The President of Perpetual War
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_president_of_perpetual_war_20130125/
Posted on Jan 25, 2013
By David Sirota
Four years into his presidency, Barack Obama’s political formula should be obvious. He gives fabulous speeches teeming with popular liberal ideas, often refuses to take the actions necessary to realize those ideas and then banks on most voters, activists, reporters and pundits never bothering to notice—or care about—his sleight of hand.
Whether railing on financial crime and then refusing to prosecute Wall Street executives or berating health insurance companies and then passing a health care bill bailing out those same companies, Obama embodies a cynical ploy—one that relies on a celebrity-entranced electorate focusing more on TV-packaged rhetoric than on legislative reality.
Never was this formula more apparent than when the president discussed military conflicts during his second inaugural address. Declaring that “a decade of war is now ending,” he insisted that he “still believe(s) that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”
The lines generated uncritical applause, much of it from anti-war liberals who protested against the Bush administration. Living up to Obama’s calculation, few seemed to notice that the words came from the same president who is manufacturing a state of “perpetual war.”
Obama, let’s remember, is the president who escalated the Afghanistan War and whose spokesman recently reiterated that U.S. troops are not necessarily leaving that country anytime soon. He is the president who has initiated undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. He is also the president who, according to data from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, has launched more than 20,000 air strikes—and those assaults show no sign of stopping.
We know that latter point to be the true because just days before Obama’s inaugural address declaring an end to war, the Washington Post reported that the administration’s new manual establishing “clear rules” for counterterrorism operations specifically creates a “carve-out (that) would allow the CIA to continue” the president’s intensifying drone war.
That’s the “perpetual war,” you’ll recall, in which Obama asserts the extra-constitutional right to compile a “kill list” and then order bombing raids of civilian areas in hopes of killing alleged militants—including U.S. citizens.
According to a study by the New America Foundation, roughly one in five of those killed by such strikes are civilians. However, even that troubling number may understate the situation. That’s because, as the New York Times previously reported, the Obama administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants” even though, according to a CIA official, Obama aides “are not really sure who they are.”
Obama partisans’ typical riposte to these horrifying truths is to first and foremost attack the messenger. As just one example, a confidante of Obama’s national security director recently berated war critics as “Cheeto-eating people in the basement working in their underwear.”
These same partisans then typically blurt out two words: national security. But the argument that the president’s drone war is protecting America is as flip as it is inaccurate.
That’s the conclusion of a new analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations—an establishmentarian group that cannot be dismissed with insults about snack food, subterranean dwelling and tighty-whities. Citing a concurrent increase in drone strikes and terrorists in Yemen, CFR says there is a predictable “blowback” effect whereby bombings result in “heightened anger toward the United States and sympathy with or allegiance to al-Qaida” among local populations.
These facts, of course, are a downer for those mesmerized by the president’s soothing inauguration rhetoric. No doubt, he is hoping we simply ignore reality because we so want to believe the anti-war oratory. If we do that, though, we will be aiding and abetting the very state of “perpetual war” that the president has created.
David Sirota is the best-selling author of the books “Hostile Takeover,” “The Uprising” and “Back to Our Future.” Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
© 2013 CREATORS.COM
U.S. Navy/MC1 Kenneth G. Takada
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Report: Nearly Half of Americans Have No Safety Net to Keep Them Out of Poverty
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
AlterNet [1] / By Lauren Kelley [2]
Report: Nearly Half of Americans Have No Safety Net to Keep Them Out of Poverty
January 30, 2013
A new report reveals a fact that too many Americans are familiar with first-hand: nearly half of the nation's residents have no safety net to protect them from falling into poverty in the event of a layoff or other financial misfortune.
The recently published Assets & Opportunities Scorecard [3] from the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) shows that "[n]early 44 percent of Americans don't have enough savings or other liquid assets to stay out of poverty for more than three months if they lose their income," as NPR summarized [4]. At the same time, nearly a third of Americans live with no savings account at all.
The nonprofit [CFED] tries to help low- and moderate-income families achieve the American dream. The group's president, Andrea Levere, says that's not easy when all your energy goes into paying the rent and buying food.
"It's only when you have those basic needs satisfied that you then can think, 'How do I make sure I have the best education for my children? How do I make sure I have the skills I need to be more competitive in the workplace?' " says Levere.
The report also looks at how individual states rank in terms of household financial security, factoring in scores for financial assets and income, businesses and jobs, housing and homeownership, health care, and education. According to the scorecard, states in the Northeast and Midwest have some of the highest rankings and states in the South some of the lowest. Just take a look at this map to see the financial inequality; it's a pretty striking image (reds and oranges mean higher financial security, while grays mean lower).
[3]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/report-nearly-half-americans-have-no-safety-net-keep-them-out-poverty
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/lauren-kelley
[3] http://assetsandopportunity.org/scorecard/
[4] http://www.npr.org/2013/01/30/170561872/study-nearly-half-in-u-s-lack-financial-safety-net
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
AlterNet [1] / By Lauren Kelley [2]
Report: Nearly Half of Americans Have No Safety Net to Keep Them Out of Poverty
January 30, 2013
A new report reveals a fact that too many Americans are familiar with first-hand: nearly half of the nation's residents have no safety net to protect them from falling into poverty in the event of a layoff or other financial misfortune.
The recently published Assets & Opportunities Scorecard [3] from the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) shows that "[n]early 44 percent of Americans don't have enough savings or other liquid assets to stay out of poverty for more than three months if they lose their income," as NPR summarized [4]. At the same time, nearly a third of Americans live with no savings account at all.
The nonprofit [CFED] tries to help low- and moderate-income families achieve the American dream. The group's president, Andrea Levere, says that's not easy when all your energy goes into paying the rent and buying food.
"It's only when you have those basic needs satisfied that you then can think, 'How do I make sure I have the best education for my children? How do I make sure I have the skills I need to be more competitive in the workplace?' " says Levere.
The report also looks at how individual states rank in terms of household financial security, factoring in scores for financial assets and income, businesses and jobs, housing and homeownership, health care, and education. According to the scorecard, states in the Northeast and Midwest have some of the highest rankings and states in the South some of the lowest. Just take a look at this map to see the financial inequality; it's a pretty striking image (reds and oranges mean higher financial security, while grays mean lower).
[3]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/report-nearly-half-americans-have-no-safety-net-keep-them-out-poverty
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/lauren-kelley
[3] http://assetsandopportunity.org/scorecard/
[4] http://www.npr.org/2013/01/30/170561872/study-nearly-half-in-u-s-lack-financial-safety-net
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
The Kill Chain
http://citypaper.com/news/the-kill-chain-1.1436761
CITY PAPER-BALTIMORE
The Kill Chain
Following the path of drones from Obama’s hit list to Johns Hopkins University
Hopkins Statue, Obuszewski: J.M. Giordano
J.M. Giordano
Peace activist Max Obuszewski is arrested while protesting extrajudicial drone killings at a “die-in” during President Obama’s recent inauguration
The BattleHawk Drone by Textron, one of the APL’s sub-contractors, which can be carried in a soldier’s backpack and launched like a toy glider.
Click here to view full photo gallery
By Edward Ericson Jr.
Published: January 30, 2013
Consider the scenario: Here in Baltimore, terrorists have a safe house, a van, a storage unit or two. They have a target. Could be the Inner Harbor or a convention that’s in town. Maybe it’s the Port of Baltimore, where about $50 billion of foreign commerce is conducted every year, or a high-profile target in the city’s large Jewish community. Maybe it’s something else.
A U.S. government agency has tracked the terrorists to a safe house. It just learned that the explosives are already in the van. With no time to deploy SEAL Team 6 or the FBI SWAT team, the agency deploys its newest weapon, developed just a few miles away by an arm of the city’s most respected and powerful nonprofit institution: Johns Hopkins University.
All but unnoticed in the evening twilight, a half-dozen tiny airplanes, the size of a child’s kite, swoop through the streets and into the alley behind the terrorists’ hideout. Nominally directed by a man sitting in a padded chair and looking at video screens two states away, the drones see through the rowhouse’s flat roof and brick walls, reading the heat signature of the men inside. Two drones blow holes through the front window and back door while two others fly into the house, landing in the laps of the terrorists and blowing them up with grenade-sized fragmentation bombs.
Meanwhile, 300 feet above, other drones circle, looking down through infrared-video eyes. A man runs from the house on fire. As he drops, writhing on the parking pad, the drone operator directs a single bullet into his head. He stops moving. Another terrorist, apparently uninjured, frantically pries at the door of the van as the other drone, operating without human input, puts a crosshair on him.
This fantastic scenario is conjured by the public documentation of the technical work going on now at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at 11100 Johns Hopkins Road in Laurel. There, in a complex of buildings surrounded by parking lots, green fields and a park with tennis and basketball courts, 5,000 scientists and engineers quietly labor to make better space missions, guided missiles, undersea threat detectors, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles—drones. Last June the school, along with the project’s sponsor, Boeing, unveiled the “swarming technology” depicted above.
“This swarm technology may one day enable warfighters in battle to request and receive time-critical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information directly from airborne [UAVs] much sooner than they can from ground control stations today,” Gabriel Santander, Boeing’s program director of advanced autonomous networks, said in a statement quoted in the news media.
And on APL’s own jargon-heavy website, it says the lab “is conducting an internal research and development project to demonstrate that small unmanned aerial systems (UASs) (those with less than a 60-inch wingspan) can provide detection, identification, tracking, and subsequent engagement of stationary or mobile threats in chaotic urban environments with minimal collateral damage and operator workload. This research is founded on an APL flight experiment where the feasibility of using a group of small hunter/killer UASs to execute the entire kill chain against a moving HUMVEE target was successfully demonstrated.”
Being able to “execute the entire kill chain” with “minimal. . . operator workload,” then, is the vision of Johns Hopkins University.
Not everyone is thrilled.
Hopkins students allied with the Human Rights Working Group, an on-campus organization formed in 2010, are collecting signatures on a petition to stop the drone research. The group is “calling for a moratorium on drone research at Hopkins until there is a fuller discussion and more disclosure of the Hopkins program,” says Derek Denman, a Ph.D. student in political science who has been researching the university’s drone program since 2011.
The effort got started, he says, when an APL researcher named Jay Moore came to the Homewood campus to give a talk about the research he was doing on swarming drones.
“I went with a few other members of the group to ask about the ethics of drone research,” Denman says. “Is it making war perpetual and boundless? How does he see his research feeding into that?”
Moore responded that the swarming technology should be used only on smaller drones, not the big Predators and Reapers that shoot hellfire missiles into terrorists’ dens and wedding parties, Denman says. (APL declined to make Moore—or anyone—available for comment). “He said this technology would be more suitable for soldiers to deploy from backpacks, send the drones up to map the battlefield,” Denman says. “He had a larger defense of drone warfare, saying that soldiers over time distanced themselves from combat—starting with armor.
“We thought that there is a giant quantitative difference.”
Airborne drone technology has potentially major implications for military, law enforcement, and even civilian rescue and filmmaking. Imagine being able to direct an aerial shot of your wakeboarding or dirt-bike wheelie exploits as easily as wearing a GoPro Hero cam is now.
Baltimore, a “chaotic urban environment” if ever there was one, is not yet subject to civilian drone overflights because the Federal Aviation Administration still holds sway. But it is studying the issue and plans to develop rules for civilian drone use as early as this year.
Military drones, meanwhile, apparently have carte blanche. The pilots of the fearsome Reaper drones fly training missions over northern New York from Hancock AFB. The pilots reportedly pick out civilian vehicles on public highways to practice following them.
Such skills have quietly become vital to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan—and countries with which America is not at war—as drone strikes have become the Obama Administration’s de facto strategy in the “war on terror.”
President Barack Obama deployed drones to kill people in Pakistan six times more often than President George W. Bush. The use of so-called “signature strikes,” where patterns of behavior by small groups are secretly deemed to be acts of war and punished with summary execution, became an administration hallmark, killing somewhere between 1,332 and 2,326 reported militants, according to a study by the New America Foundation. But the patterns of behavior common to groups of terrorists are apparently also typical of wedding parties, several of which have reportedly been bombed in recent years.
John Brennan, Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, has claimed that the CIA’s drones have never harmed a single innocent civilian—a claim that is unverifiable and disputed. Researchers from Stanford University and New York University visited Pakistan last year to interview relatives of alleged victims of U.S. drone strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan. They found dozens of noncombatant deaths, according to a paper presented to a packed auditorium at Hopkins in November. People from the tribal regions of Pakistan told the researchers—James Cavallaro, director of the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, and Omar Shakir, a law student—that they and their families had all but stopped walking anywhere in groups for fear that they would be mistaken for terrorists by the drones that flew overhead constantly, often in twos and threes. The people in the region have had their nerves frayed, Cavallaro said, by the “nagging, annoying, buzzing sound of imminent death.”
The researchers told of “double-tap” strikes, wherein a missile kills a person or group and then, later, a second missile strikes the same spot, wiping out any who came to render aid. One representative of a nongovernmental organization told Cavallaro’s team that they “won’t go to a drone strike area for six hours [after a strike] because of the U.S. double-tap policy.”
The researchers also claimed that 86 percent of the strikes come as a result of paid informants. “Even if that person is a militant, the United States has no legal right to kill them if they pose no imminent threat,” Cavallaro told the audience.
In the past year or so, the focus of U.S. drone attacks has shifted to Yemen, where al-Qaeda militants are thought to be massing. U.S.-controlled drones killed three American citizens there in 2011: Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist from North Carolina; Anwar al-Awlaki, reputed to be the man who trained the notorious “underwear bomber” who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound jet on Christmas 2009; and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar’s 16-year-old son, who was born in Denver and was killed two weeks after his father in a separate strike in southeastern Yemen. Former White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs, asked to justify the killing of the younger al-Awlaki, said, “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father.”
In September 2012, Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi told reporters in Washington that he personally signs off on all U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, and that they hit their targets accurately. “The drone technologically is more advanced than the human brain,” he said, according to the Washington Post.
Crudely put, that’s the idea being developed at Hopkins. “Minimal operator input” means fewer pilots training at New York’s Hancock AFB and elsewhere—thus, fewer places in which critics can stage die-ins. It’s also a practical necessity, as anyone who has tried to fly a tiny model helicopter in the backyard knows. Getting many small drones to coordinate with each other means developing the computerized means for them to do so automatically—far faster and more accurately than even the most skilled pilot could do. And that autonomy inevitably means programming the little flying robots to target and kill automatically, without any human input.
This is the future of drone warfare. But even in the present, the idea of a U.S. president ordering remote-control assassinations on U.S. citizens—and minors—living abroad in countries with which the U.S. is not at war has raised legal eyebrows.
On Thursday, Jan. 24, the United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights announced an investigation into the U.S. drone program, its “civilian impact and human rights implications.” Ben Emmerson, the rapporteur, appears particularly interested in the targeted killings.
“The reality here is that the world is facing a new technological development which is not easily accommodated within the existing legal frameworks, and none of the analyses that have been floated is entirely satisfactory or comprehensive,” Emmerson wrote in the announcement of his inquiry. Replete with the drab rhetorical markers of international law, the announcement hardly made a dent in the news media.
Slowly, mostly away from public notice, a movement against the drones has begun to coalesce. It is now on a collision course with the U.S. government and, closer to home, Hopkins.
Like Denman, Baltimore peace activist Max Obuszewski says APL researcher Jay Moore’s fall 2011 talk at Gilman Hall on the Homewood campus drew his attention. Moore’s talk was mainly about the technical challenges of getting small styrofoam aircrafts called Unicorns to fly automatically, without an operator monitoring or controlling them. The technical name for this mathematically based robotic swarm-control function is “stigmergic potential fields.” They are being studied and developed at the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Yale, CalTech and other universities, but Hopkins’ APL appears to be the leader, with papers on the subject dating from 2006.
“It was a Tuesday,” Obuszewski says, the usual day he and other activists hold a vigil on the street calling for an end to the wars. Obuszewski went to the lecture and challenged the professor on drone research before he began his talk. “It was the first time in years that an APL person had appeared in public,” Obuszewski says.
Obuszewski made common cause with Denman’s on-campus Human Rights Working Group, which was also organizing around the drone issue. There were actions on campus—Pledge of Resistance activists telling new students and parents about APL’s drone program on Family Weekend; evening lectures last spring and again in November by researchers documenting the effects the drones are having on civilians; and in April of 2012, a petition—different from the Human Rights Working Group’s—with more than 150 signatures asking Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels to meet to talk about the drone programs and provide “copies of contracts, and the dollar amounts, regarding unmanned aerial vehicles.” Obuszewski and allies conducted a sit-in at the president’s office. It got them nowhere.
“After the sit-in we got a response—basically [that] we’ll have to talk to APL or the Navy, ’cause we were asking for specific information,” Obuszewski says.
City Paper tried for weeks to get similar information from Hopkins, but details are hard to come by. APL maintains an elaborate website disclosing its supporting role in the development of the Tomahawk cruise missile system and the Navy’s electronic warfare program, efforts that have drawn protests to the campus for more than 30 years. “During the past few years, we have expanded our efforts into tactical aircraft, ship, and submarine programs and into programs developing better technologies for tactical surveillance and targeting. Goals for the future include further contributions in these areas and in critical programs for improving command and control for precision engagement,” the website says.
The lab’s website is full of euphemisms. Its “Precision Engagement organization,” for example, promises “high-quality technical leadership and problem resolution in the conception, design, development, integration, and employment of detection and targeting, command and control, and engagement capabilities used for the projection of military effects appropriate to furthering national goals.”
