Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
December 12, 2021
Hello All – On Friday, celebrated around the world as Human Rights Day, a British court took another step towards extraditing Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange to the USA to face 17 counts of violating the 1917 Espionage Act and perhaps life in prison. Also on Friday, the Nobel Prize for Peace was being awarded to two courageous journalists: one from the Philippines and one from Russia. Yet lawyers for the Biden administration said that when Assange published details of US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was not acting as a journalist or a publisher, but was simply a spy.
Regarding Wikileaks' publication of war-crimes documents obtained from Chelsea Manning, the substance of the US charges under the Espionage Act, Julian Assange did what the New York Times does every day: publish information. Indeed, not only did The Times and other major news media broadcast stories based on the Wikileaks' findings, but the Times is currently publishing a series of reports focusing on civilian casualties via US bombing in Syria (here and here.) And last August it was The Times that penetrated Pentagon lies to get to the truth about the drone-killing of a family of ten people in Kabul. Without the kind of journalism for which Assange, having done his job, may spend the rest of his life in prison, we would know little about what the Godfather does in the dark.
Many believe this is why former President Trump and now President Biden want to bring him to the USA for trial. They are sending a message to all the USA news media that publishing information thought damaging – in Assange's case about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – can get them in Big Trouble. Moreover, please note that Assange is an Australian – not an American – citizen, and that at no time was he on US soil while putting together Wikileaks' stories. Thus the US claim is that they have the legal power to indict and extradite any journalist, anywhere in the world, who exposes US State Secrets. This is unacceptable.
Some useful reading on the Julian Assange case
(Video) "Terrible Step": Press Freedom in Danger as U.K. Court Clears the Way for Julian Assange Extradition to U.S.
From Democacy Now! December 12, 2021] [LInk]
The Judicial Kidnapping of Julian Assange
By John Pilger, ZNet [December 11, 2021]
[LInk]
Assange Plans To Appeal High Court Decision Backing Extradition To United States
From The Dissenter [December 10, 2021] [Link]
News Notes
Ten years ago, student debt was one of the springboards for Occupy; and coming out of Occupy was the Debt Collective, which continues. Today, US household debt is $15 trillion. Check out the Debt Collective's excellent short video, "Your Debt Is Someone Else's Asset," with Astra Taylor on Democracy Now!
Forty years ago the United Nations ratified the "Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons." The purpose of the Convention is to restrict or eliminate "inhumane weapons" causing primarily injuries to non-combatants, such as landmines or incendiary weapons. The Convention's 6th Review Conference begins tomorrow, and on the Agenda is a discussion of "killer robots" and other autonomous weapons. So far, the Biden administration has rejected a ban on such weapons, calling instead for "codes of conduct" for their use. For a cogent overview of what this is about, watch this interview with the co-founder of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
Until watching this segment from Democracy Now!, I did not realize that the strike of 3,000 student workers at Columbia University was the largest strike happening in the USA. The strike is now in its fifth week, and Columbia has vowed to replace/fire student workers who did not come to work on Friday. The strike has received support from Columbia faculty. In addition to this excellent report, check out the striking students' webpage.
Finally, last week Noam Chomsky turned 93. Last Tuesday the birthday boy sent a message urging young people to create "a much better world" through activism. But Chomsky is not done yet, as you can see from this interview where (starting at 19:00) he addresses the question of "The Consequences of Capitalism."
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil will be held on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. (In January, and February, vigils will be held on the first Monday.) If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
The CFOW Weekly Reader
(Video) "Hold the Line": Watch Filipina Journalist Maria Ressa's Full Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech
From Democracy Now! [December 10, 2021]
[FB – Please listen to this powerful speech by a courageous journalist.]
---- Filipina journalist Maria Ressa and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov accepted the Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their "efforts to safeguard freedom of expression." "There are so many more journalists persecuted in the shadows with neither exposure nor support, and governments are doubling down with impunity," said Ressa in her acceptance speech at Friday's Nobel ceremony, which we play in full. [Read More]
The Art and Activism of Grace Paley
By Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker [May 1, 2017]
[FB – Saturday was Grace Paley's birthday, born 99 years ago.]
