By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

Pro-Israel neoconservatives may beat the drums for war, but dozens of antiwar activists gathered in Des Moines, Iowa’s Nollen Plaza on the evening of February 21 to urge Washington politicians to “Talk to Iran” instead.

“We’ve had way to much war in the Middle East,” declared Tony Salem of Des Moines.

“I’m out here to send a message to politicians that we don’t need another war in the Middle East,” said Ismael Hossein-zadeh, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Drake University.

Hossein-Zadeh described the situation as “quite frightening, because the constellation of forces in the region, especially in the Persian Gulf is such that a small mistake could lead to a big confrontation with unpredictable consequences.”

Furthermore, economic sanctions can be acts of war under international law, and increasingly punitive sanctions may prompt Iran to defend its people by trying to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, which could lead to hostilities, said the author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism.

A war against Iran would be much more destructive than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and would have many more consequences, said Hossein-zadeh.

Israelis are the most influential and insistent proponents of an attack on Iran, while, “as far as the United States in concerned, the signals are mixed.  There are those who are supporters Israel and who are supporters of aggression against Iran, but there are some hesitant and ambivalent forces like the president himself, who I am afraid is not leading here.  When you don’t lead, then you are going to be led,” said Hossein-zadeh.

“The time is now for diplomacy,” said Jeffrey Weiss, Director of Catholic Peace Ministry and a rally organizer.

“Iran has recently made a number of overtures.  The time for talking is now, and we are here because we are concerned that a shooting war, a major catastrophe, could begin.  It is time to talk to Iran,” said Weiss.

Lewis and Winnie Pinch, who lived and worked at the American Presbyterian Hospital at Mashad from 1967 to 1970 and who visited Iran more recently, drove from Omaha to take part in the rally across from the Civic Center where Ariana Huffington was speaking.

“An attack on Iran would be a serious problem, not just for Iran but for the United States and for Israel, where we hear that most of the war talk comes from, Israel” said Lewis Pinch.

“We get a distorted picture of Iran from our media here in the United States.  The Iranian people are lovely people by and large.  Some of them agree with their government, some of them don’t, just like here in the U.S.  The people are very friendly to the United States, in contradistinction to what you might hear, and I don’t think most people here realize that,” said Pinch.

“They loved us when we went back, October a year ago.  They’d come up to us and we were the people to be celebrated.  They wanted to know where we came from and after they found out it was the United States they said, ‘Oh we’re so glad you’re here.  We love you.  We wish more of you came here.’  They’d want photos of us with them.  They’d telephone their friends to tell them that they were talking to Americans,” said Winnie Pinch.

“I’m out here tonight because I don’t want to see more homeless veterans out under the bridges and having PTSD and TBI,” said  James Marren, Treasurer of the Veterans National Recovery Center and a member of the Des Moines Chapter of Veterans for Peace.

“The money that is being wasted on war could be spent on social issues, helping out with healthcare, helping people get jobs, rebuilding our infrastructure here.  It’s time to bring that money home and help our people.  The people of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran are victims of our war policy just as much as our veterans are.  We see the neocons pushing for their agenda – permanent war – and there are victims on all sides.  We don’t need more homeless veterans; they don’t need their families destroyed by our war machine.  That’s why I’m here tonight,” said Marren.

“There may be some people who wouldn’t like to hear this,” said longtime antiwar activist and member of the Des Moines Valley Friends Meeting Sherry Hutchison, “but I think Israel is permanently paranoid about Iran.  I think it would be a good idea if our government would say, ‘If you bomb them, no more aid to Israel from the U.S.’”

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

“Don’t do what we did!” exclaimed Mark Rudd before an audience of about 75 activists who gathered at Occupy Iowa headquarters in Des Moines on March 7.

Rudd, a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s, together with others founded the violent SDS off-shoot, the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) that engaged in a campaign of bombings of government buildings during the 1970s.  Today, Rudd’s activism in behalf of progressive social change draws on the lessons of his radical and revolutionary past while emphasizing the importance of nonviolence and political organizing.

Rudd’s presentation in Des Moines featured, first, a viewing of The Weather Underground, a 2002 documentary film depicting the rise and fall of the WUO.   The film, which includes archive footage as well as interviews with various former WUO members taped much later after the group disintegrated, places a narrative about the militant communist organization within the larger context of the Vietnam War and the social and political turmoil of the era.  Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, The Weather Underground won the audience choice award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival and went on to be nominated for an Academy Award in 2004.  Following the film, Rudd spoke eloquently and at length, his comments rich with self-deprecating humor, irony, and insight, responding to questions from an appreciative audience during an extended Q&A that lasted for well over an hour.

The Independent Monitor asked Rudd how his experience might benefit and inform the activism of Occupy Iowa.

Rudd explained that SDS organizers, many of them ‘Red Diaper Babies,’ attempted to create an antiwar movement in the 1960s based on political organizing.

“This is actually a different method than Occupy used.  Occupy used a method called exemplary direct action, and Occupy’s success was enormous.  My heart goes out to you.  Occupy accomplished what decades of organizing in the union movement [has not] … You got across the narrative, the story of the 99 percent and the 1 percent, the basic, fundamental economic and political injustice at the heart of this society.  The unions have been trying to do that for decades, and you did that in a matter of a few weeks.  It was phenomenal,” declared Rudd.

“What you did was the same thing we did in 1968 at Columbia, which was you demonstrated moral commitment.  The difference was, it took us years to get there, organizing,” said Rudd.

“Since 2003 I’ve been traveling around with this movie and talking to activists and organizers about how movements are built,” said Rudd.

Rudd said one of the big mistakes he and others made was that, “We forgot completely about organizing.  …  We stole [the SDS] and we took it in a crappy direction. … “We transformed SDS from being a radical reform and resistance organization to being revolutionary.  We wanted to go all the way.  It wasn’t enough to just be antiwar, to just end the war in Vietnam.  So, we attacked the antiwar movement because it wasn’t radical enough, it wasn’t militant enough, and it didn’t critique the entire system, the entire system being imperialism,” said Rudd.

“We quoted Che Guevara.  We loved Che Guevara!  ‘The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution’, meaning: You don’t talk about it; you do it, just like Che Guevara did it, but we hadn’t noticed that he was already dead [general laughter] in 1967.  This was 1969.  His strategy was terrible.  It was called the ‘foco’ theory.  I was a Guevarista; I was of the cult of Che.  ‘Pick up the gun!  The time of the revolution has come,’” said Rudd.

“I was elected national secretary of the SDS in June of 1969.  Within six months, my leadership clique had decided to kill off the largest radical student organization in the United States, 100,000 members in 400 chapters.  We did it in ’69, which was the height of the war.  We did it because we knew that it was not revolutionary enough, and that the only way, that the only thing that needed to be done now, was not to organize on college campuses but to pick up the gun.  That is … the arrogance that led us to kill SDS, which I incidentally consider to be an historical crime that I committed because of my ideas about revolution,” said Rudd.

Rudd described “a trajectory:  good organizing, followed by bad organizing, followed by the [Weather] Underground [Organization], which was horrible, no organizing,” and explained that he wrote his autobiography, titled Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, in order to “present this story so that people can get the distinction between how mass movements are built, which is a process called organizing – relationship building, coalition building, education, a lot of work! – versus self-expression, which is what we moved into.”