Bluntly, what “military effects” means is that APL is helping to build new machines that find people, wherever they are on planet Earth, and kill them.
One program area is called Detection and Targeting. “The challenge for the Detection and Targeting Program Area is integrating global intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) to provide timely, relevant detection, location, identification, and targeting information to decision makers,” the site says.
Susan Kennedy is the Detection and Targeting Area Manager at APL. Her phone number is listed on the website, but she did not return calls from City Paper.
Once the decision is made to kill, one option is “kinetic engagement”—APL-speak for “bombs and missiles.”
As the website explains, “The Kinetic Engagement Program Area focuses on identifying concepts, maturing technologies, and developing systems for providing precision effects at the time and place of our choosing.”
The program area manager for this is Kerrin Neace. The website says “he can be reached” at a listed phone number as well, but it is not so.
APL’s retired director, Richard Roca, earned more than $450,000 in 2010. He picked up his home phone after two rings. He told City Paper he “would be happy” to talk about his work at APL but only if the lab’s spokespeople OK’d it first.
They declined to provide permission.
“We won’t have anyone available for an interview on APL programs, though the web (www.jhuapl.edu) offers plenty of info on the broad scope of APL’s work,” spokesperson Michael Buckley wrote in an email after several conversations about this story. “We’ll defer to Naval Air Systems for information on specific UAV programs.”
City Paper spoke to Jamie Cosgrove, public affairs officer with the Naval Air Systems Command, which is a sponsor of at least some of the APL’s drone work. We sent her a list of questions; no answers came over two weeks.
“We got to the point with the APL where we couldn’t even get on the grounds without being arrested,” says Elizabeth McAlister, a lifelong peace activist who lives at Jonah House, the Catholic Worker Movement’s local headquarters. “That was late ’90s. I did a two-month jail sentence in Howard County for just a simple [protest] there. . . . The issue there became one of not feeling that our presence could touch the employees there.”
McAlister believes that 90 percent of APL’s budget is related to military work, mostly for the Navy. But despite more than three decades of protesting there, she admits she doesn’t know.
Buckley, for his part, allows that “more than half” of the lab’s billion dollars or so in annual receipts are “military or homeland security related.”
Drilling down into that using public documents proves impossible. Although the lab is a limited liability corporation and a nonprofit, it does not file its own tax returns. Instead, it is a “disregarded entity” within Hopkins’ overall structure.
Though APL is decades old, the LLC was chartered only in 2009—and for a very specific reason: Daniels, Hopkins’ incoming president, was a citizen of Canada and thus ineligible to receive the security clearance necessary to oversee APL’s secret work. As Hopkins spokesperson Dennis O’Shea explained in an email:
“The Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees formerly oversaw the Applied Physics Laboratory through the Office of the President. The arrival in 2009 of a new president who was not yet a U.S. citizen required that this oversight be done differently. The LLC was created at that point as a subsidiary of the university. APL remains a part of the university and reports to a board of managers who are also university trustees and are appointed by the chair of the trustees. The university files a 990 covering the entire university, including APL.”
He declined to list the trustees.
APL is listed at the end of Johns Hopkins’ 573-page 2010 Form 990 (the most recent available) as a “disregarded entity” with income of $1,139,129,060 and assets of $693,590,905.
The tax form, a type that almost every nonprofit must make publicly available, lists hundreds of subcontracts with other colleges, hospitals, local social-service grantees, and the like. Omitting these, City Paper checked more than 100 contract companies for military or intelligence links. We found 75 contracts totaling more than $49 million.
It is impossible to tell which contracts are specific to drones or even to military work because many of the companies—Northrup Grumman ($6.2 million in contracts) and Boeing (a $682,000 sub contract), for example—are enormous and broad-ranging.
Some—a company called Zero Point ($89,000), for example—are obviously military/security-oriented but not drone-specific.
Others, like Textron Defense Systems ($120,000), make drones but are also so large and diversified that there is no way to tell if the subcontract from Hopkins had anything to do with drones. Last spring Textron demonstrated its BattleHawk Squad-Level Loitering Munition, which can be carried in a soldier’s backpack and launched like a toy glider. It carries cameras and an explosive charge that can take out a pickup truck.
Among the “system enhancements” cited by Textron in its May 22, 2012 press release, “are improved maneuverability in mountainous terrain; upgraded dual, high-resolution digital cameras for more comprehensive target detection and tracking; and moving target tracking during terminal guidance maneuvers. Also demonstrated was the system’s ability to execute the operator’s pre-programmed flight path as evolving battlefield conditions demand.”
Textron didn’t respond to calls and emails asking about the BattleHawk and its APL contract.
Linking drones like the BattleHawk into autonomous networks controlled nominally by a single, low-ranking soldier is the next innovation in remote warfare—the next step in distancing the soldier from the killing he or she does. It took 1,000 years for body armor, swords, and spears to make way for firearms, but less than eight years from the first flight of the airplane in Kittyhawk, N.C., to its first use as a bomber—in Tagiura, an oasis near Tripoli in Libya.
Back in 1911, Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti, flying 200 feet above a few Arabs requiring collective punishment, “leaned out of his delicate monoplane and dropped the bomb—a Danish Haasen hand grenade” weighing five pounds, according to Sven Lindqvist’s book A History of Bombing.
Less than 100 years after that, the pilot may sit half a world away, in climate-controlled comfort, sipping a Red Bull as his Reaper avatar “loiters” over a village or oasis, awaiting orders to “engage.” And the future being conceived today at Johns Hopkins and other secret incubators of higher learning will allow the soldier to “pre-program” the killing.
Or so it appears. APL declines to discuss the matter.
“People say, ‘Well, you can’t know the full story,’” says Denman. “Well, we do know that Hopkins contributes to drone warfare.”
Denman says his group sees more people at each event and is planning more this spring. Aside from APL’s secrecy, the second big obstacle is breaking out of the technical framework in which drones are usually discussed—“seeing it not as just a neat engineering problem but also something that touches peoples lives,” Denman says. “People say, ‘Look at the work these things can do on land surveys,’ but we know it is primarily [Department of Defense]-funded for war-fighting. If this research was being funded through the Department of Agriculture or the EPA, then we would be having a different conversation.
> Email Edward Ericson Jr.
CITY PAPER-BALTIMORE
The Kill Chain
Following the path of drones from Obama’s hit list to Johns Hopkins University
Hopkins Statue, Obuszewski: J.M. Giordano
J.M. Giordano
Peace activist Max Obuszewski is arrested while protesting extrajudicial drone killings at a “die-in” during President Obama’s recent inauguration
The BattleHawk Drone by Textron, one of the APL’s sub-contractors, which can be carried in a soldier’s backpack and launched like a toy glider.
Click here to view full photo gallery
By Edward Ericson Jr.
Published: January 30, 2013
Consider the scenario: Here in Baltimore, terrorists have a safe house, a van, a storage unit or two. They have a target. Could be the Inner Harbor or a convention that’s in town. Maybe it’s the Port of Baltimore, where about $50 billion of foreign commerce is conducted every year, or a high-profile target in the city’s large Jewish community. Maybe it’s something else.
A U.S. government agency has tracked the terrorists to a safe house. It just learned that the explosives are already in the van. With no time to deploy SEAL Team 6 or the FBI SWAT team, the agency deploys its newest weapon, developed just a few miles away by an arm of the city’s most respected and powerful nonprofit institution: Johns Hopkins University.
All but unnoticed in the evening twilight, a half-dozen tiny airplanes, the size of a child’s kite, swoop through the streets and into the alley behind the terrorists’ hideout. Nominally directed by a man sitting in a padded chair and looking at video screens two states away, the drones see through the rowhouse’s flat roof and brick walls, reading the heat signature of the men inside. Two drones blow holes through the front window and back door while two others fly into the house, landing in the laps of the terrorists and blowing them up with grenade-sized fragmentation bombs.
Meanwhile, 300 feet above, other drones circle, looking down through infrared-video eyes. A man runs from the house on fire. As he drops, writhing on the parking pad, the drone operator directs a single bullet into his head. He stops moving. Another terrorist, apparently uninjured, frantically pries at the door of the van as the other drone, operating without human input, puts a crosshair on him.
This fantastic scenario is conjured by the public documentation of the technical work going on now at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at 11100 Johns Hopkins Road in Laurel. There, in a complex of buildings surrounded by parking lots, green fields and a park with tennis and basketball courts, 5,000 scientists and engineers quietly labor to make better space missions, guided missiles, undersea threat detectors, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles—drones. Last June the school, along with the project’s sponsor, Boeing, unveiled the “swarming technology” depicted above.
“This swarm technology may one day enable warfighters in battle to request and receive time-critical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information directly from airborne [UAVs] much sooner than they can from ground control stations today,” Gabriel Santander, Boeing’s program director of advanced autonomous networks, said in a statement quoted in the news media.
And on APL’s own jargon-heavy website, it says the lab “is conducting an internal research and development project to demonstrate that small unmanned aerial systems (UASs) (those with less than a 60-inch wingspan) can provide detection, identification, tracking, and subsequent engagement of stationary or mobile threats in chaotic urban environments with minimal collateral damage and operator workload. This research is founded on an APL flight experiment where the feasibility of using a group of small hunter/killer UASs to execute the entire kill chain against a moving HUMVEE target was successfully demonstrated.”
Being able to “execute the entire kill chain” with “minimal. . . operator workload,” then, is the vision of Johns Hopkins University.
Not everyone is thrilled.
Hopkins students allied with the Human Rights Working Group, an on-campus organization formed in 2010, are collecting signatures on a petition to stop the drone research. The group is “calling for a moratorium on drone research at Hopkins until there is a fuller discussion and more disclosure of the Hopkins program,” says Derek Denman, a Ph.D. student in political science who has been researching the university’s drone program since 2011.
The effort got started, he says, when an APL researcher named Jay Moore came to the Homewood campus to give a talk about the research he was doing on swarming drones.
“I went with a few other members of the group to ask about the ethics of drone research,” Denman says. “Is it making war perpetual and boundless? How does he see his research feeding into that?”
Moore responded that the swarming technology should be used only on smaller drones, not the big Predators and Reapers that shoot hellfire missiles into terrorists’ dens and wedding parties, Denman says. (APL declined to make Moore—or anyone—available for comment). “He said this technology would be more suitable for soldiers to deploy from backpacks, send the drones up to map the battlefield,” Denman says. “He had a larger defense of drone warfare, saying that soldiers over time distanced themselves from combat—starting with armor.
“We thought that there is a giant quantitative difference.”
Airborne drone technology has potentially major implications for military, law enforcement, and even civilian rescue and filmmaking. Imagine being able to direct an aerial shot of your wakeboarding or dirt-bike wheelie exploits as easily as wearing a GoPro Hero cam is now.
Baltimore, a “chaotic urban environment” if ever there was one, is not yet subject to civilian drone overflights because the Federal Aviation Administration still holds sway. But it is studying the issue and plans to develop rules for civilian drone use as early as this year.
Military drones, meanwhile, apparently have carte blanche. The pilots of the fearsome Reaper drones fly training missions over northern New York from Hancock AFB. The pilots reportedly pick out civilian vehicles on public highways to practice following them.
Such skills have quietly become vital to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan—and countries with which America is not at war—as drone strikes have become the Obama Administration’s de facto strategy in the “war on terror.”
President Barack Obama deployed drones to kill people in Pakistan six times more often than President George W. Bush. The use of so-called “signature strikes,” where patterns of behavior by small groups are secretly deemed to be acts of war and punished with summary execution, became an administration hallmark, killing somewhere between 1,332 and 2,326 reported militants, according to a study by the New America Foundation. But the patterns of behavior common to groups of terrorists are apparently also typical of wedding parties, several of which have reportedly been bombed in recent years.
John Brennan, Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, has claimed that the CIA’s drones have never harmed a single innocent civilian—a claim that is unverifiable and disputed. Researchers from Stanford University and New York University visited Pakistan last year to interview relatives of alleged victims of U.S. drone strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan. They found dozens of noncombatant deaths, according to a paper presented to a packed auditorium at Hopkins in November. People from the tribal regions of Pakistan told the researchers—James Cavallaro, director of the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, and Omar Shakir, a law student—that they and their families had all but stopped walking anywhere in groups for fear that they would be mistaken for terrorists by the drones that flew overhead constantly, often in twos and threes. The people in the region have had their nerves frayed, Cavallaro said, by the “nagging, annoying, buzzing sound of imminent death.”
The researchers told of “double-tap” strikes, wherein a missile kills a person or group and then, later, a second missile strikes the same spot, wiping out any who came to render aid. One representative of a nongovernmental organization told Cavallaro’s team that they “won’t go to a drone strike area for six hours [after a strike] because of the U.S. double-tap policy.”
The researchers also claimed that 86 percent of the strikes come as a result of paid informants. “Even if that person is a militant, the United States has no legal right to kill them if they pose no imminent threat,” Cavallaro told the audience.
In the past year or so, the focus of U.S. drone attacks has shifted to Yemen, where al-Qaeda militants are thought to be massing. U.S.-controlled drones killed three American citizens there in 2011: Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist from North Carolina; Anwar al-Awlaki, reputed to be the man who trained the notorious “underwear bomber” who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound jet on Christmas 2009; and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar’s 16-year-old son, who was born in Denver and was killed two weeks after his father in a separate strike in southeastern Yemen. Former White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs, asked to justify the killing of the younger al-Awlaki, said, “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father.”
In September 2012, Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi told reporters in Washington that he personally signs off on all U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, and that they hit their targets accurately. “The drone technologically is more advanced than the human brain,” he said, according to the Washington Post.
Crudely put, that’s the idea being developed at Hopkins. “Minimal operator input” means fewer pilots training at New York’s Hancock AFB and elsewhere—thus, fewer places in which critics can stage die-ins. It’s also a practical necessity, as anyone who has tried to fly a tiny model helicopter in the backyard knows. Getting many small drones to coordinate with each other means developing the computerized means for them to do so automatically—far faster and more accurately than even the most skilled pilot could do. And that autonomy inevitably means programming the little flying robots to target and kill automatically, without any human input.
This is the future of drone warfare. But even in the present, the idea of a U.S. president ordering remote-control assassinations on U.S. citizens—and minors—living abroad in countries with which the U.S. is not at war has raised legal eyebrows.
On Thursday, Jan. 24, the United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights announced an investigation into the U.S. drone program, its “civilian impact and human rights implications.” Ben Emmerson, the rapporteur, appears particularly interested in the targeted killings.
“The reality here is that the world is facing a new technological development which is not easily accommodated within the existing legal frameworks, and none of the analyses that have been floated is entirely satisfactory or comprehensive,” Emmerson wrote in the announcement of his inquiry. Replete with the drab rhetorical markers of international law, the announcement hardly made a dent in the news media.
Slowly, mostly away from public notice, a movement against the drones has begun to coalesce. It is now on a collision course with the U.S. government and, closer to home, Hopkins.
Like Denman, Baltimore peace activist Max Obuszewski says APL researcher Jay Moore’s fall 2011 talk at Gilman Hall on the Homewood campus drew his attention. Moore’s talk was mainly about the technical challenges of getting small styrofoam aircrafts called Unicorns to fly automatically, without an operator monitoring or controlling them. The technical name for this mathematically based robotic swarm-control function is “stigmergic potential fields.” They are being studied and developed at the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Yale, CalTech and other universities, but Hopkins’ APL appears to be the leader, with papers on the subject dating from 2006.
“It was a Tuesday,” Obuszewski says, the usual day he and other activists hold a vigil on the street calling for an end to the wars. Obuszewski went to the lecture and challenged the professor on drone research before he began his talk. “It was the first time in years that an APL person had appeared in public,” Obuszewski says.
Obuszewski made common cause with Denman’s on-campus Human Rights Working Group, which was also organizing around the drone issue. There were actions on campus—Pledge of Resistance activists telling new students and parents about APL’s drone program on Family Weekend; evening lectures last spring and again in November by researchers documenting the effects the drones are having on civilians; and in April of 2012, a petition—different from the Human Rights Working Group’s—with more than 150 signatures asking Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels to meet to talk about the drone programs and provide “copies of contracts, and the dollar amounts, regarding unmanned aerial vehicles.” Obuszewski and allies conducted a sit-in at the president’s office. It got them nowhere.
“After the sit-in we got a response—basically [that] we’ll have to talk to APL or the Navy, ’cause we were asking for specific information,” Obuszewski says.
City Paper tried for weeks to get similar information from Hopkins, but details are hard to come by. APL maintains an elaborate website disclosing its supporting role in the development of the Tomahawk cruise missile system and the Navy’s electronic warfare program, efforts that have drawn protests to the campus for more than 30 years. “During the past few years, we have expanded our efforts into tactical aircraft, ship, and submarine programs and into programs developing better technologies for tactical surveillance and targeting. Goals for the future include further contributions in these areas and in critical programs for improving command and control for precision engagement,” the website says.
The lab’s website is full of euphemisms. Its “Precision Engagement organization,” for example, promises “high-quality technical leadership and problem resolution in the conception, design, development, integration, and employment of detection and targeting, command and control, and engagement capabilities used for the projection of military effects appropriate to furthering national goals.”
Bluntly, what “military effects” means is that APL is helping to build new machines that find people, wherever they are on planet Earth, and kill them.
One program area is called Detection and Targeting. “The challenge for the Detection and Targeting Program Area is integrating global intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) to provide timely, relevant detection, location, identification, and targeting information to decision makers,” the site says.
Susan Kennedy is the Detection and Targeting Area Manager at APL. Her phone number is listed on the website, but she did not return calls from City Paper.