---- There's a case to be made that Grace Paley was first and foremost an antinuclear, antiwar, antiracist feminist activist who managed, in her spare time, to become one of the truly original voices of American fiction in the later twentieth century. Just glance at the "chronology" section of "A Grace Paley Reader"… Leads her Greenwich Village PTA in protests against atomic testing, founds the Women Strike for Peace, pickets the draft board, receives a Guggenheim Fellowship. 1966: Jailed for civil disobedience on Armed Forces Day, starts teaching at Sarah Lawrence. 1969: Travels to North Vietnam to bring home U.S. prisoners of war, wins an O. Henry Award. In the mid-seventies, she attended the World Peace Congress in Moscow, where she infuriated Soviet dissidents by demanding that they stand up for the Asian and Latin-American oppressed, too. In the eighties, she traveled to El Salvador and Nicaragua to meet with mothers of the disappeared, got arrested at a sit-in at a New Hampshire nuclear power plant, and co-founded the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. She called herself a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist." The F.B.I. declared her a Communist, dangerous and emotionally unstable. Her file was kept open for thirty years. [Read More]
Demand Democracy!
Biden Shouldn't Use the Summit for Democracy to Start More Cold Wars
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Publisher of The Nation [December 8, 2021]
---- While dangerous, a cold war face-off between democracies and authoritarian states, anchored by China and Russia, is the establishment's sweet spot. The powerful military-industrial security interests gain renewed importance. The tremendously bloated Pentagon budget remains unquestioned as it presumably gears up for new deployments, and a new array of weapons to counter growing Chinese assertiveness. NATO gets a revived mission. A bipartisan center can be reestablished, with bickering about tactics and spending anchored by an agreement on mission. The costs of going back to the Cold War are immense, however. While Senator Bernie Sanders praised Biden in June for recognizing authoritarianism as a "major threat to democracy," he wisely cautioned that "the primary conflict is taking place not between countries but within them. And if democracy is going to win out, it will do so not on a traditional battlefield but by demonstrating that democracy can actually deliver a better quality of life for people than authoritarianism can." … Before America chose to lead any kind of "Summit for Democracy," and before "America is back" to a new cold war, the country urgently needs a more serious discussion about its real security priorities—and the real challenges it faces. [Read More]
Also good analyses of Biden's "Democracy Summit" – "Ten Contradictions That Plague Biden's Democracy Summit," by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [December 11, 2021] [Link]; and "Why the US Is a Failed Democratic State" by Lawrence Lessig, New York Review of Books [December 10, 2021 [Link]
Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun
By Barton Gellman, The Atlantic [December 6, 2021]
---- Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect. The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already. Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small
D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake. … As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.
[Read More] Also alarming is "
In Bid for Control of Elections, Trump Loyalists Face Few Obstacles" by Charles Homans, New York Times [December 11, 2021] [Link].
War & Peace
We're not at War
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [December 7, 2021]
---- Despite a disagreement over some amendments in the Senate, the United States Congress is poised to pass a $778 billion military budget bill for 2022. As they have been doing year after year, our elected officials are preparing to hand the lion's share – over 65% – of federal discretionary spending to the U.S. war machine, even as they wring their hands over spending a mere quarter of that amount on the Build Back Better Act. The U.S. military's incredible record of systematic failure—most recently its final trouncing by the Taliban after twenty years of death, destruction and lies in Afghanistan—cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in U.S. foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress's budget priorities. Instead, year after year, members of Congress hand over the largest share of our nation's resources to this corrupt institution, with minimal scrutiny and no apparent fear of accountability when it comes to their own reelection. [Read More] For another assessment of the latest military budget, read "'Shameful': The Democratic-Led House Approves a Massive Military Spending Bill" by John Nichols, The Nation [December 10, 2021] [LInk]
Are We Forever Captives of America's Forever Wars?