The Independent Monitor then asked Rudd to talk about how and why, after the accidental explosion that killed three WUO members on March 6, 1970 in a townhouse in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, the group adopted a strategy of bombing buildings after hours and on weekends to avoid injury or death.

“There was a moment that led up to the townhouse [explosion] in which we actually fell into a classic definition of terrorism, which is attacking innocent people,” said Rudd.

The people in the townhouse, explained Rudd, were building a bomb which they planned to plant at Fort Dix to explode at a non-commissioned officers dance, a bomb that might have killed soldiers and their wives, girlfriends, or others who attended the dance.

“Thank God the accident happened and we only killed three of our own!  Because the effects on the whole antiwar movement would have been horrendous,” declared Rudd, who recalled that a few months later an antiwar group in Madison, Wisconsin planted a bomb in Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a bomb accidentally killed an antiwar grad student who was working late in the building.

“They called in a warning.  They were following our example.  But somehow the police didn’t know there was a student working late that night, and he got killed. …  The Madison movement was hit really badly.  They simply died for a number of years.  We were lucky; those people following our lead were not lucky.  I feel, in retrospect … I lost my fire, my will, my courage; it was my failing in 1970.  I think what happened was we were unwilling to break with the entire strategy of bombings.  And Underground and revolution was wrong!  We should have been organizing on the college campuses, and we shouldn’t have tainted the essentially nonviolent antiwar movement with this violence that we were promoting,” declared Rudd with evident emotion.

“To this day – I don’t like to blow my own horn – but I am probably the only one in this film who is as critical of this strategy, and I think the other people are very ambivalent and confused.  Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who are wonderful people who are like brother and sister to me, but I feel that they make the same mistake that a lot of people make when looking at this, which is that you confuse good intentions with results.  It’s very easy for us to take a subjective point of view of all of this and say, ‘Well, you meant well.  Your ideas about imperialism were right.  You were reacting to the violence,” said Rudd.

“Tom Hayden, on the other hand, analyzes it very well.  There is a brilliant book that has an essay on this called The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama, and in it Tom says, ‘We were a perfect mirror for a violent society.  The more violence in Vietnam, the more we talked violence.’  Now that’s reactive, and it’s expressive, but it’s not strategic.  Strategy is the question, How do we build a mass movement?  Our goal is always a mass movement.  We have to believe that the large majority of Americans will eventually take some action against this injustice, against militarism, for justice, our fellow citizens, the 99 percent, which is a brilliant metaphor that you’ve developed, we have to believe that those people will be involved.  So, my question to you is, What can we do to help the other 98.99 percent get involved?  What would be a reasonable thing to ask them to do?  What kind of education is necessary?  What kind of coalitions need to be built?

Responding to a question from an Iowa Occupier, regarding Occupy activists who espouse a strategy of violence or “diversity of tactics,” which Rudd characterized as code for violence, the college professor, author, and former SDS and WUO leader said, “My first thought is that those people are police agents.”

Rudd explained that he has met many times “with young people who are Black Bloc, Green Anarchists, or followers of an idiot named John Zerzan, a guy my age who doesn’t believe that mass movements have ever helped anybody in the world.   He’s teaching that.  So, I’ve got to know the kids, but I’m not good at it. … I’ve told them, and they don’t want to hear this because I am crude in the way I say it: The only people who advocate violence are either cops or very stupid.  I didn’t add that I was very stupid.  I was one of these people.  I was so angry I wanted to overthrow the whole system, and I thought that everybody in the world was gonna think like me.  A friend of mine calls it existential politics.  We have to substitute real politics,” said Rudd.

“I like to draw a clear line, and you have done this really, really well here in Iowa, better than in Albuquerque and better than in New York.  You’ve said, ‘Our movement is a nonviolent movement.  Any violence that there is comes from the state, it doesn’t come from us.’  You haven’t given them anything.  You’ve figured this out for yourselves: Anyone advocating violence is working for the other side.  I know, because I worked for the FBI – I did their work for them!  Without knowing it!  Just because I thought my ideas were so smart.  I was no different from these stupid Black Bloc kids.  So, I think we’ve got to draw this clear line,” said Rudd.

“This [Weather Underground] story is a great story of what not to do,” said Rudd.    

Rudd was invited to speak in Iowa by David Goodner, a Des Moines Catholic Worker (DMCW) and community organizer with Iowa Citizens for Community Involvement. DMCW hosted Rudd while he was in Des Moines.

By Richard Falk

The latest occupation crime in Afghanistan was a shooting spree on March 11, reportedly committed by a lone American soldier in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province.

Sixteen Afghan civilians, including women and children, were shot in the middle of the night without any pretence of combat activity in the area. Such an atrocity is one more expression of a pathological reaction, allegedly by one soldier, to an incomprehensible military reality – a reality that seems to be driving US military personnel on the ground crazy. The main criminal here is not the shooter, but the political leader who insists on continuing the mission in face of the evidence.

US soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters, the burning of Qurans, and troops convicted of killing Afghan civilians for sport or routinely invading the privacy of Afghan homes in the middle of the night: whatever the military commanders in Kabul might say in regret, and Washington might repeat by way of formal apology, has become essentially irrelevant.

These so-called “incidents” or “aberrations” are nothing of the sort. These happenings are pathological reactions of men and women caught up in a death trap not of their making, an alien environment that collides lethally with their sense of normality and decency. Besides the desecration of foreign lands and their cultural identities, US political leaders have, for more than a decade, unforgivably placed young Americans in intolerable situations of risk and enmity. Equally revealing are recent studies documenting historically high suicide rates in the lower ranks of the US military.

Senseless and morbid wars produce senseless and morbid behaviour. Afghanistan, like Vietnam 40 years earlier, has become an atrocity-generating killing field. In Vietnam, the White House finally accelerated the US exit when it became evident that soldiers were murdering their own officers, a pattern that became so widespread that it gave birth to the word “fragging”.

Whatever the pretext after the 9/11 attacks, the Afghanistan War was misconceived from its inception. Air warfare was relied upon to decimate the leadership ranks of al-Qaeda, but instead its top political and military commanders slipped across the border. Regime change in Kabul, with a leader anointed by Washington to help coordinate the foreign occupation of his country, was a counterinsurgency formula that had failed over and over again.

But with the militarist mindset prevailing in the US government, failure was once again reinterpreted as an opportunity to do it right this time. Despite the efficiency of the radical new tactic of killing targets using drones – the latest form of state terror – the outcome is no different.

What more needs to be said? It is long past time for the United States and its NATO allies to withdraw with all deliberate speed from Afghanistan, rather than to proceed on its present course: negotiating a long-term “memorandum of understanding” that transfers the formalities of the occupation to the Afghans while leaving private US military contractors – 21st century mercenaries – as an outlaw governance structure after most combat forces withdraw by the end of 2014.

As in Iraq, what has been “achieved” in Afghanistan is the very opposite of the goals set by Pentagon planners and State Department diplomacy: the country is decimated rather than reconstructed, the regional balance shifts in the direction of Islamic extremism, and the United States is ever more widely feared and resented, solidifying its geopolitical role as the great malefactor of our era.