Once the decision is made to kill, one option is “kinetic engagement”—APL-speak for “bombs and missiles.”
As the website explains, “The Kinetic Engagement Program Area focuses on identifying concepts, maturing technologies, and developing systems for providing precision effects at the time and place of our choosing.”
The program area manager for this is Kerrin Neace. The website says “he can be reached” at a listed phone number as well, but it is not so.
APL’s retired director, Richard Roca, earned more than $450,000 in 2010. He picked up his home phone after two rings. He told City Paper he “would be happy” to talk about his work at APL but only if the lab’s spokespeople OK’d it first.
They declined to provide permission.
“We won’t have anyone available for an interview on APL programs, though the web (www.jhuapl.edu) offers plenty of info on the broad scope of APL’s work,” spokesperson Michael Buckley wrote in an email after several conversations about this story. “We’ll defer to Naval Air Systems for information on specific UAV programs.”
City Paper spoke to Jamie Cosgrove, public affairs officer with the Naval Air Systems Command, which is a sponsor of at least some of the APL’s drone work. We sent her a list of questions; no answers came over two weeks.
“We got to the point with the APL where we couldn’t even get on the grounds without being arrested,” says Elizabeth McAlister, a lifelong peace activist who lives at Jonah House, the Catholic Worker Movement’s local headquarters. “That was late ’90s. I did a two-month jail sentence in Howard County for just a simple [protest] there. . . . The issue there became one of not feeling that our presence could touch the employees there.”
McAlister believes that 90 percent of APL’s budget is related to military work, mostly for the Navy. But despite more than three decades of protesting there, she admits she doesn’t know.
Buckley, for his part, allows that “more than half” of the lab’s billion dollars or so in annual receipts are “military or homeland security related.”
Drilling down into that using public documents proves impossible. Although the lab is a limited liability corporation and a nonprofit, it does not file its own tax returns. Instead, it is a “disregarded entity” within Hopkins’ overall structure.
Though APL is decades old, the LLC was chartered only in 2009—and for a very specific reason: Daniels, Hopkins’ incoming president, was a citizen of Canada and thus ineligible to receive the security clearance necessary to oversee APL’s secret work. As Hopkins spokesperson Dennis O’Shea explained in an email:
“The Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees formerly oversaw the Applied Physics Laboratory through the Office of the President. The arrival in 2009 of a new president who was not yet a U.S. citizen required that this oversight be done differently. The LLC was created at that point as a subsidiary of the university. APL remains a part of the university and reports to a board of managers who are also university trustees and are appointed by the chair of the trustees. The university files a 990 covering the entire university, including APL.”
He declined to list the trustees.
APL is listed at the end of Johns Hopkins’ 573-page 2010 Form 990 (the most recent available) as a “disregarded entity” with income of $1,139,129,060 and assets of $693,590,905.
The tax form, a type that almost every nonprofit must make publicly available, lists hundreds of subcontracts with other colleges, hospitals, local social-service grantees, and the like. Omitting these, City Paper checked more than 100 contract companies for military or intelligence links. We found 75 contracts totaling more than $49 million.
It is impossible to tell which contracts are specific to drones or even to military work because many of the companies—Northrup Grumman ($6.2 million in contracts) and Boeing (a $682,000 sub contract), for example—are enormous and broad-ranging.
Some—a company called Zero Point ($89,000), for example—are obviously military/security-oriented but not drone-specific.
Others, like Textron Defense Systems ($120,000), make drones but are also so large and diversified that there is no way to tell if the subcontract from Hopkins had anything to do with drones. Last spring Textron demonstrated its BattleHawk Squad-Level Loitering Munition, which can be carried in a soldier’s backpack and launched like a toy glider. It carries cameras and an explosive charge that can take out a pickup truck.
Among the “system enhancements” cited by Textron in its May 22, 2012 press release, “are improved maneuverability in mountainous terrain; upgraded dual, high-resolution digital cameras for more comprehensive target detection and tracking; and moving target tracking during terminal guidance maneuvers. Also demonstrated was the system’s ability to execute the operator’s pre-programmed flight path as evolving battlefield conditions demand.”
Textron didn’t respond to calls and emails asking about the BattleHawk and its APL contract.
Linking drones like the BattleHawk into autonomous networks controlled nominally by a single, low-ranking soldier is the next innovation in remote warfare—the next step in distancing the soldier from the killing he or she does. It took 1,000 years for body armor, swords, and spears to make way for firearms, but less than eight years from the first flight of the airplane in Kittyhawk, N.C., to its first use as a bomber—in Tagiura, an oasis near Tripoli in Libya.
Back in 1911, Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti, flying 200 feet above a few Arabs requiring collective punishment, “leaned out of his delicate monoplane and dropped the bomb—a Danish Haasen hand grenade” weighing five pounds, according to Sven Lindqvist’s book A History of Bombing.
Less than 100 years after that, the pilot may sit half a world away, in climate-controlled comfort, sipping a Red Bull as his Reaper avatar “loiters” over a village or oasis, awaiting orders to “engage.” And the future being conceived today at Johns Hopkins and other secret incubators of higher learning will allow the soldier to “pre-program” the killing.
Or so it appears. APL declines to discuss the matter.
“People say, ‘Well, you can’t know the full story,’” says Denman. “Well, we do know that Hopkins contributes to drone warfare.”
Denman says his group sees more people at each event and is planning more this spring. Aside from APL’s secrecy, the second big obstacle is breaking out of the technical framework in which drones are usually discussed—“seeing it not as just a neat engineering problem but also something that touches peoples lives,” Denman says. “People say, ‘Look at the work these things can do on land surveys,’ but we know it is primarily [Department of Defense]-funded for war-fighting. If this research was being funded through the Department of Agriculture or the EPA, then we would be having a different conversation.
> Email Edward Ericson Jr.
Can you get Elected Officials to sign on this Sequestration Letter
Friends,
Fund Our Communities has written a letter to Congress. It is hoped that Maryland elected officials (members of the Maryland General Assembly, mayors, county and city council members, etc.) will sign on. But we need your help in getting signatures. The essence of the letter makes this point: " We urge you not to cut federal programs that support Maryland’s cities and counties and our state. . . . By wide margins, Americans prefer new taxes and reductions in wasteful Pentagon spending to cuts in vital domestic programs." See the letter below.
The sequestration battle is just one piece of a broad attack on social spending, and it is one that we need to resist. At the same time, we want to make the point that there is plenty of money in the Pentagon, and so if the country needs money, there's where we can get some.
If we are successful in getting a large number of elected officials to sign this letter, we believe we can get media coverage. In addition, such a letter would send a powerful political message to our Congressional delegation. However, the time is very short since sequestration is supposed to happen March 1. If Congress does anything on it, they will need to do it before that date. And if we are to have any effect, we need to get all the signatures and publicize the letter by mid-February.
So, can you help us get signatures? Some FOC members have done outreach in Montgomery County to the Council and to senators and delegates in the General Assembly.
First email a note with the letter. Then deliver a hard copy to the official’s office. Finally, follow up with phone calls. Then let me know what you have done, who you contacted and what was the response you got.
Kagiso,
Max
Dear xx:
The Maryland coalition, Fund Our Communities, composed of over 60 organizations, asks that you sign the attached letter. We plan to send the letter to Maryland’s congressional delegation from elected officials at all levels of government throughout the state. The letter asks Congress to remember the needs of our people and not to cut key federal programs that support Maryland’s cities and counties and our state.
About Our Coalition: We consist of community, religious, labor, advocacy, political, environmental, and veterans groups in Maryland. We have established a strong and broad-based grassroots constituency for changes in our nation’s priorities, away from war and militarism and towards peace and social justice. Specifically, we seek to cut the Pentagon budget substantially and use the dollars saved to pay for urgently needed jobs and public services at home.
We hope you will sign this letter! You can do so in any one of these ways:
• Leave your signed letter at the desk and we will pick it up.
1. Send your scanned signature via email to jeanathey@verizon.net
2. Fax your signature to 301-570-0923 (please call first to alert us to turn on the fax machine)
3. Mail the sign-on page with your signature to 2305 Gold Mine Road, Brookeville, MD 20833.
Please contact Jean Athey at 301-570-0923 if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Max Obuszewski
MD Coalition to Fund Our Communities
--
--
FUND OUR COMMUNITIES
Bring the War $$ Home
P.O. Box 1653 Olney, MD 20830
301-570-0923 www.OurFunds.org
February 15, 2013
To Maryland’s Congressional Delegation:
We, the undersigned, are state, county and local elected officials concerned about the impact on Maryland of automatic spending cuts known as sequestration.
On midnight March 1, sequestration will take effect unless the Congress reduces national deficits by an equivalent $1.2 trillion over the next ten years. We urge you not to cut federal programs that support Maryland’s cities and counties and our state.
Vital programs including Community Service Block Grants, Head Start, Title I, infrastructure spending (water, transit, roads, bridges, etc.), and housing assistance will be cut if the automatic spending cuts take place. They are also likely targets if domestic spending cuts are used to reduce federal deficits. These cuts would come on top of already deep cuts. Federal aid to our cities, counties and state has been falling for at least the last two years and it is becoming increasingly difficult to fund critical programs for our residents at an adequate level.
This issue transcends party politics. And there are broadly supported alternatives to domestic spending cuts. By wide margins, Americans prefer new taxes and reductions in wasteful Pentagon spending to cuts in vital domestic programs.
A Maryland Coalition
Baltimore Nonviolence Center; Bethesda Friends Meeting; CASA de Maryland; Center for Peace, Fred. Co.; Chesapeake Citizens; CCAN; Citizen-Soldier Alliance, Baltimore; Columbia Christian Church; Democracy for America, Mont. Co.; Fellowship of Reconciliation; Friends Meeting, Annapolis; Generations for Peace & Democracy; Gray Panthers, Metro DC; Green Party, Anne Arundel Co.; Green Party, MD; Green Party, Montgomery Co.; Healthcare-Now of MD; Homewood Friends Meeting; Little Friends for Peace; MD Black Family Alliance; MD United for Peace & Justice; MCCRC; MCPA; MCEA; Muslim Amer. Society/MD; NAACP/MD; Net. of Spiritual Prog., MD; Orthodox Peace Fellowship; Pax Christi/MD; Peace Action, Anne Arundel Co.; Peace Action Montgomery; Peace Committee, Sandy Spring Friends Meeting; Peace & Justice Coalition, P.G. Co.; Pledge of Resistance, Baltimore; PDA, MD; Progressive Cheverly; Progressive Maryland; Progressive Neighbors; Prosperity Agenda; RRUU/Social Justice Council; School Sisters of Notre Dame, MoCo; Sheet Metal Workers Interna’l, L 100; SCLC/Mo. County; UFCW Local 1994 MCGEO; Veterans for Peace, Baltimore; Veterans for Peace, Metro DC; Voters for Peace; WeGreen USA; Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom/DC
Page 2
As the Congressional Progressive Caucus stated January 3 after Congress reached an agreement on taxes:
“With yesterday’s vote behind us, Americans face an even bigger fight in the coming months: funding our government, avoiding devastating cuts known as sequestration, and avoiding default on our country’s bills. The most recent negotiations saw a massive grassroots effort that successfully protected Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits and investments in the middle class. In the coming negotiations, we must continue the fight….Additional savings should come from new revenue and the Pentagon.”
We agree with the Progressive Caucus and urge you to protect social spending while ensuring that wasteful spending in the Pentagon is severely curtailed.
Sincerely yours,
Members of the Maryland General Assembly
Members of the Prince George’s County Council
Members of the Montgomery County Council
Members of the Howard County Council
Members of the Anne Arundel County Council
Mayors of Maryland Cities
Members of Maryland City Councils
(See signatures on following pages)
Signature Page for Maryland Elected Officials:
Letter to Congress on Sequestration
Name ____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name ____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Fund Our Communities has written a letter to Congress. It is hoped that Maryland elected officials (members of the Maryland General Assembly, mayors, county and city council members, etc.) will sign on. But we need your help in getting signatures. The essence of the letter makes this point: " We urge you not to cut federal programs that support Maryland’s cities and counties and our state. . . . By wide margins, Americans prefer new taxes and reductions in wasteful Pentagon spending to cuts in vital domestic programs." See the letter below.
The sequestration battle is just one piece of a broad attack on social spending, and it is one that we need to resist. At the same time, we want to make the point that there is plenty of money in the Pentagon, and so if the country needs money, there's where we can get some.
If we are successful in getting a large number of elected officials to sign this letter, we believe we can get media coverage. In addition, such a letter would send a powerful political message to our Congressional delegation. However, the time is very short since sequestration is supposed to happen March 1. If Congress does anything on it, they will need to do it before that date. And if we are to have any effect, we need to get all the signatures and publicize the letter by mid-February.
So, can you help us get signatures? Some FOC members have done outreach in Montgomery County to the Council and to senators and delegates in the General Assembly.
First email a note with the letter. Then deliver a hard copy to the official’s office. Finally, follow up with phone calls. Then let me know what you have done, who you contacted and what was the response you got.
Kagiso,
Max
Dear xx:
The Maryland coalition, Fund Our Communities, composed of over 60 organizations, asks that you sign the attached letter. We plan to send the letter to Maryland’s congressional delegation from elected officials at all levels of government throughout the state. The letter asks Congress to remember the needs of our people and not to cut key federal programs that support Maryland’s cities and counties and our state.
About Our Coalition: We consist of community, religious, labor, advocacy, political, environmental, and veterans groups in Maryland. We have established a strong and broad-based grassroots constituency for changes in our nation’s priorities, away from war and militarism and towards peace and social justice. Specifically, we seek to cut the Pentagon budget substantially and use the dollars saved to pay for urgently needed jobs and public services at home.
We hope you will sign this letter! You can do so in any one of these ways:
• Leave your signed letter at the desk and we will pick it up.
1. Send your scanned signature via email to jeanathey@verizon.net
2. Fax your signature to 301-570-0923 (please call first to alert us to turn on the fax machine)
3. Mail the sign-on page with your signature to 2305 Gold Mine Road, Brookeville, MD 20833.
Please contact Jean Athey at 301-570-0923 if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Max Obuszewski
MD Coalition to Fund Our Communities
--
--
FUND OUR COMMUNITIES
Bring the War $$ Home
P.O. Box 1653 Olney, MD 20830
301-570-0923 www.OurFunds.org
February 15, 2013
To Maryland’s Congressional Delegation:
We, the undersigned, are state, county and local elected officials concerned about the impact on Maryland of automatic spending cuts known as sequestration.
On midnight March 1, sequestration will take effect unless the Congress reduces national deficits by an equivalent $1.2 trillion over the next ten years. We urge you not to cut federal programs that support Maryland’s cities and counties and our state.
Vital programs including Community Service Block Grants, Head Start, Title I, infrastructure spending (water, transit, roads, bridges, etc.), and housing assistance will be cut if the automatic spending cuts take place. They are also likely targets if domestic spending cuts are used to reduce federal deficits. These cuts would come on top of already deep cuts. Federal aid to our cities, counties and state has been falling for at least the last two years and it is becoming increasingly difficult to fund critical programs for our residents at an adequate level.
This issue transcends party politics. And there are broadly supported alternatives to domestic spending cuts. By wide margins, Americans prefer new taxes and reductions in wasteful Pentagon spending to cuts in vital domestic programs.
A Maryland Coalition
Baltimore Nonviolence Center; Bethesda Friends Meeting; CASA de Maryland; Center for Peace, Fred. Co.; Chesapeake Citizens; CCAN; Citizen-Soldier Alliance, Baltimore; Columbia Christian Church; Democracy for America, Mont. Co.; Fellowship of Reconciliation; Friends Meeting, Annapolis; Generations for Peace & Democracy; Gray Panthers, Metro DC; Green Party, Anne Arundel Co.; Green Party, MD; Green Party, Montgomery Co.; Healthcare-Now of MD; Homewood Friends Meeting; Little Friends for Peace; MD Black Family Alliance; MD United for Peace & Justice; MCCRC; MCPA; MCEA; Muslim Amer. Society/MD; NAACP/MD; Net. of Spiritual Prog., MD; Orthodox Peace Fellowship; Pax Christi/MD; Peace Action, Anne Arundel Co.; Peace Action Montgomery; Peace Committee, Sandy Spring Friends Meeting; Peace & Justice Coalition, P.G. Co.; Pledge of Resistance, Baltimore; PDA, MD; Progressive Cheverly; Progressive Maryland; Progressive Neighbors; Prosperity Agenda; RRUU/Social Justice Council; School Sisters of Notre Dame, MoCo; Sheet Metal Workers Interna’l, L 100; SCLC/Mo. County; UFCW Local 1994 MCGEO; Veterans for Peace, Baltimore; Veterans for Peace, Metro DC; Voters for Peace; WeGreen USA; Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom/DC
Page 2
As the Congressional Progressive Caucus stated January 3 after Congress reached an agreement on taxes:
“With yesterday’s vote behind us, Americans face an even bigger fight in the coming months: funding our government, avoiding devastating cuts known as sequestration, and avoiding default on our country’s bills. The most recent negotiations saw a massive grassroots effort that successfully protected Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits and investments in the middle class. In the coming negotiations, we must continue the fight….Additional savings should come from new revenue and the Pentagon.”
We agree with the Progressive Caucus and urge you to protect social spending while ensuring that wasteful spending in the Pentagon is severely curtailed.
