oBOMBa Decried as a War-Criminal @ Peace Rally

Thousands rally to pull troops from 2 war zones

By MATTHEW BARAKAT
Associated Press Writer

updated 1:04 a.m. ET, Sun., March. 21, 2010

WASHINGTON - Thousands of protesters — many directing their anger squarely at President Barack Obama — marched through the nation's capital Saturday to urge immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

At least eight people, including activist Cindy Sheehan, were arrested by U.S. Park Police at the end of the march, after laying coffins at a fence outside the White House. Friday marked the seventh anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

"Arrest that war criminal!" Sheehan shouted outside the White House before her arrest, referring to Obama.

At a rally before the march, Sheehan asked whether "the honeymoon was over with that war criminal in the White House" — an apparent reference to Obama — prompting moderate applause.

The protesters defied orders to clear the sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House and park police say they face charges of failure to obey a lawful order.

Activist Ralph Nader told thousands who gathered in Lafayette Park across from the White House that Obama has essentially continued the policies of the Bush administration, and it was foolish to have thought otherwise.

"He's kept Guantanamo open, he's continued to use indefinite detention," Nader said. The only real difference, he said is that "Obama's speeches are better."

Others were more conciliatory toward Obama. Shirley Allan of Silver Spring, Md., carried a sign that read, "President Obama We love you but we need to tell you! Your hands are getting bloody!! Stop it now."

Allan thought it was going too far to call Obama a war criminal but said she is deeply disappointed that the conflicts are continuing.

"He has to know it's unacceptable," Allan said. "I am absolutely disappointed."

The protest organized by Act Now to Stop War and Racism or ANSWER drew a smaller crowd than the tens of thousands who marched in 2006 and 2007. Protests in cities around the country also had far fewer participants than in the past.

San Francisco's rally brought out Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers study of the Vietnam War and is the subject of the recent documentary film, "The Most Dangerous Man in America." He likened the protest and others like it around the country Saturday to a day of demonstrations organized against the conflict in Vietnam in 1969.

"They thought it had no effect," he told the crowd in San Francisco, referring to the 1969 protesters. "They were wrong."

Protesters in Washington stopped at the offices of military contractor Halliburton — where they tore apart an effigy of former Vice President and Halliburton Chief Executive Dick Cheney — the Mortgage Bankers Association and The Washington Post offices.

Anna Berlinrut, of South Orange, N.J., was one of a number of protesters who have children who have served in Iraq, and said her son supports her protests.

"If there were a draft, we'd have a million people out here," Berlinrut said when asked about the turnout. The exact number of protesters was unclear, as D.C. authorities do not give out crowd estimates. Organizers estimated the march, which stretched for several blocks, at 10,000.

Despite the arrests, the protest was peaceful. At the outset, police closed a portion of the sidewalk in front of the White House fence after protesters tried to use mud and large stencils to spell out "Iraq veterans against the war."

Once the sidewalk was closed, the protesters stenciled the message on the street using mud they had carried in buckets to the rally.

Sheehan has been a vocal critic of the war since her 21-year-old son Casey was killed in Iraq in April 2004. She staged a prolonged demonstration in 2005 outside former President George W. Bush's ranch near Crawford, Texas.

Fellow anti-war activist and attorney Stephen Pearcy of Sacramento keeps in touch and supports Sheehan in her efforts. Sheehan lived with his family for a year while traveling to peace events.

Pearcy said in an e-mail that in the last decade, the U.S. government has a widespread pattern of violating the constitutional rights of peaceful anti-war protesters, arresting them, then not pressing charges.

"We've essentially become a country of restrictions rather than a country of freedoms," he said.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark also spoke at the D.C. rally, calling on the Justice Department to investigate the officials who launched the Iraq war.

In New York City, a few dozen enthusiastic protesters gathered near a military recruiting station in Times Square, though they were far outnumbered by disinterested tourists.

A group of older women calling themselves the Raging Grannies sang, "The country is broke, this war is a joke." Four demonstrators evoked images of the U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by dressing in orange uniforms and wearing black hoods.

Liz Proefriedt, a retired Roman Catholic nun, held up a banner that read, "Bread not bombs."