The United States seems incapable of grasping the pathologies it has inflicted on its own citizenry. The disgusting 2004 pictures of US soldiers getting their kicks from torturing and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib should have made clear once and for all to the leaders and the public that it was time to bring troops home, and keep them there if we cared for their welfare. What the pattern exhibits is not only a criminal indifference to the wellbeing of “others”, but a similar disregard of the welfare of our collective selves. The current bellicose Republican presidential candidates calling for attacks on Iran favours taking a giant step along the road – a road that is heading towards an American implosion. And the Obama presidency is only a half step behind: counselling patience, but itself indulging in war-mongering – whether for its own sake, or on behalf of Israel, is unclear.

President Obama was recently quoted as saying of Afghanistan: “Now is the time for us to transition.”

No, it isn’t. “Now is the time to leave.” And not only for the sake of the Afghan people, but for the sake of the American people Obama was elected to serve.

Richard Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice (Routledge, 2008).

He is currently serving his third year of a six year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

Follow him on Twitter: @rfalk13

Article Courtesy Al Jazeera.com

By Brian Terrell

On the long flight to the Gulf Kingdom of Bahrain on February 10, I had been studying the Lonely Planet guide to the region in order to be able to explain at the airport, if needed, that I had come as a tourist. As it happened, while most passengers on our plane sailed through passport control, my travel companion Linda Sartor and I were pulled from the line and subjected to a closer examination. My sketchy knowledge of the historic and cultural sights that I had come to see was good enough to satisfy official scrutiny. We were granted tourist visas and sent on our way.

That we had come as tourists was true. We had intentionally neglected to mention, though, that we had been invited to Bahrain along with a few other international activists to monitor the government’s response to demonstrations marking the one year anniversary of Bahrain’s “Arab Spring” pro-democracy uprising on February 14. This demand for basic rights was brutally suppressed by Bahrain’s police and military backed by the army of Saudi Arabia.

We certainly would have been barred entry to the country had our full intent been told—but, as Daniel Berrigan once mused, “How much truth do we owe them?” In fact, our invitation from Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, came because the government had made it known that observers from established human rights organizations would not be granted visas until the next month and that access to the country by the international media was to be severely limited during that period. The regime’s resolve that there be no witnesses to the events surrounding the anniversary made our presence for those days all the more crucial.

The morning after our arrival, we met with local activists and the small group of U.S. citizens who had come before us. Before long we were in the streets of Manama, the capital city, accompanying a march to the Pearl Roundabout, the focal point of last year’s demonstration. This peaceful march of men, women and children was quickly set upon by police in full riot gear and dispersed with tear gas and percussion grenades. Our first encounter with the Bahraini police appeared to be vicious, but our local friends assured us that our presence was a restraining factor. Two of the Americans we had just met, Huwaida Arraf and Radhika Sainath, were taken into custody at this march and later that evening deported, the government said, for activities not consistent with their status as tourists.

Our small group, called Witness Bahrain, grew over the next days, even as several friends who traveled to join us were turned away at the airport by a regime made even more hyper-vigilant after deporting Huwaida and Radhika. While being careful to remain at large at least until the events of the 14th, we toured Manama and the villages over the next couple of days, hearing testimony of government abuses and accompanying demonstrations and marches.

On February 13, Tighe Barry and Medea Benjamin of the peace group Code Pink joined us, and our Bahraini guide Wafa took some of us on a tour of the zoo and the National Museum. In the afternoon we witnessed a march of tens of thousands through the main thoroughfares of Manama.

This march was tolerated by the authorities until a large group split off to walk to the Pearl Roundabout. The police response was immediate and appalling. Tear gas in Bahrain is not used as a means of crowd control so much as collective punishment—crowds dispersed by gas are not allowed to escape but are pursued, cornered and gassed again. Many are injured by direct hits from gas canisters and percussion grenades.

We witnessed beatings and heard reports of injuries by birdshot and rubber bullets.

On the actual anniversary, the police had the country locked down. Patrols of armored cars sped through the streets of Manama and the roads out of the villages were blocked by tanks. Many hundreds still made it to the streets, many were injured, many arrested. Six more of us were taken by the authorities.

In my case, finally getting pinched by the Bahraini police was anticlimactic. Four of us Americans with a Bahraini friend were taking a back way along a quiet street to catch up with others to attempt reaching the roundabout when a passing police patrol stopped us and asked for identification. One more time, we explained that we were there as tourists. “If you are tourists,” we were asked, “why do you have gas masks?”

A few hours later we were in a police station where we met two more from our group who had been captured under more dramatic circumstances. One by one, we were summoned to talk with representatives from the Ministry of Information and were told that we would be put on a flight to London at 2 a.m. as our visas had been cancelled. Our claim to be tourists was regarded as a deception by the authorities. My protestations to the contrary were to no avail.

Bahrain is a tiny island kingdom that is home to about a million people—half of whom are not citizens—that is visited by 8 million tourists a year. Many of these, we were told, are Saudis drawn there by the night life and legal alcohol. Others visit the museums and beaches. In the brochures produced by the government, tourists are encouraged to meet the friendly people of Bahrain. This is what we did and it was for this that we were deported.

We were privileged to tour this beautiful and afflicted country and to live the reality of its people, if only for a little while. Not content with having our photos taken with camels, we spoke with emergency room doctors who, after treating victims of last year’s crackdown, were themselves tortured and charged with sedition. We met with mothers mourning their children who were killed or imprisoned, and workers barred from practicing their professions for being in favor of freedom.

We were in Bahrain as tourists, not of the malls and golf courses and museums but of the streets and villages where real people live and struggle. Anyone who visits Bahrain and never gets a whiff of tear gas is a poor tourist, indeed. To the police who arrested us, a tourist with a gas mask is a hopeless contradiction and proof of culpability. For the tourist who wants to learn the present reality of Bahrain, a gas mask is more indispensable than sunscreen.

The faithfulness and solidarity of the people of Bahrain will prevail over the perfidity and cruelty of its backward and crude monarchy, supported as it is only by the brute force of its sponsors, the governments of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. “Sumoud,” meaning be strong, hold fast, is the Arabic word by which the resisters in Bahrain greet and encourage one another. Their peaceful strength is a challenge and an inspiration as we continue our common struggle on the far ends of the globe.

Sumoud.

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

After 10 years of war, a massive bail-out of Wall Street, and the worst recession since the Great Depression, Washington has run out of money.  As the pro-Israel lobby’s frantic efforts to foment war with Iran increase, the Obama administration is finally winding down the ill-conceived, immoral, counter-productive, and unsuccessful but hideously destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The U.S. military is reducing troop levels, not hiring new recruits.  Unable to find work, many Americans have thrown themselves into an effort re-invent the corrupt system that is failing them.

In a word, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), which owes so much to the Arab Spring, was – and is – brilliant.  It has reinvigorated a flagging antiwar movement and rekindled interest in progressive ideas and ideals.  On a conceptual level, with its emphasis on nonviolent protest, direct democracy, and direct action in support of economic justice, honest government, accountability, and an end to oppression, exploitation, and war, OWS has shown itself to be everything that official Washington and Wall Street are not.  Though corporate media outlets were slow to recognize the importance, authenticity, and vigor of the new popular movement, once they did the national security apparatus quickly began to coordinate efforts by municipal, county, and state law enforcement agencies around the nation to stifle OWS dissent.

In many cities, including New York, Seattle, and Oakland, unnecessary violence has characterized law enforcement reactions to OWS encampments and activities.  New York Police Department Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who was filmed pepper spraying, without provocation, a group of women standing in a police pen near Union Square on September 24, seemed to set the nasty tone.