Sincerely yours,
Members of the Maryland General Assembly
Members of the Prince George’s County Council
Members of the Montgomery County Council
Members of the Howard County Council
Members of the Anne Arundel County Council
Mayors of Maryland Cities
Members of Maryland City Councils
(See signatures on following pages)
Signature Page for Maryland Elected Officials:
Letter to Congress on Sequestration
Name ____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name ____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Name____________________________________________ Date _______________________
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Baltimore Activist Alert - Part 4
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
61] U.S., Israel and Palestine – Jan. 31
62] Understand Pentagon budget – Jan. 31
63] "The History of the 1930s" – Jan. 31
64] Film “Reportero” – Jan. 31
65] Book talk: "Doing Time for Peace” – Jan. 31
66] MICA's Nicaragua Summer – Jan. 31
67] Viet Nam reconciliation projects – Jan. 31
68] Film CRIME AFTER CRIME – Feb. 1
69] MUPJ Conference – Apr. 12 & 13, 2013
70] Support Red Emma’s in its move
71] Fellowship position available
72] Do you possess any Tom Lewis artwork?
73] Sign up with Washington Peace Center
74] Join Fund Our Communities
75] Submit articles to Indypendent Reader
76] Donate books, videos, DVDs and records
77] Do you need any book shelves?
78] Join Global Zero campaign
79] Digital Information and the Criminal Justice System
80] War Is Not the Answer signs for sale
81] Click on The Hunger Site
82] Fire & Faith
83] Join Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil
61] –
61] U.S., Israel and Palestine: What Should the U.S. Do Now? This talk is on Thurs., Jan. 31 from 11 AM through 2 PM at 1526 New Hampshire Ave. NW, WDC 20036 (DuPont Circle Metro). Many are saying that the century old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whose solution lies in an agreement for two states and a shared Jerusalem in the land that is precious to both peoples, is reaching the point of no re-turn. As the Netanyahu government rushes ahead to expand settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, the prospects for a genuine, contiguous Palestinian state are disappearing. The Hamas-Fatah split between Gaza and the West Bank also cripples peacemaking. Has President Obama, having ordered the U.S. vote against Palestinian self- determination in the UN in November, decided to defer the tough issue of peace making, given other pressing foreign policy demands? Or will he, as many Americans recommend, once again take on the formidable challenge of making peace between Israel and Palestine, to which American national security interests in the Middle East are closely tied? Reserve at www.democraticwoman.org or 202-232-7363 ext. 3003.
62] –Sign Up for 'Understanding the Pentagon Budget — and How to Move the Money,' a webinar which will take place on Thurs., Jan. 31 at 2 PM Eastern, Learn how and where to get the Pentagon spending facts you need to shape the national debate. Your knowledge will also support the long-term effort to reorient national priorities. This free webinar with analyst, researcher and experienced workshop leader Chris Hellman will help you understand better the mammoth Pentagon budget, how to find and use the information you need to campaign for changed national priorities, and develop skills for what will be a long-term struggle to shift those priorities. Register at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2507/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=7256.
63] – Bill Barry [mailto:wbarrymd@hotmail.com] is teaching a special 3-credit course, "The History of the 1930s," at CCBC-Essex for the spring semester, Thursday nights (5:45-8:40 PM) starting January 31 and running until the first week of May. You can take the course for credit, for audit or just sit in for fun (as soon as enough enrolled students sign up for the course). A comparison will be made between that Depression and today’s. The outline for the course last year is http://faculty.ccbcmd.edu/~wbarry/History%20of%201930s.html.
64] – Catch the film “Reportero” on Thurs., Jan. 31 from 6 to 8 PM at 1025 5th St. NW. The film follows a veteran reporter and his colleagues at Zeta, a Tijuana-based independent newsweekly, as they stubbornly ply their trade in one of the deadliest places in the world for members of the media. In Mexico, more than 40 journalists have been slain or have vanished since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón came to power and launched a government offensive against the country’s powerful drug cartels and organized crime. Join The Institute for Policy Studies for this screening, to be followed by an intense discussion with IPS' Drug Policy project director Sanho Tree and Frank Smyth of the Committee to Protect Journalists. A suggested donation of $5 is requested to help with costs. No one will be turned away. Email Netfa Freeman at netfa@ips-dc.org.
65] – On Thurs., Jan. 31 at 7 PM at Red Emma’s, 800 St. Paul St., Rosalie J. Riegle presents her book “Doing Time for Peace,” which explores the stories of over 75 peace activists who ended up in prison. Call 410- 230-0450 or go to http://www.redemmas.org.
This exceptional book of oral histories shares the stories of activists whose brave acts of civil disobedience landed them in prison, forcing them to choose between being with their families and communities and standing up for what they believe in. Many are Catholic Workers, devoting their lives to the works of mercy instead of the works of war. They are homemakers and carpenters and social workers and teachers who are often called "faith-based activists." They speak from the left of the political perspective, providing a counterpoint to the faith-based activism of the fundamentalist Right. From WWII resistors to anti-Iraq war activists, the book situates peace work in a long tradition of resistance to war and imperialism.
66] –On Thurs., Jan. 31 at 7 PM at Maryland Institute College of Art, The Gateway, 1601 West Mount Royal Ave., Baltimore 21217. Room 101, get information about MICA's Nicaragua Summer. Email maldana@mica.edu.
Innovation, social justice, and adventure thrive in the MICA in Nicaragua program, Art of Solidarity, founded by Maria Aldana and Aleks Martray since 2008. Artists interested in community arts and in documentary video come together to collaborate with Nicaraguan artists for 5 weeks from July 5 through Aug. 6. The small mountain city of Esteli is where the program begins. Later participants will live and work in the town of Limay, which is isolated from many resources but has a wealth of artists among its population of 13,000.
67] – On Thurs., Jan. 31 at 7:30 PM, Mike Boehm of Madison Quakers, Inc. will talk about Viet Nam reconciliation projects including the My Lai Peace Park. Mike is Viet Nam vet who has been back 16 times since 1992 working with a number of Vietnamese on various peace and reconciliation projects. Mike Marceau of the D.C. Veterans for Peace will also briefly share about his trip back to Viet Nam in 2012. This event, hosted by the St. Francis of Assisi Pax Christi group and co-sponsored by Peace Action Montgomery and Veterans for Peace, will be held in the Parish Center (church basement) of St. Francis of Assisi Church, 6701 Muncaster Mill Road, Derwood, MD 20855. Email cooker@ppnpf.com.
68] – The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration Committee, Baltimore Quaker Peace and Justice Committee of Homewood and Stony Run Meetings and Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility are continuing the FILM & SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS DVD SERIES. The DVDs will be shown at Homewood Friends Meetinghouse, 3107 N. Charles St., Baltimore 21218, on the First Friday. After the peace vigil, there will be a potluck dinner. At 7 PM, from January through June, a DVD will be shown with a discussion to follow. There is no charge, and refreshments will be available. Contact Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
The series theme is WHY CAN’T WE GET ALONG? On Fri., Feb. 1, see CRIME AFTER CRIME (USA, 2011) a documentary film directed by Yoav Potash about the case of Deborah Peagler, an incarcerated victim of domestic violence whose case was taken up by pro bono attorneys through the California Habeas Project. The documentary tells the dramatic story of the legal battle to free Peagler, an incarcerated survivor of domestic violence. She was wrongly convicted of the murder of her abusive boyfriend, and given 26 years in prison. Her story takes an unexpected turn two decades later when two rookie land-use attorneys step forward to take her case. Through their perseverance, they bring to light long-lost witnesses, new testimonies from the men who committed the murder, and proof of perjured evidence. Their investigation ultimately attracts global attention to victims of wrongful incarceration and abuse, and becomes a matter of life and death once more.
69] – The 28th Annual Maryland Peace, Justice and the Environment Conference [www.mupj.org] will take place Fri., Apr. 12 and Sat., Apr. 13 at the Turner Memorial AME Church, 7201 16th Place, Hyattsville. Save these dates. Email paulette.d.hammond@questdiagnostics.com.
70] – Red Emma's is in the process of closing down the location at 800 St. Paul St., and reopening in a much larger new space on North Avenue in the fall. The collective is seeking your help. It's time to reinvent the project started in 2004 to build a self-sustaining progressive space in Baltimore, committed to providing a daily reminder that another world was possible and that there were people working in the city to build it.
Here's how you can help: donate money, buy books at the current store, provide skilled help, and share these needs. Email john@redemmas.org or go to http://indiegogo.com/redemmas2.
71] – There is an Advocacy and Policy Fellowship for a person to work on global justice issues and gain valuable advocacy, research and professional experience? Jubilee USA Network is a coalition of over 75 faith communities, environmental organizations and a variety of other groups, working towards expanded debt cancellation and responsible lending and borrowing to impoverished countries.
Some of the responsibilities would be creating literature and fact sheets about debt and representing Jubilee at planning meetings, appointments with Congress members and public events and conducting research as needed to respond to new information or events that pertain to Jubilee's work. Some requirements would be a strong passion for economic justice and right relationships among people, excellent verbal and written communications skills, and a familiarity with general government and/or foreign policy issues. The position is a year-long commitment from August to August. To apply, please send a cover letter, resume and 1-2 page writing sample to Jennifer Tong, Communications and Development Coordinator at jennifer(at)jubileeusa.org.
72] – Stephen Kobasa is hoping to do an exhibit of the work of Tom Lewis opening in May 2013 in New Haven, CT. It would include a variety of his paintings, drawings, silkscreen prints, book illustrations, posters, banners and sketchbooks. This would not only be a display of objects on a gallery wall, but would also involve events which would return Tom's art to the streets where it was originally meant to make conscience visible.
Contact Stephen if you are in possession of original work and would consider loaning it for a month long display. You can reach him at stephen.kobasa at gmail.com or 203-500-0268.
73] – The Washington Peace Center has a progressive calendar & activist alert! Consider signing up to receive its weekly email: info@washingtonpeacecenter.org.
74] – Fund Our Communities campaign is a grass roots movement to get support from local organizations and communities to work together with their local and state elected officials to pressure Congresspersons and senators to join with Congresspersons Barney Frank and Ron Paul, who have endorsed a 25% cut to the federal military budget. Bring home the savings to state and county governments to meet the local needs which are under tremendous budget pressures. Plan to join FOC on the March 23 Peace Bus from Baltimore to D.C. Go to www.OurFunds.org.
75] – MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD. Baltimore's Indypendent Reader is looking for individuals interested in creating media - written, photo, audio, or video - that relates to issues like...economic justice, race, prisons & policing, environment, gender & sexuality, war & peace and more! If you would like to create social justice media, then email indypendentreader@gmail.com. Visit http://www.indyreader.org.
76] – If you would like to get rid of books, videos, DVDs or records, contact Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
77] – Can you use any book shelves? Contact Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
78] – Join an extraordinary global campaign for the elimination of nuclear weapons: http://www.globalzero.org/sign-declaration. A growing group of leaders around the world is calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons and a majority of the global public agrees. This is an historic window of opportunity. With momentum already building in favor of Zero, a major show of support from people around the world could tip the balance. When it comes to nuclear weapons, one is one too many.
79] – Visit the Digital Information and the Criminal Justice System at http://www.onlinecriminaljusticedegree.com/. This link presents a wide range of insightful articles for criminal justice and legal professionals, both current and future. The project aims to be an objective, authoritative resource in the ever-changing court system.
80] – WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER signs from Friends Committee on National Legislation are again for sale at $5. To purchase a sign, call Max at 410-366-1637.
81] – The Hunger Site was initiated by Mercy Corps and Second Harvest, and is funded entirely by advertisers. You can go there every day and click the big yellow "Give Food for Free" button near the top of the page; you do not have to look at the ads. Each click generates funding for about 1.1 cups of food. So consider clicking.
82] – Go online for FIRE AND FAITH: The Catonsville Nine File. On May 17, 1968, nine people entered the Selective Service Offices in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned draft records in protest against the war in Vietnam. View http://www.prattlibrary.org/digital/.
83] – Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil takes place every day in Lafayette Park, 1601 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 24 hours a day, since June 3, 1981. Go to http://prop1.org; call 202-682-4282.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better" - Daniel Berrigan
61] U.S., Israel and Palestine – Jan. 31
62] Understand Pentagon budget – Jan. 31
63] "The History of the 1930s" – Jan. 31
64] Film “Reportero” – Jan. 31
65] Book talk: "Doing Time for Peace” – Jan. 31
66] MICA's Nicaragua Summer – Jan. 31
67] Viet Nam reconciliation projects – Jan. 31
68] Film CRIME AFTER CRIME – Feb. 1
69] MUPJ Conference – Apr. 12 & 13, 2013
70] Support Red Emma’s in its move
71] Fellowship position available
72] Do you possess any Tom Lewis artwork?
73] Sign up with Washington Peace Center
74] Join Fund Our Communities
75] Submit articles to Indypendent Reader
76] Donate books, videos, DVDs and records
77] Do you need any book shelves?
78] Join Global Zero campaign
79] Digital Information and the Criminal Justice System
80] War Is Not the Answer signs for sale
81] Click on The Hunger Site
82] Fire & Faith
83] Join Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil
61] –
61] U.S., Israel and Palestine: What Should the U.S. Do Now? This talk is on Thurs., Jan. 31 from 11 AM through 2 PM at 1526 New Hampshire Ave. NW, WDC 20036 (DuPont Circle Metro). Many are saying that the century old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whose solution lies in an agreement for two states and a shared Jerusalem in the land that is precious to both peoples, is reaching the point of no re-turn. As the Netanyahu government rushes ahead to expand settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, the prospects for a genuine, contiguous Palestinian state are disappearing. The Hamas-Fatah split between Gaza and the West Bank also cripples peacemaking. Has President Obama, having ordered the U.S. vote against Palestinian self- determination in the UN in November, decided to defer the tough issue of peace making, given other pressing foreign policy demands? Or will he, as many Americans recommend, once again take on the formidable challenge of making peace between Israel and Palestine, to which American national security interests in the Middle East are closely tied? Reserve at www.democraticwoman.org or 202-232-7363 ext. 3003.
62] –Sign Up for 'Understanding the Pentagon Budget — and How to Move the Money,' a webinar which will take place on Thurs., Jan. 31 at 2 PM Eastern, Learn how and where to get the Pentagon spending facts you need to shape the national debate. Your knowledge will also support the long-term effort to reorient national priorities. This free webinar with analyst, researcher and experienced workshop leader Chris Hellman will help you understand better the mammoth Pentagon budget, how to find and use the information you need to campaign for changed national priorities, and develop skills for what will be a long-term struggle to shift those priorities. Register at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2507/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=7256.
63] – Bill Barry [mailto:wbarrymd@hotmail.com] is teaching a special 3-credit course, "The History of the 1930s," at CCBC-Essex for the spring semester, Thursday nights (5:45-8:40 PM) starting January 31 and running until the first week of May. You can take the course for credit, for audit or just sit in for fun (as soon as enough enrolled students sign up for the course). A comparison will be made between that Depression and today’s. The outline for the course last year is http://faculty.ccbcmd.edu/~wbarry/History%20of%201930s.html.
64] – Catch the film “Reportero” on Thurs., Jan. 31 from 6 to 8 PM at 1025 5th St. NW. The film follows a veteran reporter and his colleagues at Zeta, a Tijuana-based independent newsweekly, as they stubbornly ply their trade in one of the deadliest places in the world for members of the media. In Mexico, more than 40 journalists have been slain or have vanished since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón came to power and launched a government offensive against the country’s powerful drug cartels and organized crime. Join The Institute for Policy Studies for this screening, to be followed by an intense discussion with IPS' Drug Policy project director Sanho Tree and Frank Smyth of the Committee to Protect Journalists. A suggested donation of $5 is requested to help with costs. No one will be turned away. Email Netfa Freeman at netfa@ips-dc.org.
65] – On Thurs., Jan. 31 at 7 PM at Red Emma’s, 800 St. Paul St., Rosalie J. Riegle presents her book “Doing Time for Peace,” which explores the stories of over 75 peace activists who ended up in prison. Call 410- 230-0450 or go to http://www.redemmas.org.
This exceptional book of oral histories shares the stories of activists whose brave acts of civil disobedience landed them in prison, forcing them to choose between being with their families and communities and standing up for what they believe in. Many are Catholic Workers, devoting their lives to the works of mercy instead of the works of war. They are homemakers and carpenters and social workers and teachers who are often called "faith-based activists." They speak from the left of the political perspective, providing a counterpoint to the faith-based activism of the fundamentalist Right. From WWII resistors to anti-Iraq war activists, the book situates peace work in a long tradition of resistance to war and imperialism.
66] –On Thurs., Jan. 31 at 7 PM at Maryland Institute College of Art, The Gateway, 1601 West Mount Royal Ave., Baltimore 21217. Room 101, get information about MICA's Nicaragua Summer. Email maldana@mica.edu.
Innovation, social justice, and adventure thrive in the MICA in Nicaragua program, Art of Solidarity, founded by Maria Aldana and Aleks Martray since 2008. Artists interested in community arts and in documentary video come together to collaborate with Nicaraguan artists for 5 weeks from July 5 through Aug. 6. The small mountain city of Esteli is where the program begins. Later participants will live and work in the town of Limay, which is isolated from many resources but has a wealth of artists among its population of 13,000.
67] – On Thurs., Jan. 31 at 7:30 PM, Mike Boehm of Madison Quakers, Inc. will talk about Viet Nam reconciliation projects including the My Lai Peace Park. Mike is Viet Nam vet who has been back 16 times since 1992 working with a number of Vietnamese on various peace and reconciliation projects. Mike Marceau of the D.C. Veterans for Peace will also briefly share about his trip back to Viet Nam in 2012. This event, hosted by the St. Francis of Assisi Pax Christi group and co-sponsored by Peace Action Montgomery and Veterans for Peace, will be held in the Parish Center (church basement) of St. Francis of Assisi Church, 6701 Muncaster Mill Road, Derwood, MD 20855. Email cooker@ppnpf.com.