"It's sad that a lot of people did not come out for this protest," said Kathy Hoang, of Manchester, Conn. "People are getting used to the war, and don't bother even to think about it anymore."

In Los Angeles, hundreds chanted anti-war slogans and carried mock tombstones, and several hundred gathered in San Francisco. The Los Angeles march, which was under a mile, was to culminate with a rally in front of the famed Grauman's Chinese Theater.

"We want to see the troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq," said Corazon Esguerra with ANSWER. "We want all the troops wherever they are to come back."

___

Associated Press writers Verena Dobnik from New York, Noaki Schwartz from Los Angeles and Sudhin Thanawala of San Francisco contributed to this report.



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35960726/ns/politics/

On this Day in History, Remembering a Great Peace-Warrior

In 1922, Mahatma Gandhi was sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience against the British rulers of India.

The Video the US Military DOES NOT Want U 2 C!

Click on title above to see it

Osama's Son Talks about His Father, Peace

Click on title above for vid

War of Nerves

Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda


By Jonathan B. Tucker

War of Nerves is a detailed history for the general reader of the discovery, development, proliferation, and control of nerve agents such as Tabun, Sarin, Soman, and VX, the most lethal class of chemical weapons. These supertoxic poisons have no peaceful uses and, when inhaled or absorbed through the skin, are lethal in tiny amounts by disrupting the operation of the nervous system.

First discovered accidentally during the 1930s by industrial chemists in Germany conducting pesticide research, the nerve agents Tabun and Sarin were developed into chemical weapons and stockpiled by the Nazi regime. Fortunately, Hitler did not order their use during World War II because German intelligence believed--incorrectly--that the United States and the Soviet Union had developed similar weapons. After the war, the victorious Allies competed among themselves for the secrets of the Nazi nerve agent program. In the early 1950s, British industrial scientists accidentally discovered a second generation of nerve agents that were even more toxic than Sarin and were dubbed "V agents" because of their venomous (skin-penetrating) properties. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union pursued a chemical arms race in which they produced and stockpiled various nerve agents in the thousands of tons.

Beginning in the 1960s, the technology, materials, and know-how needed to manufacture nerve agents spread to the Middle East and other zones of conflict in the developing world. During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the first country to employ nerve agents on a large scale, initially against Iranian troops and then against its own Kurdish minority. In the early 1990s, the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo acquired the capability to produce nerve agents, ushering in a new era of chemical terrorism. On March 20, 1995, Aum members released a dilute solution of Sarin on the Tokyo subway, killing twelve people, injuring about a thousand, and terrifying millions. Today, al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups are seeking to acquire nerve agents, even as the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) banning the development, possession, and use of chemical arms is being implemented by some 175 member-states. Thus, the world is at a crossroads that could lead either to the further proliferation of these heinous weapons or to their ultimate abolition.

By illuminating the little-known history of nerve agents, War of Nerves provides important insights into current issues, including the 2003 Iraq War and the ongoing threat of chemical terrorism. Written in a lively narrative style, the book contains new historical information about the Soviet Union's secret development of "third-generation" nerve agents called Novichoks and the former U.S., British, and French nerve agent programs. War of Nerves is based on extensive research with primary sources, including declassified U.S. government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act; archives in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France; and interviews with individuals formerly involved in the U.S., British, and Soviet chemical weapons programs.

The author, Jonathan B. Tucker, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow specializing in chemical and biological weapons in the Washington, D.C. office of the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS). Before joining the CNS staff in March 1996, he served as an arms control specialist with the Department of State, the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where he worked on preparations for the entry into force of the Chemical Weapons Convention. In February 1995, he was a United Nations biological weapons inspector in Iraq. Dr. Tucker is the author of Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), which the Washington Post named a "best book" of 2001, and the editor of Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons (MIT Press, 2000).


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter Summaries


Prologue: "Live-Agent Training."
Learning to fight on a chemical battlefield, U.S. soldiers wearing gas masks and protective suits perform various tasks inside a sealed chamber contaminated with lethal amounts of nerve agents.

Chapter 1: "The Chemistry of War."
A vivid description of the advent of gas warfare in 1915 during the second battle of Ypres in World War I.