CounterPunch author Pam Martens reported on October 10 that, “If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

“The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

“New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.”

The taxpayer pays for each officer’s training, his uniform, his gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits resulting from official acts by police personnel following the illegal instructions of their corporate masters. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program, according to Martens.  Bologna has been sued by OWS protesters.

Oakland police shot Scott Olsen, 24, in the head with a tear gas canister on October 25.  Olsen, a member of Veterans For Peace, was peacefully protesting when he was shot.  The former Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq was hospitalized with a concussion and head trauma.

In Seattle, police pepper-sprayed 84-year-old Dorly Rainey, a 19-year-old pregnant woman, and a priest involved in nonviolent protest on November 15.

“Cops shoved their bicycles into the crowd.  . . .  If it had not been for my hero [Iraq Vet Caleb Walez] I would have been down on the ground and trampled,” Rainey told reporters.

In December, the Justice Department found reasonable cause to believe that Seattle PD engages in a pattern or practice of excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Oakland PD is currently under investigation for excessive use of force. NYPD is facing persistent calls for investigation of a stop and frisk policy that disproportionately targets Blacks and Latinos, while civil rights groups are calling for an investigation of NYPD’s monitoring of Muslims across the Northeast.

During a mid-November interview, Oakland mayor Jean Quan told the BBC that the crackdown on OWS was a coordinated effort involving the mayors of other major cities.

“I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment no longer in control by the people who started them,” said Ms. Quan.

In an article posted on the World Socialist Website, Andre Damon reported on November 17 that a, “spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Mayors told Mother Jones magazine Wednesday that the call Ms. Quan mentioned was one of numerous conference calls—which included mayors and top police brass—that focused on discussing “efforts cities have made to accommodate the demonstrators and maintain public health and safety,” a statement that the real Mother Jones, labor activist and organizer Mary Harris, would have dismissed as ludicrous.

Nationwide, OWS arrests number well over 6,000 according to published reports, but given that the co-ordinated campaign against OWS involves copious amounts of disinformation and propaganda, all corporate media reports about OWS are best viewed with skeptical eye.

Author and journalist Chris Hedges limned the national security state’s strategy to contain, disrupt, and marginalize insurgencies and popular movements such as OWS in a February 13 Truthdig article.

“Physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations to disrupt communication and organization. Dry up financial and material support. Create rival organizations … to discredit and purge the rebel leadership. Infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries. … Provoke the movement – or front groups acting in the name of the movement – to carry out actions such as vandalism and physical confrontations with the police that alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Invent atrocities and repugnant acts supposedly carried out by the movement and plant these stories in the media. Finally, offer up a political alternative,” wrote Hedges.

OWS is a popular nonviolent movement, one which has much, much more in common with the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. than with the violent tactics of Tupamaros of Uruguay, the Irish Republican Army, or the Weather Underground, but some in government are determined to destroy it and are using many of the same tools they would employ were OWS a terrorist insurgency.  That mistake may prove profoundly detrimental to what remains of civil liberties in the USA.

Some municipal law enforcement agencies have avoided violence in dealing with OWS citizen activists.  Iowa, a state with a long history of progressive politics and one that has perhaps the strongest antiwar movement in the nation, responded to OWS in ways that other states and cities might profitably examine.  After Republican governor Terry Branstad refused to extend a permit for an Occupy Des Moines (ODM) encampment on the state Capitol grounds, on October 9, Iowa State Patrol officers arrested more than 30 Occupiers who refused to leave.  Days later, Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie stepped in and offered ODM a city park on the opposite side of the Capitol complex.

“One of the original purposes of parks was for people to gather. We want you to feel like you can gather,” Cownie told ODM Occupiers on October 14. “I want my police force out chasing the bad guys and arresting criminals.”

The mayor’s administration and the Des Moines Police Department (DMPD) worked cooperatively with ODM for months, allowing the encampment to exist, inspecting the park regularly, talking with neighborhood residents, and respecting the rights of the Occupiers.

During November and December, as their plans for direct action during the weeks before the Iowa Caucuses advanced, Des Moines Catholic Workers and other experienced local peace and social justice activists worked with ODM Occupiers to conduct several nonviolence training sessions.

Kathleen McQuillen of the American Friends Service Committee in Des Moines, and Frank Cordaro of the Des Moines Catholic Worker facilitated a three-hour nonviolence training workshop at the Des Moines Valley Friends Meeting House on December 4.

“What we’ve got going for us is that we have collectively said to each other and to the world that, ‘We’re going to be nonviolent.  For this day, for this action, this group is going to be nonviolent.’  That empowers us,” Cordaro told activists during a small group session at Friends House.

“This is entry-level civil disobedience, there’s minimal risk.  I’m not saying that it’s insignificant, but it’s not that serious.  If we were taking on serious risk, we’d do a lot more than three hours training,” said the former priest whose anti-nuclear weapons and antiwar activism in the USA and in Europe spans decades and began long before he left the priesthood in 2003 after 18 years.

From their encampment at Stewart Square Park and rented space in a building in Des Moines’ East Village, ODM Occupiers, along with Catholic Workers, representatives of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, and members of several local churches and peace and justice organizations mounted a vigorous and sustained campaign of nonviolent direct action that involved several marches on and occupations of local banks and protests at both Democratic Party and Republican Party campaign events and candidate campaign headquarters during the run up to the Iowa Caucuses.  The Occupy the Iowa Caucuses coalition developed and maintained communications and cooperation with municipal law enforcement agencies in the Des Moines area, attracted over a hundred OWS movement activists from across the nation, conducted nonviolent direct actions, and staged a Peoples Caucus that attracted hundreds of activists, interested onlookers, and media personnel from around the world.

Between October 9 and January 3, local police forces made more than 100 Occupy-related arrests, and DMPD costs alone in regular and overtime pay for officers monitoring dozens of Occupy actions amounted to more than $75,000. But the Iowa Occupiers training in and commitment to Jesusonian/Gandhian/Kingian nonviolence proved remarkably successful.  No violent confrontations between municipal police officers and occupiers occurred – not even one.  Police officers respected the rights of Occupy activists, and Occupy activists cooperated peacefully with police.

That’s an accomplishment that all Iowans can be proud of.  It’s also a model that other American cities and states might explore and seek to emulate as spring approaches.

The OWS movement is evolving, and a continuing commitment to nonviolence is essential to its success.

Nonviolence, peaceful evolution rather than violent revolution, is what democracy looks like – when Americans work together for the common good during a crisis.

By David Green

I only recently learned of Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s trip to Israel this past summer (2011) for a ‘week-long educational mission where he sealed two important agreements and received briefings from high-ranking Israeli officials, academic experts and business leaders on topics ranging from high-tech development (read Motorola), energy, water conservation and environmentalism (sic) to disaster preparedness, Iran, and U.S.-Israel relations.’ This is reported on the website of Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. The reader is expected, of course, to find the high-minded and triumphant tone of this article to be unproblematic.

The article states: “The Governor’s educational visit was part of a JUF initiative that, for the past two decades, has brought influential leaders to Israel.” Quinn signed a “formal agreement on academic cooperation between Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to establish a wide-ranging partnership. The agreement will promote faculty and student exchanges, joint research, and other academic activities of mutual interest. The agreement greatly expands the existing relationship between the universities in the field of public health.”