68] – The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration Committee, Baltimore Quaker Peace and Justice Committee of Homewood and Stony Run Meetings and Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility are continuing the FILM & SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS DVD SERIES. The DVDs will be shown at Homewood Friends Meetinghouse, 3107 N. Charles St., Baltimore 21218, on the First Friday. After the peace vigil, there will be a potluck dinner. At 7 PM, from January through June, a DVD will be shown with a discussion to follow. There is no charge, and refreshments will be available. Contact Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
The series theme is WHY CAN’T WE GET ALONG? On Fri., Feb. 1, see CRIME AFTER CRIME (USA, 2011) a documentary film directed by Yoav Potash about the case of Deborah Peagler, an incarcerated victim of domestic violence whose case was taken up by pro bono attorneys through the California Habeas Project. The documentary tells the dramatic story of the legal battle to free Peagler, an incarcerated survivor of domestic violence. She was wrongly convicted of the murder of her abusive boyfriend, and given 26 years in prison. Her story takes an unexpected turn two decades later when two rookie land-use attorneys step forward to take her case. Through their perseverance, they bring to light long-lost witnesses, new testimonies from the men who committed the murder, and proof of perjured evidence. Their investigation ultimately attracts global attention to victims of wrongful incarceration and abuse, and becomes a matter of life and death once more.
69] – The 28th Annual Maryland Peace, Justice and the Environment Conference [www.mupj.org] will take place Fri., Apr. 12 and Sat., Apr. 13 at the Turner Memorial AME Church, 7201 16th Place, Hyattsville. Save these dates. Email paulette.d.hammond@questdiagnostics.com.
70] – Red Emma's is in the process of closing down the location at 800 St. Paul St., and reopening in a much larger new space on North Avenue in the fall. The collective is seeking your help. It's time to reinvent the project started in 2004 to build a self-sustaining progressive space in Baltimore, committed to providing a daily reminder that another world was possible and that there were people working in the city to build it.
Here's how you can help: donate money, buy books at the current store, provide skilled help, and share these needs. Email john@redemmas.org or go to http://indiegogo.com/redemmas2.
71] – There is an Advocacy and Policy Fellowship for a person to work on global justice issues and gain valuable advocacy, research and professional experience? Jubilee USA Network is a coalition of over 75 faith communities, environmental organizations and a variety of other groups, working towards expanded debt cancellation and responsible lending and borrowing to impoverished countries.
Some of the responsibilities would be creating literature and fact sheets about debt and representing Jubilee at planning meetings, appointments with Congress members and public events and conducting research as needed to respond to new information or events that pertain to Jubilee's work. Some requirements would be a strong passion for economic justice and right relationships among people, excellent verbal and written communications skills, and a familiarity with general government and/or foreign policy issues. The position is a year-long commitment from August to August. To apply, please send a cover letter, resume and 1-2 page writing sample to Jennifer Tong, Communications and Development Coordinator at jennifer(at)jubileeusa.org.
72] – Stephen Kobasa is hoping to do an exhibit of the work of Tom Lewis opening in May 2013 in New Haven, CT. It would include a variety of his paintings, drawings, silkscreen prints, book illustrations, posters, banners and sketchbooks. This would not only be a display of objects on a gallery wall, but would also involve events which would return Tom's art to the streets where it was originally meant to make conscience visible.
Contact Stephen if you are in possession of original work and would consider loaning it for a month long display. You can reach him at stephen.kobasa at gmail.com or 203-500-0268.
73] – The Washington Peace Center has a progressive calendar & activist alert! Consider signing up to receive its weekly email: info@washingtonpeacecenter.org.
74] – Fund Our Communities campaign is a grass roots movement to get support from local organizations and communities to work together with their local and state elected officials to pressure Congresspersons and senators to join with Congresspersons Barney Frank and Ron Paul, who have endorsed a 25% cut to the federal military budget. Bring home the savings to state and county governments to meet the local needs which are under tremendous budget pressures. Plan to join FOC on the March 23 Peace Bus from Baltimore to D.C. Go to www.OurFunds.org.
75] – MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD. Baltimore's Indypendent Reader is looking for individuals interested in creating media - written, photo, audio, or video - that relates to issues like...economic justice, race, prisons & policing, environment, gender & sexuality, war & peace and more! If you would like to create social justice media, then email indypendentreader@gmail.com. Visit http://www.indyreader.org.
76] – If you would like to get rid of books, videos, DVDs or records, contact Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
77] – Can you use any book shelves? Contact Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
78] – Join an extraordinary global campaign for the elimination of nuclear weapons: http://www.globalzero.org/sign-declaration. A growing group of leaders around the world is calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons and a majority of the global public agrees. This is an historic window of opportunity. With momentum already building in favor of Zero, a major show of support from people around the world could tip the balance. When it comes to nuclear weapons, one is one too many.
79] – Visit the Digital Information and the Criminal Justice System at http://www.onlinecriminaljusticedegree.com/. This link presents a wide range of insightful articles for criminal justice and legal professionals, both current and future. The project aims to be an objective, authoritative resource in the ever-changing court system.
80] – WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER signs from Friends Committee on National Legislation are again for sale at $5. To purchase a sign, call Max at 410-366-1637.
81] – The Hunger Site was initiated by Mercy Corps and Second Harvest, and is funded entirely by advertisers. You can go there every day and click the big yellow "Give Food for Free" button near the top of the page; you do not have to look at the ads. Each click generates funding for about 1.1 cups of food. So consider clicking.
82] – Go online for FIRE AND FAITH: The Catonsville Nine File. On May 17, 1968, nine people entered the Selective Service Offices in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned draft records in protest against the war in Vietnam. View http://www.prattlibrary.org/digital/.
83] – Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil takes place every day in Lafayette Park, 1601 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 24 hours a day, since June 3, 1981. Go to http://prop1.org; call 202-682-4282.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better" - Daniel Berrigan
Hey, Hey, Barack! What Do You Say? How Many Kids Have You Killed Today?
Hey, Hey, Barack! What Do You Say? How Many Kids Have You Killed Today?
By Dave Lindorff
I personally found the president’s inaugural speech not just insipid, but disgusting. It reached its gut-churning nadir near the end where he said:
“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war...We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear...And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice – not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.”
As he spoke these uplifting phrases, US factories were cranking out, under the terms of billion-dollar Pentagon contracts, fleets of drone aircraft that daily are raining explosives down on innocent men, women and children in countries that the US is not even at war with. Most of those drone attacks are personally approved by our Nobel Peace Laureate president, who has claimed the right -- unchallenged by either Congress or the Judiciary -- to order the liquidation of anyone he deems to be a terrorist (including American citizens), as well as those, even children, who happen to be in the vicinity of such a person. Of the 362 drone strikes in Pakistan to date, 310 were launched during the period Obama has been commander in chief.
The result of this policy of state terrorism has been a wretched, criminal slaughter of children -- a slaughter that has been hidden from view, and denied wholesale by the Pentagon and the president. Over 3000 people have been killed, the vast majority of them non-combatant "collateral damage" deaths. Over 172 of these have reportedly been children.
To borrow from the president’s own style-book, "We the People" have been complicit in ignoring this wretched slaughter. "We the People," who cringe in horror at the slaying of 20 innocent first graders in Newtown, Connecticut, don’t spare a thought or a tear for the thousands of innocent children killed in our name by our “heroic” forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere, by our Presidentially-targeted drone aircraft in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and by our weapons in the hands of allies and rebel fighters in places like Syria, Gaza, the West Bank of Palestine, Somalia, and elsewhere.
Just to try and make this monstrous crime by this president clear, here is a partial list, compiled by the organization DronesWatch, of children, some as young as 1 and 2 years old, who have been documented as killed by US drones (they are listed by name, age and sex in that order):
PAKISTAN
Noor Aziz
8
male
Abdul Wasit
17
male
Noor Syed
8
female
Wajid Noor
9
male
Syed Wali Shah
7
male
Ayeesha
3
female
Qari Alamzeb
14
male
Shoaib
8
male
Hayatullah KhaMohammad
16
male
Tariq Aziz
16
male
Sanaullah Jan
17
male
Maezol Khan
8
female
Nasir Khan
male Naeem Khan
male
Naeemullah
male Mohammad Tahir
16
male
Azizul Wahab
15
male
Fazal Wahab
16
male
Ziauddin
16
male
Mohammad Yunus
16
male
Fazal Hakim
19
male Ilyas
13
male
Sohail
7
male
Asadullah
9
male
khalilullah
9
male
Noor Mohammad
8
male
Khalid
12
male Saifullah
9
male
Mashooq Jan
15
male
Nawab
17
male
Sultanat Khan
16
male
Ziaur Rahman
13
male
Noor Mohammad
15
male
Mohammad Yaas Khan
16
male
Qari Alamzeb
14
male
Ziaur Rahman
17
male
Abdullah
18
male
Ikramullah Zada
17
male
Inayatur Rehman
16
male
Shahbuddin
15
male
Yahya Khan
16
male
Rahatullah
17
male
Mohammad Salim
11
male
Shahjehan
15
male
Gul Sher Khan
15
male
Bakht Muneer
14
male
Numair
14
male
Mashooq Khan
16
male
Ihsanullah
16
male
Luqman
12
male
Jannatullah
13
male
Ismail
12
male
Taseel Khan
18
male
Zaheeruddin
16
male
Qari Ishaq
19
male
Jamshed Khan
14
male
Alam Nabi
11
male
Qari Abdul Karim
19
male
Rahmatullah
14
male
Abdus Samad
17
male
Siraj
16
male
Saeedullah
17
male
Abdul Waris
16
male
Darvesh
13
male
Ameer Said
15
male
Shaukat
14
male
Inayatur Rahman
17
male
Salman
12
male
Fazal Wahab
18
male
Baacha Rahman
13
male
Wali-ur-Rahman
17
male
Iftikhar
17
male
Inayatullah
15
male
Mashooq Khan
16
male
Ihsanullah
16
male
Luqman
12
male
Jannatullah
13
male
Ismail
12
male
Abdul Waris
16
male
Darvesh
13
male
Ameer Said
15
male
Shaukat
14
male
Inayatur Rahman
17
male
Adnan
16
male Najibullah
13
male
Naeemullah
17
male Hizbullah
10
male
Kitab Gul
12
male
Wilayat Khan
11
male
Zabihullah
16
male
Shehzad Gul
11
male
Shabir
15
male
Qari Sharifullah
17
male
Shafiullah
16
male
Nimatullah
14
male
Shakirullah
16
male
Talha
8
male
YEMEN
Afrah Ali Mohammed Nasser
9
female
Zayda Ali Mohammed Nasser
7
female
Hoda Ali Mohammed Nasser
5
female
Sheikha Ali Mohammed Nasser
4
female
Ibrahim Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye
13
male
Asmaa Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye
9
male
Salma Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye
4
female
Fatima Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye
3
female
Khadije Ali Mokbel Louqye
1
female
Hanaa Ali Mokbel Louqye
6
female
Mohammed Ali Mokbel Salem Louqye
4
male
Jawass Mokbel Salem Louqye
15
female
Maryam Hussein Abdullah Awad
2
female
Shafiq Hussein Abdullah Awad
1
female
Sheikha Nasser Mahdi Ahmad Bouh
3
female
Maha Mohammed Saleh Mohammed
12
male
Soumaya Mohammed Saleh Mohammed
9
female
Shafika Mohammed Saleh Mohammed
4
female
Shafiq Mohammed Saleh Mohammed
2
male
Mabrook Mouqbal Al Qadari
13
male
Daolah Nasser 10 years
10
female
AbedalGhani Mohammed Mabkhout
12
male
Abdel- Rahman Anwar al Awlaki
16
male
Abdel-Rahman al-Awlaki
17
male
Nasser Salim
19
male
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/hey-hey-barack-what-do-you-say-how-many-kids-have-you-killed-today-1359471251. All rights are reserved.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
By Dave Lindorff
I personally found the president’s inaugural speech not just insipid, but disgusting. It reached its gut-churning nadir near the end where he said:
“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war...We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear...And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice – not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.”
As he spoke these uplifting phrases, US factories were cranking out, under the terms of billion-dollar Pentagon contracts, fleets of drone aircraft that daily are raining explosives down on innocent men, women and children in countries that the US is not even at war with. Most of those drone attacks are personally approved by our Nobel Peace Laureate president, who has claimed the right -- unchallenged by either Congress or the Judiciary -- to order the liquidation of anyone he deems to be a terrorist (including American citizens), as well as those, even children, who happen to be in the vicinity of such a person. Of the 362 drone strikes in Pakistan to date, 310 were launched during the period Obama has been commander in chief.
The result of this policy of state terrorism has been a wretched, criminal slaughter of children -- a slaughter that has been hidden from view, and denied wholesale by the Pentagon and the president. Over 3000 people have been killed, the vast majority of them non-combatant "collateral damage" deaths. Over 172 of these have reportedly been children.
To borrow from the president’s own style-book, "We the People" have been complicit in ignoring this wretched slaughter. "We the People," who cringe in horror at the slaying of 20 innocent first graders in Newtown, Connecticut, don’t spare a thought or a tear for the thousands of innocent children killed in our name by our “heroic” forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere, by our Presidentially-targeted drone aircraft in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and by our weapons in the hands of allies and rebel fighters in places like Syria, Gaza, the West Bank of Palestine, Somalia, and elsewhere.
Just to try and make this monstrous crime by this president clear, here is a partial list, compiled by the organization DronesWatch, of children, some as young as 1 and 2 years old, who have been documented as killed by US drones (they are listed by name, age and sex in that order):
PAKISTAN
Noor Aziz
8
male
Abdul Wasit
17
male
Noor Syed
8
female
Wajid Noor
9
male
Syed Wali Shah
7
male
Ayeesha
3
female
Qari Alamzeb
14
male
Shoaib
8
male
Hayatullah KhaMohammad
16
male
Tariq Aziz
16
male
Sanaullah Jan
17
male
Maezol Khan
8
female
Nasir Khan
male Naeem Khan
male
Naeemullah
male Mohammad Tahir
16
male
Azizul Wahab
15
male
Fazal Wahab
16
male
Ziauddin
16
male
Mohammad Yunus
16
male
Fazal Hakim
19
male Ilyas
13
male
Sohail
7
male
Asadullah
9
male
khalilullah
9
male
Noor Mohammad
8
male
Khalid
12
male Saifullah
9
male
Mashooq Jan
15
male
Nawab
17
male
Sultanat Khan
16
male
Ziaur Rahman
13
male
Noor Mohammad
15
male
Mohammad Yaas Khan
16
male
Qari Alamzeb
14
male
Ziaur Rahman
17
male
Abdullah
18
male
Ikramullah Zada
17
male
Inayatur Rehman
16
male
Shahbuddin
15
male
Yahya Khan
16
male
Rahatullah
17
male
Mohammad Salim
11
male
Shahjehan
15
male
Gul Sher Khan
15
male
Bakht Muneer
14
male
Numair
14
male
Mashooq Khan
16
male
Ihsanullah
16
male
Luqman
12
male
Jannatullah
13
male
Ismail
12
male
Taseel Khan
18
male
Zaheeruddin
16
male
Qari Ishaq
19
male
Jamshed Khan
14
male
Alam Nabi
11
male
Qari Abdul Karim
19
male
Rahmatullah
14
male
Abdus Samad
17
male
Siraj
16
male
Saeedullah
17
male
Abdul Waris
16
male
Darvesh
13
male
Ameer Said
15
male
Shaukat
14
male
Inayatur Rahman
17
male
Salman
12
male
Fazal Wahab
18
male
Baacha Rahman
13
male
Wali-ur-Rahman
17
male
Iftikhar
17
male
Inayatullah
15
male
Mashooq Khan
16
male
Ihsanullah
16
male
Luqman
12
male
Jannatullah
13
male
Ismail
12
male
Abdul Waris
16
male
Darvesh
13
male
Ameer Said
15
male
Shaukat
14
male
Inayatur Rahman
17
male
Adnan
16
male Najibullah
13
male
Naeemullah
17
male Hizbullah
10
male
Kitab Gul
12
male
Wilayat Khan
11
male
Zabihullah
16
male
Shehzad Gul
11
male
Shabir
15
male
Qari Sharifullah
17
male
Shafiullah
16
male
Nimatullah
14
male
Shakirullah
16
male
Talha
8
male
YEMEN
Afrah Ali Mohammed Nasser
9
female
Zayda Ali Mohammed Nasser
7
female
Hoda Ali Mohammed Nasser
5
female
Sheikha Ali Mohammed Nasser
4
female
Ibrahim Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye
13
male
Asmaa Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye
9
male
Salma Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye
4
female
Fatima Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye
3
female
Khadije Ali Mokbel Louqye
1
female
Hanaa Ali Mokbel Louqye
6
female
Mohammed Ali Mokbel Salem Louqye
4
male
Jawass Mokbel Salem Louqye
15
female
Maryam Hussein Abdullah Awad
2
female
Shafiq Hussein Abdullah Awad
1
female
Sheikha Nasser Mahdi Ahmad Bouh
3
female
Maha Mohammed Saleh Mohammed
12
male
Soumaya Mohammed Saleh Mohammed
9
female
Shafika Mohammed Saleh Mohammed
4
female
Shafiq Mohammed Saleh Mohammed
2
male
Mabrook Mouqbal Al Qadari
13
male
Daolah Nasser 10 years
10
female
AbedalGhani Mohammed Mabkhout
12
male
Abdel- Rahman Anwar al Awlaki
16
male
Abdel-Rahman al-Awlaki
17
male
Nasser Salim
19
male
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/hey-hey-barack-what-do-you-say-how-many-kids-have-you-killed-today-1359471251. All rights are reserved.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Selling a New Generation on Guns
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/us/selling-a-new-generation-on-guns.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130127
January 26, 2013
By MIKE McINTIRE
Threatened by long-term declining participation in shooting sports, the firearms industry has poured millions of dollars into a broad campaign to ensure its future by getting guns into the hands of more, and younger, children.