Chapter 2: "IG Farben."
German industrial chemist Gerhard Schrader, developing new pesticides, accidentally discovers the first supertoxic nerve agent, Tabun.

Chapter 3: "Perverted Science."
The Nazi regime develops Tabun and a related compound--Sarin--into chemical weapons, constructs large-scale plants for their production, and debates whether or not to use them in combat.

Chapter 4: "Twilight of the Gods."
As the Allied armies invade the Reich, Hitler orders the evacuation of his nerve-agent stockpile to prepare for a bloody last stand in the Bavarian Alps.

Chapter 5: "Fight for the Spoils."
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the four victorious Allies compete for the secrets of the Nazi nerve agent program.

Chapter 6: "Research and Development."
In 1948, Col. Charles Loucks, an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, recruits German scientists to assist with the U.S. production of Sarin and visits the French chemical testing site in the Algerian desert.

Chapter 7: "Building the Stockpile."
The United States and Britain both plan to mass-produce Sarin, but only the United States follows through.

Chapter 8: "Chemical Arms Race."
The Soviet Union begins to produce nerve agents, and the British conduct a Sarin experiment in which a young soldier dies.

Chapter 9: "Agent Venomous."
The superpowers develop and mass-produce V-agents, a new generation of nerve agents of extraordinary potency.

Chapter 10: "Yemen and After."
Nerve agents spread to the developing world, including their suspected use by Egypt during the Yemen Civil War (1963-67).

Chapter 11: "Incident at Skull Valley."
An open-air test of VX nerve agent at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah in 1968 goes awry, killing 6,000 sheep and dealing a major blow to the U.S. chemical weapons program.

Chapter 12: "New Fears."
Advanced Soviet chemical-defense equipment discovered in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War provokes a U.S. response, and the Iraqi chemical weapons program gets under way.

Chapter 13: "Binary Debate."
The U.S. Congress debates the acquisition of advanced "binary" chemical weapons, Iraq employs nerve agents in its war against Iran, and the Soviet Union develops a new generation of nerve agents called Novichoks.

Chapter 14: "Silent Spread."
The United States begins production of binary weapons, the superpowers make progress on chemical arms control, and Saddam Hussein employs chemical weapons in a terror campaign against the rebellious Iraqi Kurds.

Chapter 15: "Peace and War."
Iraq threatens to use chemical weapons during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, leading to the post-war destruction of its arsenal by UN weapons inspectors and giving impetus to the chemical arms control talks in Geneva, Switzerland.

Chapter 16: "Whistleblower."
A Soviet chemical-weapons scientist reveals the existence of the secret Novichok development program, leading to his arrest and trial; international pressure eventually results in his release.

Chapter 17: "Tokyo Subway."
In March 1995, a Japanese doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo releases Sarin on the Tokyo subway, ushering in a new type of terrorism.

Chapter 18: "The Emerging Threat."
Even as the Chemical Weapons Convention negotiations in Geneva reach the "endgame," nerve agents proliferate in the Middle East and Al-Qaeda collaborates with Sudan to acquire deadly V-agents.

Epilogue: "Towards Abolition."
Is chemical disarmament today a glass half-full or half-empty? Is the ultimate abolition of nerve agents an impossible dream?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

tp://cns.miis.edu/books/nerves.htm

No More Jesus Rifles for U.S. Military

No More Jesus Rifles

After ABC News Report, Trijicon Announces Plan to Remove Bible Codes from Gun Sights Provided to U.S. Military
By LUIS MARTINEZ, JOSEPH RHEE and MARK SCHONE

Trijicon, the gunsight maker that has imprinted Bible verse numbers on its scopes, has announced that it will no longer imprint the verses on the sides of scopes intended for the U.S. military, and will also provide clients with the kits to remove the Bible verse numbers from existing scopes.

An ABC News report earlier this week revealed that the Michigan-based company, which has a contract to provide up to 800,000 scopes to the U.S. military, prints references to New Testament chapters and verses in code next to the model numbers of its scopes. The scopes are used by the U.S. Marine Corps and Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by U.S. allies in those countries, and for the training of Afghan and Iraqi troops.