Beyond principled opposition to such academic agreements between our public universities and those of the apartheid Jewish state, it’s important to note that the academic merit and social outcomes of such agreements are obviously limited by the political context that provokes fundamental opposition from advocates of social justice. In relation to Motorola, for example, it’s impossible to believe that there will be public discussion promoting the public interest regarding military applications in general or surveillance technology in particular.

Similarly, such an agreement cannot conceivably promote consideration of fundamental and historical water resource and environmental degradation issues pertaining to political conflict between Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. It’s also highly unlikely that the essentially political nature of such an academic agreement would allow or encourage researchers to address the public health concerns of Palestinians, either as citizens of Israel or in the occupied territories; nor would they likely address, for example, the conditions of African immigrants in Israel who find themselves increasingly despised and unwanted.

A biased and discriminatory political agenda, dictated and limited by Israeli state interests and U.S. hegemonic interests in the region, is thus inevitably part and parcel of such academic agreements. The public university and its scholarly and scientific reputation is commandeered and exploited by the Israel Lobby in order to serve and legitimize that agenda.

Beyond this particular “academic exchange,” my perspective is informed by the principles of the BDS movement and the challenges inevitably presented to the movement by the Israel Lobby’s incessant pressure on public officials and institutions at all levels. As a long-term resident of Illinois and employee of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), I have been a journalist and activist regarding the manner in which Jewish and Zionist institutions have come to occupy the putatively public space of our public university—clearly to the detriment of dignity and justice for the Palestinians, as well as informed discussion in a democratic and scholarly context of the Israel/Palestine issue.

The developments noted above constitute egregious extensions of the Zionist infrastructure that has been promoted by the Israel Lobby in state government in general and in public higher education in Illinois. I would hope that this opportunistic, outrageous, and cynical agreement between Governor Quinn and Israeli officials creates a critical mass of awareness and potential activism within and beyond the BDS movement in Illinois. I would hope to see a clear response to the manner in which the Lobby feels entitled to self-righteously promote—without objection—what are repugnant and sectarian political interests in state politics and higher education—disingenuously and transparently framed in terms of technological, scientific, and economic development.

From my perspective as a Jewish pro-Palestinian activist in Urbana-Champaign, I have observed two primary developments: first, the establishment of a privately-funded Program for Jewish Culture and Society two decades ago and its attendant moral emphasis on the Holocaust and Jewish victimization in general; second, the use of PJCS as an institutional and moral umbrella for an Israel Lobby-funded and baldly propagandistic “Israel Studies Project,” which has moreover been clearly racist in its exclusion of Palestinian Israelis from its purview.

Blatant conflicts of interest regarding PJCS in relation to the Israel Lobby were obvious from the start, and dovetail with Governor Quinn’s junket. The promoters of PJCS were two professors with prominent positions in local Jewish institutions—religious, secular, and Zionist. One professor, Michael Shapiro, is the father of Daniel Shapiro, current U.S. ambassador to Israel.

In 2004, Michael Shapiro worked closely with Michael Kotzin, JUF Executive Vice President, to fund the Israel Studies Project, part of a state-wide effort by the Israel Lobby at both public and private universities. Kotzin wrote in the Forward in 2004 that the “manner in which Israel and the Middle East are taught about in the nation’s university classrooms has increasingly come to the fore as one of the most difficult and far-reaching challenges facing the Jewish community.” In translation, this is to say that the Lobby needs to take serious measures to intervene in academia to promote Israel’s interests, in response to students who are increasingly enlightened regarding the plight of the Palestinians.

Kotzin, a long-time Lobby apparatchik in Chicago, accompanied Governor Quinn to Israel, commenting “It is particularly gratifying to be here with Gov. Quinn today when that partnership moves to a new level.”Quinn’s group was addressed in Israel by Ambassador Shapiro, who tellingly “called his address to the group ‘his first official duty’ after arriving the day before to assume his responsibilities as U.S. Ambassador to Israel.”

I would add that the Urbana campus has also procured, for the past two academic years, a visiting Jewish-Israeli professor of Israel Studies whose position is by no means disinterestedly funded by the Schusterman Family Foundation and the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise(AICE). According to the Jewish Virtual Library, “The aim of the program is to present American students with a broad understanding of Israel’s history, society, politics, culture and relations with its neighbors and the broader international community.” In plainer language, the aim of this program—as of the Israel Studies Project at UIUC and the broader Israel Studies movement in general—is to promote a sanitized version of Zionism, Israel, and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. The current visiting professor at the Urbana Campus, Rhona Seidelman, has well-served this purpose.

It is unacceptable that a visiting professor essentially hired by the Israel Lobby is charged with teaching the one class offered at UIUC on the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Perhaps needless to say, UIUC has never hired a professor of Palestinian or Arab background specifically in relation to teaching and research regarding the topic of Israel/Palestine. Regarding any other oppressed minority, it would be unheard of for faculty members to be bought and paid for by interests promoting and justifying such oppression. But in the case of the Israel Lobby on campus, it is business as usual. At UIUC and other campuses in Illinois, the Lobby has de facto attempted to limit the institutional space within which Palestinian perspectives can be understood and legitimized.

The political proficiency and resources of the Israel Lobby in Illinois and elsewhere present formidable challenges to pro-Palestinian and BDS activists. Nevertheless, popular support for Israel, including among Jews and on campuses, is at an all-time low. The recent and welcome radicalization of the notion of “occupy,” combined with the principles and goals of the BDS movement, suggests assertive and persistent responses to Lobby business as usual on campus and in state government.

Article courtesy The Palestine Chronicle on-line

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

Fifteen delegates of a coalition of Iowa peace and social justice organizations visited the Des Moines office of Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) on January 18 to ask the senator to take a firm stand against a war with Iran.

“Frankly, sir, we are alarmed,” Jeff Weiss, executive director of the Catholic Peace Ministry, told Harkin aide Tom Buttry during a telephone conference call.

Weiss expressed deep concern that Harkin had joined his 99 US Senate colleagues in voting for a punitive sanctions bill that targets Iran’s oil exports and the country’s central bank.  Weiss pointed out to Buttry that that former National Security Council analyst and principal White House aide on Iran Gary Sick has described the new sanctions as “an act of war.”

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which President Obama signed into law on December 31, included an amendment authored by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) that would place crippling economic sanctions on financial institutions that do business with the Iran Central Bank. The amendment unanimously passed the U.S. Senate in December by a vote of 100-0.

Weiss also noted that the Senate voted in favor of the harsher sanctions legislation in defiance of the Obama administration’s desire for latitude in negotiations.

“We are here to ask Senator Harkin to speak publicly about the need for diplomacy with Iran and to support the Obama administration’s position as much as it is about diplomacy,” said Weiss.

Dr. David Drake, representing Iowa Physicians for Social Responsibility (IPSR), read from a letter authored by the organization.

“Dear Senator, in the name of sanity – economic, psychological, and environmental – please speak out against the current war mongering against Iran.  The USA cannot afford to risk a war with Iran.  The US citizenry is war weary and economically frustrated.  The potential costs and consequences of a war far outweigh any imagined benefits.  We all know full well that Iran is not a nuclear threat.

IPSR called on Harkin to work to de-escalate tensions and promote peace in the Middle East and Southwest Asia and to work toward resolving the very real economic and environmental challenges confronting Americans at home.