The industry’s strategies include giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on hunting by young children; marketing an affordable military-style rifle for “junior shooters” and sponsoring semiautomatic-handgun competitions for youths; and developing a target-shooting video game that promotes brand-name weapons, with links to the Web sites of their makers.
The pages of Junior Shooters, an industry-supported magazine that seeks to get children involved in the recreational use of firearms, once featured a smiling 15-year-old girl clutching a semiautomatic rifle. At the end of an accompanying article that extolled target shooting with a Bushmaster AR-15 — an advertisement elsewhere in the magazine directed readers to a coupon for buying one — the author encouraged youngsters to share the article with a parent.
“Who knows?” it said. “Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!”
The industry’s youth-marketing effort is backed by extensive social research and is carried out by an array of nonprofit groups financed by the gun industry, an examination by The New York Times found. The campaign picked up steam about five years ago with the completion of a major study that urged a stronger emphasis on the “recruitment and retention” of new hunters and target shooters.
The overall objective was summed up in another study, commissioned last year by the shooting sports industry, that suggested encouraging children experienced in firearms to recruit other young people. The report, which focused on children ages 8 to 17, said these “peer ambassadors” should help introduce wary youngsters to guns slowly, perhaps through paintball, archery or some other less intimidating activity.
“The point should be to get newcomers started shooting something, with the natural next step being a move toward actual firearms,” said the report, which was prepared for the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Hunting Heritage Trust.
Firearms manufacturers and their two primary surrogates, the National Rifle Association of America and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have long been associated with high-profile battles to fend off efforts at gun control and to widen access to firearms. The public debate over the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and elsewhere has focused largely on the availability of guns, along with mental illness and the influence of violent video games.
Little attention has been paid, though, to the industry’s youth-marketing initiatives. They stir passionate views, with proponents arguing that introducing children to guns can provide a safe and healthy pastime, and critics countering that it fosters a corrosive gun culture and is potentially dangerous.
The N.R.A. has for decades given grants for youth shooting programs, mostly to Boy Scout councils and 4-H groups, which traditionally involved single-shot rimfire rifles, BB guns and archery. Its $21 million in total grants in 2010 was nearly double what it gave out five years earlier.
Newer initiatives by other organizations go further, seeking to introduce children to high-powered rifles and handguns while invoking the same rationale of those older, more traditional programs: that firearms can teach “life skills” like responsibility, ethics and citizenship. And the gun industry points to injury statistics that it says show a greater likelihood of getting hurt cheerleading or playing softball than using firearms for fun and sport.
Still, some experts in child psychiatry say that encouraging youthful exposure to guns, even in a structured setting with an emphasis on safety, is asking for trouble. Dr. Jess P. Shatkin, the director of undergraduate studies in child and adolescent mental health at New York University, said that young people are naturally impulsive and that their brains “are engineered to take risks,” making them ill suited for handling guns.
“There are lots of ways to teach responsibility to a kid,” Dr. Shatkin said. “You don’t need a gun to do it.”
Steve Sanetti, the president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said it was better to instruct children in the safe use of a firearm through hunting and target shooting, and engage them in positive ways with the heritage of guns in America. His industry is well positioned for the task, he said, but faces an unusual challenge: introducing minors to activities that involve products they cannot legally buy and that require a high level of maturity.
Ultimately, Mr. Sanetti said, it should be left to parents, not the government, to decide if and when to introduce their children to shooting and what sort of firearms to use.
“It’s a very significant decision,” he said, “and it involves the personal responsibility of the parent and personal responsibility of the child.”
Trying to Reverse a Trend
The shooting sports foundation, the tax-exempt trade association for the gun industry, is a driving force behind many of the newest youth initiatives. Its national headquarters is in Newtown, just a few miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Adam Lanza, 20, used his mother’s Bushmaster AR-15 to kill 20 children and 6 adults last month.
The foundation’s $26 million budget is financed mostly by gun companies, associated businesses and the foundation’s SHOT Show, the industry’s annual trade show, according to its latest tax return.
Although shooting sports and gun sales have enjoyed a rebound recently, the long-term demographics are not favorable, as urbanization, the growth of indoor pursuits like video games and changing cultural mores erode consumer interest. Licensed hunters fell from 7 percent of the population in 1975 to fewer than 5 percent in 2005, according to federal data. Galvanized by the declining share, the industry redoubled its efforts to reverse the trend about five years ago.
The focus on young people has been accompanied by foundation-sponsored research examining popular attitudes toward hunting and shooting. Some of the studies used focus groups and telephone surveys of teenagers to explore their feelings about guns and people who use them, and offered strategies for generating a greater acceptance of firearms.
The Times reviewed more than a thousand pages of these studies, obtained from gun industry Web sites and online archives, some of them produced as recently as last year. Most were prepared by consultants retained by the foundation, and at least one was financed with a grant from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
In an interview, Mr. Sanetti said the youth-centered research was driven by the inevitable “tension” the industry faces, given that no one under 18 can buy a rifle or a shotgun from a licensed dealer or even possess a handgun under most circumstances. That means looking for creative and appropriate ways to introduce children to shooting sports.
“There’s nothing alarmist or sinister about it,” Mr. Sanetti said. “It’s realistic.”
Pointing to the need to “start them young,” one study concluded that “stakeholders such as managers and manufacturers should target programs toward youth 12 years old and younger.”
“This is the time that youth are being targeted with competing activities,” it said. “It is important to consider more hunting and target-shooting recruitment programs aimed at middle school level, or earlier.”
Aware that introducing firearms to young children could meet with resistance, several studies suggested methods for smoothing the way for target-shooting programs in schools. One cautioned, “When approaching school systems, it is important to frame the shooting sports only as a mechanism to teach other life skills, rather than an end to itself.”
In another report, the authors warned against using human silhouettes for targets when trying to recruit new shooters and encouraged using words and phrases like “sharing the experience,” “family” and “fun.” They also said children should be enlisted to prod parents to let them join shooting activities: “Such a program could be called ‘Take Me Hunting’ or ‘Take Me Shooting.’ ”
The industry recognized that state laws limiting hunting by children could pose a problem, according to a “Youth Hunting Report” prepared by the shooting sports foundation and two other groups. Declaring that “the need for aggressive recruitment is urgent,” the report said a primary objective should be to “eliminate or reduce age minimums.” Still another study recommended allowing children to get a provisional license to hunt with an adult, “perhaps even before requiring them to take hunter safety courses.”
The effort has succeeded in a number of states, including Wisconsin, which in 2009 lowered the minimum hunting age to 10 from 12, and Michigan, where in 2011 the age minimum for hunting small game was eliminated for children accompanied by an adult mentor. The foundation cited statistics suggesting that youth involvement in hunting, as well as target shooting, had picked up in recent years amid the renewed focus on recruitment.
Gun companies have spent millions of dollars to put their recruitment strategies into action, either directly or through the shooting sports foundation and other organizations. The support takes many forms.
The Scholastic Steel Challenge, started in 2009, introduces children as young as 12 to competitive handgun shooting using steel targets. Its “platinum” sponsors include the shooting sports foundation, Smith & Wesson and Glock, which donated 60 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistols, according to the group’s Web site.
The site features a quote from a gun company executive praising the youth initiative and saying that “anyone in the firearms industry that overlooks its potential is missing the boat.”
Larry Potterfield, the founder of MidwayUSA, one of the nation’s largest sellers of shooting supplies and a major sponsor of the Scholastic Steel Challenge, said he did not fire a handgun until he was 21, adding that they “are the most difficult guns to learn to shoot well.” But, he said, he sees nothing wrong with children using them.
“Kids need arm strength and good patience to learn to shoot a handgun well,” he said in an e-mail, “and I would think that would come in the 12-14 age group for most kids.”
Another organization, the nonprofit Youth Shooting Sports Alliance, which was created in 2007, has received close to $1 million in cash, guns and equipment from the shooting sports foundation and firearms-related companies, including ATK, Winchester and Sturm, Ruger & Company, its tax returns show. In 2011, the alliance awarded 58 grants. A typical grant: 23 rifles, 4 shotguns, 16 cases of ammunition and other materials, which went to a Michigan youth camp.
The foundation and gun companies also support Junior Shooters magazine, which is based in Idaho and was started in 2007. The publication is filled with catchy advertisements and articles about things like zombie targets, pink guns and, under the heading “Kids Gear,” tactical rifle components with military-style features like pistol grips and collapsible stocks.
Gun companies often send new models to the magazine for children to try out with adult supervision. Shortly after Sturm, Ruger announced in 2009 a new, lightweight semiautomatic rifle that had the “look and feel” of an AR-15 but used less expensive .22-caliber cartridges, Junior Shooters received one for review. The magazine had three boys ages 14 to 17 fire it and wrote that they “had an absolute ball!”
Junior Shooters’ editor, Andy Fink, acknowledged in an editorial that some of his magazine’s content stirred controversy.
“I have heard people say, even shooters that participate in some of the shotgun shooting sports, such things as, ‘Why do you need a semiautomatic gun for hunting?’ ” he wrote. But if the industry is to survive, he said, gun enthusiasts must embrace all youth shooting activities, including ones “using semiautomatic firearms with magazines holding 30-100 rounds.”
In an interview, Mr. Fink elaborated. Semiautomatic firearms are actually not weapons, he said, unless someone chooses to hurt another person with them, and their image has been unfairly tainted by the news media. There is no legitimate reason children should not learn to safely use an AR-15 for recreation, he said.
“They’re a tool, not any different than a car or a baseball bat,” Mr. Fink said. “It’s no different than a junior shooting a .22 or a shotgun. The difference is in the perception of the viewer.”
The Weapon of Choice
The AR-15, the civilian version of the military’s M-16 and M-4, has been aggressively marketed as a cool and powerful step up from more traditional target and hunting rifles. But its appearance in mass shootings — in addition to Newtown, the gun was also used last year in the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., and the attack on firefighters in Webster, N.Y. — has prompted calls for tighter restrictions. The AR-15 is among the guns included in a proposed ban on a range of semiautomatic weapons that was introduced in the Senate last week.
Given the gun’s commercial popularity, it is perhaps unsurprising that AR-15-style firearms have worked their way into youth shooting programs. At a “Guns ’n Grillin” weekend last fall, teenagers at a Boy Scout council in Virginia got to shoot AR-15s. They are used in youth competitions held each year at a National Guard camp in Ohio, and in “junior clinics” taught by Army or Marine marksmanship instructors, some of them sponsored by gun companies or organizations they support.
ArmaLite, a successor company to the one that developed the AR-15, is offering a similar rifle, the AR-10, for the grand prize in a raffle benefiting the Illinois State Rifle Association’s “junior high-power” team, which uses AR-15s in its competitions. Bushmaster has offered on its Web site a coupon worth $350 off the price of an AR-15 “to support and encourage junior shooters.”
Military-style firearms are prevalent in a target-shooting video game and mobile app called Point of Impact, which was sponsored by the shooting sports foundation and Guns & Ammo magazine. The game — rated for ages 9 and up in the iTunes store — allows players to shoot brand-name AR-15 rifles and semiautomatic handguns at inanimate targets, and it provides links to gun makers’ Web sites as well as to the foundation’s “First Shots” program, intended to recruit new shooters.
Upon the game’s release in January 2011, foundation executives said in a news release that it was one of the industry’s “most unique marketing tools directed at a younger audience.” Mr. Sanetti of the shooting sports foundation said sponsorship of the game was an experiment intended to deliver safety tips to players, while potentially generating interest in real-life sports.
The confluence of high-powered weaponry and youth shooting programs does not sit well even with some proponents of those programs. Stephan Carlson, a University of Minnesota environmental science professor whose research on the positive effects of learning hunting and outdoor skills in 4-H classes has been cited by the gun industry, said he “wouldn’t necessarily go along” with introducing children to more powerful firearms that added nothing useful to their experience.
“I see why the industry would be pushing it, but I don’t see the value in it,” Mr. Carlson said. “I guess it goes back to the skill base we’re trying to instill in the kids. What are we preparing them for?”
For Mr. Potterfield of MidwayUSA, who said his own children started shooting “boys’ rifles” at age 4, getting young people engaged with firearms — provided they have the maturity and the physical ability to handle them — strengthens an endangered American tradition.
Mr. Potterfield and his wife, Brenda, have donated more than $5 million for youth shooting programs in recent years, a campaign that he said was motivated by philanthropy, not “return on investment.”
“Our gifting is pure benevolence,” he said. “We grew up and live in rural America and have owned guns, hunted and fished all of our lives. This is our community, and we hope to preserve it for future generations.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
January 26, 2013
By MIKE McINTIRE
Threatened by long-term declining participation in shooting sports, the firearms industry has poured millions of dollars into a broad campaign to ensure its future by getting guns into the hands of more, and younger, children.
The industry’s strategies include giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on hunting by young children; marketing an affordable military-style rifle for “junior shooters” and sponsoring semiautomatic-handgun competitions for youths; and developing a target-shooting video game that promotes brand-name weapons, with links to the Web sites of their makers.
The pages of Junior Shooters, an industry-supported magazine that seeks to get children involved in the recreational use of firearms, once featured a smiling 15-year-old girl clutching a semiautomatic rifle. At the end of an accompanying article that extolled target shooting with a Bushmaster AR-15 — an advertisement elsewhere in the magazine directed readers to a coupon for buying one — the author encouraged youngsters to share the article with a parent.
“Who knows?” it said. “Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!”
The industry’s youth-marketing effort is backed by extensive social research and is carried out by an array of nonprofit groups financed by the gun industry, an examination by The New York Times found. The campaign picked up steam about five years ago with the completion of a major study that urged a stronger emphasis on the “recruitment and retention” of new hunters and target shooters.
The overall objective was summed up in another study, commissioned last year by the shooting sports industry, that suggested encouraging children experienced in firearms to recruit other young people. The report, which focused on children ages 8 to 17, said these “peer ambassadors” should help introduce wary youngsters to guns slowly, perhaps through paintball, archery or some other less intimidating activity.
“The point should be to get newcomers started shooting something, with the natural next step being a move toward actual firearms,” said the report, which was prepared for the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Hunting Heritage Trust.
Firearms manufacturers and their two primary surrogates, the National Rifle Association of America and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have long been associated with high-profile battles to fend off efforts at gun control and to widen access to firearms. The public debate over the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and elsewhere has focused largely on the availability of guns, along with mental illness and the influence of violent video games.
Little attention has been paid, though, to the industry’s youth-marketing initiatives. They stir passionate views, with proponents arguing that introducing children to guns can provide a safe and healthy pastime, and critics countering that it fosters a corrosive gun culture and is potentially dangerous.
The N.R.A. has for decades given grants for youth shooting programs, mostly to Boy Scout councils and 4-H groups, which traditionally involved single-shot rimfire rifles, BB guns and archery. Its $21 million in total grants in 2010 was nearly double what it gave out five years earlier.
Newer initiatives by other organizations go further, seeking to introduce children to high-powered rifles and handguns while invoking the same rationale of those older, more traditional programs: that firearms can teach “life skills” like responsibility, ethics and citizenship. And the gun industry points to injury statistics that it says show a greater likelihood of getting hurt cheerleading or playing softball than using firearms for fun and sport.
Still, some experts in child psychiatry say that encouraging youthful exposure to guns, even in a structured setting with an emphasis on safety, is asking for trouble. Dr. Jess P. Shatkin, the director of undergraduate studies in child and adolescent mental health at New York University, said that young people are naturally impulsive and that their brains “are engineered to take risks,” making them ill suited for handling guns.
“There are lots of ways to teach responsibility to a kid,” Dr. Shatkin said. “You don’t need a gun to do it.”
Steve Sanetti, the president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said it was better to instruct children in the safe use of a firearm through hunting and target shooting, and engage them in positive ways with the heritage of guns in America. His industry is well positioned for the task, he said, but faces an unusual challenge: introducing minors to activities that involve products they cannot legally buy and that require a high level of maturity.
Ultimately, Mr. Sanetti said, it should be left to parents, not the government, to decide if and when to introduce their children to shooting and what sort of firearms to use.
“It’s a very significant decision,” he said, “and it involves the personal responsibility of the parent and personal responsibility of the child.”
Trying to Reverse a Trend
The shooting sports foundation, the tax-exempt trade association for the gun industry, is a driving force behind many of the newest youth initiatives. Its national headquarters is in Newtown, just a few miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Adam Lanza, 20, used his mother’s Bushmaster AR-15 to kill 20 children and 6 adults last month.
The foundation’s $26 million budget is financed mostly by gun companies, associated businesses and the foundation’s SHOT Show, the industry’s annual trade show, according to its latest tax return.
