
danger being in the country. That's no longer the case.
"That's one of the reasons I'm not going back there in the
foreseeable future," he said. "I'm an American. I'm a target."
The six protesters who face trial Thursday are Betsy Williams of
Westminster West, Louis Battalen of Ashfield, Massachusetts, White,
and Brattleboro residents Sara Longsmith, Doris Lake and Leo
Schiff.
The group entered the National Guard recruiting office on Elliot
Street on March 17, 2003, and refused to leave. They wanted to
place informational posters in designated areas to give prospective
enlistees a chance to review all the consequences of joining the
Guard.
A National Guard sergeant asked them to leave, but the group
refused. The protesters then told Brattleboro Police Officer Peter
DiMarino their intention to stay put and transform the office into
a "National Peace Office" for the day.
Schiff said Sunday that the defense will likely try to defend the
protesters' intent and bring up free speech. The office was public
property, he said, paid for by tax dollars, and the demonstrators
were there during business hours.
"We'll be pursuing other avenues to explain why we did what we
did," he said.
That office has since closed; at the time, National Guard officials
said it was because the location no longer made fiscal sense.
Instead, perspective recruits are encouraged to sign up at area
armories, the closest being in Westminster, where Company B of the
2nd Battalion, 172nd Armor Regiment are stationed.
10/25/2004
Deportation of Prominent British Human Rights Activist
International Women's Peace Service
http://www.iwps.info
Angie Zelter (also known as Angela Julian), a prominent
nonviolent peace and human rights activist from Norfolk, is tonight
awaiting deportation in a cell at Ben Gurion airport, Israel.
Having arrived at Ben Gurion airport on Sunday, 24 October, Zelter
was detained and interrogated by Israeli authorities for over 12
hours.
She was detained as a 'security risk,' placed in a holding cell at
the airport police station, and told that she could be held for up
to 7 days before being put on a flight back to Britain.
Zelter is a long-time British peace and justice activist. She is
renowned as a founder of Trident Ploughshares, a prominent
anti-nuclear organisation. Zelter is a founding member of the
international human rights organisation, International Women's
Peace Service-Palestine, a nonviolent human rights monitoring and
intervention organisation based in the Palestinian Occupied
Territories. Zelter's long-time peace work is the subject of the
documentary, The Loch Long Monster, about the work of the Trident
Ploughshares. Like Uri Avnery and Felicia Langer,
Zelter was a recipient in 2001 of the Right Livelihood
Award, often called the "Alternative Nobel Prize".
Zelter's impending deportation must be made public. If Zelter is
forced against her will to return to Britain without legitimate
reason, it will reveal that Israel does not adhere to the rule of
law in its policies towards nonviolent internationals who support
justice for Palestinians.
10/25/2004
Bankers go to Baghdad
By Patrick Bond, ZNet Commentary
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund's annual meeting in
Washington earlier this month witnessed the members' rejection of
two big ideas - debt cancellation and institutional
democratisation. No surprise. There wasn't much pressure from
either Third World finance ministers or the US branch of the global
justice movement (apparently in hibernation until 3 November).
However, important financial developments are now unfolding,
reflective of Washington's geopolitical imperatives in Iraq. Bank
and IMF activity there was relegitimised at the annual meeting, but
in a contradictory and untenable manner.
A recent IMF report on Iraq claimed that 'macroeconomic stability'
has been achieved and the economy will have grown 52% in 2004. This
was in part justification for the IMF's recent $436 million loan to
the Washington-imposed Baghdad regime. The report also revealed
that the IMF has been coordinating macroeconomic technical
assistance, drawing together a team from the Bank, US Treasury, US
AID, the British Department for International Development and the
Bank of England.
Another IMF justification was that after the invasion, 'A number of
important policy reforms then began to be implemented to facilitate
progress toward a more market-oriented economy. These reforms
included the completion of a national currency exchange, the
approval of new central bank and commercial bank laws, the
liberalization of interest rates, approval of a foreign direct
investment law, the establishment of the Trade Bank of Iraq, the
passage of the Financial Management Law and a new tax law, and the
simplification of the trade regime.'