Eloise Cranke of the Methodist Federation for Social Action called on Harkin and all members of the US Senate and other government officials “to immediately work with all deliberate speed toward a peaceful resolution of nuclear issues,” “to reject any first strike action by US armed forces anywhere,” and to, “pursue these peacemaking strategies with particular regard toward Iran.”

MFSA called on Harkin to “exercise your leadership in creating avenues of communication between the US and Iran in order to prevent a dangerous escalation of the current tensions.”

Mark Rosenbury of Plymouth Congregational Church Peace and Social Justice Committee told Harkin’s aide that he his wife Janet, “have seen the futility of the Vietnam War and the most recent Iraq War and we just hope that it doesn’t get repeated.”

Author and retired Drake University economics professor, Ismael Hossein-zada, a native of Iran who has lived and worked in the USA all of his adult life, read portions of a memo to President Obama authored by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of military, intelligence and foreign service officers: “We are seeing a replay of the ‘Iraq WMD threat.’ … The Israel lobby has been beating the drums for us to attack Iran for years. … Another long war is not in America’s or Israel’s interests, whatever Israel’s apologists claim.”

“I must just add one personal note.  Senator Harkin, because of your position on the [Appropriations Defense and State Foreign Operations] sub-committees, you have a unique opportunity to help prevent another calamitous war, probably regional and perhaps even global, and I hope and pray that you will not miss that opportunity,” said Hossein-zadeh.

Bob Brammer of the Catholic Peace Ministry and STAR*PAC noted that Harkin has often in the past been “a drum major for peace and human rights.”

Brammer called on Harkin to speak against war with Iran and to push for diplomacy.

“We need you now, Senator Harkin,” said Brammer.

Gilbert Landolt of the Des Moines Chapter 163 of Veterans for Peace called on Harkin, “a veteran himself, to stand with us on this and do whatever you can” to prevent a war with Iran.

Sherry Hutchison of the Des Moines Valley Friends Meeting criticized the recent sanctions provision passed by the Senate on the grounds that it violates the separation of powers doctrine.

“There are so many hawks in Congress.  I don’t know why they think perpetual war is something we ought to be doing,” said Hutchison, who also called on Harkin to speak out publicly against war with Iran.

Carolyn Uhlenhake-Walker of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)’s Des Moines chapter called on Harkin to ask the Senate to work to open a channel of communication with Iran.

“Not since 1979 have we had direct communication with Iran, and its time that we started talking about ways to work this out diplomatically,” said Uhlenhake-Walker.

Ed Bloomer represented the Des Moines Catholic Worker and Chapter 163 of Veterans for Peace.

“We believe it’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.  The money spent on arms that kill and maim could be used to rehab infrastructure here in the US and to address the problems we have here in inner cities.  We don’t want a war with Iran,” said Bloomer.

Buttry responded to the concerns expressed saying, in part, “As far as the Iran sanctions vote goes, let me say that Sen. Harkin did vote for the Iran sanctions amendment to the defense bill.  He ended up voting against the defense bill for different reasons.  While he is not particularly enthusiastic about Iran sanctions, I think the Senate vote was a function of, there had to be some kind of reaction to the increasing belligerence of Iran.”

Buttry mentioned a “violent crackdown by Iran’s leadership in the wake of an openly questionable election,” said Iran had “kicked IAEA inspectors out of Iran,” and spoke of Iranian nuclear facilities, “that aren’t under IAEA inspection.”

“While they’re not refining uranium up to a level for nuclear weapons yet, they’re refining it well beyond what one needs for a civilian facility,” said Buttry.

“The logical explanation is that they are working toward weaponizing uranium, not to mention the assassination plot of a Saudi diplomat in the United States.  They were planning to use force in the United States,” said Buttry.

“We have the international community on our side this time,” said Buttry.

Buttry characterized the situation as “a multilateral effort to deal with a country that is being openly belligerent to the entire international community.”

Buttry noted that Rick Santorum and other Republican primary candidates have engaged in heated campaign rhetoric, but, he said he could not think of a single circumstance in which Harkin would support a full on invasion of Iran.

His listeners in Harkin’s Des Moines office seemed to be unimpressed by his response.

“Even if everything you said had a kernel of truth to it, we are still in a situation where it is necessary for the United States of America to talk to Iran, because we are in a situation where there could be an incident and a shooting war, just like that,” responded Weiss.

“The Leon Panettas and the Robert Gates of the world are warning us against this, but it could be too late,” said Weiss.

Buttry was noncommittal regarding Harkin speaking or writing publicly or working in the Senate to counter the hawkish efforts of Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who have announced plans for additional punitive legislation against Iran, but he agreed to relay the delegation’s concerns to Harkin.

Also participating in the delegation were Charles Day of Des Moines, Bill and Karen Stansbery of Ames, Karla Hansen of Clive, and John De Mott of Des Moines.

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

Chanting “Put People First!” and “Where’s Mitt?” about one hundred Occupy the Caucus activists descended on former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign headquarters in Des Moines on the afternoon on December 28 and found that campaign officials had temporarily closed the office and locked the doors.

“Let’s check out all the exits and block ’em all,” shouted Frank Cordaro, a former priest, founder of the Des Moines Catholic Worker (DMCW) community, and long time peace and social justice activist.

The group then demanded that Romney release his federal tax returns as other candidates have and return the more than $61,000 they said his campaign has received from Well Fargo Bank and the bank’s employees.

“The corrosive influence of big money in politics has undermined the democratic principles of the Iowa Caucuses.  The whole concept of civil discourse is impossible when the issues and the candidates are hand-picked by the giant, unaccountable corporations that control our economy, our political system, and the mainstream media,” said Stephen Toothman of the Occupy Des Moines media committee.

“Direct action street protests are an effective way to advance Iowa values and supplement conventional forms of political participation, including voting,” said Toothman.

Occupy Des Moines, the DMCW community, and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (IowaCCI), an Iowa social justice organization, were prominent organizers of the Occupy the Caucus campaign, which was designed to open up the public discussion and put the focus on the issues that matter to most Americans, said Cordaro.  Cordaro, Toothman, and others repeatedly stressed that their actions would not interfere with Iowa Caucus voting.

Cordaro took a teaching role in three nonviolence training sessions organized for Occupy the Caucus volunteers during the planning period in the months before the campaign began.

Arianna Norris-Landry, a paralegal, came to Iowa from St. Louis, where she is a member of Occupy St. Louis.

I’m a legal observer and a peace marshal.  I’m never directly involved unless there is violence, said Norris-Landry.

“As a legal observer, I’m here today to see that Occupy stays nonviolent and that the cops stay nonviolent,” said Norris-Landry.

“Everybody here today knows this action is nonviolent.  Some have made up their minds to risk arrest.  They’re not looking to be arrested.  All they’re doing is asking to go inside a candidate’s headquarters and air their grievances.  That’s not illegal, but they’ve been locked out.  This is not a mob with pitchforks or guns.  All these people have is their voices,” said Norris-Landry.

“When you become a candidate, you involve yourself in public discourse, and that means you have to listen as well as talk.  That’s what they taught me in civics class, and in my legal classes that’s what they taught me.  A candidate is supposed to be responsive.  We have a representative government,” said Norris-Landry.  “Why doesn’t [Romney] listen to us?”

Bryan Hynes of Bronx, NY, said he was participating in the Occupy the Caucus campaign to protest the unfair distribution of wealth.