Although shooting sports and gun sales have enjoyed a rebound recently, the long-term demographics are not favorable, as urbanization, the growth of indoor pursuits like video games and changing cultural mores erode consumer interest. Licensed hunters fell from 7 percent of the population in 1975 to fewer than 5 percent in 2005, according to federal data. Galvanized by the declining share, the industry redoubled its efforts to reverse the trend about five years ago.
The focus on young people has been accompanied by foundation-sponsored research examining popular attitudes toward hunting and shooting. Some of the studies used focus groups and telephone surveys of teenagers to explore their feelings about guns and people who use them, and offered strategies for generating a greater acceptance of firearms.
The Times reviewed more than a thousand pages of these studies, obtained from gun industry Web sites and online archives, some of them produced as recently as last year. Most were prepared by consultants retained by the foundation, and at least one was financed with a grant from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
In an interview, Mr. Sanetti said the youth-centered research was driven by the inevitable “tension” the industry faces, given that no one under 18 can buy a rifle or a shotgun from a licensed dealer or even possess a handgun under most circumstances. That means looking for creative and appropriate ways to introduce children to shooting sports.
“There’s nothing alarmist or sinister about it,” Mr. Sanetti said. “It’s realistic.”
Pointing to the need to “start them young,” one study concluded that “stakeholders such as managers and manufacturers should target programs toward youth 12 years old and younger.”
“This is the time that youth are being targeted with competing activities,” it said. “It is important to consider more hunting and target-shooting recruitment programs aimed at middle school level, or earlier.”
Aware that introducing firearms to young children could meet with resistance, several studies suggested methods for smoothing the way for target-shooting programs in schools. One cautioned, “When approaching school systems, it is important to frame the shooting sports only as a mechanism to teach other life skills, rather than an end to itself.”
In another report, the authors warned against using human silhouettes for targets when trying to recruit new shooters and encouraged using words and phrases like “sharing the experience,” “family” and “fun.” They also said children should be enlisted to prod parents to let them join shooting activities: “Such a program could be called ‘Take Me Hunting’ or ‘Take Me Shooting.’ ”
The industry recognized that state laws limiting hunting by children could pose a problem, according to a “Youth Hunting Report” prepared by the shooting sports foundation and two other groups. Declaring that “the need for aggressive recruitment is urgent,” the report said a primary objective should be to “eliminate or reduce age minimums.” Still another study recommended allowing children to get a provisional license to hunt with an adult, “perhaps even before requiring them to take hunter safety courses.”
The effort has succeeded in a number of states, including Wisconsin, which in 2009 lowered the minimum hunting age to 10 from 12, and Michigan, where in 2011 the age minimum for hunting small game was eliminated for children accompanied by an adult mentor. The foundation cited statistics suggesting that youth involvement in hunting, as well as target shooting, had picked up in recent years amid the renewed focus on recruitment.
Gun companies have spent millions of dollars to put their recruitment strategies into action, either directly or through the shooting sports foundation and other organizations. The support takes many forms.
The Scholastic Steel Challenge, started in 2009, introduces children as young as 12 to competitive handgun shooting using steel targets. Its “platinum” sponsors include the shooting sports foundation, Smith & Wesson and Glock, which donated 60 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistols, according to the group’s Web site.
The site features a quote from a gun company executive praising the youth initiative and saying that “anyone in the firearms industry that overlooks its potential is missing the boat.”
Larry Potterfield, the founder of MidwayUSA, one of the nation’s largest sellers of shooting supplies and a major sponsor of the Scholastic Steel Challenge, said he did not fire a handgun until he was 21, adding that they “are the most difficult guns to learn to shoot well.” But, he said, he sees nothing wrong with children using them.
“Kids need arm strength and good patience to learn to shoot a handgun well,” he said in an e-mail, “and I would think that would come in the 12-14 age group for most kids.”
Another organization, the nonprofit Youth Shooting Sports Alliance, which was created in 2007, has received close to $1 million in cash, guns and equipment from the shooting sports foundation and firearms-related companies, including ATK, Winchester and Sturm, Ruger & Company, its tax returns show. In 2011, the alliance awarded 58 grants. A typical grant: 23 rifles, 4 shotguns, 16 cases of ammunition and other materials, which went to a Michigan youth camp.
The foundation and gun companies also support Junior Shooters magazine, which is based in Idaho and was started in 2007. The publication is filled with catchy advertisements and articles about things like zombie targets, pink guns and, under the heading “Kids Gear,” tactical rifle components with military-style features like pistol grips and collapsible stocks.
Gun companies often send new models to the magazine for children to try out with adult supervision. Shortly after Sturm, Ruger announced in 2009 a new, lightweight semiautomatic rifle that had the “look and feel” of an AR-15 but used less expensive .22-caliber cartridges, Junior Shooters received one for review. The magazine had three boys ages 14 to 17 fire it and wrote that they “had an absolute ball!”
Junior Shooters’ editor, Andy Fink, acknowledged in an editorial that some of his magazine’s content stirred controversy.
“I have heard people say, even shooters that participate in some of the shotgun shooting sports, such things as, ‘Why do you need a semiautomatic gun for hunting?’ ” he wrote. But if the industry is to survive, he said, gun enthusiasts must embrace all youth shooting activities, including ones “using semiautomatic firearms with magazines holding 30-100 rounds.”
In an interview, Mr. Fink elaborated. Semiautomatic firearms are actually not weapons, he said, unless someone chooses to hurt another person with them, and their image has been unfairly tainted by the news media. There is no legitimate reason children should not learn to safely use an AR-15 for recreation, he said.
“They’re a tool, not any different than a car or a baseball bat,” Mr. Fink said. “It’s no different than a junior shooting a .22 or a shotgun. The difference is in the perception of the viewer.”
The Weapon of Choice
The AR-15, the civilian version of the military’s M-16 and M-4, has been aggressively marketed as a cool and powerful step up from more traditional target and hunting rifles. But its appearance in mass shootings — in addition to Newtown, the gun was also used last year in the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., and the attack on firefighters in Webster, N.Y. — has prompted calls for tighter restrictions. The AR-15 is among the guns included in a proposed ban on a range of semiautomatic weapons that was introduced in the Senate last week.
Given the gun’s commercial popularity, it is perhaps unsurprising that AR-15-style firearms have worked their way into youth shooting programs. At a “Guns ’n Grillin” weekend last fall, teenagers at a Boy Scout council in Virginia got to shoot AR-15s. They are used in youth competitions held each year at a National Guard camp in Ohio, and in “junior clinics” taught by Army or Marine marksmanship instructors, some of them sponsored by gun companies or organizations they support.
ArmaLite, a successor company to the one that developed the AR-15, is offering a similar rifle, the AR-10, for the grand prize in a raffle benefiting the Illinois State Rifle Association’s “junior high-power” team, which uses AR-15s in its competitions. Bushmaster has offered on its Web site a coupon worth $350 off the price of an AR-15 “to support and encourage junior shooters.”
Military-style firearms are prevalent in a target-shooting video game and mobile app called Point of Impact, which was sponsored by the shooting sports foundation and Guns & Ammo magazine. The game — rated for ages 9 and up in the iTunes store — allows players to shoot brand-name AR-15 rifles and semiautomatic handguns at inanimate targets, and it provides links to gun makers’ Web sites as well as to the foundation’s “First Shots” program, intended to recruit new shooters.
Upon the game’s release in January 2011, foundation executives said in a news release that it was one of the industry’s “most unique marketing tools directed at a younger audience.” Mr. Sanetti of the shooting sports foundation said sponsorship of the game was an experiment intended to deliver safety tips to players, while potentially generating interest in real-life sports.
The confluence of high-powered weaponry and youth shooting programs does not sit well even with some proponents of those programs. Stephan Carlson, a University of Minnesota environmental science professor whose research on the positive effects of learning hunting and outdoor skills in 4-H classes has been cited by the gun industry, said he “wouldn’t necessarily go along” with introducing children to more powerful firearms that added nothing useful to their experience.
“I see why the industry would be pushing it, but I don’t see the value in it,” Mr. Carlson said. “I guess it goes back to the skill base we’re trying to instill in the kids. What are we preparing them for?”
For Mr. Potterfield of MidwayUSA, who said his own children started shooting “boys’ rifles” at age 4, getting young people engaged with firearms — provided they have the maturity and the physical ability to handle them — strengthens an endangered American tradition.
Mr. Potterfield and his wife, Brenda, have donated more than $5 million for youth shooting programs in recent years, a campaign that he said was motivated by philanthropy, not “return on investment.”
“Our gifting is pure benevolence,” he said. “We grew up and live in rural America and have owned guns, hunted and fished all of our lives. This is our community, and we hope to preserve it for future generations.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Baltimore Activist Alert - Part 3
44] Israeli Elections – Jan. 29
45] Environmental Summit – Jan. 29
46] Philadelphia peace vigil – Jan. 29
47] Film “How to Survive a Plague” – Jan. 29
48] War Is Not the Answer vigil – Jan. 29
49] Book "Not In My Neighborhood” – Jan. 29
50] Peace Center orientation – Jan. 29
51] Peter Dreier at Red Emma’s – Jan. 29
52] Taylor Branch at Pratt – Jan. 29
53] Fix the Greed Rally – Jan. 30
54] The Military Budget – Jan. 30
55] Islamic Cooperation – Jan. 30
56] Film THE DUPES – Jan. 30
57] Hear from Wal-Mart workers – Jan. 30
58] Planning meeting on climate chaos – Jan. 30
59] Palestinian Statehood? – Jan. 30
60] Music for Peace – Jan. 30
44] – The Israeli Elections: Implications for U.S. Policy and Palestinians takes place on Tues., Jan. 29 from 12:30 to 2 PM at The Palestine Center, 2425 Virginia Ave. NW. Parliamentary elections in Israel are scheduled for 22 January and are expected to bring forward a pro-settlement government that is more right-wing than the current government. What implications does this have on U.S.-Israel relations? What will this mean for Israeli policy toward Palestinians and Palestinian territory? How will this new political reality effect diplomatic efforts for progress? Visit http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/d/EventDetails/i/37486/pid/187.
45] – You are invited to the 19th Annual Environmental Summit on Tues., Jan. 29 from 4:30 to 6 PM, sponsored by the Citizens' Campaign for the Environment. The Maryland LCV Education Fund and other groups host the summit annually to launch the environmental agenda for the Maryland General Assembly Session. The Summit will take place at the Miller Conference Room, Miller Senate Building, 11 Bladen St., Annapolis 21401. RSVP at https://www.thedatabank.com/dpg/288/personal2.asp?formid=meetedfund&c=4915514.
46] – Each Tuesday from 4:30 - 5:30 PM, the Catholic Peace Fellowship-Philadelphia for peace in Afghanistan and Iraq inside, during the winter, the Suburban Station, 16th Street & JFK Blvd., at the entrance to Tracks 3 and 4 on the mezzanine. The next vigil is Jan. 29. Call 215-426-0364.
47] – There is a screening of “How to Survive a Plague” with director David France on Tues., Jan. 29 from 5 to 7:45 PM at Becton Dickinson Auditorium - 615 North Wolfe St., Baltimore 21231. Johns Hopkins Center for AIDS Research, the Baltimore Student Harm Reduction Coalition and JHPIEGO present an Academy Award nominated film. Visit http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=jnjdkwkab&oeidk=a07e6weus63151e52de.
48] – There is a vigil to say "War Is Not the Answer" each Tuesday since September 11, 2001 at 4806 York Road. Join this ongoing vigil. The next vigil is Jan. 292 from 5:30 to 6:30 PM. Call Max at 410-366-1637.
49] – "Not In My Neighborhood: How bigotry shaped a great American city" is the topic of discussion on Tues., Jan. 29 at 7 PM at St. Bartholomew’s Church, 4711 Edmondson Ave., Baltimore. Baltimore is the setting for one of the most penetrating examinations of bigotry and residential segregation to be published in the United States. The book tells the story of how “legal” and “illegal” discrimination toward African Americans and Jews shaped Baltimore. Former Baltimore Sun reporter, Antero Pietila, will present his findings. Call the church office at 410-9457263, or contact Drew at 410-764-3020 or molecol@yahoo.com.
50] – The Washington Peace Center is hosting its January Volunteer Orientation and Meeting on Tues., Jan. 29 from 7 to 9 PM at St. Stephen's Church, 1525 Newton St. NW (near Columbia Heights Metro - Green Line). This is a great way to connect with the Peace Center. Come out and see how you can help the Washington Peace Center with its many projects. RSVP at tinyurl.com/wpcjan2013orientation.
51] – On Tues., Jan. 29 at 7 PM @ 2640, 27th & St. Paul Sts., Peter Dreier presents “The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century - A Social Justice Hall of Fame.” A hundred years ago any soapbox orator who called for women’s suffrage, a federal minimum wage, or laws protecting the environment would have been considered a utopian dreamer or a dangerous socialist. The radical ideas of one generation often become common sense for the next. The book also explores the new generation of 21st century activists who are shaping our future to promote a more humane, democratic, and just society. Dreier is currently the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department, at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Go to http://redemmas.org/event/2988/. Call 410- 230-0450 or email info@redemmas.org.
52] – Taylor Branch will discuss his new book, “The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement” on Tues., Jan. 29 at 7 PM at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Central Library, 400 Cathedral St. Call 410-396-5430. Go to http://www.prattlibrary.org/locations/central.
53] – Fix the Greed Rally is happening on Wed., Jan. 30 at 11:30 AM at Farragut Square, WDC. The Fix the Debt Coalition is at it again! They want to ‘fix” the debt on the backs of working families, seniors and children by lobbying to slash Social Security, education, Medicare and Medicaid and widen their tax loopholes. Visit https://www.facebook.com/events/153074858178346/.
54] – The Table Talk Lunch Series addresses US Defense [sic] Budget - Too Big to Fail? It takes place on Wed,, Jan. 30 at noon at Kay Spiritual Life Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. A donation of $5 is requested from faculty and staff to help offset the cost of the program. Email kslc@american.edu or call 202-885-3321.
55] – Jama'at al Tabligh: An Example of Islamic Cooperation Between Central Asia and South Asia is a talk scheduled for Wed., Jan. 30 at 12:15 PM at 37th and O Sts. NW (Georgetown University-ICC 270). The renewal of Central Asian Islam is generally traced to influences emanating from Middle Eastern countries, as well as to indigenous factors. This lecture will focus on equally important influences from the Indian subcontinent, notably the Jama’at al Tabligh. The history, current prospects, and geopolitical significance of this development will be considered for Central Asia, focusing on Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, where the organization is the most active and visible.
56] – See a screening of "The Dupes" on Wed., Jan. 30 from 12:30 to 2:15 PM at 2425 Virginia Ave. NW. View a trailer: http://youtu.be/k-G5D7bLx1s. This is one of the first Arab films to address the Palestinian question, and is a stark and stately black-and-white movie that traces the destinies of three different men brought together by their dispossession, their despair, and their hope for a better future" (Boston Palestine Film Festival). The story is based on the 1962 novella “Men in the Sun” by Palestinian writer, artist, and resistance leader Ghassan Kanafani. Go to http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/contactus. Call The Jerusalem Fund at 202-338-1958 or email info@thejerusalemfund.org.
57] – On Wed., Jan. 30 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM, HEAR DIRECTLY FROM OUR WALMART WORKERS. Enjoy dinner and a discussion at Sharp Hall, Govans Presbyterian Church, 5828 York Rd., Baltimore 21212 on the #8 bus line, near the Senator Theater (parking lot in the rear).
Listen to Cindy Murray and other workers, who will explain why they are fighting for justice. You will have the opportunity to sign up for a community campaign and sign on to a letter to Wal-Mart, part of a focus project of the Baltimore Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Peoples Power Assembly. Call 410-500-2168.
58] – The ffirst monthly meeting of the D.C. Climate Support Group is on Wed., Jan. 30 from 7 to 9 PM in the Decatur Room of the DC Friends Meetinghouse, 2111 Florida Ave. NW. The meeting is open to anyone concerned about global warming. A DC-CSG information-sharing meeting will be held on the following Wednesday, Feb. 6, same time, same place, to help build #FORWARDONCLIMATE, the biggest climate rally in history, to be held in D.C., mid-day on Presidents’ Day, Sun., Feb. 17, sponsored by the Sierra Club, 350.org and the Hip Hop Caucus. Contact Jim at 520-250-509 or JimDriscoll@NIPSPeerSupport.org.
59] – Palestinian Statehood: What Happens Next? Hear a talk by Mark Croatti on Wed., Jan. 30 at 7 PM at Howard County Central Library (Meeting Room), 10375 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia 21044. Now that the United Nations has recognized Palestine as a non-member observer state, what happens next? A two-state solution? A one-state solution? And how would either scenario affect the state of Israel?
Mark Croatti teaches Comparative Politics at George Washington Univ. and has taught Middle East Politics at Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County, St. Mary's College of Maryland, Notre Dame of Maryland University, Johns Hopkins University and University of Oregon. The sponsor of the event is the Committee for Palestinian Rights. Email CPR_Maryland@yahoo.com.
60] – Discover music as a means to communicate and connect across cultures. Listen, play, or learn. The event will feature an open mic forum, guitar lessons, and the chance to meet and connect with other musicians in the city. Music for Peace takes place at 7:30 PM on the last Wednesday of the month at the HI Baltimore Hostel, 17 W. Mulberry St. Call 410-576-8880 or go to http://www.baltimorehostel.org.