By Karen J. Greenberg, Tom Dispatch [December 11, 2021]
----- As August ended, American troops completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan almost 20 years after they first arrived. On the formal date of withdrawal, however, President Biden insisted that "over-the-horizon capabilities" (airpower and Special Operations forces, for example) would remain available for use anytime. "[W]e can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground, very few if needed," he explained, dispensing immediately with any notion of a true peace. But beyond expectations of continued violence in Afghanistan, there was an even greater obstacle to officially ending the war there: the fact that it was part of a never-ending, far larger conflict originally called the Global War on Terror (in caps), then the plain-old lower-cased war on terror, and finally — as public opinion here soured on it — America's "forever wars." As we face the future, it's time to finally focus on ending, formally and in every other way, that disastrous larger war. It's time to acknowledge in the most concrete ways imaginable that the post-9/11 war on terror, of which the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan was the opening salvo, warrants a final sunset. [Read More]
The Confrontation in Ukraine Is Political Theater Aimed at a Domestic Audience
By Nicolai N. Petro, The Nation [December 10, 2021]
---- The danger of accidental escalation is especially acute in Ukraine, where "volunteer battalions" of armed nationalists regard the conquest of Donbass as the only honorable solution, and barely tolerate government supervision as it is. We should not forget that it was the attack by the head of the Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, on April 20, 2014, that precipitated all-out warfare in Eastern Ukraine. Foremost in his mind, Yarosh recalls, was torpedoing the Geneva peace talks, which would have forced Ukraine to pursue negotiations with the rebels. Should the situation again spiral out of control, international actors will try to pull back from all-out war, but what incentives would these independent players have to join them? [Read More] The same author lays out some detailed background to the US Ukraine policy in "America's Ukraine Policy Is All About Russia," The National Interest [December 6, 2021] [Link].
Israel/Palestine
Details of 1948 Massacres against Palestinians Revealed in Classified Israeli Documents
From The Palestine Chronicle [December 10, 2021]
---- Israeli government discussions on the massacres perpetrated by Israeli soldiers in 1948 were declassified for the first time this week in an investigative report published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. Entitled, 'Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in '48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew', the report exposes two large-scale operations launched by the Israeli army in October 1948, one based in the south, known as Operation Yoav, which opened a road to the Negev; and another in the north, Operation Hiram. As part of the latter, within 30 hours, Israeli soldiers attacked dozens of Palestinian villages, forcefully expelling tens of thousands of Palestinian residents, while thousands of others fled. Nearly 120,000 Palestinians, including the elderly, women and children resided in the area; however, following Israel's massacre only 30,000 Palestinians were left. "Within less than three days, the IDF [army] had conquered the Galilee and also extended its reach into villages in southern Lebanon. The overwhelming majority of them took no part in the fighting," reported Haaretz. [Read More] For the Haaretz report, go here. Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy has written a powerful commentary on the new revelations.
Our History
Captives in our own country: The incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII
By Susan H. Kamei, Los Angeles Times [December 5, 2021]
[FB – The 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor is also the anniversary of the beginning of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII.]
---- On Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, Aiko Yoshinaga, a 17-year-old Los Angeles High School student, was headed home from a party with classmates when she heard a shocking radio report: Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. Even at her young age, Aiko immediately realized that with a U.S. declaration of war against Japan, her Japanese immigrant parents, legally precluded from becoming naturalized citizens, would not just be considered aliens — they would be enemy aliens. An American-born citizen, Aiko didn't think she had cause to be concerned. She thought she'd be protected by the U.S. Constitution. She, along with my grandparents and parents, would soon find out how wrong she was. My father, then a 14-year-old freshman at Huntington Beach Union High School, later recalled: "People couldn't or wouldn't make the distinction between Americans who happened to have Japanese parents and people from Japan."… On Feb. 19, 1942, little more than 10 weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, putting in motion the incarceration of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — two-thirds of whom were Nisei American citizens — as a "military necessity." Soldiers armed with guns and bayonets removed men, women and children from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona. On short notice, they had to leave behind their businesses, farms, jobs, educations, even their pets. They were allowed to take only what they could carry. They had to sell, store or abandon the rest of their possessions. [Read More]