“The inequality is not accidental.  Our government is controlled by financial interests.  The 99 percent are not being represented by the government.  We’re told that if the interests of the rich are put first, we will get some benefit, but our experience, our lived experience, is that this does not happen,” said Hynes.

“I came here to visit my in-laws for Christmas.  I drove half way across the country and I am happy to lend my voice to this campaign,” said Haynes.

Former State Representative Ed Fallon, host of the Fallon Forum which airs on 98.3 WOW-fm and a prominent figure in Iowa peace and social justice circles, said that none of the candidates have seriously addressed the concerns raised by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“There is no candidate with stronger corporate connections than Mitt Romney, and he needs to be held accountable.  His policies would continue to exacerbate the crisis in our country, and we need to remind people of that,” said Fallon.

John Frankling of Des Moines connected big money in politics and the economic crisis with the military industrial complex.

“We can’t afford to have everybody’s back around the world.  The time of the U.S. policing the world is over.  We’re broke.  It’s done.  If it keeps going on like it has been with our military we’ll end up like Russia,” said Frankling.

“We need to end these wars and all these military bases around the world and focus on what is going on here at home,” said Frankling.

When police arrived to confer with Romney campaign officials, the crowd, which had been chanting, “We are unstoppable; another world is possible!” took up a different chant. “Police need a raise!  Police need a raise!” shouted the activists.

Occupy Des Moines and the Occupy the Caucus campaign, in cooperation with various Iowa police departments, have challenged public perceptions about relations between Occupy movements and police departments across the nation.  In contrast to actions in New York, Chicago, Oakland, and other cities, there has been little or no violence between municipal law enforcement authorities in Iowa and Iowa Occupiers.  Though over 100 arrests have been made related to Occupy actions in the Des Moines area since October, with about half of the arrests occurring during the Occupy the Caucus campaign, and though the DMPD alone has spent more than $75,000 in responding to Occupy Des Moines actions, Occupy representatives and police spokespersons alike have commented publicly on the effectiveness of communications between Occupy and law enforcement agencies.

David Goodner, an organizer with Iowa CCI, was among the Occupy the Caucus activists who met with representatives from several local police departments at a pre-protest meeting to go over the plans for the action at Romney headquarters.

“We have open lines of communication.  They have my cell phone number, and I have their cell phone numbers,” said Des Moines Police Department (DMPD) Sgt. Chris Scott.

After Romney campaign officials demanded that the activists leave the property, DMPD officers spoke with the Occupiers and explained that they would be arrested if they did not leave.  DMPD officers then arrested and took into custody those who chose not to leave voluntarily.

Katie Rockey, 19, of Des Moines, Anthony Willhide, 25, of Plaquemines Parish, LA, Ed Bloomer, 64, of Des Moines, Nathan Harrington, 39, of Des Moines, the Rev. Peter Dougherty, 77, of Lansing, MI, Jalan Crossland, 41, of Ten Sleep, WY, and Jennifer Marsh, 38, of Iowa City were arrested, transported, and cited for misdemeanor trespassing at Romney campaign headquarters.

As police arrested the seven protesters, Sgt. Scott told reporters, “We’ve had an excellent relationship with the Occupy Des Moines folk.  If there’s any concerns they call us, and vice versa.”

While arrests were in progress at Romney headquarters, three activists slipped quietly away and walked about a block to a nearby Wells Fargo Bank.  The three were able to enter the bank before bank officials locked the doors when the main group of the Occupy the Caucus activists, numbering about 75, arrived a few minutes later along with dozens of reporters and broadcast media teams.

Inside the bank, Megan Felt, Rene Espeland, and Kathy Molitor presented bank officers with a letter demanding that Wells Fargo stop contributing thousands of dollars to political campaigns and start paying a fair share of taxes.

As the crowd gathered at the bank, The Independent Monitor approached a couple in a late model SUV as they were conducting a transaction at the bank’s drive-through.  Asked, through the open driver’s side window, “Any thoughts about this protest here at the bank today?”  Brenda Mouw of Des Moines responded saying, “Everybody has a right to free speech, and I think the people have a right to have their voices be heard.  It’s the American way.”

Occupy Des Moines activist Ross Grooters was unable to get into the bank to close his account.  Grooters walked up to the drive-through window, presented his bank card, and attempted to close his account there while mic-checking the crowd.

“The reason I am closing my account,” shouted Grooters, “is that Wells Fargo is corrupting my democracy!”

“They donated more money than the average American makes in a year to just one presidential candidate.  I can no longer do business with a company that makes their voice more important than my voice,” shouted Grooters.

As the crowd outside shouted, “Police need a raise!” and “Banks got bailed out – We got sold out!” inside the bank DMPD officers arrested Felt, 24, of Des Moines, Espeland, 50, of Des Moines; and Molitor, 54, of Cazenovia, WI.

Before they were transported and cited for misdemeanor trespassing, the three were able to speak to reporters.

“Mitt Romney and Wells Fargo are both symbolic of the corporate takeover of our political system and we demand that Romney return $61,500 in campaign contributions he took from Wells Fargo PAC, employees, and family members of employees in the 2012 election cycle to date, and that both Romney and Wells Fargo agree to full tax disclosure because we don’t think either one of them pays their fair share of taxes,” said Felt.

The mood of the direct action events at Romney’s campaign headquarters and at the bank might accurately be described as festive.  DMPD officers were courteous and respectful of the rights of the activists as they enforced the law and made 10 arrests.

As the action at the bank concluded, this reporter chanced to see that as he departed Cordaro paused momentarily to shake hands with a supervising DMPD officer.  Both men were smiling.

If there is a moral lesson in the Occupy the Caucuses campaign and a civics lesson for the nation, perhaps it is this: At the end of the day, a good-faith commitment to nonviolence is well worth the effort all around.

By Philip Giraldi

Mark Twain is credited with saying that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Today’s United States is often compared to other historic nations, whether at their prime or about to decline and fall depending on one’s own political perspective. Neoconservatives frequently eulogize Washington as a new Rome, promising a worldwide empire without end carried on the back of a Pentagon bristling with advanced weaponry. Other observers also cite Rome but are rather more sanguine, recalling how in the 5th century the empire failed dramatically and fell to barbarian hordes. Still others note the fate of the British Empire, which came apart in the wake of the Second World War, or the Soviets, whose collapse was brought about by 50 years of unsustainable military spending.

But the historical analogy that appears to be most apposite for post-9/11 Washington is that of the Weimar Republic. To be sure, any suggestion that the United States might be following the same course as Germany in the years that led to Nazism must be pursued with caution because few Americans want to believe that the descent into such extremism is even possible in the world’s most venerable constitutional republic. But consider the following: both the United States and Weimar Germany had constitutions in which checks and balances were integrated to maintain a multi-party system, the rule of law, and individual liberties. Both countries were on the receiving end of acts of terrorism that produced a dramatic and violent reaction against the presumed perpetrators of the crimes, so both quickly adopted legislation that abridged many constitutional rights and empowered the head of state to react decisively to further threats. The media fell in line, concerned that criticism would be unpatriotic.

Both the U.S. and Germany possessed politically powerful military-industrial complexes that had a vested interest in encouraging a militarized response to the threats and highly polarized internal politics that enabled politicians to obtain advantage by exploiting national security concerns. Both countries experienced severe financial crises and printed fiat currency to pay the bills, and both had jurists and political supporters who argued that in time of crisis the head of state must be granted special executive authority that transcends the limits placed by the constitution.