To be continued.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
45] Environmental Summit – Jan. 29
46] Philadelphia peace vigil – Jan. 29
47] Film “How to Survive a Plague” – Jan. 29
48] War Is Not the Answer vigil – Jan. 29
49] Book "Not In My Neighborhood” – Jan. 29
50] Peace Center orientation – Jan. 29
51] Peter Dreier at Red Emma’s – Jan. 29
52] Taylor Branch at Pratt – Jan. 29
53] Fix the Greed Rally – Jan. 30
54] The Military Budget – Jan. 30
55] Islamic Cooperation – Jan. 30
56] Film THE DUPES – Jan. 30
57] Hear from Wal-Mart workers – Jan. 30
58] Planning meeting on climate chaos – Jan. 30
59] Palestinian Statehood? – Jan. 30
60] Music for Peace – Jan. 30
44] – The Israeli Elections: Implications for U.S. Policy and Palestinians takes place on Tues., Jan. 29 from 12:30 to 2 PM at The Palestine Center, 2425 Virginia Ave. NW. Parliamentary elections in Israel are scheduled for 22 January and are expected to bring forward a pro-settlement government that is more right-wing than the current government. What implications does this have on U.S.-Israel relations? What will this mean for Israeli policy toward Palestinians and Palestinian territory? How will this new political reality effect diplomatic efforts for progress? Visit http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/d/EventDetails/i/37486/pid/187.
45] – You are invited to the 19th Annual Environmental Summit on Tues., Jan. 29 from 4:30 to 6 PM, sponsored by the Citizens' Campaign for the Environment. The Maryland LCV Education Fund and other groups host the summit annually to launch the environmental agenda for the Maryland General Assembly Session. The Summit will take place at the Miller Conference Room, Miller Senate Building, 11 Bladen St., Annapolis 21401. RSVP at https://www.thedatabank.com/dpg/288/personal2.asp?formid=meetedfund&c=4915514.
46] – Each Tuesday from 4:30 - 5:30 PM, the Catholic Peace Fellowship-Philadelphia for peace in Afghanistan and Iraq inside, during the winter, the Suburban Station, 16th Street & JFK Blvd., at the entrance to Tracks 3 and 4 on the mezzanine. The next vigil is Jan. 29. Call 215-426-0364.
47] – There is a screening of “How to Survive a Plague” with director David France on Tues., Jan. 29 from 5 to 7:45 PM at Becton Dickinson Auditorium - 615 North Wolfe St., Baltimore 21231. Johns Hopkins Center for AIDS Research, the Baltimore Student Harm Reduction Coalition and JHPIEGO present an Academy Award nominated film. Visit http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=jnjdkwkab&oeidk=a07e6weus63151e52de.
48] – There is a vigil to say "War Is Not the Answer" each Tuesday since September 11, 2001 at 4806 York Road. Join this ongoing vigil. The next vigil is Jan. 292 from 5:30 to 6:30 PM. Call Max at 410-366-1637.
49] – "Not In My Neighborhood: How bigotry shaped a great American city" is the topic of discussion on Tues., Jan. 29 at 7 PM at St. Bartholomew’s Church, 4711 Edmondson Ave., Baltimore. Baltimore is the setting for one of the most penetrating examinations of bigotry and residential segregation to be published in the United States. The book tells the story of how “legal” and “illegal” discrimination toward African Americans and Jews shaped Baltimore. Former Baltimore Sun reporter, Antero Pietila, will present his findings. Call the church office at 410-9457263, or contact Drew at 410-764-3020 or molecol@yahoo.com.
50] – The Washington Peace Center is hosting its January Volunteer Orientation and Meeting on Tues., Jan. 29 from 7 to 9 PM at St. Stephen's Church, 1525 Newton St. NW (near Columbia Heights Metro - Green Line). This is a great way to connect with the Peace Center. Come out and see how you can help the Washington Peace Center with its many projects. RSVP at tinyurl.com/wpcjan2013orientation.
51] – On Tues., Jan. 29 at 7 PM @ 2640, 27th & St. Paul Sts., Peter Dreier presents “The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century - A Social Justice Hall of Fame.” A hundred years ago any soapbox orator who called for women’s suffrage, a federal minimum wage, or laws protecting the environment would have been considered a utopian dreamer or a dangerous socialist. The radical ideas of one generation often become common sense for the next. The book also explores the new generation of 21st century activists who are shaping our future to promote a more humane, democratic, and just society. Dreier is currently the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department, at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Go to http://redemmas.org/event/2988/. Call 410- 230-0450 or email info@redemmas.org.
52] – Taylor Branch will discuss his new book, “The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement” on Tues., Jan. 29 at 7 PM at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Central Library, 400 Cathedral St. Call 410-396-5430. Go to http://www.prattlibrary.org/locations/central.
53] – Fix the Greed Rally is happening on Wed., Jan. 30 at 11:30 AM at Farragut Square, WDC. The Fix the Debt Coalition is at it again! They want to ‘fix” the debt on the backs of working families, seniors and children by lobbying to slash Social Security, education, Medicare and Medicaid and widen their tax loopholes. Visit https://www.facebook.com/events/153074858178346/.
54] – The Table Talk Lunch Series addresses US Defense [sic] Budget - Too Big to Fail? It takes place on Wed,, Jan. 30 at noon at Kay Spiritual Life Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. A donation of $5 is requested from faculty and staff to help offset the cost of the program. Email kslc@american.edu or call 202-885-3321.
55] – Jama'at al Tabligh: An Example of Islamic Cooperation Between Central Asia and South Asia is a talk scheduled for Wed., Jan. 30 at 12:15 PM at 37th and O Sts. NW (Georgetown University-ICC 270). The renewal of Central Asian Islam is generally traced to influences emanating from Middle Eastern countries, as well as to indigenous factors. This lecture will focus on equally important influences from the Indian subcontinent, notably the Jama’at al Tabligh. The history, current prospects, and geopolitical significance of this development will be considered for Central Asia, focusing on Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, where the organization is the most active and visible.
56] – See a screening of "The Dupes" on Wed., Jan. 30 from 12:30 to 2:15 PM at 2425 Virginia Ave. NW. View a trailer: http://youtu.be/k-G5D7bLx1s. This is one of the first Arab films to address the Palestinian question, and is a stark and stately black-and-white movie that traces the destinies of three different men brought together by their dispossession, their despair, and their hope for a better future" (Boston Palestine Film Festival). The story is based on the 1962 novella “Men in the Sun” by Palestinian writer, artist, and resistance leader Ghassan Kanafani. Go to http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/contactus. Call The Jerusalem Fund at 202-338-1958 or email info@thejerusalemfund.org.
57] – On Wed., Jan. 30 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM, HEAR DIRECTLY FROM OUR WALMART WORKERS. Enjoy dinner and a discussion at Sharp Hall, Govans Presbyterian Church, 5828 York Rd., Baltimore 21212 on the #8 bus line, near the Senator Theater (parking lot in the rear).
Listen to Cindy Murray and other workers, who will explain why they are fighting for justice. You will have the opportunity to sign up for a community campaign and sign on to a letter to Wal-Mart, part of a focus project of the Baltimore Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Peoples Power Assembly. Call 410-500-2168.
58] – The ffirst monthly meeting of the D.C. Climate Support Group is on Wed., Jan. 30 from 7 to 9 PM in the Decatur Room of the DC Friends Meetinghouse, 2111 Florida Ave. NW. The meeting is open to anyone concerned about global warming. A DC-CSG information-sharing meeting will be held on the following Wednesday, Feb. 6, same time, same place, to help build #FORWARDONCLIMATE, the biggest climate rally in history, to be held in D.C., mid-day on Presidents’ Day, Sun., Feb. 17, sponsored by the Sierra Club, 350.org and the Hip Hop Caucus. Contact Jim at 520-250-509 or JimDriscoll@NIPSPeerSupport.org.
59] – Palestinian Statehood: What Happens Next? Hear a talk by Mark Croatti on Wed., Jan. 30 at 7 PM at Howard County Central Library (Meeting Room), 10375 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia 21044. Now that the United Nations has recognized Palestine as a non-member observer state, what happens next? A two-state solution? A one-state solution? And how would either scenario affect the state of Israel?
Mark Croatti teaches Comparative Politics at George Washington Univ. and has taught Middle East Politics at Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County, St. Mary's College of Maryland, Notre Dame of Maryland University, Johns Hopkins University and University of Oregon. The sponsor of the event is the Committee for Palestinian Rights. Email CPR_Maryland@yahoo.com.
60] – Discover music as a means to communicate and connect across cultures. Listen, play, or learn. The event will feature an open mic forum, guitar lessons, and the chance to meet and connect with other musicians in the city. Music for Peace takes place at 7:30 PM on the last Wednesday of the month at the HI Baltimore Hostel, 17 W. Mulberry St. Call 410-576-8880 or go to http://www.baltimorehostel.org.
To be continued.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Our Man in Havana
Our Man in Havana
By Peter Kornbluh
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/25/our_man_in_havana?wp_login_redirect=0
January 26, 2013
Imprisoned in Cuba, Alan Gross is suing the U.S. government. And the documents the case reveals are putting the Obama administration in a tough spot.
At the very end of John Kerry's Jan. 24th confirmation hearing, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) treated him to a lecture about repression in Cuba. "And then we have a United States citizen who all he tried to do is give access to the Internet to a small Jewish population in Havana and has been languishing in jail for almost four years," Menendez asserted. "That is real torture." In his final question to Kerry, Menendez asked if "we can expect you to be a strong supporter" of U.S. "democracy programs worldwide?" The all-but-confirmed nominee for secretary of state answered, "yes."
The democracy program in Cuba that concerns Menendez has come under increasing public scrutiny since that U.S. citizen, Alan Gross, was detained in Havana on Dec. 3, 2009. In the wake of his arrest, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), none other than John Kerry, put a temporary hold on the USAID-run operation, officially known as the Cuban Democracy and Contingency Planning Program (CDCPP). For almost a year, the SFRC made an effort to bring a degree of accountability to this little-known, under-the-radar, $140 million U.S. government initiative in Cuba.
To his credit, it is Gross himself who has done the most to lift the veil of secrecy from the CDCPP. Last year, he and his wife, Judy, filed a civil lawsuit against USAID and the contractor for whom Gross worked as a consultant, Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), in an effort to call public attention to his plight and press the Obama administration to step up efforts to negotiate his release. Specifically, their suit seeks damages for the failure of USAID and DAI to inform him of the risks he faced, to "take basic remedial measures to protect Mr. Gross," and to provide the education and training "necessary to minimize the risk of harm to him."
Their legal complaint acknowledged that he was paid under a broader USAID contract with DAI to travel multiple times to Cuba, posing as a tourist, carrying specialized technology to establish independent satellite communications networks on various parts of the island; it quotes his own trip reports that this was "very risky business" for which he was not adequately trained or supervised.
This document, an August 2008 USAID contract with DAI, is one of a number of substantive records released in court filings by the suit that reveal the mission, procedures, and sensitive operations of USAID's Cuba program -- including contingency planning for political, civic, and economic support to a post-Castro government. Upgraded at the end of the Bush administration, the main objectives of the program are "hastening transition" to democracy (read: regime change), creating information channels to and from Cuba, and establishing a network through which USAID could create and deploy a "rapid response programmatic platform" on the island in the event of instability and transition.The contract shows that USAID's program intends to be prepared for a variety of contingencies in Cuba, including, as the implementation section of this document suggests, "if a USG-Determined Transition occurs, and USAID is asked to provide assistance." In that event, USAID hoped to have staffing, networking, and infrastructure in place to be able to rapidly supply financial, technological, and educational assistance to help a new government consolidate. The CDCPP is designed "to support Cuba's pro-democracy actors," the document states. "This task order will provide a contractual mechanism that will allow the USG to respond quickly to different types of opportunities or emergencies, particularly those that may result from macro-political changes."
Due to the sensitivity of these operations, the "CDCPP demands continuous discretion," states another document attached to DAI's Jan. 15 motion to dismiss the suit. But the suit itself is already eroding the discreet nature of the USAID Cuba democracy operation, and opening it to public debate over the wisdom, propriety, and efficacy of the program. In DAI's decision to file these documents in court there seems to be an element of "graymail" -- the threat of exposure of far more sensitive information about the surreptitious nature of its work with the U.S. government in Cuba -- if the lawsuit goes forward. DAI's motion states clearly that the company is "deeply concerned that the development of the record in this case over the course of litigation could create significant risks to the U.S. Government's national security, foreign policy, and human rights interests."
The incoming secretary of state is no stranger to the Cuba issue. Indeed, the beginning of the Kerry era at the State Department presents an opportunity to reevaluate not only the democracy program, but the Obama administration's overall approach to Cuba policy. Despite Obama's campaign pledge to "write a new chapter" in U.S.-Cuban relations during his first term, the president failed to substantively alter Washington's half-century posture of hostility toward the Castro regime. The fact that Alan Gross's freedom depends on a new approach to U.S.-Cuban relations is an added incentive for that reevaluation to be expeditious.
When I visited Gross in late November in the military hospital where he is incarcerated, he told me that he wanted to see the United States and Cuba "sit down and talk tachlas -- truthfully -- about mutual interests," including his case. It is now up to Kerry to move toward a normal dialogue with the Cuban government in which Gross's case can be resolved.
Read Gross's lawsuit and contract with DAI by clicking the link above.
By Peter Kornbluh
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/25/our_man_in_havana?wp_login_redirect=0
January 26, 2013
Imprisoned in Cuba, Alan Gross is suing the U.S. government. And the documents the case reveals are putting the Obama administration in a tough spot.
At the very end of John Kerry's Jan. 24th confirmation hearing, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) treated him to a lecture about repression in Cuba. "And then we have a United States citizen who all he tried to do is give access to the Internet to a small Jewish population in Havana and has been languishing in jail for almost four years," Menendez asserted. "That is real torture." In his final question to Kerry, Menendez asked if "we can expect you to be a strong supporter" of U.S. "democracy programs worldwide?" The all-but-confirmed nominee for secretary of state answered, "yes."
The democracy program in Cuba that concerns Menendez has come under increasing public scrutiny since that U.S. citizen, Alan Gross, was detained in Havana on Dec. 3, 2009. In the wake of his arrest, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), none other than John Kerry, put a temporary hold on the USAID-run operation, officially known as the Cuban Democracy and Contingency Planning Program (CDCPP). For almost a year, the SFRC made an effort to bring a degree of accountability to this little-known, under-the-radar, $140 million U.S. government initiative in Cuba.
To his credit, it is Gross himself who has done the most to lift the veil of secrecy from the CDCPP. Last year, he and his wife, Judy, filed a civil lawsuit against USAID and the contractor for whom Gross worked as a consultant, Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), in an effort to call public attention to his plight and press the Obama administration to step up efforts to negotiate his release. Specifically, their suit seeks damages for the failure of USAID and DAI to inform him of the risks he faced, to "take basic remedial measures to protect Mr. Gross," and to provide the education and training "necessary to minimize the risk of harm to him."
Their legal complaint acknowledged that he was paid under a broader USAID contract with DAI to travel multiple times to Cuba, posing as a tourist, carrying specialized technology to establish independent satellite communications networks on various parts of the island; it quotes his own trip reports that this was "very risky business" for which he was not adequately trained or supervised.
This document, an August 2008 USAID contract with DAI, is one of a number of substantive records released in court filings by the suit that reveal the mission, procedures, and sensitive operations of USAID's Cuba program -- including contingency planning for political, civic, and economic support to a post-Castro government. Upgraded at the end of the Bush administration, the main objectives of the program are "hastening transition" to democracy (read: regime change), creating information channels to and from Cuba, and establishing a network through which USAID could create and deploy a "rapid response programmatic platform" on the island in the event of instability and transition.The contract shows that USAID's program intends to be prepared for a variety of contingencies in Cuba, including, as the implementation section of this document suggests, "if a USG-Determined Transition occurs, and USAID is asked to provide assistance." In that event, USAID hoped to have staffing, networking, and infrastructure in place to be able to rapidly supply financial, technological, and educational assistance to help a new government consolidate. The CDCPP is designed "to support Cuba's pro-democracy actors," the document states. "This task order will provide a contractual mechanism that will allow the USG to respond quickly to different types of opportunities or emergencies, particularly those that may result from macro-political changes."
Due to the sensitivity of these operations, the "CDCPP demands continuous discretion," states another document attached to DAI's Jan. 15 motion to dismiss the suit. But the suit itself is already eroding the discreet nature of the USAID Cuba democracy operation, and opening it to public debate over the wisdom, propriety, and efficacy of the program. In DAI's decision to file these documents in court there seems to be an element of "graymail" -- the threat of exposure of far more sensitive information about the surreptitious nature of its work with the U.S. government in Cuba -- if the lawsuit goes forward. DAI's motion states clearly that the company is "deeply concerned that the development of the record in this case over the course of litigation could create significant risks to the U.S. Government's national security, foreign policy, and human rights interests."
The incoming secretary of state is no stranger to the Cuba issue. Indeed, the beginning of the Kerry era at the State Department presents an opportunity to reevaluate not only the democracy program, but the Obama administration's overall approach to Cuba policy. Despite Obama's campaign pledge to "write a new chapter" in U.S.-Cuban relations during his first term, the president failed to substantively alter Washington's half-century posture of hostility toward the Castro regime. The fact that Alan Gross's freedom depends on a new approach to U.S.-Cuban relations is an added incentive for that reevaluation to be expeditious.
When I visited Gross in late November in the military hospital where he is incarcerated, he told me that he wanted to see the United States and Cuba "sit down and talk tachlas -- truthfully -- about mutual interests," including his case. It is now up to Kerry to move toward a normal dialogue with the Cuban government in which Gross's case can be resolved.
Read Gross's lawsuit and contract with DAI by clicking the link above.
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