These measures, introduced by viceroy Paul Bremer, not only
represent legalized looting, but also appear totally ineffectual
for the attraction of foreign investment, as is brilliantly
documented in Naomi Klein's new Harpers magazine article 'Baghdad
Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia'
(http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html).
10/25/2004
Increase In War Funding Sought : Bush to Request $70 Billion
More
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62554-2004Oct25?language=printer
By Jonathan Weisman and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post
The Bush administration intends to seek about $70 billion in
emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan early next
year, pushing total war costs close to $225 billion since the
invasion of Iraq early last year, Pentagon and congressional
officials said yesterday.
White House budget office spokesman Chad Kolton emphasized that
final decisions on the supplemental spending request will not be
made until shortly before the request is sent to Congress. That may
not happen until early February, when President Bush submits his
budget for fiscal 2006, assuming he wins reelection.
Pentagon and House Appropriations Committee aides said the Defense
Department and military services are scrambling to get their final
requests to the White House Office of Management and Budget by
mid-November, shortly after the election. The new numbers
underscore that the war is going to be far more costly and intense,
and last longer, than the administration first suggested.
10/25/2004
Suppressing the overseas vote
By: Alix Christie
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/salon/0,,1335573,00.html
Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat is pumped. Two weeks ago, sitting in an
internet cafe on Munich's Odeonplatz, the software marketer who
crafted a hugely successful voter registration website, pulls up
numbers that show a remarkable spike in Americans overseas
mobilising to defeat George W Bush.
Between her site and another out of Hong Kong, Democrats have
registered 140,000 new voters, 40% of them from swing states - and
that is just the tip of the iceberg. Americans abroad, roused to a
boiling fury by a Bush doctrine that has smeared America's good
name across the globe, are looking like the "silent swing vote" in
several key battleground states. Overseas registration for both
parties is up by 400% over 2000; estimates put the tally of
possible civilian votes as high as 2 million.
Then the panicked emails start flooding in. Today, less than two
weeks before the tightest presidential race in memory, untold
thousands of overseas voters still have not received their ballots
- and clearly won't be able to get them back in time. Late
primaries and legal challenges to Ralph Nader's appearance on the
ballot delayed mailings from half the battleground states. In swing
states, including Florida, Ohio and New Mexico, different versions
of the ballot have gone out, sowing wild confusion. In Pennsylvania
alone, at least three versions were mailed overseas, in successive,
chaotic waves - with Nader and without him, plus a blank
one-size-fits-all ballot with no names at all.
Activists now fear that huge numbers of Americans overseas - both
military and civilian - may be as disenfranchised as they were in
2000, when anywhere from 10 to 40% of overseas ballots, depending
on the county, just plain never showed up. But, far from helping
civilians, the Federal Voting Assistance Programme (FVAP) has
dragged its feet. A small liaison office based in the Pentagon, the
FVAP provides voting materials to the departments of defence and
state for soldiers and civilians abroad, and preaches overseas
election law to thousands of local election officials back
home.
10/25/2004
Security firm collects $130,000
http://www.fijilive.com/news/show/news/2004/10/25/25flive06.html
A new security company recruiting Fijian nationals for jobs in
Iraq and Kuwait has collected close to $130,000 in registration
fees.
A check with the Public Warehouse Company at midday today confirmed
that 847 men have registered after paying $150 in administration
fees.
Public Warehouse is recruiting Fiji nationals to work as logistical
support officers out of its base in Kuwait.
Apart from the administration fees, applicants have to fork out
$22.50 for police clearance and $15 for medical checks.
PWO says only applicants between 20 to 50 years will be offered
jobs while former soldiers with valid Fiji and international
driver's license will be recruited as drivers and mechanics.
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