The Weimar Republic, which replaced rule by the German emperor in the aftermath of World War I, was a liberal democracy in the 19th-century sense, which means it had a constitution that guaranteed individual and group rights, multi-party systems, and free elections at regular intervals. It took its name from the city of Weimar, where the constitution was drawn up in a national assembly convened in 1919. From the start, Weimar was plagued by a failure to create a sustainable political culture because of the high level of polarization and violence instigated by both the major and fringe parties, even though the relatively moderate Social Democrats were normally dominant.

Adolph Hitler became German chancellor in January 1933. The chancellor was the head of government, but the head of state was President and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg was a hero of the First World War, and he despised the dangerous parvenu Hitler but foolishly thought he could control him. The National Socialist Party was, however, still a minority party in parliament with 33% of the popular vote when Hitler took charge, holding only three out of 11 cabinet positions. Strong socialist, Catholic, and communist parties actively contested the Nazis’ agenda. The media reflected the political divisions, with many papers opposing Hitler and his government.

Hitler benefited from the political paralysis of Weimar, which had forced his Reich chancellor predecessors to rule by presidential decree to bypass the logjam in parliament, but he could not actually legislate in that fashion and did not have a free ride. There was considerable resistance to his policies. All of that changed, however, when the seat of parliament in Berlin, the Reichstag, was burned down on Feb. 27, 1933. It was an act of terrorism that shocked the nation, and it was eventually attributed to an addled Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, though it was almost certainly carried out by the Nazis themselves. Hitler convinced President Hindenburg to sign a “Reichstag Fire Decree” on the following day, canceling the constitutional guarantees of habeas corpus and freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, and the privacy of communications. It authorized police search and seizure without any judicial warrant. It was no coincidence that the fire took place two weeks before parliamentary elections in which the Nazis, who beat and otherwise intimidated opponents and “monitored” the polling stations, won nearly 44% of the votes. The opposition, including the technically illegal communists, took 42% and Hitler was denied his majority, but he arrested socialist opponents, barred the communists, and was eventually able to form a government with his parliamentary allies.

Cajoling the Catholic parties to vote with him, Hitler subsequently passed the Enabling Act, which gave him the authority to ignore parliament and pass laws by decree. The full name of the Enabling Act was, in English, the “Act for the Removal of Distress from People and Reich.” Aided by leading jurists like Carl Schmitt, who argued that a powerful executive could ignore restraints imposed by bureaucrats and constitutions when required to cope with a “crisis,” and supported by conservatives and the army, Hitler quickly moved to consolidate power. The communist and socialist parties as well as any “new” parties were made illegal. In 1934, upon the death of Hindenburg, Hitler assumed the powers of the presidency, and the army began to swear allegiance to him rather than to the constitution. Germany became a dictatorship, and the rest is history. The March 1933 election was the last free election in Germany until the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949.

Fast forward 68 years. George W. Bush was president in 2001, a year after one of the most polarizing elections in U.S. history. There had been a gradual aggrandizement of the power of the U.S. presidency relative to the other branches of government since the Civil War, but most observers would have conceded that the constitutional separation of executive from legislative from judiciary remained largely intact. All of that was to change when the Twin Towers went down and the Pentagon was struck on 9/11. Though the Bush administration apparently had no hand in those events, the result was not too dissimilar to the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. A number of Bush Pentagon appointees, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, quickly mobilized to exploit the terror attack and pass legislation that would empower the White House and permit a massive military campaign directed against a number of countries that had been targeted for “regime change,” mostly in the Middle East. As a result, Iraq was eventually bombed and invaded even though it did not threaten the United States.

The first anti-terror legislation to pass was the USA PATRIOT Act, the full title of which is the “The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” a euphemism oddly reminiscent of Hitler’s Enabling Act. The PATRIOT Act became law six weeks after the fall of the Twin Towers and was followed by the PATRIOT Act II of 2006. Together, the two laws diminished constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association, freedom from illegal search, habeas corpus, prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and freedom from the illegal seizure of private property. The First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments in the Bill of Rights were all discarded or abridged in the rush to make it easier to investigate, sometimes torture, and jail both foreigners and American citizens.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) followed, creating military tribunals for the trying of “unlawful enemy combatants,” including American citizens. Unlike in a civil or criminal court, the accused needs only a two-thirds vote by the commission members present to be convicted, resulting in a much higher conviction rate. The act suspends habeas corpus and Geneva Convention protections and permits the indefinite jailing of suspects in a military prison without charges or access to a lawyer. Hearsay or even information obtained overseas during torture can be used to obtain the conviction, while detainees do not have access to any classified information being used against them and cannot cross examine or even know the identity of witnesses.

Concurrent with the PATRIOT and Military Commission Acts, advocates of torture also emerged in Washington, not unlike the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s justification of the essentially lawless “Fuhrer State.” Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee declared torture legal because the president has the authority to do anything he deems necessary in time of crisis, the same argument that Hitler’s apologists made in discarding Weimar’s rule of law.

President Barack Obama has expanded the Bush portfolio, repeatedly citing state-secrets privileges to prevent any legal challenges while authorizing the assassination of U.S. citizens overseas based on suspicion, carrying out acts of war against countries with which Washington is not at war, and now, finally, signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which provides for indefinite military detention of anyone anywhere for any reason, including U.S. citizens in the United States, because the “whole world is the battlefield.” Did Hitler behave similarly in contravention of the Weimar constitution? He sure did. And if the expression “global war on terror” had been around in 1933, he likely would have used it auf Deutsch.

Sadly, on the verge of a new year, it is hard to argue that Washington in 2011 is much different from Weimar and Berlin in 1933. Last week, a man in Boston was convicted and sent to prison because he had traveled to Yemen and apparently wanted to join a terrorist group. He didn’t actually join the group; he just wanted to do it. So the age of the thought crime has arrived, something that even Hitler’s house jurist might have thought preposterous. Though we are not yet at the point where the president can declare opposition political parties illegal, Newt Gingrich might entertain the possibility if he were in charge. Pledges of personal loyalty to the leader, disenfranchisement of ethnic and religious minorities, and the burning of books by government fiat have not yet occurred either, but if one parses some of the rhetoric coming out of leading Republican presidential aspirants it is not inconceivable Muslim citizens will be subject to special security monitoring while a bonfire day featuring tracts on global warming and Darwinism might join Dixie Chicks CDs and french fries on the destroy-on-sight list.

While I jest to a certain extent, the power coupled with lack of accountability that has been assumed by the White House should be regarded as a deadly serious matter by every American citizen. If you think Weimar Republic Germany is a long time ago and far away so it can’t happen here, you are wrong. It can happen here, and unless something is done to stop it, it almost surely will happen here. It is happening already.

Article courtesy Philip Giraldi

Paul Pillar, former CIA official, is one of several high-profile critics of Israel

With Hamas and Fatah meeting this week in Cairo, reconciliation between the rival Palestinian political parties is likely only a matter of time. Official U.S. policy holds that Hamas is only a terrorist entity, and any agreement between the two factions jeopardizes continued U.S. aid.  There is reason to believe, however, that more flexible, productive positions will be expressed in the U.S. media. Slowly but unmistakably, space is opening up among the commentariat for new, critical ideas about Israel and its relationship to the United States.

Article courtesy Salon; Photo of Paul Pillar courtesy Rolling Stone