"Trijicon has proudly served the U.S. military for more than two decades, and our decision to offer to voluntarily remove these references is both prudent and appropriate," said Stephen Bindon, Trijicon president and CEO in a statement. "We want to thank the Department of Defense for the opportunity to work with them and will move as quickly as possible to provide the modification kits for deployment overseas."

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said the Department of Defense "applauds the voluntary actions announced today by Trijicon."

Related

PHOTOS: Read the Secret 'Jesus' Messages on U.S. Military Weapons

U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret Codes

More from Brian Ross and the Investigative Team
Morrell said the coded Bible reference were clearly inappropriate. Said Morrell, "It is not the policy of the Department of Defense to put religious references of any kind on its equipment."

Earlier today, Gen. David Petraeus, who commands CentCom, which oversees U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, told a D.C. thinktank that the company's practice was "disturbing …and a serious concern for me" and field commanders. He said there had been considerable discussions within the Department of Defense about how to deal with Trijicon's practice.

The Trijicon statement said that the company would: "Remove the inscription reference on all U.S. military products that are in the company's factory that have already been produced, but have yet to be shipped" and "Provide 100 modification kits to forces in the field to remove the reference on the already forward deployed optical sights."

The company also said it would ensure future procurements from the Department of Defense are produced without scripture references,a nd offer foreign forces that have purchased the products "the same remedies."

Haris Tarin, director of the Washington, D.C., office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a civil-rights group, said his organization welcomed the announcement. Said Tarin, "We must ensure that incidents like these are not repeated, so as not to give the impression that our country is involved in a religious crusade, which hurts America's image abroad and puts our soldiers in harms way."

Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that Trijicon had made a "responsible move ... that will help reduce or eliminate a potential danger to our nation's military."



Click on title above for full story

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/jesus-rifles/story?id=9618791

Open Letter to OBomBa from Michael Moore

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new "war president"? If you go to West Point
tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than
withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and
simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do --
destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one
speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the
backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what
they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike. I simply can't
believe you're about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it
isn't so.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run
government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around.
That's the way General Washington insisted it must be. That's what President
Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. "You're
fired!," said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen.
McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU
had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we
f*#&in' hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin
Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought
redemption).

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday
(Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea -- "Let's invade
Afghanistan!" Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

There's a reason they don't call Afghanistan the "Garden State" (though they
probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his
brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan's nickname is the
"Graveyard of Empires." If you don't believe it, give the British a call. I'd
have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev's number
though. It's + 41 22 789 1662. I'm sure he could give you an earful about the
historic blunder you're about to commit.

With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and
women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of
this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion
if you become the "war president." Empires never think the end is near, until
the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the
line -- and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.

Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn't have
to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own
clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops
halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve
an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not
want us there. You can feel it in your bones.

I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan!
A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are
you serious? Have you drunk Bush's Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you're doing it so
you can "end the war") will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the
great things you've said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone
from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless
may be gone -- and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker
than you can shout "tea bag!"

Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you
as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be
safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be
Wednesday morning.

We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we
the people can't take it anymore. We can't take your caving in, over and over,
when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get
the job done. What part of "landslide victory" don't you understand?

Don't be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan
will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not
stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from
the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the
crazy Right still wouldn't be happy. You would still be the victim of their
incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you
can't change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.

The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can't be won over by
abandoning the rest of us.

President Obama, it's time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the
parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want
more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say,
"No, we don't need health care, we don't need jobs, we don't need homes. You go
on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters
overseas, 'cause we don't need them, either."

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send
more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that's
what they'd do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American
children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.

All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have
endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name:
torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had
not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam "might" be in (but never
was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave
young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish -- the full
terror of which we scarcely know.

When we elected you we didn't expect miracles. We didn't even expect much
change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the
killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that
doesn't even function as a nation and never, ever has.

Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan
civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our
nation, stop. For God's sake, stop.

Tonight we still have hope.

Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON'T have to do this.
You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother's son.

We're counting on you.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. There's still time to have your voice heard. Call the White House at
202-456-1111 or email the President.


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